You need to begin where people are. You can't punt ideas or innovations in from the 40 yard line. And yes, the work should feel so collaborative that it should feel like the end result belongs to everyone. Your best moment as a consultant is when your client plays your idea back to you as their idea. Your job: to nod sagely and say, "that's an excellent idea.".
Grant David McCrackenMost change initiatives either fail or fall far short of original expectations. More often than not, resistance is cultural in nature but the real cause of lots of resistance often is that however much a team might say that it wants to change, the old assumptions are woven, invisibly, deep within the corporate culture, and from this staging ground they act invisibly to sustain the old order. Finding the assumption out and then rooting them out is a special skill. It calls for assumption hunters, I call them.
Grant David McCrackenNow that everyone is reinventing and innovating, advantage goes to those who keep at it. We need to greet even success with humility.
Grant David McCrackenOften creativity comes from a very pragmatic kind of "well, what if we try this. How about this." You set some parameters and then work through the variations. It's hard to see something as a concept. It literally comes out of the hands on experiment.
Grant David McCrackenBusiness schools do most things very well. They are just not comprehensive and what they miss are things like culture and creativity and a certain kind of pattern recognition that comes easily to people trained in the liberal arts.
Grant David McCrackenYou need to begin where people are. You can't punt ideas or innovations in from the 40 yard line. And yes, the work should feel so collaborative that it should feel like the end result belongs to everyone. Your best moment as a consultant is when your client plays your idea back to you as their idea. Your job: to nod sagely and say, "that's an excellent idea.".
Grant David McCracken