Monday, we talked about why and how to change our conception of growth in business and economic terms. For a business to create evolutionary growth, rather than only expansion or only a twist on the known offerings, it requires an organization built to innovate. To have a business that can be tuned to such thinking is rare. Even when the key principles are found and offered, they are often ignored or excused as not fitting an industry or company.

Gary Hamel with Bill Breen produced an excellent piece of research on what such work systems look like in The Future of Management. They found several themes that reoccurred across their three cases—Google, Gore and Whole Foods. First, innovation is systemic— from strategy into product and service offerings and into operations. It is seamless. The innovation is focused on difficult to duplicate advantages. Plus the company designs and builds a management model that can keep the innovation alive in the delivery. I. E. Innovation is everyone’s business. This calls for a highly engaged work environment with the ability to be nimble and flexible in the extreme.

What does such an organization look like?

It has less management and more freedom for creativity; less hierarchy and more sense of community; less exhortation and more call to purpose; Hamel and Breen put in one place the best compilation of the principles that underlie the ability to grow via innovation creating evolutionary leaps in an industry. Although they are not focusing on “corporate responsibility” they are providing the tools that are a perfect pairing for the values that permeate responsibility, which must also be systemic. The Seven Key Principles for Google are:

1.  Create a Formula for Innovation

2. Work like an Top Flight University Graduate School

  • Rigorous Challenge of Ideas:
  • Very Big Beguiling Problems are taken on — “d.
  • Improve the World—problems that last a life time attract and grow people who are tenacious and relentlessly caring

3. Change the World

  • Empower People to Change the world through their Work; e.g. democratize knowledge, improve the world’s intelligence

4. Bozo Free Zone- Work with very smart confident people

  • They want NO ONE who will not challenge ANYONE’S point of view
  • Take the time to be “really” rigorous

5.  Dramatically Flat, Radically Decentralized

  • Intellectual independence in order to question assumptions and smash paradigms;
  • No good to attempt to calibrate and respond by relative status among participants.
  • Decisions are made by a set of extended dialogues— structured to be recurring and demanding
  • Decisions are highly consultative— all interested parties are in the room when key decisions are made; therefore micro management is absurd.
  • Mission Driven Innovation: serves as the ultimate reference point of reconciliation.

6.  Self-Managed Teams

Everyone is on a team that is responsible for product innovation. They are on more than one team often and are self-selecting in regard to their choice. They can move without any permission. This autonomy avoids a bureaucratic hierarchy and enables innovation and rapid response.

7.  Free To Follow your Passion—Engineers never have to leave the company or work outside of work to pursue his or her passion.

To see more about how Google did this, read The Future of Management where you also will learn about the key principles from Whole Foods and WR Gore.