Notes from March MLab Management 2.0 LabNotes

Tim Brown, CEI, IDEO

• At IDEO – management is tolerated insofar as it is a means to the end of facilitating what people want to do, rather than the other way around.
• Key to our culture is an absolutely incessant interest in doing things that are new.
• Choose employees with deep craft who are also keenly curious about the context surrounding it.
• The pattern of innovation in emergent, not planned
• Creative culture has a deep reservoir of trust in its DNA
• The real question about scale is not about sharing information – it is about sharing inspiration.

Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies

• The higher the quality of employee you have, in terms of capability, enablement, engagement, the better value gets created in the interface between the employee and the customer.
• Reverse accountability – managers are accountable to their employees
• For any complaint or query an employee opens a service ticket on a portal to which the department is obliged to respond. Crucially, it is only the employee who can close the ticket.

Jeffrey Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation

• In every deliberation, it behoves to consider the impact of the decision on the next seven generations.
• Extreme transparency. That inspired us to look at everything we were doing and put on our website anything critical that might be missing that anyone would want to know.

The World Beyond Budgeting, Robin Fraser and Franz Roosli

• Radical decentralization is the underlying concept. The organization revolves around the customer. Principles of the beyond budgeting model:
• Devolved Leadership principles

1. Focus everyone on their customers, not on hierarchical relationships
2. Organize as a lean network of accountable teams, not as centralized functions
3. Give teams the freedom and capability to act, don’t micro-manage them
4. Create a high responsibility culture at every level, not just at the top
5. Promote open information for self management; don’t restrict it hierarchically
6. Adopt a few clear values, goals, and boundaries, not detailed regulations
   

Adaptive Process Principles

1. Set relative goals for continuous improvement, don’t negotiate contracts
2. Reward shared success based on relative performance, not fixed targets
3. Make planning a continuous and inclusive process, not a top down annual event
4. Base controls on relative indicators and trends, not variances against plan
5. Make resources available as needed, not through annual budget allocations
6. Coordinate interactions dynamically, not through annual planning cycles

Engaged Innovation Roundtable, London Business School

• Tim Thorne, Royal Bank of Scotland: Five days of innovation training for employees. Develop ideas some of which then receive funding. 50% of those that received funding have entered the marketplace.
• Amanda West of ThomsonReuters: A supporting online toolkit and series of webinars about innovation enable staff globally across the business to build their own skills on a self serve basis
• Tod Bedilion, Roche: Put internal problems on an internal system and waited for solutions. Our hope that our internal technology-oriented people would gravitate to using this type of tool was completely unfounded… We really had to push people (via an electronic marketing campaign) to involve them in suggesting solutions. Had to offer incentives in the end.
• Thought triggered for MSU: Could alumni be involved in “innovative engagement” through technology? Would this create an institutional value for alumni. By innovative engagement I’m thinking of a system that would enable alums to post challenges that other alums could suggest solutions for? What would the incentives be? Access to knowledge?

Seven Rules for Radical Innovators, Lessons from Barack Obama’s campaign, Umar Haque, Director, Havas Media Lab

1. Have a self organizing design. Obama’s organization blew past orthodoxies for structure to use the power of self-organizing
2. Minimize strategy. Obama’s campaign realized that strategy, too often, kills a deeply-lived sense of purpose, destroys credibility, and corrupts meaning.
3. Maximize purpose. Yesterday we built huge corporations to do tiny incremental things – tomorrow, we must build small organizations that can do tremendously massive things.
4. Broaden unity. Marketers typically segment and target, Obama succeeded through unification, not through division.
5. Thicken power. True power is the power to inspire, lead, and engender belief.
6. There is nothing more asymmetrical – more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative - than the world changing power of an ideal.
7. Rule six is the starting point for tomorrow’s radical innovators. Where are the ideals in your organization? What ideals are missing? What ideals will you fight and struggle for

Gary Hamel’s Management 2.0 Book List

• Creative Experience, Mary Parker Follett, 1924
• Out of Control, Kevin Kelly, 1994
• The Age of Heretics, Art Kleiner, 1996
• Manufacturing the Employee, Roy Jacques, 1996
• Competing on the Edge, Shona Brown and Kathleen Eisenhardt, 1998
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond, 1999
• Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, David Weinberger, 2002
• The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida, 2002
• The Future of Work, Thomas Malone, 2004
• The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, 2004
• Firms of Endearment, Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth, and David Wolfe, 2007
• Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, 2008

If you are inspired to read all of any of the articles go to www.managementlab.org