A recent Business Week article profiled Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products and User Experience, at Google. In the article, she lays out Nine Notions of Innovation:
- Ideas come from everywhere
- Share everything you can
- You’re brilliant, we’re hiring
- A license to pursue dreams
- Innovation, not instant perfection
- Don’t politic, use data
- Creativity loves restraint
- Worry about usage and users, not money
- Don’t kill projects — morph them
She also recently spoke at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders seminar series and there is a 45 minute podcast (iTunes link) further detailing her ideas.
These are really valuable lessons. Someone characterized Google as “Stanford with stock options” and her description really resonates with me as to why Google is a great place to work. I used to work for a local software company in Austin called Trilogy Software. The CEO, Joe Liemandt (also featured in the ETL series earlier), came from Stanford and brought that passion for ideas and results to Austin when he began building his company in the mid-90s. I joined in 2000 when the bubble was in full swing and the web champagne still had its fizz.
The environment there was similar to Ms. Mayer’s description of Google (in some ways). The first thing you did when you arrived was go through a boot camp of sorts where new ideas were brainstormed, prototypes were developed, and in some cases, projects were selected to be funded for further development. This was a cool aspect, I thought. Another thing that they did was have the CFO give a financial update every quarter, which apparently Google had this for a time as well. Trilogy was private, so they didn’t have to share any financial information, but they did. You don’t find that kind of openness in many places, but especially not in a company of 1000 employees. The entrepreneurial and open nature of the company was one of the reasons why I was excited to join in the fray and I moved to Austin as a result.
Ms. Mayer refers to the fact that “ideas come from everywhere” and you should “share everything you can.” This is very powerful. Now this doesn’t mean that everyone has good ideas. But, anyone could have one at any one time. You should at least consider ideas from all sources and put it to bed if it doesn’t pass muster. Let the collective wisdom of the company decide on the idea’s merits. Some kind of constant sorting of the ideas that are out there in the company or the marketplace could be done. This is what Google does on their intranet, it seems. There’s a constant running tally of projects going on and metrics are collected and reported for all to see and interpret. Open communication and real action based on people’s ideas has a powerful motivating effect because people feel they are really a part of something and can affect the direction and outcome of the company on a daily basis.
Google’s notion of “20% time”, referred to as “the pursuit of dreams” in the article is another killer notion. At first blush, it seems like you are losing 20% of someone’s productivity each week. But in actuality, I think you will gain much more than you lose in the passion and excitement that your contributors will bring to work each day, and particularly when they are pursuing their dreams. New ideas will spring forth to the benefit of the company that would probably not have come up otherwise. This is good for the psyche of the employee as well as the company’s future success.
As a software engineer who has been doing quite a bit of Ruby on Rails development in the last 18 months, I regularly read DHH’s Loud Thinking blog in which he often writes about Ruby (and Rails) as being so effective largely because they increase developer happiness. This is good advice for anything you do in life…try to find the joy and beauty in it. Life is short!
Finally, the notion that “creativity loves restraint” seems similar to the idea that 37signals always talks about which is that “design loves constraint”. Their mantra about this always reminds me of the Orson Welles quote:
- The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.
An example of a constraint which you can and should place on yourself is to set a deadline. My co-worker Manton once wrote about how he sometimes sets unreasonable deadlines just to see how far he can go in a development sprint. Limiting the amount of time you spend on something helps enhance your focus on the task at hand and actually limits what you try to bite off. This is usually a good thing.
I really enjoyed listening to the talk and reading the article. I am always thinking about ways to enhance my productivity, joy, and creativity in my life and work. I also heartily recommend reading Getting Real by 37signals along similar lines. It’s all about cutting through the B.S. and getting stuff done. Joyfully.
