Page 159 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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152 THE PRACTICE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

possible. But then at least one limits further efforts and makes sure
that productive resources of men and money are no longer devoured
by yesterday. This is the right thing to do in any event to maintain the
health of the organization: every organism needs to eliminate its
waste products or else it poisons itself. It is, however, an absolute
necessity, if an enterprise is to be capable of innovation and is to be
receptive to it. “Nothing so powerfully concentrates a man’s mind as
to know that he will be hung on the morning,” Dr. Johnson was fond
of saying. Nothing so powerfully concentrates a manager’s mind on
innovation as the knowledge that the present product or service will
be abandoned within the foreseeable future.
Innovation requires major effort. It requires hard work on the part
of performing, capable people—the scarcest resource in any organi-
zation. “Nothing requires more heroic efforts than to keep a corpse
from stinking, and yet nothing is quite so futile,” is an old medical
proverb. In almost any organization I have come across, the best peo-
ple are engaged in this futile effort; yet all they can hope to accom-
plish is to delay acceptance of the inevitable a little longer and at
great cost.
But if it is known throughout the organization that the dead will
be left to bury their dead, then the living will be willing—indeed,
eager—to go to work on innovation.
To allow it to innovate, a business has to be able to free its best
performers for the challenges of innovation. Equally it has to be able
to devote financial resources to innovation. It will not be able to do
either unless it organizes itself to slough off alike the successes of the
past, the failures, and especially the “near-misses,” the things that
“should have worked” but didn’t. If executives know that it is com-
pany policy to abandon, then they will be motivated to look for the
new, to encourage entrepreneurship, and will accept the need to
become entrepreneurial themselves. This is the first step—a form of
organizational hygiene.
2. The second step, the second policy needed to make an existing
business “greedy for new things,” is to face up to the fact that all
existing products, services, markets, distributive channels, processes,
technologies, have limited—and usually short—health and life
expectancies.
An analysis of the life cycle of existing products, services, and so on
has become popular since the 1970s. Some examples are the strategy
concepts advocated by the Boston Consulting group; the books on strat-