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Q: When
you read the history of the greatest products ever
created, you find out that many times the innovator was
ignored or ridiculed by his company along the way and even
had to struggle against the wishes of management. Why does
this happen? Shouldn’t managers at least be giving these
people moral support? Name Withheld, Livermore, California
A: If only
managers could see the future like they should, right?
Come on! Of course, no one in an organization should be
ignored or ridiculed. That’s a rule, and any manager who
breaks it is a jerk.
But you
have to cut managers a break on the innovation front. How
are ordinary mortals to know if the employee toiling on a
promising project is the next Bill Gates or just a
resource-draining wannabe?
The fact
is, not every explorer, whether he’s seeking new worlds in
a garage or a corporate R&D lab, ends up discovering the
next big thing. Some are just dabblers. Some are just
dreamers. And some, despite their brains, ambition and
sincerity, are just not focusing on the right thing for
the market.
No wonder,
then, that many experienced managers have trouble lending
moral support to the aspiring innovators in their midst
and can barely keep from groaning when these same types
ask for extra people, time and funding, as they so often
do.
Your
question, however, brings up a point even more critical to
business success than the proper care and feeding of
designated innovation gurus. It’s about how and where
innovation actually happens, a topic of some confusion.
Everywhere
we speak around the world, to business groups of every
type and size, we hear people talk about innovation in its
most glamorized form—as a revolutionary breakthrough that
changes how whole industries operate or whole groups of
consumers behave. We hear questions about how companies
should organize to generate the next iPod and manage their
people to produce (or attract) the next Sergey Brin or
Larry Page.
Such
queries are all well and fine: Sometimes the innovation
war is won by a brand-new killer application or a genius
(or two) with a eureka. But far more often, innovation
comes not as a one-time thunderbolt but emerges
incrementally, in bits and chugs, forged by a mixed bag of
coworkers from up, down and across an organization,
sweating and wrangling it out in trenches.
Glamorous,
hardly. Powerful, absolutely.
Now, make
no mistake. Such iterative, bottom-up, collaborative
innovation does not happen by accident. Indeed, it can
occur only when managers encourage, and the whole
organization buys into, a mindset nearly religious in its
zeal.
This
mindset’s central belief is simple: Innovation is so
thoroughly ingrained in everyone’s job—yes,
everyone’s—that each employee arrives at work every day
thinking, “Is there a better way to do everything we do
around here? What’s a way to improve on our products and
services?” It’s a mindset that makes people excited to
share new ideas for product or process improvement with
their colleagues and to embrace the notion that you win as
an organization only when everyone’s brain is engaged.
Managers,
of course, will see this mindset flourish the more they
reward it with pay raises and bonuses and celebrate it
within the culture, making role models out of people who
bring innovative ideas forward, no matter where they find
them, be it inside the company or out.
But the
innovation mindset is most effective when it’s coupled
with an institutionalized process that draws together
employees from different levels and functions within the
business and, with a facilitator, gets them talking,
debating and problem solving as a team. Some companies
call these sessions “work out”; others refer to them as
“town meetings” or “innovation councils.”
By any
name, their purpose is the same—to bring the conversation
about innovation to the people closest to the products,
services and processes. So often, they’re the real
geniuses, and the ideas they generate collectively,
perhaps ironically, so often leapfrog the competition
waiting for its one big breakthrough.
Speaking
of irony, your letter arrived the very same day we
received a question from a reader in Chicago who asked,
“How can I dare to suggest a new idea I have for a product
to my manager, when I’m not in R&D and the product would
probably only benefit another business in our company?”
How sad, we thought, another company where managers have
sent the message that innovation comes from the chosen
few. Of course, it should come from them.
But
imagine the possibilities and the unleashed power—not to
mention the fun—when organizations engage everyone else in
the process, too.
****
Jack
and Suzy Welch are the authors of the international
bestseller Winning (Collins). Their latest book is
Winning: The Answers: Confronting 74 of the Toughest
Questions in Business Today (Collins). They are eager to
hear about your career dilemmas and challenges at work and
look forward to answering your questions in future
columns. You can e-mail them questions at winning@nytimes.com.
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