A former P&G colleague sent me this article from the Forbes Entrepreneur Blog:  Your Business Model is Killing Innovation.

The author points out one of the great problems in modern corporate culture.  The beliefs and behaviors required to drive efficiency and consistency -especially in financial results- don’t play well with those beliefs and behaviors that produce great innovation.

Unfortunately, the author trips himself up in the jargon of “business model”, suggesting that the “process” of running the current business is in conflict with the “process” of inventing new business.  It isn’t process.  It is culture.

Increasingly corporations can’t walk and chew gum at the same time because senior leaders try to rely on process alone.

In your kitchen, you can wash the dishes the same way every evening but be very nimble and creative in how you prepare dinner.  No onion in the pantry, no problem.  Why can’t corporations … which, after all, are collections of human beings … be this adaptable?

The pursuit of efficiency and repeatability is useful and important, no doubt.  But too often, this pursuit leads to the belief that human behavior and creativity needs to be subjugated to the process-flow diagram.  Leaders fall in love with Deming’s idiotic dictum:  “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.”  They forget that before there was a process, there was an idea; and when the process doesn’t work anymore, there is need of an idea.

My view is that a great business success is a great idea realized … not a superior process or model implemented.  What do you think?