Creating the Innovation Culture : Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters & Other Useful Troublemakers

Rating:
Summary: Managing creative dissenters
Review: This is another example of the material for an excellent article expanded into a book that is best skimmed rather than read in depth. The thesis is simple - good innovation relies on people who are not committed to the status quo. The advice on how to handle dissenters from the status quo who have original minds is sound but sometimes a bit tedious and obvious. However, we need to remember Tom Peters dictum 'Obviously, the obvious is not so obvious', as Horibe demonstrates how often corporations shoot themselves in the foot.

The author's starting point is the vital necessity of innovation to the health and survival of corporations and the fact that innovation - good ideas carried through to market success - is typically disruptive to existing business and typically driven by people who are not wedded to the corporate status quo. Senior executives and the corporate structure itself on the other hand, tend consciously or unconsciously to make life difficult for these dissenting innovators. The book is about relationships between the dissenters and the corporate 'establishment' and how these relationships can be managed productively.

She points out the critical difference between continuous improvement and true innovation, which is frequently disruptive. Neither the drive for efficiency nor the trend to team working contribute directly to innovation in the wider sense and both may in fact work against it. She builds the case that it is dissenting individuals who have the vision and the passion to carry genuinely new ideas through to market success, but that typically in a large corporation they do not have the power to do so.

The core of the book is devoted to an analysis of the nature of dissent, how it is typically suppressed and what is needed for the management of an organization to recognize, support and encourage potentially productive dissent, while also maintaining sensible boundaries of authority.

Each chapter ends with a summary and statement of key points. My advice is to start with these and, if they are not obvious to you or you want further explanation, go back to the main text. The points made are well set out and logically developed, but I found the explanations and illustrations unnecessarily long-winded.

Managing dissenters is, of course, only one aspect - an important one - of the complex question of how to build and maintain a successful strategy of continuous innovation, supported by culture of innovation. A listing of books on the subject can be found on my site.