Innovation is all!!!

In a recent post on the older "Blogger" blog I had talked about Tom Peter's book "The circle of Innovation". He went on to recommend a process of going about becoming innovation focused. Given that in this era of the internet, distance is dead as well as intermediary is no more useful, businesses need to be really, truly customer focused. Service becomes very important. It becomes necessary to encourage everybody to become a business person. He then virtually owns a piece of the business, logically independent. Since he is able to think as a business person he is required/encouraged to innovate to provide even better service. By extension he is able to focus on innovation that extends the business beyond other "me too" competitors. Supervisors, next level managers then are coordinators for a collection of businesses! Whole concept of business, management needs to be revised.

What triggered this thought processes again was an article that was featured in the Harvard news letter that I get once a week. What's surprising is an article " lessons not learned about Innovation" that appeared on Harvard Business Review on No16,2006. Almost 10 years after the book under discussion! Contention of the author Roberta Moss Kanter is that every generation of managers( a time span of average 6 years) forgets and relearns how to encourage innovation!!! She finds "grand declarations about innovation are followed by mediocre execution that produces anemic results, and innovation groups are quietly disbanded in quiet cost-cutting drives." That really is a mystery! Why do we have to collectively forget and rediscover that innovation is the essence for organizational growth!

Copyright:2006 Debasis Das