The company's most urgent task is to learn to welcome, beg for, demand - innovation from everyone.
Interpretation
Embracing innovation is essential for a company's success.
In this quote, Tom Peters emphasizes the necessity for companies to actively seek and encourage innovation from all employees, suggesting that a culture of innovation must be cultivated from within the organization. The urgency of this task indicates that staying competitive in the marketplace requires an ongoing commitment to creative thinking and adaptability across all levels of the workforce.
In practice
In a corporate seminar about enhancing workplace productivity.
My half-baked reading of history is that we continue to go through these waves of entrepreneurial explosion followed by merger mania and consolidation. Out of that come big sluggish companies that eventually collapse under the weight of what they've created, and are killed off by the next wave of entrepreneurs.
The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.
Nearly 100% of innovation-from business to politics-is inspired not by "market analysis" but by people who are supremely pissed off by the way things are.
Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders.
The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you're a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won't be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.
Champions are pioneers, and pioneers get shot at. The companies that get the most from champions, therefore, are those that have rich support network so their pioneers will flourish. This point is so important it's hard to overstress. No support systems, no champions. No champions, no innovations.
The way innovating companies are designed leaves ambiguities, overlaps, decision conflicts or decision vacuums in some parts of the organisation. People rail at this, curse it-and invent innovative ways to overcome it.
If you look at history, innovation doesn't come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing - from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What's very important is in-house research.
There's a silly notion that failure's not an option at NASA. Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.
The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
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