Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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new ideas can only emerge when we have open, learning minds and when we tap into the child-like parts of our personalities that respond to play, fun and games. These parts of our minds are also the source of spontaneity, imaginative and creative thinking and experimentation. Psychologists have known about this for more than 20 years, but it is only recently that this knowledge has started filtering into the mainstream business world. This realization has also fostered the emergence of a number of companies that deal with the development of creative and lateral thinking through games, roleplaying, storytelling, clowning and humour. These companies include Oracy and Jongleurs in the UK, the marketing firm Play and the consulting firm Humour University in the USA, and WAMCG in Australia.

Patrick Burns, policy director of the Industrial Society in the UK, has observed that ‘Play is becoming the buzzword. As companies become desperate to harness creativity and lateral thinking, they are being forced to look at new ways of fostering these talents. These days, we are seeing everything from mime and comedy to finger painting and storytelling.’ Andy Stefano, Play’s co-founder, believes that, ‘When you turn work into a place that encourages people to be themselves, have fun and take risks, you unleash their creativity. The best ideas come from playful minds, and the way to tap into that playfulness is to play together.’ Maria Kempinska, co-founder of Jongleurs, has observed that ‘All companies are hungry for ideas, but if you push and pull in a pressured environment, ideas rarely come. Forward-looking companies realise that a good atmosphere at work, and good relations with colleagues at work, are crucial to hanging onto creative staff. Teaching them how to laugh and communicate honestly is a good start’ (cited by Chaudri, 2000). Arie de Geus, one of the ‘godfathers’ of the learning organization, suggests, ‘Play is about fun and play is about experimentation. If you don’t understand the role that fun plays in learning, then you cannot experiment. If you cannot do this, you cannot learn, grow and change. This is why fear becomes the dominant emotion in an organization in crisis, because it has lost the capacity to learn’ (De Geus, 1997: 15).

Hence humour is the great liberator of creativity because it frees the constrained, ‘adult’, rational, logical and linear parts of our minds and allows the more anarchic, free-flowing and creative parts of our personalities to emerge. Without this, true creativity is impossible. Having said this, humour, fun and play alone will achieve nothing; these must then be combined with self-discipline, motivation to achieve, the steady generation of new ideas, and the introduction of practical products and services into the marketplace.

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Humour is by far the most significant creative activity of the human brain. (Edward De Bono, Lateral Thinking, 1970)

Encourage brainstorming

‘Brainstorming’ might sound like an anarchic process where people randomly throw ideas around and nothing ever gets done. Without some ground rules that is all it will ever be (Perkins, 2001: 96). The first and most important rule is that criticism is not allowed. However mad, crazy or unworkable suggestions might appear to be, they get discussed and recorded, because all innovations start life as small, crazy and throwaway ideas. Second, keep moving and don’t get stuck on details. Initially, go for quantity rather than quality. Third, diversify thinking by plucking ideas from anywhere and from different points of view. If necessary, create ‘whole brained’ teams with a balance of different skills, competencies and personalities (as described in Chapter 5). Fourth, as William McKnight put it 80 years ago, don’t put fences round your employees because you’ll get sheeplike behaviour if you do. Give your people the freedom, time and space to think freely. Fifth, ‘piggyback’ by building on ideas or suggestions made by other people. Sixth, push all ideas and suggestions to their absolute limit, and search for new or alternative ways of using these.

We might occasionally make fun of our Kiwi cousins, but sometimes they really do come up with world-shattering ideas. A couple of years ago, a group working with the intellectually handicapped decided to recycle animal faeces from Auckland and Wellington Zoos as garden fertilizer. ZooDoo has become a big seller in the Shaky Isles. But now they have gone one better with Endangered Faeces – small lumps of poo and compost moulded into the shapes of their main providers. The tiny elephants, hippo, camels and giraffes – the moulds for which are the brainchild of Lord of the Rings movie designer Mel Ford – are designed to sit in outdoor pot plants releasing nutrients into the soil. They are hoping to get export clearance soon.

(D.D. McNicoll, The Australian, 12 January 2002)

Creating new ideas through brainstorming is just the starting point. The next step is to capture and retain these – even if a use for them is not immediately apparent. This knowledge then has to be ordered, categorized, validated and evaluated for its organizational utility and/or commercial potential (topics we will return to in Chapter 10). Most importantly, throughout this entire process, negative attitudes and thinking that can thwart innovating thinking must be discouraged. These include the following: ‘That is an interesting idea, but it wouldn’t work’; ‘We’ve never done it that way’; ‘If it’s such a good idea, why aren’t our competitors doing it?’; ‘There isn’t a market for that’; ‘We haven’t got the time’; ‘It’s too expensive’; ‘It’s too theoretical’; ‘The Board wouldn’t accept it’; ‘Our employees won’t understand it’; ‘We’re

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not ready for that yet’; ‘We’ve been successful for twenty years, why change?’; ‘Let’s form a committee to assess your proposal’; ‘Let’s be practical for a minute’; and, of course, ‘Common-sense tells us that blah, blah, blah . . .’

New ideas will never see the light of day if these attitudes prevail and almost every innovative idea in history was dismissed as being unrealistic or impractical when it was first proposed. In Chapter 3, we saw how Akio Morita and Masura Ibuka were able to push through the idea of the Sony Walkman in the face of scepticism and opposition within the company. In the 1980s, Morita had also noticed the explosion in video-game arcades, and saw that there was an opportunity to create games consoles that could be used in the home. However, Sony would never have been able to develop and manufacture this billiondollar product if Morita had not quarantined its young designer from the rest of the company. This cut him and his design team off from the bad advice that they constantly received about not touching digital technology, because it was not regarded as being one of Sony’s areas of expertise at this time (Sutton, 2001).

A more recent example is Mike O’Dwyer’s revolutionary gun technology. When he first approached the Australian Ministry of Defence in the early 1990s, with a proposal to develop a gun that could fire one million rounds a minute, he was basically told to get lost and not mess around with things he didn’t understand. One admiral described him at the time as ‘certifiably mad’. Ignoring this initial rejection, O’Dwyer packed in his job as a grocer in 1994, and established Metal Storm with the financial backing of the Brisbane-based venture capital firm, Charter Pacific. He set about developing a gun that would be electronic, rather than mechanical, which would also be capable of delivering a wide variety of projectiles, including fire retardants and fertilizers for crops. Metal Storm was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1999. In 2001, the US and Australian governments decided to invest $US50 million in developing this new technology. This innovation represents a quantum leap in an area of technology that has not fundamentally changed since the introduction of the breach-loader in the mid-19th century (Fraser, 2001).

You see things and you say ‘Why?’

But I dream of things that never were and I say ‘Why not?’ (George Bernard Shaw)

It’ll never catch on.

(Thomas Edison. Probably the greatest inventor in human history, this was his response when told in 1890 that some people were planning to use his newly invented ‘electric phonograph’ to play recorded music. He thought it might be used to record the last words of dying people or to teach spelling to children.)

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Build innovation and intrapreneurship into the organization’s culture

Another more unusual process involves breakthrough thinking. When we assess opportunities, we ask if the usual approaches or business systems cannot produce the return on capital that we need, are there others that can? The development of the Andrew Field, which changed the economics of developing oil and gas fields in the North Sea, demonstrates the dramatic results that this kind of thinking can produce.

(John Browne, CEO of BP, cited by Prokesch, 1997: 158)

Innovation also has to be built into the culture and management practices of the organization. If mavericks and intrapreneurs are not given freedom to move and encouragement for their ideas, they will up sticks and either move to one of your rivals with their ideas or set up in business for themselves. For example, 3m allows its staff 15 per cent of their time away from work to develop new ideas, and get ideas from other companies, a process known in the company as ‘bootlegging’. Another example of a company that has successfully built innovation into its culture is Nokia (corporate logo, ‘No Limits’). The company was voted the ‘World’s Leading Technology Company’ by the US magazine Business Week in 2000. It employs 60 000 people and has had a longstanding reputation for being one of the world’s most innovative companies, even in its earliest years when its primary business was wood products. Nokia is a company that has always discouraged complacency and self-satisfaction. In the early 1990s, its management realized that, even though the company was commercially successful and profitable, it had to continue to find new ways to make money and create new innovations and products.

Since this time, people at all levels of the company have been encouraged to submit their ideas and suggestions, and hundreds are submitted every month. Lauri Kivenen, then Nokia’s Senior Vice-President for Corporate Communications, describes how this process works:

Ultimately, it’s individuals who produce innovations, then at another level it’s teams and groups, and finally the whole firm. But, it starts from the individual. [Innovation] is a spirit of trying to think outside the box, trying to look round the corner, trying to imagine the outcomes of a chain of developments. There is no secret formula to the company’s success. It has to be something that is nurtured all the time. You allow mistakes, you allow people to make bold moves and you try to spread energy. It is very much a cultural thing. You can’t force people to be innovative but you can foster it and encourage it and nourish it. We don’t have a creativity manual [ ] People are used to discussing ideas and arguing quite openly. In Finnish business culture, the idea that there might be someone at a lower level who has the key point is quite natural, especially in the IT sector. You cannot utilise the knowledge of different people in a more efficient way than if there’s bureaucratic filters all around the organization.

(Abridged from Sutherland, 2000a)

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Of course, even an exemplar of innovation like Nokia gets it wrong sometimes. The company’s integrated wireless mobile entertainment phone N-Gage was launched with great fanfare in 2003, accompanied by extensive TV advertising with a voice-over by the former Star Trek actor, Patrick Stewart. However, its cumbersome operating system was not well received by either IT commentators or consumers, and it proved to be a commercial flop. One critic described it memorably as looking like a mixture of ‘a taco and a doofus’ (Lewis, 2002: 97).

Creating an intrapreneurial culture means that organizations have to invest time and resources in their employees; this never just ‘happens’. Having recruited the right people, they have to provide the right kind of environment and incentives for innovation to bubble up from the bottom of the organization. The organization as a whole must learn not to dismiss bizarre ideas and how to push these to their limits. It has to invest in the most up-to-date creative software. It has to foster cross-functional dialogue and communication. It has to support and reward innovation. It has to use its customers for new ideas and network with other organizations. It has to learn how to keep on the cutting edge of new ideas and innovations that could affect its market position. It has to become committed to continual innovation (similar to the Japanese notion of continuous improvement, Kaizen).

Then an interdisciplinary venture team of researchers, engineers, marketeers and accountants can be set up to push new ideas further. These then have to be nurtured to see if they can be commercialized. Prototypes have to be built and feedback obtained from potential investors and customers. The market then has to be persuaded to adopt or buy the innovation. For larger and more complex companies, who may not be able to innovate as quickly as their smaller, nimbler competitors, systems have to be put in place to disseminate new ideas quickly. Company-wide gatherings, cross-functional teams, formal brainstorming sessions, job placements and formal two-way and cross-functional communication systems can all help with this. This might also require a more systemic approach to storing this knowledge and intellectual capital on easily accessible data and web bases. Another solution is of course to buy out potential entrepreneurial rivals. Microsoft and Cisco Systems have been doing this for years. Cisco, for example, took over more than 60 fledgling companies in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2000 (Stein, 2000: 65).

Large companies have also made use of ‘internal ideas factories’ and ‘skunk works’ for many years. Skunk works were pioneered at the

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Lockheed Aircraft Company in the 1940s. Engineers working inside a secret office were encouraged to break all the rules when necessary, and ignore the official procedures laid down by the Pentagon. The result was a stream of new planes and technologies that have consistently set new world standards for performance, often ahead of budget and schedule. This was how IBM, steeped in a bureaucratic culture of making large computers for fat profits in the 1970s and early 1980s, managed to break into the leaner, meaner personal computer market in the 1990s. To do this, it had to create a skunk works at Boca Raton in Florida, about as far as it was possible to get, culturally and physically, from its corporate headquarters in New York. Unlike many of its contemporaries, such as DEC and Wang Computers, this helped IBM to survive in the 1980s and then thrive in the 1990s (The Economist, 1999).

In Royal Dutch Shell, Tim Warren, the former Director of Research and Technical Services, established the ‘Game Changer’ process. He gave a small panel of selected free-thinking employees a $US20 million budget and complete freedom to allocate this to any new business ideas proposed by their peers. The game went live in 1996. Initially, ideas were slow to come in. The Game Changer panel decided to invite Gary Hamel in to run some innovation workshops for 72 would-be intrapreneurs. In two days the group generated 240 new ideas, 12 of which were given funding. Since the completion of these workshops, several hundred ideas have been received from employees. Of Shell’s five largest growth initiatives in early 1999, four had their genesis in Game Changer. And, as Hamel quietly observed, ‘The Game Changer process helped to convince Shell’s top management that entrepreneurial passion lurks everywhere, and that you really can create entrepreneurial thinking inside even the largest organization’ (Hamel, 2000b: 56). However, this is not a cure-all. It is something that may be usefully employed in very large bureaucratic companies, but can send negative messages to the rest of its employees. This may lead to the emergence of an ‘innovation apartheid’ in an organization, with a well-paid innovative elite (the ‘in-group’) and a disenfranchised majority (the ‘out-group’). The creation of skunk works might also send out signals that a company is incapable of organic, collective, bottom-up innovation and has to entrust this to a distinct, well-paid and privileged elite (Schrage, 1999).

Communicate, communicate and communicate some more

In Chapter 4, we saw that many cutting-edge companies create surroundings that stimulate employee interaction and the free flow

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of ideas. The ergonomics of these companies encourage an organic and even tribal style of communication, where people may spend some time working alone, but regularly meet to discuss their ideas and interact with colleagues. Google, and many other new companies, do these things in a very conscious way, partly because it reflects the attitudes of the young entrepreneurs who created these businesses and the average age of its employees, but also because they know that these kinds of environments foster creativity and innovation.6 Again, this is not a new idea. A hundred years ago, at the Menlo Park Laboratory in New Jersey, many of Edison’s inventors worked in a single large room, to encourage the cross-fertiliza- tion and dissemination of ideas, long before ‘brainstorming’ or ‘Management by Wandering About’ appeared in the management lexicon of organizations. Old and well-established innovative companies such as 3m and HP have long encouraged open plan offices, and collective communication sharing as a way of creating and cross-fertilizing new ideas. Improving an organization’s capacity to innovate means a major organizational commitment to twoway communication. Achieving and sustaining active innovation and learning requires sharing information and communicating openly. As Gary Hamel has observed:

In most companies, strategy is the preserve of the old guard, the same ten people talking to the same ten people year after year. No wonder that the strategies that emerge are dull. What can the top 20 or 30 executives in a company learn from each other? Their positions are so well rehearsed that they can finish each other’s sentences. What is required is not a cohort of wise elders or a bevy of planners, but a taproot sunk deep into the organization. Without new voices in the strategy conversation, the chance for revolution is nil. There are revolutionaries in your company. But, all too often, there is no process that lets them be heard. Their voices are muffled by layers of cautious bureaucrats.

(Hamel, 2000b: 50–51)

Hamel also narrated the following anecdote, as an example of the benefits of listening to younger employees’ ideas:

Alisa Petchy was a young flight attendant at Virgin Airlines, who was helping a friend to plan a wedding. Like most brides-to-be, her friend was overwhelmed by a seemingly endless list of ‘to-dos’: find the church and a reception hall, arrange the catering, hire the limousine, pick out a dress, outfit the bridesmaids, choose the flowers, plan the honeymoon, send out invitations and so on. Petchy was struck by an idea – why not offer brides- to-be a one-stop wedding planning service? She took her idea to Richard Branson. The result: Europe’s largest bridal emporium, which is called, naturally, Virgin Bride. Soon after making her suggestion, Petchy was promoted to become the Head of Marketing for Virgin Bride.

(Abridged from Hamel, 2000b: 46, 51)

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Hamel argues that businesses who want to foster innovation and learning must listen more actively to their younger employees, to those on the edges of the organization who are closest to the customers and clients, and all newcomers to the business (who have so far managed to escape the numbing effects of ‘corporate training’). For example, GE Capital in the USA has run ‘dreaming sessions’ involving employees from the company’s 28 business units. During one session in 1999, it was suggested that each business should appoint a young manager (under 30) to go out and search for business opportunities that their older, stodgier bosses might have missed. This led almost immediately to several new ideas for e-commerce, cross-selling initiatives and a website where consumers could go to find objective financial information compiled by a panel of independent financial advisers. Hamel also makes this interesting suggestion: ‘The next time someone in your organization convenes a meeting on “strategy” or “innovation”, make sure that 50 per cent of those who attend have never been to such a meeting. Load the meeting with young people, newcomers and those from the far-flung edges of the company. That’s the way to quadruple your chances of coming up with truly revolutionary business concepts’ (Hamel, 2000b: 52).7

Exercise 9.3

Creative envisioning

In Chapters 1 and 8, you were asked to develop a compelling vision that would challenge the way people in your department or organization operate now and in the future. Having read through these sections on innovation and breakthrough thinking, are you now able to develop and articulate a new vision for your department or organization? Can you tap into your employees’ ideas to help you to develop this vision? What is the end goal of this vision? What are the principal components of this vision? Can these be encapsulated in motivational ‘rallying cries’?

Think about the alternative futures that could exist for your department or organization. How could it make better use of its existing resources, products and/or services? What new products and/or services could be created? Are there other markets that could be exploited in the future?

Conclusion

The great innovators have always been young. But, you don’t always have a culture of youth in old-economy companies. That has to change. If the energy of youthful innovation and the experience of traditional business leaders can mix productively, then companies will survive and thrive. If they don’t mix, then a company is in big trouble.

(Philip Shirvington, CEO of Energy Resources Australia, cited in The Australian, 8 August 2000)

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The history of human innovation over the last 10 000 years tells us that this process has much more to do with pragmatic searches for new opportunities, and moulding already existing areas of knowledge into new forms, than the activities of lonely, half-nutty, visionary geniuses creating revolutionary new ideas. Furthermore, while there may be no single ‘best way’ to foster innovation and intrapreneurship, there is enough evidence from innovative businesses to provide a framework for organizations that do want to become more innovative. Organizations that can do this successfully benefit in three ways.

1Their employees, particularly the more creative and innovative ones, feel appreciated and involved and, thereby, motivated to contribute more.

2Innovation and creativity then become ingrained in the cultures and working practices of these organizations.

3In turn, this promotes an inbuilt capacity for fast change and renewal, without the need to ‘manage change’ reactively.

In summary, there are four important lessons that can be learnt from innovative and intrapreneurial companies. First, their leaders have changed the way they think about innovation. They regard this as a vital component of the long-term viability and success of their organizations, not as an expensive gimmick or an optional add-on to their main business activities. Second, an innovative culture and mind-set can be created in any organization, providing its leaders and managers understand the process and how it needs to be encouraged, nurtured and rewarded. Third, companies that are innovative enjoy greater commercial success, are more profitable and have longer lifespans, when compared to companies that are not innovative (Collins, 2001; Hamel, 2000a; Collins and Porras, 1996). Fourth, the most successful industrial nations in the world derive much of their annual gross domestic product from growth in new businesses. For example, the USA derives more than half of its annual economic growth from industries that barely existed a decade ago. In ten years’ time, it will obtain half its economic growth from businesses that are just starting up (Nicholas, 2000). That is the great power of innovation, particularly in an era of rapid technological change and globalization. Inevitably, many commercial organizations that are unable to embrace innovative mind-sets will have limited lifespans in the future.

The most important human innovation of all time is not an artifact, such as the pill or the electric shaver or the personal computer. It’s an idea – the very idea that made all these technical successes possible – and that is the concept of education. Our brain is nothing but a collection of neurons and