In my previous blog on Innovation Games, I talked about how "serious games" have the power to change the way you work, approach problem-solving, and seek out new buyers of your product or service. How do they do this?, you might be asking. What's the secret sauce? In a word, collaboration. Innovation Games work so well because participants come together as a team to generate new ideas and new ways of offering customers what they want.

Can playing games really lead to innovations? Yes, with Innovation Games!

Have you ever sat in a staff "ideation" meeting where the purpose was to come up with groundbreaking, business-building, innovative ideas, and no one could come up with anything? Or if someone did throw out an idea, everyone shot it down? Pretty depressing, right? Well, what if I told you there is something that gets teams engaged, encourages them to work together, and enables them to arrive at breakthrough ideas and accomplish goals faster. All while having fun. What is this magic solution, you ask? Innovation Games.

Change is all around us but few of us really know how to change

...especially when it means adopting new ways of doing things. Our brains hate change. It's literally pain! So why do it? Because we must. The times demand it.

Even though change can be painful, we really need to learn how to adapt our growth strategies, our processes, our employee engagement...even ourselves. We can't put it off. In today's highly competitive, continually disrupted business environment, that's the only way companies are going to survive.   

Is meaningful and lasting change possible? Yes.

The phenomenally successful book, "Blue Ocean Strategy" by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, powerfully teaches business leaders of all stripes how to "go where the profits and growth are and the competition isn’t." Easier said than done, right? 

But even if you know what a Blue Ocean Strategy is, and also if you don't, how do you find this untapped market space where nobody else is? Where prospective customers with unmet needs are waiting for you to help solve their problems in innovative ways? These 10 blogs, podcasts and white papers will show you.

Hopefully they will also spark some Blue Ocean "a-ha" moments of your own and open your eyes to all the wonderful growth opportunities that might be right in front of you...if only you could see them. Enjoy.

Blue Ocean Strategy®: It works when you work it but not when you don’t

I was speaking with someone recently who works for a ski resort that had wanted to find a Blue Ocean Strategy several years ago. Skiing and snowboarding were not growing, and mountains—whether they were destinations or weekend retreats—needed to find more nonusers to enjoy the experience.

Unfortunately, their Blue Ocean Strategy had not taken them very far so they abandoned it. While disappointing, this was not unfamiliar.

At SAMC, we often work with companies that need or want to change and that think, perhaps, they too can be a Blue Ocean success story. What we find is that they can, but it requires a combination of a crisis, a willingness to make the unfamiliar familiar and a Blue-Ocean style toolkit that can provide process and comfort to the unknown.

Microsoft vs. Apple: A leak ended a promising new product that might have dominated the market

The fact that this ski area had not succeeded was disheartening. What might they have done differently to find and implement a Blue Ocean Strategy?

As a corporate anthropologist and culture change expert, I work with organizations that need or want to change. I'm an observer, constantly watching for emerging “trends from the trenches,” and I like to share them so that others too can see what's coming.

As I report in my recent article for Forbes.com, one of the biggest trends I'm noticing as I travel around the country is how business leaders are really struggling with today's breakneck pace of change. (You can read the article here.) Rather than embracing change and its possibilities for innovation and growth, they’re fleeing from it. Not good!

The trends are obvious but CEOs don't want to see them

Often, the biggest challenge for people is how to recognize what's happening right in front of them. But for today's CEOs, this is particularly scary because the degree of change is so great—threatening their business models, fundamental beliefs and long-held strategies—that they feel lost, like the proverbial deer in headlights. But for those leaders who are willing to adapt and change with the times, new levels of productivity await them.

5 trends that today's business leaders should pay attention to:

Previously, we wrote about our work with CEOs at ITESM in Mexico. These were 50 very smart, successful business leaders who brought us in to help them find new markets and change their corporate cultures. The real challenge, they told us, was how to change their organizations. There are a number of ways to create a more innovative culture, embed change processes into those old, established ones, and provide more skill-development and confidence so your employees can embrace change. I thought I would share with you some of the things we discussed so you can build your own tool kit for taking the new and making it happen.

Today, in this Part 1 of the discussion, I want to talk about one approach that you might take—namely, to bring in the consultants and let them help you design, develop and implement the new "you." Being management consultants, we often are brought in to do just that—become the chief strategists for an organization and help them go through the changes. Yet, we know that it is hard to build a new organization from the outside-in. It doesn't always work well and I want to start this blog with an illustrative case to show you some of the pitfalls that you must anticipate if you are going to use consultants wisely.

This particular client situation was one where those "other" consultants did not achieve the desired results. As a case study, it serves to illustrate how to re-think the best use of outside resources. Use consultants. Let them help your organization develop and implement a change in direction. But make sure those consultants understand how to Engage, Educate and Manage Expectations—the key to the toolkit—among your own team. 

You may want to get to the toolkit right away so you can start to try this aproach  to take that new strategy and make it happen. Take a look at this webinar before you read further—or read on!

For those of us who are consumers of healthcare (which is pretty much everybody), we go to a doctor or hospital expecting to be attended to by caring staff who are satisfied with their work and dedicated to the medical field, right? Boy, are we ever wrong.

Physician burnout is quickly becoming a crisis

Here at Simon Associates Management Consultants, we've recently been studying research on burnout among medical professionals and what I’ve found is truly troubling.
Faced with diminished compensation, consolidation of practices (ACOs) and constantly-shifting insurance structures, physicians are questioning their choice of careers. Nurses are working 12-hour, or even double, shifts. Every day, medical staff care for patients who are sick, ungrateful and often depressed. No wonder they’re burned out!

As Blue Ocean Strategists, we love to read blogs posted by other BOS strategists about what they are finding. Here are some of the most-shared blog posts for you to browse (along with a couple of ours). I also added a video so you can learn about BOS in a visual way and think about it in new ways.

Maybe now is the right time to try a Blue Ocean Strategy process for your business? Without a doubt, it's the best way to respond to these changing times in a systematic way.