Why Innovation works – sometimes
Tom Peters once said that innovation was made by really pissed off people. That means, within orgainsations, standard operating procedures go out the window including the “positive communication” thing: People who are pissed off have zero patience, are not polically correct, they’re very much to the point and they’ll probably break a lot of corporate rules. But if the result is innovation, then everything is fine. The problem is that pissed off people present knowledge you as a manager would rather be without.
What’s “knowledge you’d rather be without”? Acting on the consequences means breaking all the rules, you’ll jepordize you’re career and it get’s worse because the chain of command will be flipped. Here’s the scenario; let’s say we are on board a ship from Spain to England in 1732 and there’s no land in sight because of fog, the wind is a gale and there are strong currents. If the navigator says course 16 degrees and the Captain calls it out, then that’s the heading. Now what if one of the ship mates came up to the captain and said “actually, I’ve been following your log and my calculations say we should be heading course 22 degrees” or we are all going to die. That ship mate would be flogged! Or hanged. There’s no room for creativity on board a ship. Free Knowledge, as I like to call it, is only so much “free”.
But when it is free, amazing things happen. This is when there is a chance of “emergent property” meaning the chance for something astonishing to happen: the light bulb, the walk man, the computers or the internet are all good examples.
Businesses have always wanted to harness such results for themselves but let’s face it. Businesses find it really difficult! Except for handfull who’s names we all know.
So why is that? Why can these companies work with “knowledge they would rather be without” and are they too “really pissed off”?
I’ll give you my observations on Wednesday.