The Sunday, February 26, 2012, New York Times had a great opinion piece about Bell Labs and how it was the 20th Century's hub of innovation with inventions such as the transistor, the laser, the silicon solar cell, and the first communications satellites. I think Dan Pink, a keynote speaker at our Mission-Driven Management Summit, would agree with a lot of the author's points. The article by Jon Gertner, titled "True Innovation," describes how Mervin Kelly, a physicist who rose to chairman of the board at Bell Labs, was most responsible for its culture of creativity.

This was interesting to me because many clients we work with to help build Balanced Scorecards and manage their strategies establish some kind of strategic objective for their organization to "foster innovation," yet they often do not know how to do this, never mind measure it. Gertner says that to foster innovation, Kelly consciously established "a 'critical mass' of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas." He also required "physical proximity," believing that "phone calls alone wouldn't do."