{"id":224,"date":"2009-05-21T09:04:00","date_gmt":"2009-05-21T01:04:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=224"},"modified":"2009-05-21T09:04:48","modified_gmt":"2009-05-21T01:04:48","slug":"book-weird-ideas-that-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"Recommended Book – “Weird Ideas That Work”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently stumbled across a book by Bob Sutton<\/a> called Weird Ideas That Work (and subtitled how to build a creative company).<\/p>\n


\nIt’s interesting because it does not have the word ‘innovation’ on the cover.<\/p>\n

It’s interesting because it’s written by a guy who wrote a book called “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” (he also wrote the “No Arsehole Rule,” which surely must go down in history as the best title ever given to a business book.)<\/p>\n

It’s interesting because it’s based on research and observations by a Stanford professor over ten years.<\/p>\n

The book is fascinating because it’s not some breathless magazine article extolling the virtues of a fad, or some factoid one-pager from a consultancy group (in my experience nothing pulls your head ten directions quicker than a whole bunch of shallow articles rabbiting on about business trends).<\/p>\n

Here’s the summary (I’m still digesting the book):<\/p>\n

The three key principles are to increase variance in available knowledge,see old things in new ways, and break from the past.<\/p>\n

The weird ideas that aid in implementing those principles are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.<\/li>\n
  2. Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.<\/li>\n
  3. Hire people with skills you don’t need yet, and put them in nontraditional assignments.<\/li>\n
  4. Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.<\/li>\n
  5. Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.<\/li>\n
  6. Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.<\/li>\n
  7. Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.<\/li>\n
  8. Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.<\/li>\n
  9. Use “bad” ideas to help reveal good ones.<\/li>\n
  10. Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.<\/li>\n
  11. Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.<\/li>\n
  12. Escape from the mental shackles of your organisation’s past successes.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Highly recommended if you are grappling with how your organisation builds an innovation culture while still having people focused on operational goals (which, by their nature, tend to stifle innovation).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I recently stumbled across a book by Bob Sutton called Weird Ideas That Work (and subtitled how to build a creative company). It’s interesting because it does not have the word ‘innovation’ on the cover. It’s interesting because it’s written by a guy who wrote a book called “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-innovation-culture","category-resources"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdennis.com\/ideaport\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}