The brightest business ideas and strategies will fail or yield suboptimal results in an obstructive culture. Resistance to change, territoriality, silo mentality, lack of trust, fear, unidirectional communication, inbreeding, blame game, egomania (sense of invincibility, of always being right, often leading to disregard for warnings, due process, and the law), and limited leadership gene pool have prevented, and continue to prevent, organizations from achieving the desired level of success. Indeed, many corporations have fallen by the wayside due to their inability to overcome these cultural barriers.

It’s expedient to ensure that culture doesn’t trump strategy. Executives must develop a culture that supports rapid and constant change. Innovation is change that allows an organization to improve existing processes, products, and services and create new ones. It’s the driving force for ongoing success. As Lewis D. Eigen, author and business leader, once remarked, “Yesterday’s miracle is today’s intolerable condition” (FAA, 1985). Considering that Eigen made this statement twenty-one years ago, the idea of innovation being critical to an organization’s success is not new. What’s changed is the pace at which innovation occurs. As a predictor of the rapidity of innovation, Eigen’s statement is reinforced by recent research and expert opinion. Up to the early 1990s, for instance, organizations had up to six months to prepare for a disruptive invention or technology. Juan Enriquez, CEO of Biotechonomy (a research and investment firm), founding director of the Harvard Business School Life Sciences Project, and author of the insightful book As the Future Catches You, suggests we have just twenty-four hours to prepare. He also predicts this time frame will continue to shrink.

For an organization to not fall victim to the battle of the ingrained versus the unknown, for innovation to thrive and for business to reap the resultant benefits, executives should consider the recommendations given below.

Know thyself (Socrates). Change can be initiated at any level of the organization. However, it has the furthest reach when it starts at the top.

To yield the desired result, change must begin at the level of the individual executive. There must be a personal commitment to taking the necessary steps and modeling the appropriate behavior in order to reach the desired future state.

The executive’s character—integrity, genuineness, consistency (especially between word and action)—is one of the most significant factors in establishing the credibility of a change initiative. The most searched word in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary in 2005 was integrity. Employees are increasingly paying close attention to their leaders, and gaps between what’s said and what’s done erode trust and cast a long shadow on the organization’s commitment to change. As John Tillotson, a seventeenth-century English clergyman, pointed out, “They who are in the highest places, and have the most power, have the least liberty, because they are most observed” (Atlantic Monthly, Nov.1945).

While folklore teaches us to practice what we preach, it’s expedient for leaders to preach what they practice. The credibility of leadership is not based on promises but on past actions.

Attitude and disposition also have significant implications for leaders. Napoleon Bonaparte described a leader as a “dealer in hope” (Eigen, 1998). Transitioning from one state to another and improving or creating products can be challenging. Long transitions, difficulty predicting timelines for improvements or discoveries, “failed” experiments, etc., add to the level of complexity and stress that employees deal with. To help them maintain focus and sustain a high level of performance, a leader must carry the banner of hope. He or she needs to maintain a positive disposition toward achieving the desired change. This is critical as employees ride on the confidence of their leaders. If leadership caves, they will fall through as well.

Executives’ style and preferences make a statement. When a candidate for a Chief Innovation Officer position shows up in a bow tie and monkey suit, and accentuates the look by pulling out a ten-pound, first-generation laptop to demonstrate accomplishments, what runs through the mind of the interviewer? Or imagine that the executives at Sony preferred Microsoft’s Xbox 360 for personal use while simultaneously touting Sony’s recently released PlayStation 3 as the most advanced gaming machine. Don’t let your preferences undercut your efforts in leading your organization toward continuous innovation.

Executives have to model the actions and behaviors they want to see in the workforce. They must share the “CEO” title and role in the process. I’m not talking about the Chief Executive Officer here, but rather the Chief Example Officer.

Introduce cultural elements that facilitate innovation. Transforming a culture is perhaps the most difficult and time-consuming type of change. Culture is a set of beliefs and practices that guide the actions and behaviors of a group. Such beliefs and traditions accumulate over time and are preserved for subsequent generations. Culture, therefore, is meant to withstand time.

Your organization’s ability to innovative and grow is subject to the limitations in your culture. The following ideas will be useful in turning your business culture into a change-inducing force.

Common language: Organizations that have made headway in building an innovation-fostering environment create and use a common language. This language defines the organization’s future orientation. It identifies where the organization is headed and provides a road map for reaching the destination.

In his first year as CEO, Jerry Jurgensen introduced a new lingua franca at Nationwide—ImagiNationwide. The translation for ImagiNationwide is “how we think.” Jurgensen was on a mission to grow the company through expansion and innovation. The strategic imperatives and goals of the organization were to be defined and executed in the framework of ImagiNationwide. Other key lexicons he introduced include Drivers of Value Creation, Values Driving Behavior, Extending Our Boundaries, and Culture of Discipline. Specific initiatives, performance standards, and behavioral expectations were subsumed under each of these subtitles.

Nationwide’s executives spent a great deal of time educating the workforce on this language. During orientation new employees learned what ImagiNationwide stood for and how they should be involved. Jurgensen achieved much of his goal of introducing innovative products and improving existing ones. He grew the net income of the company from $138 million in 2001, one year after he took office, to more than $1 billion in 2005.

A common language serves to galvanize the workforce and sharpen future focus.

Space: When developing an innovative culture, a deliberate effort must be made to create space for innovation. The word space is used here in a spacio-temporal sense. It’s not the same as adding on work or creating new goals. It involves making time and space for innovation to occur.

Fifteen percent of scientists’ time at 3M can be spent on projects of their choosing. During this “personal project” time, Art Fry, a 3M employee, improved upon the impermanent adhesive discovered earlier by a coworker. The result is the Post-it® note. Since its launch in 1980, this product continues to be a cash cow for 3M.

At Google, one of the world’s most innovative companies, the intranet is the platform for innovation. Every piece of work is posted on it. This enables employees to find similar projects or technologies, locate experts, and comment on or join projects.

By laying work bare, Google eliminated the knowledge and communication barriers that arise from working in compartmentalized environments. This enables the company to benefit from fluid intelligence.

Fluid intelligence arises from sharing knowledge and information across traditional boundaries. It’s how leading organizations are responding to complex challenges and breaking new ground. The United States Army’s www.companycommand.com Web site is a poster child for fluid intelligence. This site is a portal for company commanders to exchange and refine ideas. Beyond that, commanders in battlefront are able to ask questions of their peers across the world. This gives them access to the most current thinking and relevant experience on an issue in real time.

Corning Incorporated, named a Best Practice Champion in Organizational Change by the Best Practice Institute, ensures that work teams practice behaviors that foster innovation by appointing an innovation manager to work with each team. Also called learning coaches, these managers coach team members on how to overcome communication barriers and collaborate across boundaries in raising and solving complex problems.

Crossbreeding: Many organizations traditionally scout and hire people for leadership positions exclusively from within. Some insist on limiting C-level positions to close family and friends. Often referred to as inbreeding, this approach tends to overlook the vast pool of talent outside the organization.

The right talent is the most critical ingredient in building an innovative culture. Whether the organization sees its competition as regional, national, or global, it should cast its net accordingly in filling key positions.

If your organization wishes to achieve extraordinary results, it must be willing to make extraordinary moves. When Nationwide was looking to build its brand, it hired the brand manager at Victoria Secret. Innovative organizations look beyond their industry and the direct competition for the right talent. They find an organization that has excelled or has a core competency in the area of the position they wish to fill. They then seek out the brains behind the organization’s success.

Women such as Indra Nooyi (CEO, PepsiCo), Ann Mulcahy (CEO, Xerox), and Pat Woertz (CEO, ADM), among countless others, prove that when it comes to talent, gender is not a factor.

Another trend that innovative organizations have set is hiring talent with future-oriented skills and capabilities as opposed to the prevalent practice of hiring for past but increasingly irrelevant experience. As one of the top human resource executives at EDS, thirty-five-year-old Tracey M. Friend had already founded and sold an Internet recruitment and training company. She had demonstrated the entrepreneurial acumen that EDS desired to cultivate. Recognized by Business Week as a champion of innovation, Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience, and the number-three executive at Google, was born in 1975. In the journey toward enduring success, age cannot be a roadblock.

Experimentation: Experimentation and prototyping are hallmarks of an innovative culture. Nonetheless, they are the least likely to be embraced. This is primarily because the Wall Street–driven short-term outlook doesn’t foster the type of long-term investment they require. The fact that an experiment might be conducted several times before a commercially viable product emerges is a deterrent.

Business experimentation is a process of seeking and testing ideas about processes, products, and services. In addition to accelerating learning, it is the engine of innovation. Wal-Mart learned this a long time ago and has successfully turned controlled, cost-effective business experimentation into a core competency. James Cash, professor emeritus, Harvard Business School, and Keri Pearlson, research director with The Concours Group, attribute much of Wal-Mart’s success to a strong culture of experimentation. Among other organizations, they identified GE’s “imagination breakthroughs” as another successful experimental model (CIO, Oct. 15, 2005).

Organizations that wish to invent the future and set the pace for their industry must become adept at experimentation.

For any of the above recommendations to be effective, existing cultural barriers must first be identified and addressed. An executive might not even need the endorsement of the board of directors to tackle most of the obstructions mentioned in the introduction.

Most organizations have missions statements, and this can be a useful tool. However, a limiting mission statement can become an institutionalized framework that’s difficult to challenge and a potential constraint to innovation. It could prevent an organization from venturing into markets that hold promise. Nokia, a onetime paper mill, could not have become a global mobile phone giant if its mission statement had limited it only to paper production.

All efforts toward building an innovative culture should be centered on a thorough knowledge of the customer. Your organization is at a disadvantage if the competition knows the customer better than you do.

The Center for Creative Leadership recently conducted a worldwide survey on the future of leadership. Based on their findings, they recommend five new skills for the leaders of the future: co-inquiry (emphasizing cross-boundary collaboration and fluid intelligence), adaptability, risk taking, navigating challenges, and paying attention. All five skills are critical in building a culture of innovation. Executives will do well to grow these skills in their organizations.

PETER ADEBI is a seasoned Human Resources and Organizational Development consultant. He is founder of Star Leadership ® and author of The Star Principle. Contact: padebi@starleadership.org