Improvement Prophets and Innovation Heretics

“Innovations that entail a shift in strategy are successful because they are deliberately subversive.  New wealth is created not by prophets but by heretics. They are the ones who not only challenge the way an existing business runs, but offer an entirely new way of thinking about an industry. Not satisfied with something better, they want something different.” Gary Hamel, who wrote this in the Wall Street Journal, captured an important and often overlooked distinction: prophets and heretics.

Some say prophets, and their modern equivalents—management consultants—constitute the “second oldest profession.” There is ample evidence, as far back as the 8^th Century BC, of an established class of paid advisers who many contend were a part of a king’s court. These advisers were called prophets, and they were paid to prognosticate on behalf of the king.

Ancient wisdom is seasoned with warnings about false prophets. The only reliable test of a prophet and his or her prophecy was the test of hindsight—whether the prophecy of what was to come turned out to be true or not. The purpose of the prophet’s message, however, was to stimulate change—repentance or a change of mind.

Therefore, ironically, if the prophet was successful in provoking a change in the way the king and his court were thinking, then the prophecy of what was to come may not happen, leaving the prophet exposed to criticism and false prophecy. The dilemma for the prophet is that if he is successful in getting the king to change his mind, then the prophet risks ruining his own credibility and career.  Unless, of course, he has an understanding and grateful king.

The perennial presence of prophets in today’s world of corporate and governmental “kingdoms” is a testament to their usefulness. At the very least, prophets can help us see the error of our ways and how the arrogance of success sows the seeds of its own failure. However, Hamel has made a very useful distinction: most prophets and their modern equivalents tend to be more interested in making things better; e.g., continuous improvement. While these efforts are absolutely necessary for most corporations, a growing number of companies appear to be awakening to the fact that making things better, while necessary, is not sufficient. Corporate renewal requires “something different,” and that is more likely to come from a heretic than a prophet.

Hence the necessity of the heretic. When asked what his most important responsibility was in leading the staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgeway (MacArthur’s successor) simply said, “Protect the maverick.” Many of our corporate organizations have failed to reflect Ridgeway’s wisdom. Last year I was with a client group planning a series of strategic planning and invention sessions, and when it came time to discuss who would participate I suggested that we be sure to include their resident maverick. Without exception, everyone knew the kind of person about whom I was referring. Not a pain-in-the-neck iconoclast, but the prolific, inventive, productive, and often pain-in-the-neck heretic. “But Lanny,” said the director of R&D, “you don’t understand. With all the re-engineering and down-sizings we have been through over the past ten years, all the mavericks have left.”

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that “reasonable men adapt to their environment. Unreasonable men try to adapt the environment to themselves. Thus, all progress is the result of the efforts of the unreasonable man.”

We might all do better to honor the prophet among us—even those who are in our own “country and land.” However, we might all build a bridge to our corporation’s future by protecting the maverick among us.

This article by Lanny Vincent was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in April 1998. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

Visionary versus Competitive Innovation

My father taught me to race a small sailboat on a lake in northern Wisconsin. One of the cardinal rules of racing is to always “cover the boat behind you,” assuming, of course, that you are not the last boat in the fleet. This means that when the boat following you changes direction to find clean air, you should change course in parallel with them. If they find better air, you will also.

There was another rule I learned later, after many seasons of racing. It came from the expert lake sailor Stuart Walker, who observed that there are always two winds on a lake. He said, “Pick one and stay with it.” Walker observed from all his years of racing experience that the wind direction next to the shoreline typically differs a few degrees from the wind direction out in the middle of the lake. If you go from one to the other you can lose out, due to the lull in between.

Paying attention to the competition is one thing. Reading the wind is another. Sometimes you have to choose one or the other.

These rules and choices apply to innovators too as colleague and veteran innovator, Carol O’Neill, senior vice president at Spartech, reminded me recently. Thank you, Carol, for referring us to “The Creative Monopoly,” an article by David Brooks published in the New York Times. It is a must read. (nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html).

Mr. Brooks does a riff on a course Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal) is teaching at Stanford. One of the core points of the course is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. When that confusion extends into the realm of innovating, innovating can suffer at the hand of competition. “Competition has trumped value-creation,” Brooks says, and this undermines innovation.

My own experience facilitating invention and R&D-driven innovating efforts over the past 30 years resonates with and confirms Brook’s conclusion. Steadily over those three decades, innovating efforts seem to have become more competitive and less visionary. Increasingly innovators are focusing on “adjacencies.” Adjacent opportunities, theoretically, are arenas where risks appear hedged by an entirely rational pursuit of improvements in value already established and validated for existing customers. Focusing on adjacencies carries the reassurance that in the risky endeavor of innovating, one can minimize the risk by staying close to the customer and just ahead of the competition. Covering the boats behind you. 

As more companies take this more rational and less risky approach, fewer established companies are looking to create new value for people and create new customers, markets and initiate “monopolies” in the process. Now it seems that looking for the new winds, whether in the center of the lake or along the shorelines, is an innovating strategy being left to the entrepreneurial start-up.

What if you are in the boat behind, or see a wind on the other shore? You may have the incentive not only to think differently, but also act differently, and break away from the pack. It’s risky for sure. But if you see a new wind, it just may be worth it. If you fail, you will have learned a valuable lesson—perhaps that is the real value that cannot be taken away.   

In his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, said in his wonderful story of the company’s creation “what is possible cannot be determined by opinions: only by attempt.”                 



This article by Lanny Vincent was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in May 2012. For other issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

© 2013 Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 

30 Years of Innovating: Lessons Learned

Editor’s Note: Lanny Vincent has been working in and studying the field of corporate innovation management for 30 years. The art of innovation management has evolved over this period. Despite the recent “noise” about innovation, a few sustained signals of wisdom have emerged through the years. The following are Lanny’s reflections on lessons learned from three decades of client assignments and 15 years of collaborative research with the Innovation Practitioners Network. We invite your response. ­— JG

Admired economist and innovation expert Clayton Christensen recently put his finger on why the current state of innovating is so weak. In articles in the New York Times and Forbes, Christensen lays blame on a combination of the wrong metrics, misguided teachers of entrepreneurship, and misinformed tax incentives, all of which erode a proper balance among three different types of innovation, which he labels empowering innovations, sustaining innovations, and efficiency innovations.

Empowering innovations are those that transform expensive products into affordable ones, create jobs and take 5 to 10 years or more to come to the market. The Ford Model T, Sony’s transistor radio, the personal computer, and cloud computing are examples. Sustaining innovations are those that replace older products with newer, improved versions, create few new jobs and take much less time to move from conceptualization to commercialization. Most of what people think of as innovation are of this type like Apple’s iPhone and iPod, and Toyota’s Prius. Efficiency innovations reduce the costs of making and distributing existing products, eliminate jobs and take the least amount of time to implement. Efficiency innovations “emancipate capital” which can be, but is not necessarily, reinvested in innovating. Toyota’s just-in-time production system is a prime example. 

Christensen makes the case that these misguided metrics, teachers and tax-incentives favor efficiency innovations over the other two types. As Vincent & Associates, Ltd. has been geared toward empowering innovations in corporate settings, we applaud Christensen’s observation.

As a result, the following retrospective on managing innovation efforts in corporate settings over the past 30 years is biased toward empowering innovations, and intrapreneurial more than entrepreneurial contexts. Here are the top ten lessons learned from each of the past three decades in a chronological sequence.

The 1980s: ATTACKER'S ADVANTAGE  

Lesson 1: Nothing happens except out of relationships.

Innovating is not a solo act. The lone inventor or entrepreneur is a persistent myth. Look more closely and you will see a relationship. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Roy and Walt Disney. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Bill Gates and Paul Allen. HP recognizes this wisdom in its new business creation efforts by pairing a technologist with a business person where both together lead the early effort.

Lesson 2: Insight about users without invention is science; invention without insight is clever.

“No wine before its time” was a slogan made famous by Ernest and Julio Gallo.  Similarly, idea generation before its time turns into either sour grapes or fresh wine in old wineskins. Either the ideas fail to ferment to a satisfying vintage or the corporate skins can’t contain them. Either way, idea generation is best done after an immersion in new realities gleaned from investigating the end-users’ context. This requires from innovators empathy and identification with the end-user before generating new ideas.

Lesson 3: Process follows content just as form follows function.

Toyota surprisingly turns out to be agnostic about methods and techniques used in their development system and slow to implement software solutions. They are rigorous about principles, however, and this is one of them.

Lesson 4: The new is always at first rejected. If it’s not rejected, it’s probably not new.

Many companies seek to avoid rejection, and look for safer adjacencies to capitalize on their go-to-market capabilities. This safekeeping produces imitations more often than innovations.

The 1990s:  KNOWLEDGE-CREATION

Lesson 5: Innovation is “learning applied to creating value.”

The late Al Ward (an expert in Toyota’s development system) described innovation with this phrase. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, made a similar point when he called “ideas the least reliable source of innovation.” Ikujiro Nonaka reminded us that what enables a company to create new value and wealth is not what it knows so much as it is its ability to create new knowledge. Knowledge-creation (learning) is the fundamental phenomenon of innovating, even more basic than idea generation. This is particularly true for empowering innovations.

Lesson 6: Learning comes from safe, productive failures more than from success.

Fail early, often and in the field, where the truth of failures can teach us much. The biggest mistake is to try something and end up relearning what was already known. This is one of the more difficult things for corporations to do: create safe, productive failure zones where the learning curves are steep.

Lesson 7: Profits accrue to innovators more than inventors.

David Teece’s study for the Commerce Department in 1988 showed that “complementary business assets” are the key enablers to generating profits, even more than inventions. The implication? A company’s willingness to adapt and flex its go-to-market business models comprises the larger portion of success in innovating. As important as inventions are, getting them to market is even more profitable. Sometimes this requires the company to get out of its own way.

The 2000s: INSULATE (not isolate)

Lesson 8: “Success is the enemy of innovation.”

Peter Chernin, COO of Fox, said this in a meeting we facilitated. Many companies launch their innovation programs with the naïve notion that everyone in the company will welcome the new. However, sibling rivalry for resources and management attention is inescapable in a corporate setting. Our Innovation Practitioners Network actually mapped this paradox and found effective mechanisms companies use to address it. Sponsors, midwives and innovators all are necessary to avoid costly and unnecessary mistakes of innovating from the inside out. Empowered innovating is an outside-in job.

Lesson 9: Types of innovations and innovating vary depending upon context and business architecture.

Innovating in contexts of high volume, standard products is one thing; innovating in the context of a complex system architecture is quite another (think consumer packaged goods versus an enterprise IT system). What is true about innovating in one is not necessarily true for the other. And there are many different types of innovations from technology platform innovations to basic product innovations; from manufacturing and business process innovations to marketing innovations. Cross-context generalizations about innovating are dangerous.

Lesson 10: Networks, communities of practice, and organizations each play a role in parenting innovations.

The social architectures of networks (designed for transferring information) are fundamentally different than the structure of communities of practice (designed for creating new knowledge). Both differ from the basic architectures of organizations (designed for executing efficiently and effectively). Innovating takes all three, but progressively, and in stages. It takes a village.

LOOKING FORWARD

The 2010s: INNOVATING SYSTEMS

As we progress into this current decade, we anticipate gaining fresh and relevant wisdom on innovating principles from systems thinking. Already our Innovation Practitioners Network has developed two models with which we will begin simulations this winter. Some additional lessons are already starting to show themselves. 

Lesson 11: Innovations emerge, as do innovators.

In complex and even complicated contexts—where most of us spend our time—innovating efforts may need stage-gate resource management schemes. However, we should never think that innovations develop in a flow. They morph within and between phases. So phase changes are the worst time to conduct stage-gate reviews.

Lesson 12: Corporate innovating efforts need leading more than managing.

Our systems analysis work is revealing that companies tend to be quick to manage their innovating efforts, but slow to lead them. Just the opposite should be the case, as innovations—particularly empowering ones—tend to redraw boundaries and attract the creation of new resources where before there were none. Boundaries and resource creation are governing issues more than management tasks. Leaders create powerfully positive effects on their innovator communities when they express convictions describing why and where innovations are needed. When this is done well, leaders will have more than enough compelling options from which to select.

Lesson 13: Break through often requires a break down.

One reason a break through comes so infrequently is that most of us resist letting go of what worked in the past. Empowering innovations require releasing the rigid containers of our current core competencies and reframing what we know in light of the new and relevant requirements emerging from the company’s immediate external ecosystem. Discovering these new requirements is possible, and surprisingly, not with that much effort.              



© Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 2013
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in January 2013. For other back issues of our newsletter, please go to www.innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Capital Ideas

One of the most dominant criteria used to judge a new product and technology innovation is whether it fits with the corporation’s strategy, core competencies or operating philosophy. Most companies have some explicit or implicit measures of relevance to judge a new product, process or technology innovation.  Although this criteria is expressed in different ways, it usually asks the question, “Does this new idea – if implemented properly and effectively – fit”? 

There are ample reasons for asking the question of corporate fit because eventually the corporation – or one of its business units – will need to adopt, nurture and raise the newborn innovation if it is to succeed.  The adoption, nurturing and rearing of a newborn creates a demand on resources, and it competes for management time and attention against existing operations.  So at first glance, asking the question of corporate fit makes sense.

Yet a growing number of companies are recognizing that the question of fit my have been applied too narrowly in the past.  Many of these companies are now viewing their competition in different ways.  Instead of seeing them as simply threats, many companies are viewing their competitors as potential sources of revenue.  Thus the former question of whether an innovation fits with where the company is headed is, for these companies, evolving into a question of whether the particular innovation fits with where the industry or market may be headed.

If an idea, discovery or invention conceived by a corporation’s R&D fails outside the corporation’s strategy or competencies but represents potential value to others in the industry, it is no longer dismissed as quickly as it may have been on the original criteria of fit.

The innovation may represent new intellectual capital with the potential to generate revenues without requiring the company itself to commercialize and/or implement the innovation.  Corporate fit may be giving way to “strategic industry fit” as the measure of relevance for many companies.

In his new book, Intellectual Capital, Thomas Stewart cites the experience of Dow Chemical Corporation which sought to do a “spring cleaning” when it created the position of Director of Intellectual Asset Management in 1993.  “The idea was to turn a passive function – central record-keeping for Dow’s 29,000 patients – into active management of the opportunities patients represent by cleaning up the portfolio and seeing what additional licensing revenue might be obtained from them.”

Gordon Petrash, who holds the position at Dow, found that not only did the company exploit fewer than half of its patents, but “most were orphans; no business unit was responsible for commercializing or licensing them.”  Petrash found that Dow was not alone.  Most companies have a high percentage of unused, unattended patents, which not only cost a lot to maintain, but also represent significant underutilized potential.

Dow and several other companies are starting to do something about these “ideas for others.”  Over ten years, Petrash figures, Dow will save about $50 million in tax, filing, and other maintenance costs.  Even better: by bringing valuable but unused patents out from the corporate attic, he estimates that the company will increase its annual revenue from licensing patents from $25 million (the 1994 total) to about $125 million by the year 2000,” according to Stewart.

Those of us involved in product and technology innovations may want to rethink the parochial question of “fit.”  Having good ideas for others may represent a source of revenue that rivals the revenue derived from ideas that only fit our own company’s strategy and competencies.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 1997. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.  

More Data, More Doubt: How “data-addiction” leads to more imitating not innovating

Just as “cloud computing” has made its way into our vocabulary, “big data” seems sure to follow.

Enabled by ever-more capable and abundant digital storage systems, access capabilities, and bandwidth, it seems big data comes with the underlying assumption that it is always better to have more data. After all, data is crucial to sustain any endeavor. Whether the data we amass is numerical, statistically valid, qualitative, or even anecdotal; the more data we have the better.

My own experience leading a team reinforces this. When I was managing a small team of consultants, data turned out to be essential in the team’s success. Actually, it wasn’t just the data that was so helpful. It was also its collaborative collection, frequent updating and visual display. Even in creative endeavors “connecting the dots” is often about seeing correlations between previously unassociated data points. Data is essential to both operating and innovating.

However, data is always derived. It comes from direct experience and observation. The biologist, chemist and market researcher alike generate data to prove or disprove their hypotheses. But it is their hypotheses that drive the generation and analysis of the data in the first place. And solid hypotheses come from personal observation and direct experience, infused with empathy and imagination.

Observation and experience may be more nutritious to innovating than data. Don’t get me wrong. Data and analytics are necessary contributors to every successful innovating effort. But while innovating may be informed by data, knowledge-creation and understanding are driven by personal experience and direct observation.

This might sound like an obvious observation, were it not for the fact that innovators are faced with an ever-present challenge: anticipate the future. Innovating requires lead times, sometimes long lead times. Innovators must innovate in the present but for the future. Delays require anticipatory behavior. Like hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, innovators must skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.  

The future looms large in the thinking and acting of innovators. But the future is always both “data-less” and “experience-less.” Innovators cannot rely completely on data or their own experience. Something else is required, something that “one person cannot directly communicate to another,” i.e., faith. (See Prisoners of Hope: How Engineers and Others Get Lift for Innovating.)

“Data-addiction” is one reason many hosted innovating efforts prove less than satisfying and never really get beyond “creative imitating.” If innovating is allowed to be driven by data, it will likely end up more imitation than innovation.

Just as the new is surrounded by considerable and unavoidable uncertainty, so also is the future. Uncertainty is perhaps the future’s signature. Attempts to avoid uncertainty by searching for assurance from more data can lead us away from innovation and toward incremental improvements. Improvements are not without value, but let’s be honest with ourselves, they are not innovations either.

Recovering from data-addiction requires innovators to cultivate the art of advocacy—a phrase I learned from Larry Plotkin at Hewlett-Packard Company some 15 years ago. Plotkin, an innovating engineer, was taking part in a five-company study we were conducting on how companies manage to both operate and innovate at the same time. Plotkin was very clear about the need for innovators to learn the art of advocacy—what the ancient Greeks referred to as rhetoric. 

Aristotle said rhetoric was comprised of three essential elements: logos (appeals to logic or reason), ethos (appeals to conscience), and pathos (emotional appeals). Lest you think ancient is “old and out-of-date,” consider the recent discoveries of neurology that suggest emotionless thought is a myth. All thinking is processed through the amygdala, wherein emotions are “processed” as well. Pathos. And when innovators are directed to targets of opportunity, where the need is fulfilled with a compelling solution, little additional incentive is needed. Ethos. The examples of logos are legion. More recently, in his book Changing Minds, Howard Gardner (theorist of multiple intelligences) gives us a more tactical and practical look at what are essentially Aristotle’s three basic dimensions of rhetoric. 

Thirty years ago it was well understood that innovators would run into resistance from their own “host” organizations, not to mention, in the marketplace. In anticipation of this resistance, innovators were thought to need deep conviction—passion—if they were to have any chance of success. Today, I don’t hear or see much of this understanding among my clients or in the literature. Have we become too reliant upon data, because we are not stretching ourselves enough. Perhaps we are not confident enough in our own convictions or appreciative enough of the courage it takes to innovate? 

The remedy is not more data. Nor is it more logos. We have plenty of both. Instead, the remedy is to bring to our unavoidable advocacy more ethos (conscience) and pathos (conviction). This requires innovators to be willing to go deeper into the unknown and let go of what we think we know. As Dee Hock, founder of VISA International, said in his book, The Birth of the Chaordic Age, “the problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it. Once you got the old ideas out of your mind, new ones come automatically.”

Perhaps this is what we need to keep our heads out of the clouds (computing and big data) and to keep our feet firmly planted on innovating that works.    


This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2012. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

Searching for Attitude

Creating the right chemistry in an innovation team is more art than science.  Whether you are assembling a team for a two-hour brainstorming session or a two-year skunk works project, you obviously need the right mix of technical expertise for the task.  Relevant expertise and diverse perspectives are critical components in selecting team members for any innovation effort.

Of equal importance to expertise, however, are the more attitudinal characteristics of the individuals being considered—their “softer” skills and qualities—their attitudes, the way they think, and how they work with others.  This may also apply when you are recruiting qualitative research subjects.  Here are a few characteristics to consider:

People who act not only to achieve results, but also to learn from them.

My high school algebra teacher used to tell us that it was not enough to get the right answer; we needed to learn how and why we got the right answer.  The logic of the formula was even more important to learn than getting the right answer.  Now I am beginning to understand my teacher’s admonitions.  Much later in life I encountered Peter Drucker’s counsel that the primary source of innovation for a company is its own unexpected success.  “No other area offers richer opportunities for successful innovation.  In no other area are innovative opportunities less risky and their pursuit less arduous.  Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.”

We can look at success in one of two ways: either as something for which we are proud and can take credit, or as a teacher offering us something from which we can learn. How often we take successful results to be the goal more than the guide to our future contributions.  People who view success as a teacher rather than a trophy provide a very positive catalysis to any innovation effort to which they contribute.

People who have the ability to use all their senses for gathering intelligence.

When it comes to innovation – especially the “fuzzy front end” of innovation efforts – awareness and knowledge of the leading indicators frequently come more through qualitative rather than quantitative forms.  New insights that identify the first awakenings of a trend before it is generally recognized as  trend, come from creative connection-making with what initially seems like a lot of irrelevant information.  Once an insight begins to form, however, information that is “relevant” starts to emerge from the “irrelevant,” like text can emerge from context.

People who have the ability to make creative connections between seemingly irrelevant pieces of diverse information act like great artists who tap all their senses and seem to be able to make ideas come alive.

People who are more practiced at interpreting than predicting.

Several months ago Forbes’ ASAP ran a column based on an intriguing though curious analogy.  The article gave a tongue-in-cheek explanation for why Silicon Valley continually outperforms Route 128 (Boston/MIT area).  The article compared how the East Coast experiences relatively predictable seasonal changes every year, whereas the West Coast experiences little seasonal change, but instead lives with largely unpredictable natural events (e.g., earthquakes, wildfires and mudslides).

As a result, the author boldly suggested that people on the West Coast have learned a management and planning orientation that is not based on prediction, like their counterparts on the East Coast.  It is based on “resilience” – an ability to quickly recover and use unforeseen events as catalysts for seizing and exploiting opportunity.  Although the analogy is a stretch, the point is an intriguing one, especially when considering what qualities to seek in a teammate for an innovation effort.  The ability to recover, reorient, interpret and reinterpret as new information becomes available may be more valuable today than the analytical ability to predict with precision what will happen.

Aside from an individual’s technical proficiencies and experiences, the most useful quality of an innovation team member may be their attitude toward change.  After four people told me recently to read the book, Who Moved My Cheese, by Spencer Johnson, M.D., I picked up a copy.  It is a great little parable of four characters, each of whom responds quite differently to the reality of their storehouse of cheese being “removed.”  There’s Sniff, who smells the wind before looking for more cheese.  Scurry, who runs up and down the maze looking for clues to the next store of cheese.  Hem, who denies that things have changed and waits for the cheese to return. And Haw, who overcomes his denial to face the new reality and learns to love the question for “new cheese.”  Perhaps the teams we create for our innovation efforts need the right mix of Sniff, Scurry, Haw and yes, even a little Hem.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 2000. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

MAVERICK: More than Just a Word

By Dick Cheverton

Samuel Augustus Maverick (1803-1870) was a scion of Southern aristocracy who headed west and helped invent the place (and state of mind) that is Texas.  In the process, he lent his name to a uniquely American concept—the maverick.

The word “maverick” defines both a unique individual—in the herd, yet apart from it; and a less “pasture-ized” free range.

In the mid-1800s, the free range was a fragile moment and place in history, a fissure between wilderness and the fence. It was a place of supreme danger, and virtually unlimited opportunity. It attracted the brave (and the foolhardy), dreamers (and outlaws), and pioneers (and fugitives). It was the habitat of mavericks. It was the wellspring of American greatness.

We are working on a book that seeks to explore the elusive character and characteristics of the free range and the maverick; not of Texas, but of corporate innovation. We are using the experience of one man—a master maverick who brought new ideas, fresh thinking, a host of new products (and millions in profits) to the Kimberly-Clark Corporation. How this man, Bill Wilson, survived and prospered is a most fascinating untold story in recent American business history. The man was, pure and simple, a maverick to the core of his being.

Discovering Wilson’s story has prompted us to dig deep into the concept of corporate innovation.  What have we learned? First and foremost, we have renewed our appreciation for a key variable in innovation management—the role of the corporate free range (time and place): the uncharted territory of ideas, opportunities and innovations. It is largely invisible, yet it exists, we believe, within and outside every organization.

To the conventional mind, this free range seems unformed, unfocused and unsafe. It is a subversion of the organization-chart; an assault on strategic plans; a heresy against the very concept of “management.”

The maverick, however, is able to roam this intellectual territory freely from free range to pasture and back again. The maverick seeks the uncertainty of the limitless. He happily trades the lush grass behind the fence for the brambles and cacti of unfettered freedom.

The maverick seeks not “freedom from,” but “freedom to…” Freedom to dream. Freedom to turn dreams into powerful realities…new ideas, new products, new opportunities. The maverick—the ultimate subversive—can bridge the gap between the wilderness of untested ideas and the pasture of products. The maverick lives in the space where innovation becomes real.

This is not a “job description.” It is not a position that can be designed into a consultant’s system du jour. The maverick can’t be recruited, trained or mandated.

The maverick just is. The challenge for managers is to recognize the mavericks among the branded; and then work to protect them.

Find out how mavericks survive and thrive on the “corporate free range.” 

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 1998. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270. 

The Maverick Way: Profiting from the Power of the Corporate Misfit was subsequently published in 2000. To order a copy of the book, please call (415) 387-1270 or order on Amazon. 

Richard E. “Dick” Cheverton is the author of The Maverick Way along with Lanny Vincent and Bill Wilson. Chev was a top editor at the Orange County Register for 16 years. The newspaper, based in Santa Ana, California, was noted for its continual product and organizational innovations.