My responce to a CEO’s blog, for a company I used to work for. The reply to it, was written personally and was posstive, though not included here. I’ve removed the names for obvious reasons.
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Over the past three years I’ve noticed, as have many others, that [the company] is struggling to ‘keep with the times’.
Where I expected to join a company that leads its industry, that leads its people and that leads with its best foot forward – I found myself working for a company that sits complacently with other companies in the industry, is ignorant to ‘individual circumstance’ and is by no mean pushing the fold.
For the most part the people within the company are creative, intelligent and motivated. In contrast, [the company] proper is passive and appeaseable.
Creative and driven individuals don’t mince their words, nor do the companies that choose to foster them. Innovative companies, such as Google et al, are uncompromisingly creative. They don’t pull punches; they throw whatever they’ve got and live with the results. They know the score – hard work needs hard play. You don’t win by following suit, a runner knows the risks are higher the harder you train, but the dice is still thrown and the gamble taken.
I love the fact that we are starting to let new things in, but there is a bigger step to take. As [a colleuge] suggested, and I shall paraphrase with an aphorism of my own – it’s not about letting new technologies in the door, it’s about ‘taking the bull by the horns’ and making it work for us.
The very same thing can be said for talent. We’re very good at finding talent, at carrot and stick recruitment; but where we really need to work is talent realisation. We need to stop making people do thing because they are capable of doing them, and start getting people do to things because it’s what drives them – it’s what they derive passion from.
In today’s innovative climate, it isn’t good enough to be satisfied because your balance sheet shows good numbers. Neither your profit and loss, nor your shareholders can be the top priority in pointing to the direction of progress. They are there to keep us afloat, but they are by no means our power. I keep thinking that instead of “Revenue Engine” we should be talking about “Innovation Engine”. We give permission to innovate, but we do not drive it.
The situations that are stifling innovation within [the company] are not due to the attitudes of our managers towards our ideas – far from it, for the most part our ideas themselves are taken on and a dialogue is opened. What the problem is, is fear. If we’re not scared of our boss, then our boss is scare of theirs – or our boss’ boss is scared of those senior to them. Somewhere along the line, the voice of innovation goes quiet. Someone somewhere quits or gives up trying, not because it’s easier to roll over, but because they feel that’s the only option.
From vibrant “wow” and excitable “cool”, we step ever closer to “well the problem is” and “I like it, but…”
We’re starting on the way to doing things right; we have the Innovation Challenge which, we are informed, was a great success. Hopefully this will help begin the ‘fostering of innovation’. What companies need now, are not big, national or global innovation projects. By doing so, you turn innovation upside down. Innovation should not start at the top, nor should it start as a “make a big impact” idea. It should be in the very fibre of the company, and the big idea should flow along the same channels as the tiny ones. An individual on the lowest level should be just as comfortable in saying, “we need a new risk model” as “we need a new toaster in the staff kitchen”.
As a big company, we are drawn in by what the others are doing. We create a habit of making one size fits all projects they try to capture our employee audience and entice them into helping build the company further. However, if we take a leaf from the book that tells us about our clients, we know that it will not work that way. We need to focus on small groups and engage individuals personally.
We see this in examples in every area of life. A restaurant doesn’t just create one big pie for it’s customers – it provides specially made meals, and the good places will customise it to your whim. When you buy a computer, you no longer get one of whatever is available; you get exactly what you want. We can see the different in thanking everyone using generalisations and compare that to individual praise. Saying, “thanks for the hard work” is ineffective if contrasted with, “thank you for developing a new scripting system, everyone loves it and it’s increased sales x, y and z”.
By all means, have a capture all project working its way through the company, but it will not drive the company far. What we need is not hulking great achievements every year, or every quarter; we need daily innovation. Every day, a light must go on in the mind of at least one of the thousands of people we have.
Be individual, be specific – it’s a hard formula to get right, but it’s the winning one.
It’s not surprising that as an insurance company we deal with risk differently to other companies like Google and Apple. Our working lives are centred on taking as little risk as possible and mitigating those we must take.
The shear mass of [the company] as a business protects us from change and lets us cope as we take time to pick up on the innovation of other more willing companies. How long can that last? “Innovate or die” really must become the terminology we use. As aggressive and brass as it sounds, we can only go so far when we try to use nice, flowery and comforting words. Saying, “lets work as a team” doesn’t do what it used to. This phrase used to motivated people, but now, as it has been used so often, it does little more than placate. It’s too general, and too overused a phase.
I personally have decided to leave [the company]. Not because I’m angry with they way I’ve been treated, though I have had my moments of frustration. Not because I don’t feel adequately compensated for my work, or I think that my skills and strengths are in someway suppressed as a sacrifice for the power trips of others. These are all things that I have been concerned with in my tenure here, but they are not the cause of my departure.
The single most pertinent cause of my resignation is that I am a highly creative person. In stark disparity, and an opposite of how it should be, I am in fact leaving because I’m creative, instead of staying because I am so.
[the company] has drained my motivation to the point where I am not concerned with achievement, where I am complacent with being mediocre and am no longer shocked by the lack of meritocracy. This is something that I am not willing to put up with, and cannot let me self continue doing. It has been a long hard three months trying to balance my lack of motivation, my search for new opportunities and my personal need to commit to the job at hand. I no longer make a difference, and that very fact makes a difference in me.
I wish I had someone to blame, just for the sake of convenience. Yet none of the people I work with should shoulder it, not my boss or any of my colleagues. It is the culture of [the company], with its inflexible processes and its “not your job to think” attitude towards the lower echelon that I belong to. It’s [the company]’s willingness to pay £500 per day for a consultant with the gift of the gab, or a friend upon high, yet readiness to support the laziness of systems that do not, and cannot, identify personal strength and seem operated to try and play down the achievements of the masses.
Web 2.0 is a revolution in the attitudes of those who influence the Internet, lets all hope it’ll be a revolution for [the comapny] too.