Before I decided to create my own business, I used to work in one of the biggest, old and traditional company in Thailand. This almost 100 years old company play the very important part in Thailand's economic system. It produces many construction materials such as cement, roof-tile and also produces many kinds of paper. In addition, it came in to petrochemical about 15 years ago too.
As you see, this company is very big. It has many businesses to do. Please guess how many employees in this organization.
.
.
.
.
.
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20,000
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.
.
No, I didn't type it wrong again. It's really almost 20,000 people.
This organization look like a big elephant in my opinion, and in top managers' vision also. So they try to change something by launching a project called "Inno People"!!!
Exactly, the word "Inno" in this project comes from innovation. In this campaign, we have the whole friday afternoon to brainstorming about how to develop our routine work. You may propose anything like you find the way how to shorten the operation period in recruiting new employee process or you find a new way to produce very creative services and products, or even such a very small deal like you find the way to prevent the accident which maybe occur in the toilet!
So, we, the employees, use this 3,30 hours period to create anything we want it to be and that sounds great!!! We have a freedom in this giant and conservative company!!!
However, we still have some problems about it, when we propose something new but the manager level doesn't agree with you, your idea will face the wall to climb. That's mean your project won't be taken the real action in the real world (and it's always drop in this case)
Why???
Truthfully, I'm not sure. I don't want to blame just in the side of the bosses who sometimes have the conservative thinking and don't want anything to be changed but also maybe it because our new idea are really bad and cannot be successful definitely.
In my opinion, the company coming in the right way but the problem is "How could we know that the innovative ideas will be successful?" And in this case, if you cannot answer this question, they will cancel your idea.
What do you think? Anyone knows how to fix this puzzle?
Bell
1 comment:
Hi Panut,
Thank you for a thought-provoking comment!
I'm not sure I know how to solve the puzzle, I'm afraid. However, I could probably give you some ideas that might bring you closer to solution...
A you know, creativity has two major problems; it's
a) disruptive
b) costly
at least, from the point of view of a large, hierarchical company, especially if it's engaged in mass production.
This could be a part of the answer why managers at your former company paid little attention to creative solutions. If a manager does not have a personal interest in a novel solution, s/he is quite unlikely to support it, because implementation would bring him a lot of work and very unclear chances of success.
To make a company thrive on creativity you need to foster a creativity culture. Japanese managers know how to do it...
Veronica
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