Noted business strategist Gary Hamel is troubled by what he sees as "a persistent rhetoric gap around innovation."
Sure, innovation appears on just about every CEO's list of top priorities. And it's on almost every corporation's list of core values.
But if you ask front-line employees why innovation is so important to the success of their organizations -- and what tools they've been given to innovate -- you're likely to get blank stares.
"Certainly the thing that I find frustrating is that despite all of the rhetoric around innovation for a decade or more, I would argue that most companies have not yet made innovation everybody's job everyday," says Hamel, whose latest book is titled "What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition and Unstoppable Innovation."
There are several reasons for that disconnect, Hamel contends.
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| Gary Hamel: To be innovative, companies need to reinvent their management systems. |
For one thing, the fundamental principles of modern management are rooted in bureaucracy and top-down control -- which are "toxic to innovation," Hamel says.
"If you go back and look at the late 19th century and early 20th century, when pioneers like Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford and others were inventing modern management, their overriding goal was to turn human beings into semi-programmable robots," asserts Hamel.
"So you had the steel mills and the auto factories and the railway yards and so on, and what you essentially wanted was individuals who were as reliable as the machines they were serving."
A century later, that same management ideology "remains the philosophical cornerstone of virtually every large-scale human organization," he writes in "What Matters Now."
Unfortunately, Hamel writes, precision, stability, discipline, reliability and conformance -- the goals of the industrial-age management methodology -- "are merely table stakes" in today's global economy.
"Today, our institutions are up against new challenges: a rapidly accelerating pace of change, hyper-competition, the commoditization of knowledge, and ever-escalating demands for social accountability," Hamel writes.
" ... [W]e need organizations that are passion-filled, creative and malleable. Problem is, these organizational attributes are inversely correlated with bureaucratic control."
