Weird Ideas That Work Quotes

“variance in people, knowledge, activities, and organizational structures is crucial to creativity and innovation.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“variation leads to excellence in social systems,”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“managers continue to use methods that force people to see old things in old ways, expecting new and profitable ideas somehow to magically appear.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“The question is not what you look at, but what you see. —Henry David Thoreau”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk. —Thomas Edison”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Most companies interview candidates something like this: An untrained interviewer leads a job candidate through an unstructured, unplanned conversation. No record is kept of what questions were asked or answered, and the person who ultimately makes the decision to hire the person—or not—sometimes has only a dim understanding of the job skills needed. Despite these flaws, the interviewer has great confidence that he or she can distinguish between good and bad candidates. Unfortunately, research shows that job interviewing is a lot like driving, where 90 percent of adult drivers report that they have “above average” skills.2 The truth is that the typical interviewer learns little useful information for predicting job performance beyond what is available on the applicant’s job application and résumé.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Last year, I was teaching a group of executives who were arguing about whether it was possible to do creative work with people who had poor social skills and who preferred to work alone. One executive from a computer hardware firm squirmed and turned red, finally blurting out, “These are exactly the kind of people I manage.” He went on to say: They hide in their offices, and don’t come out. We divide the work so they each have a separate part. We slide their assignment under the door and run away. They ignore us when we tell them it is good enough—they won’t let us build it until it meets their standards for elegant designs—they don’t care what we think.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Nolan Bushnell, the founder and former CEO of the Atari Corporation, remarks that “sometimes the best engineers come in bodies that can’t talk,”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“The rationalization that “too much had been invested to quit” led to decisions to waste even more money. Staw and Ross have developed guidelines for avoiding such situations. The most important one is that people who are responsible for starting some project or company, and who have made public statements saying they are committed to it and it is destined to succeed, should not be involved in deciding its fate. Projects need to be structured so that separate groups make decisions about starting and stopping. This is why most banks use one group to sell loans and a different group to decide whether to pull the plug on troubled loans.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“William Coyne, former head of research and development at 3M, tells how a human resource manager once threatened to fire a scientist who was asleep under his bench. Coyne took the HR manager to 3M’s “Wall of Patents” to show him that the sleeping scientist had developed some of 3M’s most profitable products. Coyne advised, “Next time you see him asleep, get him a pillow.”3 Unfortunately, not all executives are so wise.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“My next suggestion for breaking from the past is perhaps the strangest: Use a random process to generate and select decision alternatives. Sometimes it is better to ignore the traditional decision-making process, where people spend a great deal of time comparing the pros and cons of each alternative. Writers from Benjamin Franklin to modern decision theorists have shown how, by decomposing a complex problem into simpler elements, the problem as a whole can be better understood, and better decisions can be made. As one team of researchers put it,“the terms decision theory and decision analysis describe a myriad of theoretical formulations; an assumption made by most of these approaches is that decisions are best made deliberately, objectively, and with reflection.”26 But these methods, while effective, have a troubling limitation: No matter how hard people try not to think about their past experiences, irrational prejudices, and personal preferences, much research shows that these and a host of other biases have powerful effects. These biases shape—in often suboptimal ways—which decision alternatives are generated, which decision criteria are applied, and which decisions are ultimately made and implemented.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Recall that it is hard to change behavior when it becomes ingrained and mindless. Also recall that “mere exposure” research shows that people will have positive reactions to anything familiar and negative reactions to anything unfamiliar. The longer a group has been together, the stronger these forces become. What happens inside the group becomes increasingly familiar to members, while what outsiders do seems less familiar or interesting. As time passes, motivation, experimentation, and learning may diminish so gradually that no one on the team realizes that these changes are actually taking place.22 To make matters worse, I’ve noticed that after a group of people have been together for a long time, they spend more and more time talking about things outside of work—their families, sports, hobbies, and so on—and less and less time talking about their work. After all, they don’t really think about the work; they have decided who in the group is good at what, and they don’t feel compelled to waste time talking with outsiders, so they have plenty of time to talk with their pals about other things!”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“During the early stages of a project, don’t study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“A similar method was used by the late Carnegie Mellon psychology professor Herbert Simon. He won the Nobel Prize in economics, was one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and is widely regarded as among the most imaginative and productive behavioral scientists of all time. Simon didn’t read newspapers or watch television to get news. He said that when something important happened, people always told him, so it was a waste of time. Simon even made this point in a speech he gave to the National Association of Newspaper Editors, who were not amused. “I’ve saved an enormous amount of time since 1934, when I cast my first vote,” Simon told them, and he went on to say, it had left him more time to focus on his research.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“An assumption runs throughout much of this chapter—indeed, throughout much of this book—that many new ideas are generated by people who are seen as deviants within their companies, industries, and societies. Apple Computer’s simple slogan, “Think Different,” captures this perspective well. Unfortunately, thinking and acting differently is given lipservice in most companies, but when people actually do it, they are ignored, humiliated, and fired. If you really do want to encourage people to develop ideas that will be seen as dumb and impractical, I have one more piece of advice: Outlaw even light-hearted ridicule and put-downs when people suggest these wacky ideas.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“GETTING STUPID CAN BE a mighty smart thing to do if you want to build an innovative company. Thinking up the dumbest, most ridiculous, and most impractical things you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. It helps elicit what you know and believe but may have a hard time articulating, perhaps because it is so obvious you don’t even notice it. It also helps you imagine what might happen if your dearest beliefs turn out to be dead wrong. And thinking up the most ridiculous things you can do—and then thinking about why you might do them—creates a broader palette of options. This weird idea works because it sparks two essential forces for constant innovation: variance and vu ja de.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Focus on “pulling the plug” on failed ideas more quickly, not on reducing your failure rate.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“In short, if you want innovation in your company, you need to reward people for taking intelligent action, not just for talking about the virtues of failure, experimentation, or risk taking. It might not even be enough to give equal rewards for success and intelligent failures. The excessive value that our culture places on success means that people who succeed may still get more kudos than they deserve from peers and outsiders, and those who fail may get more blame than they deserve. To offset this bias, perhaps this weird idea should be “Reward failure even more than success, and punish inaction.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Be wary when people tell you that they don’t produce a lot, but when they do, it will be “brilliant.” Remember that innovation is largely a function of productivity.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Jeffrey Pfeffer and I found that many ineffective companies suffer from this disease, which we call the “smart talk trap.”17 This a syndrome where companies hire, reward, and promote people for sounding smart rather than making sure that smart things are done. In such organizations, talking somehow becomes an acceptable—even a preferred— substitute for actually doing anything. Inaction is bad for any company. But it is especially devastating when innovation is the goal, because so many ideas need to be tried to find a few that might work.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“As they say at Netscape cofounder Marc Andrerssen’s new company, Loudcloud, the goal is to keep making new mistakes, rather than to make the same mistakes over and over again.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do it by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. . . . The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!3 —Dean Keith Simonton, researcher, summarizing academic studies on individual creativity”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Many experiments show that when people are put into a good mood (e.g., by giving them candy or showing them a funny movie), they are more creative. For example, they are better at inventing diverse and unusual ways for getting a candle to burn without dripping, or at finding more obscure and remote associations between words and ideas.22 People in good moods are “more cognitively flexible —more able to make associations, to see dimensions, and to see potential relationships among stimuli—than are persons in a neutral state.”23 In other words, they generate more varied ideas and combinations of those ideas, which are crucial aspects of creative work.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“When everyone in a group always agrees, it may mean they don’t have many ideas. Or it may mean that avoiding conflict is more important to them than generating and evaluating new ideas. It may even mean that people who express new ideas are ridiculed, ostracized, and driven out of the group. Regardless of the reasons, lack of conflict and dissent means the group is unlikely to express and develop many valuable new ideas. Groups—and societies—that stifle people with new, untested, ideas undermine both imagination and personal freedom.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Sometimes, the best management is no management at all. Jeffrey Pfeffer likes to say that managers should be required to take something like the physician’s oath: “First, do no harm.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Writings by philosophers and psychologists on the differences between intelligence and wisdom might also encourage you to become a better listener. Intelligent people say lots of smart things and produce the right answers to questions more often than less intelligent people, but they are not necessarily good listeners. In contrast, wise people are better listeners and are better at formulating questions than people who aren’t so wise.6 So, if you and your firm want to get smarter, the wise thing to do is to shut up, listen, and learn to ask smart questions—not to keep showing off how much you know and how fast you can think.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Paul Goodman commented that “Few great men could pass personnel.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“Low self-monitors are pretty much the opposite. Their feelings and actions are “controlled by inner attitudes, dispositions, and values, rather than to be molded and shaped to fit the situation.”7 Even when low self-monitors do figure out what others expect, even when they do “get it,” they will have trouble producing the “right” response in sincere and convincing ways. For better and for worse, low self-monitors are relatively unfettered by social norms. These mavericks and social misfits can drive bosses and coworkers crazy, but they increase the range of what is thought, noticed, talked about, and done in a company. High self-monitors tend to be yes-men (and -women), who can’t stop themselves from telling others what they want to hear. Low self-monitors can’t stop themselves from saying and doing what they think is right, because they don’t notice—or don’t care about—pressures to follow the herd.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“March presents impressive formulas and graphs showing that when an organization has a greater percentage of people who are incapable, unwilling, or have not yet learned the way things are “supposed to be done around here,” the company is more likely to be innovative. Yet March offers few hints about what kinds of people are likely to be slow learners. Research in personality psychology suggests that three kinds of traits are key: those who are “low self-monitors,” those who avoid contact with coworkers, and those who have very high self-esteem.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

“In fact, selling—rather than creating—inventions may have been Thomas Edison’s greatest talent. Many of the famous inventions from his laboratory were imagined and developed by his staff, not Edison. His assistant, Francis Jehl, lamented that Edison was a more skilled pitchman than inventor, that his “genius” was most reminiscent of master huckster and showman P. T. Barnum.”
― Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation