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This interview with Robert I. Sutton, author of Weird Ideas That Work: 111/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing and Sustaining innovation (The Free Press, New York, 2002) was conducted for Strategy & Leadership by Alistair Davidson, CEO of Eclicktick Corporation, a high tech consulting firm located in Palo Alto, California (www.eclicktick.com). Sutton is a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford's Engineering School, Co-Director of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization and an active researcher in the Stanford Technology Research program ([email protected])
Strategy & Leadership: Your research-based book is antithetical to the process approach to innovation. Your 1112 prescriptions (see sidebar "Robert Sutton's list of "Weird ideas that work") propose cheerful heresies that make process-oriented development of new products seem irrelevant. In contrast, many companies in the process camp are very taken with the notion of Stage-gate TM theories, developed by Bob Cooper at McMaster University-- the idea that a company should have a formal review process and, at each review point, be prepared to drop a project.
Sutton: It's not that the stage-gate concept is bad. It's just that it can be very bureaucratic. For example, I observed the stage-gate method being practiced at a well-known consumer packaged goods company with an obsession for process and not enough focus on outcomes. But I never could find anybody who had completed the entire stage-gate process. However, I did find people who repeatedly brought products to market. They had been authorized to do so by top management, because what they were doing was deemed high priority.
S&L: To create such priorities, some companies categorize projects as "Mandatory," "Strategically critical" and "Strategically important." So you are saying that , if the project is determined to be important enough, the bureaucracy can be circumvented or ignored?
Sutton: Exactly. And sometimes it seems to me that the quality of execution is more important than the decision being made.
S&L: To some extent, Weird Ideas is about embracing the people and ideas way out on either end of the bell curve. Your message is that most companies tend to have people and ideas that congregate around a norm of belief systems about what is possible or desirable. Your book argues for increasing the variability of experimentation that a...