Category: Innovation

I’ve
been thinking about this cartoon a lot over the past week, as my colleague Huggy
Rao and I spent last week leading an executive program called Customer-Focused
Innovation. I will write a more
detailed blog post about the program in the next week or so. This is a joint venture between the Stanford
d.school and Graduate School of Business. I wrote a long post about what happened
last year, but the basic structure is that the mornings are devoted to case
discussions and lecture, where the executives use “clean” academic models to
talk about ways to tackle innovation problems; and the afternoons are done in
the “messy” d.school style, where they get out and observe an innovation
challenge (this year it was redesigning the gas pump experience), brainstorm some
solutions, develop some prototype solutions, and then get feedback from
executives in the industry about what they like and don’t like about the
solutions. The d.school experience was led by Perry
Klebhan (who took a week off from his job as CEO of Timbuk2) and Alex
Kazaks (who took a week of vacation from his job as a McKinsey consultant).

I
first saw this New Yorker cartoon in a book called The
Social Psychology of Organizing by Karl Weick, one my heroes who I’ve blogged
about here before. I was thinking of it all week for several reasons.

First,
in innovation, the people who precisely quantify – or try to quantify – the risks
of any new idea can often come up with excellent reasons why a particular idea
is likely to fail, and indeed, since most new ideas have a high failure rate,
they are usually right when their logic – whatever numbers they assign – is applied
to any particular new idea. BUT the rub is that if your organization never
tries anything new because there is always a strong case against any new idea. As
an example, look at this week’s Fortune, it shows that none of “green”
investments yet backed by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, & Byers (where
Al Gore just accepted a job) has been financially successful yet.  So the realists are winning a lot of innings
lately – but without the idealists, we all lose in the end.

Second,
one of the most powerful and persistent findings in the behavioral sciences is
the self-fulfilling prophecy: Simply
believing that something will happen, and convincing others that it will be so,
increases the odds that it will, indeed, come true. Realists often do a fantastic job of
convincing others why good ideas will fail; while idealists push on and inspire
others to join them against the odds. Now, I am not against realists. We need
real evidence and we need to know the risks of what we are doing, but the irony
is that the odds of failure may be objectively lower for idealists then
realists (and pessimists); so the prophecies of each group may be fulfilled. Moreover, when the odds are against you or
your idea, oddly enough, one of the few methods that have been shown to
increase the odds of success is convince yourself and others that – if everyone
just persists – the odds of success are high. This paradox has always intrigued me and I write about it a lot in Weird Ideas
That Work. And does have a very practical, and
evidence-based, implication: All other things being equal, you should bet on
optimists rather pessimists.

Third
and finally, it reminded me of the difference between the “clean” classroom
experience in the morning and the “messy” d.school experience in the
afternoon. The mornings were taught by
master teachers, accustomed to orchestrating lecture and classroom discussion
in way that scored runs consistently and predictably in just about every
session (after you have taught case 50 times or more, the odds are that you’ve
heard most of the questions before, and know how to handle the class). But the d.school experience meant that the
teaching team was leading new exercise and that the executives were out of
their comfort zones. Walking around gas stations, doing intense teamwork with
people they had never met before, building prototypes of gas stations (and throwing
away lots of ideas). So, to paraphrase what one executive said to us last year,
the runs in “clean” part pile up faster and more consistently with in mornings,
but at the end, the d.school experience wins out for many of them because they
actually do creative work and have it evaluated by people who might actually
use those ideas. Indeed, as a general
rule, talking about how to make creativity happen in an organization is a lot
less messy and confusing than actually doing creative work.

Of
course, both the “clean” and “messy” approaches have strengths. In particular,
it is easy to forget the big picture – the firm’s innovation strategy or core
cultural elements – when you are talking to a pissed-off customer or trying to
build a model of a gas station out of Lego, sliver tape, and foam. So Huggy and
I believe that leading innovation requires both.

P.S.
Note that I got (i.e., bought) permission from The New Yorker t o use this cartoon on my blog for six months.
Please don’t paste into your page without getting permission from them.

It
sounds impossible to me as well. But these really are the numbers from Mozilla, the open source project that started at
Netscape, was morphed into a non-profit foundation, and most recently, the
Mozilla Corporation – a taxable entity owned by the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker has led
this organization throughout its crazy history, as she worked at Netscape on “the
project” (as they still call it), and – even after she was laid-off by AOL
(which bought Netscape), she worked for free to transform the project into a
non-profit organization. It is no
accident that Mitchell is so widely praised for her courage and creativity as a
leader. Check out these stories in INC and Time. 

Mozilla
is most famous for its
Firefox Browser, which has about 20% market share in the U.S., 30% in
Europe and Australia, and 15% in South America, Africa, and Asia.  The browser is now translated into 44
languages. Although Mozilla only has about 100 employees, their open source model
means that they have thousands of people who develop the product and tens of
thousand who test it. Some of the people do it for free, because they admire
the product, are part of the community, believe so strongly in the model of
decentralized participation, Some are
also paid by other organizations – like Google and Yahoo!  —  that
have an interest in having a browser that is an alternative to  Microsoft Explorer.

In
any event, I was inspired to write this post by a kind “annual report” that
Mitchell put up on her blog. Check
it out and think about what Mozilla is doing, and all the lessons that the
company has to offer. Some that occur to me include:

1.
As working becomes increasingly distributed and mediated through technology,
they provide an extreme case of product development done by people who rarely
if ever meet face-to-face. Yet they are able to
enforce very strong norms of cooperation and mutual respect – – and commitment to
quality that exceeds most “normal” organizations.

2.
There is pretty much complete transparency about what they are developing and
even what they are thinking about developing — there has to be because,
otherwise, the people who do most of the work won’t have any idea what to do.

3.
But it isn’t a purely “wisdom of crowds” situation. There is massive decentralized participation
in developing and testing, but a small and extremely knowledgeable set of
people have authority over what goes into the final version – although if
the community doesn’t like what they do, the feedback is swift and intense. This leads me to wonder about how other, more traditional, organizations  need to strike a balance  between inviting  a wide range of people with diverse ideas into the tent versus deciding which ideas to  implement versus discard.   At some point, a decision needs to be made somehow. Sometimes the "market" decides, but  having a few strong-willed and smart people who make final decisions appears to be a hallmark of the innovation process — Steve Jobs being exhibit one here. 

4.
Trying to match-up the very fact that Mozilla exists –- let alone prospers –- with
traditional economic perspectives that emphasize pure self-interest isn’t easy to do. You end-up bringing in soft concepts like
pride, identity, passion for the product, intrinsic rewards and so on. Creative economists can and have attached
described these as aspects of self-interest, but to me, it stretches the
concept so much that it becomes nearly useless. As one of my mentors used to say in graduate school, if a concept is
broad enough to cover everything, then it means nothing. Indeed, I believe that according to many of
our existing behavioral science theories, Mozilla should not exist, let alone
flourish!

Finally,
Mitchell would be the first to say that there is much more to organization than
just her – indeed, we’ve worked folks at Mozilla in the
d.school including COO John
Lilly and legendary open source marketer Asa Dotzler, and of course,
there are the tens of thousands of people in the community who develop and test
the product. But Mitchell still strikes
me as an intriguing alternative model for leadership, as her vision is so
different from tradition approaches – which I think is why she has been the right
person to steer Mozilla through such deeply weird times. She also writes her own blog, which is fantastic. And that is her on the trapeze to the left — another sign of courage and resolve!

Homer
is right. The only way to avoid failure
is to do nothing. But failure has virtues, and is probably impossible to avoid (Indeed, doing nothing is a form of failure too).

There is no learning
without failure. No creativity without
failure. That is why Jeff Pfeffer and I argue that the best single diagnostic question
you can ask about an organization is: What
Happens When People Fail? As
research on creativity
and learning shows (see this
story on the “July effect” in study by Robert
Huckman  and Jason Barro of 700 hospitals
over 8 years – mortality rates went up 4% when the new residents came in), it
is impossible to do anything new or learn anything new without making mistakes.   

Diego
and I, in teaching our first d.school class on Creating Infectious Action, initially tried to put too pretty
a face on failure. We talked to the class about
treating everything as a prototype, which we believe in strongly.  We preached bout failing forward, failing early and failing often, and used a a host of other pretty words to talk about the good things that happen when things go badly.  Yet these is no denying that going down a
failed path is still no fun, even if it is a short journey. So after out
students — under our guidance – were especially unsuccessful at promoting a
hip-hop concert (despite trying very hard, look at this cool
poster one team made), we realized that the most honest thing to do was
to deal with our feelings of disappointment, to talk about how much it sucked to have such a lousy outcome, and then turn to the learning.

There
is a silver lining, however, although it hurts, there is evidence
that people think more deeply and learn more after a failure than a success.

Homer might not like the thinking part.

 

As a short follow-up to my last post, I re-read Hairball last week, and it is still my favorite book about what it feels like to do creative work in a big organization and what it takes to make it happen. It isn’t evidence-based (although a lot of what he suggests is consistent with research on creativity, such as in Dean Keith Simonton’s book on Genius and stuff I review in Weird Ideas That Work). This book is inspiration for people who do creative work, and ammunition against people who try to stop them.  Gordon Mackenzie was a gentle genius.

 
 
   

The longer that I study innovation, the more I realize how hard it is to actually make it happen in a large company on a routine basis.  Even companies that are renowned for their ability to do so, like 3M, struggle to get it right (check out this BusinessWeek article, which is one of the best articles I’ve ever read on innovation in any outlet).  My main conclusion about innovation in large organizations at this point is that, although some practices and processes are more effective than others, the evidence about what actually works remains incredibly murky.  As one wise consultant told me recently, if you are going to consult on this topic, and want to be honest about it, you need to be a lot more humble than, say, if you are consulting on process improvement.  To me, this means that if someone tells you that they have the magic solution — be it stage gates, six sigma, or design thinking — to all your innovation problems, I would assume that that they are either bullshitting, or engaging in wishful thinking.  The definition of Bullshit used by Harry Frankfurt fits perfectly here:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the
truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who
lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent
respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he
believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly
indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the
bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side
of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts
at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except
insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with
what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe
reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit
his purpose.

This brings me to the innovation process.  A lot of companies try to use a stage gate system something like the one pictured below.  I am sure it helps some companies and they can tell you success stories. But the process just never seems as clean and efficient as the picture — even when good products and the like come out at the end, it usually feels like a disorganized mess.  And putting testimonials aside, I still haven’t found any systematic evidence that using a stage gate process actually helps –or hurts– innovation.

   

In contrast, consider the picture that a Swedish consultant sent me today.  Apparently, this is something he found on the wall at Volvo.  His translation of the six stages of product development in the picture are:

1 Enthusiasm
2 Confusion
3 Sober up
4 Hunting the guilty
5 Punishment of the innocent
6 Honours to those who didn’t participate

Just as with stage gates, I can’t find any solid evidence that confirms that this is second picture reflects how the process actually happens, but it strikes me as much more authentic than the first.  Or perhaps the first picture is what managers hope will happen, and the second picture is what actually happens much of the time.

Finally, unlike my last post on graphology, I should emphasize that reading research on innovation does not provide a clear picture of what will work and will not.  I often turn to singer Jimmy Buffet here; remember his line “Some things in life
are a mystery to me, while other things are much too clear.”   The innovation process in large organizations is one of those things that is still a mystery to me. There are some hints about what works and what does not, and when. But as that consultant commented to me, this is an area where considerable humbleness, and I would add, a sense of humor, is wise.

I also realize that — despite my cynicism and complaints — organizations still have to develop new ideas and implement them, and that if they don’t try something, then nothing will ever happen. Academics like me may complain from the sidelines, but the messy business of getting things done goes on. And I suppose that flawed systems might be better than none at all.

But I also believe that less bullshit and more commitment to the hard facts would lead to better innovation processes in most organizations.

 
 
    

The notion that companies ought to reward people for failure and punish them for success is, at best, a dangerous half-truth.  A high failure rate is a hallmark of innovation.  Whether we are talking about products, new companies, or new business processes, there is little evidence that aiming to reduce failure rates is a useful strategy.

U.C. Davis Professor Dean Keith Simonton, who has spent much of his career doing long-term quantitative studies of creative genius,  has concluded that a high failure rate is a hallmark of creative geniuses — he concludes that the most creative people — scientists,  composers, artists, authors, and on and on — have the greatest number of failures because they do the most stuff.  And he can find little evidence that creative geniuses have a higher success rate than their more ordinary counterparts; they just take more swings at the ball. Check out his book Origins for Genius , perhaps the most complete review of research on the subject. 

The upshot of all this is that the most creative people — and companies — don’t have lower failure rates, they fail faster and cheaper, and perhaps learn more from their setbacks, than their competitors.  One of the biggest impediments to faster and cheaper failures is that once people have made a public commitment to some course of action and have devoted a lot of time and energy to it, they become convinced that what they are doing valuable independently of the facts.  My colleague and friend Barry Staw at the Haas Business School has devoted much of his career to studying this process of "escalating commitment to a failing course of action."  Barry shows through a host of experiments, field studies, and case studies that such irrational devotion can be extremely destructive and remarkably hard to stop once it starts.

One antidote to such misguided commitment is provide people incentives for pulling the plug as early as possible on failing projects. Merck, the giant pharmaceutical firm, is doing a host of things to improve their innovation process these days, and following Staw’s research, Peter Kim, the new head of R&D has instituted what they call "kill fees"" at Merck, paying out serious dollars to scientists who pull the plug on failing projects.  As BusinessWeek reported:

‘An inability to admit
failure leads to inefficiencies. A scientist may spend months and tens
of thousands of dollars studying a compound, hoping for a result he or
she knows likely won’t come, rather than pitching in on a project with
a better chance of turning into a viable drug. So Kim is promising
stock options to scientists who bail out on losing projects. It’s not
the loss per se that’s being rewarded but the decision to accept
failure and move on. "You can’t change the truth. You can only delay
how long it takes to find it out," Kim says. "If you’re a good
scientist, you want to spend your time and the company’s money on
something that’s going to lead to success."’

If you blend together research suggesting that failing faster rather than failing less often is essential to innovation, that an action orientation is essential to innovation,  as well as research suggesting that so-called experts aren’t very good at guessing which new ideas will succeed and fail, you can see why I proposed in "Weird Ideas That Work" that creativity is sparked when organizations "reward success and failure, punish inaction."  It may sound really weird, but in addition to the evidence that supports it, Merck seems to be doing it. And so do a lot of other creative organizations.

When I  really want to get executives upset, I sometimes propose that they reward failure MORE than success when they are managing creative work.  I am not sure if I believe it is a good idea, but having the discussion can be pretty interesting.

 
 
      

My
list of “15 Things That I Believe” starts with Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no
harm! If you start looking closely
at how many innovations arose in large organizations, you will find that yes,
sometimes management recognized and helped them along, other times management
tried to stomp them out, and still other times, management had no idea that
they were happening, but didn’t mind using them and getting the money they
produced.

The most lovely statement I’ve ever seen on
the imperfect link between management action (or the action of any given group
or person)  and organizational
performance was written by Stanford Professor (now emeritus ) James March, in
his classic 1981 paper “Footnotes to Organizational Change," which was published
in the Administrative Science Quarterly. I urge you to dig up a copy of this paper
and read it, as it does a lovely job of summarizing themes from vast numbers of
studies, and add one creative twist after another. March’s conclusion is that organizations are
remarkably flexible, not rigid, although they often change in ways that leaders
(and others) don’t expect or want. Here
is a key excerpt (with references removed):

What most reports on implementation indicate, however, is that not
that organizations are rigid and inflexible, but that they are impressively
imaginative. Organizations change in response to their environments, but rarely
change in a way that fulfills the intentions of a particular group of
actors. Sometimes organizations ignore
clear instructions; sometimes they pursue them more forcefully than intended;
sometimes they protect policy makers from folly; sometimes they do not. This ability to frustrate intention, however,
should not be confused with rigidity; nor should flexibility be confused with
organizational effectiveness.

I
was reminded of all this by recent note that I got from Ron Avitzur about how
he and his friend Greg Robbins developed graphing calculator for Apple AFTER the
project had been canceled (they were both contractors) and they were no longer
being paid to work by Apple. But their badges still worked for awhile, and so
they kept coming to work, and because they wanted to finish the project – and
so many people at Apple helped them in little ways – they not only kept
sneaking into work to finish the calculator, it has been part of every
Macintosh since 1994.  Not many people
spend their days sneaking into a Fortune 500 company to do work for free that
is in the best interests of the company! 

The
story is so wonderful because at every turn, when they faced a setback, someone
at Apple would unofficially step in and help them – and keep the project
rolling — to help them break the rules. Take this snippet:

‘We were saved by the layoffs that began that month. Twenty
percent of Apple’s fifteen thousand workers lost their jobs, but Greg and I
were safe because we weren’t on the books in the first place and didn’t
officially exist. Afterwards, there were plenty of empty offices. We found two
and started sneaking into the building every day, waiting out in front for real
employees to arrive and casually tailgating them through the door. Lots of
people knew us and no one asked questions, since we wore our old badges as
decoys.”

This
story is very well documented.  You can find
Ron’s written description here,
listen to it on This
American Life, or see Ron tell the
long version at Google.   In
March’s terms, this is a story where good things happened despite rather than
because of managerial intention. People who weren’t in management positions
took action to keep the project going, “to protect policy makers from folly”
even though that entailed breaking many rules. The story also has a cool ending as, ultimately, senior management got
behind the project. This story is
consistent with the view I emphasize in Weird
Ideas That Work, that there are times when good management means no
management at all. And there are even times (as David Packard showed in the
Chuck House story) that, when employee defiance results in a great product,
the wisest thing to do is thank them, and ship the thing! Also like Chuck House, Ron and Greg  were (sneakily) defiant because they believed so strongly that  what they were doing was best for the company and for Apple users — and were remarkably effective at recruiting people to help by SHOWING  them their work.   

Ron,
thanks for telling me about your lovely story. It should be a standard lesson in all
creativity and innovation classes.  I am
going to start using it in my classes this year, as it is part of  a larger lesson from the innovation literature — leaders want the MONEY that comes from innovation, but often can’t bring themselves to  get out of the way enough so that creativity actually can happen.  This is a theme that I’ve heard from IDEO and d.school founder David Kelley many times. 

BusinessWeek writers Diane Brady, Michelle Conlin and Jena McGregor have just started a new blog called Management IQ. The first round of posts are pretty cool. Given my fascination with online games as laboratories for organizations, I am especially taken by their post about how IBM is doing research on games like World of Warcraft to test and develop leadership skills, because "IBM says, those same capabilities (rallying people you’ve never met to your cause, quickly learning new
skills, finding people who have the right talent for the right moment)
are exactly what’s important for today’s modern managers."

As a Stanford Engineering School
faculty member, I am delighted with the success of both Yahoo! and Google. After all, both were founded by pairs of
Stanford engineering students.  Yahoo!
was started in a trailer on campus by by David Filo and Jerry Yang, and Google was
started by  Serge Brin and Larry Page. These two companies are competitors, especially in the search business,
and there is little doubt that at the moment that Google is the victor. 

The
news yesterday that co-founder Jerry Yang had been appointed
the new CEO of Yahoo! made me wonder, however, if a change of fortune is in
the cards. Perhaps it is just because I
love modest nerds, especially when they are underdogs – Jerry Yang certainly
qualifies.

But there is one thing about
Google that makes my skin crawl and that gives me that sick feeling in my stomach
that something could go terribly wrong there, and do so quickly. As much as I admire
Google’s people and products, I wonder if the supreme confidence that has
driven their growth will cause them to stumble. I have seen hints from Google
insiders that, somehow, they believe that Silicon Valley
history and economic principles don’t apply to them because, “after all, we are
Google.” The first time I heard this, I
winced because Google has many, many connections to Stanford, and in my nearly
25 years as a faculty member here, I’ve learned that when faculty justify their
actions by saying “after all we are Stanford,” it means that they haven’t
bothered to think about the logic or they believe that were are so special that
the “usual” rules don’t apply to us.  These are vile and dangerous beliefs.

Google
looks nearly insurmountable at the moment.  But I keep hearing louder and louder whispers
of concern from Silicon Valley insiders about
Google – especially concern about their arrogance. Just yesterday, one was complaining to me
that the arrogance is so thick that people in Google don’t see it, “it is like
a goldfish doesn’t realize it swims in water.” Stanford students who interview
there for jobs (even those who gets jobs – and they are the largest employer of Stanford
students at the moment) complain about it openly. Even Google CEO Eric Schmidt has admitted that
Google might suffer from a touch of it at times.

Supreme
confidence is not new at Google. About a year before Google went public, my
Stanford college Jeff Pfeffer and I had a long interview and lunch with Google
co-founder Larry Page, during
which he expressed concern that job candidates who interviewed at Google saw
them as arrogant. Jeff and I found Larry to be charming, but well, a bit full
of himself too. Larry’s personality was a lot like the company he has
created – he was among the most likable arrogant people that I’ve ever met. Indeed, I think that their “don’t be evil”
motto (which they take seriously) may help them overcome many of the hazards of
arrogance.

Certainly,
in retrospect, Larry Page’s supreme confidence was warranted – he has since
become one of the richest people in the planet. Moreover, as I’ve argued in Weird
Ideas That Work, extreme faith in your ideas and your people is a hallmark
of successful innovators, because it creates self-fulfilling prophecies that
fuel effort and growth. So all that confidence is probably a key to Google’s current success and may fuel their future
success as well.

BUT
just as in many tragedies, the same thing that leads to a person’s greatness
can also lead to their downfall as well. I worry that, because Google has never
had a major stumble, they are starting to see themselves as impervious to
the fate of every company in Earth that has come before them. A few weeks back,
I heard some Google insiders talking about HP in a condescending tone. Sure, HP
has had troubles, but they are still the only great enduring big company in Silicon Valley,
on top of both the PC and printer businesses over 60 years after Bill and Dave
started the company.  I wonder if Google will be one of the largest and most
profitable firms in Silicon Valley 50 years
from now?  The odds are against them.

To
return to Jerry Yang and Yahoo! Yes, Yahoo has stumbled, being late to search
and video on the web, and they are not – at the moment –- the employer of choice
for Stanford engineering students and MBAs.   Plus Google’s technical dominance– and sheer confidence
to act (not to mention piles of cash to fuel action)– may simply make them an insurmountable
competitor. But that little voice inside of me keeps saying that, if Google just
stumbles modestly, and the illusion of supremacy and invulnerability is
shattered, then things could unravel very quickly.  In contrast, Yahoo! has been
through the bumps, and I see a lot of evidence of hard won wisdom among its leaders. I see the courage to act on what they know, combined
with the humility to update when they are wrong. Indeed, these are hallmarks of
Yahoo!’s two new leaders, President Susan Decker and CEO Jerry Yang.

I
also see other little troubling signs. I keep hearing rumors that the red tape
is getting thicker at Google; while Yahoo! is in a phase of cutting it
out. And one message I hear over and
over again is that Google is hiring so fast that they aren’t always bringing in
the very best people. And finally, I
keep getting emails from Stanford students who have been at Google for a year
or two, and have left for another company because “they weren’t having enough fun.”

These
are all weak signals, my information is suspect and uneven, but the one thing
that everyone seems to agree on is the arrogance that pervades Google, and
is barely noticed by insiders, is off-putting at best and a warning sign of future trouble at worst. I have no special influence over Google, but my
gut feeling is that, if they want to hold-off Yahoo! and other competitors,
they should keep the don’t be evil policy and charming courage and confidence,
but learn a bit more humility, learn to ask better questions, and especially,
to listen better.

In
closing, I want to emphasize that these are both great companies, they treat
their employees incredibly well, and I have admired every executive and
engineer that I’ve met from both places. But I worry about the long-term effects of all that arrogance at Google.

An
interesting footnote. Jerry Yang, David Filo, Serge Brin, and Larry Page have
something else in common – they are all Stanford dropouts from engineering PhD
programs. There is a long and glorious tradition
of Stanford dropouts getting rich and famous: others include John Steinback,
John McEnroe, Tiger Woods, and Reese Witherspoon! And, of course, Bill Gates is
one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts.

 

The
new issue of of BusinessWeek provides a diverse set of recommendations of Paperbacks
for Balmy Days, and they were kind enough to include a recommendation for Weird
Ideas That Work:

"Now, his 2002 book, Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company,
is finally out in paperback (Free Press, $14). Among its offbeat notions:
Reward both success and failure, but punish inaction. Encourage people to
ignore and defy authority. And "find some happy people and get them to
fight"—meaning you should hire upbeat staff and foster sharp conflict over
their competing ideas. Each of Sutton’s 11 1/2 maxims is the subject of its own
chapter. The author’s wit and erudition make Weird
Ideas That Work a pleasure to read."

There are two other great books
that they recommend. The first is Toxic
Emotions at Work by the late Peter J. Frost, which does compelling job of
showing how negative emotions and people can do damage, and does an especially
good job of showing how "toxic enablers" often unwittingly allow
toxic people to do their dirty work — and often to their own detriment. The
second is Louis Uchitelle’s The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their
Consequences, which makes a compelling evidence-based argument that
downsizing causes far more damage — to both people and profits — than most
decision-makers and management consultants realize (indeed, on that point, see
this interesting Bain study).