Nurturing Rebels and Unlocking Innovation: The Creative Turn in Business and Leadership

The CMO of frog, Tim Leberecht, recently wrote, "How to Nurture Your Company's Rebels, And Unlock Their Innovative Might" http://bit.ly/Uz6btM (the same piece appeared at FastCo. Design). Despite its brevity, the post gathers a range of examples and sources, from innovation communes and Ashoka Changemakers to Roger Martin and U2, of a telling shift underway today to embrace oppositional thinking in business. Both in cultivating internal opposition to enhance innovative outputs and in driving a more fundamental resistance to business as usual across industries, leaders and organizations are increasingly supporting varied creative processes that seek to disrupt the status quo.

For those in the creative or some R&D-intensive industries, especially, this approach and attitude to gaining competitive advantage may not seem new. But there are at least a couple significant developments in play here.  The first is nothing less than an historical transformation of the status of creativity and innovation in business. That's a far-reaching claim, of course, and one I've developed in my own teaching and consulting on creative leadership (and that Chris Bilton has also made). Essentially, the idea is that the last two to three decades have seen a dramatic reversal of the longstanding containment - or even marginalization - of innovation within organizations whose priority had been increasing efficiency, lean operations, and rational problem-solving. The change in mindset, epitomized by innovators in Silicon Valley and outlined most familiarly in the writings on disruptive innovation by Clayton Christensen, is now embraced across industries and beyond, including the non-profit and public sectors (think "creative cities").

Leberecht's post offers a range of examples of successful contrarian practices, small and large, as noted, and concludes by recommending three possible actions for those wanting to make internal oppositions within their organizations productive.  They are:

1. Create safe spaces
2. Make sure that internal opposition is constant
3. Embrace passive and active opposition 

These are sensible enough, though anyone wanting think more deeply about how to develop and deliver on this capability for this creative internal opposition should read Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind.

As important as is the call for more creative and productive internal opposition, it's a second development that I find potentially even more provocative and consequential. The image introducing Leberecht's post is a Jolly Roger and the spectre of piracy threads through his examples of creative opposition. Yet in celebrating the misfits and the rebels whom organizations and even project teams rely on for daring innovation and value-creating differentiation, the old challenge of successfully containing and incorporating oppositional thinking re-emerges. When Leberecht urges launching the development of creative opposition by asking such questions as, What is your company's black market?, in other words, one can easily extend the answer beyond that which is productive for particular organizations. Consider hacking, for example: while there are now "hackers for good," this has become a safely contained and manageable (and, by some individuals, often profitably self-marketed) subset of a larger category of creative rebels, many of whom are not "good" and indeed have proven themselves menacing.  

This is more than semantics. To think more deeply about disruption or opposition leads to the discussion of how essential creative destruction is to genuine innovation in organizations, industries and markets. Even more, though, to speak of creative leadership or innovation in terms of piracy and rebellion should necessarily take account of the boundaries of those organizations, industries and markets -- and also acknowledge the hackers, pirates, rogue traders, dark pools, black markets and more that exist beyond them. Their global rise over the last two to three decades of technological change and globalization has been every bit as dramatic - and illuminating about the nature of innovation - as that of loyal opposition whose work remains internal to corporations or industries.  

Warren Bennis on Leadership and Character ... and A Key Insight about Reflection

Like so many, I'm an admirer of Warren Bennis's thinking about leadership.  In his current Bloomberg Business Week blog posting, Bennis writes briefly on leadership and character: http://buswk.co/P6dOqc .  His question is whether business schools can teach character or, put even more basically, whether character can be taught to or learned by leaders.  A fascinating and provocative topic.

Referencing a course on global business leadership by Brandeis Professor Bob Thomas, Bennis writes that there are two overarching principles to engage in character awareness and building: "assessment/reflection and action/reflection."  The blog post concludes with the "Five C's" that Thomas's learning model for reflection is organized around: Crucibles, Commitment to Practice, Combination, Coaches, and Community.  While that model itself is valuable, the main insight I took from the post has a significance beyond the question of character, per se.  It's about the centrality of reflection to good leadership and, even more, the necessity of engaging in both assessment and action in order for reflection to be optimally successful.

Many leaders recognize the importance of reflection and introspection as necessary activities in their own leadership practice.  Too often, though, that reflection only takes the form of self-assessment.  Extending reflection into action allows leaders to build community and even to change "some corner of the world," starting with their own.

Putting more open leadership into practice: A great interview example

One of the fundamental tenets of contemporary leadership thinking, particularly the leadership of creativity and innovation, is the value of ceding control and empowering others -- subordinates and peers, customers and clients alike.  Enabling others through a greater understanding of what they find fulfilling and inspiring them to do what organizations need to be done become every bit as important for leaders as aligning structural capabilities and adapting to fast-changing environmental and marketplace conditions.  More open leadership (to use Charlene Li's term) becomes the basis for greater creativity, efficiency, communication, and overall worker and organizational well-being.

The idea seems both supported by research into the most successful and innovative corporations of the last two decades and by intuitive acceptance as the kind of approach we as leaders should be able to take.  This is potentially more effective leadership that's at once kindler and gentler.  Everybody wins.  Yet as I've repeatedly realized in working with executives, the challenge to the idea is putting it into practice.  That's not an unusual challenge with leadership and management ideas, rules or tips, of course, but the shift in mindset required of more open leadership makes its consistent, practical implementation particularly difficult.

So I was especially pleased when, in reading a recent blogpost by Anthony K. Tjan, an excellent example of how this changed mindset and more open approach to leadership could be illustrated and practiced.  Tjan wrote at the end of last week on the HBR Blog Network about what he called, "The Most Important Job Interview Question" (http://bit.ly/Pw4fNb).  Most interviews, he noted, involve "one-way questioning" about candidates' past jobs, skills, work ethic and other attributes that ultimately speak to the question of "Why should you matter to us?"  The more vital question and practical question, Tjan proposes, is "If you were given this opportunity, would you take it?" And the reasons why.

It's a great, brief idea to tuck away for your next job interview.  But more generally, it's also a very concrete example of shifting a leadership mindset to focus on others.  In doing so, the leader cedes control and in exchange takes an important step toward building more robust relationships and more fully embracing others' values and what they might mean to an organization.  

Where will you find your ideas? The Ideas Economy and Moving beyond TED

In the Financial Times this weekend, April Dembosky writes about Richard Saul Wurman, one of the creators of the TED conference, and his new WWW event:  http://on.ft.com/SXqtXS .  WWW doesn't stand for anything specific; instead, it refers to a list words starting with "W": "wanderlust," "warming," and "wizardry" -- evidently in order to emphasize the fertile openness of the events to generating new ideas.  Besides being very expensive, charging $16,000 per person, the new event has a distinctive format of conversations between two high-profile speakers.  Dembosky devotes most of the piece to Wurman and, despite alienating many he's left behind at other events like TED (which he sold in 2001), what has been his successful career at organizing such conferences.

What's more compelling about the story, though, is how Wurman has so successfully operated as an entrepreneur of ideas.  The 21st century ideas economy has thrived through the development and interaction of communities energized by extraordinary transformations in business and society but enabled by new communication technologies and a circuit of on-the-ground events.  While TED is, again, the best known of these platforms for producing and circulating ideas -- familiarly, both in person for those who can pay entry fees of $7500 and (over time) online for others at no cost -- many, many other events are what make the economy thrive.  These range from local unConferences and cross-industry workshops to South by Southwest and the World Economic Forum.  While many of the events draw together the creative class and technorati, they have varying political and industry priorities.  But together, they have tapped into and accelerated a contemporary drive to innovate and to understand the changes re-shaping business today.

The title of Dembosky's piece, "Life after TED," has an obviously specific meaning in offering its profile of Wurman.  Yet it also broaches two broader topics.  One is the matter of what comes after TED, either because that particular event is becoming, for some, too slickly-produced or even running out of speakers.  An illustrative critique of TED, by the consistently insightful Evgeny Morosov, appeared recently in The New Republic (http://bit.ly/NNmpgi).  More important than TED or its prospects, however, is a fuller comprehension of the ideas economy itself and how we should understand it as a driver of creativity and change in business and society.  (The very term, "ideas economy," is for some associated with The Economist and its excellent series of global events, http://econ.st/PloKL8 -- but that is taking the term too narrowly.) 

The compelling question -- not least for those, like me, with deep roots in the traditional academy -- is what is the future of the wider ideas economy and the dense fabric of events and communities supporting it?  In other words, what will be the shape and dynamics of how we produce, share and act on ideas in the future?  By better understanding the process and structure of how we engage ideas, we arguably will be a step ahead in producing and building on better ones.

How Innovative Leaders Lead Innovative Organizations

The current issue of Forbes features a ranking of the world's most innovative companies (http://www.forbes.com/sites/innovatorsdna/2012/09/05/how-innovative-leaders-maintain-their-edge/ ). The list itself is instructive and inspiring and refreshingly international.

At least as important, though, are the issue's introductory comments, which make clear that a crucial commonality among the innovative companies is the presence in them of innovative leaders.  That may seem at first unsurprising or even obvious: of course organizations are oriented or defined by their leadership.  But Forbes gets more specific and identifies several key traits and tendencies that leaders use to help their organizations build and sustain an innovation premium.  These include the "3P's": that is, the capability of effective leaders to continually leverage people, processes, and philosophy.

The introduction goes on to reference a favorite study of mine that has quickly become a standard in analyzing and discussing innovative leadership: Dyer, Gregerson, and Christensen's The Innovator's DNA from 2011 (http://innovatorsdna.com/).  The five "discovery skills" outlined in the book are associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting and they reveal both individually and collectively how innovative leaders successfully differentiate themselves and their organizations.  Many of the companies on the Forbes list, from Infosys to Estee Lauder to Amazon, feature innovative leaders who practice some if not all of these skills.  (Dyer and Gregerson collaborated with Forbes on the list.)

Leadership guidelines like the 3Ps or the five discovery skills are not sufficient in themselves, of course.  Their significance comes from being drawn from research and the successful examples of literally thousands of leaders and organizations.  But the true value of these insights about innovative leadership is to be found in how other and especially emergent leaders embrace the potential of the practices, reflect on and analyze their relevance to other organizations, and finally implement them in creative and effective ways.