Imagination Based Management

I think SHRM President, Susan Meisinger, described the advantages of imagination over evidence quite nicely in August's HR Magazine.

Firstly, she quotes Albert Einstein as stating:

"Imagnation is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we know and understand, while imagination embraces the entre world, and all there ever wil be to know and understand."

As AnneLiseKjaer explains, there are no facts (knowledge / evidence) about the future.

Meisinger quotes Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, interviewing an internet expert behind Israel's economic success, as saying:

"We are not investing in products or business plans today, but in people who have the ablity to magine and connect the dots."

Meisinger notes:

"HR professionals have an important role in creating an organisation culture that cultivates the imagination of their workers, taps the power of those imaginations, encourages experimentation and removes obstacles for innovative action."

Absolutely. I think SystematicHR's got some good posts on this.

But my build on this is that HR is more likely to help the rest of the organisation be more innovative when it is being imaginative itself.

So, welcome to the world of imagination based management...