Model Management: Can we make a suggestion?

In the 350 UK businesses surveyed by the CBI there are few procedures in place to encourage, track and put in place the brilliant ideas that could be emerging from the 'shop floor'. Even failures are not being analysed properly to see what can be learned from them.

Flatter structures and the end of hierarchy were supposed to liberate organisations so that intellectual energy could burst forth uninhibited and release the potential of all employees. Well, a bit like the trains at the moment, this flowering of talent and innovation seems to have been delayed.

This is an age-old management problem, and by no means solely a UK one. How do you know what you don't know? Where is the next inspired idea coming from? What could our staff really contribute given the opportunity?

Management's traditional response to these questions is best summed up by the cartoon that shows a large (but bottomless) suggestions box fixed firmly to the wall, standing directly above a capacious waste-paper bin. In the Fordist world, managers managed and worried about strategy, and workers worked, or at least pretended to.

The booming 1990s and developments in the new economy have finally put paid to the top-down only school of management. Where did Enron get the idea to trade energy services online (now 40 per cent of the business from zero three years ago)? Not in the boardroom. Who generates the ideas and revolutionary customer service innovations in internet start-ups and incubators? Everyone.

Gary Hamel has spoken eloquently on the need for businesses to open their minds to the limitless potential of innovative ideas that could emerge from anywhere. Directors and senior managers should be fostering and backing ideas. They don't have to come up with all of them themselves.

If top managers could 'lighten up', and send out the signal that 'ideas are wanted here', they could, who knows, be sitting on the next 3M Post-It note. But moving from a culture where everyone is keeping their heads down to one where everyone is holding their heads up is a daunting task.

'Innovate or die is easily said, less easily put into practice as a strategic vision. It is yet another of those leadership challenges that cannot be ducked. But the rewards for successfully establishing a culture of innovation are potentially huge.

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