Monday 7 May 2012

INNOVATION and Not EFFICIENCY - Key source of Competitive Advantage.



Efficiency and productivity have become necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions of success. If they are the basis of your approach to work, then your options – and rewards – are going to be severely limited.
So if your approach to work is based on ‘personal productivity’, you risk falling into the trap of Personal Taylorism. You’re becoming more efficient at the risk of losing your creative spark and your competitive edge, and you’ve already lost the efficiency game, anyway. The more concerned we become over the things we can’t control, the less we will do with the things we can control.

Under Taylorism, a manager could not only tell a worker to stoke a furnace, or fix a bolt,  to close a sale or type a business letter, but could arrange the task and show the worker exactly how to do it for maximum efficiency. In the early twentieth century, Taylorism was widely adopted and became one of the key mechanisms in production but nowadays Taylorism is a historical curiosity, usually cited as an example of What Not To Do when managing human beings. 

Coach John Wooden said, "Never mistake activity for achievement." These words of wisdom are nowhere more appropriate than in the wide-open world of marketing, which offers endless forms of activity that result in questionable achievement. Now a days people in position expect people to follow and perform a task/job as they expect and they think it as an achievement.  Rather they should generate enthusiasm and stimulate the team in finding the best way rather than having their own way.
                                                                                             
Efficiency is no longer the name of the game. Innovation is now the key source of competitive advantage.
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John Wooden was a three-time All-American while playing basketball at Purdue University. He is the only man ever elected to college basketball’s hall of fame as both player and coach.
As a coach of UCLA’s basketball team he produced ten national championship teams in twelve years. Seven of those national championships came in a row. (1964, 1965, 1972 – 1973, 1975).

Frederick Winslow Taylor was ‘the father of scientific management’ – a system for managing human work by developing standard methods for performing each task on the production line. Procedures were designed for maximum efficiency and workers were trained to stick to them, rigidly. Hierarchy and authority were used to maintain control.
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