"We are a technology company, still we are not as innovative as we should be" said the HR head of a middle level IT company, " what is the way we can perpetuate the innovation culture in our organisation? I am pushing my CEO to start rewarding the instances of creative thinking and execution, yet, we are far away from seeing any major innovation".
How can organisations become innovative and perpetuate a creative culture. I have worked in a large organisation for most of my life and in one of its quirks, the same organisation, wanted to get creative. That quirk gave me a chance to be part of a team that created something different, can be called as innovative now.
I have this belief, processes and innovation do not go hand in hand. And, for large organisations to become predictable, have to embrace processes and in the process kill innovation. This sounds too black and white but thats the way it is. Just imagine, in an organisation like bp, a fella in a remote corner of the world, gets up one day, creates a new application, burns down a few things and then bp has to take the pain, with the existing business delivering voluminous profits, bp will not like to take such pain. That's what keeps major organisations away from path breaking innovations.The lure of existing business and profits is too high to let that go away.
Coming back to innovation as a way of life for an organisation, I think, the theme of innovation has to start from the main person in the organisation (call them CEO, MD etc). Unless this CEO tries a few things, fails at some of them, the organisation is not going to become innovative. If it gets into creation of innovation process, rewarding people for doing incremental stuff, the organisation will stay there. This failing at a few things is what i think makes many CEOs stay away from trying.
We were discussing in a meeting about the culture of the organisation - lets create an ethos of innovation in the organisation, pat came the reply, you don't need sales people to innovate every call nor the plant team to innovate the production process, they need to just do it day in and day out and in the process get better at doing the job. Haven't you heard that before, I am sure you have. And goes the story, lets do it better.
Just ask one question every day at the CEO level, how many things i failed at and still survive as an organisation, may be you are on a path of creation of something big.
No comments:
Post a Comment