In order to cope with the ever-changing business landscape, we need leaders who lead innovatively and innovators who can also lead. In fact, 94 percent of senior executives admit that innovation is the most important factor to mark stellar organization growth. “Leadership and innovation must be treated as two sides of the same coin,” agrees Colonel Alok Asthana, Founder & Director, Innovators & Leaders – a niche organisation offering comprehensive ‘what matters the most’ in leadership and innovation fields in diverse industry domains.

Innovators & Leaders works hard on the need analysis to detect the problem areas of each organization. To effectively bridge the workshop-workplace divide, they have initial interactions at three levels – L&D team, learners, and the departmental heads. This process uncovers all facets and creates acceptability and desire. Based on their belief that all performance deficiencies are not training rectifiable, the solution they offer could be any of these – face-to-face workshop, self-paced e-learning on their Moodle based LMS (Learning Management System), OD consultancy to address a specific issue, or executive one-to-one coaching for the top leadership. Col. Alok states, “We are trainers, consultants, OD interventionists and coaches – all rolled into one”.

Leadership at Different Levels
Having gained years of experience in army and top corporates, Col. Alok adeptly tackles five levels of leadership, which also form the five sections of his well-received book ‘Leadership for Colonels and Business Managers’. Starting from the basic level of one-to-one interactions wherein social psychology is important, they move up to the one-to-many interactions which affect group dynamics, followed by formative training on organizational development, leadership behaviour, and finally the decision-making perspectives. For integrating leadership with OD, they also address four critical topics that fail to attract conscious attention in most organisations – management of complexity, uncertainty, mind-set, and organizational culture. Innovators & Leaders also offers specific programs to help organisations instil techniques of Peripheral Vision that will result in timely detection of threats and opportunities.

We are trainers, consultants, OD interventionists and coaches - all rolled into one

Promoting TRIZ Innovation for All Technical & Business Issues
While adept in different approaches to innovation, i.e. Design Thinking, Outcome Driven Innovation and some others, Col. Alok is firmly settled on the TRIZ route. This is the only evidence based system catering to all stages of innovative thinking, from problem solving through opportunity spotting to finally solution finding. Trained in this at an IIT Mumbai program in 2002, he follows his famous teacher – Darrell Mann. This variant of TRIZ has distinct and specialized versions for technical issues, non-technical (business, managerial) issues and IT issues. He also uses a format which combines TRIZ with Trends, ensuring very quick resolution of cases that initially manifest only as a vague uneasy feeling. Even when there are no specific issues, this format can be used to generate opportunities arising out of contradictions and the ‘voice of the product or process’.

Instead of targeting to achieve fixed financial goals, Innovators & Leaders is progressing with its niche offerings, with a broader aim of touching more lives and bringing about a change in the market. Col. Alok concludes, “Currently, we are at Thane with an office in the US. Our next move is to go global – either physically or by using the latest distance learning technologies. Also, we’ll now be offering one-to-one coaching in a big way. Everyone needs a coach – the higher you are, the more you need it”.