Innovation

We are close to wrapping up our 42 Rules to Lead by Google’s SVP of Product Strategy, Jonathan Rosenberg.  Our next Rule is Innovation.  

• Creativity can’t be managed – Too many companies micro-manage the creative process.  That doesn’t work.  “Creativity can’t be allocated, it can be budgeted, it can be measured, it can be tracked and encouraged, but it can’t be dictated.”  “In a Darwinian process for weeding out the bad ideas, you will do best by encouraging all of them.  The best will win and the others will fail.”
• Prepare to lose in order to win  – “A leader’s job is not to prevent risk, but to build the capability to recover when failures occur.”  There’s such a thing as good failure and bad failure.  A good one happens quickly and provides plenty of lessons.  A bad one takes a long time and you don’t learn anything.  Leaders don’t prevent failures.  They prevent bad failures.”  Even crises can serve a purpose.  Suddenly, everyone stops taking things for granted.  And that’s when real change becomes possible.
• Lay off the kill switch – Sometimes leaders kill ideas because they think they have a better one.  But there’s a bull market for innovation.  “In a Darwinian process for weeding out the bad ideas, you will do best by encouraging all of them.  The best will win and the others will fail.  Thomas Edison said, ‘To have a great idea, have a lot of time.’ “
• Create a culture of ‘yes ‘ – You want to build from a place of optimism and big thinking.  “Organizations develop antibodies to change.  That’s why big companies stop innovating.  If you’re the innovator, you’re like a virus.  The antibodies want to kill you.”  In this situation, a good leader says ‘yes’ to new ideas to protect the company from inertia.  “Pessimists don’t change the world,”  Rosenberg reminds.  Be positive.
• Good judgment comes from experience – “On my team, I asked everyone who screwed up to write a postmortem and publish it to the entire team,” he says.  “You would think this would be a shameful experience.  But we kept an archive of all these things, and you know what, show me a team that never makes a mistake, and I’ll show you a team that has never done anything innovative.”  Errors shouldn’t be defined or buried.  They are what make you smarter.  You can learn more from your mistakes than from your successes if you take time to study them.