The Myth of the Innovative Executive

I need an innovative leader, our clients tell us.

Innovation is something that we’ve studied, and mapped onto our leadership capabilities. We can describe different levels of innovation, the scaled, measurable behaviors of an innovative executive. But when clients tell us that they need an innovative executive, we pause.

Do you? Do you really?

 The myth of the innovative executive – the genius, creative leader – is compelling. Start ups glow with the brilliance of their founders – and rightfully so. And, on a larger scale, are executives like Steve Jobs, who famously held a number of patents with his name on it, including the glass stairs at multi-level Apple Stores. But most founders don’t continue to lead their companies, as Noam Wasserman pointed out, with only 25% leading their companies’ public offerings. [1]  Ah, say our clients. So, not a creative innovator CEO. But what about an executive who will create, design and personally innovate?

That, we’d reply, is a question of math. Ask yourself; who will create more innovations? One person or a thousand people?

As we know from our research, the role of the executive is to deliver results, over the strategic long-term, through people and organizations. In other words, the executive’s job is to make things happen through others or many others – not just do things themselves.  

There’s value in a creative executive -  and potential pitfalls. Behavioral economists would point out that an executive who is focused on personal creativity or even innovation may be too invested in their own ideas to make tough decisions about them (e.g., Steve Jobs and the Lisa, the NeXT Machine, the Macintosh Cube…).  An individual who draws energy from being personally creative can be so goal oriented that they inadvertently interfere with the company-wide capacity for creativity, or throw the doors wide for a creativity-fest that is simply not sustainable.

At the end of the day, the job of an executive is to enable the thousand people under them to not only be creative, but to innovate – to apply their creativity for effective results. But before we dive into how they do this, let’s take a look at the target. Do you need innovation? Creativity? Or both? 

Understanding creativity and innovation

Creativity is inherent in all human beings. At its simplest, creativity connects things that were not connected before – ideas, objects, methods. We are hardwired to do that, as part of our innate, reflexive pattern identification. You might associate pattern identification with survival skills – it’s how a baby identifies its mother, how we learned to identify safe foods on the ancient tundra, but can also pop up as creativity.  When people look at a page of random numbers, they will find patterns that are not really there, thanks to creativity. Tinkering with a recipe, trying a new route to work, reorganizing your desk can all be forms of creativity. People tend to set too high a standard for defining it – you don’t need to be Leonardo DaVinci to be creative. You only need to be human.

Innovation, as we see it, is applied creativity – creativity used to produce a useful improvement or result. One such example happened at 3M, when a researcher had tried to create a new adhesive. It wasn’t all that sticky, however, so he gave up on this formula. A colleague used bits of it to put up scraps of paper around his desk, because he could take them off and put them on. And so Post-It Notes™ were born. The adhesive was creative; the application was innovative.

But what about the cutting edge?

Innovation doesn’t have to be wholly new to offer value. Consider incremental innovation. Let’s look again at Post-It Notes™ - beloved of brainstormers, designers and all of us here at Ascent. It took a while before 3M decided to try adhesive on the paper, rather than on a bulletin board, making the little yellow square stickies that we know and love.[2]  3M then started creating postie notes in different colors and in a variety of sizes, from tiny strips to poster-sized flip charts that we tear off and stick on our walls. Those incrementally creative innovations were incredibly useful and no doubt produced a lot of revenue for 3M. Even if they don’t appear to be DaVinci-esque in their level of creativity.

What we can learn from Steve Jobs

As a leader, Steve Jobs not only modeled creativity and innovation, he enabled a creative and innovative company. By the time Steve Jobs was kicked out of Apple by John Sculley (an act that got him onto several “worst CEOs in America” lists by hindsight), Apple had numerous creative projects bubbling.  Creativity was definitely encouraged – the Macintosh was actually a project that Jobs took over after his pet project, the Lisa, failed outright. It was an error that he’d repeat later with the NeXT Machine, albeit with a happier ending. When Gil Amelio came in, he made some improvements, but also proliferated a host of Apple computers, which used incompatible parts, structure, and motherboards, making for a confusing array of offerings, each of which had to be manufactured separately. Unfocused creativity had a price, and Apple was paying it.

When Jobs came back, he took a more strategic approach. He massively simplified the company offerings, focusing Apple on a structure still largely maintained today: consumer computers (iMac) versus professional computers (MacPro). The company’s creativity was largely focused into these channels – not limiting creativity per se, but providing guardrails and guidance: aiming it in a particular direction. This enabled Apple to run a more focused and productive innovation cycle.

Executives don’t need to get patents, or be the genius at the workbench; they need to encourage and inspire their organizations to be creative, and provide guidance to get practical innovation. Consider an executive who is comfortable with innovation and creativity, and can weave them, compellingly, into their strategic approach.  You’d end up with something like Google’s 80/20 rule, or Whirlpool’s approach to integrating innovation as a company-wide discipline. [3] Contrary to popular belief, Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb – he just improved it (and bought other patents) to make it practical.

Aligning for change

That’s why, when we hear that a company wants to increase their innovation, we suggest they need a CEO and executives who can align an organization for change. They don’t need to be personally creative, but they do need to be able to help bridge the gap between an innovative and a non-innovative culture.  They’ll need the capacity to create the strategic plan to move the company in the right direction, engaging stakeholders at multiple levels, create change agents, inspiring and smoothing the path as people walk down it.

A CEO for innovation may never hold a single patent. But they will do something potentially much harder, encouraging a whole organization to embrace a cultural shift towards creativity, in defined directions that will drive the company forward.

It’s transformative.  You might even say that it’s a different kind of creation.

References:

1. https://hbr.org/2008/02/the-founders-dilemma

2. https://www.ideatovalue.com/insp/nickskillicorn/2017/04/true-story-post-notes-almost-failed/

3. https://www.wired.com/insights/2013/08/innovate-or-die-why-googles-8020-rule-is-a-red-herring/