The Easy Part: Defining an
Innovation Workplace Culture
I just checked: Amazon US
now offers 14,901 titles in its “innovation culture” category. Experts agree on
the defining characteristics of a workplace culture within which innovation is
most likely to thrive. The hard part, obviously, is creating and then
sustaining one. Cris Beswick, Derek Bishop, and Jo Geraghty offer an abundance
of information, insights, and counsel that can help business leaders achieve
that objective. More specifically, they present and examine a “six-stage
practical framework” that will enable those who read the book to define, develop,
champion, and embed a culture of innovation thereby enabling them to discover
and realize the true potential of their organization.
Here’s Beswick, Bishop, and
Geraghty’s definition of innovation: “The successful implementation off
something new or different that is affordable, accessible, adds value to the
customer by solving a real problem and drive growth for the creator.” With
regard to organizational culture, it is “essentially the collective beliefs,
values, attitudes, behaviors and communication style of the people who work
within an organization.” However different the companies annually ranked as
being most innovative may be in most respects (e.g. Buzzfeed, Facebook, CVS
Health, Uber, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Black Lives Matter, and Taco
Bell) certainly exemplify both definitions. They also suggest an important
business lesson to leaders in companies now attempting to build a culture of
innovation: Each views what it is, what it does, and how it does it today as
the greatest threat to what it wants to become and do better tomorrow.
This is what Marshall
Goldsmith has in mind when suggesting in a recent book that “what got you here
won’t get you there.” In fact, I presume to add, what got you here won’t even
be good enough to keep you here, however “here” and “gather” are defined. So
the need for a framework is obvious. The one that Beswick, Bishop, and Geraghty
propose consists of these steps:
1. KICK OFF WITH THE “WHY”:
Understand where you are today and what the case for change is.
2. ASSEMBLE A TEAM: Build
an innovation leadership team and internal change team.
3. AGREE ON THE DESIRED
FUTURE: Design the future organization and culture around innovation.
4. ENGAGE IN
CONVERSATION/COLLABORATION: Establish innovation and the required change as the
foundation for communication and employee engagement.
5. CREATE A ROADMAP: Build
innovation aptitude and develop a detailed design plan.
6. MAKE IT HAPPEN: Embed a
culture of innovation and make it stick.
Beswick, Bishop, and
Geraghty devote a separate chapter to each of these stages, with a focus on
HOW. These are among the dozens of passages of greatest interest and value to
me, also listed to suggest the scope of their coverage:
o Adaptability (Pages
19-20)
o Case study: Identifying
and overcoming barriers to innovation (27-30)
o Case study: The
importance of the cultural assessment (47-49)
o Building leadership teams
(69-72)
o Innovation (71-75)
o Accountability (86-87 and
102-103)
o Leading through change (89-91)
o Building innovation
capabilities Case study: (106-108)
o Case study: Innovation
collaboration (137-138)
o Communications (138-144)
o Case study: Launching
innovation projects (146-147)
o Creating a compelling
vision (153-157)
o Relationships (156-157
and 166-167)
o Case study: Harnessing
people-powered innovation (167-169)
o Embedding change:
Perspective (181-183)
o Inadequate culture change
(183-187)
o Hiring for cultural fit
(195-197)
No brief commentary such as
mine can possibly do full justice to the quality of the information, insights,
and counsel that are provided in this book but I hope that I have at least
indicated why I think highly of it. As Cris Beswick, Derek Bishop, and Jo
Geraghty make crystal clear, innovation really is more than a project or even
an ongoing process; it is a way of life. The Japanese term for this mindset is
“kaizen,” continuous improvement. The challenge is “make it better” at all
levels and in all areas of the given enterprise.
The extent to which that
challenge is embraced by an organization’s workforce will determine the extent
to which that organization prevails in a global marketplace that becomes more
volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous each day.
