Interview with Bob Sutton

<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr> <td valign="top" colspan=2 height=90 BGCOLOR="#006699" TEXT="#080000" background="3a1fd5a3.jpg"> <div> <FONT SIZE="5" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>Eclicktick Consulting</B></FONT><B>    </B><B> |     </B><A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Eclicktick Consulting"><U><B>home</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="books.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Eclicktick Recommended Books"><U>Eclicktick Recommended Books</U></A>   |   <B>Interview with Bob Sutton</B>   |   <A HREF="weird_ideas_that_work_.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Weird Ideas That Work "><U>Weird Ideas That Work </U></A>   |   <A HREF="not_the_same_old_waltz.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Not the same old waltz"><U>Not the same old waltz</U></A>   |   <A HREF="id67.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Managing The Ecosystem For Innovation"><U>Managing The Ecosystem For Innovation</U></A></div> <div> </div> </td> </tr><tr> <td valign="top" width=210 BGCOLOR="#FFCC66" TEXT="#080000" background="3a2d2b03.jpg"> <div> <IMG SRC="2329ed30.jpg" border=0 width="158" height="211" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> </td> <td valign="top" height=390 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <I>Interview with Bob Sutton</I></div> <div> <A HREF="whitepapers.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Free White Papers"><U><B>Return to white paper listing</B></U></A></div> <bR> <div> Surprising Conversations from Emerald Publications, <A HREF="http://gessler.emeraldinsight.com/vl=2508461/cl=125/nw=1/rpsv/sl.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://gessler.emeraldinsight.com/vl=250"><U><I><B>Strategy and Leadership</B></I></U></A> Magazine March/April 2001. </div> <div> Reproduced by permission.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Weird ideas that work</B></div> <bR> <div> This interview with Robert I. Sutton, author of Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices For Promoting, Managing and Sustaining Innovation (New York: The Free Press, 2002) was conducted for Strategy & Leadership by Alistair Davidson, CEO of Eclicktick Corporation, a high tech consulting firm located in Palo Alto, California (www.eclicktick.com).  Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford's Engineering School, Co-Director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization and an active researcher in the Stanford Technology Research program (E-mail: bobsut@stanford.edu)</div> <bR> <div> Sidebar</div> <bR> <div> <B>Robert Sutton's List of “Weird Ideas That Work”</B><FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" ><B>1</B></FONT></div> <bR> <div> Hire slow learners (of the organizational code).</div> <div> 1 ½. Hire people who make you uncomfortable, even those you dislike.</div> <div> Hire people you probably don't need.</div> <div> Use job interviews to get ideas not to screen candidates.</div> <div> Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers.</div> <div> Find some happy people and get them to fight.</div> <div> Reward success and failure and punish inaction.</div> <div> Decide to do something that will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain.</div> <div> Think of some ridiculous or impractical things to do, then plan to do them.</div> <div> Avoid, distract, and bore customers, critics and anyone else who just wants to talk about money.</div> <div> Don't try to learn anything from people who say they have solved the problems you face.</div> <div> Forget the past, especially your company's successes.</div> <div> Summary: Creative companies and teams are inefficient and annoying places to work.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <B>Strategy & Leadership:</B> Many companies engaged in developing new products are very taken with the notion of  Stage-gate<FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" >TM</FONT> theories, developed by Bob Cooper at McMaster University - the idea that a company should have a formal review process and at each review point, be prepared to drop a project. Your researched-based book is antithetical to such an approach.  You treat process with complete irreverence.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> It's not that the stage-gate concept is bad. It's just that it can be very bureaucratic. For example, I observed the stage-gate method being practiced at a well-known consumer packaged goods company with an obsession for process and not enough focus on outcomes.  But I never could find anybody who had completed the entire stage-gate process. However, I did find people who repeatedly brought products to market. They had been authorized to do so by top management because what they were doing was so important.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> To create such priorities, some companies categorize projects as Mandatory, Strategically Critical and Strategically Important. So you are saying, if the project is determined to be important enough, the bureaucracy can be circumvented or ignored?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton</B>: Exactly. And sometimes it seems to me that the quality of execution is more important than the decision being made.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> To some extent, <I>Weird Ideas</I> is about embracing the people and ideas way out on either end of the bell curve. Your message is that most companies tend to have people and ideas that congregate around a norm of belief systems about what is possible or desirable. Your book argues for increasing the variability of experimentation that a company pursues.</div> <bR> <div> I also sense in some of your work an almost Darwinian view of innovation. In other words, throw some business experiments out into the environment and see what happens.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> Well, that not just me. People have been applying Darwinian models to the organizational arena since the 1960s and even the 1950s. I think it's in the zeitgeist of organization behavior. </div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> I did like the recommendation in <I>Weird Ideas</I> that if you run across a talented person, find a project to use them.  That is, just see what you can do with an interesting person. It's an insight that not many people share. You advise that a great deal of value can be created this way and that companies should hire for aptitude rather than for track record.</div> <bR> <div> You also argue for a more diverse hiring approach, advocating that companies should hire people who may not even appear to be appropriate for the job or people that they dislike.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton: </B>That's a key point in my book. There <I>are</I> some companies that defy this specialized view of hiring. AES is an energy company that designs and manages over 110 electric power plants in 16 countries; it is an example of a company that routinely gives people jobs that they don't have the experience to do. I cite the example in <I>Weird Ideas of</I> one AES manager who had to buy a $1 billion of coal for one of their divisions, though he had no idea how to manage the ordering process. Nonetheless, he made the purchase successfully.  Now this might not work in many companies but at AES, the norms are brutal -- you will help or you will be driven out. Another AES example that staggers the imagination is that one of the divisional managers in Chile who made a billion dollar bid for a local power company, which the CEO read about first in the <I>Wall Street Journal</I>! (The CEO had, however, been in on the earlier stages of the decision process.)</div> <bR> <div> Another way of thinking about whether to hire  qualified specialists or smart generalists is to look at the professional demographics of Silicon Valley. One argument for the success of Silicon Valley is that it is filled with specialists. As many as 95% of managers and engineers are specialists. But if Silicon Valley had just the specialists, its culture would not work. About 5% of the managers and engineers are generalists. Sometimes they are general managers, sometimes engineers, but they are the people that tie things together.</div> <bR> <div> It's a marvelous technical environment, but ironically not one where many long-term businesses have been created. There has been only one great business created in the Valley, HP. The rest have pretty much gone away.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> You talk in the book about the advantage of having happy people fight.  How do you assess that when you look at HP and its merger with Compaq?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B>  Given the battle that raging it's a pertinent question. I went from being clearly opposed to the merger to now being of the opinion that the conflict about whether to merge is so destructive that either decision-pro or con--is better than the stalemate.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> That picks up on another theme in your book - the need to keep arguments from getting personal.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> The HP/Compaq merger controversy between management and key board members is, in many ways, about power. If you start reading the arguments of both sides, they are very personal in their attacks. Because the controversy is emotional, it is very destructive. That's why I discuss the importance of arguing, but impersonally.</div> <bR> <div> However, there is a contrary argument about HP and its conflicts. One of my colleagues has the view that in any organization, if you take away the top management team, it will do better financially. This, he postulates, is because the people one level down from the senior management team understand the business better and make shrewder decisions when left to themselves. This may be what is now happening at HP. The people at the business level are running the company. The corollary of this theory is: If anyone becomes ensconced too long in senior management, he or she loses touch.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> So you are arguing for the importance of decapitating a company, as a form of term limits? As a CEO myself, that doesn't sound good.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> That's the hypothesis I have heard people make to explain why HP is doing better recently despite the merger turmoil. The senior management team is horribly, totally distracted.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> As a means of fostering such beneficial turmoil, your book's first recommendation is to hire people whom you don't like. It's provocative suggestion. However, do you think that while some CEOs might well want their direct reports to hire uniquely creative individuals--smart people who don't fit in because they are slow to learn “how things are supposed to be done”--they themselves would be unlikely to do so?</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> Perhaps. But they shouldn't.  Those smart “slow” learners--people like physicist Richard Feynman and Xerox's talented researcher George Starkweather, inventor of laser printing--are often the wellsprings of creative thought.  You can surround them with fast learners who translate their ideas to the rest of the organization.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> In <I>Weird Ideas y</I>ou talk about the need to think of something impossible and convince people that it will happen, in order to make it happen. To me as a CEO, it is in some ways the single most interesting thing in the book.</div> <bR> <div> What you are implying is that to be a visionary CEO you have to risk being considered a lunatic, or at least wildly impractical. </div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> It's an easily defensible exaggeration.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> You also talk about the need in a high tech business to either keep the solution constant or the method constant. To me that is persistence. Trying to keep both constant is stubbornness and frequently dooms you to failure.</div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> Very true. The successful visionaries only hold one constant.</div> <bR> <div> <B>S&L:</B> This seems to me to be the issue that requires CEOs to make a leap of faith if they see something no one else has seen. </div> <bR> <div> <B>Sutton:</B> Yes, that's one of the points I make in the book with an anecdote about Ballard Systems. When the founder went shopping for someone to achieve the impossible with fuel cells, he picked a chemist with no expertise in batteries. But supporting such people is crucial: once you decide to attempt a dramatic change, you need to make shift resources to increase the odds that a risky project will be successful</div> <bR> <div> Ballard wanted someone with an open mind. That's why I say you should not always hire people who have solved the problem before. Human beings do learn new realities rapidly and become expert. They evolve and adapt. That's what managers forget when they recruit.</div> <bR> <bR> <div> <I>Alistair Davidson authored </I>Turn Around! A Brief Guide to Starting, Growing and Turning Around Your Software or High Tech Business<I> that is downloadable free from </I><FONT SIZE="3" COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial" ><A HREF="http://www.eclicktick.com" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.eclicktick.com"><U><I><U>www.eclicktick.com</U></I></U></A></FONT><I>. E-mail: alistair@eclicktick.com.</I></div> <bR> <div> <FONT SIZE="1" COLOR="#000000" FACE="Arial" >1</FONT>  <I>Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices For Promoting, Managing and Sustaining Innovation</I> (New York: The Free Press, 2002), page 17 (with permission of the publisher).</div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>   <script> var page_name = ''; var invisible = ''; function sE(){return true;}window.onError=sE;var lp=0; function clr(){lp++;if(lp==1){document.ctr.src="http://64.49.222.57/0.gif";} else {clearTimeout(myT);return true;}} var myT=setTimeout('clr()',120000);var rn=Math.random(); document.write('<a href="http://www.web-stat.com/stats.shtml?alistairdavidson"'); document.write(' target="new"><img name="ctr"'); document.write(' src="http://www.web-stat.com/count.cgi?'); document.write('alistairdavidson::'+top.document.referrer); if (window.screen){ document.write('::'+screen.width+'x'+screen.height+'::'); document.write(screen.colorDepth+'::'+page_name+'::'+invisible+'::'+rn); }else{document.write('::::::page_name::'+invisible+'::'+rn);} document.write('" onError="clr();" onAbort="clr();"'); document.write(' onLoad="clearTimeout(myT);"'); document.write('border=0 alt="Web-Stat hit counter"></a>'); </script><noscript> <a href="http://www.web-stat.com/stats.shtml?alistairdavidson" target="new"> <img src="http://www.web-stat.com/count.cgi?alistairdavidson::NoJavaScript" border=0> </a> </noscript>   </div> </td> </tr></table></body>