The Innovative Leader - Paul Sloane & Robert Brands discuss Innovation

Hi, my name is Paul Sloane. I'm an author and speaker on lateral thinking and innovation, and today a friend of mine, a fellow author, Robert Brandt, is going to ask me a few questions. So Robert, say a word about yourself please, and then let's get on with the interview.

Hey, good morning Paul. My name is Robert Brandt. I'm basically an innovation practitioner. I've been a president and CEO of a number of packaging firms, and basically learned on how to apply and execute innovation. I wrote Robert's Rules of Innovation, which we have a separate talk on, and that's on file, all about the 10 imperatives on how to create and sustain innovation. I had the pleasure of meeting Paul, and he was nice enough to send me his book called The Innovation Leader: How to Inspire Your Team and Drive Creativity. And to be honest, it was a great pleasure, Paul, to receive the book. And interesting, small books, small packages still have lots of value. I mean, people sometimes weigh books on the amount of pages, but this thing is a treasure trove of really good tips and hints on how you execute innovation.

Glad you like it.

I loved it, and you know why I loved it, because you read my book as well and we're very much aligned. Now, that's maybe no surprise to listeners and viewers because if you figure out what it takes to create and sustain innovation, we all are going to come across the same key barriers and requirements. And what's interesting with all these workshops that I've done in the past, the different groups always come with the same principles. And Paul somehow figured it out in this book. So I'm going to ask him a couple of questions about these, these key things. So first off, he basically breaks the book up into a number of key sections. The first one of course is leading innovation, then he goes into problem analysis, generating ideas, implementing the innovation processes, building a creative culture, and personal creativity. So they're absolutely key points and I would like to do is ask basically a question for each of these sections. So let's start off with leading innovation because leading innovation is absolutely key. So one of the key things that you're pointing out is that you should really consider issuing a declaration of innovation. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, every CEO says innovation is really important. You never meet a CEO who says innovation doesn't matter for our business. But people want to see actions and commitments, not just fine words. And what I'm suggesting is that the leader commits himself or herself to innovation to allow people to experiment, to allow people to fail, and to resource and fund experimentation and prototypes. So the leader commits to a budget, commits to a vision of where they're headed, and says why we need innovation and what it's needed for, whether it's new products, new markets, new methods, new partnerships, whatever it is, the leader should make it very explicit and transparent as to what they're trying to achieve and why they're trying to achieve it. And the Declaration of Independence— of innovation, based on the Declaration of Independence, commits the leader to certain obligations which he could then be held accountable for. You said you would resource this, you say you'd allow people to try things, you'd give them time, you'd give them budget. And people want to see that because people are fearful about trying new things and people are suspicious about the leader's motives.

Yeah, no, great points, Paul. And actually, when I, when I had a declaration at Airspray when I was the CEO with the small company that brought those little foam pumps to market for the foaming hand soap, our motto was to bring at least one new product per year to market. And even if I would ask an operator on the assembly floor, what would we do in new products, they would know about this declaration. So I completely agree, it's a very powerful tool and it's essential to make sure everybody is on the same page and knows it's okay what's going to be done.

I agree.

So let me move on to generating ideas. Um, one of the key things that you're bringing forward as tips is to bring in unrelated experts. So often people think when they brainstorm or do ideation sessions they have to bring a very nice, knit, coherent group together. Tell me a little bit about what you're recommending in bringing these unrelated experts together.

Well, diversity helps creativity and conformity, homogeneity is a barrier to creativity and innovation. If you get the same group together, the same marketing team who've been working together for the last 6 months and you put them in a room and you say, come up with some great ideas, it's difficult for them. They'll retread the same ground, they'll get into the same arguments they've always had, and if you sprinkle in some provocative outsiders, you'll get more ideas, and they can be people from other departments, other companies, maybe a customer, or what I recommend is an unrelated expert, so they're unrelated to your business but they're an expert in the topic. There was a sales company and the salespeople were not adventurous enough, they were not bold enough, they were not knocking on enough doors, they were too complacent and conservative, and they had a brainstorm meeting to look at ways to overcome this, and they brought in a major from the army, and the army knows all about courage, it knows all about how to motivate people, not with money, not with rewards, but with recognition, and one of the most powerful tools that the army uses is medals and a regimental sense of honor and commitment. And he talked about those topics before the meeting and how the army motivates people to do things they didn't think they were capable of. And then they started the meeting and they got lots of great ideas for how to motivate the sales team.

Great, cool, cool, very neat, very neat. And I've seen it work very well as well. So let's move on to implementing the innovation processes. You have a number of tips there. And one of them is number 5, train for innovation. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Well, you know, companies invest in training for management skills, sales skills, marketing skills, project management skills. They do all of those things and they think innovation will just happen if they put a few people together. But innovation is a skill which can be developed and trained just like sales or marketing or accounting or anything else. And if you get some skilled practitioners, skilled trainers, they can help train your people to generate ideas, to evaluate ideas, and to implement ideas. And you can get experts on Stage-Gate, you can get experts on every aspect of the innovation process, and you can train people and put them together. And the other thing you can do in training is you could examine what's impeding innovation in the organization today. It's something I cover in my workshops. One of the questions I ask is What's stopping you from being more innovative? And we get very common themes come out, but people never really thought about what's blocking innovation and how do we remove those blockers? How do we empower people to try more things more often? And that's the starting point. So my recommendation is that you invest in a little bit of training for innovation if you want more innovation.

Yeah, absolutely, Paul. Training is one of my 10 imperatives as well. I call it the often forgotten imperative. People forget about it. They're also forgetting about continuous training and training for newcomers. And yet when you look around best companies in innovation like the Whirlpool Corporation, they figured out that training is the number one imperative for them to succeed in innovation. So it's a fascinating element that is absolutely key. The next section that we picked was building a creative culture. Here you have a very big one in my mind which is called welcome failure. Tell us a little bit about that.

Well, everyone talks about it but not many people do it, and the question is how can we get people to be less risk-averse and more adventurous, more agile, more entrepreneurial. Every leader wants their team to be more entrepreneurial. They bemoan the fact that people are stuck in a rut doing the same thing. And yet deliberately or accidentally, they have policies in place which discourage people from trying new things. And because we've got this image in our mind that failure is a bad thing— if you fail at school, if you fail at sports, you fail an exam, you're a failure— and in business, we need more adventurous failures. We need people trying things that don't work, because if everything you try works, it means you're not being bold enough, you're not being adventurous enough. And what I like to say is, you know, why does Novak Djokovic serve double faults? He serves double faults because he doesn't want to play it safe. He's trying to— he's prepared to push his second serve as hard as he can in order to not make it easy for his opponent. He's prepared to accept a number of double faults in every match.

Yeah.

And my argument is that you in your organization should serve more double faults. You should have more failures and more mistakes, provided you're open enough to learn from them. And the really successful companies have an attitude of, we learn from failure, we share failures, we're transparent about it, and we applaud failure. Now, there's a number of things the leader can do to encourage this. They can talk about failures in their own career and how— what they learned from it, instead of boasting about their great successes, talk about some of the things they tried that didn't work and what the learnings were. And they can publicly praise people for trying things that didn't work. Very, very powerful thing for the leader to do at an all-hands meeting is to say, John here, he tried this new initiative, it didn't work, but you know what, that's exactly the sort of initiative we want in this company. And everyone watching says, wow, the CEO, she's praising somebody for failing. And it's a powerful message.

Absolutely, absolutely. And some great messages there. I agree with you. As long as failure is being seen as a learning experience, it's all win-win. And after all, the biggest and most successful companies have had some major failures, and that's only why they ultimately succeeded. So it's really, really an important element. So the last of your sections is personal creativity, and I would like to take one maybe a little bit out of the box where people are now more and more talking about some free time. within the allocated time that you have to work and report. Any input or thoughts on that as it all relates to the innovation leader?

Well, it helps for people to be under pressure, but they can't be under so much pressure they've got no time to try new things. So you've got to strike a balance, and you can't expect somebody who's really busy working flat out all week to also allocate time for experimentation and innovation. You've got to cut them some slack. Ironically, if you give them 6 months off, you know, they won't be as productive sometimes as if you give them 1 day a month off, but you've got to give them some slack. And Google famously do this with their 1-day-a-week policy where employees can spend some time on any business project that interests them, and out of that they've had Froogle and Gmail and Google Earth. And 3M for a long time had a famous rule that any engineer or scientist could spend 15% of their time on any project they're interested in. They didn't have to get their manager's permission, but they did have to tell the manager so that he was aware what they were working on. On Wednesday afternoon, I want to work on osmosis in membranes or whatever. And the manager would say, that's fine. Oh, by the way, did you know such and such a department is also working on that? So it helps people explore and experiment and try new things. And both in your home life and your personal life and your work life, you should allocate time for experimentation, for trying new things, for finding a new route to work, a new place to go out to, a new hobby to take up, a new way of doing things at work. And through that, not everything will succeed. A lot of those new routes will turn into blind alleys, but occasionally some of them turn into really productive useful innovations.

Yeah, no, great, Paul. And I always say, as long as it's strategically aligned and there's some accountability around it, the free time can really work for you. As I said in the opening, I really enjoyed reading The Innovation Leader. I saw it's available in the UK but also definitely in the US via Amazon, and it's a worthwhile booklet. And whether you already are decent at innovating, you have some processes in place, This is a great way as a little checklist with respect to continuous improvement. And if you're just starting, I feel the booklet is full of tips to, to really get you going.

That's very helpful, Robert. Thanks very much. Thanks for the interview, and thanks for the kind words about the book. I'm glad you like it.

All right, I'll talk to you soon again. Thanks.

Bye.

Bye-bye.