Where does innovation come from?

Aug 14

I recently read ”Always day one - how the tech titans plan to stay on top forever” by Alex Kantrowitz. The book covers different types of leadership styles in big tech companies (Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft) and highlights how the mindset of leaders and their capacity of being open to feedback and innovation can make or break the entire business.

While reading I really started to reflect on the quality a leader is supposed to have and on what society depicts success as.

At school, during my education and in many different moments of my life I was taught that to be a leader you need to have THE best idea. It is the strike of genius that will get you there, that brand new and amazing intuition that nobody else can have. If you have it, then you just have to make it happen, execute on it and you’re done. Think about Steve Jobs imaginary: a visionary who did not care about the ones close to him but was just focused on making his ground-breaking ideas happen.

This concept never really resonated 100% with me. Since really early in my career I always believed that many brains think better than one (no matter how brilliant one single person is) and I also never saw myself as the person who can generate the ”1 million dollar idea” while alone in a garage. But if that person with the great idea is not me, how could I lead teams of product developers who are supposed to build the next big thing?

For a long time I really felt inadequate, until one day I realized that there is not such a thing as a genius idea that changes the world. Innovation is in the process, in inventing together, in pointing the way towards a challenge/opportunity and then let smart people you work with find the best solutions for it.

If you work with product development evidence of this is all around you, you just need to choose to see them. When was the last time that someone completely disconnected from the customers found the best solution to the problem? Or when was it that you/your team had an idea that was 100% right, nothing unexpected happened when bringing it to market? Probably never, because innovation is iteration.

This is exactly what Kantrowitz in the book calls the ”engineering mindset” which is the ability to facilitate others to innovate, not in being the innovator yourself. The role of a leader is to set the directions, making sure that everyone know where you are heading and then focus on removing any roadblocks from people’s path while they figure out how to get to the goal.

Amazon does it with its famous 6 pagers, Facebook has a really structured feedback loop (in the light of recent news one might question it) and Google has a transparency by design model.

Reading that the superpower of the leaders of the some of the most innovative companies in the world is openness and facilitation skills and not an extremely brilliant brain, really helped me put things in another perspective and reinforced my believes.

If you suffer from the impostor syndrome, you should really reflect upon what are the best skills for a leader to have. Reading this book and listening to real-life examples could really give you another perspective.