How Leaders Can Encourage Imagination

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Teams, Business/management, Marketing, Strategy, Management, Innovation, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Economics, Hbr, Business/entrepreneurship, Harvard, Business, Leadership, Business/marketing, Communication

4.3 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Martin Reeves, managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group’s Henderson Institute, has looked at how companies reinvent themselves to achieve success. And he has found that an essential ingredient in that process is imagination. It’s something we cultivate in children but rarely practice deliberately in the business world. He explains how to encourage and systematize imagination in your organization. Reeves is the coauthor of the new book The Imagination Machine: How to Spark New Ideas and Create Your Company's Future.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So you got the job. Now what? Join me, Eleni Mata, on HBR's new original podcast, New
0:08.1	Here, the Young Professionals Guide to Work, and how to make it work for you. Listen for
0:13.8	free wherever you get your podcasts. Just search New Here. See you there!
0:30.0	Welcome to the HBR IDA cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish.
0:48.1	The Finnish mobile handset company Nokia, you probably know, is no longer in the
0:53.2	mobile handset business. What you maybe don't know is how it reimagined itself
0:57.9	after suffering defeat in the marketplace. When Risto Silasma joined the company
1:03.2	board, he made a rule that for any decision alternatives had to be discussed. He
1:08.1	caused that informed imagination. Nokia eventually decided to sell its handset
1:13.7	business. Silasma says that forced the company, freed the company rather, to
1:18.7	imagine a different future with a different business model. And today Nokia is
1:23.4	a global communications infrastructure provider. Our guest today believes that
1:27.8	imagination is something that more organizations can use to grow. And he's
1:32.4	here to explain how to encourage imaginative thinking in a company context.
1:36.5	Joining me now is Martin Reeves, a senior partner and managing director at
1:41.0	Boston Consulting Group. He is a co-author of the book, The Imagination Machine,
1:45.2	How to Spark new ideas and create your company's future. Martin, thanks for
1:49.9	coming on the show.
1:58.8	We all have an idea of what imagination is. What did you discover in your
2:03.1	research that changed your mind about imagination? Well, the paradox is that it's
2:09.6	a unique human skill that we all possess. So we do it. But like a lot of things
2:14.0	that we do intuitively, we can't necessarily describe accurately what it is.
	...

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