Provoke

Provoke: Culture of Disruption

Provoke: Why the Global Culture of Disruption Is the only Hope for Innovation Management 505 Organizational Behavior Stuart A. Briant

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Provoke: Culture of Disruption

Provoke: Why the Global Culture of Disruption is the Only Hope for Innovation, by Linda Bernardi, challenges us to examine why disruptive ideas make us feel uncomfortable and seek to avoid them. Linda Bernardi alleges that corporations are stifling its very lifeblood and challenges them to “embrace this discomfort to create a Culture of Disruption”. In lectures, she starts her presentations by placing her audience on tilt attacking the very positions most Chief Executive Officers believe make them creative and innovative. The author insists that only by embracing disruption, which stirs creativity, will corporations remain competitive in the global marketplace. Linda Bernardi spent ten years working for BBN Technologies which is a company that places innovation as its highest priority. It leads the world in producing and developing ideas and has been doing so for half a century. She spent her time focused on simulations and extracting information from distributed large-scale data in a cross section of industry and working with partners such as IBM, DEC, Sun Microsystems, and Cisco. She credits her fortunate circumstance to work for a firm that pursued disruptive ideas by creating an environment that nurtured creativity and innovation, to her “awakening to the power of provocation and disruption.” The author makes three distinctive points in her book. Her first concern is that innovation is floundering and our attention to “pure” research is lacking. Secondly, she says corporations must go beyond creating technology or developing innovative ideas. She insist that “brilliant solutions” must be productized, building support systems around them and bringing them into the global marketplace. Third, she asserts that corporations must create a “Culture of...