Category: Innovation

Our website www.evidence-basedmanagement.com just posted an interview with Huggy Rao about his great new book Market Rebels. Check it out, he is a mighty smart guy. Thanks to Daphne for all her work on this and the site in general.

This amazing talk is by Elizabeth Gilbert, at TED. She is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, the smash bestseller.  I saw at at Metacool and it is the best talk on creativity I ever saw.

The new forthcoming version of the Amazon Kindle has got pretty good reviews.  Predicting the future is impossible, but I saw one possible scenario when I looked at my sales as an Amazon Associate for this month (I am not getting rich off this, but the hundred or so bucks a month that I earn is nice and I enjoy spending it on Amazon).  Of the six books that people bought by connecting to Amazon through Work Matters yesterday, four were for Kindles.  And, looking at the month to date (through February 14th), people bought 39 traditional books and 11 for Kindles.  This is horrible sample to base any decision on, but it is instructive to ask "suppose this is the future?"  As science fiction William Gibson once wrote (if I have this right),
"The future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed." 

The publishing industry might be facing a scenario straight out of Clay Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma — the incumbents die or decline deeply because they can't break free from their routines and internal power structures, and the new entrants race in and win.  Indeed, Border's has hired bankruptcy lawyers, while — despite the downturn — Amazon had a record Christmas season.   And there is plenty of fear in the book business that their problems aren't
just caused by the downturn, but also by disruptive innovations that
will rival what we have seen happen to the music and newspaper
industries. The Kindle might not be the winner, in fact, there is a good chance that the ipod and iphone will be (especially if Apple comes out with a bigger itouch, for both seeing movies and reading books more easily… they have the infrastructure already and related skills).

 If I were a book publisher, I wouldn't just hunker down, cut costs, and do what I've always done until the downturn is over.  I would work to bring in people from outside the industry who understand the web and let them try some experiments — and if I was a venture capitalist, I would be looking for start-ups that can rush in and replace those giant but shrinking publishing houses in New York City.  History and the evidence is not on their side.  It is impossible to know which firms or technologies will replace them, but the odds they will be replaced by something different look pretty good to me.  Any publishing executive who believes that the best way to ride out the downturn is with a company that is an exact imitation of what they had in the past is living in a fool's paradise.  The process of cost-cutting all too often results in a "a puny but otherwise perfect replicant" of the old organization, which is only the right thing to do if the future is a perfect imitation of the past.  This is almost certainly not the case in the book business.

Having said all this, however, sniping from the sidelines is one thing, but figuring out how to navigate through these tough times is another thing.

If you were CEO of a large publishing house, what would you do? 

This is idea #6 from Weird Ideas That Work.  Unfortunately, even though there is massive evidence that innovation is impossible without action, that no learning or creativity is possible without failure either, we have entered an era of fear.  I feel it everywhere, in every industry, even among the companies and people who are riding out the bad times well.  The unstated motto these days is "Reward Success and Inaction, Punish Failure."  This is a perfect recipe for REAL failure.  It seems that trying and failing are now out of fashion.  I am not saying urging people to take risks that are too big, as Diego says, you need a place and a time for failing.  Just as I have argued about the virtues of small wins, I believe that one of the keys to getting out of this mess if for all of us to find ways to accept and learn from small loses. 

It is worth remembering research on difference between the most creative and successful people versus their more ordinary peers.  Einstein and da Vinci had more bad ideas than their peers.  Babe Ruth struck out more.  That is because they acted, failed, learned, and kept moving forward. 

As I wrote here about 18 months ago:

"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." 

Some advice for all of us… I am having trouble following too, I confess, but let's try:

1. Take a little risk.

2. Try something you are bad it

3.  Encourage someone who has given their all and failed — don't humiliate or punish them.

4.  Remember that by insisting on perfection and worrying too much that something bad will happen, you preclude the possibility that something great happen  — or of suffering failure that will teach you a lesson that will make you a huge success the time after.

5.  Talk about your mistakes and let others know what you have learned from them.

6. Punish inaction.

7. Punish CYA behavior — that isn't the kind of action we need right now.  (I put-up a snide post about A-Rod yesterday, but I have to applaud him for admitting his mistake. John Thain –and Barry Bonds — could learn something from him.)

It is time for a little movement.  In this spirit, I had the idea of putting up a picture of an Ex-Lax box on this post to convey that message.  I decided not to do it, but I am going to take the little risk. Is it in bad taste? Probably, but I hope it helps you remember the message.

P.S. Speaking of Ex-Lax, this is one my favorite "asshole boss" revenge stories.  See tip #3.

Check out this fascinating sentence completion exercise over at Metacool.  I missed it when I was on vacation.  Diego asked people to complete the sentence "Designing is…"

I might answer:

…. worrying about the journey rather than the destination.

…. seeing things as flexible that others see as fixed.

…. noticing things you have passed a thousand times for the first time.

…. muddling more and planning less.

…. watching, asking questions, and listening.

There are a lot of great answers over at Metacool.  Let Diego and me know what you think "Designing is….."

Here is a thoughtful post about whether or not brainstorming is a waste of time at Lateral Action. Don't miss the great picture.  I am quoted as being for brainstorming, which is sort of true. My perspective on brainstorming is based on an 18 month ethnography at IDEO and from teaching innovation classes at the d.school classes for some years now.  And here is an early post on this blog that is goes through some of the same things.

My perspective on group brainstorming boils down to three points that are reflected in those links and the academic article below. In short:

1. The academic research on brainstorming — the laboratory studies that are described as showing it doesn't work — are rigorous but irrelevant. They compare how many ideas individuals working alone versus versus working in groups can utter into a microphone in the same stretch of time.  This is irrelevant and silly, as the practical norm that people take turns talking seems to explain why people are more productive alone — so this research rules out LISTENING TO OTHERS as productive behavior. Also, the way those studies are done makes it impossible for people to build on each others' ideas — because building on the ideas of others is impossible when you work alone.  I would add that this is not a reflection of a bias against lab studies, and in fact, when I did a talk on brainstorming at the Stanford Psychology Department, the renowned lab researchers there thought that the research was equally silly.  The notion that face-to-face meetings are not efficient way to get things compared to working along (and you need to waste all that time listening), but meetings do other things well, is not exactly a revelation, as the late Bob Zajonc pointed out during my talk.

 Indeed, thinking about it right now, it is pretty funny that some professors, who as the word implies "profess" rather than listen, would design experiments in ways that treat listening as non-productive behavior.

2. Brainstorming by itself is a technique that people can do well or badly, and there is big variance in skill and leadership — something that even some lab studies that are labeled as being about brainstorming show. But I assert that brainstorming only makes a difference if it is part of a larger create process, as you see at IDEO, Pixar, and other places that do real creative work. If the group doesn't do some preparation and doesn't use the ideas generated — if they don't later battle over which are best,  prototype some ideas, test them, try to implement them — then it is just a bunch of useless ideas and perhaps a fun meeting.  So, for example, if you look at Tim Brown's Harvard Business Review article on Design Thinking, brainstorming is just one juncture in the process and in fact recognized as just one way to generate ideas (individual ideation is at least as important as group brainstorming).  Note that brainstorming experiments nearly always have people generate ideas about things that participants have no expertise about and generate ideas that of no value to the participants,  things like "what would you do with an extra thumb" or "how any uses are there for a brick." 

3. Brainstorming is something that doesn't work well in organizational cultures that are very authoritarian, where people view meetings as places to crush others and their ideas, where people have trouble with ambiguity, or where people do not feel otherwise psychologically safe.  It also should not be used by people who have no skill at doing it.  For example, one story that hints at all of these comes from one of my students. He had a summer job at a company where there was a strict status hierarchy and people had trouble with ambiguity.  A senior person called a one hour brainstorm.  The first 30 minutes were spent arguing over which categories to put the ideas in, and after one idea was suggested, the next 30 minutes were spent arguing over which category to put it in.  Then the brainstorm was over — this student was and is an excellent brainstormer, but as he was a summer intern, he really wasn't supposed to say anything.  If you work at company like that, don't bother to try brainstorming.

In short, brainstorming does seem moderately useful in the right hands, in the right organization, and as part of a bigger creative process.  I am ready to change my mind about this hypothesis if people have better facts, but the current research provides no clue about the value of brainstorming as it is done in the real world. For example, having fun and impressing clients aren't studied as legitimate performance outcomes in this literature.  But keeping smart employees engaged and interacting with each other is valuable to organizations beyond any other value of brainstorming, and so is impressing clients. And as I said, these studies also treat listening as a waste of time.

Thoughts? Opinions? 

P.S. The reference for my academic work on this is Sutton, RI; Hargadon, A
"Brainstorming groups in context: Effectiveness in a product design firm"
ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY; DEC 1996; v.41, no.4, p.685-718

If you read his blog, you will know that I am a bit obsessed with failure.  As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs, and is in particular a hallmark of creativity , as I commented in this more recent post about The Onion's creative process.  Given my interest, I was amused to encounter two clashing perspectives on failure recently:

The first is from former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt: "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself."

It is pretty funny, makes sense, and in fact is consistent with social learning theory— that we all learn a lot from watching others,not just from our own actions.  Robert Townsend provides (as usual) an amusing and compelling example, arguing in Up the Organization that his 15 years at American Express taught him how not to run a company.

A different perspective comes from Randy Komisar.  Randy has had quite a career, starting as a lawyer, then in various executive roles at places like Claris, GO, and Lucas Entertainment. During the dot com boom, he fashioned a role for himself as Virtual CEO, serving as mentor and adviser to CEOs of companies including WebTV and TiVO. He is now a partner at Kleiner Perkins, and Randy does other interesting things such as writing the best-selling Monk and the Riddle and teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford.

I was looking through some old video of Randy talking about failure on the Stanford Technology Ventures website.  See it here, it is a great 8 minute clip.  I was struck with his opposing point of view, which is more or less  (I may have missed a word or two):

Toward the end of the interview, Tina Seelig, STVP's Executive Director asked Randy about the value of learning for others' failures, and Randy's response was that yes, you can learn from others, but  "the only way to really, really get your money's worth, is to do it yourself" because "nothing else creates that hollow feeling in your stomach."

Randy wasn't really disagreeing with Eleanor Roosevelt, but the question of what is the best teacher, and when each is the best teacher, is interesting from both research and practical perspectives.

I'd love to hear some opinions on this one. 

My friend and colleague Huggy Rao has a great new interview and article– including video — in The McKinsey Quarterly on his fantastic new book, Market Rebels.  Check it out, and as I wrote here, this is a compelling and remarkably useful book — although in the name of full-disclosure, Huggy is good friend of mine!

P.S. I'd like to thank Dave Livingston for letting me know Huggy's article was out.

As I wrote a few weeks back, I was delighted to discover that our interview with Brad Bird in The McKinsey Quarterly was the most downloaded in 2008.  I confess, however, that I had not got around to re-reading it until today.  It reminded me what a charming genius he is all over again — one of the most fascinating people I've interviewed. I was especially taken with his points about how long it took to persuade his team on The Iron Giant to start challenging his ideas — to engage in constructive conflict (to argue as they are right and listen as if they are wrong, as Weick put it).  In the interview, Bird described show he urged his team that they would learn the most and do the best work if they showed their work to each other, critiqued it, and improved it — as the quote says "Everyone will get humiliated and encouraged together."  That is one of the best lines I've ever heard about the best atmosphere for encouraging creativity and innovation. At the same time, the interview shows that saying "trust me" is a lot easier than earning trust, as Bird reports it took a full two months before people started challenging his ideas.

P.S. Brad not only directs, he "acts" in his films, he was the voice of Edna Mode in The Incredibles, the half-Japanese half-German superhero costume designer.

The McKinsey Quarterly sent out a list of their most popular interviews of 2008, and I was surprised, but pleased, to see that two of the interviews I was involved in doing were #1 and #2 in popularity.  See the list here of the top 10; you have to register to read them, but it is free.  The top rated one was with Pixar's Brad Bird, who has won two Academy Awards — including for Ratatouille (that is the star pictured to the left, Renny the rat). The second was Mozilla's founder and chair Mitchel Baker.  These are two people with radically different careers, but both are similar in that they spent years and years fighting for what they believed in — high quality animation and stories in Brad's case and open source software in Mitchell's case and both lost jobs along the way and kept fighting for their beliefs. Both are also people who have succeeded by elevating rather diminishing the people they work with — and come to think of it, both also demonstrate the power of innovation as a social process rather than a solo act.

P.S. As I blogged about here, the history of Pixar is one of the most amazing I have ever read — check out The Pixar Touch if you want to learn about it.