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Book Review: Human Resources, Management, and Personnel: Building the Innovative Organization: Management Systems That Encourage Innovation

As indicated in the title, this book is intended to provide practical advice on how managers can encourage innovation in large traditional organizations. Christiansen does not call for doing away with traditional management or adopting a reengineering approach to organizational change. Rather, he attempts to show through a set of extended case studies how some firms have been able to tune their management systems so that they encourage rather than inhibit innovation. The author builds on his previous book Competitive Innovation Management: Techniques to Improve Innovation Performance, which examined the experiences of a single company. This follow-up book looks at a wider range of management systems based on a study of ten businesses, some successful and others not so successful, in an attempt to validate and refine the techniques put forth in the first work. Readers who liked the first book will find the comparative study presented in the new book convincing and practical for applying the techniques suggested by the author. It is important to note that the author characterizes management systems as tools. Unlike change consultants, for whom "tools" generally are packaged programs and systemic changes (I think of a change tool as something like GE's WorkOut program or an activity-based cost system), Christiansen has in mind much more general management systems, including project management, funding systems, idea generation, incentives, communication, decision-making methods, strategy, competence [sic] management, goals, organization structures, personnel management, and organizational culture. He groups these "tools" (a usage I will follow in this review) under change efforts at three levels: business systems, project systems, and individual projects. These are not new methods, since most established companies would be able to point to existing versions of them within their organizations. But Christiansen implies that managers need to look at these systems as tools to encourage innovation rather than as necessary bureaucratic evils. This attitude shift is a subtle but important contribution of the book. The book is laid out around the tools, with the central five chapters each covering a few tools. In each chapter the author lays out useful tables of the detailed tools, their impact on innovation, and a set of questions to ask when performing an initial organizational analysis. These audit questions in each chapter will probably be the most immediately applicable part of the book for line managers. For example, I found the section on strategy and goals interesting because it raised many problems faced by struggling organizations concerning such matters as goal conflict, power to set goals, and the relative importance of financial versus innovation goals. Though the book is laced with examples from the case studies, the author could have presented a clearer set of directions on how best to mitigate many of these problems, which are typical in large bureaucratic companies. Instead, these central chapters at times feel like a rich buffet of management tools presented on a bed of examples for self-service application by the reader. In the final chapter, Christiansen lays out his method for making changes to the management tool systems, a practical approach he described in his first book. His advice is to start with the tools that are easy to change and then move to the ones with higher impact and greater complexity. This means that changes should first be done that affect only individual projects before whole management systems are changed. His roadmap for successful change guides managers to make small lowrisk changes first and gain organizational experience at change before escalating to changes with broader impact. The author has clearly spent considerable time interviewing managers about their use of these tools and the effective ways they have found to encourage innovation within their organizations. Christiansen succeeds in covering a very broad array of systems, from the individual project to business unit management. Although this broad coverage results in the sacrifice of some useful detail on how to move from existing configurations that inhibit innovation to better systems that encourage it, the book remains rich with knowledge the author has gleaned from his three-year study of the sample of companies. Managers of large companies trying to foster innovation within their business units and project teams will definitely identify with much reported by Christiansen here. They will have to figure out exactly how to apply the lessons to their own organization, but the scope of this study will certainly help them think more holistically about the change pro-