Why Your Boss Will Crush Your Innovative Ideas (bbc.com)

dryriver writes: BBC Capital explores why good ideas people have in the workplace almost never reach the top decision-makers in a company. From the report: "Surely you've heard the plea from on high at your company: we want more innovation, from everyone at every level. Your boss might even agree with the sentiment -- because, of course, who doesn't like innovation? It's good for everyone, right? Yet when it comes to innovating at your job it might be better to lower your expectations -- and then some. Your idea is far more likely to die on your boss's desk than it is to reach the CEO. It's not that top managers don't want new ideas. Rather, it's the people around you -- your colleagues, your manager -- who are unlikely to bend toward change. Today, big companies that don't innovate face extinction. 'Companies are almost forced to say that they are changing these days,' says Lynn Isabella, professor of organizational behavior at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in the U.S. But, 'it's not organizations that resist change; people resist,' says Isabella. 'The people have to see what's in it for them.'" As mentioned in the report, some of the key questions that the people whom you pitch your ideas to will ask themselves include, what does this innovation mean for me personally -- will it be more challenging or will it lead to more career opportunities, and what will it mean for my job -- will I get fired or will it be (or was it) worth it? Many times the answers to these questions don't stack up in favor of the innovation, Isabella says. As a result, the people who need to buy in don't push for change.

Comments

Re:Well no fuckin shit

[ShanghaiBill]

At my company, the CEO announced a monthly contest, with an award of $100, for the best idea to cut costs or improve efficiency. The first month, the $100 went a woman whose idea was to reduce the award to $50.

Change is dangerous

[JoeMerchant]

If you work at a profitable company, change is dangerous. The way that things were done before led to the current profitable state, any significant change risks upsetting that magic apple cart that nobody really fully understands how to build up again in the current environment, so don't do anything that might risk my next quarterly bonus, right?

If you work at an unprofitable company, that's not sustainable, innovate all you like, without a minor miracle (which will have little or nothing to do with any "innovative idea" and everything to do with external forces beyond the company's control) you'll be getting your layoff notice soon enough.

Re:Change is dangerous

[Comrade Ogilvy]

Indeed.

It is a matter of how expectations are set, and thus the bonus incentives to the managers. Profitable companies have their cash cows and those are usually somewhat mature products. Managers are expected to reliably improve those products... or else. Most truly innovative ideas fail. The managers are incentivized to avoid ideas that are likely to fail. Thus throttling big innovative ideas is entirely rational -- they are literally getting paid to do so.

That is why startups work. They can have a business model that accepts a 90% chance of outright failure, if the payout for success is sufficiently high.

In theory, a profitable company could have a "skunk works" division that does its wild innovations in an appropriate business model for that kind of work. Few CEOs have the courage to maintain such a division long enough to build a track record, when it could easily be axed to cut costs and make that next quarter bonus.

Re:Change is dangerous

[Darinbob]

We got new upper management. All about change. They even bad mouth the big legacy products that built the company up and is still the source of the profits that give the execs their jobs. I wish they would sit and see reality for a moment instead of chasing the latest fad.

But even before they came on board some groups were resistant to change but others were trying to change things all the time. Most change though doesn't come up from the ground upwards. It comes from sales where they promised a feature to customers that doesn't exist yet.

Resistance to change is practical too. We have a job that we have to do; we've promised to customers and have a contract, if we don't deliver it we pay a penalty. That means you can't go and steal 5 of my workers for your new amazing project. Everyone's short handed and multitasking constantly. So someone says "we need to stop what we're doing and do X" and it won't be met with applause. Or the idea just gets put onto the back burner to fizzle out because literally everything else has higher priority.

Re:Change is dangerous

[TheRaven64]

Profitable companies have their cash cows and those are usually somewhat mature products

This also makes it very difficult to make an innovative change that disrupts that market. There's a story of some SGI engineers approaching their managers with a design for a cut-down version of SGI's graphics processor that they could make for a tenth the price of the workstation model and which would get almost half the performance. They said they could stick it on a PCI card and sell it to a few orders of magnitude more customers. Management said no, because it would cannibalise the workstation market: who'd buy an SGI workstation when you could get a commodity PC with a comparatively cheap expansion card and get similar ballpark performance? The engineers left and joined a new startup called nVidia. The managers were exactly right in one respect: Cheap GPUs did kill the proprietary graphics workstation market. They were wrong in assuming that if they didn't do something then no one else would.

Many of the successful large companies have, at least once, been willing to say 'well, most of our profit comes from here, but that's a market that someone is going to disrupt soon, we'd better do it before the competition' and launch a product that kills one of their revenue streams. IBM did this accidentally with the PC. Apple did this with the iPhone (remember when a huge chunk of their revenue came from the iPod? Now who would buy an iPod when any mobile phone works fine as a portable music player).

Innovations run the company into the ground

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of what passes for "innovation" these days is really just illusion. We're better off without "innovations" like Uber, for example. The fundamentals of Uber are flawed, but their illusory "innovations" keep investors happy. Nevertheless, the fundamentals can't be ignored forever...

Re:Innovations run the company into the ground

[fluffernutter]

You hit the nail on the head when you said "keep investors happy". Everyone says that consumer dollars should be the motivating force in capitalism, but it's not. It's shareholders running the show.

Re:Innovations run the company into the ground

[rtb61]

No it is all as shallow as fuck. If they can steal the idea from employees and claim it as their own and it makes them a lot of money, it goes ahead. If they can not steal the idea at the moment, they crush the idea and then try to steal it in the future and throw in so bullshit refinement and claim it as their own. If they can not generate enough money from the idea personally, the kill the idea, steal it and then create a new company built around it. If they can not profit from the idea, they kill the idea, then present a bargain to a competitor, who takes over and then announces the idea as their own. They also will temporarily bury ideas so they can up their shares and basically insider trade on the new idea.

Psychopath corporate executives only ever work for themselves and they will steal from investors, steal from other executives, steal from staff, steal from customers and steal from the societies as a whole.

How many executives demonstrate the peter principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Lie, cheat and steal to the top, fuck it all up and disappear with a golden parachute. Just look at the M&M and Yahoo, lots bullshit and then failure. Only plan, making remote workers come into the office so she could steal their ideas and claim them as her own. Typical corporate executive business practice. That those ass hats are exceptional is just corporate executive marketing via corporate promoting main stream media because it is all about their ego.

So True.

[gurps_npc]

If you want real innovation, you need to have the person who is really doing the asking do the vetting directly, or hire an outside consultant to do it.

Lets say you come up with a great idea. It will cut your work load in half, effectively letting half the people do the same work. Assume that means your department is given slightly more work - but not double. So your boss changes his plans to hire two more people to instead fire one person. But he won't get the credit for saving the money, you do. And your boss's salary and power are based on how much money his department spends.

Best case senario, you get promoted. You are now directly competeing with your old boss. After he lost one of his best employee (as you came up with this great idea).

Worst case scenario, the idea fails.

Why would your boss promote your innovation? No incentive.

All ideas are not good ideas

[belthize]

I despise the new MBA management style that all ideas have merit or that there are no stupid questions.

In my experience many of the people I've run across who complain that the company managers (or me when I was in that position) don't respect their ideas don't realize that their ideas are crap. They typically have a very myopic view of what the company does, what it needs or what constitutes a good idea. They have no real concept of risk, logistics, development overhead, basic physics, human nature or a slew of other issues. Their ideas can be frequently characterized as 'wouldn't be cool if'.

I rose through the ranks with a GED and no college education in an environment dominated by PhDs by having what turned out to be good ideas.

So sure, in some environments, good ideas are squashed by pointy haired bosses, but many times it's just a dumb idea.

Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Innovation is bullshit. Do your job, do it well, and explain to all your barely competent peers how to imitate your behaviors. 80% of wasted potential at work is because people don't know even 20% of what they should. Low hanging fruit, people.

The only good reason to "innovate" is to convince some dope you need a charge number to use for jerking off in the supply closet.

That, or if you are the kind that likes playing office politics and you think you can make some other asshole lose face by making their work seem trivial. Appearance is everything here, substance is nothing. The ideal outcome is that you and your enemy know it's bullshit, but everybody else thinks it's brilliant and your enemy is forced to implement your sabotage or be seen as "not a team player".

Systems

[roman_mir]

First thing you have to realise is that Systems Exist.
Systems follow very specific laws. The first Law of Systems is that all Systems follow the Law of Self Preservation. The second Law of Systems is that all Systems Fight Against Change within themselves. Systems follow the Law of Structural Conformity. Systems follow the Law of Growth and Development.

1. Systems Exist.
2. Systems Preserve Themselves.
3. Systems Fight Against Change Within.
4. Systems Ensure Structural Conformity.
5. Systems Grow and Develop.

All of these laws of Systems exist only to protect the Systems from being destroyed. Systems do not care about innovation or quality, they care to grow, to protect themselves from change that can cause self destruction, they ensure that all of their internal structures are organized to ensure self preservation, they grow just to become bigger and to have a better chance of survival.

Once you understand this you will understand why it is obvious and expected that systems prevent any type of innovation coming from individuals within the system.

It is also important to understand one more thing: when systems cannot cope with something, they stop it, they may destroy it, but if the fundamentals upon which the system relies are themselves flawed, the system reliance on those fundamentals also makes those systems ultimately vulnerable to destruction.

Re: Well no fuckin shit

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of the ideas workers submit which they claim are "innovative".... aren't. Usually it's completely pointless and has no benefit and quite frequently has drawbacks. Much of the time it's already been tried and failed.

Ideas are cheap and readily available. Good ideas are not.

Ideas are a dime a dozen

[Tony Isaac]

It's execution that's hard. Sure, the person on the shop floor or in the cube farm might have an idea that seems great, but making that idea happen politically within the organization is very, very hard. People don't like change. That "good" idea might be somebody else's worst nightmare, and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep it from happening. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just reality. That's why people who CAN change things become the leaders.

Sounds dysfunctional

[mattwarden]

Did they use only dysfunctional large orgs for their research? Many ideas "die on my desk" because they don't make sense. And it's not the idea generator's fault; he or she has a more narrow viewport into the business's operations and strategy. It's important to shoot bad ideas down in the right way, though, because 1 in 20 will be brilliant, and another 5 might cause you to think about something related that could work. So you don't want to discourage innovative people, which is naturally what you would end up doing if you're shooting down 19 out of 20 ideas.

The other thing I think is weird about this article is that the biggest problem with ideas is change management, and the biggest problem with change management is rallying the rank and file behind it. It's great to have this cool new flavor of agile that everyone should use, and I might agree with you, but how do we roll that out and get everyone to buy in? And how many such things can we roll out until people get tired of change? It's great to beat up management for "ignoring" ideas, but I think it let's the largest % of the company off the hook for being perennially resistant to change.

Innovation is stupid

[wakeboarder]

Lets be honest, most of our innovative ideas are pure tripe. Why? Because it needs to be good for everyone, you, your department, the company and the customers. How many ideas are going to be good ideas for everyone, not many.

Re: Be careful with "your" innovative ideas.

[goose-incarnated]

Better to say "I've done this in the past, and have a working version" or "I've got a demo at home".

Stupid - if it is already done by yourself and exists (even prior to you joining the company), then the company will simply claim it. Fighting for ownership of a product, even with overwhelming evidence on your side, will cost more money that you make in a year. Add to this the fact that you'll be unemployed while fighting for ownership.

Don't be stupid, be smart - if you have already created a product (or parts of one) then don't offer it to your company (don't even let them know it exists), simply leave and start your own company.

Look at yourselves

[jandersen]

The mindset expressed in the posting here is a perfect illustration of exactly what is the article's main point: the all-out negative attitude that pervades the teams at floor-level; and, may I add, this is particularly common among SW engineers, believe it or not. I think we all imagine that we are clever and sometimes inspired thinkers who are excited about new technology and new ways of doing things - but are we really? I have seen it again and again: any article that tries to present a new insight to /. seems to be met with this hailstorm of negative comments, and I see it here again. There's the comments along the lines of "This is [obscenity of choice] obvious, what a load of shit", and the "Most [obscenity of choice] idiots who think they are so [obscenity of choice] clever are just [obscenity of choice] idiots" as well as the usual N-step list of reasons why it is never going to work (which is marked "5 insightful", of course).

This article is in fact rather well written, and I think the reason it receives so much negativity here is exactly because it hits too close to home for many people: You it is true, and most of us are almost instictively against anything new, however much we pride ourselves of being the opposite. That includes myself, I have to say, but I try to be conscious about it from time to time, and try to be open minded. In Denmark we call this mindset "the Law of Jante" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante); Terry Pratchett calls it "the crab bucket" (in Unseen Academicals, if you want to check) - the explanation being that if you observe a bucket full of crabs, you will see that some times one will start climbing out, and then the others grabs it and pulls it back down. "Don't think you are cleverer than us".

Can't you see it? People around you can't find the way out of the bucket, but they sure can stop you from escaping the misery and a future in which you are all dumped into boiling water. This is one of the main reasons why people hate going to work, and why innovation only ever happens if the company buys up another company that has already developed the innovation; but it does not have to be like that. This is one of the admittedly few occasions where the blame doesn't fall on incompetent management, but on yourself and the people around you; that means that it ought to be something we can actually change, by a change of attitude.

glad, or lucky?

[haphaeu]

jeez, so many negative comments in this thread. I wish I knew better about your jobs, to make sure I never get one of these. I must say we have a positive environment towards innovation. We have a constant program that qualifies ideas and supports the good ones with a budget. The thing is, a rough feeling of a "brilliant" idea os not enough. You have to work on it yourself, and prove that it is worth investing on it. Then you get it a few hours to mature your idea and make a plan. Passing that, you can get more hours and maybe even a small team to work (part time) on that, And so on. In practice, we always have some one doing some kind of innovation. After working with this for years, having spent myself quite a few hundreds of hours in these projects, even with a team, I must say that the largest barrier for this is the people having the ideas. Most of the people don't seem to give a damn about this program and rather sit in their desks doing the same old job, and please don't suggest any changes, right? But gladly I can say yes, people having good ideas are heard and supported.

Simple answer....

[billybiro]

This is simply and succinctly explained in this cartoon, Safe Is Risky, from 2014.

In a nutshell:

Organizations can spot the risks of a new idea a mile away. But there’s a curious blind spot when it comes to the risks of not taking those risks. The path of least resistance is to play it safe and keep the idea as close to the tried-and-true as possible. We just need to ask Polaroid how that strategy works in the long run.

Executives and entrepreneurs face two very different sorts of risks. One is that their organization will make a bold move that failed — a risk they call ‘sinking the ship.’ The other is that their organization will fail to make a bold move that would have succeeded — a risk they call ‘missing the boat.’

Naturally, most executives worry more about sinking the boat than missing the boat, which is why so many organizations, even in flush times, are so cautious and conservative.

Re:Well no fuckin shit

[FeelGood314]

A very large company I worked for had this for about 3 months and the reward was a percentage of the money you saved the company. It was well thought out and ideas were all considered. The first 3 winners were secretaries of senior management and all their ideas were ones that senior management should have already implemented. The program was then canceled and I think the secretaries got screwed out of the percentage they saved.

Some managers consciously know that

[Xamusk]

On one interview, a manager actually told me that I wasn't fit for the job because I was too innovative. They were looking for people to do more of the same, even if they had a lot of room for improvement, they didn't want it.

A more optimistic viewpoint

[maiden_taiwan]

I work for a company that's reasonably large (8000+ people) and is consistently profitable, and we prize and celebrate innovation. People are encouraged to try out ideas quickly and if they fail, at least they failed fast. We have an intranet website where people post their successes and learnings. I personally know many coworkers who came up with ideas, implemented them, and made money for the company.

I am a technical manager of a team that specializes in automating manual processes and eliminating waste. I very intentionally leave room for my direct reports to innovate. If they come to me with an idea -- this is a critical point -- I treat my opinion as a HYPOTHESIS, not as absolute truth. After all, I am just guessing whether their idea will work or not. I'd rather have them build a minimum viable example to get some empirical evidence if their idea will work or not.

If I think their idea has no chance whatsoever of succeeding, I'll put forward my objections and see if they have good answers for them. This discussion is important. Sometimes they show me I am wrong, which is fine with me. (Nobody's perfect.) Other times my objections spur them to come up with a more robust idea.

Anyway, not all companies are pits of innovation death.

Evaluation

[BuckB]

On one of my early evaluations, I got a "too creative" comment. Now I just use my creativity on Easter Eggs that the bosses don't see.