DO over TALK

This XIM principle should be self-explanatory: we favor a bias towards action over exposition, especially with new ideas. This seemingly obvious advice for innovators reflects the evidence we see everywhere in corporate life of the opposite bias: too much discussion and too little action.

Corporate life unfortunately rewards early discussion of untested ideas.  Once past its high-growth years, a corporation tends to favor exploitation over exploration in its structures, processes, and behaviors.  Careers are advanced by controlling larger budgets, which proliferates the number of control-based roles, which increases the number of tollgates on action of all kinds.  All activity happens in teams, and teams grow in the name of cross-functional cooperation (thank you, OD consultants of the '90s for that juicy oxymoron), again promoting talk over action.  And so on: optimized business processes offer efficiency, but mostly create busywork; project reviews supposedly manage risk, but mostly contrive to leach the ambition out of development activities.

In this environment, it's easiest for innovators to share new ideas ab cogito - at the thought stage - before investing any time or money in development.  If you gain support at the paper stage, your personal risk associated with possible future failure declines.  Perhaps a manager will provide air-cover, or better yet, development funding.  The down side is that innovators censor their own thinking to improve the odds of a warm reception; bold ideas get watered down to suit project selection criteria and existing target market needs.  So much easier, more comfortable, less of an all-around nuisance!

Innovators, we implore you to talk less, at least early in the life of new ideas.  Instead, blow on the sparks by doing the work of innovation: clarify the benefits of your idea to customers; figure out how to test the appeal of the idea, cheaply and quickly; identify any big technical barriers.  Talk when the idea is in vitro, when you have data from your early inquiries, then the conversation becomes about how to grow it, not whether the "it" has any merit.

At any stage, bias your energies towards answering critical questions about demand for your idea, why it solves a customer pain point or upgrades their experience, over theoretical debates.  It's harder, but your idea deserves it, and oddly enough it saves time in the long run - you spend less time debating theories and more time advancing viable innovations.

The eXtreme Innovation Manifesto

Behold the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto (XIM), a call to action based on a consultant's and an entrepreneur's experience watching and driving innovation.  In the next few posts, we will explain each principle and what it means for redirecting your innovation efforts.


Let's begin with Innovators over Ideas.  This is the most important principle in the Manifesto, because it challenges deeply-held innovation dogma.  Most corporate innovation efforts focus on generating ideas.  Hands up if the following rallying cries sound familiar: "We need more ideas!", "Where is the next $1,000,000 idea?".


The seductive theory is, find ideas and you find profits.  Full disclosure: as a consultant, I earn fees guiding large corporate teams to generate ideas, but I've learned the prosaic truth. The ratio of ideas in to profits out is highly unfavorable (you'll get used to my English understatement).


Instead, flip the quest to: "We need more innovators!".  Why?  Because the odds of success are way better.  Natural innovators, if you can find the few working for your company, and if you create the environment in which they can thrive, will:

• generate compelling, different ideas
• test the concept quickly and cheaply (more on this when we cover Pretotyping), and
• iterate rapidly as early feedback improves the idea.  

In the next post, we'll discuss finding and nurturing natural innovators.

Welcome to the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto

The basic recipe for innovation is well known: fresh perspectives and orthogonal thinking, a diverse team, rapid experimentation, prototyping, scale, and hire the blimp for the IPO party. What could be simpler?

As a 15-year veteran of corporate innovation and growth efforts, I've seen (and helped) this recipe get honed and optimized, and I'm deeply disappointed with the performance of the model. In conversations with successful entrepreneurs, most especially my collaborator Alberto Savoia of Google, I've become convinced that the model needs a fundamental refresh. Alberto and I have humbly summarized this approach as the eXtreme Innovation Manifesto, a powerful set of principles that challenge much of the received wisdom of how to extract maximum ROI from innovation.

We will share the Manifesto itself, examples of how the principles apply, learnings from XIM experiments underway at Google (oh, didn't I mention? Google is applying these ideas), and tools and metrics to help you liberate the innovators at your company.

So far, all I've offered is an uncommon impulse to include adverbs in my writing, but if that's enough incentive, I'd appreciate a follow of my Tweets at: @Emirger