Does Innovation Have Politics?: Part I

Guest Contributor
March 25, 2011

I’m not usually one for management guru literature, but I just finished Bill Taylor’s Practically Radical, and confess to having sincerely enjoyed it.  Essentially, it’s a compilation of fascinating stories about organizations making transformative change, and only peripherally embellished with jargony tips and tricks.  What most interested me was the explicit and implicit theme running through the book: To innovate and change in circumstances of high uncertainty and fierce competition, organizations must decentralize power, both internally, from executive leadership to frontline staff, and externally, from the organization to its consumers.  This comes as no surprise to people familiar with organizational adaptability and innovation, but I’m looking to get my hands a little dirtier.  And hence the title of this post, a reference to technology philosopher Langdon Winner’s article Do Artifacts Have Politics, which explores how technologies can have political properties.  Similarly, I’m wondering how innovation can have political properties.  

For context, let’s looks at examples of decentralization from the book.  Organizations that decentralize power internally include Brazilian retailer Magazine Luiza, which gives frontline staff the autonomy to approve credit for customers, and the Orpheus Orchestra, which goes to the extent of omitting a permanent conductor, opting instead for a model of rotational leadership.  Organizations that decentralize power externally to consumers, on the other hand, include shoe retailer John Fluevog, which allows its consumers to design and even name the shoes, and the poster child of co-creative innovation, Threadless, which Inc. magazine described with the headline, The Customer Is the Company.  “Threadless completely blurs the line of who is a producer and who is a consumer.  The customers end up playing a critical role across all operations: idea generation, marketing, sales forecasting.  All that has been distributed” (p. 254).  As a case in point, Glenn Jones, former celebrity Threadless consumer – or more accurately, prosumer, to use Alvin Toffler’s visionary term – has since become a full-time Threadless producer, namely the company’s Art Director.  In this way, we arrive at the conclusion that innovation and change entail, in Taylor’s own words, “a looser, more flexible, more humane culture,” which gives “lots of different people…a voice in the decision-making process” by putting “elements of the business in the hands of its members – not just the process of design, but day-to-day, operating decisions that are traditionally the purview of serious, full-time executives” (pp. 208, 257, 254).   In short, in today’s uncertain and competitive business landscape, organizational innovation and change, and furthermore the capacity for organizational innovation and change, require a more democratic model of leadership.  The argument this book makes isn’t just practically radical; it’s straight-up radical. 

Certainly, this argument is somewhat of a cliché; organizational consultants advocating adaptability and innovation have been encouraging executives to empower their employees since the 1980’s.  That aside, I was struck by its modern-day implications.  First, the external democratization of power bears implications for human resource management, as recruitment in some cases shifts from active headhunting to a more organic trajectory from consumer to prosumer to employee.  It also bears implications for the what kinds of decision-making voices will increasingly be present at the table, namely those of wholly “different people.”  Will companies selling to the bottom of the pyramid give their otherwise disenfranchised consumers a say in operating decisions?  Will brands distribute decision-making power to other stakeholders along the supply chain, i.e. suppliers?  And will they somehow compensate these “different people” for their contributions?  Related, democratizing leadership bears implications for due compensation – how to appropriately compensate consumers who “may never work for you but are eager to work with you,” especially if there’s no “lone genius” and they work in a collaborative way (pp. 223, 199)?  Is it sufficient to let consumers name their creations, which still bear and ultimately benefit the organization’s brand name, or should there be more explicit mechanisms for building prosumers’ personal or even collective brand equity? 

Another striking implication of innovation requiring democratic leadership is its implications on the products themselves.  Taylor quotes The New Yorker’s James Traub observing that “’it is as if the process that Orpheus uses to achieve a common sense of purpose reproduces itself in the harmony of the music’” (p. 204).  To which I’d respond, how could it be otherwise?  How could a product – whether a musical performance, soft drink, or otherwise – not somehow manifest the process of its production?  How will more democratic processes of production affect the nature of the musical performances, soft drinks, and other products that are produced?  If we can hear democratic leadership in Orpheus’ music, I imagine we’ll be able to taste, smell, and otherwise experience it.  

Finally, I was struck by what the argument that innovation entails democratization implies for the function of large brands within the broader socio-economic system.  Recent years have witnessed the trend of brands articulating themselves as platforms, offering their consumers branded utility – read: public goods and services – traditionally considered the purview of government (take note political philosophers, this might confuse things a bit).  Nike no longer offers only running shoes but Nike+iPod, a social media platform for improving running performance that notably need not be used with Nike shoes.  Meaningfully, mega online clothing retailer Zappos describes its goal not in terms of maximizing each individual transaction, but in terms of building a lifelong relationship with each individual customer (p. 182).  If brands must democratize power to maintain innovativeness and adaptability, which drives them towards platformization and branded utility, then we have real reason to be optimistic. 

But what struck me the most about this argument, which I’ll elaborate on in Part II of this series, is this: The argument that organizational innovation and adaptability require a decentralization of power suggests an inherently direct relationship between innovation and equitability.  Why should innovation and adaptability be directly correlated with democratization and equitability?  Chew on that for a moment.  And stay tuned…

This post was contributed by Guest Blogger Stephanie Gerson, check back next week for Part II!