ABSTRACT
A recent survey given to over 12,000 leaders across 2,600 organizations and 74 countries asked upper level executives to describe and outline their anticipated needs for the future ( Boatman & Wellins, 2011 ). Emerging quite clearly from this cross-industry survey was that managing change via the facilitation of creativity and innovation will prove critical to organizational success ( Boatman & Wellins, 2011 ). This point is echoed by several other recent surveys, such as those conducted by the Boston Consulting Group ( Andrew, Manget, Michael, Taylor, & Zablit, 2010 ) who found that across executives, innovation facilitation was listed as a top requirement of organizational leaders. Similarly, a survey conducted by IBM in its Capitalizing on Complexity (2010) report also found that the ability to drive innovation was listed as the single most desired leadership quality among the range of management characteristics considered. Perhaps even more significant is that when asked what skills leaders lacked, fostering creativity and innovation was rated as the weakest and in need of the greatest improvement ( Boatman & Wellins, 2011 ). The aggregate of these efforts illustrates a growing trend in the applied world: the increasing need to be more innovative and an inability to meet this need successfully. Being innovative, it seems, may be more challenging than it might appear on the surface.
