The Creation Challenge
The legendary, 30-year old story of the race between Xerox and Apple to revolutionize the PC industry has been exposed to new light in a recent New Yorker piece titled The Creation Myth which chronicles Steve Job’s 1979 visit to Xerox’s innovation center and how it changed his direction for Apple’s next generation of personal computers.
Forbes writer Steve Denning has provided an equally interesting dissection of the New Yorker piece, commenting on how it has killed some innovation myths and created some new innovation myths.
For example, Denning challenges the belief that “Innovation is mainly about saying yes.” Steve Jobs’s recognized good ideas at Xerox, yes. But he must also be disciplined enough to say no to they many great ideas that come forward which do not fit a simple consumer product.
Denning then goes on to explain how Apple has learned how to combine continuous innovation with disciplined execution, despite the fact that traditional management practices essentially prevent the innovation that is so desperately needed to meet the needs of a demanding customer base and highly skilled work force.
According to Denning, many popular business practices of the last couple decades such as think tanks and open source innovation simply alleviate the problems stemming from a lack of innovation but fail to realize that the need is not solely for new ideas, but openness to the ideas that are available. Companies like Apple, on other hand have made five fundamental “shifts” away from traditional management, transforming them from creators to innovators:
1. The firm’s goal (a shift from making money for shareholders to delighting the customer).
2. The role of managers (a shift from controller of individuals to enabler of self-organizing teams).
3. The mode of coordinating work (a shift from bureaucratic control to dynamic linking).
4. The values practiced (a shift from economic value to the values that will grow the firm: radical transparency and continuous improvement).
5. The communications (a shift from top-down command to adult-to-adult conversation).
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