Creating the Innovation Culture: Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters and Other Useful Troublemakers

Chapter 2. The Efficiency-Innovation Dichotomy

While on the road to efficiency, we have inadvertently created organizations that are inhospitable to innovation.

Innovation: Fantasy and Fact

If this were a better world, innovation would happen like this: A bright-eyed, respectful, and tidy young employee would bounce into your office with a category-breaking idea. You would immediately see its value. You would heap praise on Tidy, who would accept it with becoming bashfulness and never need any other recognition. You take Tidy's great idea up the line where you are hailed as a genius for seeing its potential. Amid acclaim and intimations of promotion, money is thrown at it and everyone drops everything to help you get the idea to market. You hit the market in record time, make mega-bucks, and Fortune is asking for an interview.

Well, if you work in a company where that happens, write to me. I want to work there too.

Instead, innovation is more likely to happen like this: Even if the first part of the scenario holds—Tidy bounces in, you get how big the idea is immediately—your next step is to take it up the line. Your own boss is a bit of a stick in the mud. She shakes her head. "I dunno. Can't see it working, can you? I mean, it's not sticking to our knitting, is it?"

You convince her to let you take it to the next level. You do a stunning presentation but a VP raises objections. "How can you be sure of the ROI projections? Haven't you inflated the market potential? This prototype is ...