Innovate Innovate Pt 2
by Margaret Heffernan

For some companies, the biggest problem they face is the challenge of coming up with great new business ideas. They struggle with the process, the people - even with the very idea that innovation is a business necessity. But for others, the creativity challenge is different. For these companies the real difficulty lies not in having new ideas - but in knowing which ones to pursue. Smart young start ups are usually overflowing with ideas and opportunities. But just as you can die of starvation, you can die from excess too.

Most of the companies I am involved with suffer from this problem. They have hundreds of new ideas for new products, new markets, new ways of articulating their core value. Because they're fairly democratic companies, ideas bubble up from everyone and everywhere: from the CEO to the receptionist, from engineers, marketers and family members. And very few of the ideas are downright bad. This is a nice problem to have but it is still a problem.

Few companies can afford to develop all of their ideas - and even those that can, I'd argue, should not, because creativity without focus is as bad as no creativity at all. The second software company I ran learned this lesson the hard way. One week we charged ahead in one direction; the next week, we added a market, the third week, we added some features, the fourth week we improved our tagline. Any one of these initiatives might have been smart, but there was no coherence when you put them together. That they all looked smart wasn't nearly good enough. The customers were confused - and so were the employees. For them, the business strategy started to look - and this is the most damning word in the software lexicon - random.We got no leverage across our initiatives. One did not lead to another. We cross collateralized nothing. We wore ourselves ragged without ever building momentum.

It's very hard to tell a bright, eager employee that their brilliant idea is brilliant - but you aren't going to do it. At best they will be discouraged, at worst disgruntled and political. Unless you have some litmus tests - which is what we eventually developed. To be worth our very limited time and resources, every new initiative had to go through a series of filters which ensured that it was coherent with the rest of the strategy, would build momentum, wouldn't take more than it delivered, and had some demonstrable grounding in market data. This had the great advantage that it depersonalized the decision-making but it also considerably sharpened those creative minds eager to contribute bright ideas. Nine times out of ten, if an idea didn't fly, they'd realize it before concluding their proposal. And then come back with something better. A lot of mystique surrounds creativity - but those who've worked in industries where creativity is a daily requirement learn at birth that imagination without discipline wastes everyone's time.

When I first moved to America, I worked for an interactive publishing company replete with clever people. It was called Vertigo Development Group because the founders thought that being a "Group" made us sound bigger than we were. Unfortunately it made us think bigger than we were too. We had a division for servicing corporate clients like Standard and Poor's and Pitney Bowes - blue chip clients any start up would give their eye teeth for. And another division making consumer products for managing your money, studying for exams or planning your career. But this was a company of just thirty people. We didn't have the resources to deliver well on one good idea - never mind a dozen. When I was put in charge of consumer products, I went to the CEO and urged him, to his astonishment, to close my division down. We were spread way too thin, with a million ideas but no depth. No one inside or outside the business knew what we stood for. No gains in one division helped the other. Small as we were, leverage and synergy proved elusive. After I left, the venture investors categorized the company as one of the living dead: enough creativity to stagger on without ever being able to surge ahead.

Eventually, painfully, I learned that it doesn't really matter what you focus on - just so long as you focus. While big old corporations struggle with seating arrangements, furniture, job titles and funky team names, the start up rarely finds the pursuit of creativity elusive. Instead, our holy grail has to be focus, focus, focus. We have to learn to say no with good reason and quickly. We have to be confident that killing one good idea doesn't mean others won't spring up. And, as much as we all love saying yes, we have to remember that every yes has a cost.

This article was originally published in Real Business magazine

© Margaret Heffernan, 2004

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