At the core of any company's success are innovation and creativity, twin forces traditionally regarded as untamable creatures. Business leaders are looking for effective ways to harness these forces. They seek out ways to enhance the creative potential of people at all levels —  encourage and enable them to be innovators — to participate in the continuous search for improvement.

The foundation of entrepreneurship is systematic innovation (disciplined and habitual). The core habits of entrepreneurs are opportunity seeking, adaptation, constant renewal and growth, and the encouragement of delegation and innovation at all levels. It is not so much a matter of personality as it is a discipline. Forward-thinking companies regularly adapt themselves to the changes and opportunities in their market faster than they must discontinue older, less profitable ideas.

Putting these principles into practice, however, is a challenge. People often say that most entrepreneurs need to become better managers. Likewise, most managers would benefit by gaining a better understanding of disciplined innovation. For small and mid-sized technology businesses and service firms in particular, it is hard to marshal the time and energy toward this end. There is always a conflict between running the business of "now" with the real need to plan and change for the future.

A good starting point is to think of "management" in terms of building the capacity for self-sustaining growth into the organization-by creating the means for people at all levels to grow and to act innovatively and responsibly toward organizational objectives. If managers can understand, accept and learn to apply this "growth mindset," they will have taken a major step toward lasting success. Thus, one of the keys to remaining competitive today is to make your enterprise-wide learning process meaningful enough and tactical enough so that your employees can think out-of-the-box in more focused and efficient ways. Companies need to give people at all levels better control over their limited time and resources, to help them to learn more quickly and efficiently. This also encourages commitment toward organizational objectives.

In the course of this journey, however, companies face an important tactical issue: the wasting of both the time and resources of managers looking for direction and/or solutions to problems in the face of huge amounts of information and available knowledge. In this regard, there is a serious impasse in the growth of management literature and practice. There is no unified management model for a "learning organization."

For over twenty years, business leaders have been asking essentially the same questions about innovation. In the early 1980s, the question was how to catch up and stay competitive in the global marketplace. In the early 1990s, the question became how to increase the rate at which our organizations learn. Of course, there have been some recent advances in the area of collaborative software. However, we have not yet devised truly effective responses to the challenges of team and enterprise collaboration from a "content" point of view. Thus, for many companies today, the question simply has become how to do more in less time and with fewer people, and still get better results. We believe the tactical question is how to avoid wasting time while trying to capitalize on all the available knowledge.

In order for a company to move to a place of "continuous improvement," there first has to be a commitment to "transformational learning." This means that managers must seek to instill a focused and rewarding process of discovery. This entails constant self-questioning and the invitation of opposing viewpoints, and in response, thinking and acting in new and better ways. It helps to think of "continuous improvement" as a kind of "inner growth" that improves upon a company's "capacity to learn." What is set in motion is the process of transformational learning. Tangible improvement results naturally follow. Many managers also find the phrase "continuous improvement" a bit confusing. The key is to think of the word continuous as being proactive in your search for improvement.

Creating a climate of learning requires that managers emphasize the total commitment to meeting and exceeding the expectations of customers and employees, and to the objective of continuous improvement. An enterprise-wide, purposeful search for new and better ways to create customer value and build a stronger organization distinguishes the process. It is best accomplished by instituting a flexible process of team planning and learning in action-featuring openness, empowerment, knowledge sharing, systems thinking, problem solving, objective setting, experimentation and innovation.

There are two parts to getting on the path to disciplined innovation. The first is to figure out how to focus and accelerate and/or broaden and enhance a company's learning and improvement initiatives. The second is to help managers figure out where, among all of an organization's key success factors, to focus their company's learning and improvement initiatives. In order not to waste the time and resources of managers, companies need a repeatable model process, and set of guidelines, to institute a practical, ongoing process of planning and learning. Rather than reinventing the wheel for every new initiative, companies can and should institute a habitual learning and improvement process by regularly assessing their company's business practices and plans. Providing managers with a road map and the tools to bring this about can decrease endless cycle-time, and increase the rate at which companies learn.

It is always easier to transform the mindset of an organization on the heels of a crisis. However, without a disciplined commitment to systematic management, team building and habitual improvement, no amount of ingenuity, skill or knowledge will bring about continued prosperity. As well, it is far better to design learning and improvement into your company's processes in the first place rather than always having to encounter unanticipated problems. Aristotle said it perfectly, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

Alan G. Thomas is founder and president of Learning In Action Inc. Ralph L. LoVuolo is the founder of The Meadows Group. They are co-authors of "Innovative Management: Best Practice Guidelines and Templates for Team Planning and Learning in Action." They can be contacted at (617) 454-1007 or at www.practicalactionlearning.com.