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....