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- O r g a n i z a t i o n a l _ I n n o v a t i o n -
A Ridiculous Story ... Or Is It?
by Joyce Wycoff
Here's a scene: The CEO of Ford Motor Company (or Xerox, IBM, Microsoft, Ajax Dry Cleaning, or any other company you want to think about) goes to the bank, takes out half the cash, takes it out to the parking lot and burns it in a huge bonfire. At the same time, the CFO takes half of all the computers and manufacturing equipment and smashes them into scrap.
Impossible? Outlandish? Of course, yet something similar to that is happening every day in organizations around the world. In a recent survey by Kepner-Tregoe, Inc., two-thirds of the managers and hourly workers estimated that their organizations use less than 50 percent of their collective intelligence! Which is worse ... throwing away cash and machinery or throwing away the thinking power of employees? It doesn't make sense to do either.
In an article in the April issue of Training magazine, the report, titled "Minds at Work: How Much Brainpower Are We Really Using?", cited three primary reasons why we're wasting so much of our intellectual capital: organizational politics, time pressures, and lack of involvement in decision-making.
The survey also asked participants to compare the thinking styles of their organizations to a car ... less than 10% compared the speed and quality of their organizational thinking to a Ferrari, while over a third used a slow-but-sturdy Mack truck as their comparison vehicle. How many organizations will survive the next ten years with "slow-but-sturdy" thinking skills?