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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.'"
Lord knows the upper management at all but one company I've worked at is a bunch of parasitic douchebags. Good riddance.
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!
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.
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
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.
I think the younger generation is shockingly conformist. They've been raised in an environment of constant phone contact, tracking, and surveillance. Head of security at the school where I teach proudly says, "We've instituted a policy of thousands of bag inspections, and only had 3 people dispute it, usually faculty." I have students come to me freaked out because I don't track their attendance daily every day in our college class. Etc., etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes