Established companies strive to achieve ever higher levels of productivity and efficiency, in fact they evolve to deliver such. The focus becomes serving their customers better than their rival competition. The perspective is short term and the long-term priorities of innovation are obscured by the tyranny of the urgent. Trimble says “innovation and ongoing operations are always and inevitably in conflict”. Rewards are for short-term achievement, where every process and activity is driven to be as repeatable and predictable as possible. This kind of performance engine is very powerful in driving efficiency and effectiveness, at least as long as the marketplace stays constant.
However, the power of repeatability and predictability also establishes great limitations for new organic growth. Innovation becomes the last thing a manager is trained to do. Their view of their marketplace becomes narrower, not wider. Metrics drive everything except the most important metrics for innovation; what innovation must measure is too often excluded. In fact, organizational design relentlessly keeps resources and investment trained on the current performance engine at the cost of any emerging S-Curve possibilities.
Still, staying the course must live side-by-side with reinventing at least part of the company. Front and center must be the understanding that while the current Performance Engine is the mainstay of the company, the inevitable reality is that its existence is only temporary. The company’s survival and prosperity is going to depend on the development of new performance engines and new S-Curves. Within the organizational culture it is critical that a mutual respect develops between those that drive the present and those that develop the future.