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The hardest part about working out is just getting started.
CEO Doug McMillon, told the Wall Street Journal, “We stopped thinking of tech as something you bolt on. It’s in the water now. Everyone owns a piece of innovation.” Of late, when we talk about creating an innovative culture, we shape the requisite elements of that culture around the tenets of Design Thinking: a firm’s willingness to experiment, its high tolerance for failure and its psychologically safe, highly collaborative, non-hierarchical environment. It all sounds like fun. Actually, it’s hard work. Building and sustaining an innovative culture means embracing a sometimes- uncomfortable paradox. Failure can be tolerated, not incompetence. Experiment but do so with rigorous discipline. Everybody’s safe, but honesty, sometimes brutal honesty is required. And collaboration doesn’t mean you set aside individual accountability. There’s the failure from trying something new and untried and the failure that is the result of poor technique, sloppy thinking or lazy habits. Failure on the way to the A FEW YEARS AGO, we built a software platform. Traditional scrum team, traditional software development processes, traditional sprints, traditional quality assessments. That’s maybe a million, and 12-months. Today our rapid development process uses a lot of AI agents—network design architecture, database designed user interface, UI design project management. That million dollar, 12-month project, COOKED GOOSE
new is understandable. Lack of professionalism is not. Technical skill, a certain mastery of craft, critical thinking, these are the price of entry. You’re not gonna compose a piece of music if you don’t know how to play an instrument. And you’re not gonna compose a great piece of music if you don’t know the instrument really well. Tolerance for failure—the kind of failure that leads to innova- tion—demands a high degree of professional competence. Failure in this context is a valuable lesson on the way forward. Failure from poor workmanship or lack of thoroughness goes nowhere. Thomas Edison, about inventing the viable light bulb: “I didn’t fail. I found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” 10,000 was a bit of an exagger- ation. According to his records, he only failed 2,774 times. He kept scrupulous notes, designed each experiment to produce the informa- tion that would lead to the next, and had a clear sense on whether to move forward or kill an idea. The willing- ness to kill a losing idea makes it less we’ve done it in 90 days for less than $250,000. In today’s world, the technologies, the speed at which things are moving, if you’re not innovating, you don’t have a decade to catch up. You just don’t. We’re seeing million-dollar market cap organizations that have 30 employees. If you’re not already moving away from traditional models and using those new technologies, time is something that you don’t have.
risky to try the next one. It’s easy to get defensive about an idea, especially if it’s yours. Author William Faulkner offered some hard advice, “kill your darlings.” In a “safe” environment, people feel free to speak plainly. However, in a collaborative environment, if it’s safe for you to critique my ideas, it must be safe for me to critique yours. And that holds regardless of our relative positions on the organizational ladder. This openness is vital to innovation. Conflict is not to be feared. It’s called creative abrasion. Open discussion not only helps define the “problem to be solved,” it pressure-tests the solution. Collaborating, being part of a team with a common goal can be immensely satisfying and inclusive. An innovative culture depends on breaking down silos and understanding different perspectives. But we’re collaborating toward an end. There’s a goal and that goal demands accountability. Ultimately, someone must make a decision and own the consequences of that decision. But authority does not
If you’re a CEO and you don’t see that and don’t understand that, your goose is cooked. TEE GREEN The former CEO of Greenway Health, Harbert alum, Wyche “Tee” Green is now the Chief Executive Officer of 121G, LLC, an investment, business advisory and technology development firm he founded in 2016.
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