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If you’re like most business leaders, you probably are. VitalSmarts founders and researchers Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield found recently that a large majority of executives, managers, and employees have an unfavorable view of their culture, and that views of what an organization values differ drastically between management and employees. VitalSmarts, a leadership training company, has found that culture change can occur when leadership is trained in the skills to speak up and hold people accountable. According to Maxfield, cultures improve when leaders participate in interpersonal skills training. Trained leaders, he says, aren’t just better at communicating with and managing their teams, but they can also teach those skills to employees. Pick the behaviors that will make the biggest difference in performance. Once employees take a risk to share their perceptions, they begin watching to see if you’ve really listened. Pick a couple of valued and visible concerns and address them quickly. Online enrollment climbs; employees express high expectations for their enrollment experience. You can’t control life, but you can make sure your employees are covered. My firm also conducts our own research into the key drivers of Australia’s most innovative companies. Your combination of right and left brain expertise seems to make you uniquely suited to writing about the science of creativity. Do you find that creative people resist the idea that there could be a formula for nurturing creative output? Indeed, our ability to think creatively is actually only 30% genetically pre-determined. By using tools that have been scientifically proven to increase our ability to come up with great ideas and exposing ourselves to stimulus that increases creativity, every one of us can significantly increase our creative thinking abilities. ASB: You talk in your book about the strong innovation culture at GE and the weak one at Yahoo. Is there a simple way to explain the reason for the differences in level of innovation between those two particular companies? Unlike GE, which continues to produce breakthrough innovations in the many industry sectors they play in, Yahoo has struggled to disrupt its competitors and, from an outsider’s point of view, appears to play it safe. Incremental innovation rather than more breakthrough innovation has become the focus, and as such, the risk adversity inherent in this focus has a negative impact on innovation. ASB: Do you think small businesses have a better shot at being truly innovative than large corporations do? ASB: Can you describe work you might have done helping transform a particular small business into an innovative culture? Amantha Imber: A lot of the work we have done with smaller businesses involves helping them build innovation capability. And finally, we have worked with many businesses in teaching them how to experiment with an idea and test it properly with customers before investing a lot of money into implementing it. Essentially, having the skills to experiment with ideas prior to implementation is a great way to de-risk innovation.