Ten Red Flags for Innovation

The article is too full of management consultant and B-school gibberish to make any sense. Reads like a "Hire me to give you the answers" sales pitch. Another $50K management training program you need to buy, Mr. CEO.

The first signal of something wrong is that the CEO needs to hire a consultant to teach him how to create a culture of innovation.

Innovation is one of the flowers of the best forms of leadership. The quality of leadership is where to start looking for the reasons why innovation isn't happening in an organization. Formal training programs, initiatives, mission statements, procedure manuals and all that kind of stuff is a waste of time if leadership isn't working.

Innovation starts with a creative process in the mind of a team member. These people are not necessarily employees. Will the creative idea find a receiver? That's the second of many steps through many movers to actual innovation. If the new idea doesn't make the cut, and realistically most don't, will there remain any motivation left in the minds of the "movers" to try again?

Hint: Is there a political or other formal or informal structure in the organization that will restrict rather than facilitate the mover process?

I'm no expert in this stuff. I've been down this road lots of times in a long working career, mostly as an individual contributor.

One area has to do with how to successfully innovate in organizations made up of "me" people as opposed to "we" people or a mix of the two. A favorite approach with a "me" type mover is to make my idea into his idea by suggesting an opposite with a lead in it. He (it's usually a "he") hears what I have to say, comes up with a counterpoint that is my original idea; but he now thinks it's his own. Perhaps I've lost the credit; but I still have the satisfaction of seeing it move forward. Of course if I want to be sneaky about it I pull a Michael Lewis ("Liars Poker") and fail to mention some critical fine point thereby secretly preserving my ownership of the idea.

I have more of my own thoughts; but I'd like to read opinions from others.

Ed Weldon

My own red flag: if the folks running the company think that "creative" means pictures & poetry, ad campaigns, smooth shapes over someone else's technology, and believe that engineers aren't creative, RUN! My simple question for them: aren't patents proof positive that something is actually new and unique? Patents which have real utility [and monetary worth, the only reason that the company is interested] go to engineers, not poets / artists / dreamers - why is that?

Amen!

I've seen companies which for years shoveled the same core technology into different enclosures. And each time - voila! - a "brand new product" was born. And every year the "new" product was launched to the cheering masses with brass bands, apple pie, and BS so deep you needed stilts.

The only innovation permitted was by the Aesthetics team. Engineering was just the one-way street they used to get their "artistic genius" into a box. Functionality & Reliability didn't just take a back seat - they were left standing by the curb looking sad and confused while Appearance & Cheapness hotwired the car and drove away shouting "wooooo-hoooooo!" Predicably crashing and burning after skidding on several patches of warranty costs then slamming head-on into customer anger.

Yeah...they're all RIP now.

Checklists are not innovative. And ever onward from there....

pretty much the wrong audience for management double speak

innovation is much more about providing the tools & goals

not so much checklists & procedures

"pretty much the wrong audience for management double speak'

Garth -- Wow; do you have that one right. They call it "B school". I call it "BS"

Someone should write a book "George Westinhouse Didn't Go to B School"

Ed

My signature line for a day or so was:

CR4 home of the crotchety old engineer...

Like you I spent time doing,

funny how badly all those RAH RAH meetings go in a room full of smart people who are used to thinking on their feet.

The best the trainer could hope for was silence

The best the trainer could hope for was silence

"funny how badly all those RAH RAH meetings go in a room full of smart people who are used to thinking on their feet." Garth

Most of those meetings are the "innovative" product of Legal, HR, or Environmental/Safety departments, some sycophant vice president or the CEO's admin. We all know how creative those folks are.

Ed Weldon

Are the engineers desks/benches tidy? Do they fill in time sheets? Does anyone check up on either of those questions?
A yes to any of the above means there is/will be no inovation...
Del

For me, #1 alarm bell is when you hear any sentence containing the words;

"Job Description" especially when used in the sense of "That's not" - hers, his ,mine, ours.

Kyzine