Category: Innovation

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I put-up a post a few months back about the long list of successful Stanford dropouts, from Tiger Woods to the founders of Yahoo! and Google.  I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle this morning, and was amused to see one of the most successful VC’s in the valley seems to actively seek dropouts, with an added twist. I quote:

Doerr likes to invest in "white male nerds who’ve dropped out of
Harvard or Stanford, and they have absolutely no social life." That’s
why he backed Netscape, Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

I do wish Doerr would have left out the "white male" part, and in fact at least one of the founders of these companies, Jerry Yang from Yahoo! is Asian; and I would add that Kleiner Perkins, Doerr’s firm, is well-ahead of other VC firms when it comes to hiring women and I understand that Doerr has been especially supportive of women in the firm with young families.

Finally, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard a famous VC make a similar argument; I once was talking with Arthur Rock, the primary VC for both Apple and Intel, and he commented that when an entrepreneur has too nice a car or looks too perfectly groomed, he takes it as a sign that the person isn’t obsessed enough with their work!

I wrote several months back about the wonderful vacation that my family had at Tranquilo Bay, an island "ecoresort" in Panama.  The two couples who run the place (and live there with there kids), Jim and Renee and Jay and Stefanie, had such an amazing story to tell (which included five years of camping by Jim and Jay as they built the place) that I couldn’t stop talking about it.  My ranting included making a pitch to Leigh Buchanan at INC magazine, where I argued that it was more interesting than any other entrepreneurship story I had ever heard (I know her from both HBR and INC, including from her INC story on The Bully Rulebook). 

Well, after talking on the phone to Jim and Renee, Leigh got sufficiently excited that she went down to Tranquilo Bay do a story. And she took a photographer too.  Leigh’s story just came out in the May issue of INC and it is fantastic — called Paradise The Hard Way.  It is one of the most interesting and detailed stories I have ever seen in a business magazine, more like a New Yorker story in depth and smartness (but without their at times unbearable pretension).  And it is the only story I’ve read in a business magazine that starts with an email exchange — and one is a love letter — between a husband and a wife.  The first picture is of Jim and Jay, who literally had to hack their way through the jungle to build their dream.  And the second is of Stefanie and Renee, who made considerable sacrifices to make it all happen, and now live at Tranquilo Bay with their kids. 

The four of them now run the place. There is also a great slide show on the INC site that shows what it talk to build the place, which reminds me of a scaled down version of the story that David McCullough tells about the building of the Panama Canal in The Path Between the Seas — the rain, the mudslides, the setbacks, the improvisation,  the persistence, the shear craziness of trying to attempt something like that, and ultimately, the success in the end, run though both of these stories about Panama.   

P.S. My family has already made reservations to go back. They only have six cabanas, so things fill-up fast!

I have written a number of posts about Chuck House, the famous HP maverick who now is writing a book about the company.  Chuck also has a blog going, and I was most impressed with this little post about the difference between David Packard and Larry Ellison, and how each dealt with a potential property tax break. I bet you guess the difference between how each of these very wealthy men acted before reading Chuck’s story!

About a week before Brad Bird won his Oscar for directing Ratatouille, Huggy Rao (from Stanford) and Allen Webb (from McKinsey) had the good fortune to interview him at Pixar headquarters.  Bird was remarkably fun to interview and he reflects the spirit and crazy proposed practices in Weird Ideas That Work more strongly than anyone I’ve ever met ( Alice Waters might  be an equally good fit, but I have never met her).  The McKinsey Quarterly used the interview to do a bit of innovation themselves.  I believe it is one they’ve ever done that has both sounds clips from an interview and pictures to go along with the audio.  Brad is a very sharp guy and simply a delight as a human being. I was especially impressed by the degree to which he thinks of seeing a movie in much the same way that a great design thinker would — thinking not about not just what is on the screen, but the public setting in which the film is seen as something that is ripe for re-invention.

If you register, you can read the interview and get to the audiovisual stuff free here.

I have written here before about Chuck House, who is a legend in HP history for, among other things, being awarded a medal for "Exceptional Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Usual Call of Engineering Duty" by David Packard.  I just got an email from Chuck about an event that he is putting on with fellow HP veterans.  I wish I could make it; these guys lived through one of the most amazing periods at what was then — at least arguably — the best company in U.S. history. I say that, because under Bill and Dave, I believe that no company before or since has done such an impressive job of balancing the trio of making money, treating employees well, and being a great corporate citizen over such a long stretch of time. HP wasn’t perfect, but they were as close to it as any human organization I know.

Here is what Chuck wrote. I just checked out their blog — it looks fascinating:

Those of us at the Stanford d.school are all pretty obsessed with brainstorming and the role it plays in the creative process.  And I’ve thought about the effects of brainstorming and how to run a good brainstorming session for years, as this was one of the main themes that emerged from the research that Andy Hargadon and I did at IDEO — you can read about some of the main lessons we learned here and here in BusinessWeek.  But I will never think of brainstorms in quite the same way again after seeing this picture!

A new story came out today called "How Bay Area Moms Can Revive Their Careers," which talks about how Timbuk2 is using part-time and flextime arrangements to attract and keep better employees.  here is an excerpt, about Andrea, their impressive head of HR:

Andrea Yelle was one of them who turned to a company called
Flexperience Consulting in the Bay Area. She now uses her 10 years of
human resources experience to work two and a half days a week at
Timbuk2, a bag manufacturing company in San Francisco….

Both
companies and employees say it’s a win-win situation, because Yelle
gets a well-paying, fulfilling job and the small company gets
experience.“We as small company couldn’t afford Andrea full-time,” said Perry Klebahn, CEO of Timbuk2.

Such arrangements have helped my family as well.  My wife, Marina, was one of the first two attorneys at a major San Francisco law firm to become a "mommy track partner" and continued to work part-time for a few years even after she became firm-wide managing partner.  But it is also important to remember that part-time and flexible arrangement aren’t just for women, or even just for women and men who have kids to take care of at home.  One of the last projects that my wife worked on at her law firm (before leaving to become CEO of the Northern California Girl Scouts) was a survey of preferences and attitudes among attorneys in her firm toward part-time work.  One of the most surprising findings was that a large number of men were interested in part-time arrangements; sometimes because they had kids to take care of, but also, because many simply wanted to lead lives that were less focused on work and they were willing to exchange income for spending less time at work.

"Here are a few strategies suggested by experts to encourage innovation
that might surprise you: Hire naive misfits who argue with you;
encourage failure; avoid letting client input limit your vision; and
fully commit to risky ventures. This is an extreme approach to
fostering innovation in an otherwise relatively static office
environment that was proposed by Robert I. Sutton. Writing in the
Harvard Business Review in 2001, Sutton argued that fresh perspectives
derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no
preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas,
and illuminate the metaphorical darkness.

Sutton points out that ignoring client input may seem counterintuitive,
but clients can’t always imagine what’s possible. Ted Hoff, an inventor
of the microprocessor, echoed that sentiment the next year, also in
Harvard Business Review: “Don’t do what the customer wants; do
something better.” Likewise, failure is critical to the design
process—assuming the group learns from the failure—because, typically,
many bad ideas must be generated to produce a terrific one. Even the
bad ideas can illuminate a problem and serve as a creative trigger to
its solution. IDEO, the renowned Palo Alto, California, innovation and
design firm, has a saying: “Fail often to succeed sooner.”"

This quote is from current Architectural Record, which  has a story about what it takes to build a culture of innovation in a design firm.  They present some of the ideas from Weird Ideas That Work as being WAY out there (calling it "Sutton’s dogma," even though the book asks readers to challenge the ideas and suggests that they are bad ideas for many  firms.. I am not even sure I agree with all the ideas in my book, but I can show you research that supports them and firms that use them).  I guess they are too weird for many firms.  But it is interesting that when I visit or read about organizations — or more often, pockets in organizations — that are dedicated to extreme innovation, such practices are seen as routine or even mundane. IDEO uses a lot of these practices (the picture above is from IDEO and is in the story… that is a DC 3 wing that some designers told Chairman David Kelley that they "had to have" for decor). XEROX Parc used most of them when they were developing many of the technologies that made the modern information technologies possible.  Facebook uses many of these practices; and although information about Apple’s process is hard to come by, I’ve been hearing a lot of rumors lately that the team that developed the iPhone was intentionally composed of people who were largely ignorant of the assumptions held in the cell phone industry.  Or if you want a great example of an organization that has applied many of these ideas throughout their wild and path breaking history, read this great book about the history of Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, the place where many foodies claim that modern California cuisine was invented and spread from.

Check out this great post at Metacool.  Diego’s ability to make arguments that wrap-together logic and emotion in compelling ways never ease to impress me.