This presentation contains the insights I’ve developed from a couple of years of looking at organizational demographics. The idea of Organizational Aikido is that organizations naturally want to evolve in a certain way. Leading them means understanding the natural tendencies and leaving them alone unless you want to work really hard.
The key to maintaining an innovative culture is never letting people stay in one job for too long. The natural tendency of an organization is to generate feudal empires based on tenure. These self contained fiefdoms are the opposite of innovation. On the other hand, they are perfect places for intense incremental improvement.
That’s one of the interesting notions from the research. Innovation and Incremental Improvement are opposite tendencies and are very difficult to contain in the same organization.
