Creative Renewal and Legacy Management Tools

The last two blog entries focused on two key drivers in unlocking and channeling untapped workforce energy and passion into creation of new forms of value. The April 14 entry, More on Vision Statements, Alignment and Strategy talked about how a compelling vision is a primary tool in unlocking blocked workforce energy and passion. The April 25 entry, Innovation and Value Creation at Schering Plough discussed some of the key structural/technical changes introduced into Schering-Plough (SP), as part of their massive effort to channel that passion and energy into continuous creation of new, innovative forms of value – i.e. on Creative Renewal.

This week’s blog entry will focus more deeply on some of the human factors that are foundational to building organizational capability for sustainable Creative Renewal.

Creating sustainable capability for innovation and renewal is a “brave new world” for corporate America. The foundations, or “premises.” upon which most large companies have been built, stem from ways of thinking and operating that are well over 100 years old. They are rooted in the work of management and organizational theorists and practitioners whose work and thinking were embedded in, shaped by, and constrained by, the “zeitgeist” or “worldview” of the time (just before and after the turn of the century (19th to 20th)).

In a nutshell, the emphasis at that time was on creating organizations that could maintain continuity – i.e. the status quo – for long periods of time. The primary models were bureaucratic and institutional. The scientific thinking of the time, which drove these organizational models, was that the world is basically a gigantic machine, and that if we figure out the rules of that machine, we could make it do whatever we wanted it to do via the application of scientific thinking, engineering-based tools, and control-based leadership and management practices.

In that bureaucratic/institutional mindset, a parallel concept was that companies (organizations) were basically large, complex production lines. Within that worldview, a primary task of leaders and managers was to figure out how to design and operate the production lines – i.e. to keep their hands firmly on the important buttons and levers that controlled that machine. Furthermore, everybody else’s job was, in essence, a cog in that machine.

The underlying, but somewhat unstated, belief was that the world was stable – it didn’t change much, and if it did, it happened quite slowly, could be planned down to every last detail in advance (by leaders and managers), and implemented like a large engineering project. The mantra: a place for everything, and everything in its place.

Four primary leadership and management tools – hierarchical power structures, command-and-control, compliance and conformity – flow directly from these 100 year-old foundations. Their overarching goal was, and remains, predictability and stable production outputs. And to this day, those tools are smack dab at the core of how most companies operate.

The enormous problem facing business leaders today is that, while those fundamental leadership and management concepts and tools are superb if your business is based primarily or solely on continuous unchanging execution of a fixed strategy in an essentially unchanging environment, they are diametrically opposed to the goals of continuous, sustainable innovation and renewal!

If your primary business goal is to tap into collective energy, passion and creativity and channel it toward the task of continuous creation of new forms of added value, these old tools are actually counterproductive to the task! That’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s huge and it tastes quite bitter. But there it is. We need to face up to it and deal with it – directly and honestly.

(If you want to learn more about the whys and wherefores of all of this in substantially greater detail, read my article The End of "Scientific Management": Replace the Traditional 3Cs With Corporate Creativity). The nutshell version is that these old tools are based on the paradigm that the knowledge and skill needed to run a business exists solely in senior leadership and management, and everybody else’s job is to do what they’re told. It’s a military model. Another underlying assumption is that deviation and difference are the enemy of smooth, standardized, predictable and controllable production, and so they should be stamped out. This belief is captured neatly in an old Asian proverb: “the nail that sticks up will be pounded down.”

So: where do we go from here? What are the premises and practices upon which we can build organizations capable of continuous innovation, reinvention and creative renewal? We’re all in a learning mode here in this emerging brave new world, but at the Center for Corporate Renewal we believe we’ve unearthed at least a few of the key foundations. In the blog, I’d like to talk about them, and attempt to link them into the elements of the transformation happening at Schering-Plough. I will probably go beyond what Schering-Plough is doing at this point, but to the extent possible, I’ll try to link these key practices with the Schering-Plough story, as they conceive it.

More soon.

Dean Robb, Ph.D.