Great managers of innovation?
I’m writing chapter 9 of 10 (so close!) this week – its focused on how dependent, or not, innovation is on the role of the team leader or group manager.
Many legendary innovations, from the Apollo moon landing, the Xerox PARC lab, the Macintosh, the Palm Pilot and the i-pod, were all driven by strong leaders (JFK, Bob Taylor, Steve Jobs, & Jeff Hawkins respectively).
Who else deserve mention on the list of great mangers of innovation?
Or specific to your own experience:
- Have you worked with, for, or around someone who excelled at managing innovation projects? (Or are you one yourself?)
- What are the traits, tactics and talents they used to be successful?
- Or do you have a horrific tale of an innovation-assassin, who was somehow charged with managing an innovation effort? What anti-patterns did they use?
I hope you’ll take a minute and share a story or thought.
Thinking about great names on innovation, I shall mention Kelly Johnson from Lockheed Skunk Works. He was the man in charge of the design of the SR-71 Blackbird and the U-2, two of the most revolutionary aircraft ever made. There is a great book about this topic, its name is “Skunk works” by Ben Rich -Johnson´s right hand- .
From my experience: I’ve worked with a couple of innovator-managers.
1. First is a guy, who works in fire-and-forget mode. Lots of ideas goes through his mind almost in every case. I can’t recall any situation when he couldn’t find some new ideas how to resolve a problem. They’re all sorts, sometimes wise, sometimes stupid, but it keeps all runninig and thinking. You must to push your brain harder either to understand the idea or to turn it down (and it’s not easy to convince the author that he’s wrong). I don’t know where it comes from – if I had to find a name I’d say that he’s extremly creative. However, the issue with the guy is that he almost never finishes what he started. After the very beginning when everyone start to work on the idea he finds another one and leave the former one. It’s so hard to work with that type of guy because on the end you always struggle to finish anything, yet you’re still labelled as person who doesn’t feel the business, as you turn down some new ideas to work on older ones.
2. Second is another guy who was 10 years ago (I know from third party; personally i know him almost 7 years only) quite similar fire-and-forget person, but over the years as he was building his own company he developed a kind of “business filter”, which he was using to judge his ideas before telling others to implement them. Now, he’s the kind of person, who throws it the idea and it’s usually very reasonable. I think it’s because he filters out those ideas, which aren’t very clever even on the first look. Another difference between those guys is that the first is I’d say more creative but the second is more visionary. He sometimes sees business cases that start to sound profitable in a several-year perspective. I worked on project based on one of his ideas which was turned down two years before our sales came and told us that customers want this kind of solution.
Hi Tom: Thanks for the Skunk works reference. I have a copy of the book but its one of the few titles in this whole field I haven’t made it into yet (Although Johnson comes up in another book on organizing genius, which profiled several great innovative environments, including Disney, Apple, NASA, etc.)
Interesting perspective.
I wonder is a “great manager of innovation” one who initiates the “innovations” himself, or one who creates and sustains an environment in which others innovate? I’d be more inclined to call most of the people named so far “great innovators” who innovate in the large, so they need help. They manage the execution of their innovations rather well.
The transforming ideas seem to come from them, vs. their teams, so I’m suspicious that they are “managers of innovation.” What about the guys who created PARC, for example? Not the guys who through up all that cool stuff? Or what about the people who ran ATT Bell Labs, and still run IBM research?
Good question – At the moment I’m more interested in the later (creates an environment). Of course someone can do both, but part of the point of this chapter is how managing innovation doesn’t demand any sort of creative brilliance – its about a series of other management tasks that are probably more important.
Part of the reason for the post is that existing research is disproportionate. If its related to PARC, ARPANET, NASA or the Macintosh there are quite a few books, but most other projects, have a thiner pool of resources.
I want more stories even if they’re from less well known projects.
Micro-management can have a deadly affect on innovation. Junior people quickly realize that putting in effort is futile when the manager just changes it to “their way” in the end.
You have to let people’s ideas survive if you want them to keep contributing.