Reason for Innovation failure

"If not YOU, who? If not NOW, when?"
56 Reasons Most Corporate Innovation Initiatives Fail
1. "Innovation" framed as an initiative, not the normal way of doing business
2. Absence of a clear definition of what "innovation" really means
3. Innovation not linked to company's existing vision or strategy
4. No sense of urgency
5. Workforce is suffering from "initiative fatigue"
6. CEO does not fully embrace the effort
7. No compelling vision or reason to innovate
8. Senior Team not aligned
9. Key players don't have the time to focus on innovation
10.Innovation champions are not empowered
11. Decision making processes are non-existent or fuzzy
12. Lack of trust
13. Risk averse culture
14. Overemphasis on cost cutting or incremental improvement
15. Workforce ruled by past assumptions and old mental models
16. No process in place for funding new projects
17. Not enough pilot programs in motion
18. Senior Team not walking the talk
19. No company-wide process for managing ideas
20. Too many turf wars. Too many silos.

21. Analysis paralysis
22. Reluctance to cannibalize existing products and services
23. NIH (not invented here) syndrome
24. Funky channels of communication
25. No intrinsic motivation to innovate
26. Unclear gates for evaluating progress
27. Mind numbing bureaucracy
28. Unclear idea pitching processes
29. Lack of clearly defined innovation metrics
30. No accountability for results
31. No way to celebrate quick wins
32. Poorly facilitated meetings
33. No training to unleash individual or team creativity
34. Voo doo evaluation of ideas
35. Inadequate sharing of best practices
36. Lack of teamwork and collaboration
37. Unclear strategy for sustaining the effort
38. Innovation Teams meet too infrequently
39. Middle managers not on board
40. Ineffective rollout of the effort to the workforce
41. Lack of tools and techniques to help people generate new ideas
42. Innovation initiative perceived as another "flavor of the month"
43. Individuals don't understand how to be a part of the effort
44. Diverse inputs or conflicting opinions not honored
45. Imbalance of left-brain and right brain thinking
46. Low morale
47. Over-reliance on technology
48. Failure to secure sustained funding
49. Unrealistic timeframes
50. Failure to consider issues associated with scaling up
51. Inability to attract talent to risky new ventures
52. Failure to consider commercialization issues
53. No rewards or recognition program in place
54. No processes in place to get fast feedback
55. No real sense of what your customers really want or need
56. Company hiring process screens out potential innovators

After MBA- What Next?

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Let’s face it; the only true motivation behind doing an MBA is monetary.
It would be the rare person who actually means all the stuff he spouts when trying to answer or reason out his desire for pursuing a business education. I have heard every jazzy word out there in the dictionary, “add value”, “holistic perspective”, “further my prospects”, and “pursue my strengths”. Blah……… blah…………
I was conversing with a guest and far flung acquaintance of mine in my recent trip to Delhi. She is from the blue blooded place, and having an attitude that could well be considered obnoxious. Nowadays however she has tempered down, and was currently working for a B-school teaching, recruiting and placing. She was recounting one session, where the much berated down question of “Why MBA?” was returned with a rather unique response (not verbatim):

“I want to earn money, lots of it and I want to do it the socially revered manner of studying. I have worked for 5 years and now I realize that there is this acceptance that a business graduate is a fast learner. I do not believe it, however to fight in this world if a degree is required then I am prepared to get it. And yes, I am curious to know what 2 years of learning can actually teach me after 5 years of working and learning.”

Bingo, now isn’t that an honest reply. Before you wonder, yes, he got through.
For every wannabe manager out there studying marketing, finance or any other specialization offered one question lingers in mind when the study is in progress. Is this going to help me, is it really going to get me my dream job where I will be dazzling the world with my knowledge and insights?
I have been out for close to a year, and I can see some of the gaps in the expectations and the ground realities.
Knowledge and consequent work mismatch
Firstly, whatever is learnt in terms of specialization is at a very strategic level. The kind of work most end up doing is largely operational irrespective of the domain. And thus to a certain extent MBAs are seen as not being operationally efficient.

Maybe this is the same reason why most of recruitments happening for MBAs are in the field of business consulting, industry research and analytics. The traditional bread and butter sectors of manufacturing, banking etc. may thus not really augur well to a typical MBA.

Education is not Expertise
Secondly, specializations are only indicative of personal interest, they do not instantly make anybody a domain expert.

However, the sentiment in most of the aspiring managers is just the reverse of it, and thus the presence of the big “E” a.k.a. huge ego. Two years of education and they are out to defend the bastions of business established by gray haired veterans having a decade and a half worth of experience. This naturally would not augur well with anyone. You cannot command work or improvements; you would have to persuade them slowly and assiduously.

The above brings us to the obvious question: if whatever taught is neither of immediate relevance nor a substitute for expertise then is it really worthwhile pursing it?
The answer to this is a resounding yes, for the simple reason that nobody ever regrets spending two years in a business school. I have seen people patently unsuitable to be engineers, hating every minute of their education and in it only because of some compulsions. However I do not see that sentiment in a B-school. Here, you may hear cribs about the workload, lamentation about how expensive it is going to be but at the back of your mind you would be happy to make that investment in terms of time and money.
This is because it is the process of the above education that adds value to an individual. When you are continuously taught to evaluate any situation or decision objectively, considering a variety of factors, it structures the thought process.
So learning as applied to any new domain say finance, operations or marketing, no matter how new, becomes faster.

Management Game Tool Theme park

Management Game Tool Theme Park

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Break Even Analysis

Day in Shop floor

A shop floor executive describes the typical situations and problems arising in a day and how he handled them. Many of you may empathize with this narration –
The travel to factory
Every morning as I travel to my company’s factory, some thoughts and questions normally come to my mind, and the same thoughts and questions stroked me today also. “What pending activities should I complete? Will all the workers be present today? If anyone has applied for leave, then what are the backup options? What meetings need to be attended? What updates need to be given to my boss? etc.,” . I get ready mentally to face the challenges in my office. As I keep thinking about all this, my bus reaches the factory.
The Morning attendance
I enter into my boss’s cabin to sign my attendance, which is supposed to be the first activity of the day. My boss is ignorant of the challenges faced by the shop floor executives in their day-to- day life. He is only bothered about the weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual targets. Now, I enter into my shop floor and note down the names of employees in the workshop and mark attendance for them through online.
The Morning session
While taking attendance, I notice that 3 of my sub-ordinates have taken off for the day. Now I’m pressurized to find the alternate resources to fill the space as these are the critical activities. I escalate the requirement to my boss and I receive a prompt reply “The replacement will be made in 30 minutes”. I think to myself if I wait for 30 minutes then it may affect the production, therefore I decide to do the work myself till the standby employees arrive.
This is not the first time I am doing this work, but whenever such a situation occurs I perform the role of an employee, so that the production is not affected. While I do the work I hear a huge cry from one of my employee showing me a broken tool which is supposed to be very critical for his activities. I find the employee very angry because of his broken tool. I call the tool room guy and ask him to replace the broken tool. In the mean time, I try to pacify the employee for the error that has occurred and I take responsibility for the same. I wonder why this employee was over reacting to the situation, as a broken tool was a normal thing. Then I realize that working non-stop for 8 hours in that environment is extremely difficult and it is very natural for him to exhibit this type of behavior.
Finally, the 3 stand-by employees arrive in my shop floor and join the work stream and this relaxes me. However, as I relax, another problem arises. This time I find a bearing component not meeting the quality requirements, leading to assembly problem. This problem needs to be sorted out quickly; otherwise it would stop my production, finally affecting my target. But, I would never allow the problem to persist that long. These kinds of problems are very normal for a shop floor executive, but he should take preventive action so that similar kind of problems doesn’t occur in the future. Therefore, after replacing the bearing component with another one, I look around the stock area and check the quality of the materials. I find many materials of bad quality and immediately inform the supplier quality department. Normally, the supplier quality department doesn’t give a prompt response, but fortunately today they have responded immediately.
The Post lunch session
I remembered that I had to meet my boss and ask him for leave to attend a family function and becase my team had already crossed 50% of the target for the day,I decided to meet him.
Though I was sure my boss wouldn’t accept my request for one week ,as it was a very long time period, I decided to give a try. I mentally prepared myself for the meeting. I entered into his cabin and told him about the progress in the production just to set the correct atmosphere and enable me to elicit favourable reaction from him. Creating the necessary, atmosphere I slowly ask my boss for a week off. The moment I ask, my boss changes gears and starts staring at me. He increases his voice and with a big sigh he asks me “WHAT??Off for a week??”. Immediately, he turns down my request.Then, I start negotiating with him kindly and finally he accepts to provide me 3 days off half-heartedly. Though I was disappointed, I was happy that my request was not completely rejected.
I return back to my shop floor. It is around 3 pm now as I was thinking about the partially fruitful meeting with my boss,I suddenly heard a huge noise just behind me. All the workers had started running and I found that one employee had fallen down and got injured at the assembly line. Immediately, I called up the first aid centre to attend him. The first aid team reacted immediately to the situation and attended our employee. Apparently, some lubricant had spilled over the floor, made the employee to slip and get injured. In order to avoid such situations in the future I thought that instead of having the lubricants in separate tins, special provision could be provided to inject lubricants just over the work station itself. We immediately asked the tool room guy for a small injector and found an old one. This lubricant injector was used in the product testing area. We place the injector over the work station and made some test trials which are successful. Though it was a small improvement made to the work station, I was confident it would benefit a lot of employees in my shop floor.
I felt happy and explained everything to my boss. My boss appreciated me and as a token of that he wanted to reward me something. He increased my leave from 3 to 4 days. Suddenly, I found my watch showing 4pm, indicating that it was the time to catch my bus back home. While leaving from the factory,I always find big smiles on all my colleagues face. Maybe, it is an indicator of the relief each one feels after a hectic day in their shop floors. Though every day is a struggle for the shop floor executives, spending 4 hours travelling on a daily basis, working in a noisy environment, meeting the stiff targets, compromising on their personal life , sometimes we feel the plant is the only place that exists in the world, but we are accustomed to living with all these problems and even enjoy it.
The travel back home
As our bus starts from the plant we chat among ourselves. After a while, I am all alone and some thoughts and questions, that normally come into my mind at this point of the day, starts coming I ask myself “Am I missing something in my life like spending time with my kids, wife, attending family functions, celebrating weekends with my kids and wife, meeting friends?” etc., then I convince myself by saying only if I work hard today, I will be able to place my children in good position tomorrow. Therefore, I feel there is nothing wrong in compromising on some happiness. Although, I am not sure whether I am right or wrong, for the moment I am convinced.
Finally, I reach home. I find my kids doing their home work and my wife busy preparing the dinner. Though I feel like taking my kids and wife out for dinner to share my happiness, I postpone it for the next day as I am very tired. I have my dinner and I go to bed early as I have get up very early next morning to start another hectic day full of interesting and not-so interesting happenings.
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