#3: Great Managers make Lousy Leaders of Innovation

Frankly, I’d argue that great managers make lousy leaders, period. But let’s focus on innovation.

Leadership and Management: Two Distinct Roles

Management and leadership are often conflated, but they serve fundamentally different purposes. Managers focus on optimizing the present—ensuring efficiency, tracking progress, and making necessary adjustments. Leaders, on the other hand, inspire and shape the future, providing a vision and guiding others toward it.

The Role of Leadership in Innovation

While innovation benefits from strong management, managing alone doesn’t inspire—it organizes, measures, and corrects. But innovation, by definition, is about creating something new:

“Innovation is the process of envisioning and successfully implementing new ways of doing anything that creates new value for an enterprise and the people it serves.”

If something is truly new, it doesn’t yet exist—and therefore, it can’t be measured. There are no past data points, no sales volumes, no frequency of purchase to analyze. Innovation requires leaders to place bets on a world, a market, and a future that doesn’t yet exist.

Thriving in a VUCA World

As my friend Bob Johansen and the Institute for the Future emphasize, no one can predict the future—but we can forecast possible scenarios based on trends and disruptive forces. In Leaders Make the Future, Bob introduces the concept of a VUCA world—one defined by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. To navigate this, leaders must transform:

• Volatility into Vision

• Uncertainty into Understanding

• Complexity into Clarity

• Ambiguity into Agility

He also outlines 10 essential leadership skills for thriving in this unpredictable landscape.

Future success requires leadership

The Future Requires Leadership

Innovation is only truly innovation if it creates new value. To achieve this, leaders must “see what everyone else sees and think what no one else has thought.” You can’t manage the future—you must envision it and lead your team toward it.

If you aspire to be a leader of innovation, you must embrace uncertainty, master the art of navigating a VUCA world, and inspire those around you to build the future together.