Slashdot Mirror
Should Failure Be Rewarded To Spur Innovation?
Lucas123 writes "Paper products maker Kimberly-Clark drove the morale of its IT infrastructure group into the ground after massive firings and outsourcing. When they hired a new VP of Infrastructure four years later to turn things around, he implemented a program to spur innovation. The VP took a venture capitalist approach where any employee could submit an idea and if accepted, make a pitch in 30 minutes or less. If the idea had merit, it received first, then second rounds of funding. If not, the employee's idea still got lauded on the company's internal Sharepoint site. As he puts it, 'Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. It's about what we learn from the failure. Not the failure itself. We celebrate that learning.'"
Until Morale Improves.
What they don't do is "rewarding failure". They hand out incentives for trying. Subtle differences between those two....
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
Hey, it takes hard work to get into the Hall Of Shame page on the company sharepoint. Not only do you need to shoot yourself in the foot, but you need to do so in public for everyone to see.
That moment you go for a cup of coffee and all the people around the watercooler stop talking, that's the moment you know they've seen the Hall Of Shame page. You should bask in the glory of your achievement at that moment.
Failure is its own reward IF YOU LEARN SOMETHING
If you don't, YOU DON'T DESERVE A REWARD
Sorry for massive caps, but I didn't feel bold or em are emphatic enough.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This guy's way of encouraging new ideas from the employees is a good one. But publishing the failures on a website runs the risk of the website becoming a 'wall of shame' instead of being seen as a reward for having presented the idea in the first place. It also runs the risk of having people submit ideas they know are ridiculous just so they can be given whatever reward comes for presenting an idea at all.
But otherwise his head is screwed on straight as far as I can tell. He's right, it's very difficult to create an organization that rewards new ideas. Almost everything in business is set against this. It's why so many big companies 'innovate' by acquisition. And punishing failure makes the problem worse.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The title of the slashdot posting missed the point entirely. The point is not to reward failure, but instead to accept it. Failure is an inherent part of moving forward, especially when it comes to innovation. You can't honestly expect every attempt to have a 100% success rate, and if you restrict all new efforts to those which you believe have almost no chance of failing...well, you won't be making many efforts at all. Does anyone remember how many people were skeptical about the first iPad, groaning about the price, about how it wasn't enough to be a computer (which you could also buy at the same cost) but wasn't able to serve as a phone? A failure-intolerant environment would have listened to those concerns, and the iPad never would have launched. And what a mistake THAT would have been..
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I'm supposed to be motivated by a mention on a sharepoint site?
Actually, yeah. Think of it this way: by sharing the idea publicly, there's opportunity to improve it. Just because it's not being developed now does not mean that there's no chance of it being developed tomorrow.
That may or may not have happened at Microsoft.
It is a repeat of a story that happened decades earlier at IBM, back when Watson was running the company. The hapless salesman had just cost the company MILLIONS of dollars, when millions of dollars was still real money. He expected to be fired. Supposedly, Watson said something like "I can't afford to fire you now, not after spending millions of dollars on your education!"
Upper management tends to consider itself enlightened, whereas tech are just low-level functionaries who could not possibly grasp the basics of budgeting and return on investment. They never trust, even their most senior and proven people, to come up with ideas which would benefit the company in the long run. If management can't see the benefit themselves, then there is no benefit and money should not be spent.
However, technicians have an important perspective on the company's needs which can only come from having your head down in the trenches. They see opportunities for gain that upper management cannot see, and will never see, despite their importance and reality. Furthermore, some of their technical agendas can't directly translate to numbers despite their real value.
Therefore, truly enlightened upper management will accept a measure of risk, devoting some development bandwidth to the ideas being put forth by their technicians, even though management doesn't quite understand the value. Its true that some of that money might get wasted, but the gains will more than offset the costs.
Unfortunately, such an attitude requires a level of respect and humility not generally found in corporate executives.
No, you are supposed to feel confident that the higher-ups like someone who takes a risk and pitches an idea, even if it doesn't pan out. That they'd rather someone take the risk and pitch their idea, rather than sit on it, thinking they would get laughed out of there and lose the respect of their bosses. The main goal is to remove the self-doubt.
You're simply short-sighted there. Someone can e.g. come up with more productive way of handling packaging, logistics, or even improving the paper itself. And it's not limited only there as someone can come up with whole new business idea to try out, a related but completely different product to produce.