Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Normal Call of Engineering Duty

Weird Ideas That Work: How to Build a Creative Company (note the new subtitle), is about to be released in paperback.  The official release date is May 15th, but I expect that Amazon will be shipping in a few days. In going back and reading the book, and thinking about the current excitement about innovation in many companies, two intertwined themes strike me as especially pertinent to the times.  Much of the recent rhetoric about innovation focuses -- and I suppose rightly so -- on the role of senior management, and how leaders like A.G. Lafley at P&G and Jeffrey Immelt at GE take bold actions that set the stage for innovation.

But another part of the story is that innovation often happens despite rather than because of senior management, and oddly enough, the best leaders often realize that their very presence can sometimes stifle innovation. Consider a classic story from 3M. Masking tape was one of the company's first big successes -- it happened even though in 1925 then CEO William McKnight ordered Richard  Drew to stop working on that silly project and to go back to his work in quality control – McKnight insisted masking tape was bad idea, a bad product with no market.  Drew ignored him and kept developing masking tape. To McKnight's credit, this incident led to 3M's famous  15% rule, that employees in technical jobs can spend up to 15% of their time working on projects without getting permission.  Implicit in this practice is the mindset that managers often make bad guesses about what is worth working on.  And, also, it reflects the realization that close supervision of creative work often does more harm then good.  Indeed, this philosophy is captured wonderfully in something that I once heard from William C. Coyne, who headed-up R&D at 3M for over a decade.  He explained that a big part of his job was keeping senior management away from his scientists, as they asked too many questions too early, and started evaluating ideas too early. As he put it "When you plant a seed in the ground, you don't dig it up every day to see how it is doing."

This also reminds me of my favorite HP story. Chuck House was a long-time HP employee, and knew both Bill Hewlett and David Packard well. I have been seeing a bit of Chuck lately, as he is the new Executive Director of Media X at Stanford. Here is Chuck's famous story from David Packard’s autobiographical The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company. I love how co-founder Packard admits, actually seems to brag, about this engineer’s defiance:

I mentioned that sometimes management’s turn down of a new idea doesn’t effectively kill it. Some years ago, at an HP laboratory in Colorado Springs devoted to oscilloscope technology, one of our bright, energetic engineers, Chuck House, was advised to abandon a display monitor he was developing. Instead he embarked on a vacation to California —stopping along the way to show potential customers a prototype of the monitor. He wanted to find out what they thought, specifically what they wanted the product to do and what its limitations were. Their positive reaction spurred him to continue with the project, even though on his return to Colorado, he found that I, among others, had requested it be discontinued. He persuaded his R&D manager to rush the monitor into production, and as it turned out, HP sold more than 17,000 display monitors representing sales revenue of $35 million for the company. 

 Some years later, at a gathering of HP engineers, I presented Chuck with a medal for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.” . . . “I wasn’t trying to be defiant or obstreperous. I really just wanted a success for HP,” Chuck said. “It never occurred to me that it might cost me my job.”

I just checked again with Chuck to ask, again, "is this really true?"  And he answered ‘The quote is accurate.  I’m flattered to have it “continued”.  When HP issued their “Origins” DVD a year ago, they included that passage, and I got a quick cameo appearance as well.’ 

The spirit of these lovely old 3M and HP stories is that the best leadership is sometimes no leadership at all (or leadership by getting out of the way) and the best leaders realize that they are going to wrong a lot, and admit from – and in the case of Packard – even celebrate their mistakes. That is why one of my Weird Ideas That Work suggests “Encourage people to ignore and defy superiors.” And there are more than stories behind this (and other) weird ideas. For example, Anne Cummings and Greg Oldham studied 171 employees in a manufacturing plant, which compared those with controlling and non-controlling supervisors. This 1997 California Management Review article reports that employees with non-controlling supervisors made considerably more novel and useful suggestions.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that I don’t believe that people should always hide from, ignore, and defy their bosses. When doing routine work where there are big differences in expertise between the boss and others – such as flying an airplane or doing a surgical procedure --  I am all for underlings who listen carefully to the boss and do what the boss says; although even in those settings, I want nurses and co-pilots to speak up when the doctor or pilot is making a mistake!
   

Comments

[gl hoffman]

I can't wait to pick up this book.

[Stan Garfield]

I featured Weird Ideas That Work as the book of the week in http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/garfield/archive/2007/09/18/4442.html

[Carl Turner]

I like the "15 beliefs" section of this page. I blogged this book at http://triangleinnovation.blogspot.com/2007/09/first-do-no-harm-and-other-epigrams-for.html

[Daniel]

Hi Bob

In this version (paperback) of the old hardbook, are you added new topics or corrections?

Best
Daniel Varela
Santiago, Chile

[Matt Moore]

There's some kind of weird synchronicity thing going on as I have just blogged about this book here: http://engineerswithoutfears.blogspot.com/2007/04/words-meaning-3-innovation.html

I have the hardback copy which is obviously superior to the lame paperback one...

[Eric Tam]

Hi Bob,

How much of the interview can you safely devote to your Weird Idea of "using job interviews for things other than hiring".

I want to try....it sounds neat.

PS: I'm not part of the the 90% of people that think their driving skills are above average. :-)

[Light & Dark]

Bob:

Have you ever heard the story of the graphing calculator that eventually became part of Apple's operating system?

It's gotta be the ultimate example of "defiance above and beyond the call" by a programmer. The cool part of the story is how the project caught the imagination of such a disparate group of people who became co-conspirators.

The story, in the programmer's own words, is at http://www.pacifict.com/Story/

Paul

[Bob Sutton]

Hi,

It is based on the huge literature on the self-fulfilling prophecy. Extreme confidence increases the odds of success -- and as I point out in the book -- also increases the odds of throwing good money after bad. So it is a double-edged sword unless you are very careful!

[Eric Tam]

Good luck!
Hey Bob, what kind of research are ideas #7 and #8 (roughly paraphrased as "deluding yourself that difficult things will work") based on?