The Idea in Brief
Hire people you don’t like, then promote them when they defy you. Wholeheartedly commit to risky projects. Get your happiest workers arguing. And keep your innovators away from customers.
Recipes for disaster? No, fuel for innovation.
Traditional management practices apply when you need to make money now from tried-and-true products and services—but they don’t foster creativity.
To innovate, companies must ignore longstanding management wisdom and adopt downright weird ways. Unnerving, yes, but consider the payoffs: broadened knowledge, fresh perspectives on old problems, and the freedom to break from the past.
The Idea in Practice
To encourage creativity, take these counterintuitive approaches to hiring, managing, and risk-taking:
Hiring
Recruit people who aren’t blinded by preconceptions, including:
- mavericks and misfits who drive bosses and coworkers crazy because they reject popular opinion and bull-headedly champion their own ideas.
Example:
When new hires at a toy company pointed out current products’ flaws, their behavior made senior executives “hate them.” But the complainers kept generating great new-toy ideas. The lesson? Intentionally hire unlikable, creative people.
- people with seemingly irrelevant skills
Example:
Design Continuum hires engineers who have moonlighted as sculptors, carpenters, graffiti artists, and rock musicians. Their offbeat backgrounds provide a broad palette of product-design ideas to try in new ways.
- novices who don’t know how things are “supposed to be”; e.g., Dyson Appliances, maker of the hottest-selling vacuum cleaner in the U.K., employs new university graduates.
- experts in some unrelated area
Example:
Ballard Power Systems hired chemistry professor Keith Prater to develop batteries, though he lacked related experience. Prater proceeded to generate breakthroughs in fuel-cell technology that may replace internal combustion.
Managing
- Encourage people to defy superiors and peers.
Example:
When HP executives advised Chuck House to abandon a monitor he was developing, he went on vacation—and showed potential customers a prototype. Ultimately, House’s monitor generated $35 million in revenue. Founder David Packard gave him a medal for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”
- Keep creative types away from customers, critics—and anyone focused only on money. Sequestered in basement offices, Data General’s “MicroKids” designed a minicomputer better and faster than if they had worked under critics’ and bosses’ eyes.
- Get happy people fighting about ideas; they’ll surface weak spots in each other’s thinking.
- Reward successes and failures. You can’t generate a few good ideas without also generating numerous bad ones. Demote, transfer, or fire people who talk and plan but don’t act.
Risk-Taking
Risky projects’ odds of succeeding increase with wholehearted commitment. Therefore, back projects that have the most dedicated, persuasive heretics on board. You can’t eliminate risk entirely, but you can ensure new ideas aren’t biased by knowledge of past successes. Example:
At software firm Reactivity’s brainstorming meetings, employees jot technologies on one stack of index cards and industries on another—then randomly pair them. Both useless and promising new-product and applications ideas emerge.
For the past decade at least, the holy grail for companies has been innovation. Managers have gone after it with all the zeal their training has instilled in them. They’ve focused on identifying the optimal incentives and inputs to the creative process, on bringing customers’ and other important perspectives to bear, on investing in ideas according to their odds of success, and on slashing the percentage of losers. There’s only one problem: None of that works very well.
