Today there was great article in McKinsey Quarterly on Innovation Management.

Summary
In this conversation, management guru Gary Hamel and McKinsey’s Lowell Bryan discuss the need for companies to innovate management practices to better cope with and thrive in a business landscape marked by fundamental technological change and globalization.

Why Is It Relevant?

• Salesforce Ideas helps scale innovation and capture new ideas from widely distributed individuals

Gary Hamel (The Future of Management)

The outlines of the 21^st century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. 

When you look at companies like Toyota, you see their ability to mobilize the intelligence of so-called ordinary workers.

Bryan Lowell (Mobilizing Minds: Creating Wealth From Talent in the 21st Century Organizations)

I would argue there’s not 1 company out of 1,000 today that has created an organization in which innovation is truly everyone’s responsibility. If you have a new idea, how much bureaucracy do you have to go through to get a small increment of experimental capital? Are you actually being measured on your innovation performance or your team’s innovation?

Every large company, even a retailer or a mining company, has a large number of thinking-intensive employees who need to collaborate with one another. The winners will be those that enable their thinking-intensive employees to create more profits by putting their collective mind power to better use.

The issue is not just raw innovation; it’s actually being able to scale the innovation through at a large company. That’s where the wealth will be created.