Innovator's DNA

by Jeff Dyer

  Say that you have one of those reality shows on TV and you drop a bunch of people in the middle of a desert island. The winner is the person who gets to the shore the quickest. Some people try to analyze where they are, which direction to go. Some of them say, “Let’s climb up a tree or a rock or hillside and maybe we can see further and figure out what is the best direction to go.” They will spend time planning and analyzing how to find the best direction to go. But some other people will just look around, follow their intuition, and start running in a direction.

  If there are a lot of people that have been dropped on the island, I can almost guarantee that whoever starts climbing up the tree to start analyzing where he is and which direction to go will not win the competition. Why? Because there are a few other maniacs who will follow their intuition and just start running. They’re much more likely to get to shore quicker. The point is: if you have a good gut feeling for which general direction to go, then you should just run as fast as you can.

  Zennström’s challenge: act and figure it out as you go. That way, you get valuable feedback by acting, and you get even better feedback by fully engaging your innovator’s-DNA skills along the way. But act now or it may be too late. Windows of opportunity exist for capturing the full value from any innovative business idea. No wonder successful innovators move fast to implement an idea before its window closes.

  In the end, innovation is an investment—in yourself, in others, and, if you’re a senior manager or emerging entrepreneur, in your company. Whether you’re working at the top of an organization or as a technical specialist at the bottom, Meg Whitman, formerly of eBay, advises everyone “to have the courage to plant acorns before you need oak trees.” Innovation is all about planting acorns (ideas) with less than complete confidence that each will grow into something meaningful. The alternative, however, is little or no growth when no acorns emerge as trees. By understanding and reinforcing the DNA of individual innovators within innovative teams and organizations, you can find ways to more successfully develop not just growth saplings but the real oak trees of future growth. As you continue your innovation journey, let your life speak the final line from Apple’s Think Different campaign: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” So just do it. Do it now!

  Appendix A

  Sample of Innovators Interviewed

  *We use the wording “among the first” to launch a product or service offering because we have not verified that the company was indeed the first to offer the product or service. However, the innovators we interviewed claimed that this was their original idea and they were not simply imitating another company’s offering.

  Appendix C

  Developing Discovery Skills

  Years ago, Arnold Glasow, an entrepreneur and humorist, concluded that “improvement begins with I.” We couldn’t agree more. The focus of this appendix is to suggest how you might personally improve your discovery skills—associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

  Developing Your Discovery Skills

  To develop your skills, we provided a number of practical tips in chapters 2 through 6. To decide which tips make the most sense to follow, we suggest that you take five steps: (1) review priorities to see where you spend your time, (2) assess your discovery skills systematically, (3) identify a compelling innovation challenge that matters, (4) practice your discovery skills ruthlessly, and (5) get a coach to support your ongoing development efforts. When combined, these steps can help you—and your team—build the relevant innovation skills required to make a bigger, better impact at work and beyond. (If you also want to build your team’s discovery skills, take the steps outlined, but focus your development work on your team.)

  Step 1: Review priorities

  Consider how you typically spend your time at work. We suggest dividing your core tasks into three broad categories: discovery, delivery, and development. Discovery focuses on innovation and includes actively engaging the five discovery skills in search of new products, services, processes, and/or business models. Delivery is all about producing results, analyzing, planning, executing, and implementing strategies. Finally, development centers on building your capabilities and those of others (primarily direct reports, if you are a manager). This task includes selecting the right people for your team and training them well in the innovator’s-DNA skills.

  Now, look at your calendar for a typical workweek. What percent of your time do you personally spend on each task—discovery, delivery, and development? You may want to answer this question by filling out the chart in table C-1, using the following simple process. First, make your best guess about how you currently spend your time (the “today” column). Second, record your best judgment about where you think you should be spending your time (“tomorrow”), given your team’s purpose and your company’s strategy. Third, calculate the difference, or “gap,” between today and tomorrow for each category.

  TABLE C-1

  Tracking your time spent

  Next, focus primarily on the gap. Is it large? Negative? Positive? Or neutral? If the gap is zero, you’re spending the time and energy that you think you should on discovery. However, a negative gap reflects a need to devote more time to discovery activities to improve your ability as a discovery-driven leader.

  Innovative CEOs and founder entrepreneurs spend roughly 50 percent more of their typical week on discovery activities than noninnovative CEOs and entrepreneurs do. So if you aren’t devoting at least 30 percent of your time to discovery, you probably aren’t leading the innovation charge. Creative problem solving takes time, so increase the amount you spend on discovery to have a bigger impact on innovation.

  Step 2: Assess your discovery skills

  After reflecting on your time spent (discovery versus delivery), get a more refined, specific sense of your discovery- and delivery-skill strengths and weaknesses. You can gain an idea of your performance on these skills through the brief self-assessment in chapter 1. You can also visit http://www.InnovatorsDNA.com to take a more comprehensive online self-assessment or a 360-degree online assessment (which provides feedback from your manager, peers, and direct reports) to capture a better sense of your strengths and weaknesses.1 These assessments can prove valuable in helping you answer: “What is my everyday discovery versus delivery orientation? In which discovery skills am I strongest? Which ones do I want to develop? In which delivery skills am I strongest? Which delivery skills do I need to develop?”

  Step 3: Identify a compelling innovation challenge

  After assessing your strengths and weaknesses in discovery and delivery, the next step is to find a specific, current innovation challenge or opportunity so that you can practice your discovery skills. This challenge might range from creating a new product or service to reducing employee turnover to coming up with new processes that reduce costs by 5 percent in your business unit. With your innovation challenge clearly in mind, develop a plan to practice some of the discovery skills as you search for creative solutions.

  Step 4: Practice your discovery skills

  We propose that you work on your questioning skills first, since innovation often starts with a compelling question and innovative teams have a culture that supports questioning. Write down at least twenty-five questions about your innovation challenge and conduct a QuestionStorming activity (or other questioning tips) with your team, as outlined at the end of chapter 3. A personal habit of asking questions helps create a safe space for other team members to also ask questions.

  After strengthening your capacity to question, identify your strongest skill among observing, networking, and experimenting and seek to practice it as you tackle your innovation challenge (unless it’s so strong that more practice provides diminishing returns; in that case, working on a weaker discovery skill may be a better development option). Again, refer to each of the chapters about these skills (chapters 4 through 6) for suggestions about improving them. Involve you
r team as much as possible in whatever discovery skill you are working on (observing, networking, or experimenting) as you search for a solution to your challenge. Finally, engage in frequent brainstorming sessions (alone and with your team) to practice associating (see chapter 2 for tips on associating).

  Step 5: Get a coach

  Innovation is habit forming or, rather, innovation requires forming new habits regarding the five discovery skills. Our friend Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, might call this book The Innovator’s DNA: The Five Habits of Highly Creative People. How can you increase the probability that if you try out the new skills suggested, you will turn them into new habits? One place to start is asking someone to serve as your creative mentor or coach—someone who can motivate and coach you while you work on developing new behavioral patterns. Personal change is difficult, and asking someone you respect to help with the change effort is an important step (getting one person engaged in the change process will bump up your success rate 15 percent to 20 percent). The coach can be a boss, peer, professor, classmate, or even someone you live with (you might practice these skills with other family members as you attempt to creatively solve problems at home). But whomever you pick, make sure he or she is someone you can trust to give you honest feedback and suggestions. A creative mentor and coach can make a big difference in helping improve your creativity skills.

  Master the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators

  Mastery of any skill comes by practicing specific elements of that skill. For example, world-class athletes, musicians, or managers break down a skill into very specific parts of their “game.” Then they practice these minute elements relentlessly. For a golfer, it might mean short putts on the green, over and over for days until she masters one small element of the swing. Concert pianists do the same with a small part of a musical piece. Practice over the course of weeks, months, and years ultimately provides mastery of not only one skill, but a set of skills.

  The disruptive innovators in our research did precisely this, either consciously or unconsciously. They practiced skills relentlessly, on almost anyone or anything they interacted with. The mystery of innovation is far less mysterious when people practice the innovator’s-DNA skills regularly so the skills become new habits. This takes time and self-discipline. So start with realistic expectations and actively allocate time to improving your discovery skills. Most of all, remember that your personal development efforts send a serious signal to your team and organization about how high innovation ranks in your priorities and how important it might become to theirs.

  Developing Discovery Skills in the Next Generation

  The most important innovation work any of us might do is within the four walls of our home, the boundaries of our neighborhood, or the classrooms of our local schools. Why? Almost all the disruptive innovators we interviewed mentioned at least one adult in their lives who paid personal attention to their innovation skills and helped nurture them as they grew into adulthood. That’s why we think it’s so important for adults to honor and amplify young people’s discovery skills worldwide.

  Consider Steve Jobs’s life. Early on, his father set aside part of his workbench for Jobs to experiment on mechanical things. Later, Jobs’s neighbor, Larry Lang, taught him (and other interested neighborhood kids) a lot about electronics by building Heathkits together (products like transistor radios that were purchased in do-it-yourself kits). In retrospect, Jobs realized that building Heathkits with a neighbor and exploring things on his father’s workbench ultimately gave him an understanding of what lurked inside a finished product. More important, Jobs acquired the sense that “things were not mysteries” and, as a result, he also gained “a tremendous level of self-confidence” about mechanical and electronic things.

  Jobs was not the only fortunate one when it came to developing the next generation of disruptive innovators. Jeff Bezos’s grandparents played an equally powerful role in fostering his experimentation skills during the summers on their Texas farm. Richard Branson’s mother supported his curiosity to carry on a family legacy of discovering new terrain. Orit Gadiesh’s parents and schoolteachers not only tolerated her questions, but valued them. In short, disruptive innovators had one or more adults play a key role in keeping their natural innovator’s DNA alive beyond childhood. You can play that same important role with a future generation of innovators.

  Developing Discovery Skills in Homes and Neighborhoods

  What better place to start building the five skills of disruptive innovators than in our homes and neighborhoods? If you take on this challenge to “send the elevator down,” as entrepreneur (and founder of Ariadne Capital) Julie Meyer put it, and bring up a new generation of disruptive innovators, here are a few concrete, helpful tips.

  Associating Skills

  One game you can play, particularly when traveling in the car, is called “What’s the connection?” Two people each think of a random word. A third person is the player. Once they decide on random words, each of the first two people announces his or her word. The third person must then create a logical connection between the two words, but try to be creative in doing so. For example, the words pickle and stitches might be connected with: “We make sour faces when getting stitches at the hospital and when we bite into a sour pickle.” Similarly, the board game TriBond (distributed by Mattel) gives you three word clues and asks you to figure out what they have in common. (You can also try out the game at http://www.TriBond.com, where there’s a new combination of three words to connect every day.)

  Search for books that foster associational thinking. One of our favorites is Not a Box, by Antoinette Portis. The main character, a rabbit, tries to convince readers that boxes are not boxes. Instead, boxes might be anything (ranging from a race car to a spaceship) if we let our imaginations run wild. One of us read Not a Box to a three-year-old grandchild and discovered him sitting in a box later that day. It was not a box, but a pirate ship! If you enjoy reading creative books with children, a few others are Harold and the Purple Crayon (by Crockett Johnson), Ish (by Peter Reynolds), and The Anti-Coloring Book (by Susan Striker and Edward Kimmel).

  Questioning Skills

  When most children come home from school, parents often ask: “How was your day?” or “Did you learn anything interesting today?” The second question is better than the first (in terms of insights gained), but what if you regularly asked your child (or neighbor’s child): “What questions did you ask today?” “What questions did other children ask today? “What questions didn’t you have time to ask today?” Then listen; really, really listen. You may be surprised by what you discover. (You may also want to take a moment to watch What Is That?, a short video by MovieTeller films about how a father’s and a son’s questions powerfully affect each of them.)

  Whenever you face a family, school, or community problem or challenge that needs a solution, try using a modified version of our QuestionStorming approach with young people. Kids don’t have the patience to brainstorm fifty questions, but they usually have the patience to brainstorm ten questions. For example, suppose you have a problem with your child not doing chores or homework. Asking just ten questions together about the “problem” can often yield interesting insights. For example, you might ask, “Why isn’t science interesting to you?” “What can I do to be helpful?” Your child might ask, “Why do I need to know science?” “Why is science so important to you?” This process of asking questions about a problem can often trigger ideas or insights that will lead to novel solutions.2

  Observing Skills

  Give children a chance to see you at work. You never know what surprises they might have by joining you for a day. Pay attention to what they notice as they enter your world; become a fly on the wall and watch the world through their eyes as they try on the likely new, adult world of work. For Jon Huntsman Jr., going to his father’s workplace when he was eleven years old altered the course of his life. He was visiting his father, who worked
as a special adviser to President Nixon, at the White House. While there, he met Henry Kissinger, who was on his way to a secret meeting in China. When young Jon asked Kissinger where he was going, Kissinger replied, “China.” Until then in Jon’s life, China had not been a real place with real people. But hearing that one word from someone who was actually going to China sparked a lifelong interest. Huntsman later studied Asian history and Asian languages in school. In total, he spent fifteen years learning Mandarin and spoke it fluently as the US Ambassador to China.

  Take frequent walks in old places and new ones. Take a child on a walk and look at the experience through her eyes. What does she see? Hear? Taste? Touch? Smell? You may be surprised at what you’ve never noticed before. Watch carefully for what surprises her; it just might surprise you as well. When traveling or living in new places, do the same, especially in moments of transition (just arriving or just leaving) when we sometimes see things that otherwise remain invisible. Keep a journal together that captures your observations. How to Be an Explorer of the World (by Keri Smith) is a great guide for adults and children who are interested in making better observations of the world.

  Networking Skills

  You can start building networking skills with young people by occasionally bringing a work (or even family) problem to them and asking for their opinion. Explain that problems are best solved when you get a variety of people looking at them from multiple perspectives. If they express interest in the problem, you might even invite them to join you as you bring the same problem to someone else with a different background. This becomes a powerful example of the importance of networking for ideas and demonstrates a process for doing it.