Every business is successful until it’s not.  What’s disconcerting, though, is how often top management is surprised when “not” happens.
Gary Hamel, The Future of Management

What limits innovation in established companies isn’t a lack of resources or a shortage of human creativity, but dearth of pro- innovation processes.
Few organizations seem capable of proactive change. How do we explain this?  
I think the answer lies, in part, with the difficulty we have in identifying our deeply engrained habits.
Gary Hamel, What Matters Now

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We are feeling a little insecure these days.

I think this insecurity is somewhat warranted.

No matter what business you are in, there is a (possibly unknown) competitor planning right now to take your customers away from you.  Someone, somewhere, is finding ways to do what you do cheaper, faster, more efficiently.  And that someone is figuring out ways to do so with a more simple and captivating design, or more simple and easy to use (i.e. better designed) processes.

The pace is breathtaking. Hamel again:  “are we changing as fast as the world around us?”

If you have a good idea, a good product, a good process, your job today is to ask “how do we make it even better?”  Be asking it now; keep asking it every day, every week.  In every meeting.

(And, have those meetings!  You only accomplish what you meet about).

Because someone is asking that question right now.  It’s much smarter for that someone to be you.