An employee has generated a good idea. Your company’s Idea First Responders have accepted the idea, stabilized it, and started to transport it to the next phase of your innovation process. And where should they take it? One good place is the Free Port.
Free Ports of old accepted ships of all nations and gave them safe harbor. That’s a good model for harboring and developing new business ideas. An Idea Free Port may be as simple as a department manager’s “good idea” file. Or it may be a prestigious, cross-departmental committee tasked with the development and implementation of good ideas. Your Free Port should adopt rules that conform to your company culture. Here are some guidelines:
Free Ports can get bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. To avoid this, keep meetings brief and keep measurements rough. (New ideas are notoriously hard to measure. Don’t overdo it.) Also, keep the CEO involved. She can resolve disputes quickly and make the many judgment calls that need to be made. Her presence will also remind people of how important the Free Port really is.
A new CEO sweeps into your company and announces a new strategy. Your company hasn’t been doing too well so you think it just might be time for a new strategy — the old one wasn’t working, maybe a new one will. Unfortunately, the new strategy doesn’t fit well with your existing culture, which focuses on quality. The new CEO wants to focus on speed — “Let’s get to market before our competitors do — the first mover has the advantage”. Yet your fellow employees think, “There’s always a market for quality. Quality wins in the long run.”
When strategy and culture are at odds with each other, which one wins? Culture wins every time. In fact, Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Changing strategy is fairly easy — it’s just an announcement. But if the new strategy doesn’t fit the culture, it’s simply an announcement of prospective failure. First, you have to change the culture.
Watch the video for more information on culture versus strategy.