Page 138 - The Resilient Organization

Case Study: Resilience in Action—Building Reservoirs for Change 125

created (for example, an internal marketplace for ideas and talent). The jam
ended with encouragement to develop an experimentable design for the man-
agement innovation idea and try it out on a small scale, without causing dis-
turbance to the mainstream management system. There were no formal
endorsements of the ideas and/or experiments, and there were no formal
resources allocated to their experimentation. However, given that a few of the
participants held a senior position in the company, some teams had access to
company resources through their discretionary budgets. Other teams simply
donated their own time, working through lunch or early mornings, in addi-
tion to their regular jobs, and they sought to benefit from available slack
resources the best they could.
Two Management Innovation Jams were held in the spring of 2005, one
in March (which the CEO attended as a gesture of support and to speak to
the group on the importance of resilience to the company) and the other one
in April (attended by the COO who also was supportive of the quest).
During the jams and thereafter, management innovation ideas were
advanced as experiments by self-formed teams that had developed the
initial idea and were motivated to take it forward as an experiment. As a
result, a portfolio of management innovation ideas was formed. The side-
bar “Some Experimental Management Innovations” provides some exam-
ples of the ideas advanced. 1

SOME EXPERIMENTAL MANAGEMENT INNOVATIONS

• eBay for Human Capital: A marketplace for matching ideas and
talent across the company
• The Idea Reserve: A place to find a mentor or a “personal idea
banker”
• The TagWiki: An open-communication and community-building
platform
• The Red Dragon: A technology platform for harnessing innovative
ideas
• The Boss’s Boss’s Learning Journey: Taking the manager to whom
your manager reports to, to visit a place that both of you would find
instructional and enlightening