Innovation and Communication

Two of the key elements in a world-class organization, as defined by the Baldrige model, are innovation and communication. In “Eight Communication Traps That Foil Innovation” (HBR, January 12, 2011), Georgia Everse, who was the chief communications officer for Steelcase, argues that innovative ideas, initiatives, and products need smart communications to succeed. She proposes eight traps to avoid as you innovate. Here’s the positive action you can take to avoid those traps:

1. Link innovation to your mission and vision. Projects are more likely to succeed if they support your organization’s reason for being.
2. Make your thinking visible. Create a space where project teams can post charters, objectives, process diagrams, measurement trends, prototyping efforts, etc. to help teams stay on track, reinforce their goals, and bring new stakeholder quickly up to speed.
3. Follow well-defined innovation processes. Develop and refine innovation processes to ensure consistent progress and results.
4. Follow well-defined communication processes. Don’t wait until the team is ready to hand the innovation off for production or marketing or integrating it into your culture. Communicate from the start the opportunities, the options being explored, progress on the project, and your innovative solutions.
5. Bring the future to life. “Tell stories and create experiences that put [internal stakeholders] in the role of the customer, where they can touch and feel a prototype of the new product or service.”
6. Share insights into customer wants and needs. “The best ideas are born out of a discovery process that unveils insights into the behavior patterns…

Which Side of the Digital Divide Is Your Organization On?

The Baldrige Criteria ask how you communicate within and outside your organization and how you collect and transfer knowledge. The best answers to those questions are moving in a digital direction.

Here’s a quick quiz to determine if your organization is “switched off” for digital or “switched on,” courtesy of Jeffrey F. Rayport (“Does Your Company Need a Digital Readiness Checklist?” Harvard Business Review, February 9, 2010).

• We use a “walled garden” client like Lotus Notes for email, calendar, and contacts vs. we use an “open platform” like Outlook that facilitates easy connectivity.
• Our technology staff behaves as if we work for IT vs. our technology staff knows it works for us by enabling our productivity and output.
• Our organization’s policies block external streaming media, social networking, and some commercial sites to PCs and apps downloads to mobile devices vs. our policies embrace external media streams in all formats and from all sources.
• Our day-to-day communications rely on extended voicemail and lengthy face-to-face meetings vs. our daily communications rely on email, IM, phone, and concise face-to-face meetings.
• Internal communications are infrequent and randomly issued and take the form of “official” memos vs. frequent and regularly issued internal communications in the form of email employing rich media.
• Our intranet lacks or has limited social media features and crowd-sourcing of ideas vs. our intranet is abundant with social media features to encourage collaboration and crowd-sourcing.
• Our knowledge management system is hierarchical, top-down, and run by KM “professionals” vs. our knowledge management system…

The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise

When you’re doing Baldrige, it’s easy to get immersed in fixing the problems with your management system, which is good as long as you also keep looking outside your organization to see if adopting a new system should get as much attention as improving the old one.

For example, Padmasree Warrior wrote on Cisco’s blog (click here) about the Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise (NGCE), which is a very different type of management system. Here’s how she describes it:

Priorities are set by clusters of experts that make decisions. Decisions are communicated real-time through social media applications. Work is shared on a secure collaboration technology platform. Individuals are able to apply themselves to the work based on their skills and availability, regardless of their geographic location. Expertise outside the Enterprise is included ‘on-demand’ to bring necessary knowledge to bear. Funding is directed based on milestones. Direct accountability is embedded into the social network. Finally, organizational functions become less relevant and ‘Re-orgs’ become obsolete. Leadership is defined as the ability to influence, envision, and execute―rather than the authority to command and control.

Despite its innovative design, NGCEs must still address the components of a management system addressed by the Baldrige Criteria, which Warrior lists as “strategy and planning, delivering value to customers and partners, human capital, innovation and design, manufacturing and distribution, marketing, and messaging.”

Best and Worst for Employees

Glassdoor.com just announced its second annual Employees’ Choice Awards for best—and worst—places to work. Nearly 100,000 employees completed a 20-question survey on the site in 2009. Survey questions addressed employee attitudes about career opportunities, communication, compensation and benefits, employee morale, recognition and feedback, senior leadership, work/life balance, and fairness and respect. Once the overall ratings are calculated, Glassdoor.com may exclude a company from the list for detrimental acts by management or other negative company events.

This list is obviously not scientific but it does provide a general sense of who does well or poorly on employee engagement. At the Glassdoor.com Web site, you can click on a company in the list or search by company name and get more details about how many people rated it and their pros, cons, and advice to senior management.

The top 25 best places to work are:

1. Southwest Airlines
2. General Mills
3. Slalom Consulting
4. Bain & Company
5. McKinsey & Company
6. MITRE
7. Boston Consulting
8. Continental Airlines
9. Procter & Gamble
10. Juniper Networks
11. Northwestern Mutual
12. Kraft Foods
13. National Instruments
14. Google
15. NetApp
16. Goldman Sachs
17. FactSet
18. Medtronic
19. Publix
20. Chevron
21. FedEx
22. Apple
23. Edelman
24. Edward Jones
25. QUALCOMM

Companies in the next 25 included Caterpillar (#35), Turner Broadcasting (#36), Intel (#41), Best Buy (#45), and Whole Foods (#48).

The 10 worst companies to work for, according to Glassdoor.com, are:

1. Gibson Guitar
2. United Airlines
3. Spherion
4. AutoZone
5. Rain Bird
6. DHL Express (USA)
7. Level 3 Communications
8. Dominion Enterprises
9. Hertz
10. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

To learn more about employee satisfaction, read:

• 10 Critical Questions: Your Workforce
• Bottom-Line Value of Employee Engagement
• 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
• Effective Employee Communication
• What Employees Want

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