In a recent piece for Harvard Business Review, John Geraci explained one of his most colossal professional failures. Working as director of new products at the New York Times a few years ago, Geraci hoped to reinvigorate the company's flagging innovation efforts.
And his team totally blew it.
"By the end of my two years there," he writes, "two of the three products the company had launched to drive new revenue had been repositioned as free offerings intended to drive engagement, and the third had been shut down entirely; there were no meaningful plans for new products underway."
Reading about failures like this one can be fun — not necessarily because of some secret Schadenfreude, but simply because they can teach us so darn much.
In Geraci's case, the Times debacle produced a deep and valuable insight:
"Most big organizations resemble organisms. They have discrete boundaries, inputs and outputs at specific places, and wholly internal engines. They are like a giant animal — head, eyes, mouth, stomach. This makes intuitive sense to us; it's how we were taught to think of organizations. And it was useful and worked through the 20th century, when change was slow relative to how things are now."
Thinking this way about The New York Times, Geraci realized, put his team on the path to failure. Instead, Geraci says, they should have been thinking of their organization like an ecosystem — not an organism.
Ecosystems, Geraci says, engage with their environments in ways that singular organisms simply don't. They're able to tap internal and external communities to find new sources of innovation. They think at the level of the network. They can "absorb new entities, adapt, react, and transform." And they're more resilient for it. In short, organizations-as-ecosystems are more open.
Geraci's insight resonates with a good deal of contemporary thinking on the subject of open, networked organizations — what Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst, in his book "The Open Organization" (Harvard Business Review Press), identifies as the organizational structure of the 21st century. Open organizations, Whitehurst says, best leverage what is becoming a crucial competitive advantage today: innovative organizational culture.
Building a culture in which people feel free to experiment, typically think outside the narrow confines of silos, allow the best ideas to come from anywhere — and, yes, embrace and celebrate failure — isn't easy. But for the past year, Whitehurst has been thinking and speaking about his ideas for doing it. And on June 1, he'll join renowned management expert Gary Hamel for a live webcast to discuss his findings. Register now to join this conversation about the future of work, management, and leadership — in the IT shop and beyond.
