
Innovative Cultures - r4um
https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cultures
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SlightRespect
I work in an organization that asks for innovation, but doesn't allocate any
budget for R&D or investigative projects. The company also doesn't have any
culture of being ok with taking big swings and accepting misses.

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.

The subtext is, "Do the grunt work during your 40 hours that we're sure will
generate revenue, and please, please, do something innovative on top of that
on your own time/dime".

It just comes off as begging.

~~~
ManlyBread
My previous workplace was exactly like that: they wanted people to build "cool
tools that would help us do our job" but would not even let me refactor a
piece of ugly code (I literally just wanted to have variable names that
actually mean something). It's quite a pathetic display when a manager talks
about innovation when devs are stuck with ancient versions of software they
work with and there is zero chance of getting the corporate machine to allow
us to update and even if we had the permission everything would move so slow
that by the time the upgrade happens the software would already be old.

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AlexTWithBeard
TL, DR: the article argues that all the fancy buzzwords like "tolerance for
failure" must be counterbalanced by ye goode olde stuff from Management 101:

\- a tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence

\- willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline

\- psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor

\- collaboration must be balanced with a individual accountability

\- flatness requires strong leadership.

~~~
sjclemmy
>> \- psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor

I would disagree with this. Candour and honesty do not have to be brutal to be
effective in this context.

~~~
denzil_correa
Brutal doesn't mean disrespectful and the article does dive into this

> When it comes to innovation, the candid organization will outperform the
> nice one every time. The latter confuses politeness and niceness with
> respect. There is nothing inconsistent about being frank and respectful. In
> fact, I would argue that providing and accepting frank criticism is one of
> the hallmarks of respect. Accepting a devastating critique of your idea is
> possible only if you respect the opinion of the person providing that
> feedback.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
>Brutal doesn't mean disrespectful

It has done every time I've seen it.

~~~
ticviking
Often when I have seen it escalate to that level it has been due to the
individual being criticized being totally oblivious to anything more subtle.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Possibly, in my experience it was more about the person dishing out the advice
and had little to do with the recipient.

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Nasrudith
Stack ranking (or Amazon'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 /organization/ should do) and operates on very
faulty assumptions - about incoming averages vs existing labor pool /when the
actors know about it/. It is no wonder now that their phone line failed and
Fire has been tepid.

It doesn't belong on a list of intolerance for incompetence - it /is/
incompetence on management's part.

~~~
AlexTWithBeard
I've been through my fair share of forced rankings on both sides of the
barrier. Despite of all my skepticism, the whole experience was pretty
reasonable:

\- in small teams quotas are enforced pretty loosely. Everybody understands
that in a team of five engineers all five can be good and smart

\- on the other hand, everybody understands that out of hundred people in the
department there will be a couple of underperformers.

\- a department head may claim that all his one hundred people are brilliant,
but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

\- usually there is a surprising consensus about who belongs to where. Yes,
there are occasional clashes between the managers about whose guy is
"brilliant" and whose is "exceptionally brilliant", but I've never ever seen a
smart person being force ranked into a "bad" bucket

~~~
vonmoltke
> \- in small teams quotas are enforced pretty loosely. Everybody understands
> that in a team of five engineers all five can be good and smart

Not at a couple of the companies I have worked for. Small teams were still
expected to have average ratings that were close to the company-wide average.

~~~
maxxxxx
Same here. You can’t have a team with only “outstanding” score. You have to
fit your team into the standard distribution. Even if one team is much better
than the other, their average still has to be the same.

~~~
ip26
Unless you then proceed to rank the teams and use a team modifier, that's
pretty irrational.

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simon_000666
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.

~~~
jmull
I think the purpose of an article like this isn't so much about delivering
facts as it is about proposing a useful mental model.

This one is working through the concept of companies having innovative
cultures and pointing out that each of the (presumed) positive/happy/fun
attributes of innovative business cultures come with aspects that aren't so
nice.

It is all hand waving but the purpose isn't to get anyone (I assume the main
audience here is executives and managers) to take specific actions but to get
them to adopt this mental model.

To me, the general message is a pretty good one: the good/positive/happy/fun
things you want probably also have less good/positive/happy/fun implications
and you have to deal with those implications effectively or the good stuff
won't actually end up being good.

The article just iterates over a set of things considered positive traits of
innovative cultures and applies this concept. Each of the positive traits are
vague, ambiguous, and ill-defined so the counter-point traits can't be better.

I guess someone could potentially study the success of adopting the general
approach implied by this article. (That is, whether focusing on dealing with
the negative implications of a business approach helps the approach be more
successful.)

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pbadenski
"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."

I really don't see how this is puzzling.. there's plenty of people living in
denial, sure, but there'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.

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moosey
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.

There are discussions here about Xerox PARC, and I would suggest including
Bell Labs and probably a few other business research parks, and you'll find
highly educated people given the freedom to experiment.

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's an
interesting problem.

EDIT: I should include the processes that developed things like Linux.

~~~
Retra
Undirected innovation can aid the business if the business follows the
innovation, rather than expecting the innovation to follow the business.

~~~
maxxxxx
From what I have read this is something Gates and Jobs were good at. They saw
something new and could quickly see how it could be useful and then had the
courage to make it happen.

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HillaryBriss
_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)._

you can game this kind of culture. advance your career in such an "innovative"
environment merely by frequently criticizing other people's ideas before they
gain too much traction. then advance your own ideas and defend them by any
means necessary.

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.

and you don'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't have to be an engineer.

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timwaagh
you know what, firing people isn't always a good idea either. people might be
starting to get comfortable. if you'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.

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.

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dalbasal
I agree with pretty much everything, except maybe (I'd need to think to be
sure) #4.

A few kind of unrelated points about innovation within large, established
companies.

(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.

(2) A lot of these points relate to "legibility^" issues. I wrote this one
three times and it still doesn't make sense, so I'll just leave it to Venkat's
awesome blog to explain.

(3) the Economist Ronald coase's "theory of the firm" starts (paraphrase) with
the question: if competitive markets are so efficient, why do companies run
like Marxist states internally.

Large company culture isn't arbitrary. It also isn't dictated by
proclamations, value statements and such. It's a product of their structure,
incentives and such. You can't fundamentally change the culture without
changing the environment that formed it. ..the social and economic incentives,
the feedback loops...

I'm surprised there aren't more radical ideas in this space, to be honest.

^[https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-
call...](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-
legibility/)

------
steve76
\- Taking money from worldwide monsters who view mass murder as hygiene

\- Taking money from taxpayer bailouts and inflating prices

\- Dumping all your problems on the people who fought for you and gave you the
room to get you started

\- Paying lawyers to stack the deck in your favor and jail your competition

\- Forcing your customers into debt by making your $2,000 products a
necessity.

\- Turning your great country into a place where only cheap plastic goes in,
and cheap paper goes out

That's not failure.

But being 2 weeks late on a feature is.

Got it.

PS: Take a good look at how you really make money. It's the most vulgar
uncultured garbage I've ever seen. Porn has more dignity.

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.

There are loftier ambitions than cell phones, clickbait, mailing out boxes of
tomorrow'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.

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.

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

~~~
throwawaymath
Why do you say Apple didn't have an innovative culture?

~~~
tartoran
"During its early years, Xerox was not able to capitalize on the market
potential of the research and development that was getting done at PARC. The
benefit of that work accrued to other companies. During its early years, Xerox
was not able to capitalize on the market potential of the research and
development that was getting done at PARC. The benefit of that work accrued to
other companies. For example, Apple launched the Macintosh Computer in 1984.
This personal computer featured the GUI and a mouse, which for that era, was a
revolutionary new innovation.

But Apple had not invented the GUI or the mouse. This brilliant work had been
done by the scientists at Xerox PARC. So why was it Apple and not Xerox that
was launching a product in 1984 and benefiting from PARC’s great inventions?
The answer to that question lies in the fact that R&D and invention are not
enough. In order to innovate successfully, companies need frameworks, tools
and processes that can help them take their inventions from ideas to
commercial success."

