Kill the Company to Save the Company, with Lisa Bodell | Big Think

Kill the Company to Save the Company, with Lisa Bodell
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As a globally recognized futurist and expert on innovation, Lisa Bodell ignites new thinking among audiences with her high energy, humor, and powerful messaging.
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LISA BODELL:

Lisa Bodell believes in the power of simplification. She is the founder and CEO of futurethink, a company that uses simple techniques to help organizations embrace change and increase their capability for innovation. She brings her compelling message to over 100,000 people a year, showing them how to eliminate mundane and unnecessary tasks from their everyday routine so that they have more time for work that matters. Bodell has transformed teams within organizations like Google, Novartis, Accenture, and more. Drawing on her practical Midwestern upbringing and entrepreneurial background, she has used the power of simplification to launch three successful businesses, write two books (Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins), travel to over 40 countries and 48 states, and sit on boards such as Novartis' Diversity and Inclusion Board and the Global Advisory Council for the World Economic Forum.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Well, Kill the Company is all about getting rid of things that don't work to make space for things that do work. And how this all happened was I have a group of trainers that are located around the world and we teach people about innovation and change. And something very interesting was happening that the leaders that were bringing us in to actually teach change were the very ones that were holding us back from doing it. And we wanted to know why. Why is this happening? We did a lot of research over the years and worked with thousands of clients. And what we found was that people are approaching change all wrong.

And what we found was this. The very things that most companies put in place to help us better innovate or embrace change, so meetings, reports, policies, procedures, while important, they can't be the only thing that you do. And unfortunately people were putting so many of those things in place they were putting a chokehold on change and innovation. So our conjecture around Kill the Company is what you need to do first before you innovate is get rid of the things that aren't working, challenge the way things have been done before so you can make space for things to work better.

So, the idea for Kill the Company came about from a very I'll say painful experience. Here’s what happened. We were brought down to visit a company, a large manufacturing company in North Carolina. They were doing an executive offsite and there was about 50 of their senior leaders there and they asked us to do some envisioning exercises, et cetera. And myself and a few other trainers were leading this workshop. And after about an hour into the workshop I'll tell you it was very obvious to us, we were doing exercises like envision the future and from impossible to possible and we noticed the people just weren't buying it. And we took a break and I'll tell you it was one of those things where you just didn't want to come back into the room but you had to. And I pulled one of the executives aside and I said, "What's going on," because they brought us down here to talk about futuring and change. And it was a very seminal moment.

The executive said, "You know Lisa, it's not that we don't want change to happen, it's that we no longer believe we can affect it." And I thought what does that say if the senior leaders feel that way? How does the rest of the organization feel? So the idea for Kill the Company came out of one of those snap moments. We went back into the room and I had everybody throw out their agendas, and this is one of those make it or break it moments. And I said, "Everybody rearrange into your table groups by function or business unit." So you had legal or marketing or rocketry or whatever it was. And I asked everybody to pretend that they were their number one competitor. So whatever group they were in pretend they were their number one competitor. And I said, "Over the next 30 minutes your job is to put your company out of business." And it was like we gave them this out of company experience where they were forced to attack the things that were wrong rather than being politically correct.

[SliceOfDog]

This is a really interesting idea! I've seen similar things be done in the arts before (writing a purposely terrible script, for example, and then identifying what you need to avoid when writing good scripts) but never in these terms. I'm a teacher, and I think I might try this with a couple of my classes; start the year asking them to devise the worst possible classroom scenario possible, and then use that to identify how they as students and we as teachers can prevent that scenario from occurring.

[DidntKnowWhatToPut]

I've got one - Let frontline workers make the frontline decisions. 

[AmyClimer]

Great way to spark innovation! Thanks for sharing.

[antocimento]

i agree with most of the commentators, the first sentence sums up all of the video. 

[Zerepzerreitug]

Quite clever concept. I wonder if it an be applied in my own company.

[WillaLamour]

Ahh the word 'Innovation' - a word that can mean anything for anyone all for the purpose of 'make things better'!!

[rauldanielsolis]

Just like Steve Jobs when he came back to apple in 1996.

[BrainKluff]

Sounds like what the governments of the world must be thinking about planet earth

[orientrat]

What a bunch of useless buzzwords wrapped around a simple-minded concept.  Can we get the scientists and mathematicians back on this channel?  No more corporate busy-bodies who think words like "visioning" actually mean anything.  It's called Big Think, not Big Buzzwords.

[Novacification]

I don't mean to be rude, but how the hell is this "Big Think" or even new?

First of all, as a person working in a large corporation I hear great company changing ideas all the time. The problem is that for any of these sweeping ideas to be implemented, you would need the executives all the way to the top to be on board and they just aren't. Both because it would require a level of insight into their company, that they do not have and because it would require taking a risk. To an executive, making a small change in the flawed system already in place will not deviate too much from the status quo because it's safer. Making a big change has the potential to loose a lot of business, if it isn't implemented correctly. Today's corporate structure is not suited to follow through on anything that isn't general cutbacks or corporate restructuring that ultimately achieves nothing with regards to innovation.

The heureka moment Lisa Bodell is describing here is nothing more than another idea-generating exercise which ultimately accomplishes nothing, because at the end of the day, nothing in the company has changed. As she said herself, they had plenty of ideas before, but they had no confidence that anything would change.

Great ideas do not flourish in a bureaucracy and on its own a bureaucracy can only grow.

[JohnFitzgeraldKennedyJFK]

So, kinda like the US government is doing with the US?

[Snailman]

But Google just keeps in making a ton of money from everything they do. They have nothing to cut. Android-they make a ton from apps
Youtube-they make a ton from ads Google search-same free Google services-they make a ton through creating a software ecosystem
Gmail-ads. Google plus-helps them gather information to make more productive ads. mostly ads.

[miteeoak]

So the solution is to come up with good ideas? Sheesh.

[yannick_w]

nothing new about this concept. read Weick/Quinn 1976