According to one of management’s most renowned thinkers, Tom Peters, libraries are full of books on innovation. However, he felt the urgent need to make available to his readers a summary of his four decades of experience in the field.

What is this summary all about? 10 concrete, no-funny stuff tips (a common characteristic of Peters), that summarize the most essential knowledge on innovation he has acquired over his admirable career as author and expert on excellence. We share them with you in the following. 

Whether due to the lack of a true leader or too much pressure, the potential for high performers to shine can be dulled if the right kind of motivation and feedback isn’t offered. No one wants a boss who is on your toes from 9am to 6pm, but does anyone want a boss who barely acknowledges your existence? And it doesn’t matter how high your performance is, if you don’t have someone giving you feedback there’s no way to guess what your boss is thinking, right?

Autonomy and confidence to make decisions are just two of the fundamental aspects necessary to achieve optimal performance and aim for excellence. However, there is much more to have in mind in order to get the best from your people. In the following discover tips from experts in leadership, management thinkers, and renowned CEOs on how to keep your people motivated to their highest level of performance.

There are many different ways to understand and define innovation. From new business models to ideas born from continual, inspired and original creativity, even the implementation of resolutions to problems and concrete needs.

Beyond what we understand innovation to be, there are some essentials that cannott be left out such as the key role that people play in driving, generating, experiencing and transforming innovation into a reality that creates value.

According to a recent article published on Forbes.com, “innovation is the fuel of our future — new products, new services, new markets. But it isn’t just the ‘next big thing.’ It’s also a million small things. Innovation is about people working within a philosophy of continuous improvement and change.” But how to start the engines for this fuel in your organization? The article suggests five tips, summarized here. The first one?

1) Innovation is everyone’s job. Whether you lead a team, a group, or an organization, you’ve got to involve and rely on others. Isolating “a creative few” as the sole visionaries in the organization simply won’t cut it anymore.

For more tips continue reading.

Motivating people to work towards a specific goal or objective has always been identified as one of the key roles of a leader.  To achieve this it is becoming increasingly important to infuse work with a sense of meaning, as individual’s motivation is increasingly based on factors beyond economic remuneration.

In their book The Why of Work, Wend and Dave Ulrich place on the leader the key role of helping people to find that sense of meaning.  However in order to help those around them, it is necessary to discover and understand their own personal motivation.  In order to do this they propose a series of seven simple exercises that you can put into practice in order to understand your own motivations and subsequently discover what motivates those around you.

Former New York Times social media director Soraya Darabi is one of the founders of Foodspotting.com, an online mobile service that uses geolocations to help users find their favorite food, no matter where they are in the world. Considered a social media visionary, she recognizes the importance of a marketing strategy that incorporates new digital and social platforms. A believer in the power of community, she outlines five tips on engaging community, incorporating new platforms, and being more social in this exclusive WOBI interview.