Innovation and autocracy
I’ve long believed that innovation is never just about (or even) about new ideas, funky office spaces, flat hierarchies, skunks works ventures or ‘open-ended’ brainstorming sessions. Instead it’s about structure, process and culture – and, ultimately, leadership.
This piece on a HBR blog by Simon Rucker articulates this view quite well:
I’ve been advising organizations on transformational innovation for a decade now, and in my opinion, the lack of a singular, visionary — and frankly autocratic — someone in charge is one of the biggest reasons why transformational initiatives lose focus, seek the lowest common denominator, and ultimately fall short.
Steve Jobs clearly wasn’t the easiest of people to work with. But he was the sort of
brilliant, visionary, entrepreneurial individual organizations need, now more than ever.
The real challenge for organizations trying to innovate transformationally is not finding better insights or developing better intellectual property. The real challenge is providing the type of structure, resources, governance, and culture that actually enable the abrasive, original Steve Jobses of the world to do what they’re great at.
And that is a transformation that most modern organizations are seemingly unable to make.
However, I think he probably puts the cart before the horse. What’s becoming clearer as anatomies of Jobs’ leadership come to the surface is that he fashioned a highly autocratic and disciplined organisation that allow his creative vision to be realised. Many other companies entrust the work of innovation to the wider workforce but then don’t have the structural form or cultural norms in place to harness it. Ideas flourish but focus is never realised. Oceans of innovative thinking sit unconstrained throughout an organisation but there’s no organisational form to contain and channel it.
The genius of Jobs was his discipline not his creativity.
Social serfs?
From a thought-provoking Paul Ford article in the New York Magazine on the $1bn Facebook Instagram deal:
“When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the product being sold,” but I think that by now we all get that. The digital substance of our friendships belongs to these companies, and they are loath to share it with others. So we build our little content farms within, friending and upthumbing, learning to accept that our new landlords are people who grew up on Power Rangers. This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.”
The article inspires some rather fierce criticisms. One thread is about Ford’s comments on the code Facebook uses, namely PHP, and includes this nice profile of different coding communities:
PHP programmers are the unwashed masses who nail wooden wheel-barrows to the back of their jalopies to haul their monstrous piles of spaghetti code
Perl Programmers are escaped insane asylum inmates who travel by inflatable unicycle and speak in backwards esperanto
Python programmers are snobbish Montessori schoolers who drink imported coffee and smell their own farts while critiquing Phillip Glass music.