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.
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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.
Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.
The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only individual creators but the audience for which they create and the posterity that inherits their legacy.
In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.
The issue for patents for new discovers has given a spring to invention beyond my conception.
I think frugality drives innovation, just like other constraints do. One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.
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