innovation-change-management.pptVIP

* It’s an old idea, and yet it remains new, mostly because we still haven’t figured out how to make it work. Big-time decentralization dates back to the 1920s. Henry Ford’s little outfit was walloping Alfred Sloan’s little outfit. Ford, creator of the first effective system of mass production, was giving every man the chance to own a car for a few hundred dollars -- the Model T -- and, as Ford apparently bragged, “in any color you want, as long as it’s black.” Then Sloan had a profound--and profoundly simple--idea: to reorganize his company, General Motors, into divisions such as the Chevrolet Division, the Buick Division, the Pontiac division, and so on. Each division was an enterprise within the enterprise, with its own brand and would attract a different type of customer and capture a different segment of the market. Sloan’s tactic worked so well that, by the dawning of World War II, he had accelerated past Ford. A brief update and moral to the story: GM nearly lost it again in the 1980s. Its independent divisions were independent in name only. Now, GM is setting about to challenge a spunky Ford once more by, you guessed it, really decentralizing. General Motors is promoting brand management within each of its divisions, and it is finding out how hard it is to really decentralize, to really create product families that are distinctive in character and personality. * Negroponte, who heads the highly innovative, highly respected Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has allowed us no wiggle room at all. He could easily have said, “Incrementalism is an enemy of innovation.” The idea would still be profound, but with a lowercase p. But he said that incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. That’s Profound. What he means is that if you are spending every waking professional hour making “it” a bit better than yesterday, then, necessarily, you aren’t spending every waking hour working on reinventing it, blowing it up. The two notions are in tens