We are the slaves of innovation. Every day we hear we don’t innovate enough, we don’t innovate in the right ways, we are being out-innovated by some other country, we forgot how to innovate, and we will soon die from lack of innovation. I grow anxious just thinking about the next Tom Friedman jeremiad.
Who's our daddy? Innovation.
Children in America used to want to become cowboys and Indians, doctors and firemen, astronauts and acrobats. Now they want to become entrepreneurs and innovators. They are told they must change the world, often before they enter it.
Make no mistake, I think innovation is THE thing in the 21st century. But our relentless infatuation with it--our need to force it upon each and every living being--is mindless and destructive.
My Innovative Napkin
I was sitting the other day, wishing I had a napkin because I read somewhere that napkins--which used to be an exceptionally good way to wipe your lips--have now become an exceptionally good way to innovate. Much to my luck, I found one, and this is what I drew:
Who's our daddy? Innovation.
Children in America used to want to become cowboys and Indians, doctors and firemen, astronauts and acrobats. Now they want to become entrepreneurs and innovators. They are told they must change the world, often before they enter it.
Make no mistake, I think innovation is THE thing in the 21st century. But our relentless infatuation with it--our need to force it upon each and every living being--is mindless and destructive.
My Innovative Napkin
I was sitting the other day, wishing I had a napkin because I read somewhere that napkins--which used to be an exceptionally good way to wipe your lips--have now become an exceptionally good way to innovate. Much to my luck, I found one, and this is what I drew:
Observation 1: We Really Don’t Want 90% of the Population Innovating
Really.
It’s not because they can’t do it well, though that’s possible too. It’s just that innovation can cause great damage to the things we love. To the guy making the fries at McDonalds or the pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks: Don’t innovate. To the person building the next lot of iPhones from which I’ll be purchasing one: Please don’t innovate. To my tax accountant: Do Not innovate. The mechanic fixing my car. The pilot flying my plane. To the fine people at Apple: For goodness sake, stop sending me updates and new operating systems. I hate em. Just when I get everything the way I like, you innovate me into something that costs me two hours at the Apple Bar. Where, incidentally, I want zero innovation from your hip kids in blue shirts. Just follow the FAQs and fix my iPad.
This is how the world in which I live seems to work: The people who are good at innovation will innovate whether we like it or not, and then hand their ideas over to everyone else to faithfully execute. That means, for most people, doing what they’re told, following instructions and being consistent. You don’t get Six Sigma quality by everyone innovating everyday, believe you me. The more consistent someone is at booking ARs and APs, sourcing raw materials, checking for a bad resistor on a circuit board, servicing my car, drilling my teeth, obeying traffic laws and providing my home with gas and electricity--the more successful we all are.
When we complain that schools are not teaching our kids to innovate, I say: Bravo! People who can innovate will always find ways to innovate, while most of the rest of us need a serious tutorial in how to follow directions. Show up on time. Do our jobs. That’s not something that comes naturally for many human beings.
There’s nothing less intelligent or inferior about people who practice consistency.
Consistency takes extraordinary talent, just like innovation. Want to go to a symphony where the violinists innovate? Want to be operated on by a surgeon who innovates? How about if your automobile mechanic innovates a little when he replaces your brake system? Want your local minister to innovate the Lord’s Prayer from week to week? How about when a policeman pulls you over--want any innovation then? For that matter, do you want your beloved spouse doing ANYTHING at all, ever, innovative in public?
We have made innovation glamorous and consistency somehow mundane and less worthwhile. That’s our fault, not the fault of talented people whose consistency, attention to order, willingness to show up all the time and insistence on a little good ol' tradition improves our lives.
You say the Japanese miracle of the 1970s was about innovation. I say it was about consistency. We're both right. But, if you’re the doctor about to perform my colonoscopy, it would be my fondest hope that you colored within the lines in kindergarten. Trust me when I say I value your consistency far more than I value the innovation coming in Quicken 2012.
Observation 2: The Pressure to Innovate Is a Huge Drain on the Economy
To everything there is a season. Products. Companies. Billion dollar ideas.
Take Microsoft, for example. Their operating system was one of the grand inventions of the 20th century. It continues to be a massive profit center. But its time on earth is coming to an end and when it does, we won’t need it any more. We’ll be happy we had it, just like we were once happy we had the telegraph, but we won’t sit and mourn about its loss every day.
Not so Microsoft, which is forced by its investors and the pressures of its share price to grow, create new products, and try to change the traditional shape of the product life cycle. How does it do this? It innovates. That gives us Bing, which is fine (but we really don’t need), and X-box (ditto), and recently a great new smartphone (which we absolutely do not need). How much money has Microsoft invested in unnecessary innovation? They’re not innovating because they have identified really essential new problems to solve; they’re innovating because investors, Wall Street and their management team are watching their brilliant operating system, followed by their company, go the way of the telegraph.
I have great admiration for many of the things that Microsoft does and did, but I don’t think they’re adding much value by giving me a new search engine. I’ve already got one of those.
Now, visit the other end of the spectrum by sitting with a venture capitalist for a while. Do you know how many truly awful business plans they have to suffer through to find a few good ones? There are all these folks running around with presumably innovative ideas, not drawing a living salary or learning any new skills or having experiences that matter or contributing in any real way to the economy--all in the name of innovation. They've earned degrees in “Entrepreneurship” or been told--like our children--that their job is to change the world--be the next Google or Facebook or Apple. It’s patently unfair to them, and to all of us (who are now forgiving their student loans).
I was a judge at a business plan competition last year and one of my fellow judges essentially told two of the three finalists to go find a job, learn something useful, and once you’ve done that, then decide if something is worth innovating. Until then, you’re wasting your time.
Imagine how much stronger this country would be if smart, young, underemployed folks with stupid business plans were actually creating value instead of trying to get funding to build new apps.
Observation 2: The Pressure to Innovate Is a Huge Drain on the Economy
To everything there is a season. Products. Companies. Billion dollar ideas.
Take Microsoft, for example. Their operating system was one of the grand inventions of the 20th century. It continues to be a massive profit center. But its time on earth is coming to an end and when it does, we won’t need it any more. We’ll be happy we had it, just like we were once happy we had the telegraph, but we won’t sit and mourn about its loss every day.
Not so Microsoft, which is forced by its investors and the pressures of its share price to grow, create new products, and try to change the traditional shape of the product life cycle. How does it do this? It innovates. That gives us Bing, which is fine (but we really don’t need), and X-box (ditto), and recently a great new smartphone (which we absolutely do not need). How much money has Microsoft invested in unnecessary innovation? They’re not innovating because they have identified really essential new problems to solve; they’re innovating because investors, Wall Street and their management team are watching their brilliant operating system, followed by their company, go the way of the telegraph.
I have great admiration for many of the things that Microsoft does and did, but I don’t think they’re adding much value by giving me a new search engine. I’ve already got one of those.Now, visit the other end of the spectrum by sitting with a venture capitalist for a while. Do you know how many truly awful business plans they have to suffer through to find a few good ones? There are all these folks running around with presumably innovative ideas, not drawing a living salary or learning any new skills or having experiences that matter or contributing in any real way to the economy--all in the name of innovation. They've earned degrees in “Entrepreneurship” or been told--like our children--that their job is to change the world--be the next Google or Facebook or Apple. It’s patently unfair to them, and to all of us (who are now forgiving their student loans).
I was a judge at a business plan competition last year and one of my fellow judges essentially told two of the three finalists to go find a job, learn something useful, and once you’ve done that, then decide if something is worth innovating. Until then, you’re wasting your time.
Imagine how much stronger this country would be if smart, young, underemployed folks with stupid business plans were actually creating value instead of trying to get funding to build new apps.
Observation 3: We Model Ourselves After People at the Edge of the Innovation Bell Curve
When we study innovation we inevitably focus on Big. That’s what sells books and magazines. First, there’s Big and Good. Steve Jobs and Apple conceived the Mac, iTunes and the iPad and then delivered them. That’s Big and Good. Bill Gates intentionally created a universal operating system. Big and Good. Henry Ford got cars on the road and Edison electricity to your home. Really Big. Really Good.
We can erect statues to these innovators, but frankly, they are so far out on the bell curve that most of us have to climb the hump just to see them on the far horizon.
Trying to innovate like them would be like modeling your tennis game after Rafael Nadal.
Side by side with Big and Good, but even worse, there’s Big and Lucky. Google and Facebook are poster children. One was trying to write algorithms and the other pick-up girls (I can never remember for the life of me which is which), but I do know neither intentionally intended to build the defining business models of the 21st century.
We’re so head-over-heels that we sometimes get all these Big characters mixed up, like when some magazine asks if Mark Zuckerberg will be the next Steve Jobs. That’s like asking, as my friend Jim might say, if you’re going to drive to work or bring your lunch. It is a question based on a stunning confusion about how innovation works.
For a young person to aspire to have the success of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg is laudable, but to model their actions--to “innovate” the way either did--seems to me to be a complete waste of time. Unless you have an IQ of 250 and an ego the size of Montana. Or you expect to get struck by lighting.
(Just a time-out here to say: Let's hope with all our hearts that Aaron Sorkin gets to write the screenplay on the Steve Jobs movie.)
We’re focused incessantly on the kinds of innovation that do us little good to study and are--for most of us sitting in the middle of the bell curve--beyond our slope.
The Rest of Us: When the Commoners Innovate
All of which leaves the rest of us--those who don’t have Big Ideas and aren’t cosmically Lucky but still are expected to innovate. We ain’t young, and never were very good looking--but here we are, trapped right at the pot belly of the innovation bell curve.
Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right, here I am. Stuck in the middle with you.
The next post, Part 2, is for you.
We’re focused incessantly on the kinds of innovation that do us little good to study and are--for most of us sitting in the middle of the bell curve--beyond our slope.
The Rest of Us: When the Commoners Innovate
All of which leaves the rest of us--those who don’t have Big Ideas and aren’t cosmically Lucky but still are expected to innovate. We ain’t young, and never were very good looking--but here we are, trapped right at the pot belly of the innovation bell curve.
Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right, here I am. Stuck in the middle with you.
The next post, Part 2, is for you.
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