Work Matters

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss: USA Today and The McKinsey Quarterly

    Over the break, a bit more news came out after I wrote posts on kudos for Good Boss, Bad Boss and the popularity of my list of 12 Things Good Boss Believe over at HBR.Org.

    Last week, USA Today published a pair intertwined stories on workplace bullying, both of which drew on a long interview they did with me (and interviews with a host of other folks too, like Babson's Tom Davenport). The main story was called Bullying By the Boss is Common But Hard to Fix. I think the best part of this story (which, alas, opens with a story about Hooters from the TV show Undercover Boss) is the thoughtful list of why companies fail to take action compiled by journalist Laura Petrecca — it includes impediments including: victims keep quiet, intervention can take time (this is one reason assholes especially get away with their dirty work when teams and companies are under time pressure), discipline can be subjective, legal recourse can be unclear (e.g., it is still unclear in most states if it is unlawful to be an equal opportunity asshole), and savvy bosses learn to work the system (as I said in the article " "They kiss up and kick down."

    I also thought the second story, a sidebar on Survival Strategies for Workers Whose Bosses are Bullies was useful, and a nice complement to my list of Tips for Surviving and Asshole Infested Workplace.   Here is the sidebar:

    Bosses often get a bad rap — mainly because they are just that: the boss.

    These are the folks who scrutinize vacation day requests, ask for client reports to be revised and tell employees the company decided against 2010 raises. So naturally they will be closely scrutinized — and criticized — by workers, simply because they have such a large impact on their life.

    "Bosses pack a wallop, especially on their direct reports," says Robert Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss.

    However, there are many supportive, compassionate managers out there, Sutton says. "Most of us think our bosses are OK."

    But for the folks toiling under a lousy manager, the daily stress can be severe. Some ways to deal with a bad boss:

    •Have a heart-to-heart. "Perhaps your boss is one of those people who aren't aware of how they come across," Sutton says. It could be worth it to have a "gentle confrontation" with the manager in hopes of evoking a behavior change.

    •Get help. "It's like a bully on the playground," says Tom Davenport, co-author of Manager Redefined. "At some point you have to go tell the teacher."

    Employees should keep a detailed diary of a boss' bad behaviors and then bring up those specific instances when lodging a complaint.

    "Don't talk about the way you feel. Don't say 'I'm hurt,' " says workplace consultant Catherine Mattice. Instead give very specific examples of how the boss crossed the line.

    •Zone out. With some effort — be it meditation, therapy or another method — some folks are able to leave their work troubles at the office. "Learn the fine art of emotional detachment," Sutton says. "Try not to let it touch your soul."

    •Update the résumé. "Start planning your escape," Sutton says. Sure, the economy may not be the best for job seekers, but those who put feelers out now will have a head start when the hiring freeze thaws.

    In addition, I also  learned that the McKinsey Quarterly piece based on Good Boss, Bad Boss, "Why Good Bosses Tune In To Their People"  was among their 10 most read pieces in 2010.  You can see the complete list and access is free, although you do need to register.  My favorite on the McKinsey list is "The Case for Behavioral Strategy" by Dan Lavallo and Oliver Sibony.  It makes a compelling, evidence-based, case about the damage done by executives who make strategic decisions without taking their own cognitive biases into account and shows how executives can make superior decisions (and thus help their companies and keep their jobs) by taking steps to dampen and eliminate these universal human imperfections.

    Enough looking back on 2010, its time to move forward into 2011!

  • “12 Things Good Bosses Believe” is the Most Popular Post at HBR in 2010

    I got a note from Julia Kirby at HBR a few days back that my list of "12 Things Good Bosses Believe"   has been the most popular post at HBR.Org in 2010 — a list based on ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss. 

    Here is Jimmy Guterman's list of the Top 10 posts at HBR in 2010:

    1. 12 Things Good Bosses Believe
      Robert Sutton, author of Good Boss, Bad Boss, ponders what makes some bosses great.
    2. Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything
      Tony Schwartz of the Energy Project reports on what he's learned about top performance.
    3. How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking
      Peter Bregman learns how to do one thing at a time.
    4. Why I Returned My iPad
      Here, Bregman finds a novel way to treat a device that's "too good."
    5. The Best Cover Letter I Ever Received
      Although David Silverman published this with us in 2009, it remained extremely timely this year.
    6. How to Give Your Boss Feedback
      Amy Gallo reports on the best ways to help your boss and improve your working relationship.
    7. You've Made a Mistake. Now What?
      We all screw up at work. Gallo explains what to do next.
    8. Define Your Personal Leadership Brand
      Norm Smallwood of the RBL Group gives tips on how to convey your identity and distinctiveness as a leader.
    9. Why Companies Should Insist that Employees Take Naps
      Tony Schwartz makes the case for naps as competitive advantage.
    10. Six Social Media Trends for 2011
      David Armano of Edelman Digital ends the year by predicting our social media future.

    I am pleased and also somewhat embarrassed because, well, I haven't quite finished the post yet! I promised to write detailed posts on all 12 ideas listed, but I only made it through the first 10. I will finish in the next couple weeks, or at least I hope to, as life keeps happening while I make other plans (as that lovely old saying goes). 

  • Good Boss, Bad Boss on Five “Best Business Book” Lists for 2010

    Good Boss, Bad Boss has been selected as among the best business books of the year on five lists I've heard about.  These are:

    1. INC Magazine's list of "Best Books for Business Owners."

    2. One of the Globe & Mail's Top 10 Ten Business Reads of 2010.

    3. One of the four "best of the rest" selections by 1-800-CEO-Read in the leadership category, behind the winner Bury My Heart at Conference Room B. (I love that title, just brilliant).

    4. The New York Post's Round-Up of Notable Career Books for 2010.

    5. The Strategy & Business list of the four best Best Business Books in the leadership category.  See the excerpt below from, Walter Kiechel III's story here, which I found to be generally fun, thoughtful, and well-written (you have to register, but it is free). Here is Walter's rollicking review:

    Better Bossiness

    Finally, for a head-clearing blast of sauciness, pick up a copy of Robert I. Sutton’s Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst. In a year when too many leadership books combined solemn with vapid, Sutton’s decision to focus on the figure of “the boss” comes across as thoroughly refreshing. Even after decades of study, we may not agree on what constitutes a leader or all the proper functions of a manager, but everybody knows who the boss is.

    If it’s you, however long you’ve been at it, you can probably benefit from Sutton’s breezy tour of the wisdom he has distilled from scholarly studies, his own experience, and the thousands of responses he received to his last book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Business Plus, 2007). To say that Sutton, a Stanford professor, wears his learning lightly is to understate the case. At times he wears it like a vaudeville comedian’s gonzo-striped blazer with accompanying plastic boutonniere shooting water. This is a weirdly merry book, perfect for a down year — but not an unserious book.

    Consider, for example, Sutton on the imperative to take control. Yes, you as a leader have to, he counsels, in the sense that “you have to convince people that your words and deeds pack a punch.” And he offers up a series of fairly familiar gambits to that end: “Talk more than others — but not too much.” “Interrupt people occasionally — and don’t let them interrupt you much.” “Try a little flash of anger now and then.” What redeems this from being mere Machiavellian gamesmanship is Sutton’s admission that any control you pretend to is probably largely an illusion — there’s a lot of play-acting in any executive role, he wants us to know. He makes the case that pushing too hard in the wrong way is a lot more dangerous than not pushing hard enough. Given the danger of the “toxic tandem” — your people are always scrutinizing you, at the same time that power invites you to become self-absorbed — leaders are always on the edge of becoming bad bosses, or even worse, bossholes. So he also advises you to blame yourself for the big mistakes, serves you up a seven-part recipe for an effective executive apology, reminds you to ask the troops what they need, and finishes with the injunction, “Give away some power or status, but make sure everyone knows it was your choice.”

    Another chapter title captures the overall aspiration Sutton advocates: “Strive to Be Wise.” His is a street-smart, been-around-the-block-but-still-a-happy-warrior brand of wisdom, rooted in a boss’s understanding of himself or herself coupled with an appreciation that bosses have to take action and make decisions, including doing lots of what Sutton labels “dirty work.” As a boss “it is your job to issue reprimands, fire people, deny budget requests, transfer employees to jobs they don’t want, and implement mergers, layoffs, and shutdowns.” Wise bosses understand that although they may not be able to avoid such unpleasantness, how they go about the dirty work makes an enormous difference. Empathy and compassion are good places to start, says Sutton. Layer on constant communication with the affected, including feedback from them you really listen to, however painful it is. Finally, you’ll probably need to cultivate a measure of emotional detachment, beginning with forgiveness for the people who lash out at you. And maybe reserving some forgiveness for yourself.

    Indeed, Good Boss, Bad Boss is in its entirety a page-by-page guide to better bossly self-awareness. The variety of sources cited can be dizzying. On one page you may get a summary of two academic studies, a quote from Dodgers coach Tommy Lasorda, a recollection of Sutton’s parents, and three examples of bad bosses sent in to Sutton’s website. (At times, the book seems almost crowdsourced and puts one in mind of Charlene Li on the power of social technology to expose behavior.) What gives all this consistency and makes for an enjoyable read is Sutton’s voice throughout — at times yammering, on rare occasions bordering on the bumptious, but in general so “can you believe this?” ready to laugh at the author’s own pratfalls, and so eager to help, that the net effect is sneakily endearing. Rather a comfort in a low, mean year.

    That guy can write, huh?

    As a closing comment, I am tickled with the recognition this book received and certainly that it appeared on The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists.  But perhaps the most important thing to me is that, when I talk to bosses of all levels — from management trainees, to project managers, to chefs, to film directors and producers, to CEOs and top management teams, the core themes in the book sometimes surprise them a bit, but nh early always strike them as pertinent and central to the challenges they face.   I have talked to some 50 different groups about the ideas in Good Boss, Bad Boss since June and — although I enjoy talking about all my stuff with engaged audiences — there is something about this book that engages people more deeply than any book I've written since Jeff Pfeffer and I came out with The Knowing-Doing Gap in 1999.

    Finally, I want to thank all of you who read my blog for your support and encouragement. Your suggestions, stories, and disagreements (with me me and each other) played a huge role in shaping the content and tone of Good Boss, Bad Boss, and I am most grateful for all the ways you helped.

  • New Study: When NBA Players Touch Teammates More, They and Their Teams Play Better

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    I've written here before about research on the power of "non-sexual touching," notably evidence that when waitresses touch both male and female customers on the arm or wrist, they tend to be rewarded with bigger tips. Plus I wrote about another study that shows when either women or men are touched lightly on the back by women, they tend to take bigger financial risks.  That second study showed that touching by men had no effect.  Well, there is a new study that shows the power of nonsexual touch among male professional basketball players.  You can read the pre-publication version here.

    It is called : "Tactile Communication, Cooperation, and Performance: An Ethological Study of the NBA" and was published by Michael W. Kraus, Cassy Huang, and Dacher Keltner in a well-respected peer reviewed journal called Emotion earlier this year (Volume 10, pages 745-749).

    In brief, here is how they set-up the paper; these are opening two paragraphs:

    Some nonhuman primates spend upward of 20% of their waking hours grooming, a behavior primates rely upon to reconcile following conflict, to reward cooperative acts of food sharing, to maintain close proximity with caretakers, and to soothe (de Waal, 1989; Harlow, 1958). In humans, touch may be even more vital to trust, cooperation, and group functioning. Touch is the most highly developed sense at birth, and preceded language in hominid evolution (Burgoon, Buller, & Woodall, 1996). With brief, 1-second touches to the forearm, strangers can communicate prosocial emotions essential to cooperation within groups—gratitude, sympathy, and love—at rates of accuracy seven times as high as chance (Hertenstein, Keltner, App, Bulleit, & Jaskolka, 2006). Touch also promotes trust, a central component of
    long-term cooperative bonds (Craig, Chen, Bandy, & Reiman, 2000; Sung et al., 2007; Williams & Bargh, 2008).

    Guided by recent analyses of the social functions of touch (Hertenstein, 2002), we tested two hypotheses. First, we expected touch early in the season to predict both individual and team performance later on in the season. Second, we expected that touch would predict improved team performance through enhancing cooperative behaviors between teammates.

    I love that. As I always tell doctoral students, and I emphasized during the years that I edited academic journals.  A research paper is not a murder mystery.  The reader should know what you are studying and why by the end of the second paragraph — this is a nice example.

    Kraus and his colleagues go onto explain their research method a bit later:

    Coding of the tactile communication of 294 players from all 30 National Basketball Association (NBA) teams yielded the data to test our hypotheses. Each team’s tactile behavior was coded during one game played within the first 2 months of the start of the 2008–2009 NBA regular season. Games were coded for physical touch and cooperation by two separate teams of coders.

    They explain:

    We focused our analysis on 12 distinct types of touch that occurred when two or more players were in the midst of celebrating a positive play that helped their team (e.g., making a shot). These celebratory touches included fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles.On average, a player touched other teammates (M = 1.80, SD = 2.05) for a little less than 2 seconds during the game, or about one tenth of a second for every minute played.

    They also had coders rate the amount of cooperation by each player studied during that same early season game:

    [t]he following behaviors were considered expressions of cooperation and trust: talking to teammates
    during games, pointing or gesturing to one’s teammates, passing the basketball to a teammate who is less closely defended by the opposing team, helping other teammates on defense, helping other teammates escape defensive pressure (e.g., setting screens), and any other behaviors displaying a reliance on one’s teammates at the expense of one’s individual performance. In contrast, the following behaviors were considered expressions of a lack of cooperation and trust: taking shots when one is closely defended by the opposing team, holding the basketball without passing to teammates, shooting the basketball excessively, and any other behavior displaying reliance primarily on one’s self rather than on one’s teammates.

    Karaus and his coauthors then used these imperfect but intriguing measures of touching and cooperation to predict the subsequent performance of players and their teams later in the season; I won't go into all the analysis they did, but the authors did at least a decent job of ruling out alternative explanations for the link between touching and performance such as players salaries, early season performance, and expert's expectations about the prospects for team performance in 2008-2009.  And they still got some rather amazing findings:

    1. Players who touched their teammates more had higher "Win scores," defined as "a performance measure that accounts for the positive impact a player has on his team’s success (rebounds, points, assists, blocks, steals) while also accounting for the amount of the team’s possessions that player uses (turnovers, shot attempts). "

    2. Teams where players touched teammates more also enjoyed significantly superior team performance than those where players touch teammates less (the authors used a more complicated measure of team performance than win-loss record, it took into account multiple factors like scoring efficiency and assists, and other measures, which correlated .84 with the number of wins that season.

    3. The authors present further analyses suggesting that the increased cooperation among teams where players engage in more "fist bumps, high fives, chest bumps, leaping shoulder bumps, chest punches, head slaps, head grabs, low fives, high tens, full hugs, half hugs, and team huddles" explain why touching is linked to individual and team performance.

    Now, to be clear, as the authors point out, this an imperfect study. They only looked at touching in one game for each team.  So there is plenty to complain about if you want to picky.  But I would add two reminders before we all get too critical.  The first is that there is no reason I can see to expect that the weaknesses in this study would inflate the effects of touching; rather, quite the opposite.  The second is that the touching and cooperation were coded by multiple independent coders who did not know the researchers' hypotheses or the patterns they were looking for, and there was very high agreement (over 80%) among them.

    As the researchers emphasize. more research is needed, but this study at least suggests that it is worth doing.  It is at least strong enough to increase rather decrease my confidence in the the touching-cooperation-team performance link.   And the way it plays out in different settings might require some careful adjustments in research methods and employee behavior.  For example,  basketball is setting where touch is clearly more socially acceptable than in the offices that many of us work in.  So if you and your sales or project team all of a sudden decide to start doing high-fives, group hugs, and chest bumps, it might backfire given local norms.  Perhaps a more reasonable inference is that, given what is socially acceptable where you work, touching on the high side of the observed natural range just might help.

    I would love to hear reader's comments ont his research, as it is quite intriguing to me.

    P.S.  No, this is not an invitation for you creepy guys out there to start grabbing your colleagues and followers in inappropriate ways that make them squirm and make you even more disgusting to be around!

     

  • What’s Right About Being Wrong: A Sweet Little Essay by Larry Prusak

    440269main_prusak_226x286 Those of who teach and study learning, innovation, design thinking, and creativity are constantly talking about how important it is accept and learn from failure.  Diego has written great stuff on this, arguing that "failure sucks but instructs" and when I give speeches, I often half-joke that, if you want to skip reading most of my books, perhaps the best compact summary are my various snippets and blog posts on failure, and perhaps the best diagnostic question for determining if an organization learns well, a boss creates a climate of fear or not, is innovative, turns knowledge into action, and on and on, is "What happens when people make a mistake? " Do they balmestorm and stigmatize?  Forgive and forget? Or do they forgive and remember (see this post at HBR), so they can learn, help others learn, be held accountable and — if people keep making the same mistake — be reformed, transferred, or perhaps fired.

    I just read the best piece on this perspective in a long time, a piece that the amazing Larry Prusak (who I would rather hear give a speech than any other management thinker, he can be magical) wrote for ASK Magazine called "What's Right About Being Wrong." Follow the link to read it all.  Here are some quotes from this little gem that especially struck me:

    It starts:

    A number of years ago I was asked by some clients to come up with a rapid-fire indicator to determine whether a specific organization was really a "learning organization." Now, I have always believed that all organizations learn things in some ways, even if what they learn does not correspond well to reality or provide them with any useful new knowledge. After thinking about the request for a bit, though, I decided the best indicator would be to ask employees, "Can you make a mistake around here?"

    Sounds familiar? Listen to the names he names in the next paragraph:

    Why? Well, if you pay a substantial price for being wrong, you are rarely going to risk doing anything new and different because novel ideas and practices have a good chance of failing, at least at first. So you will stick with the tried and true, avoid mistakes, and learn very little. I think this condition is still endemic in most organizations, whatever they say about learning and encouraging innovative thinking. It is one of the strongest constraints I know of to innovation, as well as to learning anything at all from inevitable mistakes—one of the most powerful teachers there is. Some recent political memoirs by Tony Blair and George Bush also inadvertently communicate this same message by denying that any of their decisions were mistaken. If you think you have never made a mistake, there is no need to bother learning anything new.

    The above paragraph really made me think.  Indeed, just last night, I was having a drink with on my colleagues, and we were talking about the hallmarks of the good versus bad bosses we have had during our academic careers, and we realized that the good ones admit mistakes, tell everyone what they've learned, and push themselves and others forward in a new direction. The worst never admit they've made a mistake — so they are seen as arrogant, unable to learn, and unable to teach and lead effectively.  (See this related post on medical mistakes).

    To continue, then Larry started talking about Alan Greenspan as the rare example of someone who admitted a mistake:

    I can easily summon up the grave image of Alan Greenspan testifying before Congress last year on the causes of the financial crisis. What was so very startling was seeing him admit that he was wrong! It was such an unusual event that it made headlines around the world. But why should it be so rare and so startling? Greenspan had a hugely complex job, one where many critical variables are either poorly understood or not known at all. Nevertheless, neither he, nor any other federal director I have heard about, has ever said anything vaguely like what he did that day before our elected officials and the public.

    It is quite an essay, and as always, Larry brings a new spin.  I have not exactly had warm feelings toward Greenspan since the meltdown, but Larry does a nice job of showing us how rare his confession is among powerful people. 

    Finally, note that I am not arguing that people should go around apologizing constantly for every little thing, as I show in Good Boss, Bad Boss, there is a kind or recipe her for apologizing in ways the build rather than undermine the confidence people have in your abilities — which includes, perhaps most crucially, demonstrating what you've learned and are doing differently as a result.

  • Matt May’s Shibumi Strategy: What a Lovely Book!

    I have had Matt May's new book, The Shibumi Strategy: A Powerful Way to Create Meanningful Change, sitting on my desk for a few weeks, and I finally picked-up. Wow. I read it from cover to cover this morning. It is sort of a business book, sort of a change book, and sort of a self-help book… it defies classification in some ways, but that is one of the things that makes it so great.  A quick and satisfying read that made me think of ways I might lead a calmer and more constructive life. 

    Below is my review on Amazon; also check out this one at Fast Company:

    I am one not a Zen or touchy-feely guy, so I began reading this book with considerable skepticism. But once I got past the first page or two, I was hooked, the story is great, it feels authentic and emotionally compelling, and as it unfolds it teaches you how to apply the Zen mindset and concepts to be more effective at what you do, more patient, to avoid pushing too hard, to keep pressing forward during tough times, and always, to chip away at small wins. It is nothing like a typical business book, and as a result, far more fun, satisfying, and useful then most other business books. It is a bit like Randy Komisar's The Monk and the Riddle, which is a great book that sold a lot, but it is even better and I think even more useful for most of us.

  • Building a Better Boss: A Webinar With Polly LaBarre and Me

    Labarre2007-bw Polly LaBarre has been developing, sparking, and spreading ideas about innovative companies and people for about 15 years now, first as one of the most insightful (and downright fun) editors of Fast Company in its early days, then as a TV personality who did cool innovation stuff at CNN, co-author of Mavericks at Work, a great speaker at events of all kinds, and now at her latest adventure, the Management Innovation Exchange (or MIX) — which she is  leading with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and David Sims.  I love the MIX Manifesto:

    Why Not?

    What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.

    I've known Polly at least 12 years, as I was involved a bit in the delightful madness of Fast Company conferences and other things in its crazy early years, and she wrote one of the best stories on Weird Ideas That Work. Polly is also, as many of you will recall, the person who I learned the phrase "Jargon Monoxide" from, which I still love. 

    As part of the MIX adventure, Polly and I are doing a webinar on bosses on this Thursday, December 9th at 11AM Eastern.  The basic plan is that I will spend about 25 minutes or so presenting core ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss.  Then Polly and I will spend 15 or 20 minutes have a more rollicking a no doubt less linear conversation about it, and then the last 15 minutes or so will be more general Q&A. Polly is fun and always imaginative; I hope you will join us — and yes, it is free! Once again, you can sign-up here.

  • A Concise and Brilliant Peer-Reviewed Article on Writer’s Block

    Below you can see an entire article (including a reviewer's comment) that may look fake, but is legitimate. It was published by Dennis Upper in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Analysis in 1974, and is funny, true, and inspired — and a great demonstration that "brevity is the soul of wit."   Academics, especially the editor's of our journals, have a well-deserved reputation for being humorless assholes (note I edited a couple academic journals and include myself in this swipe), so I give these editors a lot of credit.  A big thanks to Thomas Haymore for telling me about this masterpiece and to Professor Brad DeLong for publishing it on his blog a few days ago.

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  • Asshole Bosses and You: A Cartoon By Team Synchronicity at North Carolina State


     

    I just got an email from Scott Bolin, an MBA student at North Carolina State, who worked with his team of fellow MBA's,  James Wall, My Le, and Bikram Jit Singh, create a funny and well-crafted cartoon called Asshole Bosses and You.  It not only is quite funny, "Team  Synchronicity," as they call themselves, did a great job of summarizing the main ideas in The No Asshole Rule.   I love the creativity, and while it may not be my place, I would call it "A" work if their teacher, Professor Roger Mayer, asked for my advice!  I especially love the way the evil boss looks and sounds.

  • Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity

    I just got an email from a writer who was checking to see if I had argued — in a talk long ago — that true innovations come from people who ignore customers.  As I told her, I don't recall saying exactly that, but as I argued in Chapters 12 and 13 in Weird Ideas That Work, there are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process.  At IDEO and the d.school, we talk about "the mind of the child" (see Diego's great post on this at Metacool).  Also see this old article I wrote that draws on these chapters.

    Invisalign-questions   Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done.  I once had a student who worked as an earlier employee at Invisalign (those clear braces that replace the ugly wire things), and he told me that none of the members of the original design team had any background in traditional braces or dentistry.  Indeed, at least one history of the company suggests the initial idea came from one of the founders, who had no background in dentistry at all:

    The company was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zia Chishti and Ms. Kelsey Wirth, who — as graduate students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business — realized the benefit of applying advanced 3-D computer imaging
    graphics to the field of orthodontics. Like many breakthrough inventions, the idea for Invisalign® grew from happenstance.Mr. Chishti wore braces as an adult when working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, which was awkward and embarrassing. When his braces were removed he wore a clear plastic retainer. He noticed that when he neglected to wear the retainer for several days his teeth would shift back and upon reinsertion his teeth would shift back to their desired, straightened state. It was the observation that a clear plastic device was capable of moving his own teeth that led to Chishti’s conceptualization of a process that became the Invisalign System. A background in computer science gave Chishti the insight that it was possible to design and manufacture an entire series of clear orthodontic devices similar to the retainer he wore, using 3- D computer graphics technology. He and Ms. Wirth started Align Technology in 1997 to realize this vision. And the rest – as they say – is history.

    In this vein, Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:

    • During the early stages of a project, don’t study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.
    • If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it.  Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.
    • Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you “know” the answer to or you can’t resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.
    • Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved. 
    • Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.
    • If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
    • If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don’t assume they are right especially if they tell you    they are right. 

    What do you think?  Do you have more ideas for harnessing innovation?  Do you know of other instructive cases?  When is ignorance dangerous and destructive?