In fact, under the company’s egalitarian compensation system, the scientists in the group had been receiving approximately the same salaries and bonuses as scientists in much more productive R&D units. Despite the poor performance, senior leaders had made no real changes in the group’s management or personnel. I learned that one of its R&D groups had not discovered a new drug candidate in more than a decade. Consider a pharmaceutical company I recently worked with. It sounds obvious that companies should set high quality standards for their employees, but unfortunately all too many organizations fall short in this regard.
#Creative inventive and notable people movie#
At Pixar, movie directors who cannot get projects on track are replaced. It, too, has a rigorous performance management system that moves people into new roles if they are not excelling in their existing ones. Google is known to have a very employee-friendly culture, but it’s also one of the hardest places on earth to get a job (each year the company gets more than 2 million applications for about 5,000 positions). At Amazon, employees are ranked on a forced curve, and the bottom part of the distribution is culled. Steve Jobs was notorious for firing anyone he deemed not up to the task. People who don’t meet expectations are either let go or moved into roles that better fit their abilities. Exploring risky ideas that ultimately fail is fine, but mediocre technical skills, sloppy thinking, bad work habits, and poor management are not. They set exceptionally high performance standards for their people. Remember Apple’s MobileMe, Google Glass, and the Amazon Fire Phone?Īnd yet for all their focus on tolerance for failure, innovative organizations are intolerant of incompetence. Some of the most highly touted innovators have had their share of failures. Given that innovation involves the exploration of uncertain and unknown terrain, it is not surprising that a tolerance for failure is an important characteristic of innovative cultures. Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Unless the tensions created by this paradox are carefully managed, attempts to create an innovative culture will fail. Collaboration must be balanced with individual accountability. Psychological safety requires comfort with brutal candor. A willingness to experiment requires rigorous discipline. A tolerance for failure requires an intolerance for incompetence.
They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors. The easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. The reason, I believe, is that innovative cultures are misunderstood. How can practices apparently so universally loved-even fun-be so tricky to implement?
And research supports the idea that these behaviors translate into better innovative performance.īut despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. When I asked the same managers to describe such cultures, they readily provided a list of characteristics identical to those extolled by management books: tolerance for failure, willingness to experiment, psychological safety, highly collaborative, and nonhierarchical. I cannot think of a single instance when someone has said “No, I don’t.” Who can blame them: Innovative cultures are generally depicted as pretty fun. In seminars at companies across the globe, I have informally surveyed hundreds of managers about whether they want to work in an organization where innovative behaviors are the norm. It also is something that both leaders and employees value in their organizations. A culture conducive to innovation is not only good for a company’s bottom line.
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