The Idea in Brief
Your company’s product innovations quickly lose their competitive value, as rivals copy them. So how will you keep your firm at the head of the pack? Nurture those unsung heroes in your organization who generate management innovations.
Scattered throughout your organization, these idea practitioners foster fresh notions for enhancing your company’s business practices—whether it’s managing knowledge, improving quality, redesigning processes, or leveraging technologies. Perhaps someone in manufacturing has devised a unique idea for streamlining operations, while someone in marketing may be advocating new approaches to customer management.
Idea practitioners not only envision new realities, they use savvy change-leadership tactics to embed them in your organization’s practices. Results? Your company differentiates itself from competitors, workers strive to excel, and business performance soars.
How to ensure that your idea practitioners dedicate themselves to your company—rather than taking their hot management notions to rival firms? Let them know you’ve taken note of their existence. Give them freedom to pursue innovative ideas. Reward them with attention. And publicly back their ideas.
The Idea in Practice
Strategies for Cultivating Idea Practioners
Recognize them. To spot idea practitioners in your company, look for these distinctive behaviors:
- Scouting for ideas in management literature and at business conferences—even looking outside business for new problem-solving approaches.
- Packaging ideas by framing them in terms of key themes—innovation, efficiency, effectiveness—that decision makers value.
- Selling ideas to senior executives, the rank and file, and middle managers.
- Implementing ideas; for example, by participating in early, small-scale experiments.
Idea practitioners also display specific personality traits: optimism, a passion for ideas in general, and self-confidence.
Carve out roles for them. Consider creating formal units dedicated to exploring new business ideas. Also carve out roles that leverage idea practitioners’ strengths. Ensure that they end up in a good position after an idea has run its course or becomes embedded in your organization. If idea practitioners don’t prosper from championing ideas, others won’t see the value in pushing ideas.
Give them license to pursue ideas. Set them loose within the limits of explicitly stated corporate values. You’ll help them feel more comfortable taking risks within clear boundaries.
Reward them. Idea practitioners are motivated primarily by intellectual stimulation and seeing ideas transformed into action. Reward them by hearing them out, visibly supporting their ideas, and publicly acknowledging their achievements. Motorola, for example, annually announces new recipients of its Dan Noble Fellow Award and recognizes a broader group of valued technologists by naming them to its Science Advisory Board.
Back their ideas. The single greatest factor determining whether ideas catch on in a company is the perception of CEO backing. Signal your support for a hot idea through organization-wide memos and management-team meetings where participants discuss how they’re using the idea.
Create an idea-friendly culture. To ensure that good ideas flourish, communicate the importance of embracing new ideas to risk-averse managers in your organization. Also encourage tolerance for the inevitable failures that come with exploration of new ideas.
There’s an unsung hero in your organization. It’s the person who’s bringing in new ideas about how to manage better. Mind you, we’re not talking about product and service innovations. The people who cook those up—and they are heroes of the organization, too—are celebrated loudly and often. We’re talking about the person who, for instance, first uttered the phrase “intellectual capital” in your hallways, believing that better management of knowledge assets could yield a competitive advantage. Or perhaps it was the notion of “real options” as an antidote to overly risk-averse capital investment analysis. Or, depending on how long the person has been around, maybe it was even “total quality management.”