• Need a Fresh Start on Creativity?
• Authentic Happiness
• Models of Leadership: Food for Thought

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• Temperance,
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Leadership Perspectives selects 4 or 5 key articles, learning stories & best practices each issue that offer fresh perspectives & new ideas on dealing with the challenges of:

• Formulating & communicating vision,
• Developing strategy,
• Motivating & inspiring stakeholders & team members,
• Discerning future trends, &
• Developing leadership skills

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Need A Fresh Start On Creativity?

Stanford professor Robert Sutton is a unique voice with an urgent message about how to generate and capitalize on new ideas.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: We recruit people who are quick on the uptake, people whom we like and need. We encourage coworkers to get along. We make decisions based on experience. Now flip those assumptions upside down. Hire slow learners, people whom you dislike and don't need. Encourage them to defy and fight with their managers and peers. Think of ridiculous things to do, and do them.

As management practices go, these sound wrong -- even weird. According to Robert Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford Engineering School, they're some of the most powerful practices for generating and capitalizing on new ideas. "What's weird," says Sutton, "is that people say that they want innovation, yet they can't depart from their deeply ingrained beliefs and practices about how to treat people, make decisions, and structure work."

Don't Get Too Weird Too Fast

Before you start getting weird, there's a major caveat. During the past several years, we got so frenzied about innovation that we overstated the notion that innovation is fun and desirable and that routine work is boring and not as valuable. A few management gurus who shall remain nameless did a real disservice to the business world with their exhortations that everyone should innovate all the time! That's my idea of hell.

The mantra that we have all lived with for the past five years is, "Innovate or die!" But it's just as accurate to say, "Innovate and die." All the excitement about all things new obscured the fact that most new ideas are bad and most old ideas are good.

The Strange ( But Simple ) Truth About Creativity

The truth is, creativity isn't about wild talent as much as it's about productivity. To find a few ideas that work, you need to try a lot that don't. It's a pure numbers game. More specifically, it's about variance. When innovation is the goal, organizations need massive variation in what people do, think about, and produce.

The most creative organizations in any industry cultivate a vu ja de mentality of seeing old things in new ways. The ability to keep shifting opinions and perceptions is crucial to creativity.

Freaks, Geeks, and Fresh Eyes

The best way to bring fresh eyes to any problem is to bring in new kinds of people. When it comes to innovation, no one is too weird for the room. It starts with whom and how you hire. There are a few very effective methods for finding useful misfits who will increase variance in what people think, say, and do. A final point about slow learners, loners, and agitators: They only add value if you surround them with fast learners and managers who can protect them and translate them to the organization.

Practice Random Acts of Weirdness

When you know that you need to head in a new direction, but you don't know which road to take, sometimes the best thing is to do whatever is most ridiculous or random. Thinking up the dumbest and most impractical things that you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. When you get people talking about products, services, and business practices that they believe are misguided, dumb, or even destructive, it can help bring the beliefs of the group into broad relief and crystallize what the company should be doing.

If you want to fill your company with great ideas, fill it with great people. And that, according to Stanford professor Robert Sutton, means welcoming weird people. Here are 5 1/2 ways to do it.

Weird Idea #1. Hire slow learners of the organizational code. Specifically, hire people with a special kind of stupidity or stubbornness -- who avoid, ignore, or reject how things are "supposed to be done around here."

Weird Idea #1 1/2. Hire people who make you uncomfortable.

Weird Idea #2. Hire people whom you ( probably ) don't need.

Weird Idea #3. Use job interviews to get new ideas, not just to screen candidates.

Weird Idea #4. Encourage people to drive you crazy by doing what they think is right rather than what they are told.

Weird Idea #5. Find happy people, and let them fight.

Click here to read the full Fast Company article on Robert Sutton's approach to creativity.>>

Models of Leadership:
Food for Thought

That Was Then

Acceptable approaches to leadership have changed a lot in the past 100 years. Between 1884 and 1921 when John H. Patterson built the National Cash Register Co., he used a three-step approach to employee development. First he would break a man's self-esteem. Then he would rebuild it from scratch. Then he would fire him. One NCR executive learned of his dismissal by finding his desk and chair aflame on the company lawn.

Patterson once appointed a face reader to the company's board to issue reports on his executives and went so far as to ban "harmful" foods--bread and butter, tea and coffee, salt and pepper--from company premises while decreeing the consumption of malted milk and shredded wheat. He had NCR employees weighed and measured every six months, and for a while believed in chewing each bite of one's food 32 times. He poured the contents of executives' desks into the trash so that they could "start clean" and attributed occult significance to the number five.

This Is Now

Fast forward to 2002 and we find Motek, a small software manufacturer in California, whose products are used to track the movement of goods in warehouses. Everyone at the 11-year-old company gets five weeks of vacation, plus ten paid holidays. No one is permitted to work past 5 p.m. or on weekends. Ann Price, Motek's founder, believes that everyone should be able to walk to work, so she subsidizes employees' Beverly Hills neighborhood addresses. And after ten years with the company, workers are given a leased Audi TT, Lexus IS300, or whatever car they choose within a $6,000 annual limit.

Price, who calls her creation a "capitalist kibbutz," has blended cutting-edge business practices, some idiosyncratic personal beliefs, and a renegade's delight in nonconformity into a company unlike any other in today's corporate lexicon. Motek's 21 employees vote on everything from the size of their bonuses to office furnishings. They also choose their own assignments.

Democracy & Disclosure in Action

One of the most fascinating results of Motek's democratic process involves the company's pay rates and bonuses. Everyone except the CIO and the sales manager makes one of three salaries at Motek. One opportunity to improve compensation, by distributing profits, came at the end of 2000 when Motek moved into the black. But the employees, who review the company's financial statements quarterly, decided they'd rather pay down debt than award themselves a bonus.

Security in Honesty

At Motek there is a motto: "Fail sooner; succeed more often" -- meaning that early knowledge of glitches in the work flow can help the team direct its time and energy more effectively. That short-term tactic, in turn, accelerates the pace of a long-term project.

Rewarding employees for failing sounds about as reasonable as firing someone for bringing in extra revenue. Price insists that her employees aren't rewarded for failure but for communicating about failure. It's a subtle distinction, but it lays bare the key operating principle at Motek: Smart employees manage themselves perfectly well if they have complete information.

Forward Into The Future

The question isn't whether this utopian formula can work; the firm says that it is already profitable and growing fast. Rather it is how Price is successfully conducting this by-the-people, for-the-people experiment in management -- and whether it will continue to work. Growth is the gravest threat to Motek's hothouse experiment and has already started to strain its democratic operation.

However, Price has devised a strategy that, if all goes according to plan, will shelter her employees from the growth that could ravage Motek's culture and eat up profits that might be distributed to employees.

But if Motek becomes a huge success, it will be because Price has recognized that promoting trust and autonomy are more important than even an Audi TT. The world has come a long way since John Patterson's time.

Click here to read the full Fortune article on Motek's model.>>