Rao, Perry
Klebahn, Kerry O'Connor, an army of people from the Stanford d.school,
and I are making preparations for Customer-Focused
Innovation, an executive program that we teach. This is our third year and I was thinking
back to past years (see here and here for posts). And I remembered
something interesting that I heard from an executive (I won’t name his company,
as they were trouble then and still are in trouble), who described a talk that
Steve Jobs had given to the senior team.
The thing I remember best was that
Jobs advised them that killing bad ideas isn’t that hard — lots of companies, even
bad companies, are good at that. Jobs'
argument went something like this: What
is really hard – and a hallmark of great companies – is that they kill at lot
of good ideas. Sure, this is tough on
people who have come-up with the good ideas as they love them and don’t want to
see them die. But that for any single good idea
to succeed, it needs a lot of resources, time, and attention, and so only a few
ideas can be developed fully. Successful
companies are tough enough to kill a lot of good ideas so those few that
survive have a chance of reaching their full potential and being implemented properly. I would also add that this approach also
applies to good product and experience design.
If every good idea is thrown into a product, then the result is a
terrible and confusing experience. (This seems to be the problem with the latest
version of Microsoft word, it does everything, so therefore is very annoying and confusing to
use.)
If
you take this argument to its logical conclusion, it means that innovative
companies might keep track of these two metrics:
1. How many good ideas
are killed?
(If this number isn’t high enough, that is a
bad sign.)
2. Are people
complaining – even leaving – because too many of their good ideas are killed? (The idea here is that
if no one is complaining about this problem, then there aren’t enough being
killed. The complaining, and even people
leaving, is bad. But if no one is complaining, it is a worse sign. Creating this kind of frustration is an unfortunate
byproduct of an effective innovation process and if your people don't have enough pride and confidence to get upset when their innovative ideas are killed, then something is wrong with them — or your culture.)
These
weird metrics may or may not work, but they make sense given Jobs’ argument
(which I find quite compelling). His
argument also resonates with our experience teaching in the d.school — the groups that often do the worst work
have too many pet ideas and can’t bring themselves to kill enough of them, so
they don't do a decent job on any of them. Groups that can’t kill enough ideas also often
suffer from bad group dynamics, either because multiple members won’t allow the
group to kill their pet ideas, or because the group avoids difficult
conversations about which ideas (and therefore whose ideas) to kill, and
instead, tries to develop too many ideas (None of which are developed well — which results in collective failure.) As Perry tells our students, there comes a
point in the process where you have to kill the ideas you have nurtured and come to love, even though it
hurts.
P.S. A big thanks to Wally Bock over at Three Star Leadership for selecting this post as one of the top five posts of the week from business blogs.
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