Inspiring Fast Company Founding Editor William Taylor delivers a rousing keynote to a packed house.
William Taylor, a writer, entrepreneur and popular blogger for Harvard Business Review, urged attendees of the 2015 ISPA Industry Conference to become leaders who create meaningful change and long-lasting value in the sleep products industry.
“You can’t do big things any more if you are content with doing things a little better than everybody else or a little different from how you did them in the past,” said Taylor, founding editor of Fast Company magazine.
“The only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special. Originality has become the acid test of strategy.”
Taylor has devoted his career to challenging conventional wisdom. His latest book, “Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry and Challenge Yourself,” became an immediate Wall Street Journal best-seller.
Taylor highlighted his ideas about strategy and leadership in an era of hyper-competition with case studies of some of the world’s highest-performing organizations.
When a new chief executive officer took the helm of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, he spent two years sending teams of 20 hospital employees to Japan for a week to work in a Toyota factory, learning the tools and philosophy of its business model.
Upon return, Taylor said, the employees unleashed everything they learned and managed to effect change in an industry known for adversity to it. The hospital, among other things: eliminated millions of dollars in needless inventory; reduced the distance employees had to walk across the hospital campus to do their work by 60 miles a day; and increased the time nurses spent at patients’ bedsides from 40% to 90%.
“That shows how much you can learn if you can figure out how to look at any business through a different set of eyes,” Taylor said. “R&D is not just research and development. It’s rip off and duplicate. Look for ideas from other companies in other fields. The only sustainable form of leadership is thought leadership.”
Taylor encouraged attendees to stay “energized and relevant” by setting aside daily pressures every so often and thinking about the ideas that define how they do business and distinguish them from competitors.
“Step back and make sure you don’t let what you know limit what you can imagine.”
