Although Tom Davenport’s impressive biography is here, we still want to pick out and highlight some ‘gems:’

Thomas H. Davenport is an American academic and author specializing in business process innovation and knowledge management. He is currently the President’s Distinguished Professor in Information Technology and Management at Babson College and Director of Research for Babson Executive Education and leads sponsored research programs on analytics, knowledge management, process management, and innovation. In 2003, Davenport was named one of the world’s ‘Top 25 Consultants’ by Consulting magazine, and in 2005 was named one of the world’s top three analysts of business and technology by readers of Optimize magazine.

In the April 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine‘ Bala Iyer and Tom Davenport presented the following seven lessons from Google, which organizations can benchmark their own performance to (below you can take the survey yourself):

1 - Practice strategic patience
2 - Exploit an infrastructure “built to build”
3 - Rule your own ecosystem / Exercise architectural control
4 - Build Innovation into Organizational Design
5 - Innovate Incrementally and Constantly
6 - Support Inspiration with Data and Analytics
7 - Make Your Knowledge Workers Productive

Although it is still too early to know whether Google will achieve its ambitious mission (Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates the time lapse will be something in the range of 300 years), and the company may not continue to grow and perform, the following question remains relevant:

‘Can you afford to ignore Google’s example?’ Well, Probably not . . .

Also check out Tom Davenport’s HBR blog post ‘Google - the 21st Century Company.’

= = = How Googly is Your Company? Take the Survey Now = = =

Where is your company on the strategic patience scale?
1 - Big, ambitious mission over very long time horizon
2 - Somewhat inspiring non-financial goals to be achieved over 5-10 years
3 - A few pedestrian non-financial goals along with financial—one year horizon
4 - Individual managers set largely financial goals—annual or quarterly horizon
5 - No planning process—we live day-to-day with only financial goals

Where is your company on the “built to build” infrastructure scale?
1 - Flexible, scalable infrastructure—IT or otherwise—extends into suppliers and customers and acts as platform
2 - Strong, flexible infrastructure, but internal only
3 - Infrastructure is adequate but not well understood internally
4 - Infrastructure is just a collection of technologies and is a barrier to growth
5 - What is infrastructure?

How much control do you have over partner relationships and business models?
1 - We run the show, even when we partner—interactions dynamically metered
2 - We have a good handle on what partners do with us
3 - Emerging links with partners, periodic reports
4 - We have controls, but they are internally focused
5 - We’re lucky to control ourselves

How Innovation-Oriented Is Your Organizational Design?
1 - Everyone’s an innovator, and it’s built into the structure and roles
2 - Lots of innovation from all over the organization, whether defined or not
3 - Innovation is a defined function (R&D), but not pervasive
4 - Some innovation, but only in narrow functions and roles
5 - Even the R&D function isn’t innovative

How Innovative Are Your Product and Service Offerings?
1 - So many new offerings it’s hard to keep up with them all; offerings offered early for customer feedback
2 - Small and large product innovations tumble out frequently
3 - New offerings appear at regular intervals and are tested internally
4 - Products are getting long in the tooth and are incrementally innovative at best
5 - Can’t remember the last time we had a new product or service

How Analytical Is Your Company?
1 - Every decision is made in scientific context based on data, analysis, and formal experiments
2 - A solid fact-based culture, with analytics when needed
3 - Generally fact-based decisions, with some intuition too
4 - Poor-quality data, or many versions of the truth
5 - We have little data about our business, and don’t much care

How Productive Are Your Knowledge Workers?
1 - We have our own principles for managing knowledge workers, and they work well
2 - Knowledge workers are happy, productive, and engaged
3 - We don’t have any major obstacles to productivity
4 - Knowledge workers face lots of bureaucracy and rules
5 - What are knowledge workers?

Now Add Your Scores
40 to 32 — you’re a Google clone
31 to 24 — you’re innovative, but not exotic
24 to 17 — you like the Old Economy just fine
16 to 8 — you’re probably hoping Google fails

Via