Innovation to solve the "CEO disease"

Prakash Dubey forwards the Economist Intelligence Unit report "Cultivating business-led innovation" with the purpose to "explores how senior executives can promote a culture of innovation by empowering different business units", and a blog "The Hunt for Innovation: 10 Strategic Insights" from one of his colleagues at Oracle, Bob Evans, referencing it. The blog begins:


"Ever hear of the dreaded “CEO Disease?”

It was initially diagnosed by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who discovered that the broad power and authority held by CEOs often leads to risk-averse and even truth-averse culture in which employees offer up nothing but “the good news of their perfection and the company’s success, no matter what the warning signs may be.”"

The report is a valuable read, and well done. The complete survey is provided in the appendix.  The report's executive summary lists four key outcomes from the survey:

1. Effectively capitalising on multiple resources to pursue innovation remains elusive for many companies. The bigger the company, the more likely innovation is to be siloed.


2. Companies furthest along the innovation path utilise customer data and customer participation in their product and service improvements. Fifty-four percent of respondents in this group actively collect customer feedback and analyse customer data for clues to innovate effectively, but in different ways.


3. Leading companies make use of disruptive technology trends to either foster innovation or improve business processes. Big data and social media were identified in the survey as offering the most opportunities for companies seeking to innovate effectively.


4. Many companies have no plan for learning from failed ideas. Nearly half (49%) of respondents said their company had no system to deal positively with failure.

See the complete Economist Intelligence Unit's report here and the blog at Forbes here.