{"id":3305,"date":"2010-01-11T05:30:26","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T05:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3305"},"modified":"2010-01-11T05:30:26","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T05:30:26","slug":"innovating-institutional-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3305","title":{"rendered":"Innovating Institutional Cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Hagel<\/a><\/strong> is in a small category of thinkers who manage to routinely be thinking ahead of the curve ( he calls his blog, where he\u00a0features longer\u00a0but more infrequent posts than is typical,\u00a0\u00a0Edge Perspectives<\/a><\/strong>). I want to draw attention to the core conclusion of his latest:<\/p>\n

Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback<\/a><\/p>\n

Innovation blowback
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Five years ago, John Seely Brown and I wrote an article for the McKinsey Quarterly<\/em> entitled <\/strong>“Innovation Blowback: Disruptive Management Practices from Asia.”<\/strong><\/a> In that article, we described a series of innovations emerging in Asia that were much more fundamental than isolated product or service innovations. We\u00a0drew attention to a different form of innovation – <\/strong>institutional innovation<\/strong><\/a>. In arenas as diverse as motorcycles, apparel, turbine engines and consumer electronics, we detected a much more disruptive form of innovation.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

In these very diverse industries, we saw entrepreneurs re-thinking institutional arrangements across very large numbers of enterprises, offering all participants an opportunity to learn faster and innovate more effectively by working together. While Western companies were lured into various forms of financial leverage, these entrepreneurs were developing sophisticated approaches to capability leverage in scalable business networks that could generate not just one product innovation, but an accelerating stream of product and service innovations. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

….\u00a0Institutional innovation is different – it defines new ways of working together, ways that can scale much more effectively across large numbers of very diverse enterprises. It provides ways to flexibly reconfigure capability while at the same time building long-term trust based relationships that help participants to learn faster. That’s a key breakthrough – arrangements that support scalable trust building, flexibility and learning at the same time. Yet this breakthrough is occurring largely under the radar of most Western executives, prisoners of mindsets that prevent them from seeing these radical changes. <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hagel is describing a mindset that is decentralized and adaptive with a minimum of barriers to entry that block participation or information flow. One that should be very familiar to readers who are aware of John Boyd’s<\/a><\/strong> OODA Loop<\/a>, the stochastic\/stigmergic innovation model\u00a0of John Robb’s<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0Open Source Warfare<\/a>, Don Vandergriff’s<\/a><\/strong> Adaptive Leadership methodology <\/a>and so on. It’s a vital paradigm to grasp in order to navigate and thrive in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

Western executives (think CEO) may be having difficulty grasping the changes that Hagel describes because they run counter to cultural trends emerging among this\u00a0generation of transnational elites ( not just big\u00a0business).\u00a0Increasingly,\u00a0formerly quasi-meritocratic and democratic Western\u00a0elites in their late thirties to early sixties\u00a0are\u00a0quietly embracing oligarchic\u00a0social stratification <\/a>and use political or institutional power to “lock in” the comparative advantages they currently enjoy by crafting double standards\u00a0through opaque, unaccountable authorities issuing complex and contradictory\u00a0regulations<\/a>, special exemptions and insulating ( isolating) themselves socially and physically<\/a> from the rest of society. It’s a careerism on steroids reminiscient of the corrupt\u00a0nomenklatura<\/a> of the late Soviet period.<\/p>\n

As the elite\u00a0cream off resources and access for themselves they are increasingly cutting off the middle-class from the tools of social mobility<\/a> and legal equality through policies that drive up barriers to entry <\/a>and participation<\/a> in the system. Such\u00a0a worldview\u00a0is inherently zero-sum<\/strong> <\/a>and cannot be expected to\u00a0notice or value non-zero sum<\/strong> <\/a>innovations.<\/p>\n

In all probability, as an emergent class of\u00a0rentiers<\/a>, they fear such innovations when they recognize them. If allowed to solidify their position into a permanent, transnational,\u00a0governing class, they will take Western society in a terminal downward spiral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Hagel is in a small category of thinkers who manage to routinely be thinking ahead of the curve ( he calls his blog, where he\u00a0features longer\u00a0but more infrequent posts than is typical,\u00a0\u00a0Edge Perspectives). I want to draw attention to the core conclusion of his latest: Challenging Mindsets: From Reverse Innovation to Innovation Blowback Innovation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[360,361,46,590,9,151,277,309,215,476,132,332,37,17,425,326,490,78,388,336,338,303,492,465,545,549,14,372,588,77,380,187,180,381,26,13,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-21st-century","category-america","category-analytic","category-capitalism","category-complexity","category-conspiracy","category-corporations","category-criminals","category-culture","category-democracy","category-dystopia","category-economics","category-futurism","category-global-guerillas","category-government","category-hagel","category-hierarchy","category-ideas","category-innovation","category-intellectuals","category-john-boyd","category-john-robb","category-leadership","category-legitimacy","category-liberty","category-markets","category-networks","category-non-state-actors","category-oligarchy","category-open-source","category-organizations","category-politics","category-rule-sets","category-society","category-stochastic","category-theory","category-vandergriff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}