STRATEGIC PLANNING

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning

Introduction

When a BMW employee spent months on talks and negotiations for a project that soon failed, they were rewarded with a bottle of fine wine from the boss's cellar and an official company award. Praised for the “creative error of the month”, the employee was recognized for “an outstanding and bold idea, which was well planned, an excellent contribution!”, and was one of around 12 members of staff who was rewarded for failure over a period of three years.

It was an unusual strategy, but nevertheless is one that Bernd Kriegesmann, Thomas Kley and Markus G. Schwering believe made sense. In the case in question, a member of the BMW personnel and social services department took it upon themselves to make the production line a possible place of work for a blind new employee. Having gone through weeks of talks and consultations with relevant authorities and having won the belief of a lot of experts, the blind employee ended up working only a few days before feeling overwhelmed and leaving. Though the initiative failed and valuable time and resource was wasted, Gerhard Bihl, head of personnel and social services, believed that the initiative and willingness to take on a calculated risk that could have potentially brought great benefit to the company was worthy of acclaim.

The thinking behind having an official creative error of the month award was to avoid having a workforce that failed to challenge the status quo, rested on their laurels and favored tested strategies over innovation. The idea was to remove the stigma from making a mistake at work, so a situation whereby cynical managers said “I told you so” could no longer happen. As well as being important in terms of the personal development of dynamic, and thus highly valuable, members of staff, the strategy existed to promote new ideas that would lead to improved, more profitable business.

As Kriegesmann, Kley and Schwering's article explains, too many companies, however unwittingly, operate according to what can be described as “innovation stalemate”. Managers are too ready to favor traditional ways of going about business, and the most praise is reserved for those who go about continuing these traditions flawlessly. Although in theory a senior management team can be supportive of signs of innovation, in practice the fear of failure and its associated reputation mean that potentially great brainwaves go unexplored. Having a strategy whereby having the bravery to work out the risk potential of a new idea and the tenacity to see it through was therefore Bihl's way of making sure that everyone was officially allowed to make mistakes.

For such a policy to make business sense, however, managers are cautioned to be careful about how they define these failures, or, as BMW put it “creative errors”. Obviously, rewarding foolish oversights or poorly considered ideas will send out the wrong message and no doubt fail to win the support and respect of the workforce. The kinds of errors, then, that should never be tolerated are deliberate ones, such ...