After
my last post, I got several inquires about the complete list of weird ideas
that work, from my 2002 book, Weird Ideas
That Work. I have a soft spot for this book, perhaps because it was the
first book I wrote myself, and also because it resulted from a talk that I gave
for six or seven years before I wrote it up. I can still see – in my minds-eye –
all the reactions that audiences had to the ideas as I developed them, the
excitement in some cases, the boredom in other cases, the disdain for the most
absurd, and the fantastic arguments that people had with me and each other.

As I’ve said before, my aim is not to be RIGHT
at all times but to get people to THINK, and when I am successful, this book – and the talk
that goes with it — does that. In  other words these are strong (and evidence-based) opinions, weakly  held. 

I picked
ideas that would – from logical standpoint – increase the range of ideas (or
variance) in a company, that would enable people to see things differently, and
break from the past. I also emphasized that increasing variance and the like is
great if you want creativity (say developing a new product or service) and
awful if you want to do something tried and true (say building or  flying a 747).  There is a Harvard Business Review article
called the Weird
Rules of Creativity you can buy if you are interested (although it costs
about half of the whole book), but if you want free stuff, check out my interview
on tompeters.com,
download this article from the Ivey
Business Journal, or see Polly LaBarre’s Fast
Company article.

Two
quick points.

First,
I don’t necessarily believe any of these ideas. Well, except number 7.  BUT I can marshal a pretty strong conceptual
and empirical case for each and give you examples of creative companies and
teams that use each one.

Second,
creativity happens when an organization, through some means, brings in varied
ideas, sees the same old things in new ways, and breaks from the past.  These are just some ways to make it happen; they
may help you or may not work in your organization at all. My suggestion is not
to view them as a recipe, but as a menu. I suspect that if you tried to do all
of these in one organization, it would be nightmare. Like eating the entire menu
instead of meal at restaurant, it will make your organization sick. But there
might be four or five that will work for you, at least for the places, people,
and periods when you need creativity.

Here
is the list (note I say 11.5, but there are really 12)

1. Hire slow learners (of the organizational code).

1 ½. Hire people who make
you feel uncomfortable, even
those you dislike.

2. Hire people you
(probably) don’t need.

3. Use job interviews to
get new ideas, not to screen candidates.

4. Encourage people to
ignore and defy superiors and peers.

5. Find some
happy people, and get them to fight.

6. Reward success and
failure, punish inaction.

7. Decide to do something that will probably fail,
then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain.

8. Think of some ridiculous
or impractical things to do, and then plan to do them.

9. Avoid, distract, and
bore customers, critics, and anyone who just wants to talk about money.

10. Don’t try to learn anything from people who seem to have solve the problem you face.

11.
Forget the past, especially your company’s successes.

Finally, as a summary, if you look at these, a
reasonable conclusion is that, although creative places can be a lot of fun at
times and being happy is linked to creativity (sort of, I’ll explain in a later
post), note also that Creative companies
and teams are inefficient (and often annoying) places to work.

I’ve
been thinking a lot about entrepreneurship and innovation lately. First, I gave
a talk about innovation, based on Weird
Ideas That Work, to a group of about 50 Korean executives from SK Telecom, who
were visiting  Silicon Valley to learn about
how entrepreneurship and innovation works around here. They were given a very
high-end experience, spending a day at IDEO learning about their creative
process, hearing from CEO Tim Brown and
the amazing Diego Rodriguez,
getting a speech from innovation guru Clay Christensen, and after my
talk, getting on the bus for lunch at Google and a talk from Marissa
Mayer. I also have been thinking about entrepreneurship because, as you can
see from my last post, I spent a fair amount of time poking around the updated version
of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program’s new Educator’s Corner.

As
I was preparing – and giving – my weird ideas talk to the SK Telecom
executives, I kept thinking, after spending 20+ years in the Stanford  Engineering School and studying
innovation for a long time, about which single lesson matters most, at least
given my biased view and experience. Weird Ideas That Work came out in 2002, but it was based on a talk that
I’ve been giving – and tinkering with — since about 1995.  It has 12 weird ideas for sparking
innovation. But I’ve come to believe
that one of these weird ideas is more important, more empirically valid, and
more troubling than the rest: 

Step 1: Decide to Do Something the
Will Probably Fail

Step 2: Then Convince Yourself and
Everyone Else That Success is Certain

Consider
the evidence. Most new ideas fail. Most new companies fail, most products fail,
and most new technologies fail. Darwinian
concepts apply to innovation, as hundreds of careful studies show. The only way
to do something that will probably succeed is to replicate the past, especially
to make your own future as perfect a replication as the past as possible. When Toyota makes another
Camry, McDonald’s sells another Big Mac, or P&G makes and sells another box
of Tide, the odds of success are pretty high.

Once
you enter the world of innovation, where you are doing something new, despite
all the hype, all those consultants with sure fire methods, the fact is that –
even if you have Kleiner Perkins funding, an
experienced CEO, Wilson Sonsini
as your law firm, and a bevy of hot young Stanford engineers developing your
product — odds are you will fail.  Those
are the hard facts, and although most innovators believe that they are better
than the rest, that the odds don’t apply to them, that is a delusion. Google
and its founders are worshipped, but at the time they were was funded, local
venture capitalists seemed to be just as excited about the Segway (which still may make it,
who knows), Zaplet (I
think they dropped over 100 million on that one), Guru
(another 60 million or so), and the infamous Webvan
(over 800 million!).

The
investors at top venture capitalist firms and the people who run R&D at
places like 3M, P&G, and BMW are very smart people and have a great overall
internal rate of return, but as they know so well, in the world of new ideas,
they must accept a high failure rate. They also know – and sometimes even admit — that so-called experts have
a terrible record when it comes to predicting which new ideas will survive and
which will not. Stanford’s James
March, perhaps the most renowned living organizational theorist, summarized
this state of affairs elegantly (this quote is in the last chapter of Weird Ideas That Work):

Most fantasies
lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and
individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as
heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that
can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals
and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among
alternative experiments. By glorifying
imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you
prefer, altruism).

Yet,
the fact remains that, if you are in the innovation business, developing new
products, compounds, or services, starting or funding new companies, you don’t
make a cent if you don’t place your bets on something or someone: Nothing
ventured, nothing gained, is both a cliché and a dangerous half-truth. It is a
cliché because, after all, those VC’s wouldn’t have those nice new houses and
airplanes courtesy of Google if they hadn’t made their bets. And it is a
dangerous half-truth because, well, nothing ventured, nothing lost (think
Webvan).

Once
you put your money down on something (that will probably fail), that is when
things get really weird. Sure, there are
things you can do to increase the odds of success, work hard, find smart
people, and so on. BUT if I was going to pick one thing (based on the
evidence), I’d vote for irrational optimism, convincing yourself and everyone
else that success is certain.

Why?
There is a huge literature – more than 500 studies out there now – on the
self-fulfilling prophecy: If you believe that great things will happen, the
odds of success go up, if you believe that bad things will happen, the odds of
failure do to. Sociologist Robert Merton wrote
classic article on the subject in 1948, and of course, this notion goes back to
the story of Pygmalion. And much the
same story emerges from medical research on placebo effects, that sugar pills
often work just as well as “real medicine” because people have irrational faith.

So,
if you look at the innovation and entrepreneurship game from a portfolio
perspectives, this means that – although their failure rate will remain plenty
high – investors will do better over the long hail if they bet on persuasive
optimists. Thomas Edison fits this
description perfectly, so does Francis Ford Coppola, Steve Jobs (of the famous reality
distortion field), and Burt Rutan. Rutan is the designer of the Voyager, the first plane to fly non-stop
around the world, and more recently, won the 10 million dollar X-Prize with two
flights by his Spaceship One — to demonstrate the possible viability of “space
tourism.” When so called experts told him that Voyager would never make it, he
told his team that “Confidence in nonsense is required.”

The
problem with such success stories, however, is that we tell and remember them,
and we don’t tell and forget all the failures, all those optimists who go from
failed idea to failed new idea. And that is why, as March’s quote hints, there
is a true ethical dilemma in the world of innovation. If you are on top of portfolio, being
optimistic and funding optimists, increases your hit rate, but as March says,
for the typical person, project, or company in the portfolio, the effect is to
“entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer,
altruism).”

There
is also a further twist that I’ll talk about in a future post: The same
optimism that increases the odds of success also can lead to escalating
commitment to a failing course of action. That is why banks have one group to
hands-out loans and another to pull the plug.  And it is why the lead venture capitalist on a
deal often remains behind a company 100% until the moment that his or her
partners intervene and terminate the investment. The overly optimistic backers of the
adventure will often keep throwing good money after bad because they have too
much invested to quit, even though, as they say, sunk costs are sunk and shouldn’t
affect decisions. The result is thaqt cooler and more detached folks are
enlisted to kill investments that seem doomed.

In
short, if your goal is to have the highest internal rate of return for a
portfolio of companies or the highest success rate for set of development
projects, than a strong empirical case can be made for “Decide to Do Something the Will Probably Fail, Then Convince Yourself
and Everyone Else That Success is Certain.” Yet all those sticky and
difficult ethical problems remain, and I don’t quite know what to do about
them. Think about it, if most entrepreneurs came to grips with how bad the odds
against them are, they might be less likely to be “enticed” to start new
companies, and thus avoid the pain and expense of failure. But there would be negative effects as well,
fewer new ideas, less innovation, less cool new stuff. And if only rational, well-informed
pessimists that elected to innovate, to do something new stuff, their failure
rate would be even higher.

I
once teased a local venture capitalist that, if he gave the entrepreneurs his
firm invested in true informed consent, they would have them sign a
document that said something like “I understand that, even though I am
accepting this money, the odds are only 5% that my company will succeed, and
that even if it does succeed, the odds are over 50% that the investors will
remove me from the firm."  It doesn’t
sound like much fun, does it?

The
Stanford Technology Ventures Program is
a bit over 10 years old now. I remember when it was just a pretty dream that
Tom Byers had, to build the greatest technical entrepreneurship program in the
world.  In the early days, I helped Tom
start an intense, year-long class now called the Mayfield Fellows program,
where 12 smart Stanford students first heard about what it was like to work in
the high-tech start-up for a quarter,  then each student worked in one for the  summer (and we all visited all 12 start-ups),
and then we met the next term to think about what we learned about entrepreneurship
and, especially, what each student learned about him or herself. We just
celebrated the 10^th anniversary of that adventure.

STVP
really took off when Tom brought Tina Seelig aboard as Executive Director about
8 years ago.  Tom and Tina, with help
from Kathy Eisenhardt as Research Director, have built a program of classes,
sparked and funded splendid academic research, and developed a set of materials
and conferences –- now held throughout the world –- to spread effective entrepreneurship
teaching. If you teach or want to teach entrepreneurship, or if you are an entrepreneur
yourself and want to see some great videos of world-class people in the world
of technology ventures, download podcasts, and find a host of other material,
visit their newly updated educators
corner. For example, check out a video of JetBlue founder David Neelman or the
one with Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the modern pen-based computer. 

The
thing that always impresses me about Tina and Tom is that they don’t just talk
about entrepreneurship, they never stop doing it: They are constantly starting
new programs and classes, partnering with new folks, and viewing everything
they as something that is could be even better. I talk to Tina a lot, and one
of the things I like about her most is how she is always coming with new ideas
about what to do next, and when she decides that something is worth doing, she implements
it at breathtaking speed. Things often move slowly in Academia, but not at
STVP.

 

I’ve
spent much of the summer working with a great team to design a new course
called Clicks-n-Bricks:
Creating Mass Market Experiences, the
lead-off in a series of project-based classes taught by Stanford’s Hasso Platner Institute
of Design (“The d.school”)this year. Building on what we learned from last
year’s class on Creating
Infectious Action, this fall class will focus on designing on-line and
off-line experiences for customers and employees, as students will work with
real executives, industry experts, and companies to find solutions to real
problems.

Just
like the teams that we ask students to work in, our team is interdisciplinary too.
The core team is Michael
Dearing,  Perry
Klebahn, Liz
Gerber, and me. All played key roles in Creating Infectious Action, with
Liz as a core member of the teaching team, and Michael and Perry serving as
coaches. Michael has a Harvard MBA and has had a varied and intriguing career in
industry, working at Disney and, most recently, about six years in a senior
marketing role at eBay.  And one of the
coolest – and I bet hardest – things he did was serving as Director of Filene’s
Basement in downtown Boston 
for three years. Perry, a member of the core team that runs the d.school and graduate
of the Stanford product design program, invented and spread the popularity of
the modern snowshoe. After he sold Atlas, his snowshoe company, he ran sales
and marketing at  Patagonia for several years and now serves on their board. Liz Gerber is also a graduate of the Stanford
Product Design Program, and has held jobs including middle school teacher, toy
designer, and helped start a software firm during the dotcom boom.  Liz is now working on her doctorate in
Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and has done extensive ethnographic
research on the design process, which she is studying and interpreting with
social psychological theory. Liz also
has a great deal of experience teaching product design classes and
improvisation.

In
addition to the core teaching team, we will pull in experts to help students at
key junctures in the class, including former senior HP executive and sustainability
expert Debra Dunn,
Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler
who – among other amazing things – co-leads the Spread Firefox project,
Julian Gorodsky, our “d.shrink” who will teach students group skills and
help them work through group dynamics issues, and my collaborator Diego
Rodriguez, who we hope to get involved in teaching and coaching students
about the design process.

As you can see, putting on one of these
d.school classes is a lot like putting on a high school musical, there are lot
of exits and entrances to manage.

The
class will focus on two major projects to get student
teams out into the real world to wrestle with real problems. The first project is on “improving the theme
park experience.” The teams will visit local theme parks, identify customer
experience problems, and brainstorm and then design solutions. The second
project, the capstone, will entail using the design process to work with
Wal-Mart on its sustainability initiative (see the cover story of Fortune this week) to spread knowledge,
network connections, and enthusiasm among Wal-Mart employees about this
initiative. Wal-Mart executives and managers will work with students to explain
the company’s commitment to sustainability, guide students efforts to engage
Wal-Mart employees more fully and effectively in this effort, and (along with
other experts), give feedback to students about their work.

I
will keep you posted about developments as the class unfolds. If you are a
Stanford Masters student (we love diversity, so the class is open to all
majors), please click on this
d.school page and use the link to get on the list for the application
process.

It
should be a fun and wild ride. 

 

Diego Rodriguez and I had good fun talking at AlwaysOn about our d.school course on Creating Infectious Action yesterday, and the audience — both online and offline — seemed to be especially amused when Diego talked about the websites that our students built to spread Firefox. Check out the C|Net story on Selling Mozillia Through Sex and Religion.

We then had lively panel with people who have spread ideas and products successfully. My three take aways:

1. Mitchell Baker of Mozillia talked about how hard it is — and how important it is — to let go of control of your message and your brand, to get others to help you spread.  As she emphasized, there are times when Mozillia does take steps to encourage some messages and discourage others, but they have to pick their battles because they’ve got about 55 people, and there are over 100,000 people out there spreading the news about Firefox.  Traditional corporate control freaks have a lot of control letting go, although they seem to make internal decisions that ruin brands just fine (e.g., I don’t understand how having 15 different Coca-Colas to choose from helps their brand).

2. Perry Klebhan, founder of Atlas Snowshoes and inventor of the modern snowshoe, emhasized that the product became a success only after he realized who real users where — people who wanted a safe and organized experience, not hotshots who pull over to the side of the road and take off where there no trails — which affected who Atlas marketed to and led to work with snowparks to create marked trails for snowshoe users. It was a message about listening to and finding who really wants your product, not who you think would be a "cool" person to like it.  Perry also was a coach in the class, and is heavily involved in the d.school in other ways.

3. Gil Penchino, CEO of Wikia, who had a great point. He argued that he had learned not to keep pouring gasoline on logs when there was no fire, but instead to look for little fires that were already burning and to dump the fuel on them. In other words, if there is no real interest in anything, spending a lot of money won’t help, but where there is already interest, money and attention can help something take off that is already creating excitement and buzz. 

Bruce Nussbaum and Jessie Scanlon from BusinessWeek invited me to write something on what it takes to do effective brainstorming after they saw my post on Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal. I went back and re-read the academic research on brainstorming and remain amazed by how detached it is from what it actually happens when people and teams do creative work. I developed this argument and management guidelines in an article that just appeared in BusinessWeek’s Innovation and Design section. Check out Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming.

I would also like to add a point that isn’t covered in this article. Not all psychology experiments are irrelevant to what happens in organizations. I am a strong proponent of using experimental methods when they reflect either the fundamentals of human behavior or have some hope of reflecting what actually happens in the real world. For a superb example of how this can be done, check out Max Bazerman’s book Judgment in Managerial Decision Making. Unfortunately, the assumptions and methods that most brainstorming researchers use in their experiments produce rigorous evidence that is, unfortunately, of little relevance. This isn’t just my opinion. I made a presentation a few years ago about brainstorming to a room full of renowned experimentalists at the Stanford Psychology Department, which included Mark Lepper, Lee Ross, and Robert Zajonc. The group was even more vehement about how unrealistic brainstorming research was as a model for how group work and creative work actually is done in real places.

One of the areas that I study and teach about is customer
service.  I did a lot of my early
research on jobs that require people to express certain emotions and suppress others,
including telephone bill collectors, 7/Eleven clerks, and police interrogators.
I’ve become more interested in service experiences again in the last year
or so, and in fact, a group of us including Michael Dearing (who just left eBay
after over six years as a senior executive), Perry Klebahn (inventor of the modern snowshoe and a
former Patagonia executive), Liz Gerber (a fantastic Stanford doctoral
student and skilled product designer) and I are developing a new Stanford d.school class on designing
service experiences next Fall. And Huggy Rao of the Stanford Business School and I are teaching a new executive program next November on Customer-Focused Innovation.

My renewed interest in services is driven heavily by the bewildering
and often idiotic things that organizations to do us as customers.  I won’t do the complete rant here, but I’ve
had some experiences with Air France that were simply unbelievable blends of arrogance and incompetence, for
example.  One experience was so bad that
I really couldn’t figure out how to get them to pay attention to me without
having a strategic temper tantrum (an incident I describe in my chapter on the
virtues of assholes in The No Asshole Rule).  But the experience I had with Air France was
nothing compared to the treatment that an AOL customer received when he tried
to cancel his account. Go to Insignificant
Thoughts and listen to the audio of the poor guy who was trying to cancel
his account.  The entire company owes
this guy an apology. When I hear something like this, my reaction is “now that
is a company that deserves to die.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a column that questions the value of group brainstorming for generating new ideas. Andy Hargadon and I spent several years studying this topic, which included an 18 month ethnography of the role of brainstorming at IDEO. The upshot is that it is an idiotic debate and that much of the "research" that is cited by Paul Paulus is rigorous but irrelevant.  A few key points about most brainstorming research by academics:

1. Brainstorming performance is defined only as the efficiency of idea generation — the number of ideas generated per person in say a 15 minute session. It does not measure idea quality, commitment to the ideas, whether people learned things from listening to others ideas, subsequent success and so on. It also doesn’t measure whether different people’s ideas are built on or recombined because that is impossible in an individual brainstorm. The main finding is true — but completely trivial — individuals can speak more ideas into a microphone when they are working alone because they don’t have to wait their turn to talk (and do that awful thing of listening to others ideas!).

2. The people in these experiments — nearly all undergraduates — have no past experience doing or leading brainstorms (In fact, in the one experiment that I know of where people were led by trained facilitators, the so-called disadvantages of group brainstorming went away).

3. Not one one of these experimental studies on "brainstorming performance" has ever been done in an organization where it is work practice that is used as a routine part of the work.  Paulus wrote me some years back that he tried to recruit some "real" organizations that did real creative work, but had no luck. To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex.

More generally, the question of whether "individual" or "group" brainstorming is "better" for creative work is, for starters, sort of like asking "what is more important, my brain or my heart?"  You need group brainstorming just to get the diverse ideas out on the table, to create a setting where people can build one each others ideas, and so that people can express public commitment to developing them. And you need time alone to reflect and think about what ideas you will bring to a brainstormer and what to do with the ideas after the brainstormer. In fact, in his classic, Applied Imagination, Alex Osborne was very careful to say that creativity depended on alternating between group and individual ideation.  And in fact, Paulus own research is starting to show this as well.

Also, the fact is that people in creative workplaces already know this, they always do both, and usually spend more time generating ideas alone than in groups — our surveys at IDEO showed that, as skilled as they are at brainstorming, few designers spent more than 5 to 10 percent of their work week in brainstorming sessions. It is just one part of the "mix" of creative work, so examining brainstorming without looking at it in  the larger context where it is done — in an an organization, by experts, and woven together with other work practices — is useless.

The WSJ article also quotes people in "real jobs" who talk about the notion that they’ve never had an idea in a meeting and that meetings stifle their creativity. No doubt that happens to some people, but it is less likely to happen when people are experienced at brainstorming, led by an experienced facilitator, and don’t work in a place where people work in fear. One of the critics of group brainstorming had worked at GE — an organization that fired (or "moved-out") the bottom 10% of its employees for years — I’d feel uncomfortable saying something that sounds dumb in that setting too because, after all, it might cost me my job.