Knowing your purpose
Now let’s look again at businesses. The goal of most businesses is to solve a problem for a profit.
Employees don’t work, create or innovate for you — they don’t get behind a business with their whole heart and mind — just because you pay them or just because you make great products. They work, create and innovate because they believe in your purpose — a set of ideas your company holds dear. Innovation and creativity need engagement, not just compliance. By forming around purpose, business and IT leaders can create organizations that foster and sustain innovation.
Once you have established the core set of ideas, if you really want to create and sustain an innovative organization, you will need to learn to let go. Let go of the structures and models created in the industrial revolution to control and curtail variation. They might work for a while, but if you really want to be fast-paced and disruptive and sustain innovation you need something different.
Today, innovative companies are trying out a number of new organizational models. Nothing has really become the one right way. There is the holacracy approach made popular by Zappos. There is an innovative flat model used by Gore, the makers of Goretex. Pixar believes it has hit on a model for fostering and sustaining innovation, and Google’s model scales great. At this point in management history, you will need to do some exploration of your own. Since this is not your core business, get some help. There are books on Zappos (Delivering Happiness), Google (Work Rules!) and Pixar (Creativity, Inc.). Start with these. Reach out to people at those companies or to industry experts like me.
What Leo Tolstoy wrote about families in the start of Anna Karenina is true about innovative and nimble organizations, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All nimble and innovative organizations have at their core a deep sense of purpose that guides the actions of every person in the organization. The extent to which you are willing to provide a deep why and let go of the old organizational structures is the extent to which your organization will retain its nimble and innovative advantage.
About the author:
Joseph Flahiff is an internationally recognized leadership and organizational agility expert at Whitewater Projects Inc. He has worked with Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, startups and publicly traded firms, where he has been recognized as an experienced, pragmatic and innovative adviser. He is the author of Being Agile in a Waterfall World: A practical guide for complex organizations. Learn more at www.whitewaterprojects.com.
