Approaches to Innovation: Bottom Up

In terms of cultivating an environment, Gary, where people feel like they can be creative and innovate, how do you see the leaders’ responsibilities and maybe certain practices that can drive successful outcomes in that?

The first thing I say about innovation and this is something I heard once from a very successful leader in the Nestle organization. His famous words were, innovation is everybody’s responsibility. I think it’s a great truth because the reality is, great ideas and innovative solutions can come from anywhere. It’s not just a management’s responsibility, it’s not just a marketer’s responsibility, it’s not just a consumer researcher’s responsibility to come up with the insights and ideas. We all live in the real world. We all see things and we all see opportunity. Sometimes the most obvious opportunities get missed because we’re not listening to people who may actually have the right ideas, the right solutions. You have the formal forms, often in organizations where, of course, you reign through innovation cycles. People are bringing ideas to the table and that’s great. Then you have the very informal view of there’s a suggestion box on the window, put your thoughts in there and sometimes that works.

My honest experience of this, though, is probably the best way to unveil or just realize some of these opportunities is literally by making yourself available and walking around it and having your teams walking around and talking and listening.

Just coming back and having some free form opportunity to discuss what they’ve heard. The India experience where I sent everybody to the four corners of the country, it was precisely that. We had a rough framework with the certain things we were looking for, but we were looking for things that we weren’t looking for. That was the idea, to come back with things that were truly left field. Some left field insights and to rewards that. Even if it didn’t come to fruition and ultimately resolve in new products. It didn’t really matter, what was most important was that we had opened the opportunity for the conversation. I give one real-world example that I thought was very powerful, in that same factory environment I was referring to. We had huge technical issues she hadn’t been able to resolve with specific products we were running down a very complex line. We’d had engineers flown in from overseas. We had senior technical people flying in from overseas, all trying to resolve the issue. In the end, my factory manager at that time said, look, I think we’re going about this all the wrong way. We’re trying to do everything from the top down. I’m going to create a small team, which will be factory workers, some who are on the factory floor who didn’t have a passport and had never travelled outside the state, but he arranged for them to travel without leadership to our sister factory in Japan for a two-week observation study, just to go and see how do they do it in Japan. These were literally floor workers in the factory who went over.

The first trip overseas. They came back two weeks later, and they brought with them a list of pages of observations and things they’d seen and pages of ideas that they had based on the observation. We made changes to that line which would have cost us in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, relatively small given the size of the capital investment. I can tell you, it step changed the performance of that plan like we’d never seen before. Total step change. Those people on the factory floor owned it. More important than even that was the fact that from there, we had a flood of ideas come from people on the factory floor for their lines. The things that they had seen and been thinking about for years but no one had ever asked them. There were simple things that we made changes that saved us in the millions of dollars of production costs. Many of them were very simple changes to workplaces, workflow, changes designed to packaging, all of these things. They all came from the factory floor. It came from the fact that one group had been given permission, they had seen it through, they had demonstrated success. They had been rewarded for it and recognized. Now everyone said, “Why not us? We can do this too” It literally opened the floodgates. That’s just a real-world example to show that sometimes all you need to do is give people the space and then let them shine. Ultimately, reward them for it. Once you do, others will see that as a living example of why they can do more too to help.