Wise Management

Create the right culture

Leading the people involved in corporate product creation can be extraordinarily difficult. It can also prove extremely rewarding. The people who gravitate toward innovation activities tend to be very smart, highly creative, and more motivated by recognition and the freedom to create than by the money they make. To lead and inspire such a workforce, senior management must find a delicate balance between seemingly contradictory forces: top-down direction versus individual empowerment; experienced judgement versus creative license; pressure to perform to expectation versus willingness to challenge convention; and by-the-book execution versus pragmatic adaptation. Achieving the right balance among such forces can give a company a true competitive advantage.

Allow freedom in context

Intelligent, self-motivated people generally desire—and deserve considerable freedom to deliver their best work. This proves particularly true for the creative individuals drawn to research. 3M pioneered an explicit policy that allows its staff members to devote up to 15 percent of their time to discretionary projects of their own choosing.

The policy encourages freedom, but puts it in context: 85 percent of a person’s time will be explicitly aligned with corporate objectives, underscoring the company’s understanding of the need to find the appropriate balance between creative freedom and project discipline.

Senior management should make sure that researchers and product creation staff participate in activities that connect them to the real world to help balance their instinctual aspiration for complete creative freedom and to ensure that their creativity is channeled into productive efforts. To stay grounded, researchers should regularly spend time on the more pragmatic, application activities of a product creation team.