Nurturing Innovation - Originals Book Summary & Playbook

Steve Wozniak took over a year to leave his HP day job before joining Steve Jobs. Phil Knight worked as an accountant for five years after starting to sell shoes out of his car. Larry Page & Sergey Brin took two years to leave their Stanford Ph.D. program after inventing the core search technology… and almost sold the tech for $2m. All four are generationally recognized entrepreneurs who combined risk aversion with life experience before betting the farm on Apple, Nike, and Google.

Originals is Adam Grant 's book on the psychology of innovation. The findings break conventional wisdom about who creates novel ideas and what makes them successful in organizations. It turns out that innovators love process, are risk-averse, and are often older. The young genius with a singular vision is not the rule.?

Grant’s playbook breaks down into three buckets:

1 - Take more shots on goal

2 - Get ideas to stick

3 - Nurture risk-taking in individuals

Defining innovation - critical and hard

Let’s start by starting with why innovation is essential. The Oxford Dictionary defines innovation as “the introduction of new things, ideas, or ways of doing something.” In the hyper-competitive, tech-fueled marketplace (hello AI), introducing new products & improving ways of doing things seems critical, but does it matter?

The short answer is not only yes, but that innovation is transformative. McKinsey* found that companies that master innovation produce 2.4x higher profits than other organizations. Innovative companies win in spades.?

Also, it’s hard to innovate. In the same McKinsey study, 80% of executives surveyed say innovation is a top 3 priority, but only 10% are satisfied with their organization’s performance.

So what’s the magic formula?

Take more shots on goal

“The odds of producing an influential or successful idea, are a positive function of the total number of ideas generated.” — Dean Simonton

Great ideas don’t start as beautiful snowflakes. They’re just one amongst many other ideas, more likely than not to fail or fall to obscurity. Take many shots on goal to find the great ones.

Some examples:?

• Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 sonnets over two decades. He wrote his hits (MacBeath, King Lear) at the same time as his flops (Timon of Athens, All’s Well That Ends Well).?
• In the London Philharmonic’s top 50 classical pieces of music, six were by Mozart, five by Beethoven, and three by Bach. To get there, each had to write 600, 650, and over 1,000 compositions, respectively (that’s a 1%, 0.8%, and 0.3% hit rate).?
• Picasso made 1800 paintings, 1200 sculptures, and 12,000 drawings; Einstein published 248 research papers; and Edison owned 1,093 patents.?

Innovation is a volume game; don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Get ideas to stick - organizations & tactics

“Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds” — Albert Einstein

It’s hard enough to have a great idea. The execs surveyed by McKinsey tell us that it’s even harder to get ideas to thrive in companies.

There’s two lessons for organizations:

1 - Bottoms up is hard. Innovators need to get heard, and that’s hard for organizations. Grant outlines what it takes for individuals to get organizational buy-in on a novel idea: a) status & social capital, b) the ability to disarm & pre-empt criticism, c) the determination to evangelize and saturate their idea with repetition (see the Jeff Weiner repetition principle), and d) the ability to win over execs, early adopters, and detractors. That’s a lot; no wonder it’s hard to drive innovation. Grant uses the example of Carmen Medina, the proponent of the CIA’s hugely successful internal “Intellipedia” wiki, who required multiple setbacks over a 15-year effort (!) to launch the collaboration tool.?

2 - Tops down makes it easier. Because it’s a brutal road for individuals, innovative organizations build unique cultures that foster debate, risk-taking, and support. Transparency and debate is a cross-populated idea also highlighted by Jim Collins in Good to Great (our summary) as an essential capability for long-term winning organizations.

Grant profiles Bridgewater Associates. Its institutional practice of radical transparency makes it a dramatic outlier to most corporate cultures. That’s the point: you need an organization willing to do things dramatically differently.?

The gist is that the culture embraces debate to such a degree that you can be praised for writing a public email to the CEO, giving him a “D-” performance on meeting management, and having him reply all and ask the rest of the company for feedback. Radical transparency indeed! It’s hard to argue with the results: Bridgewater is perennially the largest & most profitable hedge fund.?

And a handful of key tactics that help innovation succeed:

1 - Step waaay back. Ideas are more likely to be successful if a) they draw upon knowledge from other domains and b) leverage feedback from experts in other fields. This smacks of wisdom shared by Buffett & Munger to be a life-long learner, and invert your perspective. My healthcare professional wife and her very different domain expertise is a great resource; she has no problem telling me a business idea doesn’t make sense!

2 - Procrastinate. An idea gets better with more gestation time and divergent thinking. Often, the best ideas culminate in last-minute scrambles. Da Vinci took 16 years to paint the Mona Lisa, rushing to finish it just before his death. Lincoln finished the Gettysburg Address the night before after having two weeks to prepare. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t even start writing the “I have a dream speech,” until 10pm before going on stage the next day (and improvised live in front of a nationally televised audience).??

3 - Second-mover advantage. First-mover advantage is flat-out wrong business dogma. Golder & Tellis’s classic market research study** shows that pioneer companies (first companies in new markets) failed 47% of the time, while settlers (2nd or after) failed at only an 8% rate, a 6x failure rate difference. Also, settlers have more success, gaining 28% market share vs. pioneers at 10%. For all of Apple’s innovation glory, it’s mastered the art of technology settler (never first in a market: smartphones, wearables, subscriptions, VR headsets) to the tune of $400 billion+ in annual sales and $2.6 trillion in market cap.

4 - Experiment while you’re old. Life experience makes you a fox (referenced by William Thorndike in The Outsiders) who’s comfortable drawing on experimentation and wisdom. Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at 49 as a composite of trial-and-error short stories. Frank Lloyd Wright completed his trademark Fallingwater at 68, and Alfred Hitchcock made his three most popular films between the ages of 59 and 61 (admittedly, there’s an over-indexing of white male examples throughout the book). Tech companies now emulate this experimentation ethos with a break things, a/b testing product development orientation.

Nurture risk-taking in individuals

Contrary to popular belief, risk-taking is learned, nurture vs. nature. Some people learn it through upbringing, but an organization’s culture can also nurture this outcome. Many authors, from Carol Dweck (growth mindset) to Elizabeth Gilbert (magic of ideas) to Bob Chapman (Barry Wehmiller), talk about the presence and growth of human creativity. We just need social systems to bring it out of us.

Grant makes the point by describing how younger siblings are more often risk-takers.

• Stealing bases. In Major League Baseball, younger brothers are 10.6x more likely to steal a base. Of the ten MLB players who’ve stolen more than 70 bases in a season, 7 of 10 were younger siblings from families with an average of 9 children (the other three were only children). In that large a clan, a child learns to assert themselves.
• Comedians. 83% of stand-up comedians are last-born children. They’ve been nurtured to enjoy stepping onto the brutally lonely stage to make others laugh.

Cultures bring individual creativity and freedom to life in families and companies alike. It has for my seven-year-old (youngest of three boys). He unabashedly sports an earring, blond highlights, “rainbow” as his favorite color, and speaks his mind more comfortably than my other two sons combined.?

Hope for innovation

Grant shows us that risk-taking & innovation don’t just happen. Both come from a complex tapestry of individual and organizational dynamics. That’s what makes it so hard for companies to operationalize. Also, many of the takeaways run opposite to conventional wisdom, from innovators being older and more experienced to second-movers succeeding more often to genius being the product of process vs. inspiration.

As a business student, I’ve long thought of Innovation as a combination of elitism and mysticism. Grant shows us it’s anything but. I’m encouraged that culture can nurture innovation when willing to do things differently. And I’m delighted to learn that anyone can be an innovator. Coming from someone who only dared to become an entrepreneur at the ripe young age of 44, Grant’s quote is welcome encouragement:

“If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last.”

Footnotes

* McKinsey Study: “What is innovation?”, August 17, 2002.

** Golder & Tellis: “Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend?”, Journal of Marketing Research, 1993.