What’s stopping all the good ideas

I read somewhere, that a CEO observed recently that all that was left over from the technological and business revolution that has happened over the past 5 years is inertia.

I wish I could find the quote. And I wish it wasn’t true. But you’ll just have to believe me.

It got me thinking about change, evolution, how transformational strategies can be deployed successfully by organisations. How speed to market can still be a vital component in winning or creating new marketspace On how a very different type of company could help companies compete in a world different to the one of 10 years ago.

Then I picked up on a post at brand autposy About a new book called The Pirate Inside by Adam Morgan.

Adam Morgan in his new book The Pirate Inside

Opens his first chapter

Steve Jobs said

Its more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy

Enough. I have had enough. I have had enough of corporate rules. Of enforced mediocrity. Of doing it this way or that way, because this way or that way is the way we always do it round here. I have had enough of being a prisoner of my category’s history. Of being handcuffed by my company’s culture. Of being hamstrung by benchmarks and processes and so-called ‘best practices’ into becoming just another establishment brand.

I read the most depressing articles in the Harvard Business Review this morning. Apparantly some study looked at 340 prime time commercials to find that there was a differentiating message in only 7% of them: 7%. Is my brand really any different? Really? My God, what am I doing in this job? And why do I feel that much of the time my company’s culture is dampening, rather than igniting my ability to change those statistics?

So I want out. Well, kind of out. I want to take the brand out and see what it could do if I had a little open water. I want to try doing things a different way. Try a little liberating lawlessness, frankly. Find my piss and vinegar, and see where that takes me. I look at the great marketing pirates like Jobs and Branson, and I think, yes, I’d like some of that. Some freedom ? I could do something with that. The freedom to make up my own rules for a change.

what’s interesting is that from the world of business guru’s, Gary Hamel and Tom Peters, Henry Mintzberg, to marketing gurus’s Phillip Kotler et al, the INSEAD gurus Chan Kim and Ren?e Mauborgone, the challenger brand gurus, Adam Morgan. They are all saying the same thing.

Differentiate or die. Get creative, think laterally, and deploy with great energy. Great. Let me sign up!

But the problem is, what is stopping this happening. I have personally witnessed two global projects destroyed either because the collective culture or the key and all powerful individual were not prepared or able to embrace change. I suspect Adam Morgan has experienced the same.

My belief is that it is corporations themselves, their structures and cultures which KILL great ideas, which savage potential growth, because the system is dysfunctional. Its easier it seems to spend several million dollars, tens of milions of dollars on a line extension which has 1% chance of success at best, rather than saying, as Jobs or Morgan would say, lets spend today thinking like Pirates rather than the Navy.

Me, I am signing up to Pirate School.

SMLXL has developed its own workshops which address the issues of how to enable business leaders and their teams to understand how they can grow the business by brand-building through their people.

Themes are:
* Stop communicating, start engaging - what happens after the launch party
* Why employees don’t listen to internal communications ? and how to make sure they do
* Overcoming resistance ? and how to turn it into a groundswell of support in your business
* Developing a Change Management Toolkit ? essential structure to manage change
* Turning Managers into Leaders ? the essentials
* The really hard bit: engaging people for more than a minute (implementation planning), what good looks like; common pitfalls and how to avoid them

If they make sense, we’d be happy to talk about how we could help your organisation.

So it seems if you want to get the best work out or truly realise the best outcomes possible, companies need to align, nurture and sometimes rethink their internal structures. Companies such as People Fan Club who worked on a very challenging assignment for BAA and the T5 construction project demonstrated how addressing internal issues, internal flows of information, aligning different cultures could bring big rewards.

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