I recently posted on whether you can motivate people to be innovative. I believe you can only provide an environment where innovation can take hold and reward those that take the leap and the risk to connect to and appreciate different points of view. Unfortunately, many companies are not structured in a way that allows for innovation.
Gary Hamel's newest book - "The Future of Management" - takes a stab at how the organization of the future would operate. It is a great read and my copy is covered in little sticky-notes to remind of important things to consider for the future. One of my favorites is:
"History's most consistently victorious armies and navies have been those that were able to break with the past and imagine new ways of motivating, staffing, training ,and deploying warriors."
One of the points made in Mr. Hamel's book is that the current hierarchical organizational structure is very well designed to aggregate effort - coordinate varying roles and people within specific activities - but not very good at mobilizing effort - inspiring people to go above and beyond.
My concern - from a motivation standpoint - am I pushing the proverbial rock up the hill to create incentive and recognition programs to drive innovation when the organization that the program resides within is designed to thwart my efforts? Or can my recommendations actually help a company break some of the boundaries the hierarchy imposes - creating an overlay structure that drives innovation?
Just a thought that ran through my head this week.
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