Endless Innovation

The Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

Here's something that Deadheads could have told you 40 years ago -- there's a lot the Grateful Dead can teach you about running a business. In the March 2010 issue of The Atlantic, senior editor Joshua Green uncovers some of the management secrets of the Grateful Dead. In fact, as Green writes, "the Dead's influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to - while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite - the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by Corporate America":

(1) Focus intensely on your most loyal fans

(2) Embrace "strategic improvisation" and "flexibility" as core business values

(3) Increase demand for your product by giving it away for free - "If I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20 people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is dramatically enhanced."

Now that the Grateful Dead has finally unlocked decades' worth of commercial recordings, videotapes, press clippings, business records and correspondence into one archive, look for Dead Studies to take off - if only for the novelty fact alone. On March 5, the New York Historical Society will open the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Dead Archive. After that, there are already plans afoot to distribute the Dead Archive to everyone from musicologists to historians to psychologists to management professors. As Joshua Green opines, "it may only be a matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere."

[image: Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, via The Atlantic Online]

How far should you let people peek inside your creative process?

In the era of the social Web -- when it's possible to tweet, blog or status update every miniscule fact of one's life -- it's fashionable to opine that every personal detail and inner thought should be made public. After all, if you're not going to do it, someone else will. But just how far should you let people peek inside your creative process?

It's a question that I've been pondering for the past 48 hours, having just completed Vladimir Nabokov's posthumously published work, The Original of Laura. To make a long story short, Nabokov (pictured, left) passed away in 1977 and left strict orders to his family that the unfinished work that he was writing on his deathbed - what turned out to be The Original of Laura - should be burned upon his death if it had not been completed. Nearly 30 years later, Nabokov's son Dmitri cobbled together his father's meticulously numbered notecards and had the book published as "a novel in fragments." In an ingenious piece of PR for the book, pubishing house Alfred A. Knopf actually included copies of Nabokov's notecards as perforated pieces of pages of the novel. (If you pick up Nabokov's novel at the local bookstore, the book weighs in at a hefty-looking 275 pages, but due to the double-sided notecards and the heavy stock of paper used to publish the book, there's really only about 50-100 pages of content. A Nabokov-aholic can easily finish the book in under 90 minutes.)

What's fascinating about Nabokov's new book, of course, is that you actually see all of Nabokov's words as they appear on his notecards - complete with smudges, cross-outs, words scrawled out in Russian and French (he was trilingual) and annotated notes to himself about titles of chapters and key points he wants to make about his characters. There's one page of the book that's a full-on discussion of the precise word that Nabokov would like to describe a female character (fille, in French) and how best to render that word in English, while keeping the connotations and meaning of the word in French. If you're a scholar of Russian literature or a huge Nabokov fan, it's a real treat to see the internal gearings of his mind at work.

If, however, you're a casual Nabokov fan with only a passing interest in Nabokov's wonderful facility for wordplay and his clever post-modernist literary devices, you're bound to be disappointed. There appear to be re-thinkings of plot lines from Lolita (a character named Hubert H. Hubert and a nymph-girl named Flora), thin allusions to other Nabokovian themes and plot lines, and even misspelings ("bycycle") that Nabokov's son Dmitri did not see fit to edit.

At the end of the day, the creative genius of individuals is based, to some large part, on the ability to edit and harness the pure outflow of talent and imagination and put it into a format for others to appreciate. In the business world, it would be like a consultant showing up for a final client presentation with only a stack of note cards and some creative ideas about the points he/she would like to make, rather than a full-formed presentation deck that had been tirelessly rehearsed and edited. Clients are paying not only for the creative imagination that goes into the final recommendations and suggestions, but also for the discipline and rigor that goes into the final presentation deck.

Which is to say that I think there's some part of the creative process that should remain hidden. What do you think?

[image: A notecard from "The Original of Laura"]

Microsoft, Middle Management and Why Some Companies Can't Innovate

This week's op-ed piece (Microsoft's Creative Destruction) in the New York Times from Dick Brass, a former Microsoft VP, was a wake up call for the tech world. In a thoughtful but ultimately scathing piece, Brass describes how and why Microsoft gradually evolved from an innovative company with first-mover advantage to a technological also-ran scrambling behind just about everyone in bringing new products to market:

"As they marvel at Apple’s new iPad tablet computer, the technorati seem to be focusing on where this leaves Amazon’s popular e-book business. But the much more important question is why Microsoft, America’s most famous and prosperous technology company, no longer brings us the future, whether it’s tablet computers like the iPad, e-books like Amazon’s Kindle, smartphones like the BlackBerry and iPhone, search engines like Google, digital music systems like iPod and iTunes or popular Web services like Facebook and Twitter. [...]

Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s. Its marketing has been inept for years; remember the 2008 ad in which Bill Gates was somehow persuaded to literally wiggle his behind at the camera?

While Apple continues to gain market share in many products, Microsoft has lost share in Web browsers, high-end laptops and smartphones. Despite billions in investment, its Xbox line is still at best an equal contender in the game console business. It first ignored and then stumbled in personal music players until that business was locked up by Apple.

Microsoft’s huge profits — $6.7 billion for the past quarter — come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.’s, Microsoft can’t count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest."

Obviously, something happened to the culture of the company, changing the very direction of what it means to work at Microsoft. One way to conceptualize this is to think about the "impenetrable layer of suck" that tends to grow at just about every company -- especially those already bloated with layer upon layer of middle management. On her Strange Attractor blog, Suw Charman-Anderson has posted a fantastic graphic showing how this "impenetrable layer of suck" works. Creative ideas never quite make their way down through an organization. Note the squiggly red lines that are the "social media fissures" -- these are just about the only way that innovative ideas work can find their way down to the rank-and-file members of an organization.

You can read the New York Times op-ed piece as a bit of grumbling and mumbling from a disaffected former employee -- or as a warning shot fired across the bow to other tech companies like Yahoo, Google and Amazon -- all of which are no longer young, frisky, risk-seeking startups. Apple may no longer be a young start-up, either, but it has thus far avoided the "impenetrable layer of suck." Steve Jobs has almost single-handedly enabled innovative ideas to come to market through charisma and sheer force of will. Which explains to a large degree why Microsoft was never able to realize the full potential of the Tablet PC, while Apple was able to generate a market sensation around the iPad.

[image: The Impenetrable Layer of Suck via Strange Attractor]