Balancing Mentors and Newbies
There is a great TV commercial from the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Old man on a golf course with a young golfer. Old man says, “When I was a young man, I would hit the ball right over that tree and onto the green.”
So the young gofer takes a swing and drives the ball right into the tree. The ball bounces back.
Then the old man says, “Of course, when I was a young man, that tree was only three feet high.”
______
Can’t think of a better illustration why in all the programs we run for innovators, we try to get the experienced folks to avoid saying, “We did it in the 60′s and it didn’t work,” while getting the newbies to learn how they did it in the 60s and why it didn’t work.
They say that insanity is trying something over and over and expecting a different result. If that is true, we need more crazy people.
Three Great References
Guy Kawasaki: “Entrepreneur is not a job title. It is the state of mind of people who want to alter the future” (The Art of the Start, 2004)
Tim Brown: “Edison wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with a shrewd business sense. In his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory he surrounded himself with Gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters” (Design Thinking, Harvard Business Review, June 2008).
Henkel & Reitzig: “Companies must begin cooperating with their competitors early in the R&D process. As noted, early-stage research tends to be highly secretive, whereas a patent-protected idea often becomes a trading asset. Intuitively, this makes sense, since disclosing knowledge about unprotected ideas can make a firm’s R&D department very vulnerable. This approach has become outdated” (Patent Sharks, Harvard Business Review, June 2008).
What’s the common thread? ThreePercenters are entrepreneurial generalists with a shrewd technical and business sense. We aim to change the future. And if we want to be successful in today’s world, we need to work together across company lines.
Slow Hand Leaders Needed
People who are exploring very new things in a corporate environment need to be comfortable talking with their management about their dreams, fears, hopes and doubts. The stresses of pioneering, the duress of massive uncertainty, the inevitable missteps of path-finding take their toll on entrepreneurs.
In a corporate environment, innovators need two conflicting things from the leaders who support them: First, they need the benefit of experience-based intuition and insight into how their plans will impact others in the company. Second, they need to feel they are free and reasonably safe to explore, make mistakes, and follow their own intuition – even when it conflicts with the intuition of your leadership.
A well-intentioned executive can easily sacrifice the latter requirement in order to deliver the benefits of his experience and oversight. At Extreme Blue in IBM, we would attempt to balance this by counseling experienced mentors not to tell their young teams, “We tried that in the 60′s and it didn’t work.” But we also told the teams of young people, “Hey, get Joe to tell you about how he tried this in the 60′s, and find out where he went wrong.” It’s a balance. The key was that the Extreme Blue staff created a safe zone for the project team, constantly reminding them that their boss was not their boss for the duration of their project, that their mentor was not their boss, that they themselves were the only boss for that time period. A funding executive that can convince his innovation team that he is just a guide and they are “the boss” – at least for the duration of the project – is approaching innovation-leadership nirvana.
A terrible challenge that I and many of my colleagues face as we grow from being the innovator to being the one managing innovators is the art of the slow hand. We’ve been paid for years to be the person with the great idea. Somehow along the way it was decided that because we were good innovators, we might be good innovation managers. It’s like promoting a productive scientist to a research management job; you can get lucky sometimes, but often the skills that got them the nobel prize are nothing like the skills needed to foster teams of the next nobel prizewinners.
The slow hand is about style and grace. It’s not just about pausing before you respond to your innovator’s obviously naive, ill-informed and potentially disasterous idea. It’s about letting go, being at peace with the disaster you see them brewing. And then, once you’ve found that moment of peace, you calmly mention a few things they might want to keep in mind as they drive their boat over the waterfall.
In my experience, I’ve only known a handful of leaders who had really mastered this art. Stuart Feldman is one – he’s now at Google. John Seely Brown, the former head of Xerox PARC, is another. I’m told that Brad Anderson at Best Buy is supremely good at this. (He has a couple people like Randy Ross and Rick Rommel who are very good at this, too.)
The reason this is an art-form and not just a guideline is that it is equally useless and destructive to simply be a good listener and not provide any insight or guidance. What innovators need is for their leaders to “have the lights on,” have ideas and insights of their own, but be adept at employing the style and grace of the slow hand in how they deliver that guidance. To paraphrase how a friend recently put it: It’s no good to turn off your own intuition – that only denies your team the benefit of your experience – but you have to be at peace with them deliberately ignoring your advice in order to explore an angle that you might not be able to see from your experienced perspective.
It’s amazing how, as a guide for new innovators, you can get them to take you on their journey and still feel like they are driving the boat when you can let go of that urge to grab the wheel.
IXC Video
IXC has come out with a new video that puts a nice gloss on the messages developed when I was in Australia. Pretty nice work.
http://www.ixc.com.au/innovation/hq_1.html
The intermediary model some friends and I had been working up since 1996, and which culminated in IXC’s current model, really has some serious flaws, especially when trying to cross national boundaries. But that said, IXC is pioneering ways to find opportunities to collaborate between legally separate entities where we would otherwise be ships crossing in the night. It’s an important mission.
“Us” is all of us. “Them” is none of us.
I was grateful to learn last week that I’d been invited to the research advisory council of BIF, the Business Innovation Factory – a non-profit in Rhode Island dedicated to exploring business concept innovation and how different organizations can innovate together. I’m very glad to have been asked to get involved. BIF has been remarkably successful at building an engaged, active community.
One of the most important things that communities like BIF can achieve is advancing the cause of open and collaborative innovation across many organizations. We still have a long road ahead. “Us and Them” is a mindset that’s fundamental to the human ego. People seem so eager to define themselves – and their teams – by whom they are not. “We are better than them over there.” “We can’t trust them.”
There is no question that healthy competition can be a good thing. And the “us/them” mentality is not going to go away. On the contrary, it can help ensure survival. But it is, like so many things, a question of balance. And in an open or collaborative innovation world, the balance point needs to change.
Where I think we go wrong, in one specific instance, is in the way many people respond to folks who are working for their company but who aren’t actually employees. I would like never again to hear the phrase, “Oh yeah, we use xyz for our strategy or marketing or IT management. THEY aren’t doing a good job.” It’s the THEY in that line I don’t like. Rather we should say, “If OUR marketing and OUR technology isn’t working, it is OUR problem. The consulting firm’s people, many of whom have been faithfully working for OUR company longer than many of OUR employees, are US! WE may have a problem together, but it is OUR problem.”
Open innovation relies on turning down the amplitude of the “us/them” reaction. If you accept a person from another organization – a consultant or an expert from another firm – into your team, it is important that everyone from your corporate counsel to your management team embrace them as “US.”
The phrase I like to use on consulting engagements and when working with teams assembled from different parent firms is, “Us is all of us. Them is none of us.”
The power of “US” was well illustrated by David Gibson in R&D Collaboration on Trial. Gibson tells the story of a Japanese silicon chip consortium in the 1980′s. It was set up to pool research efforts and keep pace with US firms like IBM and Intel. One of their leaders, Masato Nebashi, noticed that the researchers from the different companies in the consortium simply were not working together. They were not building trust, and they were achieving very little as a team. Nebashi instituted the now famous “yoma atsumari” (whiskey operations) protocol, essentially taking the researchers out to get drunk every week and weekend. Nebashi said, “All I did this four years was to drink with them as frequently as I could.” After a while, the teams began to put aside distrust and work as though they all were from the same company. They achieved major breakthroughs after that.
It is hard for humans to get over the “us/them” problem. It is fundamental to how we think, and it has its uses. But we know that the next big challenges facing the world are bigger than one company or even one country. If we are going to have any chance of combining insights and expertise across company lines to solve these problems, it appears we are going to need a lot more alcohol.
ThreePercent Lawyers
If the kind of innovator we are looking for at TheThreePercent is rare – about three percent of any large population at any given time – then the kind of people those innovators need to support them is equally rare.
ThreePercenters need to be able to tap the insights, resources and capabilities of a wide array of people, from marketing experts to financial wizzes. When you have a new venture that intends to disrupt how people organize themselves, you need access to a deep and wide toolbox of knowhow. In particular, you need functional experts who are comfortable in a discussion about changing the status quo.
One of the most important sources of insight an innovator needs – particularly in Europe or America – is the legal team. Access to a sharp, experienced lawyer can be one of the most important assets a new venture can have, especially new ventures inside existing companies.
If you find a lawyer at your company or among your circle of friends who can have the following conversation, hold onto them for dear life…they are as rare as opals:
ThreePercenter: “Hey lawyer dude, I’m thinking about turning this part of the company upside down. What do you think?”
Lawyer: “Cool. Well, you’re going to run into a problem with this law, but if I understand your intentions correctly, you could approach it this other way and get the same result.”
Particularly in a corporate environment, finding a lawyer like this who won’t run screaming to pull the emergency alarm is like finding….yeah, like finding a good lawyer.
The problem is that a typical lawyer has been drilled on two things: 1) reacting aggressively to threats; 2) practicing the art of the adversarial process. This is a cultural mismatch. You need a safe place to explore how to change the rules. But choose the wrong lawyer, and it’s like trying to pet the Doberman in charge of attacking anyone that ventures into the yard – there will be blood.
This can be a real problem for CEOs and other executives trying to build an innovative culture. The traditional legal team – just by doing what it is paid to do – tends to send the innovators underground. This especially happens in highly-regulated industries or in companies which have attracted a high degree of public scrutiny due to size or past practices. This is a conundrum. There is no question that most big companies need legal watch dogs. But if exploring new ventures must be done underground to avoid aggressive confrontation too soon in the process, then most initiatives are going to miss valuable insight and can stumble into a heap of legal trouble when they launch.
But this is exactly what many “vice presidents of innovation” do at large companies. Rather than find and embrace legal thinkers who can have a positive, proactive, problem-solving conversation about rule-changing, they tend to shelter their innovators. Their favorite phrase: “You have to stay below the radar until we’ve shown results.”
This then causes a downward spiral, as the lawyers now have to clean up the legal mess caused by the ill-informed new venture which has launched without any prior awareness of the legal issues. The mess will be used as proof that more watch dogs are needed, turning the CEO’s dream of an innovative culture into a police state.
However, telling lawyers to lighten-up sends mixed messages. Most of the time you want them on high-alert.
One way to approach this is to encourage the “but the but” habit we use with scientific teams. Scientists, like lawyers, have been well trained to use the word “but”: “But that theory doesn’t hold up.” “But your approach breaks the laws of physics.” Trying to tell a scientist to employ “no killer phrases” when discussing a new venture is like asking someone to not use their tongue while talking. So instead, we say, “Use But whenever you like, but for every But, you must supply a second But: ‘But that won’t work, BUT it would if….’”
We have had somewhat more success with this simple rule in our innovation programs. It doesn’t solve the whole problem, BUT it’s a start.
Gadflys, Gossips, and Go-betweens
ThreePercenters need a lot of help when they set out to change how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives. And the things they need most are good advice and careful connections.
Most ThreePercenters know this, and they crave good counsel to the point of telling everyone they meet about their hopes and dreams. I would argue that this can be disastrous, or at least counterproductive, two out of every three times. The reason is in what Warren Bennis calls “People Judgment” (Judgment, 2007). ThreePercenters are often not equipped to distinguish between several types of go-betweens.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that innovation is more about constructing a new pattern of intentions rather than simply inventing inventions, but intentions can not be patented. They are fragile and can not be protected from predation or dilution when exposed. Nevertheless, the innovator can not hope to develop strong intentions by working entirely in his own head. The growing intention needs the oxygen of others’ experience and the nutrients that come from mentorship and connection with other peoples’ insights and knowhow.
So in whom do you confide? “People I trust,” you might say. But this is not a sufficient distinction to avoid disaster. You can trust someone to be a friend, to be a good parent or partner, to be an honest person. But even the honest person can be a poor instrument for certain jobs. You can trust someone with your life but not expect them to be able to climb a mountain to save you, if they happen to be a quadruple amputee! Likewise, you may trust a friend implicitly, but if they are incapable of keeping their mouth shut, best to leave them unburdened of your most fragile intentions.
There are three types of ‘go-betweens’ out there: gadflys, gossips and intermediaries. The innovator needs to connect with other people, and on the surface, gadflys and gossips seem to fit the bill. They “know everyone,” and have a reputation for spreading ideas around. They are the pollinators. Many bloggers fill this role. The problem with gadflys and gossips is that their often sizable egos are fed mainly by the satisfaction they get from being in-the-know. And the only way for them to cash-in on that satisfaction is to tell others liberally what they hear. At minimum, a gadfly or gossip will keep a secret but still prance about signaling the adult equivalent of the classic schoolkid’s line, “I’ve got a secret, I’ve got a secret!”
The difference between a gadfly and a gossip is that the gadfly’s ego is stroked most by whom they can claim to know. The gossip’s ego feeds more on what they can claim to know. The gadfly is so universally annoying that they are often easy to spot and can be avoided. The gossip can be harder to identify. Both types, however, can be very useful when you are ready to trumpet your innovation to the world. But beware of them when your intentions are not yet ripe.
What early-stage innovators need most are intermediaries: Intermediaries are go-betweens who are well trained or naturally good at keeping secrets, only making connections with others at the right times and with great discretion. A true intermediary has learned to manage his ego. He derives no personal satisfaction from being the person who knows something or someone. She derives satisfaction by honoring the confidence you have placed in her by providing only the information necessary to make quality connections. An intermediary typically will not tell anyone else about your idea at all. Rather, they will simply make an introduction where safe and appropriate. “Joe, I have a friend you should meet.” A trusted intermediary will require no other prompt to get “Joe” to take action. Joe will know that the intermediary only brings him worthwhile connections. He will know from her example that he must also be a good intermediary himself, not a gossip or gadfly. And he will also know that inappropriately taking advantage of the intermediary’s trust will get him excommunicated from that community. So a good intermediary becomes an arbiter of trust, ensuring that ideas can circulate among the right people who implicitly agree not to do violence to each others’ intentions.
It is crucial for ThreePercenters to know how to spot these different kinds of go-betweens in your search for good connections. I have seen other innovators go completely in the other direction, choosing to make no connections and “skunk works” their projects, disconnecting themselves from everything. This is perhaps as certain to cause disaster as being “outed” too soon by a gossip. With blinders on and no help from others with other vantage points showing you where the landmines are, you will inevitably step on one. Or you may never discover that one insight that completes your idea and makes it really work.
Being open about things is a good policy if you know what you are doing, but ironically it seems that the more closed some innovators are about their ideas, the more they make the mistake of choosing a gadfly or gossip, not an intermediary, as their confidant when they do finally open up to someone.
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