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ibm.com/bcs Executive technology report 1

Promoting rivalry for innovations sake

April 2006

Executive summary Unlike their counterparts in sales, most innovationteams tend to work in an atmosphere that resembles the world of thearistocratic amateur, with something approaching disdain for conflict. Yet,conflict is healthy, and innovation thrives on conflict. With mechanisms toengender trust and manage disputes in a lively, challenging environment, thenew possibilities that open up may even surprise the participants themselves

This Executive Technology Report is based on a personal essay by Peter Andrews

Consulting Faculty Member at the IBM Executive Business Institute in Palisades,New York.

The history of innovation is full of rivalries some friendly, some less so wherecreative people challenged each other, egged each other on and ultimately pushedeach other on to triumphs that otherwise would not have been possible. Think of thscramble to decode DNA in Watsons The Double Helix.1 Think of the competitionamong the Renaissance painters. Think of the exploration of North America and thrace to the moon.

Yet, within corporations, it is often considered impolite to have even a friendly rivalrSuch behavior may be seen as anti-team, egotistical and disruptive. When a

creative person is driven to say Im better than you are and then to prove it, thatsimmature.

There is a double standard in most cases. Somehow, this corporate polity is absenwhen salespeople are involved. When quarterly results are in play, corporationsoften encourage the creation of winners and losers in the coarsest terms. Butinnovators, though sometimes motivated by the successes of marketplace rivals,tend to work in an atmosphere that resembles the world of the aristocratic amateur,with something approaching disdain for conflict.

This makes little practical sense. Conflict is healthy, and innovation thrives onconflict. In fact, it is difficult to imagine doing anything that really matters without

risk, failure, stress and the ruffling of feathers. As George Bernard Shaw said,Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt tadapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonablepeople.


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Stimulating workplace rivalry

Therefore, the goal of anyone who wants to lead a team that is brilliantly innovativeshould not be to avoid conflict, but to manage it. It even makes sense to introducesome conflict from time to time, in the form of rivalry. What is desired (and it is adelicate balance) is to have team members want to be heroes, not victors.Admiration must eclipse envy. And, most of all, trust must be engendered overbetrayal.

Creating the right environment for friendly rivalry is exquisitely sensitive to cultureand to the personalities involved. However, at a minimum, the leader or the teamitself should seek to establish the following:

Norms and guidelines for behavior, especially with regard to any displaysby heroes who have achieved success. (A victory dance should be joyful,not irritating.)

Ways to encourage and celebrate referenced theft of ideas and practicesacross the team. (If you can make people proud to have other teammembers adopt their ideas, you win.)

Clear indications of what risk is acceptable and ways to deal positively withfailure. (The safer it is to try and fail nobly, the more ambitious people willbe.)

A playful, highly social atmosphere where people learn to appreciate eachothers talents and accomplishments. (You cant have friendly rivalries in atense, unfriendly environment.)

Opportunities for understanding. (Creating touchstones, common termsand occasions for sharing all help.)

Regular, diverse sources of ideas and information that stimulate thinkingand discussion. (Working, creative brains need to be fed constantly on adiverse diet.)

Shared questions that are thought provoking. (When people havecommon questions to focus on, they can compare their efforts directly.)

Non-monetary challenges that provide venues for regular competition andsuccess. (Goals create success stories. And keeping money out allowsthe people to attach their own meanings to their successes.)

A place be it virtual or real that is the home for the team. (Space has

forms and decorations that communicate who we are and who we are not.) Opportunities for team members to publicly appreciate each other.

(Making it okay for rivals to praise each other makes it easier to keep therivalry friendly.)


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Working through the rough spots

It wont always be smooth going for a creative team, so the team must havemechanisms to recover from disputes that go too far. And, more importantly, sociacapital must be built up regularly and conscientiously. Discussions andcommitments need to encompass the whole of who the people are, not just theirprofessional lives.

If you are leading an ambitious, innovative team, continue to develop and practiceyour skills in communications, conflict management and listening. Take more timewith people issues (and, if team members are not co-located, double that timeagain). And also, do the following:

Take time to know the players, their talents and their sensitivities

Keep asking about interests and skills some talents are only revealedover time and important clustering of talents emerge with new situationsand opportunities

Encourage eccentricity; it is good for a team to have colorful personalities(and it often provides an excuse for ideas that go astray)

Take (and show) an interest in the people and their activities, concerns andsuccesses.

Be amused by the energized relationships high drama is part of a teamworking at the limits, and it often tests and reveals character

Work to maintain respect, even mutual admiration, across the team

Be present and communicate often, thoughtfully and well Find rivals for yourself

Find good models of rivalries from history and business, and emulate them

Exploit the power of language, especially in naming projects and givingpeople titles

Strategically pair people so that in working together, they build trust andrespect

Keep it light, but dont just keep it light

How do you know if the rivalry has become unhealthy? Ask these questions:

Is there evidence that people are cheating to get ahead of others on theteam?

Are people complaining about other team members or disparaging them? Are there personal attacks, rather than challenges to ideas and directions?


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Has someone stopped participating with enthusiasm? Have people become obsessed with minutiae that have very little

relevance to overall team objectives?

Are people no longer having fun?

It is okay for people to be annoyed, even angry, with each other for short periods oftime. But protracted periods of disaffection are dangerous and must be managed.In some cases, it might mean setting new expectations for behavior or individualcounseling. In others, it might actually require changing the constituency of theteam.

Overall, the goal is to maintain a lively, challenging environment. To get people

engaged, on both professional and personal levels. The more people see theirstatus and identity within the team as being vital, the more they will push to outdoeach other. And thats how new possibilities are opened up. Often to the surprise othe participants themselves.

So, dont avoid conflict to the exclusion of achievement. In a cruel, probably unfairstatement in the film The Third Man, the character played by Orson Welles says, "InItaly for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshedbut they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. InSwitzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace,and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." 2 With something short of warfare,but more honest than a group sing-along, there is potential for greater team

achievement.

References

1 Watson, James D. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery ofthe Structure of DNA. Simon & Shuster, Inc. 1968, 1996.

2 This example is wrong in more than one sense: In terms of technical innovation,there is a lot from Switzerland, from high quality chocolate to the Swiss army knife tvelcro to Nobel Prizes from the IBM Lab. Also, the Swiss have not been entirelypeaceful: they had civil wars during the cited period, and they were even famous asmercenaries. And last, but not least: The Black forest people in Germany claim thecuckoo clock is their invention. (The Swiss made the precision mechanics watches

and still do.) - contributions from Walter Hehl, IBM.


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Related publications of interest

White, Michael.Acid Tongues and Tranquil Dreamers: Eight Scientific Rivalries thaChanged the World. HarperCollins. 2001.

Uglow, Jenny. The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World.Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003.

Eckert, Bob and Johnathan Vehar. More Lightning, Less Thunder: How to EnergizeInnovation Teams. New & Improved. 2003.

Kelley, Tom, Jonathan Littman and Tom Peters. The Art of Innovation: Lessons in

Creativity from IDEO, Americas Leading Design Firm. Doubleday. 2001.

Davila, Tony, Marc J. Epstein and Robert Shelton. Making Innovation Work: How toManage It, Measuer It, and Profit from It. Pearson Education, Inc. 2006.

Ursiny, Tim. Cowards Guide to Conflict: Empowering Solutions for Those WhoWould Rather Run Than Fight. Sourcebooks, Inc. 2003

Foster, Richard and Sarah Kaplan. Creative Destruction: Why Companies That AreBuilt to Last Underperform the Market And How to Successfully Transform Them.Doubleday. 2001.

About this publicationExecutive Technology Reportis a monthly publication intended as a heads-up onemerging technologies and business ideas. All the technological initiatives covered inExecutive Technology Reporthave been extensively analyzed using a proprietary IBMmethodology. This involves not only rating the technologies based on their functionsand maturity, but also doing quantitative analysis of the social, user and businessfactors that are just as important to its ultimate adoption. From these data, the timingand importance of emerging technologies are determined. Barriers to adoption andhidden value are often revealed, and what is learned is viewed within the context offive technical themes that are driving change:

Knowledge Management: Capturing a company's collective expertise wherever itresides databases, on paper, in people's minds and distributing it to where it canyield big payoffs


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Pervasive Computing: Combining communications technologies and an array ofcomputing devices (including PDAs, laptops, pagers and servers) to allow userscontinual access to the data, communications and information services

Realtime: "A sense of ultracompressed time and foreshortened horizons, [a result oftechnology] compressing to zero the time it takes to get and use information, to learn,to make decisions, to initiate action, to deploy resources, to innovate" (RegisMcKenna, Real Time, Harvard Business School Publishing, 1997.)

Ease-of-Use: Using user-centric design to make the experience with IT intuitive, less painfu

and possibly fun

Deep Computing: Using unprecedented processing power, advanced software andsophisticated algorithms to solve problems and derive knowledge from vast amounts

of data

This analysis is used to form the explanations, projections and discussions in eachExecutive Technology Reportissue so that you not only find out whattechnologies areemerging, but howand whythey'll make a difference to your business. If you wouldlike to explore how IBM can help you take advantage of these new concepts andideas, please contact us at [email protected] . To browse through otherresources for business executives, please visit

ibm.com/services

Executive Technology Reportis written by Peter Andrews, Consulting Faculty, IBMExecutive Business Institute, and is published as a service of IBM Corporation. Visit

ibm.com/ibm/palisades

Copyright 1999-2006 IBM Corporation. All rights reserved.

IBM and the IBM logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of InternationalBusiness Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.

Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks ofothers.

References in this publication to IBM products and services do not imply that IBM intends tomake them available in all countries in which IBM operates.

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