Innovation as a Swear Word
If you work in a large corporation, or perhaps even a small one, here are a few pointers to turn ‘innovation’ into a swear word. Note that the goals of doing this are really to decrease your organization’s competitiveness, create unhappy workers and demonstrate a general lack of respect for the livelihood of others.
- Don’t reward “out-of-the-box” thinkers. After all, who needs to retain good talent? There’s obviously plenty of that out there.
- Make sure you continue to use and embrace the processes that are broken and if someone points out an improvement, be sure to discipline those actions. In fact, just go ahead and put them in the storage room. And don’t forget the red stapler.
- Always believe that everything is okay and that no changes will ever be needed.
- When encountering an issue in your department or work, just point the finger at someone else and ensure you don’t lift another finger to solve it because someone else will obviously figure it out.
- Whenever possible, try to squeeze your valuable partners and vendors for everything they’ve got until they either go out of business or stop wanting to do business with you. After all, who needs external subject matter expertise. You can obviously do it all yourself! While you’re at it, attempt to solve world hunger on your own because everything is core to your business.
If you’ve got more to add to this list, please feel free to share. And if you’re actually following some of these principles, know that running downhill will always be easier than running uphill but that racing to the bottom won’t necessarily imply that you’re a winner.
