When I spoke at a lecture at Babson several weeks ago, one of the students asked me the question: “what do you think of Google’s 20% policy as a way of driving innovation”? My gut reaction was that if somebody at EMC gave me carte blanche and explicit permission to spend 20% of my time on whatever I wanted I’d be fairly shocked.
It’s a great question, and now that I’ve had a few weeks to think about it I’ve developed a (hopefully) more thoughtful opinion.
EMC has a culture of rewarding employees for productivity and delivery on promised goals. The goals are typically aggressive, so the rewards for hitting those goals can be fairly competitive for our industry. The overall culture can be intense, but by and large I know a lot of people that thrive in this type of environment. As each year rolls by many employees can point to their body of work and say “I was productive, and I was rewarded for it”.
The shortcoming of this approach may well be an implied (or imagined) lack of freedom to explore outside of the agreed-upon goals. I’m not aware of a manager that assigns a 20% goal stating “work on whatever you think is innovative”.
On the other hand, if 20% was legislated (or globally permitted), I’m not sure if the corporation as a whole could maintain the intensity in such a competitive industry.
I’ve come to the conclusion that if it were up to me I wouldn’t roll it out for every employee at the company. I would grant it to those employees that have earned it.
I arrived at this thought when I was visiting Harvard University last Friday as part of an “EMC Research Cambridge” grant that I was given last year. In my case I had to be nominated by a vice president to participate in the program, and I was granted one day per month. The reason that I received the grant was that I had proven that I could handle the balance between exploring new opportunities and still delivering on my day job.
I’ve been testing this thesis within my own business unit. I ran a global innovation contest within my group (about 500 employees), and we received submissions from India, China, Russia, and various locations on the East Coast of the U.S.A. Whenever I found outstanding ideas, I called the manager of that person and asked if they would permit their employee a time slice to advance their idea. In nearly all cases the manager said “yes”, and we defined some fairly achievable goals for the coming quarter.
By participating in the innovation contest, the employees were actually demonstrating the ability to be creative and productive at the same time (any employee that was behind on their deadlines might not risk participation). A phone call validated that fact.
I’ve also mentioned that there are minions that report to me as part of a rotational program. They’ve been asking me how to come up with ideas and progress them. My advice has been “not yet, first become an expert in something, build your influence, be patient, etc”. Prove that you can handle your day job before you go off and explore (I have a hunch that some of them are spinning up some skunkworks anyway).
That’s my opinion of what might work better at my company. I’d be interested to hear what might work at yours.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
