What Makes A Great Innovative CEO?
Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com
“My job is to guide Salesforce. I can’t sit in headquarters and pretend I’m in touch. Odds are, what we’re using today will be obsolete in a few years. The past is never the future. But it’s easy to get caught up in the continuum.”
Nitin Paranjpe, Hindustan Unilever
"Typically, in an entrepreneur, ambition outstrips resources and that inequality forces the entrepreneur to think differently. We've learned to innovate by raising our ambitions and constraining our resources."Victor Fernandes, Natura Cosmeticos, S.A.
Victor Fernandes is the director of science and technology concepts in innovation for Brazil's largest direct-sales cosmetics maker. "We do not innovate around products, but around a flow or well-being experiences...Our department of innovation is made up of almost 300 people here in Brazil...biologists, pharmacists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists..We launch more than 100 new products a year."
Victor Fernandes, Natura Cosmeticos, S.A.
Victor Fernandes is the director of science and technology concepts in innovation for Brazil's largest direct-sales cosmetics maker. "We do not innovate around products, but around a flow or well-being experiences...Our department of innovation is made up of almost 300 people here in Brazil...biologists, pharmacists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists..We launch more than 100 new products a year."Jeffrey Bezos, Amazon
Bezos on what he asks all job candidates: "Tell me about something that you have invented. Their invention could be on a small scale--say, a new product feature or a process that improves the customer experience, or even a new way to load the dishwasher. But I want to know that they will try new things."Pradeep Sindhu, Juniper Networks
Pradeep Sindhu is a cofounder and chief technology officer of Juniper. "Most R&D innovation at Juniper happens because someone looks two to five years out and notices a potential disruption. Our culture promotes vigorous debate based on a survival-of-the-fittest philosophy--regardless of the source. QFabric is a good example. It began as a what if conversation between two engineers debating ways to solve the data center connectivity problem at a massive scale. We formally launched it to the world earlier this year."Howard Schultz, Starbucks
"When I returned as CEO in 2008, Starbucks had forgotten that meaningful innovations balance an organization's heritage with modern-day relevance and market differentiation, so we had to reorient. In one brainstorming session, we visited and observed great retailers, then asked ourselves, 'If Starbucks did not exist, what type of coffee experience would we create?"
Robert McDonald, Procter & Gamble
"Our vision is to be the most digitally-enabled company in the world...To achieve t his we are innovating...across all major business processes: from 'molecule to shelf'...and from 'ideation to consumption.' We're getting flatter, faster and simpler. We're creating a technology-enabled culture through which consumers, employees and business partners seamlessly collaborate and interact from anywhere and at any time. And we're learning to operate on a demand-driven real-time, forward-looking basis every day."Rakesh Kapoor, Reckitt Benckiser Group PLC
"Innovation is not a process; it is more of a way of delivering on our purpose and how we do business. This means we put our customers at the center of our business and constantly ask, 'How can we make a real difference to them at those crucial moments when our products are being put to use to clean their dishes or remove the tough stain on their favorite garment?"Jean-Paul Agon, L'Oreal
"Year by year, we increase our [R&D] budgets, often significantly faster than our sales...[We have a] permanent dialogue between research teams, who invent products which consumers have never dreamed of, and marketing teams, who listen to them and constantly analyze their needs. It is the richness of this exchange that drives innovation."
Eric Schmidt, Google
Schmidt is executive chairman of Google. "Google+ is a 500-person project inside Google, but that includes everything, like apps and photos. The teams were five to ten people building on each others' work on common platforms. At the launch, the trick is not to get expectations too high. What you don't want to see is the headline, 'Facebook Killer Fails.' We're really trying to define [social software] in a new way."---------------
source: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mll45elki/eric-schmidt-google-2