Intent over Declaration

One over-riding characteristic of beginnings is that the end result can never be precisely described. Never really be more than a firmly declared intent, a goal, or a set of aspirations.

When the beginning is an innovation project then what might appear to be the most obvious route for exploration might never deliver and the very thing which seemed an unlikely proposition might provide the very fragment that does the unlocking and allows all manner of elements to fall into place forming novel combinations for the future. A great deal of time, money and effort on the part of consultancies and enterprises has gone into systems and methods of checks and balances that might give more certainty but ultimately they rarely yield sustainable results.

One of the classic and eminent thinkers on management, Peter Drucker, in the book he wrote on innovation and entrepreneurship, suggested that it “takes special effort for the existing business to become entrepreneurial and innovative. The “normal” reaction, he maintained, is to allocate productive resources to the existing business, to the daily crisis, and to getting a little more out of what we already have. “The temptation in the existing business is always to feed yesterday and to starve tomorrow” [page 149] Quite sanely, he said ” Do not ever put the entrepreneurial into the existing management component. Do not make innovation an objective for people charged with running, exploiting, optimizing what already exists”.

Sound advice and it would certainly fit into many people’s thoughts on efficient management and on what it might be prudent to expect of the current conventions in the large scale enterprise. But when this advice is heeded, there is a question as to what then actually does happen to the immense knowledge resource that resides inside the large scale enterprise?  How is it used? Does it go unnoticed and/or disregarded and get wasted? Drucker’s  sound advice might well also carry a long term risk in the loss of the very knowledge that created success. There is a vitality that occurs with the growth of new knowledge out of existing knowledge and it comes about from the every day business of problem identification and the search for potential solutions which can only happen when it is a legitimate aspect of many people’s roles.