Today's business environment demands a workforce that can move fast with focus and flexibility. If you can't respond quickly to changing market conditions and unforeseen events, you'll get left behind by faster, more strategically agile competitors that can.

 Teach people at all levels to anticipate opportunities and threats while managing their day-to-day tasks and responsibilities. Give them the training, coaching and mentoring to become more responsive to changing customer needs. Develop their creative problem solving skills, and help them understand how their decisions and actions impact the business in the future as well as today.

Structure your organization so that it can realign quickly in response to unexpected events. Learn how to say "no" to opportunities that take you off focus, unless you have redefined winning and agreed to the new destination. Create laser-like focus and prioritization at every level, keeping your picture of winning visible at all times by communicating it and keeping it physically in front of people on a regular basis.

5. Get Good At Innovating.

This is perhaps the biggest challenge because most companies aren't set up to innovate. To support innovation on an ongoing basis:

• Have a vision and set clear goals. Get very clear on why you're innovating, what you want to achieve, and how you will get there.
• Don't limit your search for new ideas. Look internally and externally for new product ideas and for ways to improve your systems and processes. Sometimes the best ideas come from unlikely sources.
• Develop a culture of communication. Innovation isn't cheap. Don't waste time and money duplicating ideas and/or efforts because different parts of the organization didn't talk to each other.
• Provide full management support. Innovation can't succeed if employees see it as just another "flavor of the month" management fad. Management must commit sufficient expertise and resources, and demonstrate that commitment by their actions as well as their words.
• Develop an appropriate reward system. If employees don't get rewarded for new ideas, they won't come up with any. Make sure your reward system aligns with your innovation goals and the innovation model you adopt. And don't limit your rewards thinking to just monetary - employees are often as motivated by simple recognition such as thank you notes, personalized emails, comments in team meetings, etc.

Most important, strive for disruptive, rather than incremental, innovation. Disruptive innovation redefines your market and the way value gets delivered. It fundamentally alters the customer's relationship with your product or service. And it puts you in a position of market leadership so that competitors end up chasing you instead of the other way around.  For companies looking to get ahead, innovation is no longer a "nice to have." It needs to become a way of life!