“Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” Thomas Alva Edison

No matter what company you work for, what country you work in, or what industry you work in, if you are a pro-active, “get ‘er done” type of person you will encounter organizational slog.

Organizational slog is the Lilliputian anchors that organizations place on their systems in order to better manage them. For example, say you want to order a set of tools through your regional office. This should take about a day, max. In order to place the PO the regional office must submit an invoice for the work. When the invoice comes in you find that it is from a new company who is not in the database. This requires another form in order to place them into the database, which requires you going back to the regional office for information. The total time to place order ends up being days.

It’s these types of time burglars that are the hidden costs on innovation speed. One way to speed up the time to market is to reduce the organizational slog.