Good ideas come as the result of many people throughout the company trying hard to see and solve problems. Motivating managers is the single most important element to growing earnings. The good news is that it is also the easiest to get right.

For most of the industrial era, companies have predominantly asked themselves how to use the resources available to them more efficiently — in other words, how do we produce basically the same kinds of goods and services only faster, better and cheaper? But in today’s value-based economy, companies increasingly need to ask themselves how to use the resources available to them more innovatively — “How do we leverage existing skills and assets in different ways, different contexts or different combinations, in order to create new opportunities for value creation and growth?”