Fearing Change?
These days, everyone is talking about "innovation." Companies and employees have to innovate or busi-ness will sink. I recently mentioned to a colleague that creativity is also important, but he quickly replied: "No, creativity is out. It's innovation now."
I wasn't sure what he meant by that, or how true that is, but one thing is for certain: everyone seems to feel the need to innovate these days. High-level managers are especially pressured to put some kind of innovation in place, even if it is not clear how necessary or wise this innovation might be.
The need to innovate was inspired by the information technology (IT) revolution. While the IT industry has lost some steam this year, it was the force behind the amazing growth that we saw during the last decade in the United States. Other U.S. sectors were quick to adopt technological innovations - making them more productive when compared to companies abroad.
I believe many companies, especially in Mexico, rush to buy new technology, hoping it will work miracles immediately. However, the result is often disasterous, with companies buying and stubbornly holding on to instruments and software that no one uses. When managers push through technological changes without fully planning costs, training or company use, these "innovations" are anything but.
As an example, let me talk about the very popular business application software, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). If used correctly, ERP cuts duplicated effort, imposes standards across the company, speeds up order deliveries and gives managers direct and instant access to every possible piece of information they might need at any given time. It is extremely costly to install and requires extensive training, but in the era of information technology and globalized transactions, the program is quickly becoming indispensable.
Yet, when I talked to some of my clients in Mexico who have the program, I discovered that most people in the company don't use it. There are a number of reasons why, but the biggest reason is lack of training. Those initially trained have left the company (possibly because they got a better offer as a result of knowing how to use the software) and the company has run out of financial resources to provide yet another training program.
A second reason is cultural. The program is only successful if all the people involved enter the information that is necessary on a regular and complete basis. Otherwise, what you get is the old axiom in computer technology: garbage-in, garbage-out. However, doing this requires an environment of trust - oftentimes lacking in Mexican companies - so that people do not fear that the information they share with others will be used against them.
Innovation, it seems, is only as good as the planning behind it. What amazes me is that these considerations - compatibility of the innovation, degree of complexity and training - are variables that were already studied in-depth more than 30 years ago!
Since the 1960s, there has been much concern about how to get the less-developed regions of the world up to par with developed countries. One dominant theory holds that this can be accomplished through a rapid and successful diffusion of innovations. Countless studies have been done on what makes people willing to adopt or reject innovations, and guess what they discovered? The more complex and the less compatible the innovation is with social and cultural norms, the less likely it will be accepted.
Here we are in the year 2001, and we are still confronting these same issues. It seems that innovation is not, after all, new. Nor is it a panacea for all of a company's woes.
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