5 Apr 2011
Three Perspectives on Culture & Innovation
Over the past few weeks I’ve been lucky to see a few great guest speakers at school:
- Jack Dorsey, Head of Product, Twitter; CEO, Square
- Nathan Estruth, VP, P&G’s Futureworks
- Phil McKinney, CTO, H-P’s Personal Systems Group
Consistent across each of the talks was a discussion of the ways these leaders contribute to fostering and managing innovation — which seems to have a lot of commonality from Fortune 500s to startups — and how entwined innovation is with culture.
I found a great encapsulation of this in Dorsey’s response to a question about focusing on barriers to entry at a startup’s inception: he doesn’t.
“The biggest competitor for any startup at the beginning is themselves,” Dorsey said; a nugget even more salient in the context of what McKinney said is his main preoccupation at H-P: fighting off “corporate antibodies” who would quash innovation in favor of the status quo. Which is to say, some of the biggest challenges in entrepreneurship are internal.
At P&G, Estruth repeatedly noted that because the company never hires outsiders its corporate culture is uniquely uniform: employees can “finish each other’s sentences” no matter where in the world they are. That enables Futureworks to hand projects off to individual business units with minimal friction. (He admits that, as a trade-off, he has to fight against “groupthink” as well.)
Under some definitions of competitive advantage, superior internal capabilities is a big one — especially in the fast-changing worlds of digital media and technology. That Dorsey would focus more on the workings of his teams than McKinney and Estruth is not surprising, given the much smaller sizes of Twitter and Square vs. H-P and P&G.
Indeed, the challenges of how to manage internal teams diverges when talking about organizations of massively different scale. Dorsey talked about his role as an “editor” at Square and at Twitter, “reviewing, asking clarifying questions, etc.” I interpret this as saying that, because management can see more clearly across a smaller organization, everyone on Dorsey’s teams are moving in generally the right direction and they just need to be guided occasionally.
McKinney, on the other hand, said his other major initiative at H-P is to get everyone at the company — tens of thousands of people — to treat innovation as part of their job and not something concentrated with management. He’s put in place a number of systems to help, including a central repository for ideas from anyone in the company. It attracts 2,500 submissions per year.
There’s a saying I like that I think sums all this up (often attributed to Peter Drucker): “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
