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Weird
Ideas
By Michael Alan Hamlin
October 8, 2001
Companies that consistently dominate their industries
are those that balance professional management and attention to
the bottom line with innovative, often startling thinking. Or at
least that's the thesis of Robert I. Sutton, a professor at Stanford
University. Mr. Sutton argues that there are three ways to manage
creative thinking that are odd but effective - and are actually
being used in successful companies - in his September 2001 Harvard
Business Review article, "Weird Ideas."
His first idea has to do with hiring. In order to turn
an organization into one that thinks creatively, Mr. Sutton not
surprisingly notes that creative thinkers should be hired. The problem
with carrying out that conceptually fairly easy task is that creative
thinkers generally drive less creative thinkers to distraction,
especially those that depend on some degree of order to keep their
own heads screwed on straight.
This suggests, although Mr. Sutton doesn't say so outright,
that creative organizations are also highly tolerant organizations,
or at least ones where straight-laced professionals who manage what's
known to work are made to refrain from firing, ignoring, or beating
designated creative thinkers who are at work on what will work sometime
in the future. Hopefully.
There are at least four ways to go about hiring creative
thinkers. First, identify applicants who are either so confident
of themselves that they will ignore company culture and practices,
or people that are so insensitive to what is going on around them
that they simple won't notice how the company does things. Mr. Sutton
explains that the first laser printer was the product of a Xerox
employee who when ordered to stop working on the device by his boss
had the confidence to complain to a senior about the stifling effects
of "laboratory dogma."
Second, Mr. Sutton says, you can hire people you don't
like, and keep them around. Because they think differently. Third,
hire people with skills you don't think you'll need, because they'll
find a way to add value to existing products and services. Finally,
hire people who know absolutely nothing, because they don't know
what won't work.
Hiring creative thinkers is just one third of the process
of making an organization a thinking one. Despite the difficulty
of dealing with contrarians, they must of course be managed. Or
must they? Mr. Sutton argues that life will not only be more pleasant
for managers but that creative teams will be more creative when
getting out of the way is the accepted management policy. The popular
Honda City Car, for instance, was developed by a young team of engineers
that were protected from their seniors by the president of the company.
To reach their creative potentials, Mr. Suttons says
that teams like the one that designed the Honda City Car must be
thick-skinned enough - that's my term (for obvious reasons), not
his - and smart enough to argue with team members about the best
approach to building a solution and making a new idea practical.
Members must be passionate enough about their ideas to defend them,
but receptive enough to the inputs of others that they will acknowledge
weak spots as well as probable remedies.
And as others have argued before him, Mr. Sutton champions
the value of failure. "If you want a creative organization,
inaction is the worst kind of failure - and the only kind that deserves
to be punished," he writes. Companies that have more successes
than their competitors almost always also have more failures. Effective
management of teams that work in isolation or a protected environment
may be as simple as monitoring whether they are doing something,
not whether that something is successful.
But Mr. Sutton has three ideas about creating a creative
organization, and the third is developing the capacity to live with
risk. That capacity, he argues first, can be numbingly touchy feely.
"More than 500 academic studies confirm the power of positive
thinking," he declares. "Forget the slim odds; simply
convince yourself and everyone else that, with determination and
persistence, the project is destined to be a triumph.
Next, commit to random selection in choosing what new
ideas to explore and develop. Sutton demonstrates the logic of random
selection in the practice of an American Indian tribe, the Naskapi.
"They placed the shoulder bone of a caribou over a fire until
it cracked - then read the cracks as a map. The ritual was effective
because plans for future hunts were not shaped by the results of
past hunts. It kept the Naskapis from mindlessly returning to -
and depleting - territory they had covered before.
Given that some of modern management's most creative
ideas - masking tape, Post-it notes, the PC, the Ethernet card,
to name a few - are random ideas successfully transformed into profitable
products by heretics who disobeyed their superiors, maybe there
is something to this touchy feely stuff after all. So this week
let's resolve to all go and do some ridiculous or impractical things
- and make them work.
(Mr. Hamlin is managing director of the consultancy TeamAsia
and the author of three books on Asian economies and managing in
Asia. His latest book is Marketing Places Asia, which
is coauthored. His e-mail address is mahamlin@teamasia.com.ph.
If you use a Smart/Talk N Text GSM user, you can text a message
to Mr. Hamlin's mailbox by typing the keyword mikehamlin and sending
it to 200.)
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