Chapter 2 - Lesson 3: Culture and Collaboration
Clause 4.4 Culture and Collaboration
The behaviors in an innovation culture do not magically happen, and an often-overlooked aspect of innovation culture is the organization structure within which the culture can exist. The world is in a perfect storm of change, and organizations have difficulty changing. To survive change, we must be agile and adaptable, and this is not a new concept. Gore-Tex developed a flat organization of great agility with self-managed teams. John Akers tried to break the IBM battleship “Big Blue” into a flotilla of little blues in 1990. Kelly Johnson famously created his skunk works at Lockheed Martin in 1943. P&G, under A.G. Lafley, outsourced its creativity through “Innocentive.” These people recognized the importance of agility and structuring to allow two different sets of behaviors to co-exist. There are different approaches, and we have to find which is best for us. I discussed adaptability previously in Chapter 1, on Innovation Principles.