Whose box are you thinking in?
Monday, November 22, 2004
Lucy Kellaway has an interesting column in today's FT about the way companies need fewer intelligent people and not more, as some might expect. It's all about the need to conform to corporate ways of thinking and doing, of course and the true can be said for almost all situations where groups of humans are trying to get along or work towards a similar goal.
Think of the maverick football genius, say, or even the black sheep of a family. They are marked out by their tendency to act differently. You could imagine a Thurber cartoon with a man huddled in the corner of a room and a group of men and women in party hats pointing and sneering. The caption would read: "The man who refused to get drunk at the office party."
This need for conformity, coupled with the increase in education and aspiration, fuels the drive to greater levels of job-hopping, home working, and entrepreneurship. That leads to existing companies focusing on doing simple things well and a group of individuals creating new companies to try new things. When they succeed they become existing companies and stop being so creative. That's when the innovators leave and start again. When thinking out of the box is actually thinking in a box that belongs somewhere else.
Think of the maverick football genius, say, or even the black sheep of a family. They are marked out by their tendency to act differently. You could imagine a Thurber cartoon with a man huddled in the corner of a room and a group of men and women in party hats pointing and sneering. The caption would read: "The man who refused to get drunk at the office party."
This need for conformity, coupled with the increase in education and aspiration, fuels the drive to greater levels of job-hopping, home working, and entrepreneurship. That leads to existing companies focusing on doing simple things well and a group of individuals creating new companies to try new things. When they succeed they become existing companies and stop being so creative. That's when the innovators leave and start again. When thinking out of the box is actually thinking in a box that belongs somewhere else.
