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Should the Power of Corporate Innovation Shift Away From Executives?
Lucas123 writes "At the Consumerization of IT conference in San Francisco this week, several speakers agreed the next big shift in the corporate establishment will not be technological but social, away from top-down responsibility for innovation and change. Businesses are on the cusp of a leadership revolution because millennials moving into the workforce are 'the most authority-phobic' generation in history, according to Gary Hamel, a management educator at the London School of Business. Not only should low-level workers be incentivized for being creative, they should be given the power to spend corporate money on research and development, Hamel said. By doing that, companies will diversity their experimental capital. 'If you don't do that, you'll never change that innovation curve,' he said. Hamel was not alone. Kevin Jones, a consulting social & organizational strategist for NASA's Marshall and Goddard Space Flight Centers, agreed that traditional corporate culture needs a radical shakeup. 'The values of management today are different from the values of the social enterprise and different from the values of the consumerization of IT — and they're not mixing very well,' Jones said. 'That's where we're having the battle.'"
Or YES !!
One of those !!
not
"I hate hippies!"
Lord knows the upper management at all but one company I've worked at is a bunch of parasitic douchebags. Good riddance.
Who kills bad ideas, based on prior experience? Nobody!
Who insures that everyone is working on something productive? You guessed it.
The most authority phobic generation in history? Really? Anyone forget the 60's? Come on, folks. People have not fundamentally changed. Every generation thinks the younger generation is the most authority phobic generation in history.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
hahaha haha HahA HAHAHAHA!
Flat management is the future of innovation.
The R&D suggestion is not a bad idea either. For the right price you can hire nonprofit research institutes that live for this kind of work.
They will be crushed and remoulded into good little cogs or fired and excluded same as every other generation before .
Not really the best analogy, but give the best empolyees in the company the power to order distant fire and I am sure some additional breakthrough will happen.
According to this theory, the millenials are a "hero (civic)" type of generation and actually not really authority phobic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generations_(book)#Hero
These are the kids raised with "zero tolerance," were not allowed to walk to school or play outside alone, and received a trophy just for showing up. They think nothing of having their every move tracked by Facebook. They love authority!
WTF is a social enterprise?
I guess that's where everyone "inovates" by surfing Facebook all day long on their BYOD iPhone.
Whatevs.
Other than a startup, I think it's rare for any innovation to come from the executives.
rotfl! I mean really? Really? Sure, smaller companies thrive on this sort of socialized creative commons. It's how ANY creative enterprise is actually innovative. Steve Jobs and Woz didn't do it all themselves, the collective hobby culture they were plugged into stimulated everything that they created. But, once anyone creates something that sells, the corporate 'buy out' crowd shows up (I'm looking at you Bill Gates!) and the CEOs take control. Of course everyone here is aware just how corporations swallow everything, so they can own it. That's their reason for existing.
The driving force of our consumer culture isn't innovation, it's markets. Corporations sometimes, in desperation, might spend some cash to fund innovative creation but why the fuck would creators just work-for-hire and give up their creations to their bosses? In the market place many are well aware that the creative, innovative business model functions for only as long till a corporation comes and buys it. That's the model! That's how most start-ups see their end game.
Besides, corporations often just wait for the government funded research to innovate so they can get that for a song, if not free, and then create that market. That's how computers and the Internet came to us in the first place.
imho, of course.
...right up until they actually start getting some authority.
Then, lo and behold, a miracle occurs! They suddenly realized that authority is just fine and dandy, as long as they're the ones wielding it! Then it will be "Respect my au-thor-i-tay!"
See also: Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary. "A High Moral Principle met a Vested Interest crossing a bridge..."
TL;DR summary: Leadership revolution incentivized to diversity their experimental capital: values of the social enterprise, not consumerization of IT! Frog blast the vent core!
Should it? Possibly.
Will it? No. It's amazing how well people play along if the alternative is no paycheck at all.
Ack!
We all have had bad experience with managers but in my experience, good managers are needed. for every one terrific idea there are 5-10 terrible ideas...You cant just have new grads tossing money around without thinking thru how it will work, how much it will cost and how much money it will make and/or time it will save...
If you can prove that your idea is a good one, any competent managment team will go for it, but too many young people just want to put things in because they are new and shiny, that doesn't work so well in business...
I recall a few of my stupid ideas as a 22 year old, I had many outlandishly stupid ideas but I had a great manager who listened to all my goofy ideas and told me why they would not work, then one day I hit pay dirt and came up with an idea that would be able to automate so much of the IT operation that we would not need to hire some temps or interns for mundane tasks. That resulted in a nice bonus but more importantly a great lesson in how to think like a business when considering IT gear/platforms/initiatives.
Good managers are not disposable
Some companies have two track career paths. One, you move up as a techie into the management path, right up to executive. Two, you move up a techie path, where you go to Senior Engineer, right up to Distinguished Engineer, a position that has the same rank as an executive. Those Distinguished Engineers are the ones who advise the senior executives on innovation.
Does really it work? I have no idea. Feel free to post your experience.
Distinguished Engineer? I'd label myself as an Extinguished Can-of-Beer.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
the owners, boards, and upper management are mostly a bunch of old, stuffy, cigar-chomping, technology and change-fearing, pointy-haired bosses, just itching to "pull a blackberry" with their company.
Does this surprise anyone? Good luck clearing them out. They're kings in their kingdom.
The most common way to "reorganize" them we see today is when upper management drives the company into the ground like a telephone pole. Problem tends to be though that these companies have a large stash of money in the bank, and are able to flop after flop after flop before they finally run the coffers dry. They've gotten very good over the years at "controlling their shareholders", ie shoveling the BS with a silver tongue and sincere promises, that the shareholders don't revolt until they're already seeing the headlight in the tunnen. But by then, the company has lost so much momentum and market share that they're often in an unrecoverable nose-dive.
Sorta sad to watch, but I think "change is good". When the system has become unfixable, the best thing to happen is for it to break completely and be re-invented from the ground up, based on modern considerations. (nuke 'n pave) "corporate revolutions" I suppose you could call it. Old companies that won't adapt fade away, while new companies come up and take their place. Reminds me of a forrest. Quit trying to save the old trees, let them die and make room for the new saplings to take their place down the road.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
At my large fortune 100 company, the exec's don't innovate, they don't come up with ideas for the "next big thing", they rely on the propeller heads to come up with new products and solutions.
Now, how we get that product can often land in the lap of the Execs. You can build it internally, you can partner with someone that already has it, or you can buy a company that has the product, services or intellectual property you want.
Technically sharp people often don't want to be challenged in an area where they often have very little experience, namely finance and business justification.
So you've got an idea for a widget. It's gonna be the next big thing. Someone that owns a $10m budget required to build this widget is going to ask the uber dork, "Show me how much we'll get back from this?" What's our addressable market? Penetration rate? Break even point?
Why do they ask these questions?
Because if they blow this $10m on something, and it doesn't work out, they've got to answer to the next person up the proverbial ladder.
Even at slashdot's favorite company, Google, has a "20% free time" and not "$20m invest in whatever you want" policy.
Smart executives surround themselves with smarter people that will advise them on what to do. You think the CEO of GE, IBM, Cisco, Caterpillar knows all the details of what their company is investing in? Nope. But (s)he knows that there is responsibility and more importantly accountability for investment decisions.
Steve Jobs laughs at them from the grave.
Put a bunch of whiney, selfish, over-indulged, arrogant, ethically-challenged, over-grown children who never got over believing they are special and everyone is exactly equal because everyone gets a trophy and have a group history of disrespecting other people's work and money, "should be given the power to spend corporate money on research and development" which means no pre-spending oversight.
What could possibly go wrong?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
There isn't a single corporate executive that hasn't had their 9th lobotomy as well as 2nd vasectomy to become brainless and ball-less so that they can do nothing without approval from the board that only cares about mining every last cent from the company stock before they drive the company to the bottom of the cesspool.
There should be the corporate carousel that once they reach a certain level, their gem turns red, and they have to either die or run. I'd love to be one of the sandmen to go after them. Would be a blast.
An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
These fresh out of college babies are definately unreasonable. Sure they can bring about change. Some good. Some bad. Someone needs to listen to their ideas and decide which are good and which are bad.
I am somewhere in the middle myself. I struggle to get both ends to understand what I have learned from my own experience. The management with their "outdate experience" and the young "know it all" newbies.
I worked for Texas Instruments Defense Systems and Electronics Group from early 1988 through about mid-1999.
TI DSEG had LOTS of R&D money available, and MANY different internal programs for handing it out. The most important one was called IDEA (I don't know if it was an acronym or not, or what it may have stood for). IDEA was designed to hand out small chunks of first-round funding, enough to keep one engineer with a crazy idea that just might work fed and working for a couple of months, while he threw together a detailed study proposal, saying how to do a pilot project to see if there might be something to the idea. IDEA money was EASY to get, and there were multiple paths to it. If you for whatever reason didn't want to go through your management, that was no problem at all: *ANY* IDEA coordinator ANYWHERE IN THE COMPANY could listen to an IDEA pitch from ANYONE, and, if it sounded AT ALL plausible, throw some funding at him.
The whole idea behind IDEA was that most IDEA projects were EXPECTED to fail, but they'd generally fail quickly and cheaply. The ones that didn't fail got more funding, and more detailed investigation. Wash, rinse, and repeat, and every so often something REALLY good would pop up, that would make TI a huge chunk of money, enough to justify all those little failed efforts, and some not-so-little failures as well.
We all know how messed up much corporate planning, decision making, and management is. They have the stupidest mental shortcuts for evaluating people and projects, and the queerest ideas about what attributes a model employee possesses. How they think and even wish people should behave is wildly unrealistic. So many employees are just playing the game, trying to appear to have the "proper" attitudes, while keeping their real opinions and thoughts to themselves. Management picks loudmouths and hardasses for management positions, mistaking noise and bullying for drive and vision. Instead of thoughtfully evaluating plans on the merits, choosing among them and measuring progress as best they can so they have some idea whether it's feasible and how long it will take, they set impossible deadlines, frantically ply the whips, and when that doesn't work blame the slave labor for letting the company down. They also can't resist working on hidden agendas driven by shockingly unprofessional and even childish motives. An upper manager might well lay off an entire department on trumped up questions about their value to the company, all because an attractive member of it refused a sexual advance. Wag the Dog would have been more likely if it had been about a corporate leader rather than a national leader.
You'd think such messed up organizations would collapse under their own incompetence every time. They do fail rather often, but surprisingly less often than one might think. I can only think a bad business survives in spite of their incompetence, because their competitors are just as incompetent. Or they don't have competitors.
Seems to me the problem is the the downright feudal nature of these organizations. Inheritance has been thoroughly discredited as a way to pick national leaders. But we still pick many corporate leaders that way, and accept it. It's as if ownership is held in the high regard that the monarchy and nobility once enjoyed. The rich are the new nobility. When the person at the top is unimaginitive and plodding, yet egotistical, arrogant and contemptuous towards the "lower classes", and also jealous and resentful of respect towards scientists, engineers, and other meritorious people, the company is not going to be well run. Ford Motor Company has had this problem. Used to refer to Henry Ford as "King Henry". What restrains them from acting too tyrannical and arbitrary is that employees are free to leave. Unless the economy stinks, or they manage to set up a company town, and collude with their competitors not to hire each other's former employees. Maybe do a bit of union busting as well. Top management strives entirely too much to achieve such dubious control. Sickening to see company resources expended for such purposes, but there it is.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I fired a client a few years ago. Their major innovation from the C level was making it possible for the software they write for airlines to charge fees for more/everything.
what are CEOs actually 'responsible' for? Responsible implies consequences. Last I heard the penalty for wreaking a company's net worth was a multimillion dollar bonus.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You can often turn a manager into 10-20 L of biodiesel without anyone noticing..
I've found it shocking how well younger folk fit into corporate life and have always felt like this is the least rebellious generation ever.
Typically, whenever management makes some absurd proposal (like some kind of odd way to track metrics), people sigh, roll their eyes, and figure out some way to comply with the letter of the mandate, while saving as much time as possible to focus on actually getting the product out the door.
My younger co-workers not only show no signs of resistance (even behind closed doors), they embrace the absurdity and offer up more of it. They end up complicating the process, even more than the middle manager wanted (since they were also just going for the checkmark). Hell, I've never even seen anyone under the age of 30 (these days) drink a beer at a social outing (even when their managers and everyone else is). Youngin's seem so domesticated these days.
Judging by all these articles, I guess my experience isn't quite the norm.
i.e. The guy with the gold makes the rules.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Yes please
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
But power and pay check they go to the top honchos no matter what. The raison d`etendre of a modern corporation is to squeeze as much profit as possible, dodge as much tax as possible and send it all as pay, bonus and stock options for the top executives.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Slow and steady innovation and improvement pretty well must come from the bottom up. The whole boots on the ground thing. Companies that are dictatorial about this are just leaving a huge amount of wasted potential untapped while annoying just about everybody. But often a company needs to make a big change. This sort of change is scary and can be painful. This is where a leader with "vision" is required. The later is where Steve Jobs and Apple seemed to have excelled. He had the vision and made it happen all the while having a zillion employees minding the details. Without Steve Jobs Apple products will probably continue to improve but will slowly miss the next wave of innovation.
I am fairly sure that the electric car is the next big thing in cars. For me a car with around 100 miles range would be great. There are few things in my life beyond that range. The Tesla with its 200 mile range is awesome and we can all assume that between batteries and other improvements the range will only get better. Yet the big automakers can't seem to understand that they need to make the leap. Things like the leaf are sub 100 miles and the Volt still had a piston engine in it. So this is a case where Tesla is now in the cycle of steady improvements of the next generation while most of the other car companies keep improving the past generation of fuel driven cars.
The corporate culture does need to be shaken up, as does the federal government, as do the big banks. They feel their control eroding by the day, which is why they're squeezing as hard as they can now. So good luck getting them to hand out startup capital to millenials. And the people making the decision where to allocate capital are MBAs who by definition defend the status quo; they want to stifle innovation if they can, or control it if they can't. The result is we all get a world that continues to Suck while our very serious problems mount quickly.
We are on the cusp of a global revolution (if you like that word) or a paradigm shift (if you don't) that requires we bypass the gatekeepers of capital. That's part of what the crowdfunding movement is about. But what we really need to do is relearn or invent anew a more fundamental skill: how to make something from nothing, using nothing but our wits, our will, our heart, and the strength of our own two hands.
It's very hard. But unless you can walk through that test of fire, acid, and darkness you are nothing more than another wannabe driven by callow greed.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
As someone that worked for an organization (small repair shop) that shifted from flat to tiered, the only real change is that suddenly people start demanding wages that reflect their new status and start lashing out when they are denied, even if their actual workload remains the same as it always was.
The organization I worked for eventually went out of business because the "new to management" employees negotiated a buyout of the building's lease behind the company owner's back. He got a call one day telling him to get out by the end of the week. Soon as the last box was loaded onto the moving truck destined for storage in his garage, all of his employees told him they quit. Next day they reopened the shop under their own name and flew a pirate flag for a week. The pirate flag was insult to injury, symbolizing the fact that they had taken everything from the client database to the building itself. Left with no building, no employees, no customers, and a home loan in default, the former owner drank himself to death.
Tesla has the luxury electric car good so far. As for the low cost manufacturing part, the big car companies are great at that. I guess Tesla's fate depends on the price of gas. The sooner gas prices jump, the sooner more price sensitive people go after low end electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, the faster the big car companies go through the learning curve in electric cars. The customers of the Model S can afford high gas prices. The Nissan Leaf customers, not so much.
Man that was a funny write up. Giving the keys to the kingdom to young upstarts and relatively new employee is hilarious. Every work with these kids? They can't balance their own checkbooks without their mothers' helping. And they expect these same kids to spend millions of dollars on their pet projects. Sure, let it happen. We could always use all kinds of mods to World of Warcraft. The facebook and twitter models are not the norm in the world of business.
Are you kidding? Hotbeds of innovation, with process out the yinyang (have you done the RIDs on your NPR7123 compliant review documents following your NPR 7120.5 rev E project plan, following NPR 7150.2 software development practices?)
Marshall, founded for all intents and purposes by Nazi refugees from Peenemunde? Goddard, where everything is contracted to beltway bandits, and design reviews are more about authenticating the existence of design documents, rather the contents of the documents.
You bet there's a battle between the values of the social enterprise and the values of the consumerization of IT and the values of tradition.
Except that individual contributors, no matter what level, do not control the financial resources or subject the company to as much risk as people on the management side of the ladder. management gets paid more, a lot more. And there are more positions on the management side. You get promoted to special distinguished principal member of the technical staff when you need to find more room on your office shelves for your second Nobel Prize.
Look for a report from the Sloan School on "dual ladder" googling "sloan school dual ladder" will get numerous hits..
The title is "The Dual Ladder: Motivational Solution or Managerial Delusion"
It's from the 80s, but the research dates back to the 60s.
Apple with Steve Jobs vs Apple without Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs was one of the most hands on CEO's I've ever heard about. He was in the trenches, interfacing directly with developers and anyone else along the production chain that proved to be a critical path to deployment. He came up with seemingly impossible ideas that no one else would have the guts to suggest. And then he rode point on the entire organization to ensure that it happened. That's what a good CEO can do, and what will almost never happen by democracy.
That is not to say that the paychecks of most of the CEOs out there are warranted. Quite the opposite. There's no reason why a CEO, on average, should be making more than 5 times the salary of the average employee. But to discount the role that can be played by someone with the talent, drive, and innovation of someone like Steve Jobs is to misunderstand the dynamics of a corporation.
From the title of the conference and almost every sentence of the summary afterwards the verbification of nouns alone ensured I wouldn't read the article. The stopping point for me was "....will diversity their experimental capital."
Yes, I figured it was a typo, but enough, already.
If there is indeed a shift in responsibility for the ideas and questions which prompt research away from the executive floor (where I doubt many of those occur anyway) then it would to me also suggest paying the highers less. (It would also bolster my long-standing argument for employee ownership; the social mechanisms in that approach would tend to favor the organization's acknowledgement of leaders rather than acquiescence to the psychopathy of the power-hungry.)
Unless you count all corporate douchebaggery and scams - especially those in financial services. There are very few examples of innovative corporations. Innovation tends to come from smaller players that are then bought by big corporation that then boast about those innovations (thay actually didn't create). Most of big corps prefer sitting on a bag of profit-generating assets, praying that no innovation wipes out their valuable assets and actively fighting any initiatives to outinnovate them and their 'precious', outdated assets.
I don't think that non-word means what you think it means.
It's quite common for management to get fired over bad investments and wasting company time. Same should hold true then for the small fish.
Privacy is terrorism.
Why do they ask these questions?
The question is "why do they ask techies these questions"? The techies don't ask the CFO to design the UPS for the new datacenter!
Is it coincidence that this story is on slashdot only a few inches below a story about how 'agile' development is chaotic, undirected, and often results in version-chaos?
-Styopa
I've worked in companies which have grown by acquisition before, and sometimes you end up with the head of R&D being the person who was head of R&D at the last major acquisition.
Those people frequently end up with a huge case of NIH, and any technologies they didn't oversee the creation of must be a waste of time.
So all of a sudden, your focus is on a specific type of widget instead of the general problem, and they start redirecting everyone to that.
And, for those of us who have had to listen to company roadmaps and the laughable vision for the future -- the executives who are setting strategy are often so far out of touch with reality or choose things which nobody is going to want in a few years that you wonder if they really have any clue.
Innovation by decree from corporate executives, in my experience, is usually a joke. I once sat in a presentation where the CEO was saying how in 3 years we'd all be working on something which they never got around to, and which never actually turned into the market force they'd hoped. But for about 6 months, that's all you heard about at company presentations, meanwhile the developers were rolling their eyes and laughing.
It's like a Dilbert cartoon some days. Whatever the current magic quadrant, or is the buzzword of the day is is a lousy way to drive your innovation. They might have been technical at one point, but now they're just upper management with delusions of still having their pulse on the industry.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That is awesome, man! Publish a how-to. :)
Yeah that will work out well for you....it's not like anything bad can happen there....*eye roll*
Executives are idiots, when it comes to innovation. They only need to be smart enough to hire people smarter than them and pay the bills. Leave the innovation to the people that know what's going on, and put them in an environment where they can do just that.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.