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Why Your Boss Will Crush Your Innovative Ideas (bbc.com)
dryriver writes: BBC Capital explores why good ideas people have in the workplace almost never reach the top decision-makers in a company. From the report: "Surely you've heard the plea from on high at your company: we want more innovation, from everyone at every level. Your boss might even agree with the sentiment -- because, of course, who doesn't like innovation? It's good for everyone, right? Yet when it comes to innovating at your job it might be better to lower your expectations -- and then some. Your idea is far more likely to die on your boss's desk than it is to reach the CEO. It's not that top managers don't want new ideas. Rather, it's the people around you -- your colleagues, your manager -- who are unlikely to bend toward change. Today, big companies that don't innovate face extinction. 'Companies are almost forced to say that they are changing these days,' says Lynn Isabella, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in the U.S. But, 'it's not organizations that resist change; people resist,' says Isabella. 'The people have to see what's in it for them.'" As mentioned in the report, some of the key questions that the people whom you pitch your ideas to will ask themselves include, what does this innovation mean for me personally -- will it be more challenging or will it lead to more career opportunities, and what will it mean for my job -- will I get fired or will it be (or was it) worth it? Many times the answers to these questions don't stack up in favor of the innovation, Isabella says. As a result, the people who need to buy in don't push for change.
It's execution that's hard. Sure, the person on the shop floor or in the cube farm might have an idea that seems great, but making that idea happen politically within the organization is very, very hard. People don't like change. That "good" idea might be somebody else's worst nightmare, and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just reality. That's why people who CAN change things become the leaders.
We got new upper management. All about change. They even bad mouth the big legacy products that built the company up and is still the source of the profits that give the execs their jobs. I wish they would sit and see reality for a moment instead of chasing the latest fad.
But even before they came on board some groups were resistant to change but others were trying to change things all the time. Most change though doesn't come up from the ground upwards. It comes from sales where they promised a feature to customers that doesn't exist yet.
Resistance to change is practical too. We have a job that we have to do; we've promised to customers and have a contract, if we don't deliver it we pay a penalty. That means you can't go and steal 5 of my workers for your new amazing project. Everyone's short handed and multitasking constantly. So someone says "we need to stop what we're doing and do X" and it won't be met with applause. Or the idea just gets put onto the back burner to fizzle out because literally everything else has higher priority.
Profitable companies have their cash cows and those are usually somewhat mature products
This also makes it very difficult to make an innovative change that disrupts that market. There's a story of some SGI engineers approaching their managers with a design for a cut-down version of SGI's graphics processor that they could make for a tenth the price of the workstation model and which would get almost half the performance. They said they could stick it on a PCI card and sell it to a few orders of magnitude more customers. Management said no, because it would cannibalise the workstation market: who'd buy an SGI workstation when you could get a commodity PC with a comparatively cheap expansion card and get similar ballpark performance? The engineers left and joined a new startup called nVidia. The managers were exactly right in one respect: Cheap GPUs did kill the proprietary graphics workstation market. They were wrong in assuming that if they didn't do something then no one else would.
Many of the successful large companies have, at least once, been willing to say 'well, most of our profit comes from here, but that's a market that someone is going to disrupt soon, we'd better do it before the competition' and launch a product that kills one of their revenue streams. IBM did this accidentally with the PC. Apple did this with the iPhone (remember when a huge chunk of their revenue came from the iPod? Now who would buy an iPod when any mobile phone works fine as a portable music player).
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A very large company I worked for had this for about 3 months and the reward was a percentage of the money you saved the company. It was well thought out and ideas were all considered. The first 3 winners were secretaries of senior management and all their ideas were ones that senior management should have already implemented. The program was then canceled and I think the secretaries got screwed out of the percentage they saved.