Musician Dev Hynes: "The best can be something you didn't think you could even do."

From Melena Ryzik's interview of producer/songwriter Dev Hynes in the NY Times:

Are you in a position to turn people down, as a producer?

Yeah, but I kind of hate doing it, because my whole thing is: I want to try everything in the world. So there’s not many people that I want to ever turn down, because I think: “Cool, yeah. So we make a bad song. That’s like the worst thing that can happen.” Which, in the scheme of bad things in the world, is not that bad. That’s why I make a lot of music and do a lot of different things. No one’s dying from bad collaborations. But the best that can happen is something that you didn’t think you could even do.

Bill Marriott: "They looked at me, and didn't follow the recipes"

This story is from Bill Marriott, chairman of Marriott International, from Adam Bryant's "Corner Office" series.

I was in the Navy Supply Corps on an aircraft carrier. I eventually took over the officers’ mess. I had worked in my dad’s restaurant when I was in college, and I had all the recipe cards sent to me because I didn’t like the food they were serving on board.

I went to these Navy stewards and said, “I want you guys to follow the recipes.” And they looked at me, they didn’t say much, and they didn’t follow the recipes. I came back a few weeks later and said, “You’ve got to start following these recipes.” And they didn’t follow the recipes. They were all World War II veterans, they’d been everywhere and they had learned not to pay attention to all these green, young ensigns.

In later years, I realized I’d failed to get them on the team. I had walked in and said: “Here, do it. I’m an officer. Salute and do it.” They ignored me and didn’t do it, and we still had lousy food when I left the ship. I realized that I should have sat down with them and said, “What do you think we can do to improve the food?”

Amy Edmondson's "Teaming"

I'm so delighted that Amy Edmondson has published "Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate, and Compete in the Knowledge Economy," a summation of her 20-year study of organizational learning & performance. Amy's ideas provide one of the pillars for this site and have helped shape my thoughts about perfectionism, leadership and teamwork.

I'm equally delighted that the book is utterly worthy of the expectations I had for it. Impeccably organized and crisply written, it sets out Amy's arguments so cleanly that you forget how radical her ideas are. At least, until you read something like this:

When I ask executives to...estimate what percentage of failures in their organizations are caused by blameworthy events, the answers usually come back between 2 and 5 percent. But when I then ask what percentage of failures are treated as if caused by blameworthy events, after a pause or laugh, their responses often yield a much higher number in the 70-90 percent range.

If you are looking for an introduction to the ideas we're exploring on The Mistake Bank, please read Chapter 5, "Failing Better to Learn Faster," several times. And then all the other chapters.

We'll spend the rest of the week sharing a few of the countless valuable nuggets from "Teaming." Expect it to be on our year-end "best of" list.

A full collection of posts related to Amy Edmondson's work can be found here.

Standalone innovation group creates "organ rejection"

In the mid 2000s I had the opportunity to create one of those innovation groups - the job of which was to get our company into new, growing markets, combining the processes we had with new technology - using partnerships to move more quickly than developing our own technology.

We had 10 folks, in marketing, product management, implementation and sales. We met every day, built expertise, became one of the top 3 names in this new market segment within months.

The biggest mistake I made was viewing the innovation group as a destination in itself. I saw it growing to become a fully-functioning company, rather than as a feeder to the main operating units. As a result, I didn't do enough to communicate with, collaborate with, or otherwise pave the way for the rest of the company to support what we were creating.

We sold three deals right out of the gate, a huge validation of our approach, in my view. However, when we needed resources and capabilities from the other units, we suffered "organ rejection" - my colleagues didn't accept our approach and decisions when it came to them doing the work. Completely understandable in hindsight - I hadn't asked them to participate in creating the solution - it was nonetheless devastating.

After several highly emotional and agonizing encounters, we found a way forward that integrated our innovation efforts with the main organization's vital capabilities - but in doing so we wasted valuable time and created lots of unproductive conflict. And poor decisions that more collaboration might have avoided also harmed the business.

Net result: we accomplished far less than we should have done.