Author: Howard Lieberman

Innovation Leadership Issues July 2015

Howard Lieberman

There is a very large difference between leadership and management. Although leaders often tend to need to manage as well, at times they can delegate this responsibility away to stay focused on leadership. Of course leaders do have to work hard to manage themselves, which can be difficult especially in the opportunistic phases, where projects or initiatives getting underway usually have more unknowns than knowns.

There are intrinsic conflicts between innovation and management. Innovation demands maximal degrees of freedom and management demands risk aversion. Innovators need to be rewarded for taking chances. Often, managers are rewarded for not taking chances. Also it is very difficult for a creative person to be inspired by a person who has very little power to change trajectory, which necessarily is often the case for managers, especially middle managers who can be terrified of the crazy-making innovators exhibit.

Crazy-making you say? Yes. Lets put it another way, rational human beings usually accept the world around them and try very hard to work within its constraints. Then the are those who seem to be somewhat allergic to the status quo, and who at every turn are noticing ways to make “improvements”. These “improvements” usually require change. Sometimes, change alters the balance of power, or schedule, or budget – all activities which usually get a manager reprimanded. So innovators do tend to frighten control freaks because they are not very controllable.

Of course there are excellent organizations built upon “Innovation Cultures” where innovation is very much supported and that makes all of the difference. Having had the good fortune to spend fifteen years working at Bose and then at Apple, I got to spend many of my professionally formative years, within two very strong corporate innovation cultures. These were, and are, excellent training grounds for innovation leaders, even though as a younger crazy-making person, I always wanted to go faster and change more than was possible. Fortunately both Apple and Bose were on the lookout for new ideas, and tried to accommodate people who passionately wanted to move toward the future. When trying to convince Amar Bose one day of my desire to pursue developing a new product idea I had right now, because of the narrow “window of opportunity”, he laughed and said when he founded Bose there were already 75 speaker companies and now there were 300 and Bose Corporation was worth almost all of them combined because in everything we did we had to strive to be unique and to be the best.

A company’s culture tremendously reflects the founder’s values, especially when the founder(s) is still alive. Amar Bose and Steve Jobs were all about innovation and tended to only hire people who also felt that way. Only time can tell how well these values ultimately stick as companies scale up to having thousands of employees.

Companies like HP have not fared as well in this dimension, as they could have, under several new leaders that not nearly as embracing  of innovation as Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard, even though one of them integrated the word Innovation into their logo tag line, put it on the signs outside their buildings, and has declared “Innovation is Priority One at HP”. New management locking the parts lockers that engineers previously could raid for any project – authorized or not certainly stifled innovation, as many new product ideas came from unapproved projects. Neither Bill nor Dave would have permitted this creativity repression as they explicitly created an innovation culture and when one of them I forget which discovered a lock on the parts room, he went and got a bolt cutter and cut it off.

Innovation is much more about audacity, and failing forward, than about tag lines and signs. Innovation is a stance about how to to be in the world every day, and is always adapting to the present moment. It is not something that is scheduled by declaring this year “lets be innovative”. Innovation DNA and Innovation Vitality are intrinsic, and as such not very subject to being turned on or off any more than than you can declare this year “I will become a curious person”. People are either curious or they are not. And if they are not, they are not going to make very good innovators, innovation leaders or innovation advocates.

Innovation is a completely natural response for all of us, until or unless it is beat out of us, usually by someone older than we are when we are young. When a creative person has the good fortune to be raised by parents who support them acting upon their insights, they can become somewhat inoculated to the resistance they will likely experience as they enter the work force unless they have the good fortune to join one of the rare companies with an innovation culture.

Founder Dropouts. A case for Innovation Leadership.

Howard Lieberman

Lets face it many gifted, creative, exceptional people generally have issues with authority.  The act of innovation, generally requires one to take a stance that rejects the way things are, in favor of the way things could be. Do you see this pattern in yourself? Many of our greatest founders are dropouts. In a conversation, I had with Craig Venter the father of the Human Genome Project, he told me he had to quit working for the NIH ,where he was unable to get adequate support for the project to proceed and was forced to become an entrepreneur. I asked him if great change or breakthroughs ever came from within giant organizations, and he said something like “Never, you have to drop out of the mainstream to make anything big happen”. He was of course spectacularly successful and listed on Time magazine’s 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. In 2010, the British magazine New Statesman listed Craig Venter at 14th in the list of The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010.

We all know stories like this including Apple, Google and FaceBook to name a few of the smaller companies on the planet. Of course there are probably 10,000 failures for each of these successes. Dropping out is certainly no guarantee of getting anywhere and usually does not. But if you have a great idea, perform due diligence to reality test it, use your critical thinking skills and work hard to accumulate enough evidence that you may be right while the rest of the world may be wrong, you eventually have to go for it even in the face of hidden pitfalls.

Here is one of them. Innovation has become a buzzword mantra in spite of most professional business people trying to eliminate risk as they are duty bound to pursue. A logical stance is “well we have to mange these people and this situation”. As the founder chairman of SVII for ten years I have been asked, initially to my amazement, hundreds of times “what is the algorithm for innovation?” Managing innovation is incredibly difficult because managing innovators is pretty much impossible.  In the case of incremental, it can be done but in disruptive innovation where juicy exciting projects live, it is somewhat oxymoronic.

On the other hand, another word for some of us who are regarded as unmanageable, and that word is leader. It may be a mostly impossible dream to manage breakthrough innovation, but at times the person with insight, also has both enough passion and enough discipline to lead it. Lets face it, one person size dreams may work well for some of the creative community, including artists, musicians, writers and coders of computer applications as well. After we hit it out of the park successfully manifesting our one person size dream, our dreams tend to grow larger and soon we realize we need help, a lot of help. Then because we may have had a hard time accepting authority, we may be reluctant to wield it to the dismay of the people who are trying to follow us.

Leadership is a service profession. You have to take care of all of your stakeholders including your followers. The bigger the dream, the more you generally need help. Sorry, you do not have a choice, as soon as you have a terrific insight that is going to require significant help, you are going to have to lead.

Being an innovation leader is extremely rewarding, as well as extremely frustrating, because you know what was said earlier about gifted, creative, exceptional people who generally have issues with authority. However you have a secret weapon, you are them! You know what they need and how they need to be treated. There is no one more qualified to lead innovation, than an innovator. And this is when the dropout becomes a drop-in.

Flipping The Master Slave Relationship

Howard Lieberman

The complex choreography between innovators and technology gives rise to many different types of dances. At times engineers invent what they would like to have, without inquiring into the needs of customers. As the story goes Henry Ford once said said “if I asked them what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”. Many technology driven enterprises over the years have adopted this stance on the product development dance floor and to great effect, both good and bad.

For example, it is doubtful that Steve Jobs ever asked the world if it wanted a retinal display, an iPhone or much else. On the other hand, Video Cassette Recorders  designers did not realize that almost no one would be willing to program the VCR system clock, which resulted for years, in a usually red flashing 12:00 in hundreds of millions of homes. When engineers design consumer electronics products, it is never the goal to make everyone who uses them feel stupid, yet this does happen too frequently.  The same could also be said for many of our online interactions. We have to gird our loins before beginning some routine tasks that we suspect are going to take an hour instead of a minute.  Some of the time things work really well. This should be the rule not the exception.

For all of us, it feels terrible when machines undermine our self esteem. In recent years we have been told that product development has become market driven. Based on the number of brain dead products we all have to deal with, one might assume there is a very large market for self esteem damaging equipment. As computer processors are now found in everything, from cars to thermostats, humans have learned to adapt to the demands of their gear. This is surprising in that digital systems inherently have a great ability to adapt to our needs. Somehow, it is now the end user doing the adapting to the technology instead of the other way around.

As a technical person myself, I find it crazy that in many situations, people have become slaves and somehow made machines masters. How many people experience incredible frustration when trying to use phones, computers and other consumer electronic devices? The time is overdue, to Flip the Master Slave Relationship between technology and people.

As SVII enters our tenth year of helping Innovation Advocates at all levels, from the largest entities in the world to solo emerging startup entrepreneurs, to “Turn Vision into Value”, it is time to resurface some of the more important themes we have been addressing from the very beginning.

This is a call to all innovators, to try harder to make sure, while we are in the process of inventing tomorrow’s systems, to prevent these products from making customers feel stupid. Yes this takes extra effort to put oneself in the place of others, and some of you may say “this is too hard, too time consuming and too costly” and “our competitors do not care because that is just the way things are”.

Let me present exhibit A for Apple. One of the reasons Apple has become the most valuable company in the world, is Apple and other successful companies try harder to make it much easier to use their products. This philosophical stance is what Apple’s imitators should be copying not only specs and designs.

Delivering this additional value can take longer, but isn’t it silly for us to have to adapt to the devices and systems we are creating?