Why CEOs Don't Get Innovation - A Nonsense Article from Stefan Lindegaard and BusinessWeek
Friday, March 5, 2010 at 10:31PM I read with interest the recent Business Week article entitled why CEO's don't get innovation by Stefan Lindegaard another innovation speaker, network facilitator, and adviser on open innovation and intrapreneurship. He runs all the usual arguments about the inability of organisations to innovate, the spurious argument that leaders now emerging with MBAs are the first with innovation subjects in their degrees (that stat certainly doesn't stack up with our research which is telling us globally universities are failing badly with MBAs, most of whom don't have innovation in their programmes anyway) and summarises with this meaningless statement
"...The problem is that top executives reward middle managers for getting stuff done and executing flawlessly. This can be counterintuitive to innovating. But top executives are often too far away from the action to understand how this compensation structure makes it harder for innovation leaders to succeed. Most leaders are more wedded to rewarding the core business rather than pursuing something new and untested..."
This article is typically of the nonsense being written about innovation currently. Indeed, it is worse than nonsense, the current theoretical discussions under the guise of innovation are meaningless.
Organisations are systemically and uniquely creative - let me repeat this - ORGANISATIONS ARE SYSTEMICALLY AND UNIQUELY CREATIVE.
The challenge is how a leader understands his/her unique creative ecology from an organisational and business context; locates and languages the DNA that has made the organisation successful and drives and finesse it ethically, passionately and morally that provides the organisation its raison d'etre and its sustainability.
The current discussions around innovation are badly framed and focused and actual confuse and impede innovation.
Why?
Because innovation is an outcome; creativity is the genesis that drives that outcome and that is where the focus in an organisation should be - on developing its ability to be creatively in order to build sustainably and value over a period of time, step by step.
In order to be creative you need to be inside the organisational system and all its constraints, interacting with it. You need to understand how you affect it and how you are creative in it and you need to be given permission to do that within the parameters and protocols constraining the operation.
In theatre, actors don't see themselves acting. They talk about the play, what it means and what they can bring to it as far as their role and skills are concerned. They know they are reliant on others - all they can do is develop their creative practice - their ability to be able to add value to the whole.
That is the way an organisation works. No amount of exhorting to innovate or general theorising by consultants is going to make an iota of difference. Indeed, it is probably going to impede what is needed - an intuitive ability to recognise when you are being creative, applying that to the best of your ability in whatever context. Leaders and their teams regardless of the pecking order know what that means. What they desparately need is to be able to understand how reflection works and to develop a confidence in expressing their reflections and applying them in practice.
Please, please Business Week take heed of your Innovation Editor Bruce Nussbaum who wrote in Dec 2008 "Innovation is dead.." and allow this glut of meaningless innovation theorising to die!!
Let's start looking at each organisation, like we do human beings, uniquely, systemically and aesthetically..and allow the world to develop as it will....
Reader Comments (3)
I would argue that innovation is a process; not an outcome. The outcome is what you get out of an innovation process in which creativity plays a big role. You can plan this process just as you can plan other management and business processes/disciplines such as sales, logistics and finance. You can also train people to become better innovators especially when you understand that innovation works best with a holistic approach. It needs to be about more than just products and technologies.
Innovation is becoming more like science than an art form as we begin to be able to look at previous patterns and experiences and use this knowledge to better predict outcomes based on the input and processes you use. This maturity is one key reason why innovation is becoming even more important - and complex.
I think your view of innovation as an outcome is where we differ the most and this, in my view, explains your outburst against the article. Hey, it is just fair to have opposing views and hopefully discussions like this can help expand the horizon for all of us.
You argue that we should forget about the term innovation. Innovation is no longer a buzz word. It is here to say and we can argue on definitions - which I always try to avoid as I believe each company must find their own definition. But we can't just pretend the term does not exist or should be replaced by other word. Those days are long gone.
Creativity is also a term that people define differently and it can also be applied in many different ways depending on the situation you are in. You need a different kind - and perhaps level - of creativity when you try to develop new innovation outcomes than what is required when you are solving a logistic solution or the daily accounting work.
Why not just accept that both innovation and creativity are terms with many different definitions that can be applied differently - and that both terms are here to stay?
Stefan
www.15inno.com
The real problem in your argument lies in the language. Language does matter. Definitions provide the subtlety of difference. Indeed, it is through language and subtleties we obtain meaning. There are big differences between creativity and innovation and our research shows that if you haven't got that meaning sorted out, in each specific context then you have confusion at both individual and organisational level. For someone to take your material seriously as a knowledge expert, you need to be clear on your definitions.
Further, your suggestion that inputs enable projections of outputs is totally flawed. Only with machines are you able to do that. You cannot do that with human behaviour or complex adaptive systems. Your statement, innovation is a science ignores the very construct of scientific reasoning. Science offers a hypothesis, that continues to exist only if it can't be proven to be wrong.
Incremental thinking might help prove a hypothesis correct or incorrect. It is not innovation that does that
Let me repeat. Innovation is an outcome and it is driven by creativity and its fellow travellers invention, experimentation, risk, action, judgment, failure - all human constructs that are far from being science.
Stefan, mine is not an outburst. It is damning condemnation of the prevailing language you and others keep churning out with the pretense of being knowledge experts. Your article and this statement
"...The problem is that top executives reward middle managers for getting stuff done and executing flawlessly. This can be counterintuitive to innovating. But top executives are often too far away from the action to understand how this compensation structure makes it harder for innovation leaders to succeed. Most leaders are more wedded to rewarding the core business rather than pursuing something new and untested..."
are so far away from creativity and your concept of "innovation" whatever that is, that it is important others are able to perceive the hyperbole around the information being disseminated on the web around innovation.
One thing for sure, it is not knowledge...