Corporate Innovation Program is the buzz word these days, and for very good reason. The awareness and action of many companies responding to change is getting better because “innovation” a must-have agenda for top management and high-level discussion including nations alike. The focus of innovation has “awakened” in the last few years, so much so that the word leadership has become low-key. I, for one, advocate leaders, with a big title, if they couldn’t innovate their days are numbered or they should be shown the door. Run!
Innovation for it’s best intention solving pain points of the organizations, also carry it’s own inherited pain points. Well, pain points may sound negative. However negative it may sound, it is almost impossible to resolve it indefinitely before any launch of corporate innovation projects. The pain points highlighted are meant to be aware of, taken into consideration and minimized its negativity impact when possible. Let the goals of the corporate innovation be our guiding light, not the pain points. After all, no pain no gain.
Here are the Five Pain Points:
1.Departmental / Divisional Fiefdom
Fiefdom is there not for a good reason, definitely to be torn down in corporate innovation. The fiefdom stems from who owns the corporate innovation project. It could be the IT, Sales, Human Resource or CEO’s office. This way the budget can be better spent and realized, it is just the project impact is risked. Fiefdom mindset drags collaboration on its feet so much so that other departments would rather see the project fail than do well. Fiefdom limits the upside potentials of any corporate innovation project.
Steve Ballmer, formerly CEO of Microsoft, once said, “After all the things we want to do is aligned, the final piece of the puzzle is how we work together.” The differences of views and opinions are critical to growth, yet, there is also s stumbling block of productivity when not handled well or fully understood.
2. “Seen All Done All Nothing New” Top Management
It is common these days to include diverse at the top management line up. Diversity is key and we all know that diversity has to be worked on and build. It wouldn’t come by itself. There’s a lot of trust building, empathic engagement and sheer intolerance of incompetent senior management. Their backgrounds while may be helpful on their CV, when put to work they find themselves unable to take a differentiated point of view and lack of willingness to change. They like the glory days of their past from other workplaces and using force (and bootlicks) to have it their way. New ideas shunned, opposing views silenced and change is too big to address because they have “seen all done all nothing new” mindset. They block any attempt to change by hoarding resources, veto decisions and play the upper hand with the Board or shareholders.
Top management that deter collaboration shouldn’t be in the line up at the first place. As we grow into leadership role at higher level, it is very much less about us, it is about them; our customers and our team members.
3. Only Pedigree Can Give Ideas
In this kind of organization, ideas are treated as sacred. Only certain people can give “great” ideas and only selected alumni from certain universities can voice their opinions. The pedigree culture blocks other people from participating in what matters to the organizations. To make matters worst, pedigrees get rewarded handsomely which further reinforced unhealthy behaviours among peers and employees alike.
Developmental talent programs such as top talent sometimes create this unwanted differences in the day to day operations. The waiting culture seeps in where without the pedigree there’ll be no decision for moving forward. No one is willing to make a mistake because huge career setbacks might affect their standing in the company and future development. The behaviours also could be manifested in negative ways such as bullying, narcissism and abuse of authority.
4. Customer Voices Not Heard
With all the good business strategies and goals for the customers, there’s huge hesitation to talk to the customers to get feedback, opinions and suggestions. By the way, who’s supposed to do it? Some say marketing, some say IT or procurement, maybe human resource? Everyone should do it. Sometimes the organization pressuring those “little” staff members at the counters with huge responsibilities to get feedback from the customers. The challenge is, those “little” staff members are receptionists or call centre agents that have little means to understand the complexities of the interactions happening with the products and services from across the organizations.
Besides, they also have limited authority to do customer recovery or beyond to directly attend to customers needs and wants. The survey provided with a checklist won’t be able to extract feelings and emotions of difficulties customers feel on getting the services done.
Additionally, there is a tendency to lead the customers to tick surveys quickly with a long-winded survey, because customers are always in a hurry. Not knowing their pain points, struggles or hearing their stories could lead to an organization that is myopic of the challenges faced by their customers. This also applies to internal customers that are using our processes to get things done.
In some organizations, the quality policy used is different to meet certain standards, such as an independent Procurement department, whereby only the Procurement is certified with ISO 14001 and the rest do not. It is a mess!
5. Tools Before Strategy
It used to be Porter’s Five Diamonds, then Organizational Development, then Agile, then Lean, the Six Sigma, then Blue Ocean Strategies, then Design Thinking, then Heart Thinking and so on. These are tools. Someone said, “A tool and a fool seldom differ.”
Organization should put their business strategies above anything else. What do we want to achieve? How do we get there? What is our value? Who should be our target customers? What capabilities that differentiate us to deliver our value proposition? These are strategic questions called Strategic Five by strategy+business knowledge portal – let’s get down to basics.
Our answers (or no answer!) to these questions will help determine the “mix” of tools you might need. No one tool fits all strategic needs of any organization in today’s environment. One thing for sure, our people and workforce needs to learn more than one tool to make them nimble, agile and empowered in decision making when interfacing with the customers. Always remember, “structure follows strategy”.
