{ "item_title" : "Agency in the Pursuit of Innovation", "item_author" : [" David S. Morgan "], "item_description" : "Your organization does not have an idea problem.In 1972 a chemist stood in front of his colleagues with samples of a glue that did not work and asked whether anyone could think of a use. Everything the Post-it Note would become was in that room. Eight more years passed before it reached a customer.The comfortable reading is that a great idea was overlooked. The truer one is harder: the idea was never the scarce thing. What was missing was any route by which a person who had noticed something could make it matter.Most organizations are that room.Agency in the Pursuit of Innovation argues that innovation is a governance problem before it is a creativity problem. The question is not how to get people to think differently. It is who may enter an inquiry, what they may alter, how much consequence they may create before someone else must agree, and what they owe once they have.Drawing on Kodak's laboratory, a crippled DC-10 over Iowa, a hospital that learned to let a nurse stop a surgeon, the worst car plant in America and the same workers who made it the best, and three decades of running organizations himself, David S. Morgan takes the capacity to act apart into six conditions: standing, judgment, permission, discretion, resources, and answerability. He shows how competent, well-run organizations extinguish that capacity without ever deciding to, through practices that are individually reasonable: the competence that wins every argument against the new, the boundary nobody drew until someone crossed it, the innovation program that absorbs the demand for change, the approval chain that turns uncertainty into waiting, and the quiet relocation of successful work away from the person who produced it.Then he follows a possibility into motion, through a first act, an experiment, an encounter with reality, an adaptation, and the point at which continuing has to be earned rather than assumed. And he shows what a leader can build so that any of this can happen without them.The book closes with the Agency Test: a fifteen-stage instrument for following one real possibility through your own organization and finding the exact stage at which responsible movement breaks.This is not a book about innovators, and it does not celebrate them. It is written for the executive who wants more initiative and cannot work out why people keep asking permission; for the manager holding a small discretionary budget and an employee with a hunch; and for the person who has seen something, could not make it count, and has begun to wonder whether the problem is them.It is usually not them.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/895/294/9798952946026_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "24.99", "online_price" : "24.99", "our_price" : "24.99", "club_price" : "24.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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