Innovation and the box
by Miki SaxonIn every country in the world bosses are looking for ways to spark innovation. Whether the company is a multibillion-dollar behemoth or the local coffee house, it needs to move forward. In these days, innovation isn’t about succeeding—it’s about survival.
Bosses constantly exhort their people to think outside the box, but exactly what is the box? How can you expect your people to think outside of something whose definition changes with every manager in the hierarchy?
What really defines the box? The culture of the company as structured by the boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™). Think about GE.
GE seemed to experience great growth for many years under former CEO Jack Welch. But, after he retired, world happenings (September 11, Enron, Tyson) put Welch’s legacy under a microscope and left new CEO Jeff Immelt to answer the questions.
As time passed, Immelt found that GE’s driven Six Sigma/strict adherence to each manager making the numbers/no room for failure culture was stifling innovation—it had to change.
What Immelt did is nothing short of a revolution, making it “…OK, to take risks,” possibly miss the numbers and, along with other innovative companies, making failure acceptable.
Sure, outside events helped drive the changes, but, at the most basic level, the new culture at GE is born of Jeff Immelt’s MAP, just as the previous culture was born of Welch’s.
GE’s innovation engine is on a tear, fueled by a culture that recognizes that risk-taking guarantees occasional failures and that if people are penalized for them nobody is going to gamble their future by innovating.
Fear of failure is the biggest barrier to outside-the-box thinking. As I wrote last July in “Don’t kill the messenger” and “How to kill the fear,” if you want your people innovating outside the box, give them a culture in which they feel safe enough to do so.
Finally, never forget that culture is grounded in your MAP, because culture, and the accountability required to make it real, all stem from the top.
