Open Up to Innovation.

Most of us would probably agree that corporate cultures stifle innovation. This has become an expectation in large firms, where the voices of customers and employees may be lost in the filter of layers of management. It's similar to the game telephone, in which the first person in a circle whispers a phrase to the next person, and that person passes it around until the last person in the chain says out loud what they heard. The message the last person hears is rarely similar to what the first person said.

Organizational distortion is subtler and even more misleading because what is filtered out may be anything upsetting to the next level of management. Often this is not a conscious process. We all try to see things in the best possible light.

Data suggesting employees are terrified of a particular manager may come out as, "Some of the employees have some issues with Manager X." Data that customers are unhappy with the latest upgrade may be translated into, "Consumers are pleased with the new features but find the user interface confusing." This is not exaggeration. Both are real examples of losing the message in context and translation.

Yet, innovation comes out of disruption. We all have heard the expression "fat, dumb and happy" applied to companies whose past success has made them complacent, so they stop innovating. Failure to anticipate market changes has brought down many companies originally known for their innovation.

In my career, I have seen a few practices that worked consistently - even in large, global firms - to create an environment in which innovation thrives, despite past success. These include:

A CEO survey, with no filter allowed. At GE, employees received periodic surveys directly from the CEO at their home addresses. The survey asked for the type of information most likely to be filtered out in the normal course of business. For instance, questions included whether the employee was proud of the quality of the company's products or whether a key initiative for the CEO was being effectively communicated and acted on deep within the organization. At Cisco, we launched a similar process in 2002-03 that continues today. With this detailed feedback, the CEO can find problems that have not come to his or her attention and act on them.

We also use "Skip Level" Meetings, at which leaders get together with the first level of nonsupervisory employees to gather feedback and talk about issues they are seeing. This approach opens a direct communications channel and sends a message that the leader really wants to hear the truth, without filters or spin. The approach also has the advantage of exposing leaders directly to talent, which helps them gauge the quality of their subordinate managers' people assessments.

Many companies gather customer data via surveys, but this can become "non data" over time. If you bought a car in the past few years, you have probably been asked to "give me a good rating" on particular questions in the survey sent to you after the purchase. Tying the pay of salespeople to customer feedback is a good idea in principle, but it can interfere with the quality of customer data received.

Direct feedback on salespeople is valuable, but an occasional face-to-face customer meeting by a higher-level leader will yield more textured data. Further, having more than one point of customer contact is important when a salesperson joins a competitor. Soliciting multiple types of feedback from a variety of sources in the customer's business is important to understand the relevance and quality of products and the customer's thought process when selecting a vendor.

In addition, moving people around within the company will put fresh eyes on business issues, which can improve the quality of data received. This also is a good hedge against salespeople who leave and take your business, as you can establish that the relationship is between the customer and your company, not the assigned salesperson.

Perhaps the most important thing to ensuring your organization hears the truth and allows the disruptions necessary to innovation is to visibly reward the courage to deliver bad news or to challenge accepted business theories and assumptions. The company culture that values truth over conflict avoidance has a big advantage in fostering innovation.

Reference:
Kate DCamp
[About the Author: Kate DCamp is the senior executive adviser at Cisco.]

The Google Way...

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, is a tall, blond 32-year-old with two Stanford degrees in computer science. She's also Google's high priestess of simplicity.

Here she shares the rules that give the search giant its innovative edge

1. Innovation, not instant perfection

"There are two different types of programmers. Some like to code for months or even years, and hope they will have built the perfect product. That's castle building. Companies work this way, too. Apple is great at it. If you get it right and you've built just the perfect thing, you get this worldwide 'Wow!' The problem is, if you get it wrong, you get a thud, a thud in which you've spent, like, five years and 100 people on something the market doesn't want."

"Others prefer to have something working at the end of the day, something to refine and improve the next day. That's what we do: our 'launch early and often' strategy. The hardest part about indoctrinating people into our culture is when engineers show me a prototype and I'm like, 'Great, let's go!' They'll say, 'Oh, no, it's not ready.

It's not up to Google standards. This doesn't look like a Google product yet.' They want to castle-build and do all these other features and make it all perfect."

"I tell them, 'The Googly thing is to launch it early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants--and making it great.' The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back."

2. Ideas come from everywhere

"We have this great internal list where people post new ideas and everyone can go on and see them. It's like a voting pool where you can say how good or bad you think an idea is. Those comments lead to new ideas."

3. A license to pursue your dreams

"Since around 2000, we let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things. After September 11, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat, would go to 10 or 15 news sites each day looking for information about the case. And he thought, Why don't I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who's an expert in artificial intelligence, used a Web crawler to cluster articles."

"He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, 'This isn't just a cool little tool for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.' That's how Google News came about. Krishna did not intend to build a product, but he accidentally gave us the idea for one."

"We let engineers spend 20% of their time working on whatever they want, and we trust that they'll build interesting things."

4. Morph projects don't kill them

"Eric [Schmidt, CEO] made this observation to me once, which I think is accurate: Any project that is good enough to make it to Labs probably has a kernel of something interesting in there somewhere, even if the market doesn't respond to it. It's our job to take the product and morph it into something that the market needs."

5. Share as much information as you can

"People are blown away by the information you can get on MOMA, our intranet. Because there is so much information shared across the company, employees have insight into what's happening with the business and what's important."

"We also have people do things like Snippets. Every Monday, all the employees write an email that has five to seven bullet points on what you did the previous week. Being a search company, we take all the emails and make a giant Web page and index them."

"If you're wondering, 'Who's working on maps?' you can find out. It allows us to share what we know across the whole company, and it reduces duplication."

6. Users, users, users

"I used to call this 'Users, Not Money.' We believe that if we focus on the users, the money will come. In a truly virtual business, if you're successful, you'll be working at something that's so necessary people will pay for it in subscription form. Or you'll have so many users that advertisers will pay to sponsor the site."

7. Data is apolitical

"When I meet people who run design at other organizations, they're always like, 'Design is one of the most political areas of the company. This designer likes green and that one likes purple, and whose design gets picked? The one who buddies up to the boss.'

Some companies think of design as an art. We think of design as a science. It doesn't matter who is the favorite or how much you like this aesthetic versus that aesthetic. It all comes down to data. Run a 1% test [on 1% of the audience] and whichever design does best against the user-happiness metrics over a two-week period is the one we launch. We have a very academic environment where we're looking at data all the time.

We probably have somewhere between 50 and 100 experiments running on live traffic, everything from the default number of results to underlined links to how big an arrow should be. We're trying all those different things."

8. Creativity loves constraints

"This is one of my favorites. People think of creativity as this sort of unbridled thing, but engineers thrive on constraints. They love to think their way out of that little box: 'We know you said it was impossible, but we're going to do this, this, and that to get us there.'"

9. You're brilliant? We're hiring

"When I was a grad student at Stanford, I saw that phrase on a flyer for another company in the basement of the computer-science building. It made me stop dead in my tracks and laugh out loud."

"A couple of months later, I'm working at Google, and the engineers were asked to write job ads for engineers. We had a contest. I put, 'You're brilliant? We're hiring. Come work at Google,' and got eight times the click rate that anyone else got.

"Google now has a thousand times as many people as when I started, which is just staggering to me. What's remarkable, though, is what hasn't changed--the types of people who work here and the types of things that they like to work on. It's almost identical to the first 20 or so of us at Google."

"There is this amazing element to the culture of wanting to work on big problems that matter, wanting to do great things for the world, believing that we can build a successful business without compromising our standards and values."

"If I'm an entrepreneur and I want to start a Web site, I need a billing system. Oh, there's Google Checkout. I need a mapping function. Oh, there's Google Maps. Okay, I need to monetize. There's Google AdSense, right? I need a user name and password-authentication system. There's Google Accounts."

"This is just way easier than going out and trying to create all of that from scratch. That's how we're going to stay innovative. We're going to continue to attract entrepreneurs who say, 'I found an idea, and I can go to Google and have a demo in a month and be launched in six.

Value of Innovation.

THE VALUE OF INNOVATION: HOW DO YOU RECOGNIZE & ENCOURAGE IT IN YOUR ORGANIZATION?? 

Innovation has always played a pivotal role in the history of mankind. Be it the discovery of the wheel, making fire, the first towns of the new civilizations or the discovery of the first vaccine and all other breakthroughs in modern science & technology, it can all be attributed to that one factor: the innovative mind!! 

The innovative process begins with the determination of a creative person tomove away from contemporary reality by making something new. Developing creativity begins with asking questions about the present situation: Have I tried my best? Is the current situation ideal? Isn't there a better method? Such probing stimulates one's latent creativity: the more one probes the greater will the results be. 

In corporate management, innovation refers to the creation and introduction of new things, better use of goods and more efficient services and systems. A concerted, planned and organized effort is required if an innovation is to be fully developed and completely implemented. Within industry, the first step towards this objective is to make innovation one of the prime objectives of the company and to allocate resources in that direction. 

Management can promote innovation with more success if they can identify beforehand individuals who can generate creative ideas and think of novel approaches to problem solving. Psychometric tests can play a major role in identifying those individuals with ability for divergent thinking and a knack for coming up with original ideas. These individuals if provided with environments conducive to their inquisitive minds and "will find the answer" attitudes are capable of taking the organization's success to new heights. 

Recognition and remuneration are extremely important in prompting and sustaining innovation. Employees cannot be expected to develop their innovative skills if they believe their efforts will not be appreciated. Any idea that shows promise in furthering the organization's limits should be encouraged by the management however strong the pressures for conformity and continuity may be. After all, history confirms that innovation almost always brings worthwhile benefits to business and industry. 

Glue like Mindsets, die hard Habits and concrete wall like Attitudes are key hindrances to creativity.