I went back to Crossfit for the first time since before the holidays and loved it. The workout was kettlebell swings, lunges, squats – and then some strength work afterward.
Since my body is not used to it, for the next several days I hobbled around the house because my muscles were so sore. Do you know that painful sore feeling?
It reminded me of an awesome recent commercial from Nike we’d seen in between football games, called “Stairs.”
That’s what I looked like this week! There’s a fair few stairs to navigate in my house, and I had to take them one at a time 🤣
My schedule should be clear for Crossfit at least once per week going forward. My goal is to build up to 2-3x/week this year, depending on how I stack running, rucking, and strength stuff at home.
If you remember, my “learning” from last year is that goals don’t happen without habits, so I’m building my habits for this year.
When we subtly shift toward both focusing on and finding joy in the process of achieving instead of having the goal, we have gained a new skill. And once mastered, it is magical and incredibly empowering.
— Thomas M. Sterner in “The Practicing Mind”
Three Things
1 – 🍫 Spring & Mulberry Chocolate – I received a bar of Lavender Rose chocolate as a gift recently, and it was amazing. There are only six ingredients in the bar I had, and it’s sweetened with dates instead sugar. They’re $12/bar if you buy them individually, so this definitely in special treat territory. Check it out!
2 – 🌈 Colorful Sarasa Pens – This pack of colorful gel pens work really well for spicing up my meeting notes. They write smoothly and don’t bleed. Fun!
3 – 🤗 Hugging Face Course on Building AI Agents – As someone who learns best by doing, in addition to using AI, I recently joined this free online course to learn how to build AI agents. The prerequisites are a knowledge of Python and LLMs. I’m going to see how far I can get. Let me know if you join!
(Enjoy this 7️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Nurturing Innovation
Innovation is not the same as generating a new idea. Innovation is turning a new idea into reality. Innovation is creating the practical application of a new idea.
Generating new ideas are pretty easy. Turning them into reality? Hard.
When studying innovation, there are really good theoretical frameworks and analyses, like in the book “Loonshots,” but it’s also helpful to study organizations who have a track record of success.
And few places in history have been as successful at innovation as the six decade run of Bell Labs.
A Primer on Bell Labs
Bell Labs was established in the 1920s in the United States (it had some history before that, but this is when things were finally put together for them to start cooking).
There was an effective monopoly on phone systems in the US at the time. It was believed that only a single entity could manage the complexity of a national long distance phone system – which was true for a while.
This monopoly created two conditions that helped enable Bell Labs to do what they did; confidence in consistent funding, and long-term time horizons.
And what did Bell Labs achieve during the next several decades? They invented or otherwise delivered the following: – The transistor – The binary code system (realizing information could be coded in 0s and 1s) – Undersea trans-Atlantic communication cables – Satellite communications – The laser – Solar cells – Unix, C, and C++ – Charge-coupled device (CCD) – unlocking digital imagery – A whole host of other frameworks and methods to support modern information theory
That’s a spectacular list – and it’s not even everything they did!
Something special was going on; this is one of the most concentrated innovation centers of all time. You don’t get a list like by accident.
Funding and long-term time horizons were necessary, but insufficient. What else did Bell Labs do to create those outcomes?
How did they do it?
The leaders insight Bell Labs were just as brilliant as the researchers they hired. They architected a system in which researchers and other people could be successful – much more than just throwing scientists in a large building and hoping for the best.
What were some of the components of that system? I’ve identified the following components: 1. A critical mass of talent density 2. Investing across multiple zones / time horizons 3. No goals 4. Close proximity and high collisions 5. The importance of good questions 6. Permissionless collaboration 7. Failure didn’t reflect poorly on the person
I’ll run through these for you and then share ways we can incorporate these in our business – even if we don’t enjoy a monopoly in the market 😁
A Critical mass of Talent Density
If you want to create great outcomes, you need great people.
Netflix wrote about this in their iconic culture deck. They said a great workplace is “stunning colleagues.” Their uncommon internal processes are all designed around ensuring that they retain a high talent density.
Bell Labs was very intentional about this. They had a leader of the org. travel around the world to lure amazing people, wherever they were found, doing whatever kind of research, to come work for Bell Labs.
This means the leaders were good talent scouts. It didn’t matter if you were working in an unrelated field – if you were a baller, they knew you could succeed on the team.
This also means they benefited from diversity (not in all dimensions, of course – as far as I can tell, all the famous people at Bell Labs were white men). By bringing in people from many different areas of research, they benefited from novel insights that could combine into new ideas.
Okay, this is TOO dense. Spread out a little.
Investing Across Multiple Zones
By “zone” I’m referencing Geoffrey Moore’s book, “Zone to Win,” in which he described how to organize your work across different horizons. He had four zones: – Performance (improving top line revenue) – Productivity (improving bottom line expenses) – Incubation (near term new ideas) – Transformation (big bets on the future)
Bell Labs pre-dates this book, but they had a similar intentionality around zones. They designed three groups, tied roughly to the sequence of discovery, development, and manufacturing.
Research – “Completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.”
Systems Engineering – Bridging the gap between new and existing technology, these folks “considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical.”
Manufacturing Engineers – Creating the new devices and systems that leveraged these discoveries.
While you might think that the research group was the most important and therefore the biggest, they were actually the smallest. It was estimated that there was a 14:1 ratio of non-research to research. That’s how much work it takes to turn an idea into innovation – 14x.
No Goals
I learned one thing that really challenged my own thinking; the researchers would operate without goals for years. 🤯
For someone like me who has worked in modern tech culture, with a large array of personal, team, and department goals that are refreshed every six months, this sounds anathema – and refreshing 🙂
The rationale was that new ideas can’t be forced to operate on your timescale. As long as everyone is mission-aligned, they don’t need goals to motivate them or orient them.
You get everyone pointed in the same direction, ensure they are properly motivated, and then let things happen.
“IN TECHNOLOGY, the odds of making something truly new and popular have always tilted toward failure. That was why Kelly let many members of his research department roam free, sometimes without concrete goals, for years on end.”
Innovation happens when ideas have sex. To ensure there are opportunities for ideas to procreate, you need close proximity and a high number of collisions (usually in the form of conversations).
Bell Labs designed their physical buildings to support this. For example, they had a really long central hallway, not a building with a lot of hidden nooks and crannies. To get to the cafeteria, you had to walk past all your “stunning colleagues” doing amazing things essentially out in the open.
This physical design ensured that the employees were “colliding” all the time; combining and recombining ideas so that innovation was constantly moving forward.
“In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual. Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other. These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building.”
One interesting byproduct of no goals and the rest of this environment was what I call permissionless collaboration. If you were walking down the hall and heard someone working on something that intrigued you, you could hop over, have a conversation, and start contributing.
You didn’t need to notify your boss. You didn’t need to clear it with the “higher ups.” The assumption was that people want to work on the most impactful things, so they ensured there was minimal friction in that process.
And the engineering and research groups were not kept separate. They worked right alongside each other!
You’d have the manufacturing folks contributing right alongside the systems and research folks. Everyone cared about getting a practical use out of ideas, so those ideas were invaluable to the process.
Everyone is working together to bring ideas to market.
The Importance of Good Questions
As the leaders of Bell Labs were trying to optimize the system, they researched what made certain researchers more productive than others. It was a precursor to future Google’s Project Aristotle study.
What did they find?
The best researchers ate meals with Harry Nyquist. 🤔
What did Harry do? He asked great questions.
His questions drew out the thinking of the researchers so they could be more effective back in their labs.
One reason this probably worked is fresh eyes. When you’re too close to your own problem, it can be hard to generate new insights. The other reason this probably worked is that by being challenged to explain your thinking, you’re forced to confront holes that you might not have noticed otherwise.
Failure Didn’t Reflect Poorly on the Person
When you’re working on a frontier lab, most things aren’t going to work. If you punish people if their paths of research don’t work out, you’re going to get fearful researchers who only work on sure bets.
That’s a sure way to “succeed” in the short term, but fail in the ultimate long-term mission.
Bell Labs made sure that there was no negative stigma associated with failed projects. You just got back on the saddle and attempted something else.
Modern Application
If you care about driving innovation in your work, what can we learn from Bell Labs?
I’m sure you’ve been able to think of a few things while reading about their methods, so I’ll just highlight a few things quickly.
Hire great people, and create a great system for them to work in.
Operate across multiple zones. If you focus only on ideas, you won’t be able to drive impact. If you focus only on executing in the short term, you won’t get innovation.
Ensure a strong mission and team alignment to it. You need something pulling people forward. Without it, you’re going to get short-term thinking, politics, and all sorts of other negative outcomes.
Create an environment with a high number of collisions. Allow people to share their work and see what serendipity happens. Don’t drive everyone in a function into a large monolith; move to a more decentralized structure where multiple roles can work together to achieve an outcome.
Permissionless collaboration! This might be my favorite one, and it might be deserving of it’s own future deep dive. Let your people work with each other with minimal friction. When you have “resource allocation” committees, layers of management, and strict short-term goals, you’re not going to get collaboration. It’s likely you won’t get strong innovation either.
Separate failure from the person. Let people endeavor towards the unknown, and don’t punish failure.
If you’re able to improve how your team performs against these dimensions incrementally, you’re improving your ability to innovate, which improves your ability to compete.
Call to Action
Leaders are organizational architects. You have a value delivery stream in your business. How well have you designed a system to support innovation?
Take a look at all the conditions Bell Labs created and assess your organization against them. Find out where you have opportunities for improvement, then prioritize them and get to changing!
I’m very interested in this topic and would love to hear from you. What’s your assessment? What do you think about what Bell Labs was able to accomplish? Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know.
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