Do you want change in your organisation, but it is not happening? You could be the problem. Here are some sure ways to stop innovation.
- Regard any new idea from below with suspicion – because it’s new, and because it’s from below
- Insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other levels of management of get their signatures.
- Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticize each other’s proposals. (That saves you the job of deciding: you just pick the survivor).
- Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your praise. (That keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time.
- Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area isn’t working.
- Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently .
- Make decisions to reorganize or change policies in secret and spring them on people unexpectedly. (That also keeps people on their toes).
- Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given out to managers freely. (You don’t want data to fall into the wrong hands).
- Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move people around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
- And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.
From: R. Moss Kanter, The Change Masters, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1983.
