Innovation requires creativity – do we know how to foster it?

We at least have some idea of what doesn't work. Take this article.

Coming up with good idea takes creativity

How do you come up with a really good idea? (By the way, if I had a sure-fire answer, I would not be sharing it today). But in the proper spirit of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, let’s look at some sophisticated research, done at the Stanford Graduate School of Business by Melanie Brucks and Szu-chi Huang, that might shed some light on the puzzle.

The answer is creativity. And the question is should you spend a few minutes every day working on a problem or should you wait for the idea to appear like a lightning strike while you’re shopping at Vons. The Brucks and Huang research concludes, “regular brainstorming sessions are not likely to lead to an increase in unique ideas.”

This research simply confirms what creative people like David Ogilvy and David Gelernter have already told us about the nature of creativity.

Thinking about thinking, creativity and, innovation

Killing Creativity

Finding big ideas

Brucks and Huang's work also supports Gen. George Marshall's contention that “ no one ever had a creative thought after 5 pm.”

Subjects in the test did much better in the morning. Around 11 p.m., they produced the worst results. And they noted that “thinking late in the afternoon” leads to more habitual (not very creative) thinking.

We have known for some time that brainstorming rarely produces breakthrough ideas or significant innovation. Yet organizations keep turning to it. Another Marshall aphorism helps explain why.

Don't fight the problem – decide it! 

Brainstorming, just like endless debate and repetitive analysis, can be a means of avoiding hard decisions and harsh realities.

Related:

Understanding innovation

Caught flat-footed in a VUCA world

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“Dollars can't buy yesterday” (II)

(Part I is here)

Mahan's dictum that good men and bad ships make a better navy than bad men and good ships was always near Nimitz's thoughts .
Ian Toll, Pacific Crucible

In the previous post I noted that the US Navy fought the absolutely critical; battles of 1942 without the benefit of the new ships built under the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940. This was, in itself, a remarkable achievement. As FDR said in his 1943 SOTU address:

This past year was perhaps the most crucial for modern civilization. The Axis Powers knew that they had must win the war in 1942 – or eventually lose everything.

It would be wrong, however, to discount the Navy's performance in 1943-1945 by ascribing it solely to the numerical preponderance produced by America's industrial base.

Numbers count in war but they are not everything. Note that the Royal Navy entered the war with a tremendous advantage over the Kriegsmarine. Yet it took nearly four years for Britain to secure it vital lifelines against a numerically inferior enemy. That is, roughly, the amount of time it took the US Navy to sweep the far more formidable Japanese navy from the whole of the Pacific.

Norman Friedman details just how remarkable an accomplishment that was:

To win the Pacific War, the U.S. Navy had to transform itself technically, tactically, and strategically. It had to create a fleet capable of the unprecedented feat of fighting and winning far from home, without existing bases, in the face of an enemy with numerous bases fighting in his own waters. …

If it seems obvious that any naval officer aware of the march of technology would have developed the massed carriers and the amphibious fleet, the reader might reflect that the two other major navies failed to do so. The Japanese did create a powerful carrier striking force, but they made no real effort to back it up with sufficient reserves to keep it fighting. They developed very little amphibious capability useful in the face of shore defenses: They could not, for example, have assaulted their own fortified islands, let alone Normandy or southern France. The British built carriers, but accepted very small carrier air groups because, until well into World War II, they saw their carriers mainly as support for their battle fleet. Like the Japanese, they did not develop an amphibious capability effective against serious defense.

Norman Friedman, Winning a Future War: War Gaming and Victory in the Pacific War

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When it came to experience, the USN trailed Japan and Great Britain. It had not been at war with a great power since the War of 1812.

Its last conventional naval war had been fought against Spain in 1898, before nearly all the weapons and ships of 1919 had even been conceived. Its World War I experience was limited almost entirely to anti-submarine warfare,

Correlli Barnett called war “the great auditor of institutions”. The Pacific War showed that the USN, as an institution, led the world's navies in technological innovation and operational excellence.

Clearly, the USN had done a lot of things right in the eras of Normalcy and Depression.

Friedman has an idea of what the most important thing was:

What set the U.S. Navy apart? War gaming at the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, seems to have been a large part of the answer. The games played by students there were a vital form of training, but at least as importantly, the games served as a laboratory for the U.S. Navy. It seems to have been significant that, until 1934, the Naval War College was part of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV) rather than part of the naval school system. Gaming experience fed back into full-scale exercises (Fleet Problems), and full-scale experience fed back into the detailed rules of the games, which were conceived as a way of simulating reality as closely as possible. Game data were also fed to the U.S. Navy’s war planners, all of whom had graduated from the War College and thus had considerable game experience. The successes and failures of simulation give some guidance into what is needed in current and future games.

Adm. William Sims made war-gaming central to the NWC's mission. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Navy Department used the NWC as a quasi-think tank and R&D lab. A generation of captains and admirals grappled with the pareticular challenges of war with Japan as well as the evolving nature of sea warfare.

At the same time Newport inculcated a “common command culture “ in the navy's senior leaders and helped breakdown functional silos and mental blinders.

This paid off in the four critical carrier battles of 1942:

During World War II, U.S. non-aviators such as Admiral Raymond Spruance and Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher (both War College graduates) successfully wielded carrier forces. Non-aviators in other navies do not seem to have done nearly so well.

In the “improvised war” the NWC grads and their common command culture bested Yamamoto and his battle-hardened samurai. They did this without the benefit of numerical or technical superiority.

Friedman suggests that the wargames at Newport were the ideal tool to prepare the navy for the Pacific War:

Perhaps the fairest evaluation of military judgment versus gaming would be that in areas in which considerable full-scale experience had been accumulated, military judgment was much more likely to be accurate. Gaming offered insight into wars that had not yet been fought, involving new weapons—particularly aircraft. As we look back, the shift in War Plan Orange—a shift which proved extremely beneficial—was one of those areas.

The Japanese navy also used wargames (as did the Prussian/Germany army which essentially invented military gaming). Why did the USN derive so much more benefit than Japan? Three key differences seem to stand out.

For one thing, the Japanese were focussed – even obsessed – with the idea of a Mahanian decisive battle against the US Battle Fleet in the western Pacific. Like the pre-1914 German General Staff they devoted their wargaming efforts to refining a single strategy. This tunnel vision led the IJN to ignore the problems that came with long campaigns and wide-ranging operations.

Another significant difference was the role of logistics in game play and discussion. In the IJN, logistics officers – if they were even included in the gaming sessions – were to see but not speak. Their role was limited to observing and noting the requirements of the planned operation.

Finally, the NWC wargames were played out by mid-level officers. They were free to explore new strategies and tactics and the faculty could referee the games with no concern about alienating senior admirals. The top officers in Washington were free to analyze the results of the games without implicitly committing to any particular course of action.

Japan's wargames precluded this sort of free-ranging exploration. Their games, like all their planning exercises, were fraught with tension caused by political rivalries, considerations of rank and seniority, and prickly concerns about personal honor. https://leadandgold.blogspot.com/2019/12/pearl-harbor-clausewitz-and-path-to.html

In 1942 – FDR's “critical year” – the Pacific War offered two strategic inflection points. The first occurred after the dazzling Japanese victories at Pearl Harbor, Malaya, and Burma. The second came in the wake of their crushing defeat at Midway. In both cases, the IJN reacted tentatively and with a complete lack of focus. In the spring, Yamamoto sent his carriers to attack Darwin, Australia and then against the Royal Navy in the Bay of Bengal. Meanwhile, he drew up plans for offensives against New Guinea, the Solomons, the Aleutians, and Midway. After Midway he seems never to have settled on clear plan for the defensive war Japan would have to fight. Guadalcanal was seized as an airbase but the island as not fortified and work on the airfield progressed slowly.

In both victory and defeat Yamamoto and his staff seem confused when confronted by sudden changes in the strategic situation.

One cannot ignore the simple fact that not a single [Japanese] operation planned after the start of the war met with success

H. P. Willmott, Empires in the Balance

The USN presents a completely different picture. Despite the shock of Pearl Harbor, which crippled the battleship fleet and rendered the existing warplans obsolete, the Navy moved swiftly and with strategic focus. Steps were immediately taken to secure the sea-lanes to Australia. Carrier operations began to harass the Japanese bases and blunt their offensives: Lae, the Doolittle Raid, Coral Sea, Midway.

When the tide turned, the USN seized the initiative. Marines went ashore at Guadalcanal and Tulagi. Unlike the Japanese, they quickly put the airfield into operation. At a stroke they essentially eliminated the threat to Australia's lifeline. They also gained a foothold for a campaign against the key Japanese base at Rabaul.

This was not the war the USN had expected to fight; it bore little resemblance to the campaigns gamed out at the War College in the 1930s. Yet it was the war they had to fight in 1942. They fought it, won it, but were not diverted from their overall strategy when the new ships were completed and the Central Pacific campaign could begin.

The, IJN, in contrast [syn] improvised and extemporized their way to a strategic disaster:

Japan reached its level of incompetence, where it fought with all its power and to the death. The battlefields of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were simply too large and too far forward to suit its tiny logistical and transport capabilities....Japan was fighting precisely the war which least suited its material resources, a prolonged and costly battle of attrition beyond easy reach of its supply system.

Michael Handel and John Ferris, "Clausewitz, Intelligence Uncertainty and the Art of Command”

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“Dollars Can't Buy Yesterday”

In war, time (speed) usually is critically important in determining success or failure:

“The difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds…”

Commodore Arleigh Burke, the second commander of the storied Little Beavers of Destroyer Squadron 23, first uttered those words shortly after taking command of the squadron in October 1943. He came to this conclusion after studying the Battle of Tassafaronga and validated it through his own observations of combat at sea. The same thinking that led to future Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Burke’s conclusion, echoes today in the words of current CNO Admiral John Richardson, who states in the Design for Maintaining Maritime Superiority, “The margins of victory are razor thin – but decisive!”

Col. John Boyd put speed at the center of our thinking on the tactical and operational levels of war. It is an important factor at the strategic level as well, but things get a great deal more complicated there.

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In 1940, Congress passed the Two-Ocean Navy Act which funded a massive increase in the size of the US Fleet. While testifying on behalf of the bill, CNO Adm. Harold Stark warned that “dollars can't buy yesterday.” He wanted the lawmakers to understand that it would take years for the new dollars to translate into new ships and crews; simply passing a law would not undo a decades of austerity budgets.

Stark was absolutely correct. War came to America before she had her two ocean navy. The US Navy would fight the critical naval battles of 1942 without the new ships Congress authorized in 1940.

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The French army in 1940 faced the opposite problem. They had the material they needed: The Allies surpassed the Germans in tanks, planes and artillery. What they lacked was an effective doctrine for modern war and the requisite training to fight it.

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.

UCLA coach John Wooden 

The Fall of France shows that top to bottom organizational learning can be a decisive factor in war – fully as important as material factors. Yet this is immensely more difficult difficult to accomplish than simply buying equipment.

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In 1917 Britain and France believed that they had learned the lessons of trench warfare. By the end of the Battles of the Somme and Verdun they had successfully combined overwhelming, accurate artillery fire with careful infantry attacks to seize ground from the Germans and then hold it in the face of the inevitable counter-attack. In 1917 they believed that they could put those lessons to work on a large scale and win the war.

Unfortunately, the German army was also a learning organization. By the the spring of 1917 they had developed new defensive tactics which largely negated those of the Allies. As a result, the Nivelle Offensives did nearly end the war – not with an Allied victory but with a near-collapse of the French armies.

Learning from from your enemy is a devilishly difficult task as the British experience shows.

A committee of British generals attempted to adapt the German defensive tactics for British use, but the resulting instructions denied junior commanders any choice about where to defend or when to counterattack. Although the British defenses were laid out in a manner similar to those of the Germans, they failed due to the absence of local initiative and counter attack, coupled with the British determination to defend hard-won ground even when the ground placed them on forward, rather than reverse slopes.

Jonathan M. House, Combined Arms Warfare in the Twentieth Century

(This calls to mind GM's experience with NUMMI. The venture proved that American workers and managers could apply Japanese automotive methods successfully on US soil. The venture failed, however, to be a catalyst for the revitalization of the whole of GM. The executives could not, or would not, take advantage of the insights from NUMMI.)

Jeffrey Liker, author of “The Toyota Way,” (McGraw-Hill, 2003), says that GM couldn’t figure out how to absorb company-wide the positive cultural lessons it was learning in Freemont.

“I remember one of the GM managers was ordered from a very senior level, a vice-president, to make a GM plant look like NUMMI,” says Liker in the radio story. “He said, ‘I want you to go there with cameras, and take a picture of every square inch, and whatever you take a picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.’ Immediately this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy and play motivation, we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy. You can’t take a photograph of it.”  

In the Spring 1918 Offensives British soldiers paid a heavy price for their leaders failure (refusal?) to learn. To make matters worse, their German opponents had not stopped learning.

What is interesting in the preparations for the spring 1918 offensive was the ability of the German army, having only in fall 1917 established the new offensive doctrine, to implement training on a consistent and coherent basis throughout those attack divisions that would launch the coming attacks. This was done with a massive, intensive, and thorough program that schooled divisional officers and then worked up the attack divisions for the great western offensive.

Williamson Murray, German Military Effectiveness (1992)

The result was another disaster which once again brought the Allies to the brink of defeat.

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Related:

Why Organizational Change is Hard I

Why Organizational Change is Hard II

If the German Army excelled in organizational learning (at least at the level of tactics and operations), the same cannot be said of their brethren in the Luftwaffe. In the Battle of Britain they were completely outclassed by Britain in doctrine, intelligence, and the “wizard war.”

Victory in the Battle of Britain, -- and Dowding;s claim to be one of the few great captains of the twentieth century -- resulted from the fact that he built an effective air defense system that altered the entire context of within which air forces operated. What is crucial in this example, as Beyerchin suggests, is that while Germans may have possessed better equipment and even tactics, the British operated in a broader framework of contextual change. By doing so they created a new logic within which the Luftwaffe was incapable of winning.

Williamson Murray, Military Innovation in the Interwar Period

What is interesting here is that the Germans still excelled in the technical and tactical spheres of the air war. In France, as part of a combined arms campaign, that had been enough to seal a rapid and decisive victory. When the strategic context changed – the Luftwaffe was now tasked with winning air supremecy over distant island-- they needed something more.

Thinking through (or rather among) the implications of fundamental change requires an interaction of practical and philosophic bents of mind.

A. Beyerchin, “From Radio to Radar”

In Hermann Goering's thoroughly Nazified Luftwaffe, few senior officers possessed minds with a philosophical bent. Britain, fortunately, found just enough such men and found them when it really mattered (1934-1939).

Related:

Understanding innovation  

The forgotten man who saved the world

Sometimes fate is fickle and speed is not rewarded. I've discussed how Britain's army modernization left them critically vulnerable in Malaya and Burma in 1942. Something similar happened with carrier aviation in the Royal navy. In 1936, as part of her military build-up, Britain authorized the building of a new class of aircraft carriers. These ships were woefully outdated by the time they were launched during World War Two. This was not the fault of the designers or of the politicians who approved their creation. What neither group could know was that Japan and the United States would radically advance the state of the art in carrier operations and naval aviation in the years the ships were under construction.

Innovation and the "cult of the imperfect"

Robert Watson Watt was one of the "boffins" who did so much to help Britain win the Second World War. He was instrumental in the development of radar and radio direction finding.

He was, he admitted in his memoirs, part of the "cult of the imperfect."

Give them the third best to go with. the second best comes too late, the best never arrives.

Germany was defeated, in large part, by good enough/now/in large numbers.

Her leaders had chosen to follow a different path during the critical years.

One reason for this [Kursk] and subsequent German defeats was the small number of German tanks produced. Hitler and his assistants were fascinated with technological improvements and frequently stopped production to apply the latest design changes to existing tanks. Further, most German planners prized high quality and were suspicious of mass production techniques. Such problems, coupled with shortages of raw materials, meant that Germany could not compete with its foes in sheer numbers of tanks produced.

Jonathan House 

But technological superiority by itself has never guaranteed success. The Germans had technologically inferior tanks and artillery in 1940; nevertheless, they won one of the greatest operational victories in the history of the twentieth century. In the 19441945 campaigns, the Germans possessed by far and away the most sophisticated fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated heavy tank, the most sophisticated medium tank, the most sophisticated submarine, and the best machine gun. And they went down to catastrophic defeat.

Williamson Murray 

Two style of innovation opposed each other during the war. On the German side you see perfectionism inside a closed system with top-down direction. The western allies operated a much more open system, with room for bottom up experimentation and a willingness to accept good/now beats better later.

We know which one worked.

Oddly enough, the German officer corps under stood. The American General Albert Wedemeyer attended the Kriegsakademie in the late 1930s. As part of his report to the army he noted "“The Germans point out, that often a Commander must make an important decision after only a few minutes deliberation and emphasize, that a fair decision given in time for aggressive execution is much better than one wholly right but too late.”

This is an interesting video that defends/explains the very imperfect Sherman tank.

Related:

Understanding innovation

Patrick Blackett and the innovation trap

Strategic problems and the problem with strategy

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"Innovation Theater"

An interesting piece from the Harvard Business Review

Why Companies Do “Innovation Theater” Instead of Actual Innovation

The type of disruption most companies and government agencies are facing right now is a once-in-every-few-centuries event. Disruption today is more than just changes in technology, or channel, or competitors — it’s all of them, all at once. And these forces are completely reshaping both commerce and defense.

Today, as large organizations are facing continuous disruption, they’ve recognized that their existing strategy and organizational structures aren’t nimble enough to access and mobilize the innovative talent and technology they need to meet these challenges. These organizations know they need to change, but often the result has been a form of organizational whack-a-mole – a futile attempt at trying to swat at problems as they pop-up without understanding their root cause.

A subject near and dear to my heart

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (Part Two)

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (III)

Doctrine and Fad Surfing

Innovation: The limits of vision

In journalism and media portrayals innovation is all about visionaries and technology (think Steve Jobs). Like David with his sling, a company with a visionary will create cool technology and slay Goliath (think Apple).

Books like Paul Kennedy’s Engineers of Victory challenge those popular preconceptions. Take for example, the experience of Italy in World War Two.

Giulio Douhet was one of the earliest and most influential theorists of airpower and strategic bombing. Italy designed and developed some of the most advanced aircraft in the world in the 1920s and 1930s. Her pilots won international competitions and set world records.

So the Regia Aeronautica had visionaries and the cool technology. Yet Italy lost campaign after campaign between 1940 and 1943.

A key reason, as Kennedy points out, is that Italy lacked the natural resources, economic capacity, and industrial technology to support a modern war against a European Great Power. Vision and a few good ideas could not make up for this systemic weakness.

Resources aren’t everything but they do weigh heavily in the strategic and competitive balance. Vision and advanced technology if used in an astute manner can offset some inferiority in material resources. For Italy between 1940 and 1943, the gap was too great and her strategy too inept. Catastrophic defeat was almost inevitable.

Williamson Murray reminds us that cool technology is often useful but is rarely the decisive factor in victory or defeat:

But technological superiority by itself has never guaranteed success. The Germans had technologically inferior tanks and artillery in 1940; nevertheless, they won one of the greatest operational victories in the history of the twentieth century. In the 1944-1945 campaigns, the Germans possessed by far and away the most sophisticated fighter aircraft, the most sophisticated heavy tank, the most sophisticated medium tank, the most sophisticated submarine, and the best machine gun. And they went down to catastrophic defeat.

Britain’s crushing defeats in Malaya and Burma in 1942 are a reminder that strategic context matters when it comes to the value of cutting edge technology. The British built the first fully motorized army. It pioneered tank warfare and tank development. Japan’s Army moved on foot and on bicycles. By European standards, their tanks were a joke--- little more than toys.

In the jungles of Asia (strategic context) Japan’s “primitive” army enjoyed superior tactical and operation mobility versus the “advanced” British. They were able to outflank British positions and routed the road-bound British time and again.

“Cutting edge technology” ended up hamstringing British commanders.

Understanding innovation

Paul Kennedy’s Engineers of Victory is one of the best books on innovation I’ve ever read. Which is extraordinary, really, given that it is a book about World War Two and was written 70 years after the critical events it narrates.

The book grew out of an insight by Kennedy a historian who has devoted his career to the study of grand strategy and geopolitics:

Grand strategists, leaders and professors alike, take a lot of things for granted

When the subject is WWII, what they usually take for granted is the back-story of many of the key technologies that contributed to the Allied victory. To cite one example:

Where did this centimetric radar come from? In many accounts of the war, it simply 'pops up'.

These sorts of blind spots create a bias in our narratives and our historical understanding. They tempt us to over-emphasize command decisions in strategic affairs and to understate the role of organizational culture.

Closing the air gap did not happen because some great person decreed it

[And]

The improvements did not arrive according to a grand incremental plan from Max Horton's office; rather, they entered the Royal Navy's tool kit episodically, and some of these newer systems took months before they properly fitted in the whole. Yet the commander of a U-boat that had been sent south in late March 1943 to wreak havoc off Freetown would have been completely disconcerted by what he saw when he arrived back at his base in Brest in July.

This last point serves also as a useful reminder that these vital innovations were not just a question of inventing new weapons; these weapons had to be deployed and used effectively. That meant that organizational learning, training and doctrine all came into play.

The book’s subtitle is The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War. Kennedy does not limit himself to the inventors. Weapons, like intelligence, counts for little until it is put to use by the men at the point of the spear. He reminds us that one definition of engineer is "a person who carries through an enterprise through skillful or artful contrivance."

New weapons for old" is apt to become a very popular cry. The success of some new devices has led to a new form of escapism which runs somewhat thus-- "Our present equipment doesn't work very well; training is bad, supply is poor, spare parts non-existent. let's have an entirely new gadget!" ... In general, one might conclude that relatively too much scientific effort has been expended hitherto in the production of new devices and too little in the proper use of what we have got.
Patrick Blackett, "Scientists at the Operational Level"

While the British could not match the US in industrial production, during the war they were the undisputed champions of “artful contrivance.” On land, sea, and air they came up with new weapons and new methods that contributed to the final victory.

Part of this was cultural:

It was not surprising that a society brought up on H. G. Wells and Jules Verne novels, the Boy's Own Weekly, and Amateur Mechanics should now produce vast numbers of citizen-based concoctions intended to help beat Hitler.

A key ingredient was leadership. The British were blessed to have Churchill as their war-leader.

The plain fact is that there probably was never another war leader with his talent-spotting skills and his capacity to inspire and encourage.

WSC was the first Prime Minister to appoint a science adviser. He was a devoted reader of H. G. Wells and had a biography right out of Boy’s Own Weekly. In the First World War he had been the driving force behind the development of the tank (a weapon that had appeared in a Wells book in 1903).

Churchill understood that sometimes a leader must prod an organization to get the right men in place and to move the culture in the right direction. He forced the army to find a place for MG Percy Hobart a pioneer in tank warfare and a man with an enormous capacity for artful contrivance.

I am not at all impressed by the prejudice against him in certain quarters. Such prejudices attach frequently to persons of strong personality and original view... We are now at war, fighting for our lives, and we cannot afford to confine Army appointments to officers who have excited no hostile comment in their careers.

Hobart amply repaid Churchill for his confidence. He trained three outstanding armoured divisions and created a series of specialized weapons to defeat Rommel’s beach defenses at Normandy.

Kennedy’s account underlines the fact that G.K. Chesterton wrote the first rule of innovation:

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Starting from zero, the US Marine Corps created and perfected amphibious warfare. It was neither a short journey nor an easy one. Allan Millett describes their first attempt to put doctrine into practice:

The Navy's coxswains did not reach the right beach at the proper time; the unloading of supplies was chaotic; the naval bombardment was inadequate; and the Navy's landing boats were clearly unsuitable for both troops and equipment. The exercise, however, identified enough errors to keep the Corps busy for fifteen years.
(A. Millett Semper Fidelis on USMC amphious exercises in 1923-24)

Try-fail-learn-improve-try again. When you succeed, keep learning and keep improving. The Marines and the Navy kept at it all through the 1920s and 1930s. They also kept to this cycle throughout the war in the Pacific:

Tarawa II: Learning and doing

Guadalcanal

The internet in historical perspective

Tom Wheeler, former chair of the FCC:

Today, everybody talks about how much information is bombarding us. Imagine what it must have been like after the printing press when people who had been totally devoid of information had all of this information flooding them. The powers-that-be rebelled against that. Shortly after the printing press was developed, a Swiss scholar sat down and said, “I’m going to catalog all of the books that have been printed thus far.” He ended up warning of the harmful magnitude of books and how it will create nothing but chaos. Well, that’s kind of like what we’re experiencing today on the internet, isn’t it?
****
The railroad was the first high-speed network. From the beginning of humankind, geography and distance had defined the human experience. How far can muscle power take you in a day was a defining force. How far you can carry raw materials — whether it be coal or wheat — was a defining economic force. All of a sudden, the railroad comes by and destroys distance. It was the original death of distance. It totally reshaped economies and created the Industrial Revolution by being able to haul raw materials to a central point for mass production, and then haul the finished product back out to a connected market.

Immediately on top of the railroad came the telegraph. It became the tool by which to manage the railroad as well as manage these far-flung production capabilities. It introduced the first national news media, the first national financial markets. These two together in the middle of the 19th century created the reality that we take for granted today and are now living as a result of the internet.

From 2003

The Internet seems less important than the printing press. So much that flowed from movable type and cheap paper-- books, newspapers, magazines, pamphlets-- was new. Websites and blogs just seem like a continuation of some of these innovations.

On the other hand, the Internet is probably as important as the telegraph or telephone. They are also similar in that they represent improvements in the speed and ease of long-distance communication. But that is evidence that the Internet is not unprecedented or revolutionary as some boosters claimed. And returning to Brad DeLong's point, it suggests that technological advances do not automatically create business or social utopias. The telegraph's effect on government and business were varied. The Internet's effects will probably be the same mixed bag.

A case study on organizational learning

Great interview with the author of a new book

THE U.S. NAVY AS A LEARNING ORGANIZATION WITH TRENT HONE

Hone examines how the so-called New Navy of the twentieth century managed innovation and transformed doctrine in an era of rapidly changing technology, first emphasizing a centralized fleet's massed gunfire, and later the coordination of dispersed aircraft carrier task forces. He argues"the Navy's surface warfare doctrine in the first half of the twentieth century was an example of sustained and repeated innovation" and uses this evolving doctrine to examine "organizational development through the lens of complexity."

This is a subject of great, long-standing interest to this blog:

Military Schools and Business Education

Tarawa II: Learning and doing

Coping with a VUCA world

Patrick Blackett and the innovation trap

When the search for technological breakthroughs is nothing more than way to avoid hard work and difficult choices.

Patrick Blackett was not a congregant in the Church of the Next New Thing. In 1941 he warned Britain’s war leaders against a pernicious form of Magical thinking:

"New weapons for old" is apt to become a very popular cry. The success of some new devices has led to a new form of escapism which runs somewhat thus-- "Our present equipment doesn't work very well; training is bad, supply is poor, spare parts non-existent. let's have an entirely new gadget!" ... In general, one might conclude that relatively too much scientific effort has been expended hitherto in the production of new devices and too little in the proper use of what we have got.

This is a remarkable assessment from a man whose work as an experimental physicist earned him a Nobel Prize.

It also has the advantage of being true.

The search for “breakthrough innovations” is often an expensive way to avoid dealing with difficulties in the here and now: A charade that wastes time and money with no chance for a payoff.

It is appealing to think that a few brilliant people can come up with an idea that will save an organization. (How did that work out for Xerox?) It is even more tempting to think that such an idea can come from a random collection of people using the latest fad for idea generation.

After reviewing the successes and failures of military innovation between the world wars, Allan Millett came to this conclusion:

The key to technological exploitation became not so much the revolutionary character of inventions and processes, but creation of a management and logistical system that made the application of technological advantage possible.

Simply put, the greatest technical breakthroughs in the world cannot overcome organizational weaknesses in strategy, doctrine, management, or logistics.

Related:

Why corporate change is hard and failure almost inevitable (Part Two)

Conquest's Law

That vision thing

Creativity comes from seeing old ideas in a new light

Short but interesting take on invention and creativity:

Not Invented Here

Ideas build on each other

There is no such thing as a completely new idea. Every step we make is based on the combination of different ideas that create something new.
...
Combination drives innovation

Everywhere you look progress comes from mixes and mash-ups
...
The way to create something new is to mix two old ideas.

Not a new idea, certainly, since David Gelernter discussed precisely this idea in his Muse and the Machine in 1994

Some related posts on the subject:

Finding big ideas

Thinking about thinking, creativity, and innovation

Killing creativity

When disruption requires a sugar daddy

From the always interesting Nicholas Carr:

The Uber advantage

We’re often told that companies like Uber and Amazon are masters of business innovation and industry disruption. But an argument could be made that what they’re really masters of is getting investors, whether in public or private markets, to cover massive losses over long periods of time. The generosity of the capital markets is what allows Uber and its ilk to subsidize purchases by customers, again on a massive scale and over many years. It’s worth asking whether these subsidies are the real engine behind much of the tech industry’s vaunted wave of disruption. After all, the small businesses being disrupted — local taxi companies and book shops, for instance — don’t have sugar daddies underwriting their existence. They actually have to make money, day after day, to pay their employees and their bankers. They have to charge real prices, not make-believe ones.

Some will argue that the capital markets are acting rationally, investing for future returns. But if those future returns are predicated on the killing off of competitors through years of investor-subsidized predatory pricing and other economically dubious behavior, how rational are the capital market’s actions, really? At some point, it starts to smell like a market failure rather than a market success.

This reminded me of something Peter Drucker said back when the first Dot-Com bubble was bursting:

Many of these internet startups were not startups of businesses at all. They were just stock exchange gambles. If there was a business plan, it was only to launch an IPO or be bought. Not to build a business.

Finding big ideas

A valuable post on innovation and the mind-set of discovery:

Where to Look for the Next Big Thing

This is a key point:

Great innovators are not just smart, they are curious. They are rarely purists or polemicists, but are courageous enough to venture outside their domain.

Howard Gardner touched on this in his book Changing Minds.

[Gardner] is especially pessimistic on our capacity to change our own minds. We do not, on the whole, accept new facts and revise our theories. Rather, we interpret or disregard the new information to make it fit our theories. This is not a matter of IQ or lack of education. He points out that intellectuals are "particularly susceptible" to removing cognitive dissonance by "reinterpreting" the facts.

Among the forces that exacerbate this tendency to lock-in a theory are emotional commitment, public commitment (pride makes it hard to climb down when everyone is watching), and an absolutist personality. (Source)

(Further discussion of this problem here)

Also relevant is David Gelernter's ideas about the mind and creativity.

Gelernter argues in The Muse in the Machine that creativity has three distinctive traits:

1. At base it "is the linking of ideas that are seemingly unrelated."

2. It is not an incremental process, rather inspiration comes as a bolt from the blue."

3. It occurs "in a state of unconcentration." Hence, "hard work does not pay. You can't achieve inspiration by concentrating hard, by putting your mind to it."

I've always liked David Ogilvy's advice on finding big ideas:

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you.

Harvard versus Harvard UPDATED

Disruption theory and the Genteel Tradition

Disinterested scholar or scared Luddite?

Harvard history professor Jill Lepore has a lengthy article on Clayton Cramer’s theories of innovation and industry disruption.

THE DISRUPTION MACHINE
What the gospel of innovation gets wrong.

These are the two best responses I’ve read:

Will Oremus: The New Yorker Thinks Disruptive Innovation Is a Myth

Steve Denning: The New Yorker: Battle Of The Strategy Titans

Lepore starts out strong. She criticizes Christensen for drawing simplistic conclusions from ambiguous case studies, for overstating the predictive power of his theory, and for ignoring contrary evidence.

So far, so good. But even this portion of her critique is vulnerable to the Gelernter Rejoinder:

But if you allow carpers to shoo you away from every generalization before you have time to explore it, you have no hope of coming to grips with basic questions of modern America.

There is no doubt that Clayton Christensen has spent the last twenty years exploring some of the most important questions in modern business. Lepore implies that his work is fatuous; thousands of executives and investors disagree.

Harvard history professors are not in the business of writing narrow critiques of business fads and theories. Nor is the New Yorker in the business of publishing them. Lepore piece is supposed to do more than that. She hints that disruptive innovations are bad (likening them and the companies who try to implement them to terrorism and “packs of ravenous hyenas.”)

Why?

First of all, why single out Christensen’s work for its shaky intellectual foundations? The flaws of his case study based research are shared by most social science research. Unliked Freud, Christensen at least used real names in his case studies.
Related:

Give us science but not too much

I think Oremus nailed this point in his article:

At this point I couldn’t help thinking that her thesis boils down to: “Disruptive innovation is a myth, and also please stop doing it to my industry.”

Recently, Christensen has written influential articles on the coming disruptions in higher education and journalism. Lepore, Harvard professor and New Yorker writer, has two oxen being gored by Christensen and his acolytes.

As Oremus notes, Lepore shifts “awkwardly” in mid-article “from questioning the legitimacy of Christensen’s theory to lamenting its impacts on established institutions that she holds dear:

That’s how a smart skeptic becomes a clever Luddite.

Articles like this probably should come with a warning label:

Content only appears to be disinterested scholarship. The writer has large financial interests and larger psychological investments in the material s/he discusses.

Over a century ago George Santayana mocked his Harvard colleagues for their cloistered existence and their blind faith that it could be preserved:

Yet the smoke of trade and battle
Cannot quite be banished hence
And the air-line to Seattle
Whizzes just behind the fence.

It looks like not much has changed in Cambridge.

Lepore:

Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readersobligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.

Journalism has always been an industry in America. The owners wanted a profit and employees wanted higher wages. The rest is just self-serving PR flackery.

Related:

The Newspaper today and tomorrow

In the end, Lepore’s special pleading reveals her ignorance of both innovation and journalism. I’ve read most of Christensen’s published works. I know that he never wrote anything as stupid as this:

The logic of disruptive innovation is the logic of the startup: establish a team of innovators, set a whiteboard under a blue sky, and never ask them to make a profit, because there needs to be a wall of separation between the people whose job is to come up with the best, smartest, and most creative and important ideas and the people whose job is to make money by selling stuff. Interestingly, a similar principle has existed, for more than a century, in the press. The “heavyweight innovation team”? That’s what journalists used to call the “newsroom.”

Scott Shane of the New York Times disagrees that the newsroom represents a “heavyweight innovation team”.

A typical daily reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day.

Doesn't sound like the work of Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs

UPDATES:

Lepore a not so careful reader?

David Foster from the comments:

"The logic of disruptive innovation is the logic of the startup: establish a team of innovators, set a whiteboard under a blue sky, and never ask them to make a profit..'

This makes me wonder if she actually *read* Christensen's books. In The Innovator's Sollution, he specifically stated that In a venture dedicated to the introduction of a disruptive technology--whether a start-up business or a division of a larger company--early profitability is more important than early rapid growth. See my review of the book, here:

This John Kirk article is outstanding:

Disruption Corruption: What Disruption Theory Is And What It Isn’t

His point about insiders being blinded by product features is important. It is lies at the heart of incumbent blindness when a disruptive innovation starts up. He uses the iPad as an example. One could also point to Detroit in the 60s and 70s where "car guys" just knew that Toyotas and VWs were not "real cars" and hence no threat to GM and Chrysler.

Christensen has addressed this point when he tells managers to ask "what job do consumers hire my product to do"?  Often, that job has little to do with the features than managers consider important.

Thinking about thinking, creativity and, innovation

Several recent items that serve as variations on a theme.

Who knew that the classic Eames recliner owes its origin to the US Navy’s search for a better splint in WWII?

All Technology is Assistive Technology

In 1941, the husband-and-wife design team, Charles and Ray Eames, were commissioned by the US Navy to design a lightweight splint for wounded soldiers to get them out of the field more securely. Metal splints of that period weren’t secure enough to hold the leg still, causing unnecessary death from gangrene or shock, blood loss, and so on.

The Eameses’ unpainted wood splint, curved at its edges to keep the leg from falling off, with a targeted set of slots and holes for tying secure restraints.

The Eameses had been working on techniques to mold and bend plywood, and they were able to come up with this splint designconforming to the body without a lot of extra joints and parts. The wood design became a secure, lightweight, nest-able solution, and they produced more than 150,000 such splints for the Navy.

Over the next decade, the Eameses would go on to refine their wood-molding process to create both sculpture and functional design pieces, most notably these celebrated chairs:

Graham Pullin, in his book, Design Meets Disability, cites this story as an example of a seemingly specialized design problema medical aid for disabled soldiersthat inspired a whole aesthetic in modernist furnishings. The chairs that launched a thousand imitators, and a new ethos of simple, organic lines in household objects.

I’ve posted before about David Gelernter’s ideas on creativity which I think apply here.

Killing Creativity

David Gelernter argues in The Muse in the Machine that creativity has three distinctive traits:

1. At base it “is the linking of ideas that are seemingly unrelated.”

2. It is not an incremental process, rather inspiration comes as a bolt from the blue.”

3. It occurs “in a state of unconcentration.” Hence, “hard work does not pay. You can’t achieve inspiration by concentrating hard, by putting your mind to it.”

Gelernter’s framework demonstrates why the nose-to-the-grindstone approach is a drag on creativity:

A. Ideas cannot be linked until the mind acquires them in the first place. Hence, study and reflection are critical.

B. It allows no time for broad study. Yet that is the only way to increase the chances that the right unrelated ideas will be linked. (As Jacques Barzun puts it, “abundant reading develops the original mind.” )

C. Intense focus allows no time for relaxation and reflection. There is not enough time spent in a state of unconcentration-- the state where inspiration occurs.

The mythic stories of scientific discovery support Gelernter's thesis. There are no better examples of the role of relaxed reflection than Archimedes in his bath or Isaac Newton beneath the apple tree.

Next we have an incisive critique of brainstorming:

Brainstorming Is Not Very Creative

Brainstorming has three serious flaws that prevent it from being very effective as an idea generation method: people shouting out ideas is less creative than people writing ideas individually; reserving judgment and prohibiting criticism reduces creativity; and decision makers tend to choose moderately creative ideas over highly creative ideas. The first is easily resolved. The second two are fatal. All three of these flaws have been found and tested through clinical research by individuals and groups that have nothing to gain by finding flaw with brainstorming. Let’s look at the research.

As the author notes the “no criticism” rule works against what we now know about how real creative collaboration works.

Peter Drucker wrote that, in his experience, when anything important was accomplished, it was by “a monomaniac with a mission.” Conventional brainstorming is a poor method to find such people. A delicate flower who cannot defend their idea is not the sort of relentless monomaniac who will drive a project forward in the face of the inevitable obstacles.

Finally, there is this:

It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity.

Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.

At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

The minimalist office reflects an antiquated view of work and thinking. It might be fine for work that involves sequential, machine-like thinking (but wouldn’t a machine be even better?) but is wholly unsuited for the lateral thinking that Gelernter is writing about.

This calls to mind C. S. Lewis:

And all the time-- such is the tragicomedy of our situation-- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that our civilization needs more 'drive' or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. we make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. we laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful.

Which helps to explain the persistence of brainstorming exercises. Executives, having eliminated the prerequisites of creative thinking, must “bid the gelding be fruitful”. Even though the sessions provide little benefit, they at least provide the illusion of action.

Innovation: Lonely geniuses need not apply

Harvard Professor Finds That Innovative Ideas Spread Like The Flu; Here's How To Catch Them

"What we found was striking," Miller says. More than an individual work, the quality of relationships that a team had was a crucial--especially having someone on the team highly connected to the rest of the network. The most successful teams were the most interwoven, because as Miller says, "If you're doing great work back in a closet somewhere, it doesn't matter."

In this case, too, information--here the process of innovation--acts as contagion. Successful teams were able to spread their ideas through the organization, gathering commentary, criticism, and broader support. Movement of information from person to person and across departments advanced the innovation, Miller says, which couldn't have happened if it stayed on an island. "High-performing people tend to have strong connections, both laterally across departments as well as up and down the hierarchical chain."

Marketing and innovation redux

This post raises some interesting issues:

Are Engineers, Scientists And Mathematicians Enemies of Innovation?


Innovation is about social applications of inventions, not about the inventions themselves. Engineers, scientists and mathematicians don’t get this. It’s not part of their culture. We see time and again, engineering-driven corporate cultures failing because they don’t address the social needs of their customers and they don’t address the social ramifications of invention.

Any time this problem appears, we are looking at a company that ignores one of Peter Drucker's most important insights:

It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance- especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers "value," is decisive- it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it prospers.

And

Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two- and only two- basic functions: marketing and innovation.

If a firm takes Drucker seriously, the marketing and engineering people work together to turn inventions into innovative and successful products. Most companies, however, do not operate this way. Instead, they clutter their internal processes and dysfunction results.

One cause of the dysfunction is the tendency of engineers and other technologists to build things that appeal to engineers and technologists. They then expect "non-technical people" to buy their cool stuff. Someone has to speak for the customers and the technical types have to listen.

Executives often make it hard for the communication to take place. They allow the 'expense" areas to dominate internal communications. The critical dialogue between inventors and marketers is drowned out in the verbal free-for-all.

Marketers often fail to live up to live up to the high responsibility Drucker places upon their shoulders. They lack the strategic insight and product knowledge that are vital. Instead they rely on a handful of shopworn tactics to push products out the door. Often, these tactics are chosen, not because they are the best for the product or company, but because they are the only tricks the marketing department knows.

This problem is exacerbated by the high turnover that is endemic to marketing. new people bring new tricks and new buzzwords.

In such circumstances, i cannot blame the engineers for tuning out the marketing types.