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In The Cure for Corporate Inertia, Julian Birkinshaw discusses the difficulty of trying to change how companies actually go about their daily activities, quoting the above adage as a reminder that so few actually manage it. He outlines three main reasons that the actual business of running a business is so difficult to change (and thus unwittingly stifles much of the would-be innovation work its executives are nominally aiming to achieve): Management processes are a long way from the action; there are strong vested interests at play, and last but by no means least, management processes are “usually dependent on each other.” Of the last, he writes:
Together they create a tightly-woven matrix that cannot easily be pulled apart. If you try to change one process, you upset a further two or three others, and pretty soon you are taking on the entire system.
Birkinshaw, who’s professor of strategic and international management at London Business School, has some sensible advice for those looking to get around these familiar sounding problems, while he adds some tales from his own experience that sound awfully familiar. Well worth a read.
(Story via Umair Haque.)
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