Eight Attributes of Innovative Companies
- A bias for action: Even though these companies may be analytical in their approach to decision making, there are not paralyzed by that fact.
- Close to the customer: These companies learn from the people they serve. The provide unparalled quality, service, and reliability—things that work and last.
- Autonomy & Entrepreneurship: The innovative companies foster many leaders and many innovators throughout the organization. They are a hive for champions.
- Productivity through people: The excellent companies treat the rank and file as the root source of quality and productivity gain. They do not regard capital investment as the fundamental source of efficiency improvement.
- Hands-on, value driven: All Innovative companies are agile and give lot of focus on values.
- Stick to the knitting: While there may be few exceptions, the odds for excellent performance seem strongly to favour those companies that stay reasonably close to business they know.
- Simple form, lean staff: The underlying structural forms and systems in the excellent companies are elegantly simple.
- Simultaneous loss-tight properties: The excellent companies are both centralized and decentralized.
Most of these eight attributes are not startling. Some of them are very simple, but Real power lies in Simplicity.