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Radhika Chadha

Shock a stagnant gene pool in your organisation into innovation by hiring someone who questions the status quo.

Towards flexibility: Once step for an employee, a giant leap for the organisation.

LAST time I developed the theme of how the managerial gene pool in most large Indian organisations is strikingly similar and this lack of diversity is a major roadblock to innovation. Yet, we do see new innovative products around us all the time. Where do they come from?

Well, certainly not from those that are regularly rated as the best marketing companies in the country. Show me a multinational that has done groundbreaking innovation in India. Hindustan Lever? Hardly the best example. Even its most-touted sachet revolution was not HLL's brainwave. True, its sheer market dominance helped HLL propel the sachet juggernaut forward, but it was a small company, Velvette, that first dreamt up the idea. Low-price detergents, high-price compacts, regional tea blends, sub-popular soaps, direct selling, hand sanitisers ... the innovator is consistently someone else. HLL is just a high-profile example - a good hard look at any of the leading MNCs brings out the same point.

The real innovating companies in India are the small players. Who have a better connect with consumer needs, and a "what's-to-lose" philosophy - unencumbered by heritage, a set-in-stone "brand image", international affiliations in advertising, a parent in the US who demands that the brand follow the global party line, or that new launches be culled out of a global portfolio of products. The local Indian entrepreneur is the one who takes risks and changes the rules of the game.

The biggest drawback, for established large companies, is their MBA population - which quickly absorbs the organisational culture, sets it down in concrete, and refuses to buck the rules, for fear of blotting its copybook. And the big danger for small players is that as their strategies work, and they grow, they fall into the same seductive trap of imitating the large companies, losing that innovative edge that was their advantage in the first place.

This was brought home to me sharply in my second job, in Crisil. Crisil had just been set up, and credit rating was a totally new concept in India. We, the original management team, were exploring the processes and methodology most suitable for the Indian environment. In effect, we had a blank slate, and we created and innovated the initial rating methodology for India, fixing and fine-tuning it all the time.

Barely two years later, I had a conversation with a new recruit about a particular process. "Let's change it", I suggested, "This way would work better". He frowned disapprovingly, "But this is the way it's always been done, how can we change it?"

"Always been done this way" - the death knell of innovative thinking! This, mind you, in an organisation that was just two-years-old, with a management team of less than 20! Can you imagine the inertia, then, in organisations with hundreds of MBAs, with old brands that no one dares take risks with, large teams forming silos of knowledge and information that act as introverted shells, neither learning nor growing? To convert such organisations into creative, innovative, nimble, workplaces, is a mammoth task - and it begins with the people. To repeat an adage, `If you want to change the way your organisation works, first change the way your people think'.

One provocative thinker in this regard is innovation guru Robert Sutton, who tells us that "the best way to bring fresh eyes to any problem is to bring in new kinds of people". In fact, he goes on to flip over conventional wisdom in hiring. He notes that organisations tend to hire people who are quick on the uptake. Instead, he advises, provocatively, recruit slow learners with a "special kind of stupidity", the kind to reject the way things are "supposed to be done around here".

Again, he points out, we tend to hire those we like: instead, he recommends, hire people who make you feel uncomfortable - not those who are rude or obnoxious, but those who have different beliefs, knowledge and skills from yours. Such people form better headlight teams, scouting out new trends and opportunities.

Further, organisations tend to encourage recruits to get along with each other. But as one recent research study showed, the more socially cohesive a group, the less creative it is. Getting along is not a prescription for innovative success, and is in fact, more likely to suppress a candid exchange of opinion.

All this is not to say that you populate your entire management team with dysfunctional weirdos. To begin with, such a company would be almost impossible to run smoothly. As important, the weirdos may get the ideas, but who will implement them? Not the loners and the rebels - their ideas need to be powered and implemented by the fast learners and the managers. In other words, you need a constant interplay between the geeks and the weirdos to ensure that your innovation engine keeps throwing up new ways of thinking and behaving.

This is not the way companies operate, and making the transition can be very difficult. Which is why a crucial first step is deciding just how important innovation is to your strategy, and how much you are willing to do to embed it in your organisation.

(The author is a Chennai-based consultant. Karate-gy is a proprietary term for strategic exercises conducted by Paradigm Management Knowhow. Feedback can be e-mailed to bleditor@thehindu.co.in.)

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