Innovation and Change Management
Innovation is about strategic change. General Electric has used Crotonville to develop a course—Leadership, Innovation, and Growth (LIG)— to embed innovation into GE’s DNA. One of the features of LIG is that in-tact management teams from different GE businesses participate—as opposed to individual executives participating. Team based learning leads to long-term and sustained growth.
In the January 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review, there is an article on “How GE Teaches Teams to Lead Change." The article documents how GE has developed and executed LIG as a change management tool to drive innovation. An integral part of the course is the 3 Box approach to strategy and innovation. Projects in 2009 should be in one of the following 3 boxes: Box 1 (Manage the Present), Box 2 (Selectively Forget the Past), or Box 3 (Create the Future). Corporations typically over-emphasize Box 1, yet the desirable approach is to have balance across all 3 Boxes. (For more details on the 3 Box approach to strategy and innovation, visit my website www.vg-tuck.com).
The Harvard Business Review article describes how GE uses the 3 Box language to set strategic priorities. What have been your experiences in executing innovation during these difficult economic times?
Comments
VG-
Our firm has utilized your 3-Box framework to help us align our present with our future. As a team that likes to think in 3-D, we wrote our planning initiatives on small boxes of equal weight and then placed them in three boxes representing the present, forgetting the past, and the future.
Holding each bucket clearly showed the unbalanced weight that we placed in - you guessed it - the present. This was a real eye-opener for us. Since innovation is one of our core values and one of the driving forces of our success to date, it was shock to see that we were neglecting something that is fundamental in our business. Since then, we're re-instituted our mandate that 20% of our work week be devoted to learning and driving innovation as teams.
Thank you for the great tool, VG. We like to think we brought a little of Crotonville to San Diego. :)
-johnny
Posted by: Johnny Chan | February 10, 2009 08:24 PM