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Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry
April 29, 2009
By Jane Bozarth
By Nancy Tennant Snyder and Deborah L. Duarte, Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 272 pp., $27.95
Unleashing Innovation: This topic is of particular interest to me, as I recently have been subjected to—er, I mean, been an integral part of—a misbegotten series of "innovation" initiatives run from a silo at headquarters. I believe in innovation, and I believe innovation initiatives can work. I've just never seen one that did.
"Unleashing Innovation" offers an inside-out view proving that such initiatives can not only work, but can even transform a company. Page 171 alone is worth the price of the book, and Nancy Tennant Snyder and Deborah Duarte get extra karma points just for writing it. Headed "Cultural Barriers to Creativity," the page opens a glorious discussion of some of Whirlpool's failed approaches to getting its workforce to be more creative, including "creativity" workshops, which (surprise!) were fun but saw little transfer back to the workplace.
Finally, management stopped assuming the problem was with the employees (how can we make them more creative?) but maybe instead with the organization itself. When asked what barriers stood between them and innovation, employees were loud and clear: "Everyone above us can say, 'No,' to an idea." The company "forced an orientation to work that was mechanical and internally focused." The authors pull no punches, admitting gaffes and shortcomings on the path to a culture of innovation, and offer some new ideas for creating a culture that nourishes creativity instead of killing it. And if you haven't yet seen Whirlpool's "Centralpark" site, which offers options for customer choice on electronic interfaces for appliances, then by all means, go Google it. This is innovation.
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