UnInsider

Weird ideas that work!

"A weird idea works because it trips discomfort. The idea is to flip from autopilot to mindful creation." -- Robert Sutton

"I'm not happy unless I'm uncomfortable. "
-- Jay Chiat

The one thing that you can safely say about innovation, change, and new ideas in business is that they make people uncomfortable. They're threatening. They seem weird. They don't belong "here."

People who are in touch with their creative resources understand - and even welcome - this discomfort, as Jay Chiat does.

In Robert Sutton's book, Weird Ideas That Work, he explores the connections between "weird" ideas, innovation, and business success.

Here are some of his weird ideas on getting the right people on board to make innovation happen in order to move your business forward:

Weird Idea #1: 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 #1½: Hire people who make you uncomfortable - even those whom you dislike. Then take extra care to listen to their ideas.

Weird Idea #2: Hire people whom you (probably) don't need. Interview and occasionally hire interesting or strange people with skills you don't need at the moment - and might
never need.

Ask them how they can help you. You might be surprised.

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

Give job candidates problems that you can't solve.

Listen as much as you can. Talk as little as you can.

Weird Idea #4: Encourage people to ignore superiors and peers. Hire defiant outsiders.

Rather than teaching newcomers about company history or procedure, have the newcomers teach the old-timers how to think and act.

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. If you want innovation, you need upbeat people who know the right way to battle.

Avoid conflict during the earliest stages of the creative process, but encourage people to productively "fight" over ideas in the intermediate stages.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. "
-- Hunter S. Thompson

Translate business strategies into clear objectives and tactics

Most managers acknowledge the importance of planning and goal setting. Sometimes, however, time pressures get in the way. Setting aside time to identify and develop your business goals and strategies is the first step in improving your ability to plan and manage effectively.

In order to develop successful plans, it is necessary for managers both to understand their organization's strategic vision and to incorporate that vision into their plans and day-to-day operations. To clarify and increase your understanding in this area, ask yourself questions such as:

• What is the organization's strategic vision?
• What does that mean for me and my unit?
• What are the future opportunities?
• What talents and resources will I need to accomplish my part?

Once you have developed business strategies, translate them into clear objectives and tactics. Consider the following suggestions:

• Once you and your people have developed your vision and mission, work with them to formulate strategies, specific objectives, and tactics to accomplish the objectives.
• Review your department’s strategies, objectives, and tactics for compatibility with the organization’s strategic plans.
• Identify colleagues who appear to have well-defined strategic plans. Ask what process they used to develop objectives and tactics.
• Ask your direct reports to submit an annual work plan for your review and then use their ideas to construct an operational plan for the department.
• Plan an off-site retreat with your direct reports to brainstorm and choose the most viable tactics for reaching objectives.
• Communicate your department’s business strategies and objectives to peers in other departments. Seek input on objectives and tactics that might affect them.

Recruiting and Retaining is All About Sales!

Skilled workers even more difficult to recruit and retain
Sell Your Job, Sell Your Business!

Hiring guru Lou Adler, in an article written for ERE Network, points out: "...the big issue about job boards is that they are relevant only if you post compelling jobs that capture the candidate's attention. If you post traditional job descriptions that are the same as everyone else's, you will get average results. There are a host of other things you can do to get your jobs noticed by the right audience, but if your jobs are boring, it won't matter where you post them or who sees them." We might add that the same holds true wherever you advertise your jobs. Break the mold. Think outside the box. Have your sales department write all your job ads. Stretch!

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Be Realistic About Current Costs:

One of our clients was kind enough to share an estimate of what it cost them to hire and then lose a manufacturing manager. Here are their calculations:

Direct Labor: $850

Recruitment: $23,350

Training, getting to full competence in the environment: $102,000

Training and support staff: $1,450

Loss of productivity: $19,200

TOTAL: $146,850

Measure What You're Getting!

Also from the ERE Network, Dr. John Sullivan suggests following Dell Computers' metrics approach for quality of hire: "By looking at the number of new hires that become top performers within 12 to 18 months, they are hitting the nail right on the head. Great recruiting is not about hiring a large number people or hiring them cheaply. It's about hiring individuals who become top performers and who stay with the organization."

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Foundation Principles of Referral Programs:

Be sure you're rewarding the outcomes you're seeking. A smaller reward, given with recognition and close to the behavior you're trying to increase, is more effective than a larger one more separated in time from the target behavior.

The notion of paying upon hire rather than after 90 days is right on point -- after 90 days, you're not impacting the target behavior much. The policy of adding it to the regular paycheck eliminates much of the effect -- it's not timely, it doesn't involve recognition, is reduced by taxes, and spouses are as likely to be the beneficiaries as the person whose behavior you want to reinforce. The policy is for the convenience of accounting/bookkeeping, not the employee who did the good thing. If you want to maximize your bang for the buck, find the referring employee on the day the new one is hired, gather his co-workers and supervisor around, and hand him/her a crisp new $20 bill, with applause. Add the rest of the bonus, minus taxes on the whole amount, on the next paycheck. It's less convenient for payroll, but much, much more effective in creating the behavior you desire.

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The Times, They've Already Changed...

According to the Atlanta Business Chronicle, "The days of perusing the Sunday paper to find a job are over. Job seekers are turning to the Internet to not only find jobs, but to submit applications, post résumés or simply check out a company. Their method is being noticed by the big boys. The use of career Web sites by Fortune 500 companies has grown from about 29 percent in 1998 to 94 percent in 2003."

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Your Best Strategy for the Long Run

Figure out how to make every hire a potential top performer, then learn what it takes to keep them -- it's better than hiring replacements, especially in a jobseeker's market!

Using Einstein’s Theory to Find Innovative Talent

Using Einstein’s Theory to Find Innovative Talent
Persons traveling at high speed may be greater than they appear.
By Timothy L. Faley

Innovation is increasingly becoming the differentiator of successful businesses—all businesses. While technology companies have been preaching the gospel of innovation for years, the sermonizing from other sectors is starting to get just as passionate. Boston Consulting Group recently reported that the 500 executives it surveyed in 47 countries in all major industries ranked innovation as one of their company’s top three strategic priorities in 2005.

And why not? What company does not want to be able to identify emerging opportunities (and threats); formulate and assess business solutions against these opportunities; develop actionable plans from disparate and incomplete information; identify, align and/or acquire the necessary resources needed to power a project or program forward; all with the ambition to drive accelerated growth?

Companies that need innovation must somehow find the innovators to bring it about. But where can they be found and how can they be identified? As Peter Drucker noted nearly 20 years ago, innovation is the tool of the entrepreneur. So the need to innovate means that businesses today, of all sizes and all industries, need entrepreneurs. While many people still think of entrepreneurs solely as proprietors of small businesses, one should approach entrepreneurship as a mindset and set of skills or competencies that can be developed through a combination of traditional coursework and action-based learning programs.

This entrepreneurial skill-set and mindset can be applied to businesses of any size, but they are most readily developed in the fiery crucible of high growth-potential innovative startup businesses. This suggests that a prime source of innovative entrepreneurs is the pool of people that have startup business experience. Unfortunately, it is not always clear how to interpret the backgrounds of those with small or startup company experiences in a large-company framework. Large corporate managers are comfortable assessing the progress, and therefore the potential, of individuals in organizations like their own. The frustration and misunderstanding in assessing the potential of innovators from different backgrounds makes it challenging for these larger entities to identify the innovators that they so sorely need.

This is where Einstein’s theory of relativity can help. Young, rapidly growing companies can have annual corporate growth rates 20 or more times that of their more established brethren. As the change in a given position’s scope and responsibility over time is impacted by this growth, the relative differences in growth rates must be accounted for in assessing talent from large versus startup companies. Due in part to the disparate company growth rates, for example, the development pace of an employee who maintains the “same” position at a fast growing startup over a five year period is equivalent, in terms of increasing job complexity and responsibilities, to a counterpart at a moderately growing large corporation who has multiple-level promotions during the same period.

This relativistic nature of growth of positions within these two types of companies can lead to resumes that must be interpreted quite opposite from the norm for a large-corporate evaluator. The following examples show two different types of innovators in two different settings.

• Functional specialists. Inside large organizations, these employees have very recognizable, stable-looking resumes. They tend to stay in positions within organizations for long stretches of time. However, these same individuals in young, fast-growing companies appear to the uninitiated to be unstable job-jumpers. Since the responsibilities for a given job rapidly expand in high-growth companies, these individuals must frequently change companies in order to keep a position with a relatively constant level of responsibility.

• High potential leaders. Those fast-trackers who move frequently to positions of increasing responsibility in a large organization look quite the opposite in smaller high-growth companies. Those same fast-trackers in the smaller, high-growth firms tend to stay in one position longer, but the company’s hyper growth drives their rapidly expanding job scope and responsibilities. When these individuals do move from one small company to the next, however, unlike the specialist, title changes tend to accompany the company change. Their entrepreneurial career path may start as new business development specialist in one firm, then to new business director in the second firm, business development VP in a third firm, etc.

Large corporations need innovative functional specialists as well as innovative high-potential leaders. Being able to correctly interpret the resumes of those with startup company experience should help in their identification.

As in assessing all candidates, it is of course best to focus on competencies and responsibilities versus job titles. Comparisons of skill-sets and mindsets must still bear in mind the large disparity in growth rates between different sized organizations. The maximum use of innovative talent is of interest to all. The more companies become dependent on innovation, the more individual career paths are likely to migrate between the worlds of large and small businesses. Part of lowering the barrier to this possibility is meeting the challenge of understanding the differences and similarities between the two camps.

Timothy L. Faley is the Managing Director of the University of Michigan’s Samuel Zell and Robert H. Lurie for Entrepreneurial Studies and an Adjunct Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the Ross School of Business.