I enjoyed a recent post on Wally Bock’s Three Star Lead­er­ship Blog about inno­va­tion — Wally con­tends that ideas are easy, but inno­va­tion requires work. He quotes Robert Tucker, who said: “Any­one who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea.” He may be right… I had a great idea in the shower today too… and a good strate­gic one at that. The ground he cov­ers from there is to illus­trate how some ideas die on the table, and oth­ers get killed. He had some good insight around the way in which an idea’s cre­ator often can’t see the per­mu­ta­tions of the idea… like Edi­son devalu­ing the use of the phono­graph for record­ing music.

He gives a good exam­ple of researchers not both­er­ing to ask why frogs weren’t get­ting sick… until one sci­en­tist did, and fol­lowed the trail to a new type of antibi­otic. That takes think­ing dif­fer­ently, but the results are pretty clear. What I wasn’t aware of are the sta­tis­tics he cites (yeah, I know – 85% of all sta­tis­tics are made up on the spot to prove a point). Only 5% of peo­ple in an orga­ni­za­tion cre­ate ideas; another 10% will sup­port and pro­mote them. The remain­ing 85% try to kill them.

Wow.  I con­sider myself some­one who cre­ates ideas… so no won­der I get such oppo­si­tion.  It’s innate!  Next time you instinc­tively go to squash a new idea, think twice… lis­ten again, and ask that 10% slice what they like about it (assum­ing they do).  You might be killing a bad idea… but you might also be killing a key inno­va­tion, and you won’t know unless you lis­ten.  Said William McK­night, CEO of 3M from 1949–66 as the com­pany trans­formed into one of the most inno­v­a­tive we’ve seen in the last cen­tury: “Encour­age, don’t nit­pick. Let peo­ple run with an idea.”