Morning. Early. Coffee. Feed pets, including But I've also found that it's really the same self-discipline tactics that have helped grow our business and others by remaining focused and getting things done. Things like product launches, client events, important media announcements are most successful when they are well-organized, meeting deadlines. And here's the blasphemy from someone with an art/design background and is a self-professed new-technology-loving-geek: "self-discipline" wins out over "innovation" as the Numero Uno competency to drive business success.
"Ooh, fancy talk! Competency? Really?" I can hear you all a Twitter now.
While I'm not an I-O psychologist, I'm married to one - and have written about talent measurement and human capital management for a decade now, communicating for several clients and past employers. Of course I know there is no 'No. 1' competency, and that it depends on the job, the company, and a lot of other complicated inter-connected things.
But here are my Top 6 reasons why Self-Discipline is more important to business success than Innovation:
1Self-discipline helps maintain focus - increasing productivity. When you are paying attention to your process or task at hand, things get done more quickly and efficiently, with fewer errors.
2Self-discipline can be learned and increased through practice. This is less true for innovation. Training and education can help most individuals build self-discipline - so an entire organization can improve.
3Self-discipline increases happiness and confidence - because rewards are tangible. If you stick to your diet or your workout schedule, results are visible. If you stick to your writing, you finish your article on deadline.
4Innovation is highly subjective - often not immediately recognized.You have to work hard to get the word out about your innovation, before someone else comes along with a similar idea or claims it as their own.
5Innovation is time consuming - breakthroughs take years/decades. This is hard for many companies, especially small ones, to sustain over enough time to realize ROI.
6 Innovation can be very risky - first to market is often not most successful. We have dozens of examples to point to...can anyone say 'MySpace'?
Self-discipline takes commitment and persistence all working together to be most effective. In absence of creativity or innovation, self-discipline can still provide results as in: projects accomplished >> sales leads followed up >> deals closed >> revenue. Innovation alone cannot do any of these things.
Of course in a perfect world - you have both. Innovative culture and self-disciplined talent. Maybe a sense of fun thrown in for enjoyment.
The reason I even decided to write about this is in response to the incessant drumming of 'innovation, innovation' in recent articles popping up all over those RSS feeds, newsletters and blogs that I scan. Cool. I'm all for it. However, success takes hard work - and I don't see a whole lot written on that topic. Call me old-fashioned, or maybe too 'self-disciplined', but I just had to point out the obvious.
Now it's time to go do some yoga.
--Donna
Image credit: Lululemon Athletica's Flickr stream, Creative Commons attribution
