How innovative is your company? Can it change as fast as change itself?
I watched a really inspiring video presentation the other day by Gary Hamel (celebrated management thinker and author) about the biggest challenge companies face today - to build organizations that can change as fast as change itself. Companies that are adaptable to its core will be the ones best suitable for the rapid changing future. To do that you need to make innovation intrinsic and instinctive.
If you want to test how innovative your company is then take a representative cross section of your employees and ask them the following three questions.
- Have you been trained to be a business innovator? Have we invested any capital into your creative capital?
- If you have an idea – how quickly can you get a small amount of experimental capital and launch or test something new?
- Are we measuring innovation input, throughput, and the health of the innovative culture?
Are we holding every leader accountable and attaching that back to compensations?
Very few companies come out of these questions with a very good score. So, what to do? Build a self-renewing company.
To build a Self-Renewing Company
It is really hard to make people change before they have to. To do that you have to give people something worth changing for. It usually takes a crisis or a total change of management for that to happen.
The only guaranty a company can have against irrelevance is to create or build an evolutionary advantage. But as Hamal says, “No evolutionary advantage without an innovational advantage, since innovation is the fuel for renewal. But then, no innovation advantage without an inspiration advantage”. In other words – we need leadership with the vision and long-term perspective to act as the inspiration advantage.
How much is it worth?
There are a few companies that have done it right and that are very inspirational and some have found new ways of getting their employees inspired and engaged.
Amazon CEO and Founder – Jeff Bezos is known as one of the world’s most inspirational leaders and his shareholder letters are infamous for their visionary and inspirational content. In a recent letter to his shareholders he said ….. We are going to make Amazon into the world’s biggest laboratory.
Amazon runs more than 2000 business experiments a year.
Zappos a US based shoe retailer with more than 1500 employees recently announced their intention to move to a self-governing operating system called ‘Holacracy’. In ‘holacratic’ organizations there are no job titles and no managers, and hierarchy is removed completely. In its place is established what is called ‘Holacracy’.
A simple piece of math evidence of the effect of working in an innovative and inspiring company is the case of Apple vs. its competitor Han Hai Industries. An Apple employee is 100 times more worth than Han Hai Industry employees when measuring profit-per-employee, because they work in a company that is passionate about humanizing technology and innovative at its core.
If you are serious about this, I suggest that you run the 3-question test of Innovation Focus above as a start.
Any companies you know of that have done something inspiring you to change? Leave your comments below or connect with me for more interaction.