Top ten tips for preventing innovation -Tyner Blain

Apropos the bad mood I have about innovation rhetoric: Top ten tips for preventing innovation by Tyner Blain. Gotten off Scott Berkun.

This funny but painful list covers:

• Hire employees looking for safety in their roles. Find people who primarily want security and a nine-to-five role, stay away from those troublemakers who want to “change the world.”
• Hire incompetent employees.
• Keep salaries below the 75th percentile. Innovators know their value - and when they aren’t applying for jobs with intrinsic utility to them, they are commanding higher salaries. If we keep our salaries low, there’s much less risk of one of these innovators sneaking into our organization. As a bonus, we’ll save a fortune!
• Treat employees like garbage. Yell at them. Whenever possible, call them at midnight to yell at them some more. They work for us. If they get uppity, make them work on the weekends. Make them dig holes and fill them back up again. Threaten them - especially when they need the job. If you can’t yell, at least be condescending in public forums. Remember we are smarter than they are. Punks.
• Reward conservative and marginal successes. The old rule of thumb for office politics was “It takes ten good projects to recover from one bad project.” Stick to it! If we punish people for mistakes when they ’swing for the fences’, and reward them for marginal and safe projects, they will quickly get the idea. This is the most subtle of all the tips - but don’t worry - people will figure out the reward system and shy away from those risky projects. This technique has the added benefit of propogating itself up and down the management hierarchy.
• Micromanage. We’ve been promoted because we understand their jobs so well that we could do them in our sleep. Whatever those pesky little people think, it’s wrong.
• Only create customer-requested features. Let our customers tell us what to do. ... Oh - and don’t second guess the customer. If they say they want the menu items in alphabetical order, well, that’s what they want. The customer is always right. If Henry Ford had listened, think of how fast horses would be today. Even better, appoint a user-representative, then we don’t have to talk to the customers at all.
• Build a kingdom. When we have information, that means we have power. With that power, we can grow our organization. The more people we have, the more important we are. We need to make sure that those other teams don’t get our information. They might apply it in ways that we didn’t intend. While we’re at it - make sure our people don’t find out what we know. Not only will it protect us from them, but it will keep them from accidentally discovering a more important problem, or an alternate way to apply what they already know to a new problem domain.

It's an excellent list.