The Little Big Things

by Thomas J Peters

  So the generic “skunkworks idea” is a “band of brothers and sisters,” contrarian in nature and determined to do it their own way, who live in the netherworld, who stink-up-the-central-culture as they pursue what they believe is an earth-shattering dream. (Companies like Xerox and Apple have also used these units to great—yes, earth-shattering—advantage at various times past.)

  There are various ways to build skunkworks–flavor operations. Here are a few, meant only to tease, and hardly an exhaustive set:

  Concoct a Parallel Universe. Big firms win in large measure through focus, which can be invaluable, and also invariably leads to calcification of culture, staff, the works. One way to get around this is to create what I call a Parallel Universe. It’s effectively a “shadow company” with its own staffing—its own culture, in fact.

  For example, as business schools saw the attractiveness of the two-year residential MBA decline, many simultaneously sensed a sharp rise in demand for part-time executive education and continuing business education in general. But “standard” professors used to “standard” students and “standard” classes at “standard” hours frequently balked at proposed change. Several smart schools set up schools within schools, utilizing outside assets (other profs, semidistant facilities) to experiment with and deliver executive education. (Some of these “parallel universe” operations didn’t even report to the B-school dean and hierarchy, but found a home in the university’s generic continuing education operations. One “parallel universe” exec-ed operation actually attached itself to the university’s English Department—which offered autonomy for the exec-ed operation and put bucks into the impoverished English Department’s coffers!) In some cases, the school-within-a-school eventually reintegrated with the “parent,” but only after it had acquired enough muscle to resist the regnant culture; in a few cases the shadow organization’s success actually eclipsed that of the traditional organization. (Key idea: Don’t waste time trying to change the regnant culture. Fat chance! Get on with gettin’ on in another setting.)

  One-off projects. All units of all sizes should mount at least one “one-off,” more or less skunkworks—that is, a separated band pursuing no-fit, low-fit projects. Such a “band” may be as small as one person in a six-person department—i.e., this truly applies to every unit of any size. (It also applies equally to small businesses—in a four-person video company, one of the four ought to be spending 50 percent of her time on something “far-out,” perhaps a “far-out” collaboration with another small outfit.)

  Centers of Excellence. A more formal approach to important innovations involves setting up something like “centers of excellence.” GlaxoSmithKline, for example, created seven CEDDs, Centers of Excellence for Drug Discovery. Previously, GSK used a huge functional organization to do its development work—as usual, functional warfare and hypercomplex processes slowed things down and often dumbed them down through lowest-common-denominator compromises. Now the self-sufficient CEDDs, led by powerful project managers, short-circuit some of the previous issues—early results are promising.

  Centers of Excellence in Design. Design, writ large, is increasingly the chief route to product or service differentiation. Many companies are now beyond lip service, but a long way from fully incorporating the numerous aspects of design into the heart of the company culture. One effective approach, a variation on the theme immediately above, is a Center of Excellence in Design with the avowed goal of nothing less than becoming a “hotbed” of global excellence—for example, Samsung followed this path, renovated the entire company (great design is Samsung, circa 2010), and is giving Sony a run for its money; Samsung has in fact modeled the way for Korea’s national aspirations for differentiation for an entire nation via integrated commitment to Design Excellence.

  The general operational idea here is that, big business or small, retail or technology, HR or IT, you can’t depend on “normal” mainstream innovation programs, even in arenas dedicated to innovation per se such as R&D, to deliver the (truly new-enterprise-redeeming) goods—a huge problem given the increasing life or death importance of first-rank innovation skills. You must create some sort of out-of-the-mainstream, parallel infrastructure. I repeat: For the five-person training department, where the Innovation Imperative is as strong as it is for the enterprise as a whole, this can consist of “as little as” a halftime, three-month “freak assignment” for one person. Above all (1) get cracking and, I repeat (2) don’t wait for the mainstream to deliver the goods—the odds of their so doing are low, very low.

  108. S.A.V. (No, It’s Not a Kind of Truck.)

  “If I had said ‘yes’ to all the projects I turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones I took, it would have worked out about the same.”

  —David Picker, movie studio exec, quoted in William Goldman’s classic Adventures in the Screen Trade (cited by Caltech physics professor and author Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)

  If, as I fervently believe … Randomness Rules Our Lives … then your … only (logical) … defense is-must be taking refuge in the message of the so-called … law of large numbers. That is, any success follows from tryin’ enough stuff so that the odds of doin’ something right tilt your way.

  Conclusion:

  Ultimate & Perhaps Only “Surefire” Winning Formula:

  S.A.V. * ** ***

  *Screw Around Vigorously.

  **Start today.

  ***Please.

  SCREEN TRADE SECRET

  A shrewd observation, attributed to an unknown Hollywood scriptwriter:

  “Ever notice that ‘What the hell’ is always the right decision?”

  NB: I admit it. I found the quote, not at a Harvard B-School exec program, but in a nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, novelty shop. There’s a message here—not least part of which is to consider the value of the $4.00 card vs. a $4,000-a-day program at the HBS? The card, however, cost a lot more than four bucks; I ordered a couple of hundred and give them away like candies at seminars.

  109. What Have You Prototyped Lately?

  Don’t let yourself get stuck!

  (What a silly statement.)

  (But, then, my goal in this book is largely to remind you of “silly” things that fall by the wayside.)

  Fact: There is … always … something … some little thing … you can start/do in the next … 30 minutes … to take a tiny, concrete step forward toward solving a problem or creating a new opportunity.

  My colleagues and I call this the … “Quick Prototype Attitude.” MIT’s Michael Schrage offers us what I think is a Very Big Truth: Innovation … is … per se … the reaction to a prototype. To move forward, you must have some eighth-baked thing to talk about and shoot at and tinker with … ASAP.

  (Schrage also tells us the attitude-approach is one of … SerioUS Play. In fact, that is the title of an entire book of his—which is firmly embedded on my “ALL-TIME TOP 10 BIZ BOOKS” list.)

  If you’ve got a Cool Idea, don’t sit on it.

  Don’t research it to death.

  Grab a pal, or three (no more).

  Find an empty conference room.

  Right now.

  Start modeling-mocking up some little bit of where you’ve gotten so far.

  Then show it to a half dozen other trusted pals.

  ASAP.

  Get their hasty input—not “considered” input; but “hasty” input.

  Get on with round two …

  Three.

  Four.

  Forty-four.

  Lesson/Message:

  Prototype.

  Now.

  Now = Next half hour.

  “SERIOUS PLAY” BEATS SERIOUS PLANNING (SERIOUSLY)

  “Effective prototyping may be the most valuable core competence an innovative organization can hope to have.”

  — Michael Schrage

  “You can’t be a serious innovator unless and until you are ready, willing and able to seriously play. ‘Ser
ious play’ is not an oxymoron; it is the essence of innovation.”

  — Michael Schrage, Serious Play

  “We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn’t think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we’re already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months.”

  — Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg by Bloomberg

  110. Hell Hath No Fury: Celebrate “Disturbers of the Peace.”

  Writer-editor-historian-man of the world Harold Evans had problems with the movie Aviator. Not the acting or cinematography, but his insistent belief that the lead role in the saga of the airline revolution belonged not to Howard Hughes, but to Pan Am boss Juan Trippe, who among other things was the driving force behind the introduction of the B747. Evans makes a good case:

  “What drove Trippe? A fury that the future was always being hijacked by people with smaller ideas—by his first partners who did not want to expand airmail routes; by nations that protected flag carriers with subsidies; by the elitists who regarded flight, like luxury liners, as a privilege that could be enjoyed only by the few; by the cartel operators who rigged prices. The democratization he effected was as real as Henry Ford’s.”

  —Harold Evans, “Trippe the Light Fantastic,” in the Wall Street Journal

  I believe that the Mother of [Almost] All Innovation is … fury.Abiding anger at the way things are … coupled with an “irrational” (statistically inappropriate) determination to beat back the innumerable protectors of the status quo and find and implement a better way.

  (The launch of the B747 is one chapter. The building of the Panama Canal another. But, typically, so is the rollout of a revolutionary new mentoring program in a 16-person HR department.)

  There are a thousand articles and dozens of books on the “sources of innovation.” And as far as I’m concerned, they are all pretty much … baloney.

  Yes, as far as I’m concerned there is one and only one “source of innovation”:

  Fury.

  Or … “seriously pissed-off people” … as I prefer to more bluntly put it.

  An innovator’s life, almost regardless of the size of the innovation (people fight the small ones about as tenaciously as the large ones), is pure hell. All guardians of the status quo are her enemies. That includes about 100 percent of her bosses, appointed stalwart custodians of “the way we do things around here.” Why is fury required? Simple: In order to survive the onslaught of these Powerful Guardians of Yesterday, and come out the other end intact, she has to be really pumped up 100 percent of the time, and equipped with very thick skin indeed—that is, really truly pissed off with the way things are.

  What is the operational message here?

  If you’re a boss aiming for big change, begin the search today for … the Pissed-Off People. (They’re always there—and often in hiding.)

  If the recession forces cuts, don’t automatically, as one company disastrously did, use it as an opportunity to weed out the “misfits,” so labeled by prior HR reviews. (Innovation dried up—not too strong a phrase.)

  When you hire, look for clear evidence of times that a prospect has taken the heat as she pursued something important—if all references say “She’s easy to get along with,” well, worry about that.

  Beware in general of people who agree with you 97 percent of the time, and 100 percent when the issue’s important. Professional suckups have little time or energy left over to pursue innovation.

  All (ALL) innovation comes from fury.

  Hire fury.

  Find fury.

  Give fury room to Disturb the Peace.

  (Can this go too far? Of course. But the problem in 9 out of 9.3 cases is not going far enough! So err on the side of collecting … the Furious Ones. Most companies inevitably slide downhill, sooner than one would imagine; and one big reason is the failure to keep bringing misfits aboard—or the unwillingness of misfits to accept job offers because of the perceived futility of attempting to do new things.)

  111. The Innovation15: What We Know So Far …

  Libraries are full of books about innovation—I’ve written a book or two myself. (E.g., The Circle of Innovation, 1997.) And I recently penned (keyboarded?) “The Innovation 122,” available at tompeters.com; yes, count ‘em, 122 ideas about innovation. There never has been and never will be a “last word,” or last 100,000 words, concerning innovation. So what follows is not it either. Nonetheless, I felt a pressing need here to devote an item to summarizing my four decades of noodling on this subject, including some stuff you’ve seen in more fulsome form in these pages; and all of it in 804 words:

  (1) Try it. Repeat. Repeat. He who tries the most stuff wins. I study the history of innovation. There’s nary a Nobel Prize winner who hasn’t explained his win more or less thus: “We ran more experiments.” (And not a Nobel historian who’s failed to trot out the word “relentless.”) Prototype it: A particular form of trying—some model of some part of “it” that everybody quickly has an opportunity to shoot at. Innovation guru Michael Schrage says that a distinct competence in prototyping per se is Innovator’s Advantage #1. (He even offers a measure, “mean time to prototype.”)

  (2) Celebrate failure. Keyword: CELEBRATE. Not “tolerate,” but “celebrate”—if “most tries” are king, then “most failures” are necessarily crown prince.

  (3) Relentlessly decentralize. It’s “the law of large numbers”—to truly decentralize means more “statistically independent tries.” With, say, six divisions or a portfolio of six discrete project teams with different sorts of leaders, the odds of at least One Big Win, or two, go way up!

  (4) Parallel Universe. Frequently the resistance to change is so strenuous that one must, in effect, give up on normal channels. An answer: Create a pretty-damn-separate “new world” with new folks, new location, new attitude, etc., etc.—yes, a “parallel universe,” or, my favored term, a skunkworks.

  (5) Searchers. Fact is, most organizations, even rather small ones, are awash in innovation—if only you’d bother to search for them. Organization observers like Bob Stone and William Easterly urge us to forget reinventing the wheel—and concentrate on our homegrown wheel makers. But you’ve got to have a pretty good Intelligence Network to find ‘em; most are in hiding. Your job: Find ‘em. Celebrate ‘em. Encourage others to visit ‘em. Then let the customized replication games begin.

  (6) Hang Out Axiom. Every”hang out” decision is a “yes” or “no” innovation decision: That is, hang out with interesting, get more interesting; hang out with ordinary, get more ordinary. Across the board: Employees. Customers. Vendors. Etc. E.g.: “Cool vendors” who push us hard beat “strategic vendors” who specialize in telling us what we want to hear in order to preserve their business. Case study extraordinaire: “[CEO A.G.] Lafley has shifted P&G’s focus on inventing all its own products to developing others’ inventions at least half the time.” (It’s worked—a near miracle among slugabed giants.)

  (7) “d”iversity. I call it “lowercase ‘d’ diversity.” That is, diversity on any damned dimension imaginable. (!!) In any and every situation. More variety = Higher odds of success-Wow!

  (8) Co-invent with outsiders. Again, seeking new inputs and a great test bed is the idea—working side by side with pioneer customers gives them a leg up, and you, too. Their “exclusive use” for a while may be a small price to pay. The ultimate: Crowd-sourcing! My God, the Power of Everybody—proven every day!

  (9) “Strategic” listening. This well-developed “core competence” is key to harvesting ideas from any and every source imaginable, creating great alliances, turning on the troops, etc. Is there anything more powerful or closer to the true heart of sustained innovativeness?
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  (10) Hire and promote innovators. The best test of innovation potential is … a track record of innovation. If you are assessing a 26-year-old candidate and there are no cases-of-innovation-of-some-sort-worth-bragging-about in his or her past—then don’t expect much in the future. To some extent, considering this applies to every job—e.g., the goal is universal curiosity!

  (11) XFX/Cross-functional Excellence. Ninety percent (95 percent?) of innovation requires or can immeasurably benefit from working across functional borders, so Border Bashing/X-border Love is key to innovation success. (Many, probably most, failed innovation efforts list lousy cross-functional behavior as a “Top 3” cause—and often a “Top 1.”)

  (12) Complexity and Systems Destruction Officer. Systems are imperative. Systems constrain and strangle—and grow and grow and grow. We must declare war on our own systems, even as we depend on them, to make sure that freedom continues to ring.

  (13) R&D Equality. “Research” is not the exclusive charter of the new product or marketing folks. Every (!!!) department needs a well-funded, highly regarded R&D activity; the clear expectation is that every unit/function will be as well-known for its innovation record as for its execution of standard tasks. This, collectively, may be “value-added Secret #1.”

  (14) Fun! Self-deprecation! Innovating is about breaking the rules—often our rules. There is a certain mischievousness about innovative organizations—not fun and games, but pleasure in sticking a finger in convention’s eye, especially one or more of our own conventions. (Remember: When it comes to innovation, Enemy #1 is ourselves and, frightening-but-true, our most cherished past successes!)

  (15) Good luck! Entropy rules! Performance over the long haul deteriorates! Working on every-damn-thing-you-can-think-of to up the odds of renewal ups the odds of beating the Perpetual Entropy Surge!