Hiring for Innovation? Where do people “who have done it before” best fit in?

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis draws from her extensive experience as a serial CEO, executive consultant, and board member to assesses the cons and pros of hiring people who “have done it before.”

Clichés have an advantage: they are self-explanatory. But the main drawback of these ready-made phrases is that nobody questions their meaning any longer. >>>

Companies don’t Innovate, People do… So, Watch how you Hire!

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Almost every company pledges to value innovation, a topic that lends itself to all sorts of grand planning strategies and methodologies as well as lyrical musings. Yet to actually be able to deliver on innovation goals, organizations must often get back to earth, i.e. look closely at the multiple aspects of the management of the company’s human infrastructure, and focus on the most foundational of them: the way we hire. In her new book, Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, Marylene Delbourg-Delphis invites executives to pay attention to their company’s recruiting practices—and more specifically to two of the key principles that prepare companies for continuous inventiveness, hiring employees for their potential rather than only their current skills, and hiring people for the company as a whole rather than for a manager.  >>>

What Makes Startups Creativity Tanks?

By Guest Author Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Peter Cappelli, Professor of Management at Wharton School and Director of the Wharton’s Center for Human Resources endorsed Marylene Delbourg-Delphis’ book Everybody Wants to Love Their Job: Rebuilding Trust and Culture, saying “The energizing culture of the start-up world can be imported to even the biggest organizations. A powerful case for bringing the human element back into management.”

Startups are inspirational for many reasons. The “human element” is definitely one of them. >>>

NetApp Excellerator Startups Awarded Scholarships to the 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator

The One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator is yet another benefit granted to NetApp startups through a partnership between the two companies. For the second time this year, NetApp has awarded six startups one-year scholarships to the 1Mby1M Premium program, offering them the advantages of access to the 1Mby1M online curriculum, weekly online mentoring sessions and an international network of investors, potential customers, channel partners, and more.

The participating startups include:

CloudOptimo – Co-founded by Vaibhav Kamble and Tushar Chakote, CloudOptimo’s platform helps to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a cloud infrastructure up to 80% using Cloud Provider’s excess capacity.

FirstHive – Founded by CEO Aditya Bhamidipaty, FirstHive is a Customer Data Platform that builds Unique Customer Identities by aggregating data from across all sources of customer interactions and customer transactions.

>>>

EIT Health Partners with 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator to Train More Than 100 European Entrepreneurs

Digital Health Semifinalists of the European Health Catapult have been awarded one-year scholarships to the One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global virtual accelerator thanks to a new partnership with EIT Health. In addition to the 15 scholarships to the 1Mby1M Premium program, EIT Health will also fund scholarships to 1Mby1M Basic for an additional 100 promising digital start-ups.

Sramana Mitra, Founder of 1Mby1M, announced the winners during the Semifinals, held on October 10 in Erlangen, Germany. You can listen to her keynote address, AI Powered Digital Health IS The Next Big Thing, here:

>>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Anita Sands, Board Member of ServiceNow and Symantec (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I love this keeping all your innovation process tied to customers. That may yield slightly less glamorous innovation, but it keeps a good solid innovation process running. The thing that is tricky at this stage where ServiceNow is, it’s now getting to a much larger organization. It’s over 7,000 people.

There are a lot of people that are connected to customers in different ways. Somebody knows something about a customer through the grape vine. This could be a relatively junior engineer or a pre-sales engineer. There needs to be process to bring that knowledge and insight back to the decision makers through a sustained process so that you are not missing opportunities for act three or act five as this company scales. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Anita Sands, Board Member of ServiceNow and Symantec (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: One thing to remember here is that some of the most successful companies in the world have been led by Founder CEOs, whether it’s Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs, actually, got into a tremendously traumatic situation being fired out of Apple.

By the way, the Steve Jobs that came back to Apple is not the same Steve Jobs that left Apple. He got fired. He matured and came back as a very different CEO. I will defend a little bit the founder’s desire to often drive the vision of the company. Fred stayed in that role for a long time before he handed things over.

Anita Sands: He did and he stayed in the role as Head of Product after that. I’m not at all advocating that the founder needs to disappear into the horizon. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Anita Sands, Board Member of ServiceNow and Symantec (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch gears a bit and talk about hyper growth. The SaaS industry, especially, is going through hyper growth and there are lots of great companies in the market right now that are going through hyper growth. You sit on the board on one of the most prominent of those. Tell us what you have learned about managing hyper growth.

Anita Sands: First of all, it has been an amazing experience. I’ve been on the board for four years now. The company was doing very well before I got there. Hopefully, it will be doing very well after I leave. I think there are some great lessons to be learned. Some of these will seem obvious. When you really see where the rubber hits the road, they’re not that obvious at all. I have yet to >>>