Anyone who has made the most cursory study of human systems knows that one on the up finds a model that works, rises by it and then eventually dies by it as the world changes but all the organically grown, self reinforcing bits of the system - its DNA if you like - keep on reproducing the same system.
Anyone familiar with evolutionary theory knows why - this is the classic evolution to a lower peak in a fitness landscape - its not the true peak, but moving from the sub optimal peak would kill the organism soonest, so it chooses to cling to its hilltop and slowly wither away.
Of course, a huge amount of work - from academics and other professional pundits to snake oil salesmen - has been done on helping corporates stuck up these faux foothills to find the colour of their paradigms shift, and one of the Big Things To Do in the Noughties has been to Foster Innovation - in a safe, predictable, corporate-sanitised way of course.
Sadly, it probably isn't working - three things caught my eye today, all in their own way the arrival at the bleeding obvious by fairly circuitous outes:
(i) This article in the NYT pointing out the blinding insight that Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike (and nor do they think linearly, sequentially or to order). The fascinating thing about this article is that it articulates the extraordinary lengths corporates will go to rediscover what every Medieval King's court Jester and Machiavelli knew - you have to have people "embedded" in the system who would continually poke at it.
(ii) Stowe Boyd pointing to Gary Hamel (he of the Corporate Re-Engineering fame and launcher of a thousand corporate shipwrecks*) who underwent a Damascene Conversion and argued that companies need to start managing themselves less and not necessarily from the centre - Stowe reckons he is becoming a Management Guru Pariah, because he is arguing that Business Schools do not necessarily produce the best and most innovative managers (well there's a surprise...).
(iii) This article in The Register rationally articulating the heart rending saga of the Professional Craftsman Photographer (aka the Lane Hartwell Lament), and in essence how awful it is that user generated media is ruining their livelihood. This ruination of the shutterbugs is (accurately) likened to the Industrial Revolution, but the obvious lesson is ignored - many of the crafts of yesteryear are gone, and many of todays' will go, due to technology. The trick is not to Seize Yesterday, but to Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow.
Anyway, the common thread (and the RIAA set course for oblivion we talked about yesterday) all point to the same issue - All structures exist to replicate themselves.
Pushing the Evolutionary analogy a bit farther, I wonder if it is possible to push any one particular corporate DNA too far off its track - to Innovate Inside as it were - just as cross-breeds of related animal species typically are infertile, and it is often new species from left field that compete and capture new niches.....
*By this I don't mean that Hamel et al personally ruined these companies, just that some appalling stuff was done ostensibly in the name of Business Process Re-Engineering.
