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.
Interpretation
Innovative companies often face internal challenges that can lead to confusion, but people find creative solutions to overcome these issues.
This quote by Rosabeth Moss Kanter highlights the inherent complexities and challenges found within innovative organizations. These challenges, such as ambiguities and conflicts, can frustrate employees, yet they often inspire them to think creatively and develop new approaches to navigate these difficult situations. This process of overcoming obstacles contributes to the company's ability to innovate and grow.
In practice
In a team meeting where we discuss how to handle unexpected challenges in our project.
Tribalism reflects strong ethnic or cultural identities that separate members of one group from another, making them loyal to people like them and suspicious of outsiders, which undermines efforts to forge common cause across groups.
Organizational structures that allow divisions and departments to own their turf and people with long tenure to take root creates the same hardened group distinctions as Congressional redistricting to produce homogeneous voting blocs - all of which makes it easier to resist compromise, let alone collaboration.
The boomers' biggest impact will be on eliminating the term 'retirement' and inventing a new stage of life... the new career arc.
The middle of every successful project looks like a disaster.
I've found that small wins, small projects, small differences often make huge differences.
Leaders is the new organisation do not lack motivational tools, but the tools are different from those of traditional corporate bureaucrats. The new rewards are based not on status but on contribution, and they consist not of regular promotion and automatic pay rises, but of excitement about the mission and a share of the glory of success.
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.
Japan's very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don't think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that's already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor.
Companies over-emphasize idea generation and under-emphasize idea execution when it comes to innovation.
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.
To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.
The issue for patents for new discovers has given a spring to invention beyond my conception.
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