A recent article by Gary Hamel, titled ‘The Why, What and How of Management Innovation’, intrigued me, but I wasn’t sure what it meant. I’m familiar with product, process and service innovation but management innovation? In my opinion there’s a word missing – the article is really talking about management process innovation, but obviously that’s not as strong a title.

So what’s the message?

Hamel says that “A management breakthrough can deliver a strong advantage to the innovating company and produce a major shift in industry leadership. Few companies, however, have been able to come up with a formal process for fostering management innovation. The biggest challenge seems to be generating truly unique ideas”.

He suggests a series of questions to uncover whether our management processes are supporting or exacerbating big organisational problems and whether they are supporting or limiting big organisational opportunities.

This links to another HBR article by Bower & Gilbert – Whose Strategy is it? The authors have observed that the “carefully-crafted strategies of senior management” can be derailed by the decisions of middle and front line managers. They rightly observe that “every time a manager allocates resources, that decision either moves the organisation into or out of alignment with its intended strategy”.

So, taking asset allocation as a management process, we can apply Hamel’s thinking and ask “How we can innovate the system to ensure it delivers asset allocation decisions in line with the desired strategy?”. In a wider sense, both articles refer to the typical management issue of how to innovate the personal choices that all managers and employees make about where they allocate their time and efforts – which is the province of the Personal Efficiency Program that Paul is licenced to run.

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Over the holidays, I (Sharon) read an eclectic collection of books - from Storytelling in Organisations, to Design philosophy, to Evidence based Management, to the McKinsey approach to consulting, to…

I often get asked “How can I get my staff to commit to this change?” and I laugh internally at the implication in the words. It’s human nature to want others to give first, but it’s been my experience that leaders need to be prepared to give in order to get.

One way of ‘giving’ is to show our commitment first and be subject to the same standards. David Maister’s blog describes a great example of this type of commitment from the President of a global advertising firm, who asked staff to evaluate him as a leader and then promised to resign if he did not improve his rating as a leader.

Another way of ‘giving’ is to describe how the change might benefit them personally, not just benefit the organisation.

So when you next want a commitment from your people, think first about tuning in to the universal station, WII-FM (What’s In It For Me): Describe what you are prepared to offer from your end, or what benefit you believe the change will provide to them as individuals, before you ask for their commitment. Read an example below. (more…)