Innovative Cultures

I work in an organization that asks for innovation, but doesn&#x27;t allocate any budget for R&amp;D or investigative projects. The company also doesn&#x27;t have any culture of being ok with taking big swings and accepting misses.<p>The project deck is fully loaded with status quo type projects, based on client demands. Teams are asked to track all of their hours toward these projects.<p>The subtext is, &quot;Do the grunt work during your 40 hours that we&#x27;re sure will generate revenue, and please, please, do something innovative on top of that on your own time&#x2F;dime&quot;.<p>It just comes off as begging.

TL, DR: the article argues that all the fancy buzzwords like &quot;tolerance for failure&quot; must be counterbalanced by ye goode olde stuff from Management 101:<p>- a tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence<p>- willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline<p>- psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor<p>- collaboration must be balanced with a individual accountability<p>- flatness requires strong leadership.

Stack ranking (or Amazon&#x27;s lipstickes pig version) is also the opposite of a good policy as it literally encourages sabotage of peers instead of cooperation (you know what an &#x2F;organization&#x2F; should do) and operates on very faulty assumptions - about incoming averages vs existing labor pool &#x2F;when the actors know about it&#x2F;. It is no wonder now that their phone line failed and Fire has been tepid.<p>It doesn&#x27;t belong on a list of intolerance for incompetence - it &#x2F;is&#x2F; incompetence on management&#x27;s part.

This article is complete conjecture. Having worked in a highly innovative environment and ‘informally surveying’ a random sample of people from random companies that may or may not be innovative are completely different things. There is no attempt here to identify how one might measure ‘an innovative culture’ nor can the author call on personal experience to at least talk anecdotally. This is just another puff piece to further validate the ‘Arbeit macht frei’ Culture that is currently fashionable in silicone valley and China.

&quot;But despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. This is puzzling.&quot;<p>I really don&#x27;t see how this is puzzling.. there&#x27;s plenty of people living in denial, sure, but there&#x27;s whole a load of people who understand intellectualy how to do all kind of things: lead a happy fulfilling life, bring up your kids in a healthy way, be physically healthy. Knowing things is really overrated.

I think that what MIT considers innovative and what Harvard Business schools thinks is innovative are different, and the models for getting there are going to be different from each school of thought. The HBR article touches on some things that produce what I would consider innovation: Researchers and scientists using the scientific method, but it never goes that far.<p>There are discussions here about Xerox PARC, and I would suggest including Bell Labs and probably a few other business research parks, and you&#x27;ll find highly educated people given the freedom to experiment.<p>I guess my argument is that in order to produce innovation, I think that the best thing that management can do is put the right people together and get out of the way, but undirected innovation might not aid the business. It&#x27;s an interesting problem.<p>EDIT: I should include the processes that developed things like Linux.

<i>No one minces words about design philosophies, strategy, assumptions, or perceptions of the market. Everything anyone says is scrutinized (regardless of the person’s title).</i><p>you can game this kind of culture. advance your career in such an &quot;innovative&quot; environment merely by frequently criticizing other people&#x27;s ideas before they gain too much traction. then advance your own ideas and defend them by any means necessary.<p>if you get really good at this, others will fear you and always run their ideas past you. you will become the gatekeeper. you will have power.<p>and you don&#x27;t, in the last analysis, have to be more correct than anyone else, just more difficult, more critical and more competitive. you are an advocate and a fighter. you don&#x27;t have to be an engineer.

you know what, firing people isn&#x27;t always a good idea either. people might be starting to get comfortable. if you&#x27;re not going to offer google level salaries, you will have to offer job security because otherwise people will draw their conclusions way before you want to get rid of them. and always having inexperienced juniors is also not an option.<p>these exceptional companies can get away with very aggressive hr practice because their salaries are off the charts and i do not think this can be taken as a guideline for other business at all.

I agree with pretty much everything, except maybe (I&#x27;d need to think to be sure) #4.<p>A few kind of unrelated points about innovation within large, established companies.<p>(1) A lot of these hard things (incompetence intolerance, flat but strong leadership model) are the easy default for a small, young company. So... a lot of this is about making large, old companies culturaly similar to small, young ones. No surprise that this is hard.<p>(2) A lot of these points relate to &quot;legibility^&quot; issues. I wrote this one three times and it still doesn&#x27;t make sense, so I&#x27;ll just leave it to Venkat&#x27;s awesome blog to explain.<p>(3) the Economist Ronald coase&#x27;s &quot;theory of the firm&quot; starts (paraphrase) with the question: if competitive markets are so efficient, why do companies run like Marxist states internally.<p>Large company culture isn&#x27;t arbitrary. It also isn&#x27;t dictated by proclamations, value statements and such. It&#x27;s a product of their structure, incentives and such. You can&#x27;t fundamentally change the culture without changing the environment that formed it. ..the social and economic incentives, the feedback loops...<p>I&#x27;m surprised there aren&#x27;t more radical ideas in this space, to be honest.<p>^<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-big-little-idea-called-legibility&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ribbonfarm.com&#x2F;2010&#x2F;07&#x2F;26&#x2F;a-big-little-idea-call...</a>

- Taking money from worldwide monsters who view mass murder as hygiene<p>- Taking money from taxpayer bailouts and inflating prices<p>- Dumping all your problems on the people who fought for you and gave you the room to get you started<p>- Paying lawyers to stack the deck in your favor and jail your competition<p>- Forcing your customers into debt by making your $2,000 products a necessity.<p>- Turning your great country into a place where only cheap plastic goes in, and cheap paper goes out<p>That&#x27;s not failure.<p>But being 2 weeks late on a feature is.<p>Got it.<p>PS: Take a good look at how you really make money. It&#x27;s the most vulgar uncultured garbage I&#x27;ve ever seen. Porn has more dignity.<p>Teach lessons. Otherwise you just race to the finish line as fast as you can, cowering to arbitrary delusions, and end up as some grotesque burden on everyone.<p>There are loftier ambitions than cell phones, clickbait, mailing out boxes of tomorrow&#x27;s garbage, or making cartoons. These are no different than police sting. You are a fool to think power gives it up to make things better.<p>Aim for lofty ambitions first. Take all of creation before working for kings. And when you do, know there are poor people out there who can take them out with nothing.

This is dumb. Apple did not have an innovative culture. Xerox PARC did. Innovative != commercially successful.