When we reflect on innovation, especially technological innovation, we envision multi-faceted solutions, global teams, and well, lots of technology. Mention the individual within technological innovation and it appears to be an oxymoron – a necessary evil but hardly innovative. After all, individuals are devious, self indulgent, and egotistical, no? Just as team builders advocate “there is no ‘I’ in team,” there is also no “team without I.”
Teams are wonderful, make no mistake about it. They allow us to leverage individual thought threads and innovations into collective work products and solution sets that could not be achieved without collaboration. Without teams, complex and compartmentalized software could not be implemented in a single lifetime. From my experience, high-performance teams are only as strong the weakest individual contained within them.
Let’s face it, data centers, disaster recovery, and business continuity would all be dreams without teams of orchestrated groups working in concert against a set plan of action or operation. Without teams, the old and new wonders of the physical world would never have been realized. Imagine, if you would, a single individual trying to completely control and improve the end-to-end delivery of mortgage products — from origination to securitization in addition to being responsible for the global exchanges on which they trade – a complete impossibility.
However, as the world moves into an Olympic year, the dreams of self discipline and sacrifice reach a crescendo with the athletes seeking to be world class – more to the point, the best in the world. They did not get there alone and neither does technological innovation and its individual contributors. But, without the drive and determination and yes, proper “training,” would they have reached such recognition? Will the mortgage industry achieve a rebirth without individual innovators dispersed within our organization? Has innovation become singularly owned by our vendors and outsourcers?
As our headlines scream out a global credit crisis and our industry wrestles against “whispers” that send institutions into the arms of the FDIC or M&A’s, the force-multiplier of the individual has never been lower. We only have to look at the parade of FSI executives being publically put on “trial” if we had any doubts.
Some sources have tallied that the mortgage industry since the start of 2007, has lost over 150,000 jobs with more to come. So where and how are we investing in our corporate innovators – and our future? What are the proper and forward looking human capital programs that must be deployed under intense budget cuts and brain-trust drains?
My fear and the apparent reality of the next several years will be the demise of the internal innovator as investments in education, training, and certifications are reduced. Human resource management (pick your acronym or phrase) has become increasingly about layoffs, separations, litigation mitigation, payouts, and retirements.
I must point out the obvious, human resource management is not a singular responsibility of a named department. It is the responsibility of every department and manager. I still believe that the individual innovator as part of a collaborative team environment is a requirement for survivability — albeit I seem to be in a shrinking minority.
So I ask everyone, what are you doing to foster the innovators within your operating environment? How can you be successful without a robust human capital innovation program, or has our industry simply become focused on continued existence?
In closing, I found an interesting quote on www.Thinkexist.com, attributable to William Pollard that permeates this week’s entry, “Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”
