Resources:
The Journal of Innovative Management

Management as a discipline only emerged after World War II. As late as 1950, when the World Bank began to lend money for economic development, the word "management" was not even in it's vocabulary. In fact, while management was invented thousands of years ago, it was not discovered until after World War II. It has taken less than fifty years--from 1945 to 1990--for the Management Revolution to become dominant and worldwide.

    ---Peter F. Drucker

Here's what's in the Winter 2008 issue of the Journal:

Continuous Improvement for Leaders and Managers
at Work

A Baldrige National Quality Award winning company, DynMcDermott Petroleum Operations is a privately held corporation that holds the Maintenance and Operations contract for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve of the Department of Energy. Its stated mission is to excel at delivering safe, secure, environmentally responsible and cost effective SPR operational readiness.

Robert McGough, President and CEO, begins our case study of this award-winning organization by telling us something about their idea of leadership:

Our leadership style can best be described by the answers to six questions, which provide a common foundation for the DynMcDermott team:

• Who are we? (Our values)
• What do we do? (Our mission)
• Who do we do it for? (Our customers)
• How do we do it? (Our processes)
• How well do we do it? (Our performance metrics)
• How do we know it? (Our feedback mechanisms)

Our values determine who we are. We understand our mission, identify with our customer (the Department of Energy), and use our processes, metrics, and feedback mechanisms to achieve our goals.

This system didn’t fall into place overnight. It took us about ten years to get where we wanted to be, and we continue to strive to improve. By focusing on feedback
from our customer, our employees, and outside sources such as the Malcolm Baldrige examiners, we have strengthened our commitment to continuous improvement.

In the article, Open Source Your Innovation, Jeff DeGraff, a professor at the University of Michigan, and doctoral candidate Pete Bacevice, apply the concepts of open source to improving innovation. They tell us:

Open source has gained popularity due to its versatility. Its roots stem from the computer industry where programmers openly shared code in order to develop, de-bug, and improve software. The philosophy behind open source is that it is a combination of community building and competency building.

The creation of knowledge—and thus the development of new innovations—resides within the variety of social networks that exist around us. Open source innovation might be a virtual network or a literal network of product developers, customers, users, etc. that share information and resources to create breakthrough innovations or to make incremental improvements to existing innovations.

Manufacturing the Solutions, by L. Hunter Lovins, the President and Founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions, is drawn from her keynote presentation at the Association of Manufacturing Excellence (AME) annual conference, in November, 2007. In speaking to leaders of business and industry, Hunter begins with:

As business and industrial managers, you may think of what you do as a job. I see it as essential to the survival of life on earth. Creating innovative and sustainable ways to make the things we need and deliver the services we want is going to determine whether or not we survive as a species. Governments won’t give us the answers: we need solutions at the speed of business.

Sustainability pays. The companies on the Dow Jones Sustainability Index are outperforming the general market. Goldman Sachs released a report in 2007 showing that the companies that are the leaders in environment, social, and good governance policies have 25% higher stock value. Almost 90% of CEOs from most of the world’s developed countries think sustainability is a key to their profitability and will be an even more important issue five years from now.