Innovation or innovators?

David Harrison, Managing Partner of True Potential LLP, The Open University MBA alumnus

Edited transcript of Business Perspectives Video: Innovation or innovators?

“Most of the organisations I see, they train everybody”

“I have observed first hand that it’s about selection. I’m not necessarily a nature versus nurture addict if you like, but if I was, it would be nature. But if you look at any elite organisation in the world, it will probably be down to selection. So if you look at British Special Forces, as an example away from financial services, they don’t train people until they’ve selected them, on a course of selection criteria which rules out just about every human being possible.  The ones that get through, they train them.”

“So what people do is set criteria, some sort of hurdle that most people can’t get over, “therefore they are weak, and let’s train that weakness”. And I don’t. I think I ignore weakness, I work with strengths.  One strength can be innovation that you have within individuals in an organisation, but there will be other individuals who don’t have that as a strength. People then tend to get angry and say “everyone is creative”, “are you saying I’m boring and dull or whatever?”. And if you are in finance, you may say “I wanted to be in finance, boring and dull, I didn’t want to make a mistake and cost everybody millions of pounds”. So there has to be those people, and those people, I believe, are happy doing that job, because they are naturally endowed with the ability to be careful, to be numerate, to do the things which other people may find boring. They probably think that all creative people are glib, they are chaotic, they create a real mess for these people to tidy up.  And I think it’s just recognising in an organisation that there are different people. And I want to separate that form of creativity, that form of real innovation, which may find you in a different market, with a different product and so on and so forth, from what I call the ordinary everyday creativity, which most people have, which can also lead by the way to big leaps, such as improving a process we’ve already got.

So if you look at the organisation we have got, we have got lots of people, they are mostly partners, and I think that helps creativity because essentially what they are doing is,  if they bring something to us, then it is to their advantage as well. The more they do of that, the more shares they are likely to have, the more important they are going to be in terms of value for the organisation.”