From my current newsletter:

What are the leaders doing?

Taco Bell sought out the feedback of about 10,200 participants to choose from various categories of fixings to create a hot selling burrito. To the shock of the dieticians at Taco Bell, instead of a low calorie item, most respondents wanted an ‘indulgent’ burrito and they were willing to pay extra for it.

At Apple, Steve Jobs believes “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem. Its ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

IBM has allocated upto $5000 annually for each front line manager, no questions asked, to spend on responding to extraordinary situations that will enable them to generate business, develop client relationships or respond to any employee’s emergency need. With 22,000 front line managers, Sam Palmisano calls it their “$100 million bet on trust”.

To read more examples go
here