Also at the VPS-CIN and Hargraves Institute innovation conference, Peter Williams, CEO of Deloitte Digital spoke on innovation.
Deloitte are doing some very interesting things in the innovation area, and Peter made many pertinent points about innovation. Amongst the many interesting points Peter raised, he suggested that the acid “test of innovation is execution.”
Peter also provided a tip for working with clearing out the thinking in an organisation – and correpondingly clearing out the cobwebs from an organisation’s visible artefacts in processes, culture, and organisational structure – by asking “what is the dumbest thing we do” in order to to “blow out old, out-dated, irrelevant processes.” This idea struck me as being a bit like Jack Welch’s approach for General Electric of getting rid of their “worst performing” 10% of staff each year – but with the focus on organisational processes and behaviours instead of people.
