maximum performance a practical guide to leading and managing people phần 7 ppt

Visionstems from the ability to see the world in new or different ways, tomake associations between already existing bodies of knowledge inorder to create new ideas, or to see new and em

Only the paranoid survive.

(Andy Grove, co-founder and former Chairman of Intel, 1990)

1 This section is adapted from Forster (2002).

2 For a more detailed account of the turnaround of Continental, see Bethune (1999).

3 And, in the cases of Enron, Worldcom and several other companies, the directors of these companies led them headlong into bankruptcy, while at the same time award- ing themselves very large salaries, stock options and ‘performance bonuses’, and lying systematically to their employees and shareholders, within weeks of these companies’ collapses (see Chapter 12 for further discussion of these issues) In their book on the rise and fall of Enron, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind describe Enron’s culture from the mid-1990s to its demise in 2001 as arrogant, chaotic, destructive, rotten, dysfunctional, delusional, individualistic, over the top, unethical, avaricious, greedy, macho, immoral and obsessed with money making regardless of any moral considerations (McLean and Elkind, 2003).

4 A detailed discussion of the evaluation of change management programmes is beyond the scope of this book The most systematic and widely used method of

‘before/after’ evaluation is the ‘Balanced Scorecard’ system, developed by Kaplan and Norton (1996, 2000).

9 Innovation and

organizational learning

Objectives

To define innovation and invention

To describe the pivotal roles that innovation, creativity and neurship now play in modern organizations

intrapre-To enhance your lateral thinking abilities, help you become morecreative and improve your ability to envision the future

To describe how to create an organizational culture that can promotegreater creativity and innovation amongst employees

To define what a learning organization is, to evaluate the benefits ofintroducing learning organization principles into organizations, and todescribe some strategies for achieving this

Introduction

Innovation.

(The one-word logo on 3m products This US company has been regularly cited in business surveys as being one of the world’s most consistently innovative compa- nies over the last 50 years)

Destroyyourbusiness.com.

(The name of Jack Welch’s intranet initiative at General Electric in the mid-1990s)

Innovation is the only core competency that an organization needs.

(Peter Drucker, 1985)

The role of innovation in organizations

Innovation comes from the Latin innovare, meaning to ‘change into

something new’ Innovation and innovate have been in use since the

347

early 16th century, and ‘innovative’ since the 17th century However,during this time the word had largely negative connotations For

example, William Shakespeare, in King Lear, talks of ‘Poor

discon-tents, which gape and rub the elbow at the news of hurly-burly vation.’ Innovation was synonymous with revolution and, for thepolitical and religious authorities of the time, something to beactively discouraged Over the next three hundred years, the mean-ing of innovation slowly evolved to signify the creation of something

inno-new The 1939 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary first articulated

the modern meaning of this word as ‘the act of introducing a newproduct into the market’ It is defined here as the process of creatingnew products or services, introducing new methods and ideas, ormaking incremental changes or improvements Innovation is linked

to, but distinct from, the process of invention This word also

origi-nates in innovare To invent means to devise, originate, produce or

construct something by original thought Both are forms of creativity,but invention does not always lead to innovation For example,Thomas Edison, probably the single most successful inventor inhuman history, with 1093 patents to his name, was, strangely, a hope-less innovator His financial backers routinely removed him frommany of the new businesses he founded and put these in the hands ofprofessional managers (Nicholas, 2000)

If ‘culture’, ‘quality’ and ‘re-engineering’ were three of the dominantbuzzwords of the 1980s, then ‘innovation’ was certainly the dominantbuzzword of the 1990s, being described by some business analysts asthe ‘industrial theology’ of the last decade of the 20th century InOctober 2000, in its annual survey of ‘the world’s most admired

companies’, Fortune asked the question, ‘How do you make the

world’s most admired list?’ The answer was, ‘Innovate, Innovate,Innovate!’ (Stein, 2000) This survey reported that all of the world’stop companies believed that the key to staying ahead of the pack wasconstant innovation and learning Included amongst these innovativecompanies were BP and Royal Dutch Shell, who are featured later inthis chapter There are three principal reasons why innovationbecame such an important organizational competency during the1990s

First, many ‘old’ management techniques such as just-in-time, chain management, outsourcing, total quality or business process re-engineering have been used, at some time, by almost every large andmedium-sized business in the industrialized world So, in order to gain

supply-a competitive edge, compsupply-anies hsupply-ave to be supply-able to find new wsupply-ays ofincreasing their performance, and improving the quality and novelty

of the products and services that they bring to their markets

Second, these traditional organizational management techniques,while certainly improving efficiencies for many companies around theworld over the last two decades, can also lead to rigidity and inflexi-bility In itself, this might not be a problem, except that new ideas,knowledge and intellectual capital are fast becoming the primarydrivers of competitive advantage in business According to manycommentators, efficient internal systems and processes have becomemerely a prerequisite for being in business, and non-linear innovativethinking is fast becoming the principal driver of long-term wealthcreation It is no longer sufficient to make one thing well and sell it at

a profit Sooner or later a competitor will undercut your price, stealyour ideas from you or create something better Sometimes they will

do all three at the same time In any event, your company will eitherdie or be taken over So the Holy Grail for many businesses today is thegeneration of a steady stream of new ideas, services or products thatwill sell in the marketplace (James, 2001; Sutton, 2001; Hamel, 2000a, b;Drucker, 1985)

Third is the impact that innovation can have on the bottom-line mance and profitability of organizations In Chapter 3, we cited severalexamples of the dividends that can flow from upward communication

perfor-in organizations They are also excellent examples of the power ofunleashing the innovative capabilities of all of an organization’semployees Between 1984 and 1999, the top 20 per cent of firms in the

annual ‘Innovation Poll’ conducted by Fortune (in conjunction with

Arthur D Little) achieved double the shareholder return of a ison group of their peers (Jonash and Sommerlatte, 1999) Anothersurvey showed that the overall rate of return on 17 successful businessinnovations made in the 1970s averaged 56 per cent, compared with anaverage return of 16 per cent on investment in all American businessesbetween 1970 and 2000 (Nicholas, 2000) A study of 30 large interna-tional companies revealed that the single most important factor thatdifferentiated high-growth companies from low-growth companieswas the emphasis they placed on strategic innovation (Kim andMaurbogne, 1999)

compar-In the 1990s, the desire to become more innovative led to an increasedinterest in ‘intrapreneurship’ in many companies, by devolving power,setting up internal ‘ideas-factories’ or ‘skunk-works’, and a concerteddrive to recruit and retain creative and innovative employees(Christensen, 1997) The idea of ‘intrapreneurship’ is not a new one.H.G Wells, the visionary 19th-century science-fiction writer, created agame in the 1880s called ‘Cheat the Prophet’ This game involved gath-ering together the smartest group of forward thinkers and futurists hecould find, asking them to describe the future and then imagining how

they could undertake every one of the crazy, laughable ideas that theycreated Amongst the ideas that Wells generated were international airtravel, flying to the moon, genetic engineering, human invisibility andtime travel Three out of five within 100 years is a pretty good trackrecord A few maverick scientists even believe that the last two are nowtheoretically possible (see Chapter 11) Over the last hundred years, wecan find many other ideas that were also regarded as being crazy,laughable or ludicrous when they were first suggested For example,when Jerry Levin (the founder of AOL) first proposed in the early1980s that every home in America could be wired by cable, andconnected to online subscription media and television services, mostbusiness people dismissed the idea out of hand In the 1970s, the corpo-rate world thought that Bill Gates was a pie-in-the-sky dreamer when

he first described his vision of having a PC in every home and in everyoffice around the world At the time, most senior managers in largecompanies such as IBM and Rank-Xerox dismissed the PC as a toy,with limited commercial applications Single-handedly, this one inno-vation tore the whole of the mainstream computing industry apartand, in the process, pushed IBM to the brink In Chapter 11, we’ll look

at some other scenarios for the future that most people would currentlydismiss as being crazy, laughable or ludicrous

In spite of the importance of innovation, many leaders and managerscontinue to be sceptical about the business value of ‘creativity’ and

‘learning’ There is no denying that much day-to-day work in zations is routine, and involves what essentially amounts to efficientrepetition and/or the fine-tuning of productive processes that haveworked well for a period of time Creativity and innovation implyconstant change and constant evolution, and many organizations andtheir employees can find this prospect threatening and stressful.Nevertheless, sometimes companies must embrace radical innovations

organi-in order to prosper For example, organi-in the late 1990s, Charles Schwab had

to make the difficult decision to move its business to the Web, ing that this move would force it to slash prices by 60 per cent Howwould your colleagues react if you told them that your companywould have to do this next month? Other companies, such as MerrillLynch, dithered and delayed, but Charles Schwab went ahead and, as

know-a result, gknow-ained know-a cleknow-ar competitive edge over their mknow-ain rivknow-als Onlynon-linear thinking, with an eye to the future, gave the company theconfidence to do this (Hamel, 2000a) All of the available researchevidence indicates that innovative companies benefit in a variety ofways They are more adaptable to change, they are able to respondmore quickly to changes in their environments, they are able to createchange for others to follow in their wakes, they spot new opportunitiesbefore the competition does, and are consistently more profitable over

longer periods of time, when compared to non-innovative tions (Hamel 2000a, 2000b; Collins and Porras, 1996).

organiza-When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy organiza-When you have disciplined actions, you don’t need excessive controls When you combine a culture of discipline, with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.

(Jim Collins, Good to Great, 2001)

Becoming more creative and innovative

Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different or better results.

(An old definition of madness)

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.

(Canadian hockey superstar, Wayne Gretsky, 1990)

In Chapter 1, it was noted that one skill that certainly is important toleaders these days is the ability to envision the future This ability hasbeen described as something that often sets true leaders apart from thecrowd, a unique ability to spot new business opportunities and newmarkets, like truffle hounds sniffing out truffles in the woods Visionstems from the ability to see the world in new or different ways, tomake associations between already existing bodies of knowledge inorder to create new ideas, or to see new and emerging worlds in thefuture This also implies a capacity to view the world as an oyster ofcreative possibilities, rather than a world of restrictive limitations Inthis section there are several opportunities to try out some creative andlateral thinking exercises that will enhance your ability to envision and,later on, scenario-map the future

If necessity is the mother of invention, then lateral thinking is themother of creativity Creativity refers to the ability to synthesize ideas

in new ways or to make unusual or novel associations between bodies

of knowledge, in a way that leads to different understandings or pretations of reality This is where Edward De Bono’s concept of

inter-‘lateral thinking’ can be extremely useful De Bono has argued for sometime that ‘linear thinking’ (based on judgment, analysis, logic andargument), the dominant way of thinking of the 20th century, will have

to be supplemented by ‘what can be’ thinking (based on creativity,imagination, reconstruction and redesign) However, most education,

in either the scholastic or managerial sense, tends to overlook, or evenignore, the natural ability that young children have to think laterally

As we observed in the last chapter, this is why they are continuallyasking ‘why’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions and whythey often learn best through play and experimentation during their

formative years However, most people’s natural creative skills andlateral thinking abilities are usually hampered by the formal educationthey receive in secondary school and/or universities, where education

is still largely based on spoon-feeding, power-point presentations, rotelearning and examination tests Most traditional organizations alsoemphasize control and the measurement of performance, rather thancreativity and learning This is why it can be difficult for adults toembrace creative thinking, and is the main reason why acquiring thisgets harder the older they get, unless they practise this skill The maindifferences between linear/sequential thinking and lateral thinking aresummarized in Table 9.1

Table 9.1 Linear and lateral thinking

Linear/sequential thinker Lateral thinkerCan only look at problems Tries to find new ways of lookingthrough common-sense at things; is concerned withframeworks of understanding; change and movement;

is concerned with absolute constantly questions the judgments and stability status quo and common senseTries to find ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ Tries to find what is different;solutions to all problems as not obsessed with finding the

Makes quick judgments about Analyses all ideas for anythingideas as being either ‘workable’ that may be useful, however

first appear to beCan only progress by taking Progresses by making sequential steps within narrow dissociative leaps between frameworks of understanding different frameworks and bodies

of knowledgeSelectively chooses only the Will consider anything, from anyinformation that fits within their source or body of knowledge, to

Always considers the obvious; Progresses by creating the futureconservative; constantly reacts for others to follow; is

to and resists change and comfortable with change,

learning

Source: Adapted from De Bono, 1970, 1985.

All leaders and managers will recognize and understand logical orsequential thinking Fewer will be comfortable with the notion oflateral thinking or, initially, see what its value might be So to startthings off, over the next few pages we are going to reawaken yourinnate creativity and ability to think laterally These exercises start withsome well-known and relatively simple ones, progressing to othersthat will stretch your lateral thinking skills and, in the words of manyMBA students, ‘make your brain ache’.

Please solve the following problems (time allowed, 20 minutes).

1 If today is Monday, what is the day after the day before tomorrow?

2 You are a woman What relationship to you is your father’s only son-in-law’s mother-in-law’s only daughter?

3 Add five lines to the lines below to make a total of nine.

it was raining, he did not have to get out at the tenth floor.)

2 A farmer comes into one of his fields one morning He sees a man lying in the middle of the field The man is dead The farmer knows immediately how he died How did the man die? (Clues: he was not murdered, killed by farm machinery or attacked by a wild animal.)

A ‘dissociative jump’ from:

3 An important event took place in Neufchâtel on 17 August 1968 that had a profound effect

on Switzerland’s major manufacturing industry It took some ten years to recover from this What were the event and the industry?

If you can’t find the solutions to these, you may want to read through the next paragraph

Was there a mild sense of Eureka when you got the answers? In the

case of the parachutist exercise, you needed to ‘think beyond the field’and consider where the dead person came from and how he arrivedthere Most people will spend all their time considering what might

have happened in the field The ‘nine dots’ exercise is a perfect ple of not looking for what you were looking for (discussed further below).

exam-You might have started at each corner and joined the dots up andfound that two or three dots managed to ‘evade’ your four lines everytime Through trial and error, you may have covered all but one dotusing this method, and assumed that, because you were so close, youwere on the right track and persisted with this for some time

However, it would only be when you realized that you had to, ally in this case, ‘look outside the box’, that the solution would haverevealed itself Most people trying to solve this problem wouldconfine their lines to the box as defined by the dots The successfulproblem solver would see, in their mind’s eye, that the only solution

liter-is to extend the four lines beyond the edge of the box (Perkins, 2001:

49–50) The historical questions highlight how closed people’s mindscan be to new ideas and innovations, particularly those who wouldconsider themselves to be rational, practical and hard-headed busi-ness people

What these exercises also reveal is that everyone sees the worldthrough preconstructed mind-sets In Chapter 1, in the context of ourviews about what leadership ‘is’, we saw that we do not ‘create’these mind-sets in any conscious sense This is how a normal mindworks and, without this automatic filtering process, we could notfunction in any meaningful sense These perceptions also operate

almost entirely at an unconscious level, and only a pathological mind

can see the world unfiltered through prior knowledge This is whygenius is often associated with madness, or at least eccentricity, and

is the main reason why almost all new ideas appear to be crazy whenthey are first proposed However, we also saw that the ability

not to take things for granted, and to question common-sense ways

of doing things, are skills that differentiate visionary leaders fromhumdrum, run-of-the-mill leader/managers Here is another exer-cise to illustrate the consequences of our selective perceptions

In Figure 9.1, there are a series of picture puzzles Please describewhat you can see in each of these The solutions can be found in note2

These exercises have been used with several hundred MBAs over the

last ten years In that time, not one has been able to see all sixteen

objects in these pictures at the same time Very few were able to seemore than half of these at first However, with practice they could get

better at this, but only by not looking for what they were looking for This

may sound odd, but is exactly what you have to do to in order to

improve your ability to see the whole picture, and to look at these

pictures (or, in organizational contexts, alternative realities) fromdifferent perspectives This ability is sometimes described as ‘refram-ing’ and, by looking at something in a different way, ‘reality’ itselfcan appear to change The next group of lateral thinking exerciseswill help you look for what is not immediately obvious in a specificsituation

Figure 9.1 Picture puzzles

Exercise 9.2

Advanced lateral thinking

Time allowed = 60 minutes

1 Two strangers meet at a party and fall into a conversation about their lives At one point, the first stranger says, ‘I have to confess that I don’t always speak the truth.’ The second stranger replies, ‘Well that I must certainly believe.’ Yet the second stranger has not heard anything he knows to be false Why is the second stranger so sure that the first stranger’s confession is true?

2 One day at the office, Alice says to Betty, ‘I heard this great joke from Cathy’ and she begins

to tell Betty the joke But Betty says, ‘Oh, I already know that joke.’ Alice says, ‘So Cathy’s already told you it?’ ‘No’, says Betty ‘In fact, I’ve never heard it or read it before.’ Explain how this could be true.

3 Here is an equation: 2 + 7 – 118 = 129 Add one line anywhere in the equation to make it true.

4 You are standing in a room Above you are two strings some distance apart On a table, there

is a dictionary, a glass, a live toad, a stapler and a clothes peg Holding one string in your hand you can’t quite reach the other string, even when you stand on the table How might you tie the two strings together?

5 Last, here’s a real tester One day an old wind-up clock that chimed the hours (for example, seven times at seven o’clock) and quarter hours (one chime each quarter) struck twenty- seven times within the span of one hour and one minute Yet there is nothing wrong with the clock and all this happened in a natural and appropriate way How could this possibly happen?

If you are struggling with these, you may like to read through the next section, and then have another attempt before looking at the solutions These can be found in note 2.

Source: Adapted from Perkins (2001: 59–61 and 118).◆

Each of these exercises highlights different facets of lateral and creativethinking For example, ‘To tell the Truth’ is a seemingly clueless exer-cise, but it shows how a problem solver needs to be able to ‘see thewood from the trees’ Which is the one statement that might be true andwhat can be inferred from this? ‘The Joke’, reminds us of the SherlockHolmes principle: when all other possible solutions have been excludedthe one that remains, however unlikely, must be the answer to the

mystery Betty hadn’t read or heard the joke before, so where could it

have come from? Or, by taking another lateral step, can you work outfrom where Cathy might have obtained the joke? The solution to the

equation exercise is similar to the ‘Six’ and ‘Nine’ exercises The usualapproach is to try out various permutations of brackets and plus orminus signs in order to equalize the equation However, it is only when

the actual numbers in the equation are reframed (that is, looked at in a

different way) that the solution becomes apparent

The ‘Two Strings’ exercise highlights something that psychologistshave called ‘functional fixedness’ This refers to the tendency to onlysee the normal function of objects, rather than their possible alternativeuses So, as soon as you can see an alternative use for one of theseobjects, the solution reveals itself The remaining items are distractions,which may have taken you up a number of blind alleys The clock exer-cise is the perfect example of how lateral thinking can be superior tolinear and logical thinking The logical and sequential approach wouldhave been to add up the maximum possible number of chimes in thehour between 11.00 and 12.00 (11 chimes at 11.00 + 3 chimes on eachquarter hour + 12 chimes at 12.00 = 26 chimes) So, how is it possible toget an extra quarter of an hour and the one extra chime to make 27chimes in total? Invariably, the focus is on the clock How can it strike

27 times in an hour, when only 26 chimes are possible? The onlyanswer is that it must be caused by something external to the clock.What could that be? What forces or circumstances could make a clock

strike 27 times in the hour? Or, taking the next lateral step, what specific

event external to the clock could alter time? As soon as this is taken, the

solution reveals itself (abridged from Perkins, 2001: 61–3)

When you knew the answers, did you again get that Eureka feeling,

‘Well it’s obvious isn’t it!’? Maybe so, but the important point is that it

wasn’t obvious before you knew the answers, and this is why leaders

have to be able to question ‘common-sense’ ways of doing things Ifyou didn’t do so well with these exercises, don’t worry We are deal-ing with creative skills that may have lain dormant for many years orhave never been properly activated As noted earlier, we can blametraditional teaching and lecturing techniques for this, where rotelearning of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers and examination tests alltoo often stifle imagination and creativity However, with practice,you will become better at this and you will experience more dissocia-tive cognitive leaps and breakthrough thinking moments When youcan do this, you can start to envision the future in new, bold and imag-inative ways

These exercises highlight two other important elements of personalcreativity, lateral thinking and the ability to create new visions for thefuture: you have to be able to look for, and find, new opportunities orrealities that are not obvious to everyone else, or you have to be able to

make bisociative links between existing bodies of knowledge, in order

to reframe current reality or create a new reality

It is often assumed that Eureka or inspirational breakthrough moments

are the product of individual genius, but the previous sections showthat lateral and creative thinking are skills that can be enhancedthrough learning and practice Of course, in themselves, lateral think-ing exercises will not be sufficient to increase your innovative capabil-ities, because there are three main sources of breakthrough thinking

The first, bisociation, requires an ability to make links between

appar-ently unrelated areas of knowledge or experience (Koestler, 1975).More often than not, a new idea is the consequence of melding two ormore existing areas of knowledge together for the first time Some real-life examples of bissociation are described in the next section

The second, incubation refers to the process where you may have been

wrestling with a problem for weeks, or perhaps months, and suddenlythe solution just ‘appears’ in front of you, often at an unexpectedmoment The Romans believed that, when people experienced theseinspirational moments, the gods had literally ‘breathed’ this into their

minds (inspirare) We now know that that these moments of

inspira-tion, or acts of creainspira-tion, are the products of the normal functioning ofthe unconscious mind (Howkins, 2002; Koestler, 1975)

The third source is Selective encoding, combination and comparison: this

form of trial-and-error creativity results from the classical process ofexperimentation and falsification, as described by the philosopher ofscience, Karl Popper (1959) This is best exemplified in ThomasEdison’s famous saying that creativity is ’10 per cent inspiration and 90per cent perspiration’

It doesn’t matter which one(s) you rely on because they all have theiruses However, the only way to become more creative is by ‘wearing’what Edward De Bono (1985) has described as different ‘ThinkingHats’ This means moving out of the narrow realms of understandingthat leaders and managers often mistakenly describe as ‘the real world’.For example, how much do you know about the following real worlds?

A woman entrepreneur in India or Japan An accountant working inMoscow A Japanese salary man A ski-instructor A lawyer/attorneyworking in (a) France, (b) the USA or (c) the UK A farmer working inthe mid-west of the USA A Web Master A mid-ranking tax official inthe Italian Civil Service A child slave-labourer in Burma A womantrying to break into a male-dominated profession, such as the military

An employee on an oil-rig A young doctor working 80–100 hours a

week as a hospital intern A vice-chancellor of a large university Acomputer games software developer A scientist working on nanotech-nologies or biocomputers A resource or mining manager The CEOs of

any of the Fortune top 100 companies.

It can be a sobering experience when we first realize that our personalunderstanding of the ‘real world’ is usually quite limited When welook at the life worlds that most people inhabit, we invariably find thatthese are constructed and constrained by their upbringing, culture,gender, unique life experiences and education, as well as their choice ofprofession and the kinds of organizations they have chosen to work in.Hence the starting point on the journey to becoming more creative andinnovative is the realization that there are a remarkable number of realworlds out there All of these have the potential to inform the way welead people and how we manage our businesses or organizations.Making the most of this journey means reading voraciously, studyingareas of knowledge outside our immediate area of expertise, and takingthe blinkers off So, if you are an engineer, a technician or an accountant,read up on some qualitative or ‘soft’ subjects, such as existential philos-ophy or psychology or sociology If you are an artist, graphic designer

or a musician, read some Stephen Hawking If you work in a university,spend at least 10 per cent of your time working with companies in theprivate sector If you work in a large bureaucratic organization, readsome books on innovation and entrepreneurship If you run a smallcompany, study the histories, cultures and management practices of thebest (and the worst) large companies If you haven’t travelled much,read up on the cultures and histories of other countries, or take a sabbat-ical and travel yourself If you are hopeless at numbers, enrol on a statis-tics course If you hate speaking in public, take some classes inpresentation skills Whatever you do, extend your personal ‘envelope’,push the bubble and get outside your comfort zone

Read, or subscribe to, professional journals and magazines that havenothing to do with your job, profession or occupation You will beamazed at how often insights and ideas from apparently unrelatedareas have applications to your business, the way you go about doingyour job and the way in which you go about leading and managingothers Increase your faith in intuition or ‘gut-feelings’ If you areskilled at information gathering and analysis, and lateral thinking, thechances are that your instincts will be the right ones to follow Weremarked in the notes at the end of Chapter 6 that intuition is a muchundervalued management skill, and simply means the ability to makegood decisions with incomplete data At times, you will simply have totrust your judgment and go with this Let your playful and child-likequality come out, use your daydreams and allow your unconscious

mind to roam free.3Make the most of your ‘creative bubbles’ and keep

a notebook or electronic organizer to jot down any new ideas that youcome up with These will often pop up at the most unexpectedmoments, when doing the ironing, when out walking, during the night

or when waking up in the morning, when our unconscious minds

‘release’ new ideas into the conscious mind Remember also theemphasis placed on fun and creative learning in the companies welooked at in Chapter 4 Humour is a font of creativity, and creativitydrives innovation

Other useful insights into the creative mind can be found in thebiographies of business leaders, innovators and paradigm breakers Agood starting point is the autobiographies of Akio Morita, Andy Groveand Thomas Edison, who were true visionaries, maverick geniuses andsocial philanthropists Make creative use of all the future-casting, inno-vation and new technology sites that are now available on the web.Network incessantly and find a group of people or a partner who mayshare your ideas or vision of a new business opportunity There aremany examples of this kind of collaboration in the past, including theWright Brothers, Gates and Allen at Microsoft, Jobs and Sculley atApple, the Phillips Brothers and Hewlett and Packard, all of which can

be described as genuine chalk and cheese partnerships Last, but notleast, make full use of the variety of presentation and persuasion skillsthat were reviewed in Chapter 3 to describe what you see to yourpeers, bosses and followers You may have some great ideas, but youmust be able to convince the people you work with that your ideas (orreinterpretations of reality) are correct, and also represent the rightway, road or path to travel along in the future If you can find sometime to develop the skills described in this section, you will becomemore creative and innovative, more capable of envisioning the futureand in a much better position to persuade other people that your ideasand innovations are the right ones to pursue

In summary, the only way to become more open-minded and creative

is to embrace different mind-sets By taking this leap, we are then in abetter position to make dissociative leaps between different real worldsand the bodies of knowledge they encapsulate In turn, this will lead togreater personal creativity and innovation Perhaps the best exemplar

of this principle is Peter Drucker, the most innovative and visionarymanagement thinker of the 20th century In the early 1950s, hepredicted that computer technologies would transform all businesses

In the 1960s, he was one of the first to warn of the rise of Japan as aneconomic powerhouse, and the first to warn of its economic declinewhen it was at the peak of its industrial power in the mid-1980s Amongmany other new ideas he developed were ‘knowledge workers’,

‘management by objectives’ and ‘privatization’ He was among the first

to extol the importance of innovation in organizations and, morerecently, to question pure economic rationalism as a sensible way tomanage businesses His ability to create these ideas stemmed in partfrom the sheer range of the intellectual and practical interests hepursued These ranged from history to economics, from psychology tophilosophy, from African cultures to Japanese art and opera Hisconsulting portfolio embraced hundreds of organizations, includingsmall businesses, multinational corporations, churches, hospitals,NGOs, charities and governments In 2004, at the age of 94, he was stillsearching for new and better ways to understand how business worksand, more importantly, continued to make bold intuitive predictionsabout the future of business

The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

(F Scott Fitzgerald, cited by Richard Schickel, The Disney Version, 1968)

We become creative by finding a likeness between things that were not alike before The creative mind is a mind that looks for unexpected likenesses in everyday things.

(Jacob Bronowski, 1980)

Creativity and innovation in practice

What is most remarkable about breakthrough thinking is that the way

in which this process works has changed little over the last 100 000years, although the general pace of innovation has certainly acceleratedover the last 1000 years From the time when our earliest ancestorsdiscovered how to make fire by creating friction between two sticks; tousing flints, stones and other materials to create a variety of tools andweapons; to employing coloured ochre to create the first cave paint-ings; to the discovery of smelting; the development of the wheel; thebuilding of the first boats and the development of sails; the domestica-tion of animals and planting seasonal crops in settled communitiesand, laterally, to the development of written languages, mathematicsand philosophy; all of these innovations stemmed from creative imag-ining, breakthrough thinking and by asking the perennial question,

‘What if we ?’ The Greek scientist and innovator, Archimedes, was

certainly not the first person to experience a Eureka moment in human

history

Two of the most famous examples of dissociative and creative leaps ofimagination are the Gutenberg Press and the development of the firstheavier-than-air flying machine In the mid-15th century, only a tiny

number of people were literate (primarily the clergy and some of thenobility), and all books were written by hand and took months toproduce Johannes Gutenberg, a German metal worker, had a visionand a mission: to create an efficient technology for mass-producingBibles He did not have to start from scratch Primitive wood-plateprinting did exist, but still required the laborious carving of every singlepage of a document or book The actual printing was also done manu-ally, by pressing the wooden plate against the paper The finishedproduct, while cheaper and quicker to produce, was of poorer qualitythan the hand-written books of the time Gutenberg’s first breakthroughcame as the result of a lateral leap As a metal worker, he was familiarwith the metal stamps used to emboss the wax seals on official docu-ments He then conceived the idea of a series of small metal stamps orplates, each with letters and symbols that could be assembled into thetext for a given page Multiple copies could then be printed off and theplates reassembled for the next page, and so forth He then needed tofind an efficient mechanical method for pressing the plates against thepaper After wrestling with this problem for months, he was taking abreak and attending a local wine festival By chance, he encounteredanother technology that would enable him to make the next vital break-through There, amidst the high spirits and drunken revelry of the festi-val, he saw one of the first mechanical wine presses in Europe Instantly,

a lateral link occurred, and he developed this technology into a machinethat led, amongst other things, to the industrial and scientific revolu-tions of the 19th century and the emergence of democracy in the 20thcentury The arrival of the first recognizably modern printing press in

1455 had as big an impact on the world at that time as the Internet andthe personal computer are having on our world today

More recently, in the 1890s Orville and Wilbur Wright – like Leonardo

da Vinci before them – took their initial inspiration from the flight ofbirds and the use of propellers to provide the necessary thrust for take-off, combined with the new science of aeronautics They assumed thatthey could make use of theories of propeller design contained inmarine engineering textbooks They quickly discovered that thereweren’t any After much brainstorming they developed a new theory:that the propeller should be thought of not as a screw, as used on ships

to displace water, but as a rotary wing Just as the wings of the planewould give lift, the ‘wings’ of the propeller would pull the planeforward This breakthrough thinking allowed the Wright Brothers toapply what they already knew about wing design to the design of theirpropellers Combined with a redesigned and more powerful internalcombustion engine taken from already existing car engine technology,this was the last major hurdle to be overcome before powered flightbecame a reality (abridged from Perkins, 2001: 5–6, 44–6)

Around the same time, when Edison’s inventors were developing thelight bulb, their experimental bulbs kept falling out of their sockets.After trying dozens of different fixtures, one technician noted that the

threaded cap of a kerosene bottle kept it firmly in place Eureka, and the

introduction of a design that has not changed in US light bulbs formore than one hundred years (Hargadon and Sutton, 2000:32) Again,what use could you make of glue that can’t join anything together?Marketing executives at 3m were shown this in the 1930s and, natu-rally enough, couldn’t think of any use for glue that didn’t dry andcouldn’t actually stick things together In the 1940s, one employee, whowas also a devout Christian, realized that it was ideal for marking thepages of the bible that he was reading He had also noticed that thebookmarks placed in hymnals at his church invariably fell out Afterinitially being taken up and used by secretaries within the company,the product was eventually marketed and became a hugely successfulproduct It is now sold in a mind-boggling array of shapes, colours,designs and dispensers in almost every country in the world: the ubiq-uitous Post It

Another example of both lateral association and incubation is Velcro

(from the ‘vel’ of velvet and the ‘cro’ of crochet) During the late 1940s, a

Swiss national named George de Mistral was both irritated andintrigued by the way that the burrs of cocklebur bushes clung likelimpets to his clothing and his dog when he returned from hiking orclimbing Examining these under a microscope, he saw that the burrswere covered in thousands of tiny hooks that caught on the tiny cottonhooks of his clothing (and his dog’s coat) Taking a lateral step, heconceived of developing a synthetic equivalent that could be used as asimple fastener on many different products He approached severaltextile firms with his idea, and was rejected by all but one, a weaverfrom Lyon, who painstakingly created a prototype that he called a

‘locking tape’ However, it took another seven years to incubate theproduct and find a material sufficiently strong and flexible to copewith thousands of openings and closings After many experiments, heeventually discovered that infrared-treated nylon became almost inde-structible By the late 1950s, 55 million metres of Velcro were beingproduced each year, and it has been estimated that four out of five ofthe world’s inhabitants have at some time owned a product thatincludes a Velcro fastener

A more recent example of the power of bisociation is Java-Logs.

Launched in 2003, these are made from 100 per cent recycled spentcoffee grounds – a useful way to recycle the world’s most consumedbeverage These logs generate 25 per cent more energy and three timesthe heat of wood logs At the same time, they produce 50 per cent less

soot Best of all, in an era of growing concerns about the impact ofhumanity on the natural environment, they also recycle an otherwisecompletely useless waste product from landfill sites: the traditionalhome of coffee dregs (Green Business, 2003).

Last, but not least, what could be created from these elements (Perkins,2001: 56)?

Binary arithmetic + Charles Babbage’s calculating machine (first conceived

in the early 19th century) + the Punch Card (first devised by Herman Hollerith, for the 1890 census in the USA) + the audion tube (invented in 1906) + symbolic logic (developed by Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead between 1910 and 1913) + the concepts of programming and feedback (which had arisen out of several abortive attempts to develop more effective anti-aircraft guns during World War 1) 4

The most striking characteristic of the Wright Brothers, and other vators and inventors, has been their ability to reframe reality and/or tolook at existing realities in different ways, thereby becoming break-through thinkers Linking already existing bodies of knowledge, orbisociation, is a very common way of creating new innovations, but, as

inno-we saw in the last example, sometimes it can take decades for people

to pull together disparate bodies of knowledge to create somethingnew Charles Handy has described this process as ‘the displacement ofconcepts’: the ability to make links between two apparently unrelatedareas in order to create a novel idea or product (Handy, 1999) Almostall human innovations have been derived from these processes, andthe next section will look at how these can be built into the operationalcultures and management practices of organizations

Creating an innovative organization

Revel in your glorious failures Dance on the borderline between success and disaster, because that’s where your next success will come from.

(Alberto Alessi, CEO of the innovative Italian product design company Alessi, cited

Very few businesses will ever be lucky enough to find a Bill Hewlett,

an Akio Morita or a Thomas Edison in their ranks, and innovativecompanies have long recognized that they cannot rely on a few maver-ick innovators or solitary geniuses to create new ideas These organi-zations have created cultures that attract creative people and fostered

working practices and processes that encourage the creation, fertilization and rapid dissemination of new ideas As John Browne,CEO of BP, has commented, ‘The conventional wisdom is thatexcelling in incremental learning is a science – a matter of installing theright processes – while excelling in breakthrough thinking is more of

cross-an art I disagree about the latter: I think you ccross-an install processes that

generate breakthrough thinking We have’ (cited by Prokesch, 1997:150) Research over the last decade has shown that innovative compa-nies like BP focus their energies in five main areas

1 They spend a lot of time and resources identifying and recruitingemployees with good technical skills, who are also creative, havehigh levels of intrinsic motivation and whose personalities will fit inwith their organizational cultures

2 They create work environments that foster and support the creation

of new ideas amongst their employees

3 They recognize that new ideas are not the privilege of a minority ofemployees; everyone, at all levels, can and should contribute

4 They have leaders who know, intuitively, which are the right ideas

to back and push into the marketplace

5 They reward employees who create new ideas and do not punishthem if their experimental ideas fail

This systemic and systematic approach to innovation means thatcreative mind-sets are built into the cultures of these organizations,their employees’ daily working practices and their human resourcepolicies How can the leader of a traditional company go about creat-ing such a mind-set? It might sound daunting, but it can be done withtime and commitment and, once established, the bottom line willshine through The next section contains some suggestions for creat-ing an innovative organizational culture (developed from Hamel,2001a; 2001b; 2000a; 2000b; Harvard Business School, 1999; Drucker,1985)

Understand creativity and innovation

As a leader/manager you have to really understand the process oflateral thinking, creativity and breakthrough thinking, and how thisdiffers fundamentally from day-to-day linear thinking This alsorequires nurturing and resourcing, because a ‘bean-counter’ mentalitywill not generate breakthrough thinking, nor will ‘cost-cutting’ or ‘effi-ciency drives’ It also means appreciating that it is a huge step fromcoming up with an innovative idea to then turning it into a concept fordevelopment, assessing its feasibility and market potential, pushing it

through product development, marketing and advertising it and,finally, selling it in the marketplace As Gary Hamel has observed:For every 1000 ideas, only 100 will have enough commercial promise to merit a small-scale experiment, only ten of these will warrant a substantial financial commitment, and of those, only a couple will turn out to be unqualified successes It’s the inverse log scale behind innovation Innovation is an inherently inefficient process [ ] As top management strives for ever-greater efficiency, it must learn to tolerate ‘stupid’ ideas and ‘failed’ experiments Those are the byproducts of a well-functioning innovation pipeline.

(Hamel, 2001b: 76–7).

In other words, to create even one great idea that will take the place by storm, you need to generate hundreds of small ideas fromyour employees Really big or revolutionary breakthroughs are veryrare This is an important point, because even the most innovativefirms get it wrong sometimes For example, do you remember satellitephones, promoted as the next-big-thing in telecommunications a fewyears ago? In the early 1990s, Motorola decided to back Iridium’sdevelopment of a system of 66 geostationary, low-orbit satellites, tocreate a global phone network that would operate independently ofterrestrial systems Big mistake This strategy threatened national tele-phone monopolies and, as a result, it failed and cost the company

market-$US150 million Consequently, Motorola was very slow getting intothe digital phone market and initially paid a heavy price for fallingbehind Nokia, who had got into this market at the very beginning.Another example was the battle between the Betamax video-recorder,first unveiled by Sony in 1974 and the VHS system unveiled by JVC in

1976 Both companies took an already existing technology (originallycreated by the American company, Ampex, in 1954), miniaturized themain components and targeted the home market So far, so good Twocompanies, with two good products and, potentially, multibillion-dollar sales However, what Sony did not foresee was that tape manu-facturers and consumers would then opt for the simpler and morereliable VHS format, and it was this format that came to dominate thehome VCR market of the 1980s and 1990s

The average Silicon Valley venture capital firm gets as many as 5000unsolicited business plans every year How many new ideas does aBoard of Directors in a non-innovative company get from its employ-ees each year? A few dozen – if they’re lucky What’s even more signif-icant is that most new business ventures will be rejected a number oftimes by venture capitalists, and other lending institutions, before theyfind someone who is willing to back them In large organizations,where new ideas may have to move up a chain of command, it takes

just one ‘No’ to consign a good idea to oblivion, forever In Silicon

Valley, no one cares whether you are young or old, black or white,male or female, what clothes you wear or even if you have a universitydegree All that matters is the power of your ideas and the quality ofyour business plan (abridged from Hamel, 2000b: 52).

Hire creatives and mavericks

It is much easier to build an innovative organizational culture if youcan attract and retain creative people, and more employers are putting

a premium on this kind of recruitment For example, an AC Nielsensurvey of 1105 Australian companies reported that many employerswant more creative and critical thinkers The survey also discoveredthat most employers believed that new graduates lacked communica-tion skills, creativity, innovative capabilities, a capacity for indepen-dent thinking and ‘flair’ But this study also reported that one of themain reasons for employing graduates was ‘to introduce new ideas or

fresh thinking into the organization’ (reported in The Australian, 1

January 2000) We saw, in Chapter 4, that cutting-edge companiesspend a great deal of time recruiting and selecting their employees.They are also careful to recruit the best talent, regardless of their age,culture or gender As Leonard and Strauss suggest, ‘to innovatesuccessfully, you must hire, work with and promote people who areunlike you You need to understand your own preferences and blindspots, so that you can complement your weaknesses and exploit yourstrengths The biggest barrier to recognising the contributions of otherswho are unlike you is your own ego’ (1999: 66)

An example of a company that does this is McKinsey and Co From theearly 1990s, the company embraced a radical hiring policy that hasaimed to recruit more creative brainpower At that time, the only way

to get into the company was with an MBA, preferably from one of thetop US management schools Since then, recruits are just as likely to befrom economics, engineering science or law McKinsey has alsoemployed an ethnomusicologist, an expert in Ancient Greek and aRhodes scholar in English literature Managing partner John Stuckeyhas said that the company has one main criterion in recruitment: itwants ‘distinctive people’, who are best equipped to deal with thecomplex problems facing all companies in a globalized marketplace.Stuckey believes that ‘radical hirings’ bring heterogeneity of knowl-edge and creative thought styles to their clients’ problems and, as aresult, are better able to analyse and solve them Such hirings nowmake up 40 per cent of the company’s annual recruitment of new staff(up from 5 per cent in 1982) and the company has enjoyed a 90 per centsuccess rate with these non-traditional hirings (Bagwell, 1997)

You then have to get your staff to build creativity/innovation into theirpersonal managerial repertoires and ‘tool-kits’, to enable them tobecome intrapreneurs This may also mean a committed investment inboth in-house and external development programmes that can helpthem learn how to become more creative, to use their intuition, to thinkbeyond common-sense ways of doing things, to look beyond theboundaries of the organization and to embrace the learning organiza-tion principles described in the last section of this chapter Somecompanies, such as HP, General Electric and 3m, also use job rotation

as a way of fostering innovation and knowledge sharing At the KaoCorporation (a consumer products manufacturer), employees areexpected to do at least three different jobs in any ten-year period AtAustralia Post, graduate recruits are required to work in three or fourdifferent functional areas during their first two years of employment.These organizations use this as a means of preventing the emergence

of ‘bunker’ mentalities, as a way to help future leaders understand thewhole business from a variety of perspectives and to encourage thecross-fertilization of ideas, thus creating more ‘fluid’ knowledge shar-ing amongst different groups of employees Last, you have to rewardyour innovators and intrapreneurs extremely well As the futurist JimTaylor puts it, ‘you need a tradition of spectacularly rewarding thepeople who make a non-linear change in the business It has to be clearthat spectacular innovation is the surest way of reaping spectaculareconomic rewards’ (cited by Hamel, 2000b: 60) Innovators need toseek a direct relationship between the ideas that they create and therewards that they receive.5

Encourage play, fun, humour and games

The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment Ritual emerged from sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization in its earliest phases played.

(Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 1938)

What a depressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.

(Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1901)

It has been suggested several times in this book that a sense ofhumour is an important and often overlooked quality in leadershipand people management We’ve also seen that an atmosphere of funand enjoyment is an integral part of the organizational cultures ofsome of the world’s most successful companies There is also a closecorrelation between humour and creative thinking This is because

new ideas can only emerge when we have open, learning minds andwhen we tap into the child-like parts of our personalities thatrespond to play, fun and games These parts of our minds are alsothe source of spontaneity, imaginative and creative thinking andexperimentation Psychologists have known about this for more than

20 years, but it is only recently that this knowledge has started ing into the mainstream business world This realization has alsofostered the emergence of a number of companies that deal with thedevelopment of creative and lateral thinking through games, role-playing, storytelling, clowning and humour These companiesinclude Oracy and Jongleurs in the UK, the marketing firm Play andthe consulting firm Humour University in the USA, and WAMCG inAustralia

filter-Patrick Burns, policy director of the Industrial Society in the UK, hasobserved that ‘Play is becoming the buzzword As companies becomedesperate to harness creativity and lateral thinking, they are beingforced to look at new ways of fostering these talents These days, weare seeing everything from mime and comedy to finger painting andstorytelling.’ Andy Stefano, Play’s co-founder, believes that, ‘Whenyou turn work into a place that encourages people to be themselves,have fun and take risks, you unleash their creativity The best ideascome from playful minds, and the way to tap into that playfulness is toplay together.’ Maria Kempinska, co-founder of Jongleurs, hasobserved that ‘All companies are hungry for ideas, but if you push andpull in a pressured environment, ideas rarely come Forward-lookingcompanies realise that a good atmosphere at work, and good relationswith colleagues at work, are crucial to hanging onto creative staff.Teaching them how to laugh and communicate honestly is a good start’(cited by Chaudri, 2000) Arie de Geus, one of the ‘godfathers’ of thelearning organization, suggests, ‘Play is about fun and play is aboutexperimentation If you don’t understand the role that fun plays inlearning, then you cannot experiment If you cannot do this, youcannot learn, grow and change This is why fear becomes the dominantemotion in an organization in crisis, because it has lost the capacity tolearn’ (De Geus, 1997: 15)

Hence humour is the great liberator of creativity because it frees theconstrained, ‘adult’, rational, logical and linear parts of our minds andallows the more anarchic, free-flowing and creative parts of ourpersonalities to emerge Without this, true creativity is impossible.Having said this, humour, fun and play alone will achieve nothing;these must then be combined with self-discipline, motivation toachieve, the steady generation of new ideas, and the introduction ofpractical products and services into the marketplace

Humour is by far the most significant creative activity of the human brain.

(Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking, 1970)

Encourage brainstorming

‘Brainstorming’ might sound like an anarchic process where peoplerandomly throw ideas around and nothing ever gets done Withoutsome ground rules that is all it will ever be (Perkins, 2001: 96) The firstand most important rule is that criticism is not allowed However mad,crazy or unworkable suggestions might appear to be, they getdiscussed and recorded, because all innovations start life as small,crazy and throwaway ideas Second, keep moving and don’t get stuck

on details Initially, go for quantity rather than quality Third, diversifythinking by plucking ideas from anywhere and from different points ofview If necessary, create ‘whole brained’ teams with a balance ofdifferent skills, competencies and personalities (as described inChapter 5) Fourth, as William McKnight put it 80 years ago, don’t putfences round your employees because you’ll get sheeplike behaviour ifyou do Give your people the freedom, time and space to think freely.Fifth, ‘piggyback’ by building on ideas or suggestions made by otherpeople Sixth, push all ideas and suggestions to their absolute limit,and search for new or alternative ways of using these

We might occasionally make fun of our Kiwi cousins, but sometimes they really do come up with world-shattering ideas A couple of years ago, a group working with the intellectually handicapped decided to recycle animal faeces from Auckland and Wellington Zoos as garden fertilizer Zoo- Doo has become a big seller in the Shaky Isles But now they have gone one better with Endangered Faeces – small lumps of poo and compost moulded into the shapes of their main providers The tiny elephants, hippo, camels and giraffes – the moulds for which are the brainchild of Lord of the Rings movie designer Mel Ford – are designed to sit in outdoor pot plants releas- ing nutrients into the soil They are hoping to get export clearance soon.

(D.D McNicoll, The Australian, 12 January 2002)

Creating new ideas through brainstorming is just the starting point.The next step is to capture and retain these – even if a use for them isnot immediately apparent This knowledge then has to be ordered,categorized, validated and evaluated for its organizational utilityand/or commercial potential (topics we will return to in Chapter 10).Most importantly, throughout this entire process, negative attitudesand thinking that can thwart innovating thinking must be discouraged.These include the following: ‘That is an interesting idea, but it wouldn’twork’; ‘We’ve never done it that way’; ‘If it’s such a good idea, whyaren’t our competitors doing it?’; ‘There isn’t a market for that’; ‘Wehaven’t got the time’; ‘It’s too expensive’; ‘It’s too theoretical’; ‘TheBoard wouldn’t accept it’; ‘Our employees won’t understand it’; ‘We’re

not ready for that yet’; ‘We’ve been successful for twenty years, whychange?’; ‘Let’s form a committee to assess your proposal’; ‘Let’s bepractical for a minute’; and, of course, ‘Common-sense tells us thatblah, blah, blah ’

New ideas will never see the light of day if these attitudes prevail andalmost every innovative idea in history was dismissed as being unre-alistic or impractical when it was first proposed In Chapter 3, we sawhow Akio Morita and Masura Ibuka were able to push through theidea of the Sony Walkman in the face of scepticism and oppositionwithin the company In the 1980s, Morita had also noticed the explo-sion in video-game arcades, and saw that there was an opportunity tocreate games consoles that could be used in the home However, Sonywould never have been able to develop and manufacture this billion-dollar product if Morita had not quarantined its young designer fromthe rest of the company This cut him and his design team off from thebad advice that they constantly received about not touching digitaltechnology, because it was not regarded as being one of Sony’s areas ofexpertise at this time (Sutton, 2001)

A more recent example is Mike O’Dwyer’s revolutionary gun technology.When he first approached the Australian Ministry of Defence in the early1990s, with a proposal to develop a gun that could fire one million rounds

a minute, he was basically told to get lost and not mess around withthings he didn’t understand One admiral described him at the time as

‘certifiably mad’ Ignoring this initial rejection, O’Dwyer packed in his job

as a grocer in 1994, and established Metal Storm with the financial ing of the Brisbane-based venture capital firm, Charter Pacific He setabout developing a gun that would be electronic, rather than mechanical,which would also be capable of delivering a wide variety of projectiles,including fire retardants and fertilizers for crops Metal Storm was floated

back-on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1999 In 2001, the US and Australiangovernments decided to invest $US50 million in developing this newtechnology This innovation represents a quantum leap in an area of tech-nology that has not fundamentally changed since the introduction of thebreach-loader in the mid-19th century (Fraser, 2001)

You see things and you say ‘Why?’

But I dream of things that never were and I say ‘Why not?’

(George Bernard Shaw)

It’ll never catch on.

(Thomas Edison Probably the greatest inventor in human history, this was his response when told in 1890 that some people were planning to use his newly invented ‘electric phonograph’ to play recorded music He thought it might be used

to record the last words of dying people or to teach spelling to children.)

Build innovation and intrapreneurship into the organization’s culture

Another more unusual process involves breakthrough thinking When we assess opportunities, we ask if the usual approaches or business systems cannot produce the return on capital that we need, are there others that can? The development of the Andrew Field, which changed the economics of developing oil and gas fields in the North Sea, demonstrates the dramatic results that this kind of thinking can produce.

(John Browne, CEO of BP, cited by Prokesch, 1997: 158)

Innovation also has to be built into the culture and management tices of the organization If mavericks and intrapreneurs are not givenfreedom to move and encouragement for their ideas, they will up sticksand either move to one of your rivals with their ideas or set up in busi-ness for themselves For example, 3m allows its staff 15 per cent of theirtime away from work to develop new ideas, and get ideas from othercompanies, a process known in the company as ‘bootlegging’ Anotherexample of a company that has successfully built innovation into itsculture is Nokia (corporate logo, ‘No Limits’) The company was votedthe ‘World’s Leading Technology Company’ by the US magazine

prac-Business Week in 2000 It employs 60 000 people and has had a

long-standing reputation for being one of the world’s most innovativecompanies, even in its earliest years when its primary business waswood products Nokia is a company that has always discouragedcomplacency and self-satisfaction In the early 1990s, its managementrealized that, even though the company was commercially successfuland profitable, it had to continue to find new ways to make money andcreate new innovations and products

Since this time, people at all levels of the company have been aged to submit their ideas and suggestions, and hundreds are submit-ted every month Lauri Kivenen, then Nokia’s Senior Vice-Presidentfor Corporate Communications, describes how this process works:Ultimately, it’s individuals who produce innovations, then at another level it’s teams and groups, and finally the whole firm But, it starts from the indi- vidual [Innovation] is a spirit of trying to think outside the box, trying to look round the corner, trying to imagine the outcomes of a chain of devel- opments There is no secret formula to the company’s success It has to be something that is nurtured all the time You allow mistakes, you allow people to make bold moves and you try to spread energy It is very much a cultural thing You can’t force people to be innovative but you can foster it and encourage it and nourish it We don’t have a creativity manual [ ] People are used to discussing ideas and arguing quite openly In Finnish business culture, the idea that there might be someone at a lower level who has the key point is quite natural, especially in the IT sector You cannot utilise the knowledge of different people in a more efficient way than if there’s bureaucratic filters all around the organization.

encour-(Abridged from Sutherland, 2000a)

Of course, even an exemplar of innovation like Nokia gets it wrongsometimes The company’s integrated wireless mobile entertainmentphone N-Gage was launched with great fanfare in 2003, accompanied

by extensive TV advertising with a voice-over by the former Star Trek

actor, Patrick Stewart However, its cumbersome operating systemwas not well received by either IT commentators or consumers, and

it proved to be a commercial flop One critic described it memorably

as looking like a mixture of ‘a taco and a doofus’ (Lewis, 2002: 97)

Creating an intrapreneurial culture means that organizations have toinvest time and resources in their employees; this never just

‘happens’ Having recruited the right people, they have to providethe right kind of environment and incentives for innovation to bubble

up from the bottom of the organization The organization as a wholemust learn not to dismiss bizarre ideas and how to push these to theirlimits It has to invest in the most up-to-date creative software It has

to foster cross-functional dialogue and communication It has tosupport and reward innovation It has to use its customers for newideas and network with other organizations It has to learn how tokeep on the cutting edge of new ideas and innovations that couldaffect its market position It has to become committed to continualinnovation (similar to the Japanese notion of continuous improve-

ment, Kaizen).

Then an interdisciplinary venture team of researchers, engineers,marketeers and accountants can be set up to push new ideas further.These then have to be nurtured to see if they can be commercialized.Prototypes have to be built and feedback obtained from potentialinvestors and customers The market then has to be persuaded toadopt or buy the innovation For larger and more complex compa-nies, who may not be able to innovate as quickly as their smaller,nimbler competitors, systems have to be put in place to disseminatenew ideas quickly Company-wide gatherings, cross-functionalteams, formal brainstorming sessions, job placements and formaltwo-way and cross-functional communication systems can all helpwith this This might also require a more systemic approach to stor-ing this knowledge and intellectual capital on easily accessible dataand web bases Another solution is of course to buy out potentialentrepreneurial rivals Microsoft and Cisco Systems have been doingthis for years Cisco, for example, took over more than 60 fledglingcompanies in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2000 (Stein, 2000: 65).Large companies have also made use of ‘internal ideas factories’ and

‘skunk works’ for many years Skunk works were pioneered at the

Lockheed Aircraft Company in the 1940s Engineers working inside asecret office were encouraged to break all the rules when necessary,and ignore the official procedures laid down by the Pentagon Theresult was a stream of new planes and technologies that have consis-tently set new world standards for performance, often ahead ofbudget and schedule This was how IBM, steeped in a bureaucraticculture of making large computers for fat profits in the 1970s andearly 1980s, managed to break into the leaner, meaner personalcomputer market in the 1990s To do this, it had to create a skunkworks at Boca Raton in Florida, about as far as it was possible to get,culturally and physically, from its corporate headquarters in NewYork Unlike many of its contemporaries, such as DEC and WangComputers, this helped IBM to survive in the 1980s and then thrive in

the 1990s (The Economist, 1999).

In Royal Dutch Shell, Tim Warren, the former Director of Researchand Technical Services, established the ‘Game Changer’ process Hegave a small panel of selected free-thinking employees a $US20million budget and complete freedom to allocate this to any newbusiness ideas proposed by their peers The game went live in 1996.Initially, ideas were slow to come in The Game Changer paneldecided to invite Gary Hamel in to run some innovation workshopsfor 72 would-be intrapreneurs In two days the group generated 240new ideas, 12 of which were given funding Since the completion ofthese workshops, several hundred ideas have been received fromemployees Of Shell’s five largest growth initiatives in early 1999,four had their genesis in Game Changer And, as Hamel quietlyobserved, ‘The Game Changer process helped to convince Shell’s topmanagement that entrepreneurial passion lurks everywhere, and thatyou really can create entrepreneurial thinking inside even the largestorganization’ (Hamel, 2000b: 56) However, this is not a cure-all It issomething that may be usefully employed in very large bureaucraticcompanies, but can send negative messages to the rest of its employ-ees This may lead to the emergence of an ‘innovation apartheid’ in

an organization, with a well-paid innovative elite (the ‘in-group’) and

a disenfranchised majority (the ‘out-group’) The creation of skunkworks might also send out signals that a company is incapable oforganic, collective, bottom-up innovation and has to entrust this to adistinct, well-paid and privileged elite (Schrage, 1999)

Communicate, communicate and communicate some more

In Chapter 4, we saw that many cutting-edge companies createsurroundings that stimulate employee interaction and the free flow