Work Matters

Category: Innovation

  • CEO Decision-Making: A Great Observation By Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz

    I have been reading through "Ben's Blog," which is written by Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitiz (a firm that just raised 650 million, yikes!)  He wrote a great post awhile back on how the firm evaluates CEOs. Read the whole thing, it is inspired.  I especially love this part, because it is so true and explodes the myth of the all knowing and all powerful CEO:

    Courage is particularly important, because every decision that a CEO makes is based on incomplete information. In fact, at the time of the decision, the CEO will generally have less than 10% of the information typically present in the ensuing Harvard Business School case study (emphasis added by me).  As a result, the CEO must have the courage to bet the company on a direction even though she does not know if the direction is right. The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

    This point dovetails well with the quote at the top of Ben's Blog:

    There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. - John Von Neumann

    I will poke around more; he is a very thoughtful guy. Also, Ben's point reminds of something I heard Andy Grove say several years back along similar lines — see this HBR post on how a good boss is confident, but not really sure.

  • Dan Pink: “It’s a short step from scale to sclerosis.”

    Dan's lovely quote is from a story in this morning's New York Times.  It is about how Google has become so big that it has lost its start-up feel and some of its best employees are heading for more exciting places, especially Facebook.  As further evidence of Google's concern about a talent drain, Google gave every employee a 10% (or larger) raise this month.  I agree with the story's premise that Facebook is one of the hottest employers in Silicon Valley, partly because they do give technical folks very cool work (although so does Google) and partly because they are pre-IPO, so there is the lure of a big payday when they go public. 

    The challenges of scaling an exciting small company into a big one are not easy (see this great post by venture capitalist on Taking The Mystery Out of Scaling a Company, which I will likely do a longer post on soon).  But I do think that Google has done a pretty good job here; size creates complexity that is unavoidable, but they've done a good job of staying pretty lean and not adding excessive rules and constraints compared to most rapidly growing companies.  But the process whereby people leave a once small company to start their own company or to join a smaller and more exciting one has always been part of the growth cycle in every company, especially in Silicon Valley.  Indeed, during the glory days of Hewlett-Packard, they fueled the growth of Silicon Valley with employees who left to start their own companies (including Steve Wozniak; his Apple PC to them, but they didn't want it).   Although the loss of specific employees was regretable, these same employees helped fuel an ecosystem of innovation that benefits HP to this day — and the same is true of Google. 

    I wonder, what other companies have impressed people for their ability to scale without sclerosis, and which companies are horror stories of red-tape, unnecessary rules, and petty politics, and bulky bureaucracies?

    P.S. The large company that has done the most impressive job of scaling (although there are some unattractive features about them) is Wall-Mart.  Their lack of excessive complexity and action orientation is really something.

  • Fortune Names Diego Rodriguez as Among the Smartest People in Tech

    4_diego_rodriguez
    The latest Fortune magazine has a list of the Smartest People in Tech, they listed 50, starting with Steve Jobs. Also on the list was IDEO's Diego Rodriguez, who has written the inspiring Metacool blog for years (Don't miss his innovation principles on the right side of his blog).  I was delighted to see Diego on the list because we are friends and he has helped me in many ways over the year.(he got me started on both blogging and the twittering thing). But I was also delighted because, after seeing him in action at IDEO for over a decade (off and on, he went to Harvard Business Business school and did a stint at Intuit), first as young engineer and now as a partner and founder of their business design discipline.  I also taught a class at the d.school with Diego called Creating Infectious Action the first year the Stanford d.school was open. 

    I have him watched him grow into one of the most imaginative and practical people in the innovation world.  Diego's ability to understand design and business, and their intersection, at such a high level constantly amazes me — he takes design principles (often with his own twist)  such "the mind of a child,"  "build to think," "prototype until you puke,"  and "failure sucks but instructs" and then applies them to hardcore business problems — strategy, organizational design, the CEO's role in a company, performance metrics for innovation — that are both new and at the same time reflect the practical realities of running a business. 

    I am glad to hear this as it is nice pat on the back for Diego.  I am also glad to hear it because it is a nice reflection on IDEO and the Stanford d.school.  And I am also glad because Diego's success, like so many people I know, would not have been possible without David Kelley's amazing creative courage and vision, as in the process of founding and building IDEO and then the Stanford d.school, Diego is just one of many of us who have been taught and inspired by David, and benefited in more tangible ways too, from the the fruits of David's imagination (See this recent post on creative confidence for a bit more about David along with this older one on the inevitable messiness of innovative work).

    Once again, congratulations to Diego.

  • Innovation Will Always Have Messy Parts: Wisdom from IDEO’s David Kelley and 3M’s Bill Coyne

    After all these years that I've studied and taught creativity and innovation, I am starting to believe that one element of the process is tougher for many people to accept than the rest — that it is a messy and uncertain process and efforts to make the early messy stages more rational, safer, and generally neat and clean comforting get in the way of the process. 

    I confess that I suffer from wanting to get rid of this messiness now and then too, and in fact, during the early days of the Stanford d.school, I went to our founder and inspiration David Kelley and asked him to make things less confusing and upsetting, and in the nicest possible way, David said he couldn't, that we were involved in messy process and if I couldn't deal with it, perhaps I should do something else.  I see the same instinct in how some university administrators and faculty react to the d.school, in that the love the innovation and creativity, but the physical messiness and lack of orderliness disturbs them.  Now, we have developed techniques to help people navigate the messiness more effectively (notably the Bootcamp Bootleg) but the process is still messy and uncertain.

    I was thinking of this because I was reading an article by Bill Coyne, who led R&D at 3M for over a decade. I met Bill about ten years ago, and he is very wise  And he understands both the messiness and misguided impulse to clean it up. I loved this quote:

    Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky,
    glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that
    describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front
    end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow
    the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term
    growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on
    many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving
    leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be
    willing to make necessary, healthy stumble    s.

    Given all this, innovators still are often surrounded by people who want to give their process "a nice haircut."  How can this be stopped?  And perhaps I am being to closed-minded.  Do any of those haircuts ever work?

  • The Creative Process Gone Wrong

    One of my students, Rob, just sent me a link to this video on how the design of the stop sign is ruined by a bad creative process — unfortunately, this parody resembles the process in far too many organizations and teams that try to do creative work in real organizations.  It is funny but disturbing.  He
    saw this in Tina
    Seelig's     class, who teaches a fantastic class on the creative
    process.  

    This video brought to mind three things:

    1. One of the main sicknesses you see in this video is a failure to kill ideas. Most of the ideas are, on their own, sort of logical. But when you mash them all together, the complexity ruins the experience for the users and the designers end up doing many things, but none very well.  See this post about Steve Jobs on the importance of killing good ideas for more on this crucial point. 

    2. Th process in the video, where a good idea isn't shown to users or customers, but each internal voice adds more and more, and forgets the big picture in the process, also reminds me of the stage gate process at its worst, where it each stage, the product or service is made worse as it travels along. 

    3. Finally, if you want a great companion innovation video, check out Gus Bitdinger's amazing song "Back to Orbit," which he wrote and performs. I wrote a bit more about it here.  It was Gus's final project for an innovation class that Michael Dearing and I taught a few years back, and he does an amazing job of summarizing the key points of my favorite creativity book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.   It sort of addresses both the problems in the stop sign video and the solutions — and in general is a delight and very instructive on the creative process. 

    This all raises a broader question: What are the most important things a boss can do to speed and improve the creative process.  Certainly, talking to customers and users to identify their needs and test your ideas is standard and increasingly, so is the advice that you've got to kill a lot of good ideas, not just bad ones.  I have also always been enamored by the power of a fast and civilized fight, and touch on a lot of other related topics in Weird Ideas That Work.  Also, don't miss Diego's 17 Innovation Principles at Metacool;I especially like #17: It's not the years, it's the mileage. But I also know that there are some essential elements being left out here… what would you add?

  • Front Stage Vs. Backstage Behavior: A Cultural Lesson?

     I try to understand and respect the differences among cultures, what they mean for how I should behave, and the implications for how well — or badly — management practices from one culture apply to another.  But trying to understand them does not mean that I quite know how to deal with differences as I encounter them in the moment, or even if what I THINK are cultural differences really are differences — or just reflect the usual variation in organizational cultures and human personality that are always present. But I might have learned something in Singapore last week that is a cultural difference — and I would appreciate any comments about if I am right or wrong, and that add nuances that I no doubt mixed. 

    I had the privilege of spending three days in Singapore last week working with leaders in industry and the government on leadership and innovation issues.  In one of the workshops I helped lead, I reviewed various studies and examples showing that constructive conflict is linked to group performance and, especially, creativity and innovation.  If you read this blog, you will see this theme pretty often, as I write about having strong opinions weakly held, fighting if you are right and listening as if you are wrong, fast fights at the Stanford d.school, and this was big theme in the interview we did a couple years ago with Brad Bird of Pixar. All these studies, however, are (I believe) conducted in western countries.  One of the folks I was working with in Singapore commented that open — even if constructive — conflict is something that westerners do, but Asians tend not to do (and indeed although I engaged in some open disagreement, especially with a fellow American academic, there was not much other open disagreement in any of the workshops).

    BUT I am talking about in open — if small — public forums.   In contrast, I spent a lot of time in one on one conversations engaging in quite active debate and (polite) two-way constructive criticism.  Indeed, I would say that I engaged in more argument in one-on-one conversations than I would with a typical American business crowd.   I would also add that these backstage conversations — for the most part — helped improve the workshops and sharpen my thinking.  So here is my hypothesis, that as the famous sociologist Erving Goffman emphasized, there is always a huge difference between front stage and back stage behavior in organizational life… and in this case, the amount and quality of constructive conflict I experienced was similar to what I would expect from a U.S. organization, but the difference is that it all happened backstage.

    My tentative hypothesis here is that there is just as much constructive conflict in Singapore and perhaps other Asian countries as in western countries, but more of it happens in one-on-ones and otherwise behind the scenes.  I suspect that a lot of you out there will say "duh" in response, but I am curious to hear if this seemingly obvious truth is, well, true.   And if it is wrong or partly wrong, why — and any other related insights. Thanks.

  • Join Us and Whitney Mortimer for “IDEO in 4 Acts” this Wednesday at Stanford

    Mortimer_Whitney_bw1 This Wednesday, March 3rd, we are holding a special section of my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach.  Class will be held in an auditorium at Stanford, at Gates B01.  Our guest star for the day is IDEO Partner and head of marketing, Whitney Mortimer (pictured to the left). I have invited Whitney because our class is currently studying how to build and sustain a culture of innovation, and IDEO is the poster child for this feat.   \

    I've know Whitney more than 10 years and she has often been a guest in this class.  In general, she has refrained from being a public face who represents this great company, leaving that to others like the amazing Tim Brown and David Kelley.  But whenever I hear Whitney talk about IDEO, I always see them from a different and compelling vantage point, as her perspective on the links among IDEO's culture, strategy, brand, and history is unique, despite all that has been said and written about this great company and its leaders.

    This event is open to the public, but there are a few details and constraints.  First, pizza and soft drinks will be served right outside the classroom from about noon to 12:25.  Then Whitney's talk will commence from 12:30 to 1:30.  Because the room only holds about 200 people (and we will occupy perhaps 100 seats with our students and some other guests) we only have room for about 100 guests.  In addition, we need to know how much pizza to order. So, if you are going to join us, please send and rsvp to Carol XU, her email is jxcarol2001[at]gmail[dot]com.

    Also note that we are "closing" the invitation at 9AM on Weds. morning or when we are sold out, whatever comes first. We hope to see you there, it should be great fun, and it is a fun chance to learn about the history of one of the greatest and most civilized companies I know, and from a perspective that is a bit different than is usually told.

  • “From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit”

    There is saying, kind of a crude little formula, I have been using for years when I write and give talks on what it takes to build a culture where people innovate routinely (which I think I stole from Charles O'Reilly at the Stanford Business School):

    Creativity + implementation = innovation

    I have always found it a useful oversimplification of the two big things that have to happen in order to innovate, to cash in on new ideas.  It is also related to one of the main ideas in Weird Ideas That Work, that creativity is about increasing the amount of variation and all around messiness and routine work is about driving out variance and driving in order and predictability.  

    John Edson In this spirit, one of
    the student groups in my class on Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based
    Approach, did a fantastic case study of the culture of innovation at Lunar Design. The members were Ioannis Alivizatos, Meeta Arora, Stephen Streeter, and Ben
    Merrick.  They heard the quote in the
    title of this post from John Edson (pictured to the left), Lunar product design firm that has designed many
    familiar products including the HP Touchsmart, the Oral B CrossAction
    toothbrush, and the Modu phone.  I think that "“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit” conveys a similar message to the one I borrowed from Charles – that the
    messiness and failure required to generate a new idea needs to be shut-off as
    you move into the implementation phase, where more control and order are
    required.  Knowing how and when to make
    that shift is tough, although the best firms and bosses make it happen
    routinely.  For example, Intel’s motto “disagree
    and then commit” reflects this spirit – you fight during the creative part, but
    join arms to make the idea work during the implementation part, even if you
    think the decision was wrong.

    P.S. And following my last post on failure, I also liked how a key element of their culture was that, when people made mistakes, they framed it as "Paying for education."

  • My Challenge to GM: A Change You Need to Make If You Really Want Cultural Change

    Today's New York Times has a very encouraging article about the cultural and organizational changes that are happening at GM in the wake of their bankruptcy.  I was simply delighted to read about changes like this, where GM is finally beginning to tackle what Jeff Pfeffer and I call "The Otis Redding Problem."

    In the old General Motors, employees were evaluated according to a “performance measurement process” that could fill a three-ring binder. In
    Terry Woychowski’s case, for example, his job as director of G.M.’s
    vehicle engineers was spelled out in exhaustive detail, and evaluated
    every three months. But in his new job as vice president — a
    promotion he was given 20 days after G.M. emerged from bankruptcy — his
    performance review will be boiled down to a single page, something he
    had never seen in his 29 years with the company.Mr. Woychowski
    said he felt the grip of G.M.’s legendary bureaucracy start to loosen,
    something he never imagined possible. Now, such reviews are being
    scaled down and simplified across the company. “We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday,” he said. “But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.”

    As regular readers of this blog may recall, last November, I wrote a rather scathing post on GM's "no we can't mindset" in which I argued that GM's core competence seemed to be coming-up with reasons about why the couldn't stop doing seemingly dumb old things and start doing seemingly smart new things. I provided quite specific suggestions that stemmed from my now nearly 30 years of intermittent contact with diverse parts of the company. I am not especially good at figuring out the impact of different posts, but from the number of page views, number of comments, and the strength of the emotional reactions to it, I think this post had more impact than anything else ever written here.  This Times article suggests that they are making real progress and committed to making more.

    In that spirit, I have a pet peeve that I have been complaining about openly and repeatedly to GM managers and executives about for years.  This is a change I believe they can  and should make immediately, and that will help reverse two of GM's biggest cultural problems:

        1. Management and senior executives don't quite understand and are insulated from the experience of owning and buying a GM car — and how it stacks-up against their competitors.

        2. They think and act like too much like they are just selling cars, when in fact, they are selling a car ownership experience — yes, the car itself is an important part, but there are many other parts such as shopping for a car, buying it, having it serviced, and so on that are treated as separate and less important.

    To me the single most destructive thing they do to themselves is to have a program — one they still have — where managers and executives are given a free GM car to drive.  I have heard a lot about bits and pieces of this program over the years, but I confess to not knowing every detail.  My understanding, as I wrote last November, is that it goes something like this:

    GM has a perk for managers down to fairly
    low levels where all are given a GM car to drive – they rotate from one car to
    another.  I am not sure of the exact details,
    but answers to the questions I’ve asked over the years  suggest it goes something like this: the
    lowest level managers have to buy their own cars, the ones at somewhat higher
    levels get a new car to drive every six months or so but have to do some
    servicing, the managers who are somewhat higher-up get somewhat fancier cars and are freed from any servicing (gas
    is even put in the cars of some executives so they don’t have to go to the
    service station), and the highest level executives get a car and a driver.


    In other words, this system effectively
    insulates people in management – especially those in senior management — from
    experiencing what it is like to shop for, bargain for, purchase, service, and
    sell a car. They only get the driving experience. Well, except for the most
    senior executives, who don’t even get that experience — they watch a person in
    the front seat drive a big car.  Now, it
    is true, that the most senior executives do own GM cars for personal use, but
    it is my understanding that when a car is delivered to a senior executive,
    special attention is devoted to the car – even during the production process –to
    make sure the top brass aren’t exposed to a car with any flaws. Wouldn’t that
    be nice? 

    Here is my challenge to GM, and frankly, since you are running on U.S. taxpayer money, my money and the money of millions of us who would rather see the money going to things like education, I think that you owe to us — and yourself — to do the right thing:

    1. Get rid of the program immediately.

    2. Use the money spent on the program (even though I know it won't have the tax advantages of the old program) to give each manager and executive money to help buy a car for work — they only get the money if they buy a car.

    3. Get rid of the GM employee discount program completely, so that when managers and execs walk into a GM dealer, they have to do the same negotiation as everyone else.

    4. Stipulate that not only can people buy non GM cars, only 25% of those participating in the program at any time can own a GM car.  That way, there will be information in the company about the experience of owning a wide range of cars.

    5. Everyone — from the CEO on down — will be required to partake in the full car ownership experience, from selecting, to shopping for, to servicing, to getting gas, to selling and trading in their cars.

    There are a lot of other things about GM that need to change — or more optimistically — perhaps are already are changing. See this amazing story provided by Matt May about how badly their managers sometimes listen. But I believe that this single change will have a large and positive impact, forcing GM management and executives to break out of their isolation, to learn about competitors' car and car buying experiences, and to come to grips with what the GM ownership experience actually entails.

    Dear GM Executives: you know these problems exist, you know that this program contributes to these problems, and you are at a juncture in your history where change is possible.  Why can't you end this program immediately?  Rather than falling back on your old core competence of explaining why it is impossible for you to do the right thing, how about showing the American taxpayer and yourself too that it is possible for you to do the right thing and to do it fast?


  • Leading Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

    CFI Goes to the Tesla Dealer
    As I blogged about awhile back, this week, Perry Klebhan, Alex Kazaks,Huggy Rao and I are running rather intense executive program called Customer-Focused Innovation.  As you can see from the schedule, we are keeping the 21 executives in the program mighty busy. We kicked off with a tire-changing  exercise led by Andy Papa, who among other things leads the pit crews at Hendrick's Motor Sports, where one team established the all time CFI speed record, changing in a tire on a NASCAR racing car in under 13 seconds. Yesterday, the group spent the day at the Tesla dealer in Menlo Park talking to owners, potential customers, people in sales and marketing at Tesla, and people who didn't like the idea of owning a Tesla at all. In the picture above, the two executives on the left are interviewing George Kembel, the d.school's executive director (he is the tall guy facing the camera) and the group on the right is interviewing one of the Tesla salespeople (the woman in black with sunglasses in her hair).

    The idea is to use their observations, empathy for others, and identified needs to develop prototype solutions to improve the Tesla car ownership experience.  The group focuses on cases, theories, and models in the mornings, and applying design thinking in the Tesla project in the afternoon. It is a lively and motivated group, and we all are very curious to see
    the suggestions and prototypes they offer to Tesla executives on
    Thursday.

    Huggy Rao and I kicked off yesterday morning by doing case discussions and a bit of lecture on the hallmarks of innovative organizations. As part of that session, I put together the list below for the executives. I've also included links for anyone who wants to dig into the subject a bit further. I will add a few more ideas and links during the course of the week.  I would love to hear some additional ways that great bosses spark innovation and comments — and extensions — on the ideas below.

    Leading
    Innovation: 21 Things that Great Bosses Believe and Do

    1.
    Creativity means doing new things with old ideas.

    2.
    Treat innovation as an import-export business. 
    Keep trying to bring in ideas from outside your group or organization,
    keep trying to show and tell others about your ideas, and blend them all
    together.

    3.
    Look for and build     “intersections” places where people with diverse ideas
    gather together. And when you go there, talk to the people you don’t know, who
    have ideas you know nothing about, and ideas you find weird, don’t like, or useless    .

    4.
     Treat your beliefs as “strong opinions, weakly held.”

    5.
    Learn how to listen, watch, and keep your mouth shut.

    6.
     Say “I don’t know” on a regular basis.

    7.
     Have the courage to act on what you
    know, and the humility to doubt your beliefs and actions.

    8.
    Reward success and (intelligent) failure, but punish inaction.

    9.
    Make it safe for people to take risky actions and “fail forward,” by developing
    a “forgive and remember culture.”

    10.
    Encourage people to learn from others’ failures – it is faster, easier, and
    less painful.

    11.
    Eliminate hiring and reward practices that reinforce cultures where “the best
    you can be is a perfect imitation of those who came before you.”

    12.
    Hire people who make your squirm.

    13.
    Create teams composed of both experts and novices.

    14.
    Make it safe for people to fight as if they are right, and listen as if they
    wrong.

    15.
    Encourage your people to be “happy worriers.”

    16.
     Sometimes, the best management is no
    management at all.  Know when and how to
    get out of the way.

    17.
    Have the confidence and resolve to make tough decisions, stop your people from
    whining about the decisions made, and to get on with implementing them    .

    18.
    Kill a lot of ideas, including a lot of good ideas.

    19.  Innovation entails creativity +
    implementation.  Developing or finding a
    great idea is useless if you can't implement it or sell it to someone who believes they
    can.

    20.
    Remember Rao’s Recipe for Innovation: Will +Ideas + Tools.

    21. Innovation requires selling your ideas.  The greatest innovators, from Edison to Jobs, are gifted at generating excitement and sales.  If you can't or won't sell, team-up with someone who can.

    As I edited this list a bit, I realized it is important to remind people that there is a lot about innovation that sucks.  Yes, it is necessary, but innovator beware, it is an inefficient and distressing process plagued by a high failure rate — and a lot of self-delusion. And that is when you are doing it right!

    Sources:  Rao’s book Market Rebels  Sutton’s Weird Ideas
    that Work    ,      and Sutton’s personal blog Work Matters.