A recession can be a good time to re-think corporate strategy, products, and especially R&D approaches. Indeed, what many companies want to achieve is the next breakthrough that launches the organization forward or in a new direction – a disruptive innovation.
The challenge can be to, (a) get enough people on board and (b) actually shake things up enough that change can happen.
In a recent Knowledge@Wharton article, the author highlights a presentation from Jeong Kim, President of Bell Labs at Alcatel-Lucent which describes in detail these challenges as well as how he has managed to surmount them.
The problem is that success creates a virtual construct, a paradigm of “How to Do Things,” inside of which new thinking cannot flourish. Kim calls it “The Curse of Knowledge.” Cross-discipline teaming “is one way of breaking the Curse of Knowledge,” he says. Another is “experience pairing,” or matching a senior employee with an individual who has considerably less experience, but a fresh perspective on how to solve problems.
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Kim offered a case study from Alcatel-Lucent – Lucent Technologies at the time – on how to inject a spirit of disruptive innovation into an existing and stagnant culture. Lucent’s optical networking division was severely underperforming and the company fired the unit’s top managers. “I was really convinced that the reason I was put in there was that nobody else would do it, and they needed somebody to blame,” says Kim.
The division was moribund: Financial results were disappointing and morale was low. Kim shook up the management team and took the survivors to an off-site retreat that featured whitewater rafting. “First thing they do is say, ‘Why are we doing this …?’ After a while, they get really bored.” The exercise, intended to foster teamwork and cooperation, was designed with the help of a psychologist. Instead of cooperating, the managers began splashing one another with their oars, “like little kids.”
But the exercise-psychology experiment wasn’t over at the end of the rafting run. “After six or seven hours of whitewater rafting like this, they were tired.” That evening over dinner, people let their “at-work” guardedness down and spent time learning about one another.
The next day included all the off-site strategizing and white board sessions one might expect, but Kim says the interaction was more genuine and productive than if they had met as they were previously, a grouping of near strangers. In the first quarter following that meeting, he says, the group posted revenues of $510 million, $560 million the next quarter, then $730 million, then $970 million. The point, he adds, is that “teamwork is so critical for the success of a company.”
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“You have to make an investment in capital, human knowledge and networking,” says Kim. “That’s the way to get ahead.”
A key point to remember here is that there are many ways to invest in “human knowledge and networking.” There are also many ways to “disrupt” existing norms in order to shake out a more disruptive innovation.
Workplace change could be one – having employees to sit in different places, or around different people. Another option would be introducing new employee activities (whether rafting or something else that gets people interacting and connecting to different people and in different ways).
What efforts (if any) at “disruptive innovation” are you seeing?