I’m not sure if it’s because I was recently asked to chair a panel on “driving innovative thinking through podcasting” or because I’ve been reading/listening to a number of innovation-related blogs and podcasts lately, but I’ve been reflecting a lot on Getting ETech Support and also thinking about driving innovation and creativity in business organizations (particularly in the medical/scientific fields).
Whatever the case, one of the most inspiring things I heard was the May 17th episode of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast, which features Marissa Mayer (VP, Google), who talked about Google’s well known philosophy/culture of allowing engineers to use 20% of their time to “to pursue projects they’re passionate about.”
Apparently, they did an analysis of all the product/feature launches in the last six months of 2005 and discovered that 50% of everything Google launched during that period came from the 20% of time that people used for their own projects. Marissa then went on to say:
When you take really smart people [and] give them really good tools, they build really beautiful, amazing things that are really exciting. And they do it with a lot of passion and momentum, in such a way that you actually see 2.5 times the output of what you would expect, given the time…It’s that license to do whatever they want that really, ultimately fuels a huge amount of creativity and a huge amount of innovation.
What a great statement and testament to the Power of Fun! This insightful comment also aligns well with the whole idea of Kathy Sierra’s posts on Brain Death by Dull Cubicle and Brain Death by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function, as well as Rod Boothby’s post on Micromanagement, which states “The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organized lags far behind.”
In support of this, Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google) was also quoted as saying the following in Business 2.0 (NOV’2005):
Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don’t come out of the management team.
And similarly, one of the funniest replies to a post on Knowledge Management is Dead simply says: “Hooray! It was the management bit that killed it.”
So, where are we going with this? Is Google the only company that can benefit from this model of success and innovation?
Well, though there has been controversy, praise and even speculation of a review of Google’s 20% model, there’s probably nothing that speaks
louder than real world examples. And, as a matter of fact, Atlassian and JotSpot—both enterprise wiki companies—have implemented similar models with great success.
Atlassian calls it “FedEx Day” (because of the “we deliver” slogan) and JotSpot calls it “Hackathon;” but whatever you call it, one thing is clear: they love it and it works!
Here’s what Joe Kraus (CEO, JotSpot) had to say:
It’s unbelievable what you can get done in a day with a focused, motivated and creative team. When you give people the time to do the thing that always seems “just out of reach” people’s creativity cracks wide open…What was particularly cool was the energy it brought to the team. People felt invigorated and recharged. In fact, one of our engineers was so excited he exclaimed (during the presentations) “Dude, I just want to crawl into my hole [his cube], grow a beard, and build shit!”
And knowing full well that one model won’t fit every business, Joe goes on to dispense some good advice about adapting the Google model:
Google does something like this with their “20% of people’s time is supposed to be on projects that aren’t related to what they’re working on” but for us, in a startup, we found that allocating time is not the same as taking it. Essentially, we would allocate time but it would get taken up by something urgent that came up at the last minute. Making an event out of it added enthusiasm, anticipation and stupid antics that make this kind of thing fun (air-horns, stupid hats, lots of pez, etc).
So what’s the lesson to be learned from all this?
Well, it appears to be an emerging trend among companies—particularly, the smaller Web 2.0 companies— to steer away from the “old corporate culture”, plagued by micromanagement and dull, repetitive, monotonous work, which stifles creativity.Instead we should, IMHO, be moving towards a culture of “creating passionate workers” (to put a twist on the Creating Passionate Users) and put some fun and freedom back into the daily grind, in order to bake innovation and creativity back into the system!
After all, all work and no play makes us very dull people!
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