Sylvester McMonkey McBean

Here is an an article written by Scott Anthony for the Harvard Business Review blog. To check out other articles and resources and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

*     *     *

Dartmouth College graduates are generally big supporters of our most famous alumni — Theodor Geisel (Class of 1925) known better as Dr. Seuss. On Sunday evening, my son pleasantly surprised me by picking one of my favorite Dr. Seuss stories, The Sneetches [click here] from the shelf for his bed time reading. Reading the story helped me visualize why a company I recently visited was approaching innovation the wrong way.

For those of you who don’t remember the story, the sneetches (yellow characters that vaguely resemble ostriches) start the book as a divided crowd. One group of sneetches has stars on their stomachs. They consider themselves superior to the sneetches without “stars upon thars.” Then Sylvester McMonkey McBean arrives with a machine that can put a star on a sneetch’s chest. Much to the star-bellied sneetches dismay, the non-starred sneetches go through the procedure. Then, of course, the star isn’t special anymore, so McBean unveils a star removal machine. Hilarity ensues.

By the end of the book, the sneetches have all lost their money but can no longer remember who had a star and who didn’t. The story carries obvious lessons about the dangers of conformity, and upon basing social status on silly, superficial things.
But what the heck does this have to do with innovation?

First, when you are setting up innovation groups, you have to avoid simply putting “stars upon thars.” Sometimes members of these groups begin preening, thinking they are the chosen ones within the organization. As Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble point out their new book The Other Side of Innovation [click here], the resentment that typically follows is dangerous because innovation success almost always requires support from the base business (who of course provides the money to make innovation happen).

The other problem relates to how companies structure for innovation. The company I was with was working on a highly disruptive business model. I asked how they planned to commercialize their idea.

“We’ve read the literature, so we know if we run this from inside the mainstream organization, we’ll screw it up,” one leader told me. “So, we’re going to create an autonomous group to commercialize the innovation.”

So far, so good.

“Who is going to staff this autonomous group?” I asked. “And how will you measure progress?”

They told me that the team would all come from the core business. And the metrics, not surprisingly, would be the kinds of metrics that would typically govern the core business.

All they had done was put stars on some Sneetches’ bellies. Sure, superficially it might look different, but the reality was the group would work, and think, like the base business, which wouldn’t help foster disruptive innovation.

Autonomy isn’t just about making a team separate, physically or organizationally. A truly autonomous team has the ability to hire the right people for the job, whether they are in the organization or not. And they have the freedom to work with leadership to craft different, appropriate metrics for their initiative.

If you forget this imperative, I suggest you reread The Sneetches.

*     *     *

Scott Anthony is the Managing Director of Innosight Ventures. Scott has written three books on innovation, the latest being The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, published by Harvard University Press (2009). To check it out, click here.