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We are assuming that you want to create a fast moving, innovative organization
that takes the world by storm. You want process innovation. You want new products
and services. You want old products and services produced and sold in new ways and
in new places. You want continuous improvements and you want breakthroughs. You want
to get better and stronger faster than your competitors so you can become or remain
the undisputed leader in your industry. Your company can achieve these things, but
clearly not as a bureaucratic organization. To get an explosion of appropriate innovation
you must find the way to direct and release the entrepreneurial spirit buried in
your employees. Here are some simple steps that will open wide the doors of innovation.
Raise the discomfort with the status quo.
At the heart of innovation is a healthy dissatisfaction with things as they are.
Why else make change? Bureaucratic organizations become satisfied with their performance
and focus energy on fighting for internal position and a share of the spoils. Innovative
organizations look outside themselves to find and anticipate new challenges. They
keep searching for a better way.
If you really want to raise the level of dissatisfaction don't let the system filter
out unpleasant truth. Build direct lines to customers, suppliers and employees. Establish
a system that allows you to carry on anonymous, in-depth e-mail conversations with
random employees. You reply to a number to continue the dialog for as long as you
like but the employee has the safety of anonymity. Then use the information to fix
the larger system, not to hunt down the poor employee's supervisor or department
head.
Adopt a customer and spend time with them.
Find out what suppliers think. Get together a panel of the lower-level consultants
working with your organization. What have they learned about how the company functions?
Once you, as a senior management team, have become truly dissatisfied with things
as they are and determined to make them better, it's time to raise the level of dissatisfaction
in the rest of the organization. Create a stretch vision or strategic intent. It
is impossible to give employees the freedom they need to be innovative unless they
are guided into alignment by some force other than hierarchical commands. Vision
is a powerful tool for aligning the independent, innovative
employee.
Create a vision that stretches the organization
beyond the present business-as-usual.
A strategic intent that reaches beyond what seems possible with existing resources,
inherently calls for innovation. Such a vision or intent demands
organizational transformation, not just incremental improvements. It creates new
freedoms and new responsibilities because it requires the creative energy of all
employees.
Ask for help
We often attend the annual meeting of the top 100 officers of a company and listen
to the CEO and the chief strategist lay out the strategy for the next year. Though
they give brilliant presentations, too often we see a blankness or weariness in the
audience. Why aren't they moved? If leaders are too perfect, nothing happens. As
long as the CEO preaches from a position that says, "I know it all and I hope
you all get it," the creativity of the audience is not evoked. Instead, they
wait for the all-knowing to tell them how this applies to their area of work. Effective
leaders admit that they don't know it all. Though they are sure the directions they
point to contain fruitful opportunities for innovation and change, they know they
need the creativity and help of everyone in the organization to find out what those
specific opportunities are.
Find out what is blocking innovation and handle
it decisively
Nothing creates cynicism faster than a senior management team that calls
for innovation but leaves in place the systems and people who are obviously blocking
it. Put a bureaucratic naysayers head on a pike. Create an environment in which people
at all levels can get on with the work of turning the vision into a reality. Promote
only those who sponsor rather than block innovation.
Search for and reward sponsors.
Sponsors are the critical link between top management and the innovators of the organization.
They select, fund, nurture, guide, educate, question and redirect innovators. No
system for promoting innovation can replace the courageous and vital sponsor who
understands and cares about the idea and its intrapreneurial team. But effective
sponsors are generally rare and underappreciated. Ask yourself, "Whose people
are innovating?" Ask successful innovators, "In your darkest hour with
this innovation, who was your sponsor?" You will discover that a tiny proportion
of the company's managers are doing the lion's share of the successful sponsoring.
The rest get in the way and/or lack the business judgment to know who or what to
sponsor.
S Value all types of innovation
State the kinds of innovation you want and then
don't change your mind before they come to fruition.
We have witnessed many tragedies of interrupted innovation. The company, after a
long cost-cutting binge, decides that it cannot achieve profitability and growth
through cutting costs alone. Therefore, senior management calls for new ventures,
new products and new services. Would-be innovators throughout the company respond.
Then, just as the flow of new revenue generating innovation nears the market and
begins to encounter the costs of scale-up and market introduction, senior management
decides to shift the focus back to process innovation and cost reduction. All that
new product work is lost. To make matters worse, it takes a few years to fill the
pipeline with breakthrough process innovations, so in the beginning mediocre process
ideas are funded. Then the focus shifts again and breakthrough process projects are
killed before fruition to make room for revenue focused innovation.
Keep the system open to all kinds of innovation
all the time:
continual improvement, process breakthroughs, line extensions, new products and services,
new ways of working together, new internal services and new organizational patterns.
While the emphasis may change, all kinds of innovation have their place.
Create a mutable architecture.
The essence of an innovative organization is flexibility. The flexibility needed
is not achieved by constantly changing the formal organizational structure. The innovative
organization is a constantly changing network of relationships across the boundaries
of the formal organization. A flexible organization is created on-the-fly by people
seeking the connections that will enable them to do their best work.
Ask yourself, "What policies and institutions will foster the effective self
organizing system? What force fields can I put in place that will guide its evolution
toward constructive activities and forms?"
Build choice into the system
To build flexible systems that adapt to the challenges at hand, build
choice into the lives of employees. In a bureaucracy, employees wait to be told what
to do. In an intelligent organization, employees don't wait. They exercise their
freedom of choice.
Kinds of choice you can build into your system:
- Institute a 15% rule. 3M employees, by policy, use 15% of their time to work
on new ideas of their own choosing.
- Give employees more choice over which projects they work on. You'll find out
who the real leaders are. Everyone will want to be on their team. Some projects that
don't make sense at the practical level will die for lack of staff.
- Let operating divisions choose how much staff service they want to buy from whom.
Not only will costs drop, but staff services will improve. Former bureaucratic staffs
will get creative in finding ways to satisfy the needs of their internal customers.
The Forest Service had two technical service centers each serving half of the country.
Service to the national forests was not customer oriented. They gave the forests
choice of which tech service center to use. Almost overnight the tech service centers
became more concerned with providing cost effective services which were valued by
their users.
Competition and duplication have a bad name in companies, but in truth, competition
and duplication can be good or bad. Political competition to get control of a monopoly
right to deliver services or provide components brings out the worst in people. When
customers have choice, competition to be part of an evolving network providing solutions
to customers brings out innovation, cost consciousness and a search for effectiveness.
Build community: be intolerant of selfish politics
Freedom is the product of a people's capacity to go to the core of their
souls and to evoke constantly new and ennobling patterns of meaning and significance.
William van Dusen Wishard You will find it easier to build choice into the system
if you can trust your people to use it for the good of the organization and not just
to make themselves look good at the expense of others. Build community spirit by
creating visions of the future of the organization that address people's deepest
values. Make the organization stand for something the employees can be proud of --
something that makes it worthwhile to rise above their selfish concerns as they cheer
for the whole. The best leaders create a community of many leaders, all taking responsibility
for more than their narrow areas of formal responsibility.
At the core of community is voluntary contribution to the whole, above and beyond
the call of duty. Too strict an accounting for time, too brutal an MBO scheme, too
much focus on narrow measures of performance, and community suffers. As leaders you
can:
- Respond with gratitude to all volunteer efforts to serve customers and make the
organization more effective.
- Create space for individuals to volunteer for team projects outside their normal
jobs.
- Make sure all managers understand that the volunteer sector inside the organization
is the root of corporate community.
On the other side of community building is discouraging managers who are more interested
in fighting over turf than building the strength of the whole. It is very easy for
the people below to see which managers are builders of the organization and which
are only builders of their own careers. It is apparently very difficult to tell from
above. Too often those who fight for what they believe is right are labeled as "not
team players," while those who earn points with the boss at the expense of the
organization and its customers are seen as "willing to sacrifice for the good
of the whole." Do not be fooled. Use 360i feedback.
To create an organization that has the integrating force of community, go out of
your way to discourage and refuse to promote those who are primarily working to increase
their own power. Some hints:
- Be intolerant of finger pointing. Speak strongly to those who blame individuals
rather than find the root cause of a problem.
- Favor those individuals who correct the systemic sources of problems.
- Build processes to reveal subordinates' opinions of leaders and managers.
- Review the long term effects of a manager's tenure. If a manager's area falls
apart soon after they leave, they probably created short term results at the expense
of the long-term health of the organization. If many innovative successes were started
during their tenure, you had someone who was working for the long-term good of the
system.
Measure the rate of innovation
You get what you measure and pay attention to. If you want innovation,
measure it. It's not easy to do, but the effort to do so puts people's attention
on getting results with innovation.
Measure the environment for innovation
How will are you doing in creating an environment for innovation? Do a
yearly innovation environment audit to findout.
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