Bridging the Gap Between Stewards and Creators Harvard Case Solution & Analysis

Many high-tech companies now depends on technical expertise of employees and managers can not fully understand the work of these employees do. In addition, managers and technical staff may have a very different world, and their world views may conflict in business innovation. After studying the movement of Internet and computer pioneer among the various organizations in the period between the beginning of the 1960s and the mid-1990s, the authors identified two types of personality (stewards and creators), which are vital to the success of technological innovation - but whose thinking often face. Stewards, usually managers, their goal is a thorough distribution of the organization's resources in order to achieve the best return on investment. Authors often skilled, dedicated employees, have a grand vision and mission, they often view business problems as secondary. According to the authors, the conflict between stewards and creators is, to some extent, inevitable. However, when such a conflict is managed poorly, the organization's ability to innovate effectively may be impaired. The authors suggest eight guiding principles for managing steward-creator of conflict. These principles include: (1) to retain talented creators around, although they can be difficult to manage, and (2) balance the influence of the stewards and creators in the organization, so that neither team always wins, (3) to educate people who have credibility with both creators and managers and can help resolve conflicts, and (4) the use of expert judgment to estimate more accurately the creators of specialized engineering works, (5) the structure of the innovation process, so that the creators of tangible results on a regular basis, (6) understand that there will always be some conflict between the organizations creators and stewards (7) to avoid overly prescriptive controls that could alienate developers and (8) to ensure the closure of the projects achieved not too fast and not too slow "Hide
. by Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan Source: MIT Sloan Management Review 10 pages. Publication Date: January 1, 2007. Prod. #: SMR232-PDF-ENG

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