Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 14

From Principles of Excellent Organizations to Organizational ‘Virtues’

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-up

Simultaneous loose-tight properties, the last of our eight basics of excellent management practice…is about organizations being on the one hand rigidly controlled, yet at the same time allowing (indeed insisting on) autonomy, entrepreneurship, and innovation from the rank and file.

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence

In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, was the first management ‘blockbuster’. Over 5 million copies were sold in the four years after its publication in 1982. Despite this, most of the eight themes of excellent organizations that it promoted have not stood the test of time. By 1990 two-thirds of the forty-three companies identified by Peters and Waterman were no longer ‘excellent’. Many were no longer solvent. The book has subsequently been criticized for lacking a rigorous methodology and in certain instances not even being ‘based on fact’.

IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE'S EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF EXCELLENT ORGANIZATIONS

1. A bias for action, active decision making – ‘getting on with it’.
2. Close to the customer – learning from the people served by the business.
3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship – fostering innovation and nurturing ‘champions’.
4. Productivity through people – treating rank ...