Innovative strategy Words to remember:

merger – слияние

personality clash – личная ссора

hostile workforce – враждебно настроенные рабочие

to make someone redundant – сократить кого-то, уволить

to hang on to weaknesses – цепляться за слабости

to give a rationale – представить мотив

to come to the conclusion – прийти к выводу

to view changes – рассматривать изменения

to encourage people – вдохновлять людей

to swing the door open – распахнуть дверь

to invigorate people – бодрить, оживлять

to relish changes – наслаждаться переменами

increment – прирост, увеличение, прибыль

Starting up How important is creativity in business? Are creativity and innovation the same things? What are the conditions for creativity in business? Here what the psychologists think:

1. Be a risk-taker. Those who are reluctant to take risks don’t innovate.

2. Be illogical. An over-reliance on logic kills off ideas before they have a chance to develop.

3. Let yourself be stupid from time to time. Great ideas often start out as stupid ideas.

4. Regularly rethink things. Problem-solving frequently involves breaking up problems into parts and putting them back together again in a different way.

5. Take advantage of lucky breaks. The most creative people never ignore an opportunity.

Reading

Jack Welch successfully led General Electric through a period of great change. Do you think he sees change as a danger, an opportunity or a challenge? What is Jack Welch’s general attitude to change?

1. “We want to be a company that is constantly renewing itself, leaving the past behind, adapting to change and innovation. Managements that hang on to weakness for whatever reason – tradition, sentiment, or their own management weakness – won’t be around in the future”.

2. “How do you bring people into the change process? Start with reality. Get all of the facts out. Give people rationale for change, laying it out in a clearest, most dramatic terms. When everybody gets the same facts, they’ll generally come to the same conclusion.”

3. “The difference between winning and losing will be how the men and women of our company view change. If they see it as a threat, we lose. But if they are provided with the educational tools and are encouraged to use them – to the point where they see change as an opportunity, then every door we must pass through to win big around the world will swing open to us.”

4. “Gradual change doesn’t work very well in the type of transformation General Electric has gone through. If your change isn’t big enough, the bureaucracy can beat you. Look at Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. They said, ”This is what it’s going to be.” And then they did it. Big bold changes.”

5. “(GE leaders always) have enormous energy and the ability to energize and invigorate others, to stimulate and relish change and not be frightened or paralyzed by it, and to see change as an opportunity, not a threat.”

6. “Most bureaucracies unfortunately still think in incremental terms rather than in terms of fundamental change. Changing the culture means constantly asking now how fast am I going, how well am I doing versus how well I did a year or two years before? How fast and how well am I doing compared with the world outside? Are we moving faster, and are we doing better against that external standard?”