Virtually every company that has been around for longer than a few decades and has grown to substantial size was originally based on the vision of a founder. Even if a company is said to have been founded by a group, one person was the driving force, with the remainder of the group in assisting or supporting roles. From there, many hands are called upon to make that vision a reality, to produce it, to bring it to market, and to make it a success on a sustainable scale.
But at the helm, there is a single vision - clear and focused, devoid of ambiguities and hidden agendas. And if the founder is an effective leader and his vision is compelling, this singularity of purpose resounds throughout the company of people he gathers around himself and drives the way in which they perform in aggregate.
Eventually, the founder departs and the organization loses its way. The vision is blurred and the mission statement becomes convoluted. There is disagreement about the goals and purpose of the organization. The body of people who once collaborated to achieve a shared vision are now pursuing conflicting objectives, either based on their earnest interpretation of what is needed or on ulterior motives.
Even worse, such an organization has been left without a navigator to carry on a journey that the crew does not completely understand or embrace, but follows as a matter of course - and that is a far more pernicious problem. Once a successful system has been established, it is presumed that the system must remain untouched in order for it to remain successful. The assumption is that any significant change will be detrimental, so changes are subtle, incremental, and often in the nature of scale and efficiency - the core concept remains, even as the environment evolves. It takes nothing short of a crisis for the fundamental assumptions to be challenged - and even then, a sizable organization will do everything in its power to avoid making substantive changes. People will attempt to continue in what they are already doing, perhaps in a slightly different way, and hope that the external environment will change in a way that makes it more productive.
There has been a growing acceptance of the idea that organizations must to be open to change - but that is to say the idea is accepted but not widely practiced. Even in organizations that pay lip-service to the notion, there remains a dedication to tradition and a defensive posture against altering the standing practices. Changes are made to superficial elements in ways that range from being entirely uninspired (upgrade the software without changing the practices) to completely ludicrous (put pinball machines in the break rooms). All of this indicates a lack of understanding of the problem faced by a firm that has remained stagnant in an evolving market.
In order to understand the way in which something is broken, you must first understand how it worked in the past, and identify the factors that have changed such that it is no longer achieving the same results it once did. Failure to perform that analysis leads inexorably to the inability to envision an effective solution. This is where creative strategy departs from raw creativity - raw creativity is often a euphemism for anything that is not clearly understood, whereas creative strategy is grounded in reality and has a clear objective: changes have a causal relationship to the outcomes they are intended to achieve.
There are, as the authors indicate, numerous other qualities that a company that wishes to be genuinely creative must undertake: open communications, simplified processes, a tolerance to risk, and the like - but adopting these qualities merely creates a culture in which change can be introduced easily. Understanding the necessity of specific changes requires a great deal more effort and dedication, and is likely the hurdle that organizations that earnestly wish to be innovative are unable to clear.
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