Encouraging Innovation David Mayle Head of the Centre for - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Encouraging Innovation

David Mayle Head of the Centre for Innovation, Knowledge, and Enterprise d.t.mayle@open.ac.uk

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For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.

• H. L. Mencken

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Definitions

The United Kingdomʼs Department of Trade and Industry website (www.innovation.gov.uk):

Innovation – the successful exploitation of new ideas – incorporating new technologies, design and best practice is the key business process that enables UK businesses to compete effectively in the global environment.

Wikipedia

Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved idea, good, service, process or practice which is intended to be useful

Harvard Business Review

ʻ…we define Innovation broadly, encompassing not just brilliant new products but also distinctive operating practices, managerial tactics, and even business strategies.

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What would you consider to be Appleʼs great innovation? The WIMP operating system (ʻborrowedʼ from Xeroxʼs Palo Alto Research Centre)?

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What would you consider to be Appleʼs great innovation? The sexy styling of the hardware (think iMacs of any of several generations)?

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What would you consider to be Appleʼs great innovation? The iPod (in all its various forms)?

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What would you consider to be Appleʼs great innovation? The iPhone?

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What would you consider to be Appleʼs great innovation? The iPad?

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How about iTunes?

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The Innovation Imperative

(also known as ʻKeep up at the back there…ʼ)

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An American Icon

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The Stratocaster is now manufactured all over the world with different models at different price points and manufacturing locations have included: USA (Custom-shop only) USA/Mexico (US final assembly) Mexico Japan (mostly for domestic market) Korea China India Indonesia

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Global Manufacture

Increasingly seen as unremarkable

Global Design

Only now being widely recognised

Global Brands

RCA? Sony? Samsung? ? Motorola? HTC? ??

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So if Innovation is so important, how do we do it?

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LOOKING INWARD

Variety is the spice of life. Anybody recognise this guy?

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“The best way to guarantee a steady stream of new ideas is to make sure that each person in your organization is as different as possible from the others. Under these conditions, and only these conditions, will people maintain varied perspectives and demonstrate their knowledge in different ways.”
 Nicholas Negroponte (b. 1943) U.S. computer scientist, co-founder of MIT Media Laboratory

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Different Types of Folk

Psychologists have developed literally thousands of ʻtestsʼ designed to explore aspects of personality and cognitive style. Some of the more interesting (& reliable) for our purposes are:

MBTI (ʻMyers-Briggsʼ) (NEO-IPIP) The ʻBig Fiveʼ KAI (Michael Kirton)

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MBTI psychological types (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator)

The MBTI, loosely based upon the work of Carl Jung, claims to measure four bipolar preferences:

Extraversion

(E)

How you relate to others and the world

Introversion

(I)

Sensing

(S)

The way you gather information

Intuition

(N)

Thinking

(T)

The way you make decisions

Feeling

(F)

Judging

(J)

The way you choose priorities

Perceiving

(P)

These in turn combine to describe sixteen personality types. Being pseudo-Jungian, MBTI ʻtheoryʼ allows for people to change as they grow, and experience supports the fact that many folk do change, especially as they grow older (& maybe wiser?). A central feature of the MBTI is mutual respect for and the usefulness of the different types.

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External, outside, people, do E

Extraversion

I

Introversion

Internal, depth, ideas, think Realist, practical, step by step S

Sensing

N

Intuition

Possibilities, theory, insights, agile Head, logical, reason, firm T

Thinking

F

Feeling

Heart, subjective, compassionate Plan, set goals, decisive, organized J

Judging

P

Perceiving

Spontaneous, open, flexible

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Hirsch (1985) outlined the role each type inclines to when problem solving:

E – communicates, acts and carries it out. I – dreams up ideas, reflects in advance and uses concepts S – creates order, practises, forms habits and applies experience. Gets things into use. N – develops theories, gets things designed, uses hunches and intuition. Applies ingenuity. T – logical, organised, reforming. Creative with impersonal data. F – stresses values & supplies meaning. Arouses enthusiasm. Is creative with personal data. J – methodological, cautious, plans, seeks closure. Has few inputs. P – fearless adventurer, seeks more data. Has many inputs. Going back to our original thesis regarding variety, it should I hope be apparent that for problem solving (& hence Innovation) you really do want access to all these talents… And yet?

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Managerial MBTIs?

ISTP 22 ISFJ 8 INFJ 2 INTJ 7 ISTP 5 ISFP 2 INFP 4 INTP 2 ESTP 5 ESFP 1 ENFP 3 ENTP 6 ESTJ 18 ESFJ 7 ENFJ 2 ENTJ 8 This is an old (1990) sample of ʻtraditionalʼ managers; Note the preponderance of ST types.

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ISTJ 13 ISFJ 1 INFJ 2 INTJ 18 ISTP 3 ISFP 1 INFP 3 INTP 18 ESTP 2 ESFP ENFP 4 ENTP 16 ESTJ 7 ESFJ ENFJ 1 ENTJ 11

This is a cohort of Creative Management students; 25% ST, 63% NT. This is a very different population!

A simple MBTI-type test is available at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

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The Big 5

Dimension High Medium Low

Openness Open to new experiences. Broad interests and very imaginative Practical, willing to consider new ways of doing things. Balance between old and new Down to earth, practical, traditional, set in ways Conscientious- ness Conscientious, well

• rganised. High

standards, strives to achieve goals Dependable, moderately well organised. Clear goals but can set work aside Easy-going, not very well

• rganised, sometimes
• careless. Prefers not to

make plans Extraversion Extraverted, outgoing, active, high- spirited. Mainly prefer to be around people Moderate activity and

• enthusiasm. Enjoy
• thersʼ company and

value privacy Introverted, reserved,

• serious. Prefer to be

alone or with a few close friends Agreeableness Compassionate, good- natured, eager to cooperate and avoid conflict Generally warm trusting, agreeable, but sometimes stubborn and competitive Hard-headed, sceptical, proud and competitive. Expresses anger directly Neuroticism Sensitive, emotional, prone to experience upsetting feelings Calm, able to deal with stress, may experience guilt, anger or sadness Secure, hardy and relaxed even under stressful conditions

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Potential Problems

You should note that thereʼs a right end to each of the Big 5 dimensions. Open? Conscientious? Extravert? Agreeable? Not Neurotic? then the world is your oyster. If on the other hand you are unfortunate enough to be Closed, not Conscientious, Introverted, Disagreeable, and Neurotic… then ʻDonʼt call us, weʼll call youʼ If anybody wants to try a free (but very respectable) Big 5 inventory, thereʼs a good one at Penn State University (http://personal.psu.edu/~j5j/IPIP/ipipneo300.htm)

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Kirtonʼs Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI)

Adaptors Innovators

Do it better Do it differently Work within existing frame Challenges, reframes Fewer, more acceptable solutions Many solutions Prefer well-established situations Set new policy, structure Essential for ongoing functions Essential in times of change

• 32 item questionnaire (& yet excellent reliability!)
• Explains communication ʻdifficultiesʼ
• Emphasises complementarity (see also Belbinʼs Team Roles)

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So why does all this matter?

1 It explains ʻthe guy down the corridorʼ 2 Negroponteʼs plea for variety 3 Managerial rites of passage Stop recruiting in your own image Start recruiting people who disagree with you!

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LOOKING OUTWARD

Youʼve got to know whatʼs going on elsewhere.

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Tools for Looking Outward

Benchmarking Creative Swiping Scenario Planning

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Benchmarking

The literature (after Camp, 1995) recognises four distinct types of benchmarking activity:

1 Internal (comparing similar functions from other internal departments) 2 Competitive (comparing a large number of functions within an ʻindustryʼ) 3 Functional (comparison with similar functions in other organisations) 4 Generic (comparing many functions across many organisations).

This typology usually forms a progression towards the latter stages, culminating in a striving for ʻBest in Classʼ performance.

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The emergent lessons

1 Strict comparability of metrics is seldom achievable, so aim for idea benchmarking (youʼll get there in the end, anyway). 2 Always benchmark the best even if they are in a different sector. (This also means that they are less likely to see you as a competitive threat and more likely to share good practice). 3 Implementation is something else entirely (benchmarking is not quite an end in itself…)

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Creative Swiping

Less than obvious competition 1 Foreign firms, especially the cautious new entry into a small niche within your market. These firms will not share your baggage regarding ʻthe right way to do thingsʼ. 2 Tiny domestic operations who may also start by concentrating on small niche markets. These people are unlikely, for good or ill, to be able to afford some of your more bureaucratic systems. 3 Major players diversifying into your market. These will have a rather different mindset to you. 4 Local players who confine themselves to particular geographical territories. These may be spectacularly successful in their own locale but too small to appear on your corporate radar. 5 New entrants using different business models. This is where even world-class

• perations can get blind-sided. Think not just Amazon as an alternative to your local

bookstore, but Appleʼs iTunes Music Store as an alternative to your local record store. Also of note would be Direct Line Insuranceʼs reengineering of the domestic insurance market by initially dealing solely by phone

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Scenario Planning

• Originally used by Pierre Wack in his work for the Royal Dutch Shell Group.
• Mostly about asking ʻWhat if?ʼ. It is emphatically not about predicting the future
• Used to evaluate the robustness (or otherwise) of your plans and strategies.
• Learn in depth about how your organisation really works

Intelligent use of scenarios can provide several advantages: 1 It can challenge conventional wisdom. 2 Compares alternative strategies under different scenarios. 3 Spreads environmental scanning thruout the organization (when done properly The real benefit of scenario planning is not in the accuracy, or otherwise, of the scenario, but in the change of perceptions and increased flexibility of response that is enabled by the process.

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Culture and Climate

Anybody recognise this guy?

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Open Innovation (Henry Chesbrough)

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Consequences of Open Innovation

• Redesign of whole industries (Big Pharma and Baby Bio?)
• Enhanced Understanding of Intellectual Property

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Anybody recognise this?

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Disruptive Innovation

First coined by Clayton Christensen in a seminal article for Innovation Management (Bower and Christensen, 1995). The premise is entirely plausible: large companies, significant players in their field, may be quite good at innovation that fits within their existing paradigm, but are often vulnerable in the face of radical changes that challenge their worldview.

When companies have to name their most daunting competitor, they often point to the leading incumbent in their market-place. Thirty years ago. General Motors would point to Ford Motor Corp. [...] Harvard Business School would point to Stanford Business School. These are all sustaining rivals, where companies are fighting for existing customers in existing markets. These battles are important, but companies also need to watch for disruptive innovations incubating outside of the core market. (Anthony and Christensen, 1995)

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Examples of Disruptive Innovation (and their victims)

• Amazon.com (the local bookshop)
• Direct Line Insurance (the insurance agent)
• eMail (the postal service)
• SouthWest Airlines (traditional ʻhubbedʼ airlines)
• Electronic watches (Clockwork watches)
• Digital Photography (Kodak!)

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An honourable mention must go to one of my heroes, Michael Tushman in a 1986 paper co-authored with Philip Anderson entitled Technological Discontinuities and Organizational Environments

… we demonstrate that technology evolves through periods of incremental change punctuated by technological breakthroughs that either enhance or destroy the competence of firms in an industry. These breakthroughs, or technological discontinuities, significantly increase both environmental uncertainty and munificence. The study shows that while competence- destroying discontinuities are initiated by new firms and are associated with increased environmental turbulence, competence-enhancing discontinuities are initiated by existing firms and are associated with decreased environmental turbulence. These effects decrease over successive

• discontinuities. Those firms that initiate major technological changes grow

more rapidly than other firms.

Michael Tushman & Philip Anderson (1986) Administrative Science Quarterly

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Organisational Arrangements

Empowerment

A recurrent theme underlying many of the new employment practices has been the trend to empower staff to a greater degree than hitherto. In essence, empowerment means devolving the responsibility for decisions much further down into

• rganisations than has traditionally been the norm. The principal aim of

empowerment is to increase the organisationʼs flexibility and speed of response. Empowerment can also lead to a more cooperative and committed workforce. Instead of being coerced through management monitoring, staff are given responsibility and expected to manage themselves. They are trusted to produce quality material without the imposition of bureaucratic control procedures, a scenario which should have benefits for both sides. David Mayle (2006), Changing Organisations (OU)

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Levels of Empowerment

Like most things, there are degrees of empowerment:

Marchingtonʼs Empowerment Staircase

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Illustrating the empowerment continuum

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The Contingencies of Empowerment

(Bowen & Lawler, 1992)

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Examples of highly empowered organisations

When I cite examples of highly empowered companies, Semco is often near the top of the list. As a São Paulo based company, I have to be careful because many of you may well know much more than I about Semco, but I will nevertheless offer a quote from Ricardo Semlerʼs book Maverick!

If you havenʼt guessed by now, Semcoʼs standard policy is no policy. Many companies have entire departments that generate mountains

• f paperwork trying to control their employees. Take travel. They

have rules that govern how much a person can spend in every possible situation. At Semco we want our people to spend whatever they think they should, as if they were taking a trip on their own, with their own money. Thereʼs no department, no rules, no audit. If weʼre afraid to let people decide in which section of the plane to sit, or how many stars their hotel should have, we shouldnʼt be sending them abroad to do business in our name, should we?

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Dutton Engineering

• a small, sub-contract, sheet-metalworking company located just north of London
• No set hours of work, just an annual contract. ʻJob and finishʼ means precisely

that: if thereʼs no more work, youʼre free to go home. The downside is that you may be summoned (by your peers!) pretty much at any time

• The hierarchy is minimal and decision making is pushed down to the lowest

possible level. Even the Japanese come and visit them to see how itʼs done!

• Lewis began the company transformation after a trip he took to Japan. He initially

embraced TQM, then Kaizen, Kanban, Just-in­time, and the Business Excellence model.

• Dutton has now moved far beyond this to embrace open-book accounting, profit-

sharing, the sponsoring of almost any kind of training, and self-managed teams who deal directly with the customer, design, cost and set delivery dates.

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Oticon Lars Kolind

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Oticon

Not too many years ago a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggested that eight out of ten important breakthroughs happen because of ʻcorridor conversationsʼ. Oticonʼs refurbished headquarters has tried to turn its entire office into that proverbial corridor. [...]. To quote Lars Kolind: ʻ...thereʼs never a breakthrough that has occurred by writing a memo, breakthroughs occur when two or more people get together, get inspired, have fun, think the unthinkable.ʼ. (Mayle, 1998)

Video, ʻThey did it their wayʼ

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Gifford Pinchot III (www.pinchot.com)

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Leadership

Reich: The team as hero

Robert B. Reich, noted politician and academic, long ago de-bunked the concept of the heroic individual in US business culture (Reich, 1987). In this critique he highlights the all-too-common stereotype of the heroic figure holding centre stage, working alone against insuperable odds, while minor supporting roles are given to a vast, anonymous and largely interchangeable workforce. The entrepreneurial hero and the worker drone personify the mythic vision of how the economic system works ... There is just one fatal flaw with this dominant myth: it is obsolete. Reich, R.B. (1987) ʻEntrepreneurship reconsidered: the team as heroʼ Harvard Business Review, May–June)

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Mythical Heroes?

And yet even today, the media, and yes, even business schools, still look to identify the key individuals who they seem to believe are largely responsible for the success of their

• rganisations

Steve Jobs Bill Gates Jack Welch Lee Iacocca Richard Branson Herb Kelleher Ricardo Semler

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Good to Great

Another powerful antidote to the heroic leader is the work of Jim Collins, in particular his concept of Level 5 leadership. This arose out of his Good to Great thesis… …we searched for a specific pattern: cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market for 15 years, punctuated by a transition point, then cumulative returns at least three times the market over the next 15 years. We used data from the University of Chicago Center for Research in Security Prices, adjusted for stock splits, and all dividends reinvested. The shift had to be distinct from the industry; if the whole industry showed the same shift, we'd drop the company. We began with 1,435 companies that appeared on the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995; we found 11 good-to-great examples. That's not a sample; that's the total number that jumped all

• ur hurdles and passed into the study.

What they found was not what they were expecting.

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Does anyone recognize these names:

Fred Allen (Pitney Bowes) George Cain (Abbott Laboratories) Joe Cullman (Philip Morris) Lyle Everingham (Kroger) Jim Herring (Kroger) David Maxwell (Fannie Mae) Colman Mockler (Gillette) Carl Reichardt (Wells Frago) Darwin Smith (Kimberley-Clark) Cork Walgreen (Walgreen) Alan Wurtzel (Circuit City) Thought not; these were the CEOs of the ʻGood to Greatʼ companies.

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Level 5 Leadership

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Level 5 Leadership

your span of responsibility, you would lose your paycheck. Such near-ruthless rebuilding might be ex- pected from an outsider brought in to turn the company around, but Cain was an i8-year in- sider - and a part of the family, the son of a pre- vious president. Holiday gatherings were proba- bly tense for a few years in the Cain clan-"SorTy 1 had to fire you. Want another slice of turkey?"- but in the end, family members were pleased with the performance of their stock. Cain had set in motion a profitable growth machine. From its transition in 1974 to 2000, Abbott created share- holder returns that beat the market 4.5:1, out- performing industry superstars Merck and Pfizer by a factor of two. Another good example of iron-willed Level 5 leadership comes from Charles R. "Cork" Wal- green III, who transformed dowdy Walgreens into a company that outperformed the stock market i6:i from its transition in 1975 to 2000. After years of dialogue and debate within his ex- ecutive team about what to do with Walgreens' food-service operations, this CEO sensed the team had finally reached a watershed: the company's brightest future lay in convenient drugstores, not in food

• service. Dan Jorndt, who succeeded Walgreen in 1988, de-

scribes what happened next: Cork said at one of our planning committee meet- ings, "Okay, now I am going to draw the line in the

• sand. We are going to be out of the restaurant busi-

ness completely in five years." At the time we had more than 500 restaurants. You could have heard a pin drop. He said,"l want to let everybody know the clock is ticking." Six months later we were at our next planning committee meeting and someone men- tioned just in passing that we had only five years to be out ofthe restaurant business. Cork was not a real vociferous fellow. He sort of tapped on the table and said,"Listen, you now have four and a half years. I said you had five years six months ago. Now you've got four and a half years." Well, that next day things really clicked into gear for winding down our restau- rant business. Cork never wavered. He never doubted. He never second-guessed. Like Darwin Smith selling the mills at Kimberly-Clark, Cork Walgreen required stoic resolve to make his deci-

• sions. Eood service was not the largest part of the busi-

ness, although it did add substantial profits to the bottom

• line. The real problem was more emotional than finan-
• cial. Walgreens had, after all, invented the malted milk

shake, and food service had been a long-standing family tradition dating back to Cork's grandfather. Not only that.

THE YIN AND YANG OF LEVFL 5

PERSONAL HUMILITY PROFESSIONAL WILL Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shun- Creates superb results, a ning public adulation; never boastful. Acts with quiet, calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate. clear catalyst in the transi- tion from good to great. Demonstrates an unwavering resolve to do whatever must be done to produce the best long-term results, no matter how difficult. Channels ambition into the com- pany, not the self; sets up succes- sors for even more greatness in the next generation. Sets the standard of building an enduring great company; will settle for nothing less. Looks in the mirror, not out the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming

• ther people, external

factors, or bad luck- Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company-to other people, external factors, and good luck.

some food-service outlets were even named after the CEO-for example, a restaurant chain named Corky's. But no matter, if Walgreen had to fly in the face of family tra- dition in order to refocus on the one arena in which Wai- greens could be the best in the world-convenient drug- stores-and terminate everything else that wouid not produce great results, then Cork wouid do it. Quietly, doggedly, simply. One final, yet compelling, note on our findings about Level 5: because Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies, they routinely select superb successors. Level 5 leaders want to see their com- panies become even more successfui in the next genera- tion, comfortable with the idea that most people won't even know that the roots of that success trace back to

• them. As one Level 5 CEO said, "I want to look from my

porch, see the company as one ofthe great companies in the world someday, and be able to say, 'I used to work there.'" By contrast. Level 4 leaders often fail to set up the company for enduring success-after all, what better tes- tament to your own personal greatness than that the place falls apart after you leave? In more than three-quarters of the comparison com- panies, we found executives who set up their successors for failure, chose weak successors, or both. Consider the case of Rubbermaid, which grew from obscurity to be- come one of Fortune's most admired companies-and then, just as quickly, disintegrated into such sorry shape that it had to be acquired by Newell. The architect of this remarkable story was a charis- matic and brilliant leader named Stanley C. Gault, whose

JANUARY 2001

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The importance of mistakes

Thereʼs an old English proverb that ʻmistakes are evidence that someone has at least tried to do somethingʼ. In his celebrated video The Importance

• f Mistakes (Video Arts, 1987), John Cleese argued that:

A tolerant and positive attitude toward mistakes manifests itself in two ways. First in allowing behaviour that may turn

• ut to be a mistake and second by acknowledging the

mistake if itʼs eventually proved to be such. (Cleese, 1987)

Failure to observe the first creates a fear of making mistakes. Failure to

• bserve the second results in mistakes being hidden and therefore not

corrected.

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Failure tolerant Leadership

Once the attitude to making a mistake is changed, people will start coming up with ideas, and if your organisation employs a lot of good people(as most do), they are capable of coming up with some really good ideas

Failure-tolerant leaders emphasize that a good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from Peter Drucker, Readerʼs Digest, or an

• bnoxious co-worker.

(Farson and Keyes, 2002)

In the healthiest organisations, the taboo is not on making mistakes, it is on concealing them.

(Cleese, 1987)

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Supervision and Accountability at Southwest

Southwest Airlines has been the success story of the airline industry. Widely credited not just with inventing the point-to-point low-cost carrier model, but managing to do so whilst simultaneously carrying off major awards for customer satisfaction, Southwest has attracted more than its fair share of attention from management literature. Inevitably much of this has focused on Herb Kelleher, Southwestʼs charismatic co-founder and Executive Chairman, rather less on the operational details of how they manage to turn around a Boeing 737 in 15 minutes. Unlike most articles about Southwest, Jody Hoffer Gittell addresses ʻalternative systems of coordination and controlʼ and explicitly considers such issues as accountability and supervision via a direct comparison with American Airlines. At least nominally in pursuit of accountability, American Airlineʼs reaction to a gate delay seems to have more to do with categorising the fault and apportioning blame than rectifying the problem. Southwest, by comparison invented ʻa “team delay” which allowed less precise reporting of the cause of delays, with the goal of diffusing blame and encouraging learningʼ. The implicit question is revealed as which do you want: to know who to blame or to fix the problem?

David Mayle, on Gittell, 2000

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Culture, Supervision, and Leadership

We have argued earlier that much work is increasingly less amenable to supervision; Gittell neatly sidesteps that argument by noting that Southwest has largely redefined the role of the supervisor: ʻtheir job was to help the people [who reported to them] do their jobs betterʼ. At the end of the article, Gittell ponders the influence of strategy and of culture on the differences she observed. Strategy is dismissed out of hand (ʻ... a more complex process like Americanʼs should benefit even more from the kind of coordination at which Southwest excelsʼ) but her position regarding culture is more equivocal:

However, culture comes from somewhere, after all, and the evidence presented here suggests that it is powerfully driven by the choices that leaders and others make about how to measure performance, how to supervise, how to select employees, how to resolve conflicts...

(Gittell, 2000) Given Southwestʼs position, consistently named among the top five ʻMost Admired Corporationsʼ in America in Fortune magazine's annual poll, some of us suspect that it really is the culture that matters, and that enlightened leaders, and others, are indeed capable of influencing it via the choices they make.

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Conclusions?

There is a story that the Royal Artillery were giving a demonstration to some visiting Europeans on Salisbury Plain in the 1950s. The visitors were most impressed with the speed and precision of the light artillery crew, but one of them asked what was the duty of the man who stood to attention throughout the whole demonstration. ʻHeʼs number six,ʼ the adjutant explained. ʻI too can count. But why is he there?ʼ ʻThatʼs his job. Number six stands to attention throughout.ʼ ʻBut why then do you not have five?ʼ No one knew. It took a great deal of research through old training manuals, but finally they discovered his duty... Antony Jay (1970), Management and Machiavelli, p. 99)

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Donʼt expect to be popular… (ʻtwas always thus)

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of

• things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have

done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the law on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

Machiavelli (1532) The Prince,

Donʼt fall into the obvious traps

There are two kinds of fool. One says, 'This is old, and therefore good.' And one says, 'This is new, and therefore betterʼ.

Brunner, John (1975) The Shockwave Rider London, HarperCollins

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The balancing act

One of the joys of Innovation and Change, is that ideas are entertained on their merits rather than their provenance; the task is therefore to design of our organisation in such a way as to enable this process. This usually requires a challenging balancing act… Remembering or Number 6, ʻ…the one who holds the horsesʼ Things need to be challenged. Remembering our pleas for pluralism and diversity People need to be respected.

Good Luck!

David Mayle, Walton Hall, November 2011 d.t.mayle@open.ac.uk

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