Items related to Weird Ideas That Work
A breakthrough in management thinking, "weird ideas" can
help every organization achieve a balance between sustaining performance and fostering new ideas. To succeed, you need to be both conventional and weird.
- Hire misfits
- Pursue the impractical
- Find happy people and encourage them to fight
- Reward failure but punish inaction
- Forget your own successes
These and other counterintuitive strategies will unlock ideas you never knew you had.
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About the Author:
Robert I. Sutton is professor of management science and engineering at the Stanford University School of Engineering, where he is the former codirector of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. Sutton is the author of The No Asshole Rule and coauthor of The Knowing-Doing Gap and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One: Why These Ideas Work, but Seem Weird
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
-- Thomas Edison
The question is not what you look at, but what you see.
-- Henry David Thoreau
I realized that my competition was paper, not computers.
-- Jeff Hawkins, describing the key insight that led his team to design the Palm Pilot
I admit it. I call the novel ideas in this book "weird" to get your attention. After all, unexpected, even strange, management practices are more fun and memorable than bland old ideas. But there is another reason these ideas may seem counterintuitive: To innovate, companies must do things that clash with accepted management practices, with common but misguided beliefs about the right way to manage any kind of work. In company after company, managers act as if they can keep developing new products, services, and solutions by adhering to customary ways of managing people and making decisions. This happens even in companies where managers say that innovative work requires different practices than routine work. Yet these same managers continue to use methods that force people to see old things in old ways, expecting new and profitable ideas somehow to magically appear.
Last year, for example, I had a long conversation with an executive who wanted some ideas about sparking innovation in a multibillion dollar corporation in a mature industry. I can't reveal the company, but I can tell you it was a book publisher. Profits were falling, and so was the stock price. Wall Street analysts were complaining that the company wasn't innovative enough. This executive was exasperated because her company, especially the CEO, "hates taking risks," and she believed that other senior managers wouldn't back any program that might fail or distract people in the core businesses. She especially emphasized that any program that might further reduce quarterly profits would be unacceptable, even if it had long-term benefits. The CEO and other senior executives were convinced that the business practices they were using to do the company's routine work, the things they did to make money right now, could somehow generate profitable new products and business models.
These executives were dreaming an impossible dream. To build a company where innovation is a way of life, rather than a rare accident that can't be explained or replicated, people need to discard, and often reverse, their deeply ingrained beliefs about how to treat people and make decisions. They need to follow an entirely different kind of logic to design and manage their companies, even though it may lead them to do things that some people -- especially people focused on making money right now -- find to be counterintuitive, troubling, or even downright wrong.
Trying to spark innovation with methods that actually stifle it doesn't happen just in big, old companies. Entrepreneurs start new companies partly because they are purported to be more innovative, free from the pressures in established firms to follow ingrained precedents. Yet, after coaching start-ups for over 20 years, James Robbins finds that entrepreneurs can fall prey to ingrained habits just like managers in big firms. Long before it was a fad, Robbins was creating and managing new business incubators, including an Environmental Business Cluster in San Jose and in Wuhan, China, the Software Business Cluster in San Jose, the Panasonic Incubator in Santa Clara, and the Women's Technology Cluster in San Francisco The software Business Cluster has been especially successful since it was started in 1994. It has nurtured more than 50 new companies, which have attracted over $300 million in funding .
Robbins coaches the entrepreneurs in these incubators to build companies that generate, rather than stifle, new ideas. A sign in his office -- the only sign I saw -- says: The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. He posts it because so many entrepreneurs suffer from this kind of insanity, which makes it impossible to do anything new. These people are not crazy when they do the same thing over and over again, but expect to get the same result. That is the right way to manage routine work, to make the future a perfect imitation of the past. But repeating the same old routines again and again in pursuit of innovation is pure insanity.
Practices that are well-suited for cashing in on old, proven ways can make innovation impossible. To thrive and survive in the long term, companies must keep inventing (or at least keep uncovering) new ways of thinking and acting.
Organizing Principles for Routine versus Innovative Work
The difference between organizing for routine versus innovative work can be seen by contrasting "cast members" at Disney theme parks with the "Imagineers" at Disney Imagineering, the company's research and development facility in Burbank, California. The job titles are revealing metaphors for the two kinds of work. Cast members in theme parks follow well-defined scripts; Imagineers dream up wild ideas about new things that guests might experience. Whether they are dressed as Cinderella or Goofy, acting as guide on the Jungle Cruise, or sweeping the streets, precise guidelines are enforced to ensure that cast members stay "in role" when they are "on stage." This is Disney's routine work. In contrast, Disney Imagineering is a place where people are expected to keep trying different things, where creativity is the goal. As one former "Imagineer" put it: "You're encouraged to come up with all these great fantasies. Most of your ideas are never executed into reality. That is frustrating sometimes, but protecting the brand, creating compelling guest experiences, and telling great stories are important. The romance is still there. Where else are you asked to come up with wacky ideas for the next great ride for Disneyland!?"
Stanford's James March expresses this difference as: exploiting old ideas versus exploring new possibilities. Exploiting old ideas means relying on past history, well-developed procedures, and proven technologies to do things that generate money right now. Exploiting old ideas happens when McDonald's makes and sells a Big Mac hamburger. Billions of Big Macs have been made in the past, so unless they ask for something special, customers expect all Big Macs to look and taste the same. McDonald's goal is to use old knowledge to make the next Big Mac exactly the same as the last one.
March points out that, in the long run, no company can survive by relying only on established and proven actions. To make money later, companies need to try new things, to "explore" new possibilities. This means experimenting with new procedures, hiring new kinds of people, and inventing and testing new technologies. New ideas need to be invented (or imported) to satisfy customer demands, to enter new markets, to gain an advantage over competitors, or at least to keep pace. McDonald's uses some of the cash from all those Big Macs to explore new possibilities. The question is not whether McDonald's or any other company should do exploration or exploitation. It is silly to argue about whether a company should do only one or the other; it's like arguing over which is more important for an automobile, the engine or the transmission, or which you need more, your heart or your brain. Both are necessary for moving forward. The real question is what proportion of the firm's time and money should be spent on which.
Like other companies that have performed well over the long haul, McDonald's experiments with new ideas. At their Core Innovation Center near Chicago, for example, they constantly try new products, new ways of cooking old products, new ways of queuing customers, and different ways of organizing work in their fully functioning kitchens. Similar labs generate and test ideas for new products in other countries where McDonald's establishments are located. At the moment, for example, McDonald's is experimenting with a technology for cooking their famous fries in about 65 seconds rather than the current 210 seconds. And experiments don't happen just in corporate labs; the Big Mac was invented and tested in 1967 by Jim Delligatti, who operated a dozen stores in Pittsburgh. Other experiments have also been successful, like the McHuevo (poached egg hamburger) in Uruguay, Vegetable McNuggets in India, and the "Made for You" innovation in the United States, where, instead of being kept warm until it is purchased, every sandwich is quickly assembled after it is ordered. But the majority fail, like the McLean hamburger in the United States and a cheese and pickle sandwich tested in Britain called the McPloughman's.
My weird ideas spark innovation because each helps companies do at least one of three things: (1) increase variance in available knowledge, (2) see old things in new ways, and (3) break from the past. These are the three basic organizing principles for innovative work, but as the table shows, the opposite principles are right for routine work. This contrast is not only essential for understanding where I got my weird ideas and why they work, it is also essential for understanding why so many managers unwittingly use flawed practices that fail to spark innovation.
Variance: "A Range of Differences"
Companies where people want to do things in proven ways are wise to drive out variation. This mostly means doing old things in time-tested ways. This is why total quality management experts emphasize that driving out errors, reducing costs, and increasing efficiency of existing products and services requires driving out variation in what people and machines do. This is why Intel, which has dominated the semiconductor industry largely through its manufacturing prowess, uses a technique called "Copy Exactly." When Intel managers agree that something is a good idea, there is a religious fervor about implementing it in ...
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- PublisherE-Penguin
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0141886226
- ISBN 13 9780141886220
- BindingHardcover
- Rating
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