In Great Company

by Louis Carter

  While the agency never failed to capture the imagination of the public, NASA’s existence seemed in doubt after the International Space Station was completed and the Space Shuttle Program ended. These problems did not occur because NASA lacked future aspirations but because space exploration is extraordinarily expensive and NASA funding was increasingly being siphoned off to support other government programs. That’s where open innovation came in. In order to fund Mars exploration and other initiatives, NASA crowdsourced resources from the private sector, made its own patent portfolio available to inventors and entrepreneurs, and partnered to tackle some of the most pressing items on its agenda. The most public partnership by NASA was their collaboration with SpaceX to develop rockets and launch cargo to the International Space Station. Even after NASA’s $140 billion investment in the SpaceX partnership, one study found that the collaboration had created efficiencies within NASA, and it had saved the agency hundreds of millions of dollars.11

  As it did for NASA, open innovation can open doors and bring many more minds together to share ideas and resources along the path to a positive future. But open innovation is just one possible play among many in the positive future playbook (Figure 4.1).

  FIGURE 4.1

  1. Leverage Passion

  Big River’s entire corporate culture was designed to steer employee and customer sentiment in a positive direction and prevail against massively challenging headwinds. The inevitable question that loomed around the launch in 2014 was: why start a new steel company? And the very best answer they had was: because that’s what rebels do. They portrayed the organization as a team of mavericks.

  And it worked. People got fired up by the message and Big River’s new and innovative methodology for making steel. Company executives created a “Rebels Wanted” logo, and employees put it in their cars, stuck it on their lunch boxes, and hung it in their homes.

  The type of passion that makes you put the company bumper sticker on your car yields much more than just good PR. Passion delivers positivity because it makes employees evangelists. Evangelism and passion are critical in start-ups because the barriers to entry are high, success rates are low, and people need to give their all every day just to keep the ship sailing. But passion is important for all companies every day. In fact, according to research from Michael Mankins at Bain & Company, an engaged employee is 44 percent more productive than merely a satisfied worker, but an employee who feels truly inspired is nearly 125 percent more productive than a satisfied one. In other words, companies that leverage the passion of their employees outperform the rest.12

  Creating a rebel brand is one way to get people fired up to innovate and perform at their best. There are other strategies as well that organizations can use to funnel passion as an ingredient of positive future.

  Let Purpose Drive Passion

  People are far more likely to be passionate about work if they believe their actions are changing the world for the better. Yet, not all of us are employed by Doctors Without Borders or another organization driven entirely by social mission. Still, companies can harvest passion in employees in nearly any industry.

  Big River Steel stoked passion in their people by focusing their corporate culture squarely on things that deliver meaning: positive change in manufacturing, high quality standards, sustainability, empowerment, and innovation. Other companies, from Starbucks to Salesforce, have charitable foundations dedicated to advancing causes from strengthening the community to addressing climate change.

  This combination of commerce and commitment allows people to work on behalf of their favorite causes under the umbrella of their own organization. Another way to generate purpose- driven passion in any company is to provide employees with flexibility to donate their time and skills during the workday to social causes. This simple measure may mean they bring their passion back to work with them.

  Turn Passion into Products

  Perhaps the best way to leverage people’s passion is to listen to them and take their suggestions seriously. Innovative organizations like Amazon make a habit of empowering people to pitch their plans and side projects. For instance, the blockbuster success Amazon Prime came about after an Amazon software engineer floated the idea through the company’s digital suggestion box. The Chinese appliance maker Haier is another organization known to encourage employees to pursue the ideas they are passionate about. In their case, they recognize employees for their contribution by naming the new product after them once it is commercialized.13

  Some companies offer employees financial rewards for their best new ideas, others recognize them with awards and validation. Regardless of how it happens, giving employees a venue in which to express and pursue their ideas keeps their passion alive and focused in a productive direction.

  Let Passion Pivot

  Another part of enabling people to pursue ideas with passion is creating space for them to learn. Not all of our passions are worth pursuing, after all. Intuit encourages their innovators to pull the plug themselves when an idea or experiment is not panning out and directs them to pivot based on what they have learned.14

  Likewise, Amazon treats every idea like a “two-way door”—the person who is leading development can turn back if he or she decides it is not working.15 The takeaway is to empower people to experiment, but encourage them to course correct quickly. Turning negative dynamics like failure into something positive has a double benefit: it provides a way for employees to pursue their passion without fear and it creates a larger culture of positivity.

  Look for Passionate Persuaders

  Creating a culture of positivity attracts passionate people, but the onus is on everyone to sustain that culture. The first step is hiring passionate people. Projecting your expectations helps job candidates opt out of the process if the upbeat culture does not suit their personality. Likewise, recruiters can use assessments and interview questions to identify people who would be passionate in their work.

  Big River Steel made it perfectly clear in their logo—“Rebels Wanted”—that they were looking for people with spark to help them actively reinvent the steel industry. Slackers need not apply. Passion and positivity need to extend beyond the product development team. Middle managers, line staff, customer service, and the C suite—it only takes a few disengaged people to create a bottleneck that stops passion it its tracks. Executives at Big River set the tone—the top team was overtly passionate about their start-up mission.

  Put Passion in Its Place

  As critical as passion is to positivity and success, left unchecked and unfocused it can divert attention from more important matters. I use three questions to help direct passion appropriately. First, is passion aligned with the business? While projects based on passion may be a way to unlock innovation and new business, they also need to meet business requirements and fit within the organization’s mission.

  Next, are you solving a problem that matters to customers? Like many things in business, drawing a direct line to customers focuses energy in the right direction and keeps new ideas market driven. Finally, is this sustainable? Not every passion project should be a business. Companies need criteria to help people know what ideas to keep or kill. Without guidelines, passion can become distracting.

  2. Turn Change into a Positive

  Things can turn negative fast in organizations. When companies are not performing well financially, people point fingers and look for someone to blame. When surprise events and unexpected disruptions send shock waves through industries, companies seize up and go back to the basics. When a new leader arrives on the scene and changes the norms, many of us push back and resist. Fear of change is widespread. It causes us to feel threatened, and it casts us into primordial fight-or-flight mode. While this physiological response to change is natural, it makes it all the more difficult to create and sustain a culture of positivity.

  In order to be In Great Company, we need to do much more than simply accept change. We need to learn to view change in a
positive light. Only by deliberately building change into our positive vision of the future can we realistically expect to succeed and advance in today’s world of permanent disruption. James Citrin, leader of Spencer Stuart’s North American CEO Practice, put it this way: “We can’t get away from the need to translate and wade through change. If CEOs do not have the ability to learn, if they think that they have all the answers, then they are, by definition, going to be wrong.”16

  Spencer Stuart, the executive search and leadership development consulting firm, believes that the ability to accept and manage change presents such a powerful advantage for leaders that they have developed a tool to test for it. The Executive Intelligence evaluation tests and measures a leader’s ability to thrive in new, unfamiliar, and complex situations. “There’s so much disruption, there’s so much technology, and there are so many new industries that leaders know very little with certainty,” Citrin said. “The ability to learn and take in new information, and actually apply it in smart ways, is a core capability of great CEOs today.”

  Agreed. Reinvention is a core capability for almost everyone right now in any personal or professional leadership capacity. Change management is one of the best tools we can use to create a culture of positivity that connects us to each other. In addition to being ever present, change is a lever that mobilizes action and draws us together—ideally to move toward a more positive future. In my work with organizations, I teach people to reframe change as an opportunity as opposed to a threat and to use it to advance as leaders in a number of ways we will examine below.

  Neutralize the Pain of Change

  Whether it is organizational or personal, change entails letting go of things that we care about, such as beliefs, norms, and traditions. To pave the way for this difficult work, we need to acknowledge the pain that is involved and salvage the psychological safety that allows people to engage.

  Chris Voss has proposed making confrontational situations—like change—more manageable by labeling negative emotions. Verbalizing and naming negative feelings allows people to move forward feeling positive, he said. A good use of emotional labeling would be, “You sound hurt by the decision. It doesn’t seem fair.” This direct, empathetic observation, Voss said, recognizes people’s feelings without judging them, and it helps defuse their negative emotions.

  Another way to neutralize the pain of change is to celebrate the success of old norms before moving on to the new normal. Pausing to acknowledge accomplishments and recognize success takes some of the sting out of change efforts and helps win over the hearts and minds of change resisters. This is especially important where change occurs in enduring institutions like corporate culture, when one segment or demographic in the organization may be brought into existing traditions and another has already moved on.

  No matter how it is accomplished, recognizing the pain of change can neutralize negative feelings and create emotional connectedness.

  Get Positive with “Deviants”

  One of the most ingenious and inspiring strategies for engaging in positive change comes from the positive deviance movement.17 Based on the observation that within most communities there are people whose uncommon behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions than their peers to the same seemingly intractable problems, the positive deviance approach requires no outside resources or additional knowledge.18

  Put into practice by the late Jerry Sternin and his wife Monique as part of their lifesaving work with Save the Children in Vietnam in the 1990s, positive deviance helped address the dire child malnutrition crisis that existed in the region at the time.19 Observing that traditional supplemental feeding programs (implemented by indigenous and international development organizations) provided only temporary solutions, the Sternins led the effort to identify cases in which local positive deviants solved their own problem with special practices and strategies that could be widely shared. In this instance, the positive deviance paradigm showed that poor families with well-nourished children supplemented their diet with foods traditionally considered inappropriate for children (sweet potato greens, shrimp, and crabs), fed them four times daily instead of twice, and washed their hands before meals.

  Part of the appeal of this approach is its simplicity and utility:

  Define the problem and what the outcome of a successful program to address it would look like. (This is usually stated in terms of behavior or a state of being.)

  Determine if there are individuals with the community who already exhibit the desired behavior (that is, identify the presence of “positive deviants”).

  Discover their uncommon practices or strategies that enable the positive deviants to succeed when their neighbors do not.

  Design an intervention enabling others in the community to access and practice the positive deviant behaviors.

  Positive deviance created and sustained positive change in Vietnam and elsewhere for the same reason it has worked within organizations such as Merck and Hewlett Packard: it uses existing resources, highlights solutions that are already working, and champions best practices from within the community as opposed to being imposed by outside forces.20 Change that springs from within a community or organization, through a process of self-examination, is viewed more positively by individuals engaging in change and has a higher likelihood of acceptance.

  Offer More Ways to Change

  Organizations need to create opportunities for leaders to disrupt themselves, including how they think, work, and lead. After all, the more comfortable a leader becomes with change, the easier it will be to find a positive, effective way to drive it forward organizationally.

  The auto industry presents a case in point. With “radical disruption” on its doorstep, General Motors chief talent officer Michael Arena launched GM2020, a grassroots initiative designed to enable employees to “positively disrupt the way they work.”21 The far-reaching program positions employees for change through a variety of programs from design thinking seminars to “co-labs”—teams working entrepreneurially to find innovative solutions to problems. The point is to keep GM’s workforce engaging in positive change to allow the organization to “keep pace with start-ups.”

  AT&T is undergoing a similar talent transformation. The telecomm and mass media behemoth is in the middle of a massive retraining effort to reeducate 100,000 employees and arm them with cutting-edge skills. In this case, the change effort is aimed at preparing employees for the future and creating the kind of nimble workforce the company needs to compete in the twenty-first century.22

  Offering programs and training that incentivize employees to engage in change is yet another positive step to help them work together to prepare for the future.

  3. Create Space to Innovate

  Big River’s CEO, Dave Stickler, loves to say: “We have one swear word around here that we aren’t allowed to use, and that is: ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it.’” Disney CEO Bob Igor has put it like this: “The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.”23 As for me, I like to say: “If we’re doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, . . . that’s the definition of insanity.”24

  It was a nearly universal belief across the companies in my study that without innovation, an organization is literally standing still. It’s not a new insight, but it is one that is becoming more urgent every day. We all need to create space to innovate. Why? Large organizations that don’t innovate lose ground to scrappy start-ups with little inertia and bigger ideas. Small organizations that fail to innovate become eclipsed by bigger companies with deeper resources and economies of scale. Innovation today is about survival. That’s a given. But I would argue that just as ample a piece of the innovation pie is employee engagement and emotional connectedness.

  We explored the connection between innovation, progress, and positivity above. The bottom line is that our best employees want to invent the future. Talented, innovative, creative people from every generation and demogr
aphic want to work for innovative companies. They want to be challenged, encouraged to create, and enabled to grow.

  In the past, the highest barrier to innovation was organizational structure, with hierarchy and silos acting as bottlenecks. But that’s changing. With cross-functional teams, flat organizations, and collaboration becoming the norm, the gap between our desire as individuals to innovate and the ability to execute our ideas is less pronounced. Innovators from all over the organization have a way to float ideas up to the top or spread them across the organization from the edges. The last obstacle is culture. People are In Great Company when organizations set up and sustain a culture that recognizes and rewards innovators and make new ideas everyone’s job. It is a massive balancing act to set people free to innovate yet still create real rules and guardrails to keep them focused and on task. But it can be done. These are the best practices from my study, as well as the years of work and insight from the Best Practice Institute.

  Stay Future Focused

  WD-40 started its life as an innovation. Developed in 1953 to prevent corrosion in nuclear missiles, the breakthrough was named WD-40 because the first 39 attempts to perfect the “water displacement” formula failed. With a single blockbuster product, how does the WD-40 company remain innovative? One big way is to stay future focused.

  And it is a very deliberate effort. In 2006, CEO Garry Ridge and his executive team intentionally extended their planning horizon to 10 years out.25 Until then, business planning was by annum with the occasional attempt to look out three years ahead. As another part of their future focus, they introduced the idea of “unlimited possibilities” into their thinking.