

Much Modern Innovation Isn't - jgarmon
http://broadstuff.com/archives/2703-Official-much-modern-Innovation-isnt.html

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PaulHoule
Well, the most innovative company of all time was AT&T back in the monopoly
days.

They gave us the transistor, Unix, and the C programming language. They hired
people like Claude Shannon and Dennis Richie.

Then they broke up AT&T and now "innovation" at AT&T is peddling an inferior
DSL service and trying to figure out how to get you to pay more for your cell
phone bill.

YCombinator-style startups might make something like AirBNB, but they won't
make something as transformative as the transistor.

As for lean and agile, these are both profoundly conservative forces, in fact,
that's really their strength. At their best, they improve the odds of project
success by squeezing out risk. However, they also encourage people to keep
their heads down and not ask the kind of fundamental questions that can lead
to 10x gains rather than 10% gains.

~~~
jaydub
The article makes a point that impactful change tends to come from trial-and-
error over a longer period of time. I think in startups it's possible but its
a lot harsher environment where only the strong/successful ones survive early
to mature and spread their innovation. Maybe at a larger company the same
experiment would have had more time to incubate, perhaps because (at e.g. Bell
Labs) the parent could afford to invest in basic research for a long time. Or
maybe a startup founder would see a problem in a very different light and
attack it in a way that a big company (perhaps AT&T today) would never OK in
the first place.

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loudin
Yes and no.

Lean and Agile act as a "hill-climbing" algorithm. You start at point x and
take an action in some direction. If you improve, continue. If you don't,
change directions. Keep doing this until you can't improve any further and
you've hit a local maxima.

The important concept here is that you hit a LOCAL maxima. There could be
other vastly superior outcomes, but whether or not you reach these outcomes
depends on your starting point.

I think Lean and Agile are fantastic for making improvements to a product.
However, in order to change the game, you need to take risks by jumping to a
new starting point and beginning again.

I think Google, as the article points out, espouses both philosophies. They
take massive lateral jumps (Driverless Cars, Project Glass, etc.), but once
they make that jump, their development is Lean and Agile.

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minimax
Neither "lean" nor "agile" appear in this blog post. Someone should fix the
link text on HN, which is currently "Is an obsession with Lean and Agile
killing true innovation?"

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mimog
What did this article have to do with Lean and Agile?

~~~
darkxanthos
I fear this is blowing up just because of the incendiary title.

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darkxanthos
TL;DR The article says nothing about what the OP titled it as. Read it then
comment.

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lhnz
The headline is implicitly related to the article, but at no point is that
question explicitly posed.

However I think it's a good point so I'll bite.

There are many reasons for Agile and Lean and there are also differing
interpretations for what it means. However, generally it does mean continuous
improvement as opposed to blue skies type innovation. Usually this is a good
idea since it removes product development risks. A lot of people aren't very
good at getting things done, aren't that good at coming up with creative
ideas, and given too much lee-way will hide inside the red tape you've created
for them; for most companies it's more important to get something out than it
is to innovate. Similarly this is the reason for closed-allocation policies,
etc.

Of course, if you are in the top 20% then you possibly could be ultra
innovative, creative and productive in a less restrictive environment...

Not that agile or lean are about process of course, but the interpretation by
most companies is very different from the original manifestos.

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jaydub
My fundamental question is: what _exactly_ is innovation? We throw this word
around all the time - but is there a way to quantify it? Perhaps the number of
people who use or rely upon a given technology? Even if something is widely
used, is it necessarily innovative (i.e. is that part of the definition)?

~~~
api
I don't think innovation has a final closed-form definition, which might be
related to the fact that there is no foolproof closed-form static method or
algorithm that can reliably produce it.

Speaking more loosely I'll take a stab. Innovation is a shift in the way
things are done that either permits more value to be created with less
resources, increases human freedom of choice, or that opens an entirely new
avenue of human endeavor.

Innovations can be small or large, but when I think of innovation I usually
exclude routine, linear improvements to existing things. For example, I don't
consider a car that gets 32mpg instead of 30mpg an "innovation" but a
"refinement of an existing innovation." But fuel injection was an innovation,
and boosting fuel economy was one result.

One of the characteristics of innovation, I think, is the "leap." An
innovation isn't just a purely logical, linear next step derived in a
formulaic way from previous steps. There is some new information there, and
the fact that it's very hard to say _how_ this new information came into being
seems one of the circumstantial characteristics of an innovation.

That is not to say it emerges out of the blue. It does come from study and
focus. But it is not plodding and purely logical. There is some "eureka"
that's hard to back-trace. I've had innovations come in dreams, or out of the
blue in the middle of the day while doing something else.

All that being said, I think it's probably true that overly rigid structures
inhibit it. Overwork can also inhibit it, due to its serendipitous and
apparently "right brain" nature. Agile and Lean are all about increasing
efficiency, and they often work that way, but they also impose a lot of
rigidity in certain places.

A lot of rambling and philosophizing I know... trying to say something about
innovation does that.

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gesman
All these bullshit methodologies are about _taking_ total control over
everything and leaving no space for creativity to flourish.

All creativity is about _giving_ space and _giving_ trust to people to express
their creativity and create something amazing.

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programminggeek
Um.... no.

If by innovation you mean the invention of totally new and interesting things,
no. There are plenty of new and innovative ideas/products that come from an
agile/lean process.

What people are glossing over is the fact that building things is hard.
Inventing things is hard. Changing the world is hard. It takes time, effort,
the right people, the right timing, the right placement. Agile or waterfall
don't matter. People do.

Smart, driven, clever, brilliant people are never going to be the majority.
The majority of people are not above average. Expecting a large portion of
people to become continuously more awesome every generation is insane.

Not everyone is going to be a winner. Most people aren't exceptional.

No amount of process of any sort can change that.

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api
I'm gonna be a dork and not read the article and just say this:

There is no magic bullet "methodology." Agile, Lean, etc. are sets of ideas
and methods and some of them are very good, but they cannot be applied without
_thought_. Think of them as management design patterns. You still have to look
at these sets of design patterns and decide which ones work for your
particular situation, or adapt them to your peculiar organizational needs.
I've seen too many shops that apply Agile/Scrum/whatever slavishly and
unthinkingly with poor (and often extremely annoying) results.

~~~
varelse
I don't think agle/lean/scrum is the underlying problem. These methods, like
any other, have their place.

But in my painful experience, large corporations seem to:

1\. Apply all the micromanagement bits they like (daily standups, sprints) and
ignore the rest of the methodology. This then creates a horrible Lovecraftian
mutant methodology about which others have written, but IMO sucks.

2\. Insist on a one-size-fits-all approach and broadly speaking, agile is fine
for incremental development of software with solid and understood
requirements, but it goes off the deep-end when there's any level of open-
ended research required to get a satisfactory result. Ironically, this part is
inextricably intertwined with the first point wherein fixed schedules and
requirements are hybridized with daily standups and 2-week sprints.

