Knowledge@Wharton: If a company is committed to making that kind of change, how would managers go about looking at where the firm fails on the innovation spectrum?
Bodell: What they have to do is look at their culture … to determine how much risk they are willing to take. I think they can look at a few things. How much do their executives lead by example? How much failure or experimentation are you allowed to take? How many resources – time or money – do they put toward new ventures? What metrics are they measuring, and do those metrics have to do with new things? You’ll get a real feel for that spectrum quickly.
Knowledge@Wharton: In terms of different types of organisational cultures, what do you see?
Bodell: Over the last few years, I studied corporate cultures and change. What was fascinating to me is we seem to talk about cultures in terms of good versus bad. But I don’t think it’s that simple.
There’s another culture that permeates all of the organisations that many of us have worked at, and it’s probably the silent killer.
The worst kind of culture isn’t a bad culture, it’s a complacent one. The world has gotten so complex that we keep putting more and more processes in place, and the result of this is that people become complacent. They no longer think they can effect change. Even though they think they might want to, they give up.
It’s the, ‘Oh, everything’s just fine’ mentality, and we see that at a lot of big corporations. They have the money and the brand, and they can ride it out for a long time, until all of a sudden, where did that small company come from? They had a complacent culture. That’s something that people really have to watch for in the future.
Knowledge@Wharton: If an organization is ready to change, what are the tenets to making change stick?
Bodell: There are a few. In fact, we did some case studies over the last couple of years because we didn’t know what really made change stick. What we’ve found … wasn’t what I thought when we first set out to do it. The first is that change has to happen, not from the top down, but from the middle out.
What I mean by that is it has to really stick with people who are in the trenches who are respected by leadership but who are admired by those who are rising stars. These are the guys who are … slugging it out every day, [and they] can really effect change the most as long as, of course, leadership wants them to make that change in the first place.
The second thing is we think change is a process. I don’t believe that’s true. If innovation or change was a process, we all could do it because I’m sure people are very smart and can follow the rules. I think it’s a tool kit. In this world that’s so complex, they need on-demand tools they can draw on when different things come at them.
The final thing is I don’t think it can be big mandates. I think it has to be something called Little Bigs. It’s change with a little ‘c’. We have to start effecting change on an everyday level – in those meetings, with emails, with reports, with procedures. We have to effect it by leading by example in small ways to get people to then want to make big change. That’s not something we expected.
We thought it would be big change initiatives, and in fact, it was the opposite that worked. So that was a great, cool learning for us.
