Page 205 - Free the Idea Monkey

In the aftermath of the announcement, we at Maddock
Douglas applaud. (Innovation is our business after all.) Wall Street
applauds—and the stock price rises. And there is a renewed opti-
mism among the rank and file in the halls of the sleepy company.

And then something unfortunate happens. Nothing.
Nothing happens.
Nothing at all.
After a blizzard of memos outlining what the “new” company
is going to look like, nothing changes. Why? Blame it on the inevi-
table outcome when a bull meets a grizzly bear—and a bunch of his
friends—in the woods.

THE REAL BEARS IN THE WOODS
In the world of investments, there are

bears and there are bulls. The bears say
things are going to get worse and the bulls opti-
mistically and aggressively place bets that not
only won’t that be the case, but that everything
is going to get better.
In the world of corporate innovation, the bullish CEO (“We can
reinvent our industry”) is often a bull who makes the unfortunate
mistake of surrounding himself with bears.
I love bullish CEOs, but I am pretty sick of working with
bears. Bears tend to nod a lot in meetings and then passive aggres-
sively do everything in their power to keep any significant change
from happening. To the CEO’s face they say innovation effort is, in
fact, truly needed. When he is out of sight, they
whisper to everyone in the senior ranks that
things are just fine as they are. (All of us here
on the executive level have jobs, don’t we?)

190 S O L V I N G T H E I N N O V A T I O N N I G H T M A R E