Often what managers say and what they do are two different things.  When a company’s formal rules/systems are not aligned with informal rules/systems there can be confusion, resentment, and misunderstandings that could be avoided if these things were in synch.  Also, different parts of the organization work best within different cultures so even saying that a company “has a culture” may be misleading.  The creative teams (like advertising, design, etc.) may thrive in loosely based teams while functional teams (like accounting, legal, etc.) may need a more rigid structure.  It is important to recognize that and find ways for those sub-cultures to exist while still maintaining ways for them to work together when needed.

For a company to excel at innovation, it must have high levels of creative capabilities, such as R&D, and production capabilities, such as operational execution. Moreover, the people with these capabilities need to work together seamlessly. For example, in setting up wise and decisive approval mechanisms that can separate the wheat from the chaff, companies must take a variety of factors into account — the designers’ original intent, the limitations of downstream production, and the needs of the marketplace — that are typically perceived differently on the creative and production sides.

Getting people to work well together requires not only measuring the successes, but also the failures.  It is as bad to waste time on a bad idea as it is to fail to capture a good one, but often managers focus only on the latter.  Certainly failure should be expected and even encouraged (if you aren’t failing “enough” you are missing out on some opportunities to be sure).  And, of course, companies can learn from failures if they take the time to effectively study them to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.  This article does a nice job exploring all of these concepts.

Right at this moment, in a conference room or at an executive off-site meeting, a group of senior leaders of a large global company are wondering why they aren’t innovating enough. They’re probably focusing on a few specific questions: “Why don’t we have enough good ideas? How can we tell which idea is going to be the next big thing? Why is it so hard to get an idea from the drawing board into the market?” Most telling of all is the question: “Why do we still waste resources on ideas that people don’t believe in?” In other words, even though an idea has been effectively “killed,” it still remains on the agenda, with nobody fully willing to learn from the mistake, put it to rest, and move on to other endeavors.

Are You Killing Enough Ideas?. Companies can improve their innovation performance by getting their formal and informal organizations in sync. Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach. strategy+business. Autumn 2009.