What's stopping you achieving remarkable growth?
‘A ship is always safe at the shore – but
that’s not what it is built
for.’
Albert Einstein
Why is it that organizations fail to
innovate? Why can a company with a good
track record and a sound core business miss out on opportunities it is
presented with?
Executive management has become all about
metrics, about maintaining and growing existing market share and about predicting future growth –
right down to the last cent. This is a
company like a ship moored at the harbor where it is safe from the uncertain
nature of the open sea. The open sea is
too risky. We don’t know what’s out
there or if the weather will turn.
But this same executive management urges
its employees to come up with out-of-the-box remarkable new ideas for
generating extraordinary growth. This
has to be done without upsetting the normal operations of the company and its
predictable, budgeted-for growth.
This is a mixed message to staff. And what they will hear loudest and clearest
is that they are to do nothing that will upset the predictable future – in
other words, business as usual or ‘the way we have always done things’.
And thus no radical ideas ever get
out-of-the-box. The staff are hearing
that they are not to take the ship out of the harbor, but to somehow explore the
uncharted high seas from safety. The ship stays in
the harbor where everything is predictable.
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