Tendayi Viki - Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation

Tendayi Viki is an award-winning author and innovator. He has worked with several large organisations including AkzoNobel, Air France, Lufthansa AirPlus, Pearson, Standard Bank, Salesforce, Unilever, Rabobank and TD Ameritrade.

Tendayi co-designed and helped implement Pearsons Product Lifecycle, which is a lean innovation framework that won Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York.

Originally from Zimbabwe and now based in London, Tendayi was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award and named on the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List of emerging management thinkers to watch (www.thinkers50.com). He is the author of two other books: The Corporate Startup and The Lean Product Lifecycle .

Holger Nils Pohl is a visual strategist his core strength is creating clarity and helping companies design a better future. He has worked with companies such as Zurich Insurance, Roche and IKEA.

Holger helps clients create lasting strategic solutions rather than quick fixes. His clients say that he performs magic with his visual imagination.

Hes the founder of the WorkVisual Institute, lecturer at the MHMK Cologne and the UdK Berlin. Holger is a co-creator of the business game Playing Lean and author of Creating Innovation and Biz4Kids.

With special thanks to the Ignite Team at De Beers Group

With thanks for the support of Unilever Foods & Refreshment

With thanks to the super patrons

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When Steve Jobs said that it was more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy, he was highlighting the fact that large companies are much slower to respond to change than startups. This is the speedboat versus oil tanker conundrum. The bureaucracy that runs many established companies is inadvertently designed to create inertia. This is not very helpful in a fast-changing world.

Unlike startups, large companies also have to follow the rules. As Steve Blank notes:

Startups can do anything.

Companies can only do whats legal.

Having no business model and no market reputation to defend makes startups quite dangerous as competitors. If you combine this with the fact that startups are now better funded and their incentives are aligned with their investors goals, large companies are competing with a formidable foe.

Meanwhile, inside most large companies there are still leaders who question the need to innovate. To be fair, there is a discernible shift in leadership attitudes towards innovation taking place in most organisations. However, in some large companies there is still an intractable core of leaders who actively resist innovation projects as a waste of time and resources.

It is a myth that innovation is sexy. In a lot of companies, it is career suicide. So, while startups are focused on resisting enemies and competitors that are outside their company, innovators within large companies have to contend with enemies and competitors inside their own companies as well.

Corporate innovation is a paradox. Intrapreneurs employees who work on entrepreneurial ideas inside an established company have to innovate for the future, inside a machine designed to run the current business. It is the management of the current business that tends to get in the way of innovation. The bureaucracy and incentives of the organisation are all geared towards improving and exploiting the currently successful products and business models.

At the same time, these large corporations have entrepreneurial employees who are constantly trying to innovate. As far as I am concerned, these people are crazy. They wake up every morning and go to work to swim against the tide. This is insane! And yet, they exist: passionate employees who are committed to helping their company become more innovative. They can see the future coming and they are committed to ensuring that their company survives in that future.

Only a few leaders are happy with these crazy innovators. The majority of leaders view them as disruptive rebels, aka pirates in the navy. These leaders actively create barriers to block innovation efforts, often driving intrapreneurs to quit their jobs in frustration. When innovation does succeed inside a large company, it is often in the form of one-off projects that have had to be guided through the landmines of corporate politics. This can be demoralising.

Most intrapreneurs recognise that they cannot keep doing innovation as a series of ad hoc projects that have to jump through political hurdles. They realise that there is a need for some changes inside their companies to allow innovation to happen as a repeatable process. But how do they get this done? How do pirates in the navy slowly transform their companies to become more supportive of innovation?

This book is written for passionate innovators who are working inside companies, especially large ones. If you have ever asked yourself the questions below, this book is for you:

How do we get our company ready for innovation?

How do we change the culture within our company?

How do we start a movement that transforms how innovation is managed?

How do we influence our leaders to prioritise innovation?

How do we work with detractors and naysayers?

How do we collaborate with enablers such as finance, HR, legal and branding?