Steve Mann (who sounds like a whole lot of fun to hang with) comments on Bruce Nussbaum’s list of five innovation killers. Good list, good comments, but, in fact the list applies to far more than innovation—hypercritical as that is.

CEO sloth. There’s no pretty word for failure to focus on innovation by top management. Every major innovation index, including the new one coming out by Business Week in 08, shows significantly higher rates of return for companies that innovate. Yet CEO’s consistently mouth the word without providing the leadership and resources to make it happen. CEOs need to make the time to lead the innovation movement in their companies.

There’s no pretty word for failing to focus, period. The same thing can happen to any new initiative. It’s a cinch to implement new stuff if you keep it isolated, which eliminates the need for change throughout the organization. Too often CEO’s range from ostriches, clueless to what’s critical because of ignorance, fear, or ego to lip service that talks fluently to analysts and investors, but barely limps when it comes to execution.

Adding, not transforming. Most corporations today will allow innovation to be added to their structure. They will add a new innovation pipeline, a new social networking process, a new customer focus group, a new product or service. But companies usually don’t scale or leverage the innovation to transform the entire corporate culture–so the innovation remains isolated. In the end, the old pushes back and erodes the new, the best talent leaves, and managers wonder why innovation doesn’t work.

The same thing can happen to any new initiative. It’s a cinch to implement new stuff if you keep it isolated, which eliminates the need for change throughout the organization—the road to failure is paved with silos.

Choosing Metrics over talent. You must run a global corporation with a system of metrics in place. But measuring efficiency doesn’t make a company creative. You need talented people for that. Creative talent is rare in business culture. B-Schools are only beginning to produce them. Getting your efficiency metrics grid down is critical to success but doesn’t guarantee it anymore. Swimming in the global talent pool to get creative people for your company is just as critical to success today.

Creative talent is rare, period. Measuring it is almost impossible. As with leadership, creativity is usually recognized after the fact. You can hire the most-proven talent in the world, but they won’t produce in an environment that doesn’t support and nurture them.

Failing to use design thinking strategically. Most companies employ innovation and design consultancies at the midlevel to foster culture change. That underestimates the power of design thinking to guide companies through this unusual period of constant and unexpected change. Innovation consultants and coaches should be used at the top of the executive pyramid.

Until about 30 years ago, quality was done at the end of the manufacturing process; quality checks and testing came after the product had been built. Now quality is an active part of the initial architecture/development. Design needs to make the same jump now, not in a decade or so.

Underestimating Crisis. We don’t live in a world of change, we live in a world of crisis. It’s “change” on steroids” and its impact on us is greater than at any other time in a century. We are living through an energy crisis, a technology crisis, a political crisis, an economic crisis, a food crisis, a demographic crisis, a terrorist crisis–all overlapping and happening at the same time. How to manage in constant crisis mode is the critical management problem of our era.

Perfectly stated. And playing ostrich or running in circles saying ‘woe is me’ or ‘it’s not our fault’ isn’t going to cut it as a solution.

Have you worked with management that does some or all of these points well?  Or worse?

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm and is filed under About Leadership, Culture, management, What Leaders DO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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