WINNING WAYS IN MANAGEMENT
By Jack and Suzy Welch
Providing support on innovation front
Q: When you read the history of the greatest products ever created, you find out that many times the innovator
was ignored or ridiculed by his company along the way and even had to struggle against the wishes of management.
Why does this happen? Shouldn't mangers at people moral support?
-Name Withheld, Livermore, California.
A: if only mangers could see the future like they should, right? Come on! Of course, no one in an organization
should be ignored or ridiculed. That's a rule, and any manger who breaks it is a jerk.
But you have to cult mangers a break on the innovation front. How are ordinary mortals to know if the employee
toiling on a promising project is the next bill gates or just resource draining wannabe?
The fact is, not every explorer ends up discovering the next big thing. Some are just dabblers. Some are just dreamers.
And some, despite their brains, ambition and sincerity, are just not focusing on the right thing for the market.
Now wonder, then, that many experienced managers have trouble leading moral support to the aspiring innovators in
their midst and can barely keep from groaning when these same types ask for extra people, time and funding, as they so often do.
Your question, however, brings up a point even more critical to business success than the proper care and feeding of
designated innovation gurus. It's about how and where innovation actually happens, a topic of some confusion.
Everywhere we speak around the world, to business groups of every type and size, we hear people talk
about innovation in its most glamorized form – as a revolutionary breakthrough that changes how whole industries
operate or whole groups of consumers behave.
We hear questions about how companies should organize to generate the next iPod and manger their people to
produce (or attract) the next Sergey Brin of Larry page.
Such queries are all well and fine: sometimes the innovation war is won by a brand-new killer application or a
genius (or two) with a eureka. But far more often, innovation comes not as a one-time thunderbolt but emerges incrementally,
in bits and chugs, forged by a mixed bag of coworkers from up, down and across an organization.
Now, make no mistake. Such iterative, bottom up, collaborative innovation does not happen by accident. Indeed, it can
occur only when mangers encourage, and the whole organization buys into, a mind-set nearly religious in its zeal.
This mind-set's central belief is simple: innovation is so thoroughly ingrained in everyone's job that each employee arrivers at work
every day thinking, "Is there a better way to do everything we do around here? What's a way to improve on our products and services?"
It's a mind-set that makes people excited to share new ideas for product or process improvement with their colleagues and to embrace
the notion that you win as an organization only when everyone's brain is engaged.
Managers, of course, will see this mind-set flourish the more they reward it with pay raises and bonuses and celebrate it with the
culture, marketing role models out of people who bring innovative ideas forward, no matter where they find them, be it inside the company or out.
But the innovation mind-set is most effective when it's coupled with an institutionalized process that draws together employees from
different levels and functions within the business and, with a facilitator, gets them talking, debating and problem solving as a team.
Some companies call these sessions "work out"; others refer to them as "town meeting" or "innovation councils.
By any name, their purpose is the same - to bring the con variation about innovation to the people closest to the products,
services and processes. So often, their're the real geniuses, and the ideas they generate collectively, perhaps ironically, so often leapfrog the
competition waiting for its one big breakthrough.
- New York Times News Service.
Rajendra.Deshpande.
B.Pharm.MMM.(Bajaj).PGDIT.
Trainer.
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Rajendra Deshpande.
Training.//.Travel.//Tours.//Forex.
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