Senior managers as controllers
Management support for innovation is not a one-time thing. It requires continuing top-level support. It is impossible in two months to create a complete plan when doing anything significant. If management doesn’t support those efforts over time, no matter how good the idea, then there is no hope of success.
The Character Of The Innovation Resisters
Those top managers who fail to provide their support for bold innovation are generally not evil or malevolent individuals. They are, in my experience, sincere, well-meaning, competent, skilled exponents of a different set of principles and processes—principles and processes that were successful in the 20th century and are still taught in business schools and prevalent in most large firms. These people see themselves as being in the right when they decline to support innovation. They see themselves as the loyal centurion guards of the right way to run a company—precise, orderly, controlled, and effective.
Pursuit of significant innovation beyond upgrading the current products can seem to these people like a descent into chaos, and hence to be resisted strongly. They view their resistance to a descent into chaos as heroic virtue, not a flaw. They go home at night to their families, confident that they have done the right thing
Resistance To Innovation Never Ends
Resistance to innovation doesn't disappear with a single top-level decision to proceed. Resistance often goes underground. The centurion guards who are intent on preserving the status quo may have lost a battle, but they courageously fight on and seek ways to win war on another day, and in another way.
In subsequent budget discussions, they can find ways to short-change spending on innovation.
- In HR discussions, they can put black marks on the career records of those pursuing radical innovation, and reassign activists to other departments.
- In sales and marketing, promising new innovations can be put on a permanent back burner.
- And they can quietly lobby to welcome an activist investor to the firm's board, or even secretly encourage a takeover of the whole firm.
In this way, the established industrial-era corporation runs like the auto-immune system of the human body—systematically and heroically doing its best to prevent major innovation.
Clearing Our The Centurion Guards
Change can move faster if these highly motivated centurion guards can be persuaded to devote their talents elsewhere.
• Steve Jobs did this at Apple in 1997 by saying goodbye to some four thousand middle managers.
• Satya Nadella achieved this more quietly at Microsoft in 2014 by persuading key figures in the old guard that they would be happier elsewhere.
• Curt Carlson at SRI elegantly induced nine of his ten direct reports to look for work elsewhere in the first year of your tenure in 1998.
Reversion Remains A Risk
Even after those changes at the top, continuing efforts are needed to persuade the rest of the firm that innovation is not only allowed but the mainstream of the future. And even after 16 years of enthusiastic top-level vision and support at SRI, the arrival of a new CEO with industrial-era views (as in 2014), could quickly drag the firm back into the old way of operating, to the great joy of any lurking centurion guards of the old order.
And read also:
Lessons In Measuring Innovation: Truth Is Often The First Casualty
How Industrial-Era Management Kills The Entrepreneurial Spirit
