“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit”

There is a saying, kind of a crude little formula, I have been using for years when I write and give talks on what it takes to build a culture where people innovate routinely (which I think I stole from Charles O'Reilly at the Stanford Business School):

Creativity + Implementation = Innovation

I have always found it a useful oversimplification of the two big things that have to happen in order to innovate, to cash in on new ideas. It is also related to one of the main ideas in Weird Ideas That Work, that creativity is about increasing the amount of variation and all around messiness and routine work is about driving out variance and driving in order and predictability.

In this spirit, one of the student groups in my class at Stanford on "Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach," did a fantastic case study of the culture of innovation at Lunar Design. The members were Ioannis Alivizatos, Meeta Arora, Stephen Streeter, and Ben Merrick. They heard the quote in the title of this post from John Edson (pictured above), Lunar is a product design firm that has designed many familiar products including the HP Touchsmart, the Oral B CrossAction toothbrush, and the Modu phone. I think that "“From Chaos Comes Creativity, from Order Comes Profit” conveys a similar message to the one I borrowed from Charles – that the messiness and failure required to generate a new idea needs to be shut-off as you move into the implementation phase, where more control and order are required. Knowing how and when to make that shift is tough, although the best firms and bosses make it happen routinely. For example, Intel’s motto “disagree and then commit” reflects this spirit – you fight during the creative part, but join arms to make the idea work during the implementation part, even if you think the decision was wrong.

P.S. And following my recent post about failure on my personal blog, I also liked how a key element of their culture was that, when people made mistakes, they framed it as "Paying for education."