Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Normal Call of Engineering Duty

Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company (note the new subtitle), is about to be released in paperback.  The official release date is May 15th, but I expect that Amazon will be shipping in a few days. In
going back and reading the book, and thinking about the current excitement
about innovation in many companies, two intertwined themes strike me as
especially pertinent to the times.  Much of the recent rhetoric about
innovation focuses — and I suppose rightly so — on the role of senior
management, and how leaders like A.G. Lafley at P&G and Jeffrey Immelt at
GE take bold actions that set the stage for innovation.

But
another part of the story is that innovation often happens despite rather
than because of senior management, and oddly enough, the best
leaders often realize that their very presence can sometimes stifle innovation.
Consider a classic story from 3M. Masking tape was one of the company’s first
big successes — it happened even though in 1925 then CEO William McKnight
ordered Richard  Drew to stop working on that silly project and to go back
to his work in quality control – McKnight insisted masking tape was bad idea, a
bad product with no market.  Drew ignored him and kept developing masking
tape. To McKnight’s credit, this incident led to 3M’s famous  15%
rule, that employees in technical jobs can spend up to 15% of their time
working on projects without getting permission.  Implicit in this practice
is the mindset that managers often make bad guesses about what is worth working on.  And, also, it reflects the realization that close supervision of creative
work often does more harm then good.  Indeed, this philosophy is captured
wonderfully in something that I once heard from William C. Coyne, who headed-up
R&D at 3M for over a decade.  He explained that a big part of his job
was keeping senior management away from his scientists, as they asked too many
questions too early, and started evaluating ideas too early. As he put it
"When you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every day to see
how it is doing."

This also reminds me of my favorite HP story. Chuck House was a long-time HP
employee, and knew both Bill Hewlett and David Packard well. I have been seeing
a bit of Chuck lately, as he is the new Executive Director of Media X at Stanford.
Here is Chuck’s famous story from David Packard’s autobiographical The
HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company. I love how co-founder
Packard admits, actually seems to brag, about this engineer’s defiance:

I
mentioned that sometimes management’s turn down of a new idea doesn’t
effectively kill it. Some years ago, at
an HP laboratory in Colorado Springs devoted to oscilloscope technology, one of our bright, energetic engineers,
Chuck House, was advised to abandon a display monitor he was developing. Instead he embarked on a vacation to California —stopping
along the way to show potential customers a prototype of the monitor. He wanted to find out what they thought,
specifically what they wanted the product to do and what its limitations
were. Their positive reaction spurred
him to continue with the project, even though on his return to Colorado, he found that
I, among others, had requested it be discontinued. He persuaded his R&D manager to rush the
monitor into production, and as it turned out, HP sold more than 17,000 display
monitors representing sales revenue of $35 million for the company. 

 Some years later, at a gathering of HP
engineers, I presented Chuck with a medal for “extraordinary contempt and
defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.” . . . “I wasn’t trying to
be defiant or obstreperous. I really
just wanted a success for HP,” Chuck said. “It never occurred to me that it might cost me my job.”

I
just checked again with Chuck to ask, again, "is this really true?"  And he answered ‘The quote is
accurate.  I’m flattered to have it “continued”.  When HP issued
their “Origins” DVD a year ago, they included that passage, and I got a quick
cameo appearance as well.’ 

The
spirit of these lovely old 3M and HP stories is that the best leadership is
sometimes no leadership at all (or leadership by getting out of the way) and
the best leaders realize that they are going to wrong a lot, and admit from –
and in the case of Packard – even celebrate their mistakes. That is why one of my Weird Ideas That Work suggests “Encourage people to ignore and
defy superiors.” And there are more than
stories behind this (and other) weird ideas. For example, Anne Cummings and Greg Oldham studied 171 employees in a
manufacturing plant, which compared those with controlling and non-controlling
supervisors. This 1997 California
Management Review article reports that employees with non-controlling
supervisors made considerably more novel and useful suggestions.

Finally,
it is important to emphasize that I don’t believe that people should always
hide from, ignore, and defy their bosses. When doing routine work where there are big differences in expertise
between the boss and others – such as flying an airplane or doing a surgical procedure
—  I am all for underlings who listen carefully
to the boss and do what the boss says; although even in those settings, I
want nurses and co-pilots to speak up when the doctor or pilot is making a
mistake!