Exercising Patience

In moral matters, patience is a virtue. In innovation, patience is not only a virtue, it’s a necessity—a corporate “muscle” in need of constant exercise. 

Venture capitalists are not the only ones losing their patience these days. Established companies competing for financial capital and talent push harder to show better results, faster. Declining investments in R&D (as a percentage of sales), shorter cycle times, and every increasing “D” in proportion to “R,” are just a few symptoms of this growing corporate impatience. Many companies’ patience muscles may be getting a little weak.

The rewards for patience can be significant. R&D investments can produce returns that surprise even investors. For example, Kimberly-Clark Corporation originally estimated the disposable training pants market to be $250 million. Yet in a few short years after they introduced Pull-Ups®, sales exceeded $450 million for their product alone. While Pull-Ups was introduced to the market in 1989, it was almost ten years after the two product development visionaries—Glen Fleischer and Walt Pearls—patiently listened to mother after mother to help them conceive of this new product. Perhaps the cycle time could have been shorter, but it’s dubious the gestation period for this innovation could have been rushed.

In their impatience to make the number, many companies risk missing out on bigger numbers than can come from moments of discovery that precede invention and innovation—moments that require patience.

From the growing number of market discovery assignments and collaborative invention assignments we do each year, a pattern appears to be emerging—discovery precedes invention and successful innovation. Invention can certainly occur without some preceding discovery. Yet innovations that follow a fresh discovery—be it a surprise result in the lab or a new perspective on the market—seem to carry a quality far superior to and more strategic than their “stand alone” counterparts. If this is true then how can a company build in the regular exercise that the muscle of patience requires?

Strategy can be one way of making patience a regular practice. Cisco takes a minority interest in smaller companies with interesting technology for a time before acquiring them—and their talent.  Policy can be another way of building patience. The board of Marriott International, among others, deliberately refuses to make decisions at the same meeting in which an issue is raised. They wait until the next meeting, just to increase the quality of the decision by adding a little patience. Segregating and dedicating selected resources to an effort is yet another way of exercising patience.

Ezra Pound said, “Glance is the enemy of wisdom.” We are coming to believe that wisdom, and the patience required to develop it, may be the silent partner that sustains a company’s innovation efforts well into its future.

This article by Lanny Vincent originally appeared in Innovating Perspectives in April 2000. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd.