How Much Innovation You'll Have Next Year

I never touched a gun in my life. That and that alone forever doomed to me to middle management."

-Steve Martin in "My Blue Heaven"

I'm going to tell you today exactly how much innovation there will be in your organization in the coming year. But before I do I need to tell the story that got me thinking...

A man named Joe Doyle went to a Drivers License Bureau in Atlanta and took his place in the main line. Forty-five minutes later he reached the head of that line, and once there, found this sign: "If you are here to renew your license, you do not need to be in this line."

I doubt you're shocked by that incident. Indeed, I suspect the typical reaction would be, "Typical." We've been trained to have low expectations of government service. (Dennis Miller described the speed of service at his post office as "underwater tai chi.")

But think of what it's like to be one of the employees. At the Drivers License bureaus in Georgia, employee morale was so low that one staffer told Joe Doyle that his colleagues, forced to wear shirts with departmental insignia, were too embarrassed to eat lunch at a nearby Waffle House. (I don't know about your experience with Waffle House, but at the one near my house you could walk into wearing nothing but a hula skirt and a fez and no one would notice, so you can imagine how ashamed these poor staffers much have felt.)

But back to Doyle, standing in line: He wasn't there to get his license renewed, he was trying to figure out how to renew government service in the state of Georgia.

Doyle was an entrepreneur who'd sold his business and retired. He took a state job in Georgia, mostly for something to do. He was so na•ve about working in a government bureaucracy that shortly after arriving on the job, when he heard that the governor had asked for suggestions on improving the quality of the state government, he took it seriously, and wrote five pages, single-spaced. That memo not only got read, but ended up getting him the assignment to head up a new service initiative.

Let's stop and consider that last detail. Joe Doyle happened to arrive early in the first term of a new governor, Sonny Perdue, who was himself a former entrepreneur. In fact, the governor had set out a big goal, to make Georgia the best-run state in the country. One of the ways that he intended to move up in the rankings was by issuing this vision: "Georgia will have the best customer service of any state in the nation," and, in Doyle's words, "We could all tell he was serious about it." Doyle was given the assignment of making it happen. Next time I'll explain just how he is pulling off that trick, piling up service innovations, but for today, I want to tell you just how much innovation you'll have at your department or company next year.

Innovation is slippery business; it slides down the to-do list, day after day, important but still there, delay-able, like religion or dieting or reading my last book. Only when someone grabs hold of innovation and puts it at the top of the list does it happen. Saying innovation is critical doesn't count. Listing it in the Mission Statement doesn't count. Making promotion and firing decisions based on innovation counts. Putting it in the bonus calculation counts.

So, how much innovation will you have next year? Exactly as much as the leader demands.

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Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators' Lab.  His latest book is "(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success" (John Wiley & Sons).  Please write to him in care of King Features Syndicate, 300 W. 57th ST, 15th Fl, New York, NY 10019, or at dale@dauten.com.

Copyright © 2009, King Features Syndicate

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