workers. After all, that is the nature of how ideas move. The main
problem of transferability is scalability to much larger organizations,
and I will try to address that.
Think about what stops ideas from spreading in an organization:
- Fear of losing credit
- Dislike for the leadership or the goals of the organization
- Belief that sharing ideas will create jealousy or resentment
- Lack of knowledge that anyone knows what is desired
- Belief that only very special people (in one’s inner circle)
have a chance of possessing knowledge worth pursuing - Lack of knowledge of how to find it if anyone does
- Stovepiped organization that discourages knowledge of or
contact with others outside a specified area - Few assignments that make it easy for people to contact one
another - The time it takes to share ideas, especially if there is no
immediate need for them of which the giver is aware - Fear of losing indispensability if unique talents are made
available - Inertia
Let me use an example from my consulting work at GE. Jack
Welch tried for years to free up people and ideas throughout GE,
with less success than he wanted and needed. In frustration, he and
others developed WorkOut, which had two purposes: (1) to get rid
of unnecessary work accumulated from the hundred-year history of
the company and (2) to eliminate the fear of speaking up by
putting the general manager of each business on the spot to
respond to proposals from multilevel teams of employees. As the
lead consultant of one of the most traditional businesses, I had the
unpleasant opportunity to witness a senior manager screaming at
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