Management thinking is inherently faddish, but there are some perennial favourites that never fall out of favour. Innovation is one those evergreen themes: it is a rare CEO who doesn’t list innovation as one her top four or five priorities.

In the creative economy, innovation is more important than ever. Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance. It’s the only antidote to margin-crushing competition, the only hope for out-performing a dismal economy, and the only way to truly amaze your customers. Innovation—in operations, products, business models and ecosystems—isn’t merely a competitive advantage, it’s the competitive advantage.

Our newest MIX Maverick and author of "HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything," argues that the "soft stuff"—leadership, trust, reputation, relationships—is fast becoming the hard currency of advantage. How we behave—as individuals, leaders, and institutions—makes all the difference in the 21st century.

Dov Seidman: Are you outbehaving the competition?

Dov Seidman has built a career, and pioneered an industry, around the idea that the most principled businesses are the most profitable and sustainable.

Learn more about Dov, LRN, and the HOW Report here .

The sole purpose of a business is to grow. This can take on many dimensions – profits, revenues, market share, brand or community influence just to name a few. The road to growth is very simple. Innovation is required to drive growth. You make something better or new (products, services, solutions, etc.) and you sell to someone better or new (markets, segments, channels, etc.). Basically that’s it the rest is just fine print.

It sounds easy enough but of course it isn’t. This is because there are seven underlying issues, deadly sins if you will, that make leading innovation difficult and completely different from everything else you do in your business. But there is hope—simple things you can do to avoid the anguish and misery that often accompany the wide range of chaotic activities that produce valuable innovation.

First Deadly Sin: Believing You Can See the Future

The more breakthrough the innovation the more likely it will occur sometime in the distant future for which there presently is no data. Unless you posses a crystal ball and remarkable prophetic abilities, believing you can see the future first is delusional at best. Borders was a pioneer...

All too often, direction setting happens in an ivory tower—cut off from valuable in-the-trenches insight and expertise and out of tune with shifts in the broader environment. What’s more, when strategy is cooked up in an elite enclave, the process of “selling” it to the very people expected to implement it becomes an arduous and uncertain chore.

In their excellent new piece in the McKinsey Quarterly , MIX co-founder Michele Zanini and Arne Gast, a principal in McKinsey’s Amsterdam office, explore a set of compelling alternatives (many of which emerged as stories on the MIX) —and make a case for cultivating the social side of strategy.

Here’s a taste of the piece:

In 2009, Wikimedia launched a special wiki—one dedicated to
 the organization’s own strategy. Over the next two years, more than 1,000 volunteers generated some 900 proposals for the company’s future direction and then categorized, rationalized, and formed task forces to elaborate on them. The result was a coherent strategic
 plan detailing a set of beliefs, priorities, and related commitments that together engendered among participants a deep sense of dedication
 to Wikimedia’s future. Through the launch of several special projects and the continued...

There is no doubt that there is tremendous goodwill, not to mention countless exciting experiments, when it comes to making the world of work more deeply human—designed to promote more freedom , equity , and engagement , and passion . Why, then, can those words sound so cheap and drained of their juice when we hear them repeated over and over by leaders of all stripes? Probably because they’re spoken so much more often than they’re ever enacted.

That’s why it’s so very refreshing to spend time with a leader who is relentlessly inventive and impressively effective as a champion of the fullest expression of humanity at work. We aim too low, says Ricardo Semler, the irrepressible force behind Brazil’s Semco Group . “We constantly talk about passion—serving customers passionately, filling in forms passionately—but what if we created the conditions for people to feel exhilaration, to get involved to the point they shout ‘yes!’ and give each other high fives because they did if their way and it worked?” What if, instead of assuming passion will just show up when we invoke it, we focused on designing organizations to unleash human flourishing?

For...