Innovation Practice - Telenor

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Management
• Create an environment of care, trust, and sharing
• Must provide learning opportunities to attract and retain talent
• Continuous questioning of assumptions and established truths
• Larger difference between managing status quo and leading change
• Create alignment between organisational and personal values and goals
• Understanding of the nature and contribution of knowledge and competence
• Focus on incentive systems and the processes of interaction and value
creation
• Balance between short and long term goals; Sustainability and Shareholder
Value
• Empowerment of people and communities through diffusing and distributing
control
Knowledge workers
• Lifelong learning
• Increased flexibility
• Increased interconnectedness
• Increased learning on demand
• Shorter time to respond to changes
• Increased need to master complex behaviour
• Increased use of IT and learning technologies
• Shorter time for exploration and experimentation
• Willingness to accept responsibility for own actions
Required for success (adapted from Carlsen, Syed & Välikangas
(1999): Knowledge Collectives as Complex Systems, SRI Business
Intelligence Program)
We must find ways to foster intellectual capital that becomes inextricably
bound to a sense of personal meaning.
– John Seely Brown (1999), Sustaining the Ecology of Knowledge, Leader to
Leader, No. 12
Need for meaning
Core products
Core competence
Communities of practice
Individual competence
Organisational core competence
Innovation is about utilising an idea. If there is an idea
which describes a real market need, one must judge if
one has resources to develop the product or service
and to get it in front of customers. On the one hand,
such resources could be tangibles such as money,
property, machinery and infrastructure. But intangibles
such as competence and organisational capabilities
are equally important and require deep insight into
the knowledge and competence of individual employees
and inside the employees as a collective.
The art of leading knowledge based firms, Knowledge
Management, is rapidly gaining ground, though
unfortunately, there has been some unwise hype and
hope in this area. The main difference between leading
traditional firms and knowledge based firms is
that productivity in a knowledge based firm depends
more on the utilisation of the mind of the employees
than the hands of “the workers”. In traditional firms,
one worker could be somewhat more efficient than
another, and negative motivation, the “management
by fear” 1) , is a viable management strategy. Management
focus will then be on designing efficient work
processes where expert managers teach and manage
the troops. In knowledge based firms, on the other
hand, productivity is primarily dependent on the optimum
utilisation of every expert employee’s mind.
Here, management is about facilitation and empowerment.
Whoever contributes the most value must have
the power to execute. Motivation is both internal and
peer based, whereby individual and group values and
goals need to be aligned with firm values and goals.
The employees need to believe in the contribution of
the firm towards markets and its impact on society in
general. Incentive systems must be in place so that
what’s good for the firm is good for the employees.
But the strange part about knowledge work is how
dramatically the knowledge workers differ in efficiency.
One person may be ten or even a hundred
times more productive than another who is equally
formally qualified. It then becomes crucial to identify,
attract and retain these talents and enable them to
produce what they are capable of. This requires transparency
in processes and towards decisions and value
contribution accounting systems. Only if systems are
in place for measuring contributed value can such talents
be identified and rewarded in a fair way. These
people must form the cores of value creation processes,
with other people with such talents supporting
and enabling the extraordinary people to maximise
their contribution. Only with measures of productivity
will such a system be perceived as fair and
thereby add to a constructive motivational system.
1) For a series of excellent studies of this, and of other dysfunctional leadership styles, check the Dilbert comics.
ISSN 0085-7130 © Telenor ASA 2004
Telektronikk 2.2004