On April 6, I had an opportunity to speak on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. I shared some ideas for how small to medium-sized businesses can improve their customer communications and take advantage of valuable marketing opportunities. I also reflected on some strategies I used as CEO, and discussed how Pitney Bowes is working to evolve, adapt to change, and enhance the “customer experience” through innovation.

I enjoyed this interview very much. Please click below to listen to the recording.

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At Pitney Bowes, we have done a lot of thinking about how to innovate successfully. As a result, we have challenged conventional wisdom about how innovation actually occurs. There are two traditional views about innovation with which I am familiar:

• One is the idea that institutions have large research and development budgets, begin a number of projects, have many failures, and funnel down to a handful of successes. The “funnel” metaphor is used to describe this idea.
• The second is the idea that organizations either invest in entrepreneurial companies, or create entrepreneurial “skunkworks” which operate outside the company’s annual budgeting processes and produce innovation. This was a popular theory, supported by the IBM PC launch in the early 1980’s.

Both views are flawed, because they oversimplify how innovation really happens. I got the best insight on innovation from my 15-year-old daughter, who is not only a serious musician, playing the harp, flute, and piano, but an avid student of popular music history. She read and gave me a copy of Bill Wyman’s Rolling with the Stones. Wyman was one of the founding members of the Rolling Stones. (more…)