When you spend all day looking for the perfect example of how NOT to foster a sane approach to innovation, stories like the one Kurt Eichenwald just penned about “Microsoft’s Lost Decade”* make you want to stop and thank the gods of research.
There will be a lot more on this topic in future posts, but for now, let’s call Eichenwald’s description of dysfunctional culture Type I Innosanity:
Forcing innovators to show in advance how their ideas will rapidly support the current core business.
While there are other, less brutal ways to demoralize and drive innovators out of the firm or underground, this is the most pure form of innosanity. It supports improvers well, the people who are focused on improving the current business, but it is death for “mad cow” innovators that live for taking the company in new directions.
And if Eichenwald’s account is accurate, you just have to admire the machine-like efficiency that MSFT employed to crush and grind the life out of its innovators. It rivals the meat manufacturing plants of the American beef industry (insert 1000 drug-addled heifers and wait for the pink slime).
It’s not just the top-down commitment of executives forcing an industry-transforming project like a precursor to the Kindle to “look more like Windows” that impressed me. I mean, that’s a fantastic story of classic success-induced-myopia, true. But it’s the mathematical precision of it all that is truly frightening. It takes the skill of an acre of engineers-turned-managers to come up with something as inhuman as curve-grading employees. That’s the kind of genius organizational scheme that not only destroys the will of the most stalwart innovator but turns his soul into syrupy goo.
There is so much more to say about all this, but for now I just want to thank Microsoft for providing the perfect example of the first, most effective method of systematically destroying a company’s innovation engine. There are other, more insidious ways to do it, but you really have to start with this one. Good timing, Kurt!