Often heard in executive meetings: "Our employees just aren't contributing ideas. Maybe they don't have any." The reality? Your organization has lots of brilliant ideas that you've never even heard of. Or as Steinbeck puts it: "Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to look after them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." In other words, getting ideas is a habit. But it needs to be stimulated. What it comes down to is, how do you identify and stimulate rabits? Here's some hints:
As early as 1963, Theodore Levitt noted, "anybody who carefully looks around in any modern business organization and speaks freely and candidly with the people in it will experience little shortage of creativity and creative people in business." Levitt pinpointed the fundamental problem of innovation: some people naturally generate lots of far-reaching ideas, and others naturally implement solutions within an organizational framework. Sometimes it seems that never the twain shall meet.
Hiring smart people who come up with good ideas - as evidenced by the dot-com graveyard -is but a small piece of the puzzle. “The answer”, according to Michael May, global managing partner of Accenture’s Strategy & Business Architecture service line in the CEO Connection, “lies in being able to translate ideas into commercial reality very quickly." Unfortunately, that's not easy. For every phenomenally successful product or market innovation there are hundreds of abysmal, and costly, failures.
How do you resolve that fundamental oxymoron create new and implement? Part of the answer is having a culture that fosters the bringing forth of new ideas. And that culture needs to encourage not only ideas, but also action associated with those ideas. Another part of the answer is having an innovation process that successfully brings people together to channel action into results.
One of the biggest enemies of getting something done is the dreaded "P" word: "program." Whenever you hear that a company is about to "roll out a program," it's not good news. It suggests that the company is about to spend all of its time worrying about the content of the program, rather than learning by doing. David Kelley, founder and CEO of Ideo, has it right: "Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects."
Another huge obstacle to doing in companies is corporate memory: "how we've always done things around here" substitutes for "doing things the right way around here." People don't want to make mistakes, and the best way to avoid making a mistake is to continue doing things exactly as they've always been done. Companies get trapped in a kind of circular logic: "We do what we do because it's the best thing to do. And it's the best thing to do because it's what we've always done."
After a while, what was originally adopted as a means to an end becomes an end in itself. There is no function that is more culpable in this regard than human resources. In company after company, the human-resources department puts into place a whole bunch of policies that undoubtedly started with good intentions. But in time, those policies, which originally were just a means to an end, become ends in themselves. And nobody remembers what outcome those policies were actually intended to produce. What you end up with are sacred cows -- things that you take for granted; processes, practices, and rules that you think will help you get things done. In reality, all they do is get in the way of getting things done. (Jeffrey Pfeffer, 2002)
Beware of Innovation killers!!
Letting mid-level managers take over and reshape the innovation initiative;
"Do what I say, but don't look at what I do because innovation doesn't apply to me";
"Let's all become more entrepreneurial";
Success. Past successes prevent organizations from questioning what they do and how they do it;
Blame somebody else (the staff, mid-level managers, HR, circumstances etc.)
Lack of (pick one):
Trust - If I don't believe my boss and the organization's leader will stand behind me if something goes wrong, then why should I expose myself?;
Innovation champion;
Risk tolerance - If to get promoted you have to minimize mistakes, then why should I take risks? Look inside your organization and watch who gets promoted; that should give you an idea of how ready you are for the implementation of innovation;
Clear sense of where the organization is going. If you don't know where you're going, don't innovate, you'll probably go in the wrong direction;
Teamwork between departments or divisions. Today large-scale innovation demands organization-wide efforts. - If only a few want to be innovative and the others want to preserve the status quo, the status quo will always win;
Time - If you don't have the time to do things differently, you will never learn;
Communication - If people don't communicate, they can't share their knowledge to create innovation.
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