The Myth of Management Innovation

Jim Heskitt has a post on HBR's Working Knowledge entitled "Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?" It discusses some of the concepts in Gary Hamel's new book entitled; The Future of Management.

He argues that Management Innovation, to date, has been an oxymoron (my words not his), but that its time has come.

He argues for the transition from a command and control model, to a nimble, team based, single purpose focused model where innovation is in everyone's job description.

I think innovation starts and ends with the org chart.

Modern businesses are comprised of jobs, feeding heirarchical reporting structures. Very neat. Very organized. Well documented job descriptions, complete with lists of required tasks to be performed. Easy to measure individual performance (against a pre-defined task list). The focus is on task management. We measure people in the same way we monitor a manufacturing process - throughput.

There's no place for innovation within this structure.

BUT, give a person a role (with responsibilities) instead of a job (with a set of tasks to be performed, wrapped in pre-defined boundaries) and watch what happens.

No longer does the company have to spend countless hours "supervising" the tasks of subordinates. They need only measure employee impact. Is the role being performed or not? The position tasks become the domain of the individual within the role. (S)he is the master (or mistress) of their domain. They are set free to innovate, to try new things, to experiment, to fail, to learn, to adapt, to grow in their role.

As a manager in this new age setting, you set direction, maintain singleness of purpose, encourage innovation and coach the team (without providing the answers).

You "set free" unprecedented innovation within the ranks.

All this comes at a cost, of course. Working in an environment of responsibilities vs tasks involves a huge leap of faith and comfort with change. But after all, isn't that at the core of innovation?

The major roadblock to Management Innovation is embodied in a phrase I once heard from a leader in a multi-billion dollar organization. He said: "I don't mind change, as long as we don't have to do anything differently."

That says it all.