In this monologue, Tom Guarriello, a consultant, critiques the common corporate approach to innovation, which often reduces to a vague mandate for everyone to “be innovative” without providing practical mechanisms. He argues that this superficial push leads to overload, causing employees to revert to familiar, non‑innovative habits. Guarriello dismantles the myth of the solitary genius, emphasizing that modern corporate innovation must be collaborative – what he calls “social innovation.” He highlights pervasive barriers such as the “Not Invented Here” mindset, departmental silos, and entrenched processes that stifle ideas, fostering cynicism and skepticism among staff. Drawing on extensive consulting experience, he stresses that the real intelligence resides within the organization, but conventional structures prevent its expression. The solution, he proposes, is to deliberately connect the right people, conversations, and processes at the right time, embedding a mindset that enables ideas to be executed. He concludes with a metaphor that innovation, like entering heaven, requires a willingness to “die” to old ways, underscoring the need for genuine change.
Chapters
Well, hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, one of the things we run into in our consulting practice a lot today are leaders who are understandably concerned about innovation in their organizations. And very often what we hear are leaders trying to set up methods for getting the idea of innovation into their organizations. Now, often those approaches— I chuckle because it's an understandable approach— but those approaches sometimes sound a little bit like trying to get people to fly. You know, the leaders will say, "You know, we've got to be innovative. We're in a tremendously competitive environment and the only way for us to succeed is to be innovative. So we want everybody to get out there and innovate. And, you know, people get all excited and they're like, yeah, we, we got to innovate, that's what we got to do, we got to innovate, you know. And, and so then the meetings are over and people go back to their desks and their cubicles and their work, and, you know, the tsunami of stuff that, um, consumes so much of the day for people in corporations just overwhelms them again. And so what do they do? They end up doing what they've always done. What do you do in a pinch? You go back to doing what made you successful in the first place. So people focus on, you know, I just gotta, I gotta get back to blocking and tackling. I gotta get back to the basics. I gotta get back. And what they're doing, what we're doing when we do that, of course, is the opposite of innovating. So our job is to try to help our clients to think differently and to work differently in order to be more innovative. How do we do that? Well, one of the ways we do it is to get away from a theory of innovation and creativity that has been pervasive in our minds— our minds meaning, I think, probably Western civilization's minds— for a long time, which is the idea of the solitary genius. Now, the solitary genius theory is pretty much what you think about when you think about the artist going off into her or his studio and closing out the world and creating. That's a, you know, it's an image that's pretty deeply ingrained in our thinking, and it has a kind of a romanticized element to it. You know, it's the, you know, that kind of Beethoven in the, you know, hunched over, furrowed brow, creating. Well, that's certainly one way to be creative, and we know that plenty of people have been creative over history in that manner. But the kind of innovation that is key to corporate success today is often very different than that. The kind of innovation that's required in most settings is innovation that gets people to work together more effectively. What we call in our firm social innovation. Trying to enable the kind of connections that create new ways of going about doing things, and most importantly, new ways that are actually going to be executed. You know, one of the things that corporations develop to a very high level is a very sophisticated immune system. It's often called Not invented here, right? Not invented here doesn't just mean not invented here inside our company. No, no. Not invented here often means not invented in my department, not invented in my organization. If somebody over there in the next bay of cubicles invented something, "Oh, we can't do that. That's their stuff. Our job is different." You hear this all the time. You see this all the time in organizations. One of the keys to effective innovation is getting organizations to be able to figure out ways to get the great ideas that are there. Trust me. We've done lots and lots of work with lots of companies over the years. What we discover is the intelligence exists in the system. The people in the organization know a lot about the kind of innovative thinking and execution that would make a difference within the organization. But the conventional ways of going about doing things so often prevents those innovations from actually taking place. And so they sit there. They die. The people who had hope that these innovations were actually going to be able to make a difference, they become more We have— we talk about the cynicism-skepticism— the skepticism-cynicism scale, you know. All of us is a little bit skeptical today. The most practiced of us is very cynical today. So what happens is that people begin to believe, well, you know what, things can't really ever be any different. No matter what happens, eventually somebody is going to find a way to keep this idea from actually happening because of whatever. There's always, you know, it's invading their turf or it wasn't invented in their department. So what we strive to do is to try to help our clients to understand, look, if you want to be innovative, one of the things you need to do is to connect the right people talking about the right things at the right time in the right way. And Getting companies to actually think about that, getting companies to actually get that mindset embedded in their organization is one of the things that we've found that really makes innovation work. So I just wanted to say a few words about innovation today because once again, I was talking to my partner and she was talking to someone today about how they were just about ready to go off to a meeting about, "We've got to be more innovative. We've got to be more innovative." And, you know, kind of in a way, it sort of reminds me of this old joke and this old saying, which is, you know, in regard to innovation, it's a little bit like going to heaven. And, you know, the old story, everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. So if you want to innovate, you got to do things differently. So thanks a lot. Talk to you soon. Take care. Bye-bye.
