clair075

I've written and spoken about the importance of corporate culture and its impact on innovation over the last 15 years or so.  Heck, one of the underlying issues I address in my book Relentless Innovation (shameless plug) is the overwhelming challenge that corporate culture presents to an innovation team.  I've argued that corporate culture, more than any other issue, is the biggest barrier to sustained innovation. I've just found a great article on the subject of corporate culture, published recently in the Harvard Business Review.  This is one of the best articles I've read recently about corporate culture, and while the article barely touches on innovation, the points it makes about corporate culture and employee motivation are important. Links between culture and motivation At the heart of the article is the question of what impact corporate culture has on employee motivation.  I've always used a simple definition of corporate culture  - it's how things get...

Oscar Wilde, perhaps one of the most acerbic and humorous writers of the 19th century, once commented that a second marriage after a failed first marriage was the "triumph of hope over experience".  His point was that people continued to pursue marriage, even in the face of bitter previous failure.  Now Wilde was a bachelor, and also unable to marry in his time, since he was gay, and may have had a bit of snark in his writings, but his point remains.  People who do the same things over and over again, expecting different results, could be equated to Einstein's theory that doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Does this make innovators, especially committed corporate innovators, insane or simply like a cuckolded spouse seeking out a new relationship?  What kind of person does it take to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune and continue in their belief that innovation is good for their ...

It seems so funny, looking back on a meeting I attended about 20 years ago.  At that meeting a good friend was presenting a new book, entitled Who Moved My Cheese?  He was recommending this book to all of us in the leadership team of a mid-sized ERP consulting firm.  Of course most of us read it and thought - hmm - that's interesting.  We need to get better at accepting change, instead of seeking to sustain the status quo. You don't need to worry any more about someone moving your cheese.  If you are still moving in the slow, certain ways of most businesses, your cheese was consumed by another firm a long time ago, and shortly you'll notice that the cheese supply seems very limited.  In fact you'll probably discover that the entire cheese supply has been cornered and many of your competitors have shifted their diets to cheese flavored tofu or something else.  It's no longer a matter of IF your cheese will get moved, it's not even a question of WHEN you...