Innovation is one of the most hackneyed words in business today, overused to the point that no one knows what it means anymore. It’s something we expect all organizations to aim for, or at least to have printed somewhere on the company’s website or in a values statement hanging on a wall. In business, we define innovation as creating groundbreaking products, new services or novel ways of working. Because it comes in many flavors and is so romanticized, innovation is often mischaracterized. Here are three great innovation myths to quash: Myth #1: Innovation = Invention. For many companies, inno ..read more

Editor’s Note: At our upcoming Manufacturing Leadership Summit in Detroit this May 7&8, we’ll meet with Williams at the plant and dive deep into his playbook for turning it around as part of an exciting, intimate, interactive agenda. Please join us > Webasto Americas was in a huge jam: It had a new plant producing a major new product type for a very important customer, but its performance on the contract was falling flat. Enter manufacturing turnaround artist Tyrone “TJ” Williams, who at 37 years old and without formal managerial education has performed what amounts to an industrial mir ..read more

Before becoming a U.S. Marine and president of Aflac U.S., Virgil Miller played baseball and football and even took up fencing in college. In his view, a critical link between athletics and corporate leadership is the unwavering focus on fundamentals. To that end, Miller has a recommendation for fellow leaders: The next time you and your team find yourselves patting one another on the back because you think your process for doing something is as good as it gets, try a little exercise he puts his own teams through to test their satisfaction: walk your own process. At Aflac, this means having t ..read more

Steve Case has led some pretty big projects over the course of his career. There was this big thing called the “Internet,” which Case helped invent through his role as co-founder of AOL, then came the second largest merger of all time with the blending of new media AOL and old media Time Warner.  Given that AOL began as a handful of people that grew to some 90,000 employees as AOL-Time Warner, Case became an expert on the spectrum of leadership required to run a growing organization. The key concept, explained Case during the podcast, involves where on the “imaginer and manager” spectrum ..read more

I very clearly remember one of my first meetings with  Sears’s newish CEO, Alan Lacy, shortly after I had been promoted to head up corporate strategy. To refresh, this was shortly before we would launch what would turn out to be a too-timid transformation of the storied and once remark- able retailer. As I recall, he started off our meeting saying something like this: “The first thing we all should accept is that in most respects, our current business model makes no sense. If you were starting a retail concept today, there is no way you would create anything that looks like what we do.” I ..read more

CEOs have become pretty set in their perceptions of the business climate in many states, especially those on the east and west coasts. But there’s still lots of movement in what company chiefs see as the business-friendliness of many other states, and CEOs’ conclusions are being driven by new factors ranging from the rise of AI to relative housing costs. Those are some of the main takeaways from our 2024 Chief Executive Best & Worst States for Business survey of more than 600 American CEOs, with representation from every state, to gain their perspectives on state business climates and how ..read more

Beneath the headlines about the stalling of America’s electric-vehicle revolution is the unspectacular reality that the nation’s transition to this new form of transportation continues to be nearly inevitable—though it likely will proceed at a significantly slower pace than imagined even a year ago, as consumers, auto dealers and other constituencies revolt against the federal governments forced march into the future. This means it’s still full speed ahead for companies that are still trying to position themselves as suppliers in the new manufacturing chain that will define the industry in the ..read more

If the chickens unleashed by the pandemic and remote-work revolution are finally coming home to roost in the U.S. commercial real-estate market, Arlington County, Virginia, keeps trying to chase them out of the nest. Across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., the county is an epicenter of federal-government employees, lobbyists, military contractors and related knowledge and tech workers. Arlington County scored a big coup, of course, when Amazon pledged in 2018 to build a campus that would employ 25,000 tech workers there. The county beat out literally hundreds of other locales across Am ..read more

Over his career as “Mr. Wonderful” on Shark Tank, Kevin O’Leary has invested a reported $8.5 million or more into dozens of startups that have appeared on the long-running TV show gamifying entrepreneurism, including makers of genetic test kits for cats, snack bites made out of dates, online forms for pre-nuptial agreements and sheet de-tanglers for dryers. Now, O’Leary is placing his investment recommendations on entire states. Lately, North Dakota, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Montana have gained endorsement in his “Competitive States Investment Tour,” and it’s no surprise that some economic ..read more

In our new polling to see what CEOs believe to be the best and worst states for business, we also took the opportunity to ask CEOs about other parts of how and where they’re doing business. The big takeaway: Many are restless. Fully 49 percent of those surveyed said they were “more open to examining new locations.” Forty-four percent said they were “considering opening or expanding new operations or facilities in a new state,” while 35 percent were considering shifting operations to a new state. Here’s a quick look at the findings:   The post Best & Worst States: CEO Poll Finds 4 ..read more