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Management dilemma: Efficiency vs. trying out something new

As I was reading The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book written by Clayton Christensen I was struck, for example, by the following passage on page 188:
"One of the dilemmas of management is that, by their very nature, processes are established so that employees perform recurrent tasks in a consistent way, time after time. To ensure consistency, they are meant not to change – or if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures."

In this regard, Gary Hamel writes the following in this blog posting:
"Fact is, most businesses were never built to change - they were built to do one thing exceedingly well and highly efficiently - forever."

I’d like to ask you how you solve this dilemma. What do you, yourself, do, when you have an idea about something which you think somebody should do differently in order to create more value for customers and for shareholders? To whom do you communicate your idea? Which communication technology do you use to communicate your idea? And how do you formulate your idea? It would be great if you could come up with one or more examples?

Comments

Unknown said…
Here's an article that relates to the topic: The yin and yang of improvement and innovation.

http://www.innovationtools.com/News/news-detail.asp?NewsID=3441
Unknown said…
Here's another interesting posting on the topic:

http://www.realinnovation.com/content/c090209a.asp

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