Drive a Culture of Innovation
Get your team to invent well
Hello, it’s Ethan & Jason. Welcome to Level Up: Your source for executive insights, high performance habits, and specific career growth actions.
FYI, we have 4 upcoming events—join us live!
(Mar 18) An Insider’s Guide to High Profile Events (Davos, TED). Ethan & Alisa Cohn will discuss how to get into elite events, what to do, how to network, and how to follow-up. RSVP here.
(Mar 28) How to Work with Senior Leaders (So They See Your Impact). Jason & Sally Ivester will share how to make your message executive ready and how to speak in high-stakes rooms. RSVP here.
(Mar 28) Leadership Lessons from Startup to IPO. Jason & Brian Distelburger will discuss Brian’s 18 year experience of taking his company public. RSVP here.
(Apr 2) Unforgettable Presence: Get Seen, Gain Influence, and Catapult Your Career. Jason & Lorraine K. Lee will discuss her new book and how to develop executive presence, virtual presence, and leverage LinkedIn. RSVP here.
How do you build a culture of innovation on your team?
Amazon has a Leadership Principle (LP) ‘Think Big’ that says: “Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.”
When I started at Amazon I had no idea how to do this.
I thought that being a visionary was a gift you were born with.
More than 70 US patents later…
I’ve come to realize there are systematic ways anyone can learn to Think Big.
In this Level Up Career Talk, I break down the two main inputs to culture, share my personal 3-step innovation framework I used to get 70+ patents, discuss how to drive team innovation as a leader, and answered pre-submitted and live audience Q&A.
Watch on YouTube.
Takeaways
“How things are done around here” is the one-line definition of culture. It’s comprised of the company’s stated culture (e.g. Leadership Principles), how it’s implemented (e.g. interviews, promotions), origin stories / history / lore for preservation, rewards / incentives, and what the leader talks about and backs up with action (e.g. your team watches what you say and do). You cannot have a culture of innovation based solely on process and structure…it takes constant leadership energy, Jeff Bezos gave out the ‘Just Do It’ award every quarter to employees who just did it (see below image for more).
Amazon integrated and pushed the Leadership Principles (LPs) into the company through 3 main mechanisms:
Interviews. When 4-5 people are chosen to interview someone (creating the interview loop), each person is usually assigned 2-3 LPs (thus 8-10 of the LPs get covered) and the interviewer’s goal is to figure out if the candidate meets your LPs (e.g. do they think this way, can they think this way, is there evidence they’ve acted in this way).
Annual reviews. Part of your review is your peers saying which LPs you do the best on and which you can do more of.
Promotion documents. Part of all levels and more so at the leadership level.
Source: Fact of the Day 1 My 3-step framework on how to approach invention focuses on the foundations (not magic). It is intentionally not complicated:
Learn enough to know the basics and be competent—constantly feed yourself the new and cutting edge.
Spend real time thinking (this is where most leaders struggle)—proactively schedule weekly time to reflect deeply. Thomas Edison said: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” you must put in the dedicated time.
Use the ‘Creative Whack Pack’—this set of prompts will shake you out of your standard thinking. Most of invention is Isaac Newton’s apple hitting him on the head (in the story). You need a stimulus that causes you to think differently.
Leaders, if you want a symbol to shows you prize innovation…buy everyone on your team this Whack Pack.
Amazon gave out awards for people who patented inventions—this served as an artifact that venerates invention. Here’s what one looks like (alongside my deck of Whack Pack cards).
The four keys to driving innovation into your team:
Setup a culture that promotes invention (see point 1 above).
Help your team gain the knowledge and skills to innovate in existing and new areas.
Create time for your team (e.g. Google’s 20% time, hackathons). This spurs ‘The Long Nose of Innovation’ (see below).
Setup a clear system of reward that includes people seeing inventions be actually implemented, getting personal value or acknowledgement, and knowing the company is a safe place to fail.
Audience questions I answer in the video
Watch the video for my answers, starts at 33:54
“How do we cultivate innovation culture when you are always in the crisis of delivering against tight deadlines?”
“What strategies can help shift the dynamic away from a focus on cost-cutting and scaling mature products, to contributing to early-stage innovation, without relocating?”
“Thoughts on Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy for startups and challenges to go after incumbents?”
“How do you change a culture / leadership team of 'no risks' to embracing change and risks?”
“How does one develop the ability to think innovatively continuously?”
“How do you find the right resources to follow-up on good ideas?”
“How do you determine if the org isn’t structured to be right place to innovate technically even if innovative in other regards?”
“How do you see companies innovating if their leaders are slow to adopt or deny AI's transformative power? Could this shift open the door for younger leaders to take charge?”
Live audience questions:
“How do you convince people on the team who want to innovate but have fear of creating friction with others or overstepping boundaries?”
“How do you foster an ongoing commitment to a culture of innovation?”
You only need a few good ideas to take you through a career or lifetime.
Level Up In-Person Meetups Coming Up
I'd love to meet you in person if I can.
Here are some places I will be in the near future (click the city name to RSVP):
San Francisco / South Bay area. April 22nd. Co-hosted with Nishant Jain (Apple) & Arjun Raja (Google).
Arlington, VA / Washington DC. May 8th. Co-hosted with Omar Halabieh (Amazon) & Rajdeep Saha (Amazon).
Other places on my travel horizons where I welcome local connections (no promises of timing) here.
And, if you visit Honolulu, Hawaii—message Jason to meetup. He’s met many Level Up readers already (example)!
Connect With Ethan & Jason
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‘Breakthrough to Executive’ course: We go in-depth on how to become a scaled deep leader, change agent, and trusted decision maker to meet the standards of executive performance followed by how to manage your executive promotion process to win. The next cohort starts April 26—if this fits your career goal, explore the course page.
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