FAST COMPANY: How can a leader affect and change innovation?
KAVEH NAFICY: This is a very special kind of leadership. It has to do with pull. Pulling ideas out of the organization, not pushing. So it means that you manage your own ego, you manage the ego of your leadership team, that you use your position power to remove barriers in the way of innovation and that you really lead the communication, the celebration, around those great new ideas and the teams the people that were behind them.
How can a leader affect and change innovation?
Kaveh Naficy is the founding partner of Philosophy IB, a management consulting firm focused on
the execution of business strategy. He has over 30 years of business experience as a management
consultant, corporate executive, and entrepreneur. Kaveh's emphasis is on developing leaders
in dynamic and changing environments by co-developing objectives, leveraging strengths, and
removing obstacles to reach client objectives and organizational outcomes. His clients include global
organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Microsoft, Nokia, BASF, Gerber, and Pfizer.
As an executive at Warner Lambert/Pfizer Consumer Healthcare he had a key role in developing
the five year strategy of the business, and supporting the successful integration of Pfizer and
Warner Lambert. Prior to working at Warner Lambert, Kaveh created Ernst & Young’s European
strategic change practice based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, developing it into a multimillion dollar
business. Kaveh also spent fifteen years at Citicorp in a variety of business, line, and organizational
effectiveness capacities. He was a catalyst in the development and successful implementation of
Citibanking—Citibank’s vision of consumer banking. Currently, Kaveh devotes a great deal of his
time with organizations and leaders undergoing significant culture change, in particular in the area of
innovation
Kaveh received his BA from Baker University, a master’s degree in labor relations from Cornell
University and an MBA from Boston College. Kaveh oversees the coaching component and instructs
in the Executive MBA program at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. He is a
frequently invited speaker and the author of How Executive Coaching Can Fuel Professional and
Personal Growth, published in the OD Practitioner and Executive Coaching: Building the Path for
Personal Growth, published by the Darden School at the University of Virginia.