Yesterday’s Sunday New York Times article in the technology sector titled : “Big Data trying to build better workers” – caught my eye, no doubt….Big data used internally to understand and improve the work force.

Interesting concept.

I totally agree with Google’s philosophy. I am deeply involved with helping individuals in large companies become more innovative and for helping those companies to become more innovative. Large companies are delivery-centric with huge top-down command and control, so we need to disrupt heavily, work through the stages of resistance and start the movement towards a culture of innovation.  And yes, inspiration is critical. Often a forgotten art in the heavy battlegrounds of a big company, inspiration and happiness is the key to having a sustainable innovative culture, hence a highly productive culture.

Google states that its happiest employees are their most innovative employees (we totally agree on this point !), and these individuals by definition are those who have a strong sense of mission about their work and who also feel that they have much personal autonomy. They view the importance of their ‘people-decisions’ equal to their ‘product-decisions’, focusing equally on people as they do to engineering.

A company is comprised of one element: the employees, the people-capital. I talk about this in the Ecosystem of Disruption.  If this capital is motivated and inspired globally, the company succeeds.  Some would say that Google is a new company and as such it’s easier to nurture these elements in a new culture. Well, as Google gets close to being 15 years old, I’m not sure it is considered a new company, rather one which the employees and new hires expect to remain highly open-minded and respect individual contribution and autonomy.  Many companies, like Google, need to have practices in place to work on, perfect and focus on the critical asset of the company, the people and the autonomy of the people. Ultimately- their happiness. A paycheck does not assure happiness, it only holds the employee until such time that a  better option is found. Innovative people can not be micro-managed. By definition, that halts innovation.

Big data is used to understand employees better and to focus on improving processes. To do so, a company needs to recognize that to improve the happiness- factor in a company, to create a sense of disruption and invite change, that this requires being open to change. Most large companies avoid change and disruption as they fear loss of control, which in turn they view as loss of revenue.  The fact is that revenues always go up when the people are empowered and become innovative. The invitation is to break the old habits, and utilize the available information to understand and improve the ‘health’ of the happiness-ratio of the employees. I see hugely talented people who are exasperated and eventually shut down due to process and command-control processes. I invite big companies to shift the attention from procedures, blue-tape and arbitrary processes to the employees and tap into their most significant asset. Your employees, your people!

Having said that, I salute some of the outstanding executives in big companies whom I know who are breaking the mold and are actively bringing mindful-disruption to change the culture and create a vibrant culture of innovation. To my renegades: I salute you… Don’t stop disrupting , in order to innovate.

Related articles

• Unboxed: Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers
• Spying on Employees: Should You Do It?