I really enjoyed to playing football when I was a child, but when adults came and wanted to arrange our play into clubs and time manage our training there was no fun left for me and I left. I enjoyed very much to sing but when started school and I was forced to sing alone everything changed and I stopped singing. I was paralyzed of fear since my singing was suddenly measured and I was also told it sounded terrible.

Your post is well focused on the pressures of innovation in the workplace. I think it extends beyond the workplace for many – especially in today’s uncertain economy. I have been thinking about the real human cost of all this focus away from “The Big Shaggy”. I know for me, a person who studied theatre and the creative arts, I am ever more thankful as I grow older that I have at least some appreciation of being challenged and not always knowing the answer… of being prepared for the bumpy road. I’m sure I could be a better businessman if I had learned more cold-hard business sense, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have made me a happier person. And I’m not sure my employees would enjoy working here as much.

My take-away from that long ago experience was people and companies were asking the wrong quetions. They were asking “what are you doing, what works?” What they should have been asking is “how did you go about learning what you needed to know to adapt the work team concept to your situation”. In other words, comanies were focused on copying what others that were successful were doing.

I came to the conclusion that the best way for a company to “get ahead” of the competition was to have the competition exactly adopt what the sucessful company was doing, without going through all the steps that made what the sucessful company was doing sucessful.

However, I do believe that studying best practices to ascertain the output that other companies are getting and Innovation are not at odds and actually complementary. To find out industry leaders are 50%-100% better than you on some key indicator is useful information. How to close the gap and get ahead is a problem to be addressed through innovation. If you just do what the other company is doing (and your are not likely to be able to reproduce it sucessfully unless you are just like the benchmarked company, the very best you can hope for is to draw even, and that is highly unlikely given their learning advantage and postion on the learning curve.