At Work Newswire

By D. Quinn Mills

Most organizations are not particularly good at creativity. This is because large organizations exist to carry out a particular set of functions—production, sales, shipping, etc.—efficiently. This means that they are structured to do certain things over and over while minimizing the cost. Managers are there to see that things are done right, on schedule, and within budget.

Innovation, however, is a creative process and notoriously resistant to being reduced to an efficient routine.

A result is that many managers become actively hostile, though they don’t usually recognize it, to innovation. Innovation represents a departure from standard procedure that may prove expensive and ineffective. It means that employees are thinking about something else than being as efficient as possible in their current assignments.

So innovation is often pushed off to a special department—a “skunk works” or development laboratory.

This is unfortunate, because innovations arise most naturally out of the imagination of people in the ordinary work environment. They see what could be done differently and better. They see what new concerns the customer has and what new products or services might be offered him or her.

Discouraging innovation

Ross Perot was working for IBM as a salesman when he realized that customers wanted not just computer hardware but services. He tried to get his managers at IBM to move in that direction. They didn’t want to be bothered—they were too busy “pushing the iron,” as they called selling hardware. So after years of trying to urge a major innovation on his employer, Ross left to form EDS and created the computer services industry.

This sort of story is repeated continually in industry. Many, if not most, successful entrepreneurs first attempted to get their current employers to embrace the innovation, and when they failed, left to found new companies. While being a start-up entrepreneur is a very difficult and risky thing, it allows freedom to experiment and pursue innovation. So the challenge for a company is how to champion good innovations rather than drive them out of the firm.

There are innovations of different degrees. Some involve small changes in current products and procedures. A leader or manager can facilitate these by building a culture of continual improvement in his department, division or even company. Steady improvement in methods is expected—employees are encouraged and rewarded for good ideas; employees meet frequently to evaluate suggestions and plan for putting the good ones into effect. The efficiency of the department is expected to rise in small increments continually, so that over a long period of time, large improvements will have been accomplished.

Larger innovations are a much more significant challenge to managers. Most ideas that people have are probably not valuable—they’re often not really new, or they have major flaws. People can become very attached to their ideas and won’t accept their limitations. Some people get obsessed with their notions. A manager doesn’t want to have his or her time chewed up in discussing and rejecting idea after idea—it’s also discouraging to employees who offer ideas when they are rejected. Hence, most managers are not willing to have employees bring ideas for innovations, except on the small scale of incremental improvements in existing practices, brought to them.

Doing better

Can we do better? Perhaps. A leader or manager can let employees know that she or he will listen to ideas at certain times, say once a week or a month, in his office, alone, and will respond to the ideas in a week or so privately. It’s important not to let an employee get excited about an idea and spread it around the work place, only to have it rejected and lose face with his or her peers.

A manager should keep an open mind about the suggestions he or she receives. This is not easy. Many of us are not very innovative ourselves, and may not recognize good ideas. So if an idea appears to us to possibly have merit, we may want to have someone else to take the idea to for an assessment. Then, if it still stands scrutiny, we may want to suggest to the employee that it be taken elsewhere in the firm, and maybe we’ll support it on its journey.

In some companies there is no standard way for an innovative idea to go forward. In this setting it’s very difficult to advance an innovation, and the manager may simply have to decide if it’s worth it to take the idea directly to top executives—with the risk that may entail.

If a company has provided avenues for innovative ideas, as 3M is famous for doing, then a leader or manager has a much easier task in encouraging innovation in the organization.

D. Quinn Mills is the Alfred J. Weatherhead Jr. Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He consults with major corporations and teaches at Harvard on subjects of leadership, strategy, and financial investments.

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Copyright © 2007 D. Quinn Mills

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