Start with the unsettling combination of uncertainty, fear, and excitement that every organizational change creates, magnified all the more so given the economy. Add to this the major push around culture and innovation -- not the most straightforward of subjects -- and I suspect the atmosphere is feeling fairly ambiguous to many of CareFusion’s employees. You go off to the culture training and you can’t help but start asking questions like “Will changes really happen?” “How much will end up being just talk?” “Can we “nail down” something as slippery as culture and elusive as innovation?”
So I don’t have all the answers but here are some things (courtesy of a few battle scars) for you to consider if you are in a position to do so…or pass them on to your manager. Either way, remember, there are concrete things that can be done to make a culture and innovation initiative go smoothly (and have a positive impact).
Culture
- Ultimately, culture is all about behavior. So it’s critical to go beyond values to ground the culture in management practices/behaviors proven to translate into high performing cultures. Grounding the culture in specific behaviors allows you to define, measure, and assess a potentially ethereal subject -- the culture development process -- in a much more analytical manner.
- Use visual communication techniques to literally “paint the picture” of what the future culture should look like. One of the benefits to advances in consumer electronics and software is that you can create a video fairly inexpensively that demonstrates the desired future version of CareFusion. The more you make the future tangible, the more likely you will fill a potential vacuum where fear can run rampant and dire scenarios take root.
- Culture is important but not critical…spend too much time on it and it can become naval gazing and distracting to the actual business.
- Clearly distinguish between innovation, creativity, and invention. Use a definition of innovation that emphasizes a commercialization aspect and clearly articulates the role of creativity in the innovation process. Point out that a creative use of technology may be more of a novelty (i.e., “invention” in the Sharper Image sense) than an innovation.
- Don’t inadvertently choke off innovation. Tough markets and limited R&D funds increase corporate expectations of funding only winners/low risk projects.
- Ground the discovery process for innovation opportunities in learning as much as possible about the “jobs” your customers are trying to get done and what you can offer them that addresses affordability, convenience, or accessibility. Check out Anthony Ulwick’s “What Customers Want” to give you more on this.
A Culture of Innovation
Now let’s put the two together. I think you’ll see this alchemy ends up creating a set of its own issues.
Every culture ultimately exhibits biases. The trick is to be on the look out for them to make sure they don’t become debilitating. For many reasons, companies can inadvertently create a culture genetically blind to innovation opportunities. Here are some questions I encourage CareFusion leaders and managers reflect on to avoid this disability:
To what degree do we esteem the idea of superior technology that we end up over-designing our products with functionality that is technologically sophisticated but ultimately superfluous to what the customer is trying to get done?
Can we look for opportunities for innovation both up-market and down-market?
Do we equally value innovation around integration and product innovation?
In the case of our stated corporate values, is “value created” synonymous with innovation? Who defines what is considered innovative, our customers or we?
Do we have the structural creativity, financial flexibility and cultural mindset to pursue opportunities for innovation that may cannibalize our current portfolio?
Are our stated corporate values and the standards by which our employees make prioritization decisions (what some would also describe as “values”) congruent? How would we anticipate these standards for deciding priorities would change as corporate expectations of acceptable gross margins change? How would we anticipate these standards would change as our definition of what we consider a big enough market opportunity changes? (Clayton Christensen lays this dynamic out beautifully in Chapter 8 of “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”) What is the risk to the business if these prioritization standards end up drifting further and further from our stated corporate values?
I’ll stop here and let you think this over.
