FIVE:
Combine and Innovate

The old proposition of Divide and Control no longer creates competitive advantage. “Unity, Focus and Collaboration” are becoming the mantra of tomorrow’s business leaders.

When the leverage to gain and hold market share was found in standardized machines and production systems, it made sense to force employees to comply with procedures, even though they thought they had a better idea about how to do their work. Everyone who has held a job knows what management does with most employee suggestions: nothing. In traditional organizations, new employees learned quickly to check their brains at the door when they arrived at work.

Today’s – and tomorrow’s – knowledge workers will not check their brains at the door. They will not be a cog in a machine. They will be heard. They will contribute their ideas and see them work. They will do it here, or they will do it in their next job. Actually, that’s the good news.

Dilbert as a Failure Indicator. Every morning, millions of American employees get a sour laugh reading the Dilbert comic strip as it lambastes management for its stupidity and incompetence. Are managers generally stupid and incompetent? Of course not! It is impossible for the nearly 15 million Americans who hold executive and management jobs mostly to be stupid and incompetent. Then, why do so many people relate to Dilbert? Because the rules and processes of almost all management work are still rooted in the Industrial Age. The old corporate machine is the walking dead. And each day, Dilbert fans mock those who still try to run it.

If we are to earn the loyalty and the innovative contributions of our employees, we must abandon the systems they mock. And we must earn the innovative contributions of our employees. Just as global markets allow buyers and sellers to freely cross the economic boundaries between countries, we must emancipate employees to freely cross the departmental and divisional boundaries within our companies to combine their talents and invent new ways to succeed. Global free markets mean businesses must constantly innovate, and businesses can no longer afford to squander the spirit, intelligence and inventiveness of rank-and-file employees. Innovation can no longer be the domain of the Research & Development department. It must come from everyone. Management cannot be allowed to decline employee suggestions for improvement; it must become the facilitator of every one of those suggestions, supporting the employee innovator in getting ideas implemented. Even “bad” ideas, because innovation is, by nature, experimental. And experiments, by nature, do not always succeed.

At ChangeCraft, we’ve learned ways to mobilize the vast, untapped resource of employee brainpower. Our clients implement a system that brings together small teams of employees with diverse backgrounds, and blindly pre-approve any change they implement to make the business work better for everyone who cares: customers, owners, employees, the community.