THE IDEA HUNTER - How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen presented by Andy Boynton, dean, Carroll School of Management, Boston College, Boston, Mass.
In today’s information-based economy, ideas are an extraordinarily valuable asset, fueling professional growth and driving your organization’s success. What can you do to help your organization become a magnet for great ideas? How can you leverage “the hunt” for great ideas as a source of competitive advantage? Andy Boynton has spent a career working with executives around the world exploring these very questions. He will share the essential skills and tools of idea hunting and demonstrate how ideas drive progress for individual leaders, high-performance teams and winning organizations. He will share stories of great idea hunters, from Henry Ford to Pablo Picasso, and from Thomas Edison to Warren Buffett. This session will detail the four steps necessary to become an effective IDEA hunter:
- I – Become intensely INTERESTED; become a learning machine.
- D – DIVERSIFY your idea web; take a different path and learn from weird people.
- E – EXERCISE your idea muscles daily.
- A – AGILE, meaning adapt, reuse and test the ideas around you to create new uses.
Boynton also will demonstrate how creating world-class “IDEA HUNTER” capabilities and culture in your organization will lead to high-performance leadership and teamwork, effective change management, new strategy formation and implementation, innovation, creativity and originality, and greater engagement and empowerment.
Andy Boynton
Andy Boynton is dean of Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, one of the world’s leading business schools, the author of several books and co-creator of DeepDive™, the world’s leading methodology for helping executives harness the power of teams to significantly improve problem-solving speed, innovation and results.
Prior to joining Boston College, Boynton was a professor of strategy at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland for 10 years. At the IMD he led a faculty team and was program director of one of the world’s top ten Executive MBA programs, as recognized by BusinessWeek.
Boynton has recently launched new research projects to explore how distinguished experts from a variety of knowledge-domains work with ideas to achieve professional success and improve their effectiveness in social networks. His latest book, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen (Jossey-Bass), is based on this research and is co-authored with Bill Fischer and William Bole.
He has also published extensively on factors underlying high-performing teams across a variety of disciplines, including art, science, exploration and design. His previous books include Virtuoso Teams: Lessons from Teams That Changed Their Worlds (Financial Times-Prentice Hall) and Invented Here: Maximizing Your Organization’s Internal Growth and Profitability (Harvard Business School Press).
He is a 1978 graduate of Boston College. Boynton earned his MBA and PhD at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He has served on the MBA faculty at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business and at the Darden School of Business, University of Virginia.
In addition to his publishing career and role as dean of the Carroll School of Management, Boynton has over twenty years of experience speaking and designing powerful executive education sessions and seminars for firms around the world. He is often utilized by organizations looking to build more innovative and effective teams and his articles in this area have appeared in elite management journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review and The California Management Review.