Easy to Be a “NaySayer and a Skeptic", Right?
Image credit: Dilbert.com
“ …Innovate? You must be kidding. My company does not allow us to ‘just innovate’.”
“I am closely watched here to do what I was hired to do and that is it.”
“We don’t have a culture of innovation here . Inspired? No. This is my job, not my hobby, so of course I am not inspired!”
“It is a myth that companies can be inspiring or innovative… just a myth!”
“If I suggest innovation or execute on innovation, that is considered risk. My company rewards me to sell a lot of our ‘stuff’, and does not reward me for creative thinking and ‘de-focus’ on innovative experimentation….”
Sounds familiar? I can not tell you how many times a day I hear this from the fantastic rank and file in companies, and at the same time, from the execs in the company I hear the following:
“… We are very much looking to evolve our culture into a Culture of Innovation and get our folks to see and suggest what is possible and for our company to become innovative. We don’t know how to do it!…”.
While I am not suggesting that all company execs have innovation as their highest priority, many do. Not for altruistic reasons, rather for reasons of competitive differentiation and survival.
In life, it is always easier to be a skeptic rather than someone who takes risk. After all, skeptics don’t experiment, don’t face failures, avoid confrontation and it is considered to be risk free and safe. Innovation in large companies is completely in the hands of the employees. If employees push the envelope on innovation and the executives support a climate of innovation, that is when great change can come about. When I ask the skeptics if they have ever submitted their ideas and gotten rejected, more often than not the answer is no, as there is no point to attempt, they tell me. Can employees change the culture of the company? Yes! I say they can. If 100,000 highly talented and skilled individuals become more innovative and open with their ideas, and if they are relentless (i.e. don’t give up if the first attempt doesn’t work), the culture will start changing. All have to play in this, all levels need to embrace a culture of disruption/innovation versus a culture of complacency!
It frustrates me to no end. Today Kodak filed for bankruptcy. For 130 years, Kodak was what film was all about. Kodak had and still has very talented employees and ‘thinkers’. When the entire digital revolution was happening, did the execs of Kodak not listen to the input of their talent pool or was it that folks just did not speak up? Seriously, was the United Stats Postal Service sleeping in when the so call the ‘minor internet thing’ happened? Were there not folks that saw digital was going to change things? So, how could Kodak with tens of thousands of employees, or the USPS with over 1M employees completely miss and not innovate? When either the employees or the management or both stop disrupting, innovating and changing is when that business (any business) will go out of business and will become obsolete. The USPS perhaps never thought that it would need to layoff 300,000 people or more. Why didn’t it? Were the same people not using email, signing and scanning docs, faxing and embracing the digital era? Did the Kodak folks not have digital cameras, started using Flickr and had stopped going to CVS to print their photos years ago?
When people (all people) lower the bar, stop disrupting and innovating and become skeptics rather than ‘doers’ is when things fall apart.
I completely agree with this having experienced the drill myself. Having managed several software engineering teams in a large corporation for the last 8 years, I must say that managers play a big role in cultivating a culture of innovation within their teams. Most large corporations have a multitude of teams, each with different performance levels and dynamics, often competing against each other. The rank and file employees usually get crushed by the priorities set by their managers leaving very little time devoted to innovative projects or plain out-of-the-box thinking. Employees adapt to these pressures and generally tend to play it safe when it comes to setting their work commitments and delivering results. More often you see even the best employees deliver results just marginally better than their peers. This is because they feel that their job is secure as long as they are better than their peers and that they even have a shot at growing up the ladder.
One technique that has worked quite well for me in the past to break this cycle is to have at least one open learning and innovation commitment for my employees. This makes it a priority for employees to take time to come up with ideas and deliver significantly differentiated results and at the same time managers are held accountable for creating the time, space and opportunities needed for employees to deliver on their innovation commitment. It could be a day per week for working on the project or multiple weeks set aside. As long as there is buy-in and there is sponsorship from the management team, employees feel motivated to adopt innovation as part of their work culture.
Just as birds are the decendents of the dinosaur Kodak lives on as Eastman Chemical. “But because of a sea change in digital technology and different approaches to business, Eastman Chemical’s stock market value has since increased 71 percent to $5.5 billion today, while Kodak’s ….” We know. Kodak spun off its chemical business which still thrives. There was always the question will someone miss your business if it’s gone and I can’t see that the camera company is missed since the camera has been replaced by the smartphone. Both at my company and as we saw at Boeing the innovation must be directed from the top. If the leaders don’t prepare for the future it will come anyway. The turkey is fine until the end of November.
There is risk in everything that someone in the company does. If the company does not innovate, it runs the risk of falling behind the curve. The landscape of competition is continually changing, so survival We need to be looking for ways to innovate that lead to be on the forefront of game-changing disruption.
Your comments on Kodak made me think of this video which circulated a few years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYW49bsiP4k
This video is evidence that there were at least a few employees inside of Kodak (with access to a marketing budget) who saw innovation happening inside the company and were inspired to tell a credible, emotional, and passionate story about the possibilities ahead. Yet here we are 5-6 years later, and few of the new technology described in the video have come to market. Were employees and execs inside of Kodak makign the same kind of statements highlighted above? Meanwhile, the market has been progressing rapidly, to the point where photography advancements for the camera in my new phone makes the point-and-shoot I bought just a few years ago kind of pointless. Where has Kodak been during all this advancement? Clearly the disruptive ideas were there….but they did not yield growth.
I clearly see many companies foster delivery culture, because most of the CEO’s goal was to look good in-front of stock holders and wallstreet and increasing stock price for now, rather than spending good amount of energy to build competitive and sustaining company. It is important that executives should encourage culture of innovation through appreciation, rewards.Since still there is lot of hierarchy in the companies, access to business unit managers is very less to share ideas or there is no systematic way of sharing ideas too so that all heard by business unit managers. All the time immediate managers are continuously focused on delivery never talk about innovation or encouraging people to attend technical conferences. Even if someone asks most of the time managers mention of budget problems, can’t support much of continued education, but they have ton of money to waste on many useless nonsense. Execs usually start initiations for the purpose of saying we are also working. Considering all this people may easily say easily NO, also very skeptic about any new initiative will last longer.
The managers in the large companys i worked for are not very well receptive to innovation if it does not directly solve the work or reduce the work statement at hand. They prefer to impose they ideas onto the employees rather than the reverse. This also happens in Colleges where professors instruct students only to work on they projects for which they can secure funding
I agree that it is easier to shoot down ideas and that’s why many fail to make it. I think the issue really lies with risk adverse behavior in people today. Bucking the trend is extremely risky and I think that stops many people. I for one stay in the slow moving stream – I have a family to support. I am not given the luxury to take risks. I think the more we remove the potential negatives the more disruptive people will be but that’s a tall order in today’s society
Sam, you make a valid point, that risk is inherent in any innovation. For many of us with a moderate-to-low risk profile, we are attracted to jobs in large corporations because they allow to explore and innovate with a safety net. That’s the advantage of “intrapreneuralism” – innovating within a large organization can be harder and with more constraints, but that’s half the challenge. Plus, a consistent paycheck.
When you look at the USPS historically it’s a very strange business. They have a requirement to pre-pay for the retirement plans they offer their employees…a requirement that probably would have saved a lot of faith put into those same plans by GM workers who saw their retirements vanish. The USPS has also repeatedly asked Congress to simply allow them to carry more debt. Handing “businesses” (and that’s a loose word to use for a government agency) a get-out-of-jail-free card just ensures that nothing will change and the problem will get worse.
The time has come to cut off subsidies to the USPS and let them sort their business out. Most of the people I know have already evolved to a model where I receive important documents by FedEx, bills via email (I don’t subscribe to any services that won’t bill by email, period. Even my mortgage comes this way) and I literally dump every piece of mail I get into a shredder once a week and recycle it. That’s the value of the USPS in my life.
Unfortunately we’ve moved on. Other companies do the high-end delivery better, bills and mundane correspondence happen online, and nobody ever liked junk mail unless they were on one of those goofy coupon-clipping shows. The USPS doesn’t really have many places to go to become relevant anymore unless it wants to leverage all that manpower to try and actually compete with UPS, DHL and FedEx.
The failure to recognize the potential of disruptive technologies is devastating to a company or industry, but it’s significant at the individual level too. When world processing shifted from typewriters to computers, many typewriter technicians found themselves unemployed and without the requisite skills for the next thing. Today I see brilliant COBOL programmers that don’t believe they need to worry about learning C# or an object oriented language, because those languages are easier and just about anyone can learn them. Well what happens there are no more COBOL based systems to support and no one wants a new one.
Regarding USPS, I think about what came in the mail when I was a child and it was everything, bills, letters, cards and checks. Now I think about what comes in the mail and it’s nothing. I have a locking mailbox and I don’t think I’ve checked it over a week. I just open it and dump 99% of the mail right into the recycle bin. I wonder if I can set my forwarding address to the recycle bin and save myself the trouble. Everything important is delivered electronically anyway.
Great point, Joe, and one that is super-relevant to us in Linda’s class at UW. What do professionals need to do to stay innovative and up-to-date in our rapidly emerging industry? We need to keep alert to new trends, tools, and disruptive technologies…or better yet, invent the ourselves. As legendary visionary Alan Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
It has been my experience that the people who are skeptics are the ones that bring about change. At my company I always look at what we have for operating procedures. 99% of the time there is no value added or the process can be done more effectively with simple tweaks. The concern is voiced in meetings and the questions, why are we doing this or how can we do this better is presented? From that point managers look at what they are presented and the aha moment occurs. Without the skeptic/naysayer questioning I don’t think anything would happen.
I have had the good fortune to work for several small companies that realized they needed to be aware of new trends to stay relevant and competitive. These companies had an environment that not only welcomed and encouraged new ideas and better processes, but actually acted on them. So, it is happening, but unfortunately just not everywhere.
The problem that I most frequently run into is not necessarily that the employees do not know how, or do not want to innovate; rather the exec refuses to recognize any innovation that is not their own. Even on the low end of innovation, on the company process side, execs tend to be threatened by new ideas that may be outside their realm of thinking. I personally believe that the leaders of such companies are the reason that skepticism in disruption exists. After running into proverbial brick walls time and time again, the desire to be creative tends to wane.
I’ve always been a believer that the lack of innovation starts from the top-down. Unfortunately, all too often, we see managers and execs not wanting to do, what’s essentially their job, which is to manage their employers. This includes ideas for innovation. The “not right now”, “this is not our business”, or “it wouldn’t be a good fit” are the go-to responses to employees. God forbid, you do it too long, you might even get fired or laid-off. I’ve witnessed employees get alienated many times, due to voicing concerns of old processes, or even suggesting better ways to perform a task. For some reason, it seems that a sense of comfort, and over-confidence goes hand in hand with upper management positions.
6 years ago, I used to do one hour photo at a grocery store for Kodak. 6 years ago you could clearly see that people were actively switching to digital. You could see it in the drop of film processing we did and you could see it from customer questions and wants as well. It seems almost unreal how effectively Kodak kept their blinders on for years while the market demands were obviously changing around them.
I’m sure it is true that if 100,000 people rose up in unison and were persistent about it, they could innovate — or change a lot of other things. That’s an awfully tall order. Governments have been toppled with less. Isn’t it the job of the execs to put the right incentives in place, and empower the right levels in the right ways, so that smart, motivated people can get done what the execs want done? If the execs are saying they want their company to be innovative, they either 1) don’t really mean it, 2) don’t know how, or 3) mean it but aren’t willing to trade off anything for it.
My argument is open to debate. I feel manger have a fiduciary duty to be less skeptic. However there is always more employees than mangers (at least over 70%). There is strength in number – which gives employees the power to change the culture if there are persistent
Dilbert cartoons have such an incisive way of portraying the “truth” that it really makes it easy for me to laugh at the contradictions we encounter in daily lives. I’m actually sad to see how Kodak have failed. I have many memories of “Kodak moments,” and I still believe there’s something magical and romantic about film that digital will never have. It’s my opinion, of course, and I’m just an ant in a forest of forces that pull and push us. Most other people are happy with doing away with film, and Kodak, as a firm, should have realized that much, much earlier. I have a similar position with respect to USPS. I think about that Kevin Costner movie, The Postman, I think it was called, and it makes me nostalgic knowing that, yes, the postal service as we know it will have to drastically change or, worse, fail.
Rank and file. Working for a small jurisdiction, I saw this problem all to often. Anything that disrupted the status quo or questioned processes designed by management were immediately dismissed many times. One of the key techniques when dealing with managers that are adverse to change is to make them believe certain ideas are their own through questions that infer certain solutions. If they can connect the dots and believe they are, they you may just have enough initiative to get something started.