Organise for Innovation
Management guru Peter Drucker, in his challenging book The Post Capitalist Society (1993), boldly states that we are constantly being pressured to conform to the status quo.
"Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability and to prevent, or at least slow down, change," he writes.
Organisations of the 90s and into the next century, however, says Drucker, must be organised for constant change. They must be "destabilisers" of the status quo.
Essentially, to survive the constant change, organisations must be built on innovation. Drucker is not saying we must merely allow or encourage innovation to take place within our usual business practices. He is saying we must reorganise and restructure our organisations to be based on innovation.
While West Aussies have a great and deserved international reputation for inventing useful things, we do not innovate well at all.
What's the difference between inventing and innovating, you ask?
Inventing is finding a new solution to a problem. How to get a bigger, faster computer ? Invent a bigger chip and processor.
Innovating is applying the invention, be it tangible or not, to a real situation. The bigger chip and processor are not an innovation until they have been produced, marketed and distributed into use.
A new management theory, such as Just In Time management, is invented and put down on paper (disk), but is not an innovation until it is put into practice in a workplace situation.
Most inventions in WA die on the vine because we are not good at recognising what skills are needed to get the invention into use, into being an innovation.
One area of particular weakness is design. We tend to think that if the widget works, who cares what it looks like. Or how we package and market it.
Market reality proves that the consumer cares what it looks like, in and outside the wrapping. (Hence, stand by for different shapes and different colours for computers - any day now.)
Inventors tend to preciously guard their "baby," keeping everyone else at arms length. We do not trust anyone else to do right by us or our invention.
So industrial designers, production engineers, market analysts, and marketing reps are rarely consulted and even more rarely listened to.
The inventor amateurishly bumbles along, doing it their way, in areas of increasing complexity, sophistication, and required expertise.
Whether we are talking innovating a product, such as a pink computer, or a system, such as the structure of an organisation, we just have to recognise that we can't do it all by ourselves.
We can't be best at everything. Not even many things. Businesses who have a healthy future are those which have a new style of thinking, a different form of organisation, and a changing set of procedures.
In the coming decades, any business that is not using the best knowledge and best experience available to set up its business for constant change will simply fall by the wayside. The old "she'll be right, Mate" attitude is Jurassic.
The old hierarchical, conservative, seniority-based organisational structure is going the way of the dinosaur - sinking into the mud.
Organise for destability; organise for innovation.
Next article: Five tactics for creating an innovative organisation.
Business News 15 Feb 1996
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