Management by Imagination - The Conversation

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: "If you can't measure it, it doesn't count"; "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it"; "If you can't measure it, it won't happen"? We like these sayings because they're comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it. But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What's more, we won't see what we're missing because we don't know what it is that we don't know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world

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Combining Ideas – a Key to Innovation - Tim Kastelle, School of Business the University of Queensland

One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and innovations within your organisation. These act together to create non-linear feedback loops which make the change process nearly impossible to predict or manage. How do we manage this? The act of innovation consists of combining ideas in new ways, and then executing the this new combination effectively (If you’re nerdy, I’ve got a fairly technical model of how this works in the paper I wrote with Jason Potts & Mark Dodgson for this year’s DRUID Conference). One of the ways that we deal with the complexity we face is by innovatively connecting ideas.

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The 4 Best Ever Harvard Business Press Articles on Strategy as Selected by ther Creative Leadership Forum

Harvard Business Press worked through the last decade collating what they saw as the best articles on strategy and ended up with 1o. We chose what we believe to be the top 4.

Read these and you will have a good basic understanding of what strategy is from a theoretical perspective.

The Core Competency of the Corporation by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel

Leading Change - Why Transformation Efforts Fail by John P. Kotter

Innovation: The Classic Traps by Rosabeth Moss Kantor

What Makes a Leader by Daniel Goleman

All 10 have been edited into a nice compilation that can be purchased from Harvard Business Press. Click here to see the list of the 10 articles and to place an order..

Management's Dirty Little Secret

A great piece from Gary Hamel's Wall Street Journal blog on Management. How would you feel about a physician who killed more patients than he helped? What about a police detective who committed more murders than he solved? Or a teacher whose students were more likely to get dumber than smarter as the school year progressed? And what if you discovered that these perverse outcomes were more the rule than the exception—that they were characteristic of most doctors, policemen and professors? You’d be more than perplexed. You’d be incensed, outraged. You’d demand that something must be done! Given this, why are we complacent when confronted with data that suggest most managers are more likely to douse the flames of employee enthusiasm than fan them, and are more likely to frustrate extraordinary accomplishment than to foster it? Consider the recent “Global Workforce Survey” conducted by Towers Perrin, an HR consultancy. In an attempt to measure the extent of employee engagement around the world, the company polled more than 90,000 workers in 18 countries. The survey covered many of the key factors that determine workplace engagement, including:

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The International Journal for Innovation Research

I came across this journal edited by Mark Dodgson, the Executive Director, Uniuversity of Queenmslands Business School's Centre for Technology and Innovation Management

This is the journal's preamble

"Innovation' may be defined as the generation and application of new ideas and skills to produce new products, processes and services that improve economic and social prosperity. The scope of Innovation: Management, Policy & Practice (IMPP - ISSN 1447-9338) encompasses innovation research, policy analysis and best practice in large and small enterprises, public and private sector service organizations, state and national government, and local and regional societies and economies with special emphasis on linking academic research to future practice"

There are some worthwhile articles here.