Category: Innovation

That sentence is the entire text of Chapter 19 in Gordon MacKenzie's 1998 Orbiting the Giant Hairball, still the best book on what it takes to be creative in a big company — or really — in any company.  If you haven't read it, and are interested in innovation or creativity, skip the newer stuff and start with the hairball. I was reminded of this one sentence chapter when I was reading an advanced copy of Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten's The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, which comes out in February.  I will be posting more on the 100 Best in the coming months.

P.S. Speaking of short, here is the entire first sentence of the 100 Best: 11,000.  As Jack and Todd tell us (based on ISBN numbers issued) that is how many business books were published in 2007. Staggering, isn't it?

There is a serious new security flaw that was just uncovered in Internet Explorer. I am biased as I love Mozilla's people and their mission — but it seems to me that it is a good time to switch to the Firefox Browser.  You can get it here and you will be amazed by how quickly it happens — remember to import your bookmarks from Internet Explorer and the rest is absurdly easy.

You have to see this to believe it. There is a reason that IDEO is known as one of the most creative companies in the world. They do it, in part, by trying deeply weird and technically difficult things.  Check out the film here — to entice you to watch it, consider a bit of the description from their website:

"How could someone actually engineer a pole-dancing doll to spin around
in silver garland, knock down a Phillippe Starck juicer, trigger a
Gaussian gun, and topple a Tickle-Me Elmo, plastic eyes first, onto a
computer mouse that then prints a document in Shanghai? All told, there
were about ten other machine-based vignettes that lasted almost 20
minutes and spanned day and night, thanks to the fifteen-hour time
difference between offices."

P.S. In the name of full-disclosure, I am an IDEO Fellow — I am still not quite sure what that means after a decade or so but I am proud to be associated with these delightful and creative people.

Idee Strampalate Che Funzionano was just published in Italy.  They tell me the translation is "Ideas Weird That Work."  The publishing industry works in weird and mysterious ways. Weird Ideas That Work came out in hardback in the U.S. in 2002 and paperback in 2007. But after the success of Il Metodo Antistronzi, as they call The No Asshole Rule in Italy, my publisher Elliot (a scrappy start-up) decided to purchase and publish Weird Ideas in Italy.   I am quite curious to see what happens — the little staff at Elliot are more impressive and relentless than any big publishing house I have ever worked with — especially when it comes to marketing.  You can read a bit more about them here, as I wrote a trip report after I went to Italy to do some book promotion.  Il Metodo Antistronzi actually sold more copies in Italy during the first year of publication than copies of The No Asshole Rule were sold in the U.S. during the first– and it was a New York Times bestseller here, on the BusinessWeek bestseller list for 6 months, and of all books published in 2007, it was the #32 bestseller on Amazon (and the #8 business book).  So these people can hustle. 

I wasn't surprised when they were able to land a big story in L'Espresso on the book, which they described as sort of like the Time Magazine of Italy — you can see at least the first page of the article here — Download lespresso.JPG.  But I was shocked — and then amused — to realize that a long email  interview that I did with a reporter from the Italian version of Marie Claire (and I think some text from the book) was used in a joke calender (that contains a blend of English and Italian). If you speak Italian, I would love to know how they used my text — I can read the English like "Trouble. Luck can last a lifetime unless you die young" with a picture of a cheetah chasing its prey.  Here is a pdf of the entire calender if you are curious — Download marie_claire.pdf

I squirm a little when I see things this over the top, but then I realize that there is no reason to take myself so seriously.  And I've also learned that when you have the luck and privilege to work with people who are creative, work very hard, and not afraid to take some risks, it is better to go with it, enjoy the ride, and realize that change and innovation is about pushing the edge.  And when you feel a uncomfortable, that is a sign you are doing something new.

Creativity happens when people are in their discomfort zone and they entice others to join them on the unsettling and uncertain ride.  Indeed, this one of the main messages of Weird Ideas That Work.

P.S. As an important footnote, another message is that creativity, taking risks, and pushing the edge are things that should be done under conditions where it isn't possible to do much harm.  Having a silly calender published in Italy, at worst, will leave some people with the impression that I am not a sufficiently serious management thinker.  But if the same approach is used by the pilot flying your plane, the surgeon who is taking our your spleen, or the people who are managing our investments can lead to disaster.  As Diego says, a great question is "Where is your place for failing?"  Every organziation needs one, but you need to pick a place — or a set of problems — where the learning and upside can be high and the potential damage is low.

Huggy
Rao, Perry
Klebahn, Kerry O'Connor, an army of people from the Stanford d.school,
and I are making preparations for Customer-Focused
Innovation, an executive program that we teach.  This is our third year and I was thinking
back to past years (see here and here for posts).  And I remembered
something interesting that I heard from an executive (I won’t name his company,
as they were trouble then and still are in trouble), who described a talk that
Steve Jobs had given to the senior team.

The thing I remember best was that
Jobs advised them that killing bad ideas isn’t that hard — lots of companies, even
bad companies, are good at that.  Jobs'
argument went something like this:  What
is really hard – and a hallmark of great companies – is that they kill at lot
of good ideas.  Sure, this is tough on
people who have come-up with the good ideas as they love them and don’t want to
see them die.  But that for any single good idea
to succeed, it needs a lot of resources, time, and attention, and so only a few
ideas can be developed fully.  Successful
companies are tough enough to kill a lot of good ideas so those few that
survive have a chance of reaching their full potential and being implemented properly.   I would also add that this approach also
applies to good product and experience design. 
If every good idea is thrown into a product, then the result is a
terrible and confusing experience. (This seems to be the problem with the latest
version of Microsoft word, it does everything, so therefore is very annoying and confusing to
use.)

If
you take this argument to its logical conclusion, it means that innovative
companies might keep track of these two metrics:

1. How many good ideas
are killed?
 (If this number isn’t high enough, that is a
bad sign.)

2. Are people
complaining – even leaving – because too many of their good ideas are killed? (The idea here is that
if no one is complaining about this problem, then there aren’t enough being
killed.  The complaining, and even people
leaving, is bad. But if no one is complaining, it is a worse sign.  Creating this kind of frustration is an unfortunate
byproduct of an effective innovation process and if your people don't have enough pride and confidence to get upset when their innovative ideas are killed, then something is wrong with them — or your culture.)   

These
weird metrics may or may not work, but they make sense given Jobs’ argument
(which I find quite compelling).   His
argument also resonates with our experience teaching in the d.school  — the groups that often do the worst work
have too many pet ideas and can’t bring themselves to kill enough of them, so
they don't do a decent job on any of them. Groups that can’t kill enough ideas also often
suffer from bad group dynamics, either because multiple members won’t allow the
group to kill their pet ideas, or because the group avoids difficult
conversations about which ideas (and therefore whose ideas) to kill, and
instead, tries to develop too many ideas (None of which are developed well — which results in collective failure.)   As Perry tells our students, there comes a
point in the process where you have to kill the ideas you have nurtured and come to love, even though it
hurts.

P.S. A big thanks to Wally Bock over at Three Star Leadership for selecting this post as one of the top five posts of the week from business blogs.

I wrote a rave for Guy's new book Reality Check a few weeks back.  I just got an email from Amazon that my copy of the book is shipping (they sent me an advance copy in paperback, but I wanted a real hardback). I think that means that, even though the website says it isn't out until October 30th, if you buy one, they ship it now.  It is a great book — I love Guy's blog but liked the book even better.

P.S. If you want to learn more about Guy's book before buying, I see that he has a free taste today on his blog.

One of the hallmarks of creative people, teams, and organizations is that they accept failure and view it as an essential part of their life.  That is why, as Diego Rodriguez and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.  There is growing evidence that people learn more from failure than from success — although an important caveat is that people seem to learn the most when they review  both successes and failures that occurred during an experience.  Regardless, whether it is venture capitalists, pharmaceutical researchers, or product designers that you are talking about, there is always a high failure rate in creative work. I used the the example of toy design at IDEO in Weird Ideas That Work.  Note that Brendan Boyle, the star of this story, is still at IDEO and they still design toys and other products (and experiences) for kids, but Skyline has now been integrated into the rest of the company.

Here is what I wrote back in 2001:

Brendan Boyle is
founder and head of Skyline, a group of toy designers at IDEO in Palo Alto, California Boyle provides compelling evidence that
innovative companies need a wide range of ideas and that success requires a
high failure rate.  Boyle and his fellow designers keep careful track of
the ideas they generate in brainstorming sessions and informal conversations,
and that just pop into their heads.   Skyline keeps close tabs on its
ideas because it sells and licenses ideas for toys that are made, distributed,
and marketed by big companies like Mattel and Fisher-Price.  
Boyle showed me a spreadsheet indicating that, in 1998, Skyline (which had
fewer than 10 employees) generated about 4000 ideas for new toys.  Of
these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a
nice drawing or working prototype.  Of these 230, 12 were ultimately
sold.  This “yield” rate is only about 1/3 of 1% of total ideas and 5% of
ideas that were thought to have potential.   Boyle pointed out that
the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that
are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small
percentage reap large sales and profits.  As Boyle
says, “You can’t get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy,
and crazy ones.  Nobody in my business is very good at guessing which are
a waste of time and which will be the next Furby.”

I use this example a lot in talks on innovation because Brendan was kind enough and brave enough to give me information about his team's failure rate, but unfortunately — although I am always asking for this kind of information — most people decline to give it to me (sometimes they say it is propriety information, other times it is clear they just don't want to have information out there about their failures).  But I just accidentally ran into another example on the radio show, "This American Life," in an episode called "Tough Room," which aired in February.  Check out this podcast, notably "Act One: Make 'em Laff," which is about the creative process at The Onion, the famous fake news organization. It describes and has audio of the sessions where the writers pitch headlines for Onion stories to their fellow writers.  As host Ira Glass says, this is a tough room where most ideas being shot down immediately and, even those that strike people as funny at first usually don't make it into print.  According to the story, to get the 18 headlines they need for each week's edition, the writers usually propose about 600.  This is actually a higher success rate than IDEO's toy group (about 3% survive), but printing a bad story is a lot cheaper than launching a bad product.  I found the other nuances to be fascinating too — especially the constructive conflict and criticism in the group and the tensions between veterans and newcomers. 

Also, I found the above picture of the white board with lists of possible future Onion stories on the This American Life website — look at all those ideas, that is what creativity looks like.  

P.S. As you may recall, The Onion ran this story mocking researchers who discovered that assholes are bad for employee morale, which sure sounds like a parody of The No Asshole Rule to me (at least I hope so).

I have a longstanding interest in the challenges of creating infectious action. This is the theme of a class that I've been involved in teaching at the d.school for several years now, which Diego of Metacool fame and I started, and has included Debra Dunn, Michael Dearing, and this year, Perry Klebahn as leaders of the teaching team at various times. This is also a central theme in the piece that Huggy Rao and I recently published in the McKinsey Quarterly on the Institute for Health Improvement's 100,000 lives campaign. And I have especially learned a lot from the folks at Mozilla and their masterful attempts to spread the Firefox browser through viral campaigns (check out the latest stuff, they are taking open source marketing to the next level in their Impact Mozilla campaign).

Just yesterday, however, I was sent an email that contains one of the most impressive viral tools I've ever seen.  It is from the people at Moveon and is campaign tool for Obama, and I realize that many readers may not support Obama. But my focus here isn't on plugging any campaign (this isn't political blog, and I stay away from political opinions here), is it is on the genius of this as a tool to send a viral message.  You can customize it to create news video that blames any person for not voting, and thus costing Obama the election.  Here is my video and you can see how I am blamed for Obama's loss. You can customize it and send to anyone (note when you get to the end there is a place to send the video to anyone you want.)

Check it out.  I think it is brilliant as viral tool, but it is also kind of scary because it provides more evidence that you can't believe anything that you see and hear.  And it provides evidence that there are some damn smart geeks out there!

Unfortunately, the downturn is placing pressure on a lot of organizations to do layoffs.  In recent days we have read about them at GM, eBay, and Tesla (the electric car company).  And there are going to be a lot more.  I have written quite a bit about downsizing, as much of my earlier research focused on organizational decline and death.  You can see some of my major arguments summarized here, here, and here at Harvard Online.  One big lesson from research on downsizing is that when organizations hold-off on layoffs as long as possible and do less deep cuts, they tend to bounce back faster (compared to similar organizations that rely more heavily on layoffs) when the upturn hits (especially organizations with skilled workers).  This happens, in part, because they save recruiting and training costs when the demand for their people returns, and by keeping their experienced workforce around, they can move more effectively than competitors who are scrambling to hire and train new employees with the right skills.  I noticed, for example, that Toyota is using the downturn to train employees — to increase the skills of their existing workforce so that, when demand increases again, they can come back even stronger.

The other lesson I take away from the research on downsizing is that, if you must do layoffs, do it in a manner that gives people as much predictability about how and when it will be done, as much understanding about why it is necessary for business reasons, and as much control over their lives in the process. Finally, expressing human compassion to those who lose jobs, those who stay (who are losing friends, may feel guilty for not being cut, and also often fear the next round of cuts) , and the surrounding community also helps everyone get through tough times, and increases productivity and loyalty among those employees who survive layoffs.

I was also reminded of another lesson about layoffs  from an email exchange I've been having with Bill Burnett, over at Superinnovator. A downturn can be an opportunity to get rid of incompetent people and, of course, destructive assholes.  But beware of the evils of using layoffs as a reason to expel everyone in your organization who does not act, think, and look like everyone else — beware that most of us are prone to hold an overly narrow image of a "good employee."  As I show in Weird Ideas that Work, since we human-beings have powerful and positive emotional reactions to people who are "just like us," and equally powerful negative reactions to people who are "different," the hiring process in most organizations acts to "bring in the clones." Or as Harvard's Rosabeth Moss Kanter famously put it her classic Men and Women of the Corporation, organizations engage in "homosocial reproduction." 

As this Dilbert cartoon suggests, the same psychological forces that cause leaders to bring in the clones during the hiring process can also cause them to (unwittingly)get rid of the people who think differently than everyone else and perhaps are prone to constructive argument.  So a risk of the layoff process in many organizations is that it drives out the variation and diversity  so essential to innovation in every organization.  Take a close look at the people you are keeping versus those you are cutting. Are you unwittingly protecting the clones, those people just like your favorite person — yourself?  And are you consistently expelling able people who make you squirm, who give you the creeps at Scott Adams put it, but who will assure that your organization won't be condemned to be stuck in the past?

My colleague Huggy Rao and I just published an article in the McKinsey Quarterly called "The Ergonomics of Innovation."  We analyze an astounding effort by a small non-profit in Boston called The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) to lead a campaign to reduce medical errors in U.S. hospitals.  Their goal was to stop over 100,000 preventable deaths in hospitals over a one year period. And, although there is some controversy about the campaign's effects, it appears that they ultimately involved hospitals that included over 75% of the beds in the U.S. and exceed their goal by about 20,000 lives.

 You can get the article here at the McKinsey website (it is free, you just have to register) or here is the pdf:

Download the_ergonomics_of_innovation.pdf

Even if you get the pdf here, I suggest poking around the McKinsey site as they have lots of great free stuff.

We call this article "the ergonomics of innovation" because the IHI staff did such a brilliant job of designing the campaign so that it reduced the cognitive and emotional load on their tiny staff (about 100 people) and, especially, on the thousands of hospital staff members who participated in the campaign.  For example, IHI focused everyone's efforts on six relatively simple behaviors that had been shown to be big causes of preventable deaths in prior research.  They developed very concrete guidelines that hospitals could use to stop these causes — which reduced load on everyone because, although the list could have contained hundreds of evidence-based practices, instead, it helped people focus their efforts and also made it more efficient for hospitals to share what they had learned because they were working on a limited numbers of problems.  IHI also created all sorts of efficient ways for people to learn and share, including a weekly "call-in" radio show that as many 4000 people a week participated in and they made it very easy for hospitals to sign-up for the campaign: all it required was a one page fax signed by hospital administrators in which they agreed to try at least one of the six practices and to provide mortality data from their hospital after the campaign was over.

This is an inspiring case because so many lives were apparently saved in a system that is often seen as both broken and impossible to change.  It gave me great hope that change is possible even when seems things seem bleak, which is something that all of us need right now given the state of the economy.  The specific long-term interest for Huggy and me is that the case taught us that — although efficiency and innovation are two words that often seem at odds — there do seem to be ways and times when ideas can be developed, spread, and implemented in efficient ways.  We use the term "ergonomics" because we spotted so many ways — like ergonomically sound tools — that were found to reduce the cognitive and emotional burden on everyone involved.  

I would love to hear any comments you have on the article, and even better, other examples and practices that combine "innovation" and "efficiency" in ways that lead to and spread better ideas, and at the same time, bolster rather than damage the human spirit.