Insomnia

Innovation is the creativity are the holy grail of employees everywhere. Pretty much everyone wants to work for an innovative and creative company. Manager want to manage hot, creative teams that deliver new innovative projects. CEOs want to be CEO of IDEO.

Employees drool over pictures of the office space at Google. The read articles about the kind of innovation that Blizzard brought to their work environment. They all think that this is the hallmark of a cool, creative environment. Put your people in a great office and give everyone a Nerf gun and you're done. I think that I used to think that too.

I am halfway into the art of innovation and I realize now that this is not about the office space or the product. It is about the DNA of your company. When you are a creative/innovative company, everything you do is done to support this. From the products/services you chose to offer all the way to the people you choose to hire. And of course, to a certain extent, the office space and furniture.

The hard realization for me is that I work for a successful company that is focused on quality production much more than innovation and creativity. This means that the DNA of the company has coerced it to grow to be an effective product delivery machine. It has hired the best software people to predictably and reliably deliver products.

This means a lot of things. For example, for most of our employees, work day starts at 9:00 and ends at 18:00. This is something we advertise to prospects that we interview. This is definitely something that becomes "untrue" when most of your work is creative in nature. Creativity might happens at odd hours and requires that you be fully absorbed into the process.

So the challenge for a company like ours if we want to become an innovation powerhouse is the significant changes to the core values of the company on the way to get there. There are a lot of examples of successful companies that started-off with that core DNA. Does anybody know of a company that reinvented itself all the way to the core and managed to turn it into a success?

Labels: work

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