Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program PreviewLeading InnovationRobert SuttonCopyright © Stanford University 2020.pdf

Innovation and
Entrepreneurship
Program Preview
Leading Innovation
Robert Sutton
Copyright © Stanford University 2020

Leadership Fundamentals, Especially
for Innovation
1. Being in tune
2. Assertiveness
3. Small wins
4. Having their backs
3
1. The “In‐Tune” Leader
The best leaders have a great deal of self‐
awareness – they know what it feels like to
work for them, how they come across to
others, and how to get the best out of people
given their strengths, weaknesses, and
quirks….. but this isn’t easy.
4

Great bosses are self‐obsessed
Not for egotistical or selfish reasons, but
because staying “in tune” with their people’s
opinions and responses requires honing your
self‐awareness and empathy.
“Its not all about you” is a useful half‐truth
5
Beware the toxic tandem
The “interesting shoes day” story
6

A Human : After a big promotion
7
“I realized that life was never going to be
the way it had been before, that people
were watching everything I did. And it
wasn’t just going to be about how I
dressed. It was about my behavior, the
example I set, the tone I set, the way I
carried myself, how confident I was — all
those kinds of things.”
Linda Hudson,
CEO of BAE Systems
Baboons too
8
A typical member
of a baboon troop
glances at the
alpha male every
20 to 30 seconds.

Power Poisoning: Effects of giving
people power
• Focus on their own needs and concerns
• Focus little attention on the needs of others
• Act like the rules don’t apply to them
9
The Cookie Study
Three Berkeley students, five cookies. Two
students brainstorm and the third has the
power to evaluate their ideas.
• Those with power tended to:
• Take the fourth cookie
• Eat with their mouths open
• Leave more crumbs
10

A reading to warm up for your assignment
Robert Sutton’s Harvard Business Review
Some bosses live in a fool’s paradise
11
Assignment: “Clueless leader”
As we’ve seen, there are a lot of powerful forces that cause leaders to be out of touch
with the people they lead, so there are a lot of clueless leaders out there:
1. For starters, identify a clueless leader – it could be a past or current boss (change
the name if you like), a public figure, or even a fictional leader. Send us a picture or
a short video clip of the boss if you would like.
2. Please list a few ways in which this boss is clueless – say three to five – and tell us
why these behaviors are destructive
3. Now, let’s make it a bit more personal. If you are a boss, or if you ever are a boss,
what could you do to avoid turning into one of these insensitive creeps?
Again, use your favorite media, write a story, send some pictures with captions, do a
video – whatever works best for you.
12

This slide is intended to be blank.
13
2. Assertiveness
•“The best bosses are rated roughly average by
followers on terms like competitive, aggressive,
passive, and submissive – they are moderately
assertive.”
•Key: being “in tune” with reactions to your
words and deeds, and making the right
adjustments.
14

15
“I believe managing is like holding a dove
in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you
kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you
lose it."
— Tommy Lasorda
Assignment: Assertiveness
What is a sign that a leader is pushing people
too hard?
What is a sign that a leader is not pushing
people hard enough?
16

The best management is sometimes
no management at all
•Managers often overestimate their value – and
don’t realize the damage – caused by watching
and nagging employees.
•“First do no harm” is especially crucial to
innovation – manage by getting out of the way.
17
The managers of the most innovative
teams…
• Devote less attention to their people
• Allow them to act without asking for
permission first
• Don’t enforce rules as consistently as
managers of less innovative teams
18

19
“After you plant a seed in the ground, you don’t dig it up every
week to see how it is doing.”
— 3M’s William Coyne
3. Use a “small wins” strategy
Long term, “big hairy goals” are
essential – but when people
don’t focus on the little steps
required to make constant
progress, they freeze up and
freak out.
20

Small wins are the stepping stones to success
•Even the biggest accomplishments
and victories rest on a series of
intertwined small wins.
•The best bosses frame what they do
as a series of manageable and
doable steps, which leads to better
decisions, sustains motivation, and
stops people from freaking out.
21
The CEO and the sales campaign
Her people were freaked out and overwhelmed
by a crucial sales campaign.
22
Until…

Quick Read
Start the New Year with Progress
by Teresa Amabile and Steve Kramer
23
Assignment: Honing Your Leadership Skills
Name one tiny thing you will do in the next
week to hone your leadership skills in some
small way. Send us a follow‐up to let us know
how it worked.
24

Examples from three executives – all
lead 100 million plus businesses
• I started to pay attention during meetings and discussions with team members for
signs I was being too pushy (and how to relieve pressure). [I learned that..] facial
expressions were easy to pick in a one to one meetings but difficult to catch when
members become overly quiet during a group discussion and a meeting with a
remotely based team member by phone.
• “I simply listened more and asked for actions/solutions to the issues that were
being presented to me. The meeting was definitely different. There periods of
silence but once that past the meeting actually ended quickly. It is too early to tell
if my team felt more empowered and more confident they were coming up with
the right solutions vs. feeling that I may have been less engaged. Time will tell.”
• “Being on time to meetings. I tried it but no one else was because they're used to
starting 5‐10 minutes late ‐‐ but I did get an important side meeting in.”
25
4. Got their backs?
The best bosses protect their people from harm, intrusions,
distractions, indignities, idiots, and idiocy of every stripe.
26

27
“Someone once defined a manager, half in jest,
as someone who sees the visitors so that
everyone else can get the work done."
— Henry Mintzberg
Meetings
• A power grab or a performance grab?
• Will Wright of Spore and The Sims fame – an employee
centered method.
– Used artist Ocean Quigley “like the canary in the coal
mine.”
28

Protecting people from idiocy from on high
An old story about Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith.
I convinced Ed to let me tell on HBR
29
Assignment: When to Protect Your People
When is it a BAD idea to shield the people you lead?
30

Achieving Innovation
through Inspiration
Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn
Stanford d.school
To get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.
- Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel Prize winner

Filling the Funnel is the job of the innovator
Exploration Funnel
4,000 226 12 2–3
Source: Bob Sutton

Exploration Funnel
Levers to
“Fill the Funnel”
 Combine different perspectives
 Look through unique frames
 Seek unexpected sources of inspiration
 Deliberately engage a divergent mindset
 Strategically embrace distraction
 Apply distinctive selection criteria
 Commission a portfolio of experiments
4,000 226 12 2–3
Source: Bob Sutton
Lever 1
Different
Perspectives

Exploration Funnel
Levers to
4,000 226 12 2–3
Source: Bob Sutton
Non-homogeneous teams are simply smarter.
Working with people who are different from you
challenges your brain to overcome its stale ways of
thinking and sharpen its performance.
- Rock and Grant, “Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter”

Patagonia Wetsuit Story
Consider Your Different Duos

Congratulations!
Your innovation potential just increased 10x.
Lever 2
Framing

Exploration Funnel
Levers to
4,000 226 12 2–3
Source: Bob Sutton
Look Through A New ‘Frame’

Let’s tackle a problem:
How can we get kids to eat vegetables?
Brainstorm a list of IDEAS
Let’s ask a different question:
What are places that do exciting things with kids?
Brainstorm a list of PLACES

With a new perspective
How would (place) get kids to eat vegetables?
Let’s try a different perspective:
What are places that make food exciting?
Brainstorm a list of PLACES.

With a new perspective
How would (place) get kids to eat vegetables?
What Changed?

As a neuroscientist, I have discovered that humans
do not use vision to see what is...
They only see what has been useful to see in the
past.
- Beau Lotto
Building Company Culture
Hayagreeva Rao
Stanford University

Teaming
Objectives
● Share ideas that you need to think about as you compose
your founding team
● Discuss some guidelines on how to use teams in your
organization as you scale
● Identify ways to manage teams effectively

Allocating Equity
• Allocating equity equally amongst the founders can be
problematic if unforeseen circumstances arise in the future
• Most important thing when founding a team: Don’t allocate
founder equity at one time
• Founding team needs to have a prenup or misunderstandings
will arise
 Founder equity: Allocate part to founders, earmark part for
activities
 Norms: Clearly spell out the sacred and the profane
Knowledge and Functional Diversity
Knowledge Diversity: Diverse experiences working in diverse
functions
● Expands the bandwidth of the founding team, notice more,
process more, less likely to have blind spots
● Promotes innovation and creativity
● Flexibility and holism in thinking

Fast vs. Far
• Need game plan
▪ Speed matters
▪ Others might want to go far, disrupt an entire industry
• Think about who you need in your founding team to help you go fast and go far
• Go Fast: Easy when people have worked together and have diverse knowledge
• Go Far: Knowledge diversity is super important
• Beware of co-founders that are vulnerable
Founding Team Composition Wrap Up
• Allocate some equity and earmark for activities
• Have a prenup, equity and operating norms for organization
• Knowledge diversity
• Mindful about going fast or going far

Multiteam System
• Organizations are multiteam systems
• Component teams all working together with the other teams
to execute a project
• Typically has more than two teams, sometimes up to
hundreds of teams working together on various components
of a large project
▪ Examples: SaaS organizations, disaster relief, emergency
care
What Makes a Team?
• Rule #1: The team needs a definite project where it can make
a difference
• A team is an organization that has defined deliverable,
defined problem to solve where team members need to work
well together in order to develop a new product

Teaming Coordination
Coordination: A particular kind of understanding; the ability to work well
together
• Easy predictability allows people to seamlessly work together
• Need common ground for communication to be successful
• Coordination is helped when there is common representation of a problem
• Coordination is improved when there’s synchrony, team members are in sync,
working in a pattern or rhythm
• Better coordination leads to better cooperation
To amp up coordination, teams need to:
• Reduce representational gaps
• Create synchrony
Using Agile to Improve Coordination
• Agile creates synchrony and coordination through the time-boxing of activities
• Scrum: Scrum master is responsible for decomposing projects into sprint
planning (or weekly targets), sprint activities, sprint review
• Product owners are the ones responsible for specifying customer requirements
• Teams with a certified scrum master:
▪ Increase the ability to coordinate and do projects quicker
▪ Can do better when they have team members who are diverse in terms of
knowledge and also have familiarity with the team’s history of tasks

Teaming Cooperation
Cooperation: The willingness to work well together
Felt Accountability: People have a sense of ownership and obligation that’s
deeply felt, and they will automatically cooperate better
How to increase cooperation in teams and also improve coordination?
Allow employees to choose their own job titles to showcase their unique
personal strength. Coordination can improve because titles create common
representations and allow the team to sync up.
Teaming Composition
• How many team members on a team?
▪ 5 is the optimal number
• Who should be on a team?
▪ Knowledge diversity, each person should have different
functional experiences
▪ Mix novices and experts together
▪ Mix optimists and pessimists

Atlassian Case Study
• Think about how the company uses teams to innovate
regularly
• Pay close attention to how teams are organically formed, the
problems they tackle, and how ShipIt Days work
Atlassian Case Wrap Up
• Teams solve different problems
• Customers are involved to evaluate the demos made by the
teams
• Pay close attention to how teams are composed, their size
and the fact they work under very sharp time constraint

Teaming Summary
• A team has to have purpose, clear goals, clear deliverables —
all of which activate felt accountability
• Multiteam system has many teams, so think about what
connects the teams together, what brings the teams together,
and how information is circulated amongst the teams
• Inter-team coordination, not just intra-team coordination

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