"Corporate Boring" and hindering innovation

Something that reminded me of that today was Kathy Sierra's Brain death by dull cubicle blog entry, which is a typical Corporate Boring, near impossible to circumvent standardized policy often instituted for what is thought to be for our own good.

I coined the term Corporate Boring (or at least I think I'm the 1st to give it this name, the 1st page of a google search seems to confirm ) originally to describe the new mandated 2006 Official PowerPoint guidelines at my company as a counterpoint to my attempt at a Lessig/Hardt/Takahashi presentation, but realize it goes a lot farther than that. I've been trying to congeal these recurrent observations I have regarding the differences in the following arenas:

• small company vs big company
• agile vs waterfallish (don't have a really good word for this yet, plan driven and engineering approaches have been used in the past),
• software that rocks vs software that meets requirements through lawyer speak
• innovative vs same old standardized stuff
• stuff that helps us vs process for process' sake
  

No doubt there are others, but this is what's at the top of my head. I imagine an Agile Manifesto like statement of "while there may be value in the things on the right, we clearly favor those on the left."

Corporate boring is definitely characteristic of the right which most like originates from a good intent of, "if we all did the same thing, then it'd be easy to ....", which of course has value, but can run astray and often does with the chilling effect of inhibiting innovation and turning people into sheep.

Forrest