I recently stumbled across a book by Bob Sutton called Weird Ideas That Work (and subtitled how to build a creative company).
It’s interesting because it does not have the word ‘innovation’ on the cover.
It’s interesting because it’s written by a guy who wrote a book called “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” (he also wrote the “No Arsehole Rule,” which surely must go down in history as the best title ever given to a business book.)
It’s interesting because it’s based on research and observations by a Stanford professor over ten years.
The book is fascinating because it’s not some breathless magazine article extolling the virtues of a fad, or some factoid one-pager from a consultancy group (in my experience nothing pulls your head ten directions quicker than a whole bunch of shallow articles rabbiting on about business trends).
Here’s the summary (I’m still digesting the book):
The three key principles are to increase variance in available knowledge,see old things in new ways, and break from the past.
The weird ideas that aid in implementing those principles are:
- Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.
- Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.
- Hire people with skills you don’t need yet, and put them in nontraditional assignments.
- Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.
- Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.
- Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.
- Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.
- Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.
- Use “bad” ideas to help reveal good ones.
- Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.
- Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.
- Escape from the mental shackles of your organisation’s past successes.
Highly recommended if you are grappling with how your organisation builds an innovation culture while still having people focused on operational goals (which, by their nature, tend to stifle innovation).