I hear your frustration about trying to get funding for an innovation initiative. It's like a lap of high hurdles at the track meet, yes?
I remember sitting down with a senior executive who was pissed about the bureaucracy of her old-line organization. See had proposed a new innovation center outside headquarters. (In fact it was in the next country). Each department head and process owner was throwing into process their requirements for gaining their approval. She saw that responding to each and incorporating their suggestions were slowly killing the initiative.
A bureaucracy can often be gauged by the number of hand-offs and approvals required to get something done. The more steps, the more bureaucracy.
I told her about Gordon MacKenzie's story. He was the head of creative at Hallmark Cards, responsible for the developing the new lines and messages. Hallmark was in many ways a traditional, old-line organization. The corporate "antibodies" surrounded changes and worked hard to expunge them from the status quo.
So Gordon wrote a book, called "Orbiting the Giant Hairball."[1] In a short, very entertaining read, he described how change can happen in an old organization. His central metaphor, as the title suggests was orbiting the bureaucratic hairball. The thing about orbiting is that you have enough distance not to be sucked in by the antibodies, but close enough to maintain a relationship, especially for investment.
Sometimes the distance of an orbit needs to be physical, locating the new initiative in another state or country (like our senior exec was doing) [2]. Sometimes the distance is a funky decor that screams "new here". But as any orbiting planet will tell you, you need to maintain a distance. |