I am a big fan of collaboration. So when I teach college classes, I often put my students in groups, and give them assignments that they have to do in teams. And, I give the team one grade; everyone in the team gets the same grade.

A lot of my students hate this. We have very smart, high achievers here at Washington University, and they all have memories of working with less-able peers in high school. Of being stuck with a lazy partner, and having to do all of the work. So my students usually advocate grouping top performers with other top performers, and grouping the lazy lower achievers together.

If you’re a manager, your question is: how can I get the most out of my staff? Even after you fire the lowest performers, you’re still going to have a range of abilities and motivation levels. Should you mix everyone together, or keep the top performers together? It could be that spreading around the top talent raises everyone else’s level of performance–the lesser performers learn from the better performers, and they’re motivated to try to be just as good. Or, it could be that the lower performers drag the best down–the “weakest link” phenomenon.

Two researchers at the University of Wurzburg recently studied exactly this question.  Bernhard Weber and Guido Hertel reviewed 17 studies on what they call “inferior group members” or IGM for short.  These 17 studies included a total of 2,200 people.  Their conclusion?  IGMs work harder when they’re working with superior group members.

*Weber, B., & Hertel, G.  (2007). Motivation gains of inferior group members: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(6), 973-993.

I just returned from speaking at a workshop hosted by the National Science Foundation headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. I know everyone loves to bash government bureaucracy, but the NSF is a quality organization and I’m always impressed with everything they do. This workshop was no different, with the title “Art, Creativity, and Learning”. The mission our group of experts faced: to prepare a list of important research questions for the future, and to advise the NSF on what types of research should be funded in the next few years.

The event was organized by Christopher Tyler of the Smith-Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco, and neuroscience research was a constant theme–what does the brain look like when it’s being creative?  Or when it’s listening to music?  Or looking at a painting?  The other constant theme was, when we participate in the arts or in creative pursuits, do we learn things that can make us smarter in general?  For example, everyone seems to believe that playing music makes you better at math.  But, surprisingly, there’s no solid evidence that’s true.  We proposed several research projects that could help us to understand what’s uniquely valuable about the arts.

For me, the high points of the conference were presentations by Ellen WInner of Boston College, perhaps the leading scholar asking questions about the arts, development, and learning; and Dan Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of the best seller This is Your Brain on Music.

I wish I could report some surprising new answers, but our goal was to ask the big unanswered questions, and we did a good job of that: Does participating in the arts give you any increase in general mental ability that transfers to others domains?  If you use dance, music, or painting in math or science class, does it help people learn math or science better?  (This is a common belief that has no solid research support.)  I personally love the arts and I want them to remain in the curriculum.  But, as a scientist, I want to be able to argue for the arts using solid data and research findings, not just wishful thinking.

I’ve been cleaning out my file cabinets to get ready for an upcoming move to a new building.  Buried in a long-forgotten file folder, I found a 1999 “Innovation Survey” by Price Waterhouse Coopers.  Many readers of my blog already know that just about every consulting firm now publishes an annual innovation survey; the best known are Boston Consulting Group (published in connection with Business Week magazine) and Booz Allen Hamilton (published in their own magazine, Strategy+Business).  The amazing thing about the 1999 PWC report is that it is right on the money.  Remember my blog posting from last week, about Gary Hamel’s “Inventing the Future of Innovation” conference?  Just about every recommendation that we came up with was already in this 1999 report.  Here’s a sampling:

* The critical role of knowledge management in gathering, discussing, and disseminating new ideas from both inside and outside the firm

* Innovation can’t be limited to a separate group, like an R&D lab; it has to be everyone’s responsibility and be built into everyday ways of working

* Diverse teams generate better ideas

* The most critical element of an innovative culture is trust between people that will enable them to share ideas freely

* Survey respondents fall into two management styles: managed (planned, systemic) and open (radical, discontinous initiatives that have no obvious connection with past successes; balancing the consensual and the anarchic).  Of the top 20% of performers in their survey, 75% displayed the open style; of the top 5%, all displayed the open style.

If you’ve read my book GROUP GENIUS, you know that I wasn’t surprised by any of this.  But what is surprising is that this knowledge has been around for so long, for at least ten years, and the majority of companies still aren’t paying attention.  If we all get together in ten more years for another “future of management” conference, it would be pretty depressing if nothing in the corporate world has changed.

Expert consultants to the report included: Mark Brown and Dominic Swords of Henley Management College; Scott Isaksen, Brian Dorval, and Ken Lauer of the Creative Problem Solving Group at Buffalo; Gerard Puccio of the Center for Studies in Creativity; and Chris Dewberry of Birkbeck College.  The report originated in the U.K. and has a distinctly U.K. flavor (or “flavour”?) but the findings are valid in every region.

How can we maximize human potential to make the world a better place? How can we make work more fulfilling–whether in a business, a school, or a government agency?

For the past two days, I’ve been attending a high-powered conference here in Half Moon Bay, California, hosted by Gary Hamel (Wall Street Journal’s “top business guru” and author of The Future of Management). Our goal: to use the latest management research to re-design organizations to release the full potential of their employees, and to generate maximum innovation, adaptability, and engagement. Our starting point is the observation that management today–whether businesses, government agencies, or educational systems–is deeply flawed (think of Dilbert’s cartoons and you’ll know what we’re trying to fix).

Most of the 40 or so in attendance were thought leaders, authors of best-selling business books and/or professors (The photo shows, from left to right, C. K. Prahalad of University of Michigan, Peter Senge from MIT, Gary Hamel (standing), and Eric Abrahamson of Columbia).

But the high point, for me, were the presentations by a few CEOs, representing innovative styles of management: Gore, Google, Whole Foods, and IDEO, all companies I describe at length in my book GROUP GENIUS.

Representing Gore was CEO Terri Kelly; Whole Foods, CEO John Mackey; and IDEO, CEO Tim Brown (in the photo). If you’ve read my book GROUP GENIUS you know that all of these companies represent a new sort of management technology, one that is designed to tap into the power of collaboration.

A high point of the event was when Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, answered questions from the audience about Google’s unique organizational culture (sitting at the right of Gary Hamel in the photo). I haven’t written as much about Google, simply because that company has been so widely reported in the media already; but, like Gore, IDEO, and Whole Foods, Google is a company that maximizes the collaborative potential of its employees.

“Inventing the Future of Management” was designed to be a beginning, so we didn’t come up with concrete advice so much as challenges, obstacles, and important issues. But I was delighted to see that the consensus emerging from this group is directly aligned with my message in GROUP GENIUS: that innovation can’t be forced in a command-and-control organizational design. Innovation always emerges from the bottom up, in teams that form spontaneously and interact improvisationally. In the future, we need organizations that enhance the power of collaboration, managers that facilitate the unpredictable creative work of everyone.

Attendees: Eric Abrahamson, Chris Argyris, Julian Birkinshaw, Tim Brown, Lowell Bryan, Bhaskar Chakravorti, Yves Does, Alex Ehrlich, Gary Hamel, Linda Hill, Jeffrey Hollander, Steve Jurvetson, Kevin Kelly, Terri Kelly, Ed Lawler, Andrew McAfee, John Mackey, Tom Malone, Marissa Mayer, Lenny Mendonca, Henry Mintzberg, Vineet Nayar, Jeff Pfeffer, C.K. Prahalad, J. Leighton Read, Keith Sawyer, Peter Senge, Rajendra Sisodia, Tom Stewart, Jim Surowiecki, Hal Varian, Steve Weber, David Wolfe, Shoshana Zuboff.

I’ve just returned from presenting a keynote address at a conference at the University of Padua, in Padua, Italy: the title of the conference was “Improvisation: Between Technique and Spontaneity.”  The core idea of the conference was that the tension between technique and spontaneity is found in just about all expert and professional activity.  Professionals are “experts” because they’ve mastered a large set of routines and “cookbook” solutions to problems.  But that, alone, isn’t enough.  To be a master, you have to be able to improvisationally respond to the unexpected, to weave new cloth out of known solutions and routines.

Jazz musicians know this better than just about everyone.  To play jazz at a high level requires years of hard work and practice.  It’s a myth that jazz improvisation means “anything goes”–the technique, the routines, the shared cultural norms and communication practices are what allow the genius of the group to exceed the brilliance of any one individual.  That’s why the Padua conference had a strong jazz emphasis.  And, unusual for an academic conference, it was collaboratively organized by three different departments: education, philosophy, and linguistic, communication, and performing arts (I know, that last department name is a mouthful!)

In my talk, I described how experienced teachers also blend technique and spontaneity in the classroom.  I cited research that has discovered that experienced teachers improvise more than novice teachers; but, paradoxically, they also have mastered more standard routines than novice teachers.  Professional expertise, like jazz improvisation, requires both mastery of standard solutions and routines as well as improvisational ability.

Other highlights of the conference included talks by Andy Hamilton (a philosopher at Durham University), Tord Gustavsen (an internationally known jazz pianist and now a doctoral student at Oslo University), and Frank Barrett (at the business school at the Naval Postgraduate University).  And later that night, the Tord Gustavsen trio performed to a sold-out crowd of 600 people in the beautiful Auditorium Pollini.

Thanks to Marina Santi, the lead organizer, for this wonderful event!

Innovation is the flavor of the month; has been for more than a few months now.  Organizational learning is another management trend–it refers to the ability of an organization to learn–to become more effective over time, to develop new knowledge and retain it to respond to future situations.  What both innovation and learning have in common is adaptability and improvisationality.

In an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Sloan Management Review, Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva studied organizations high in organizational learning capability (OLC) and identified five core features of high OLC companies: experimentation, risk taking, interaction with the external environment, dialogue and participative decision making.  This is fascinating because in my research, I’ve found that these five characteristics also hold true of organizations that use the power of collaboration to generate innovation.

(1) Experimentation, as defined by these authors, produces a flow of new ideas that challenge the established order.  (2) Risk taking is just what it sounds like: the tolerance for ambiguity and errors.  And as I’ve found, innovative organizations foster idea generation and tolerate failure.

(3) Interaction with the external environment is what I call “collaborating with customers” and is associated with innovative networks that I call collaborative webs in my book Group Genius.  Deborah Ancona, in her 2007 book X-Teams, has likewise discovered that successful teams have an outward focus, and strong social network ties with people outside of their team.

(4) Dialogue and (5) participative decision making are what I call improvisation–a style of communication and an organizational culture that is egalitarian, open to flows across status levels.  Improvisational organizations excel at a type of dialogue that opens up possibilities, a style of conversation in which new and unexpected ideas emerge.

I firmly believe that organizations high in learning ability are more likely to be innovative organizations, and I’m delighted to read of this fascinating study confirming the link.

I’ve just read an interesting academic paper by Pamela J. Hinds at Stanford.  It’s an experimental study that seems to show that if your company asks you to protect proprietary information, you might end up being less creative.

She took 69 undergraduates and asked them to imagine they worked for a company and that their goal was to “generate novel and marketable ideas for consumer-oriented information appliances” (like a toaster with a computer screen on it).  Theiy were told they’d then share their ideas with a task force containing people from many companies.  The best ideas would get a $25 bonus payment.  Before starting the task, she gave each of them a packet with eleven pieces of information about information appliances.

Then, she split them into two groups.  Half of the students were told that of the eleven pieces of information, four of them were proprietary and could not be used in the final suggestion–because, after all, that would be shared with the task force and other companies would have people on the task force.  The other half of the students were told all the information was public and they were allowed to use all eleven pieces of information.

Of the proprietary students, the average number of ideas they generated was 10.18, and of the
public students, the average was 7.54.  That seems to suggest that working with proprietary information makes you have fewer ideas.

Prof. Hinds then had all of the ideas rated for novelty and marketability by a product design engineer, on a scale of 1 to 5.  The average creativity rating of the proprietary students’ ideas was 3.54, and for the public ideas, 3.47–not a significant difference.  Finally, she compared the single highest rated idea for each student; and it turned out that the public students’ single best idea was more creative than the proprietary students.

The results are not dramatic but they are suggestive.  Prof. Hinds concludes by discussing the reasons why this might be the case.  It could be that suppressing the proprietary information is mentally demanding, and so interferes with idea generation.  Or, it could be that students in the proprietary condition perceive the task to be more constraining, feel that they have less autonomy, and thus their motivation to create declines.  Prof. Hinds is inclined to the first explanation, but further research is needed.

Hinds, P. J.  2000. The hidden cost of keeping secrets: How protecting proprietary information can inhibit creativity.  Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii Int’l Conference on Systems Science.

Apple’s corporate image is one of the creative iconoclast; their motto, “Think Different.” Their products look great. Artsy people like graphic designers, photographers, and film directors choose Apples.

Does the ad campaign work? Does the average person-in-the-street think of Apple computers as being more creative? A recent study done at Duke University’s Fuqua school of business provides some evidence that it does. This research has been all over the newspapers and even on NPR, so you may have already heard the take-home message: research subjects were shown an image of either Apple’s corporate logo or IBM’s corporate logo, and immediately afterwards they were given a creativity test. The subjects who’d seen the Apple logo scored higher on the creativity test. Ready-made message for news reporters: Apple really does make people “think different”. I’m sure Apple’s PR department was high-fiving over this free publicity!

But the details of the study haven’t been reported at all, and when you look at the details, the message is more complex. First of all, the test used to measure “creativity” has some problems; it’s from a research article published back in 1958, and all it asks is “think of as many unusual uses as possible for a brick.” (It’s called the “unusual uses test”.) This is a measure of what creativity researchers call “divergent thinking” and it isn’t really what most of us mean when we talk about creativity. And in fact, no studies have been able to prove that a higher score on divergent thinking tests translates into real-world creative output. Second, the difference between seeing Apple or IBM was very small. The 219 subjects who saw an Apple logo, on average, wrote down 7.68 uses; the 122 who saw IBM wrote down 6.10. When independent judges rated the creativity of the answers, Apple answers got a rating of 8.44, IBM answers a rating of 7.98. These differences were statistically significant, but it’s not hard for small differences to reach statistical significance when you have so many subjects; it’s well-known in psychological research that a greater number of subjects raises the significance of the finding. And furthermore, when the researchers added a third experimental condition–no brand logo shown at all–the Apple subjects did not score significantly higher than these “no brand” subjects (they still scored higher than IBM subjects, though).

The researchers later did another experiment where they first measured how much each subject valued creativity–how much they wanted to be creative. Those who scored low on this measure, who didn’t really want to be creative, showed no differences on the unusual uses test with either Apple or IBM logos. But those who scored highly showed a difference, coming up with about 8 unusual uses for the brick in the Apple condition, but just barely over 5 in the IBM condition, and just barely over 5 in the no-brand condition. (And, the independent judges rated the Apple uses as being the most creative of all three conditions.)

One final interesting fact about this study: in the first experiment, the Apple and IBM logos were flashed on the screen for only about 13 milliseconds, so briefly that no one was consciously aware they had seen the logo. This was a subliminal effect. In the second experiment, the one that asked about your motivation to be creative, the subjects actually saw (and manipulated) images of generic-looking computers, with either an Apple or IBM logo prominently displayed on the computer’s monitor (or no computers at all, in the no brand condition).

You know how your car always seems to run better after you take it to the car wash? Of course, it runs exactly the same as before you washed it. In the same way, when you use a product that you associate with creativity, you should feel more creative (even though you’re probably not). However, discovering that exposure to corporate logos changed their score on a test is intriguing. I wouldn’t call the “unusual uses test” a measure of creativity; but the experiment makes you wonder, nonetheless. Should Apple feel proud about the results of this research? The headline would be very different if it read “Staring at Apple computers helps you think of strange ways to use a brick.”

A long-awaited report on how to measure innovation in the U.S. economy has just been released by the U.S. Commerce Department. The report is called “Innovation Measurement: Tracking the State of Innovation in the 21^st Century Economy”. I first learned about this high-profile initiative last October; a press release revealed that a panel of CEOs and academics had met in Washington DC to discuss how to measure innovation in the U.S. economy. When I say “high profile” I mean folks like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Medtronic Chairman and CEO Art Collins, IBM CEO Samual Palmisano, and Harvard economist Dale Jorgenson.  The original press release said that the panel’s recommendations would be published in November; perhaps only an innovation junkie like me would be checking every week since then!

To measure the impact of innovation on the economy, analysts often use a measure called Total Factor Productivity (TFP). Any growth in TFP is assumed to result from innovation. Of course, the problem is that productivity could grow for other, non-innovation, reasons (for example, if existing innovations are diffused more broadly, TFP would grow even without new innovations). Other common measures of a country’s innovation have their own problems. You could count up the number of patents; but, patents alone don’t translate into successful innovation. You could count up the number of professionals working in R&D and university research labs; but as with patents, that’s a crude measure that doesn’t directly track successful innovation.

In the end, the panel’s report doesn’t tell us exactly what to do.  Panel member Ashis Arora, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon, said that “The current advisory panel did not opt to recommend an index, because there is no serious evidence on how different measures of innovation should be combined, either at the organizational level or at the aggregate national level.”  However, Commerce Secretary Gutierrez outlined a plan for moving forward: a better measure of the impact of high-tech goods and services (to be developed by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics); a better way to measure productivity increases that result from innovation investment (to be developed by the BEA); and new data collection efforts to measure the role of basic research (spearheaded by the National Science Foundation).

A longstanding problem has been getting different government agencies to share data with each other.  The stumbling block has always been confidentiality concerns.  Secretary Gutierrez announced his intention to work aggressively with the relevant agencies to try to find a way to share the relevant data while addressing confidentiality concerns.  That’s going to require working with a wide range of agencies including the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisors, the Census Bureau, and the Securities and Exchange Commission.  That’s a pretty tall order, but if that could happen it would result in a much better picture of national innovation.

Quote of the week:

“I don’t think people appreciate how much money, time and good technical research goes into what we do. Sometimes, people think the idea is the thing. I think the idea can be the easy part.” Dr. Darryle Schoepp, of Eli Lilly, in an interview about new drug development quoted in the New York Times (Sunday, February 24, 2008, Business section p. 10).

The annual Booz Allen Hamilton report on the world’s 1000 largest corporate R&D spenders has just been published.  As with previous BAH reports, the surprising finding is that the amount of R&D spending is not correlated with any financial measures of corporate performance.  It’s not how much you spend, it’s how you spend it.  In their analysis, Booz Allen found that the companies that get the most bang for their buck–what they call “high leverage innovators”–are the ones that integrate customers and users deeply in every stage of the innovation process.  These successful innovators involve customers in idea generation, in selecting the best ideas, and in refining and elaborating ideas.

For example, one company they interviewed, Parker Hannifin, reports that they require a lead user to be on every development team.  A second company, DeWitt (maker of professional power tools) has their engineers and marketers spend hours each week at construction job sites.  Once a prototype is ready, they take it straight out into the field, lend the prototype to the workers, and then check back in a week to find out how it worked out.

This finding reflects my own research finding: that companies that build collaborative webs with their customers are the most innovative (see Chapter 10 of my book Group Genius).  As I’ve found, it’s not good enough to simply do market research or focus tests.  Customers have to be deeply involved, participants in the internal conversation.

There’s one finding in the BAH report that conflicts with my own research: after interviewing a smaller subset of the 1000 companies (they don’t say how many, but it’s probably less than 20), they report that all of those companies interviewed used a tightly managed stage-gate process.  At each stage, approval to proceed was based on measurements of a variety of critical factors.  Frankly, to me that sounds like attempts to apply Six Sigma to the innovation process.  These are misguided and almost always kill innovation (see my previous blog posting).  I’d be very surprised if the most innovative companies were all doing this, so I wonder how representative the companies interviewed really are.

Thanks to Booz Allen Hamilton for providing this service each year!