Bottom-up innovation is often dismissed by innovation consultants and theorists as being mainly incremental, and therefore strategically uninteresting.

Why have your front line employee suggest some minor change to a process when you can spend your time designing a strategic new product or service that’s material to the top line of your organization?

But for many companies, this is a demonstrably failing strategy.

How else do you account for the massive failure rate of new product introductions?

For every 4 projects that enter development, only 1 makes it to the market. At launch, at least 1 of 3 products fail despite deep research and planning. And its been estimated that 46% of all resources allocated to development and commericalization by US firms is spent on products that are cancelled or yield a completely inadequate financial return (from: Winning at New Products 4th Edition, Cooper, 2011, p9).

Now, individual bottom-up innovations may not have a much better chance of success, and according to some sources, are actually more prone to failure than big strategic initiatives (see here).

But the point, in the case of bottom up, is not the failure rate, but the volume of changes you get.

You see, if you focus on 4 big strategic changes, and 75% fail, you’re left with one big change, and it has to cover the costs of 3 big investments that went nowhere.

Usually, big, strategic level initiatives are expensive, so you don’t really want a failure. Or three.

They’re also embarrassing. Possibly career ending.

75 little failures are less difficult to explain, particularly if you have 25 pretty good successes to offset them. And anyway, it might not matter how many failures you have, because the blame is  diffused across a far larger number of stakeholders, and is therefore less damaging to anyone in particular.

Financiers would call this sensible management of risk concentration, even if their recent history has not necessarily proven them to practice much of what they preach.

Failure rates and economic rationale aside, I think there is another reason  bottom-up innovation represents the next big wave of value creation.

Bottom-up’s driving dynamic is hyperlocalism: they are  innovations personally interesting to those who propose and implement them, and therefore, innovators have a personal stake in making sure things work, regardless of any extrinsic reward that might achieve by doing so.

For bottom up innovation, in fact, almost the entire reward for participation is actually intrinsic. Apparently, you don’t need a big chunk of money to get people to do great things.

That’s why extraordinary movements like the Honey Bee network  and Grameen Bank are able to make a world changing difference, one tiny step at a time. Even in situations of abject poverty where no money is available to bribe people in the first place.

The question is this: how can corporations make use of the hyperlocalism dynamic that drives bottom-up innovation to get big outcomes?

The answer to this question, clearly, must come from the emerging science of crowd behaviour and, in particular, our increasing understanding of the ways that emergence and path dependence work in the innovation system context.

It may be that innovation systems of the bottom-up kind exhibit the same kinds of dynamics that other complex systems do in seemingly unrelated domains such as sociology, biology and physics. Some authors have even extended complexity systems metaphors directly to the innovation space (see, for example, the Innovation Butterfly, a specific instance of the “Butterfly Effect” known from complexity and chaos theory).

A complex systems approach to innovation is a cornerstone of an emerging science of innovation I previously called Innovation 2.0 a few weeks ago.

It is an exciting frontier which will likely be the subject of many – probably most – of my posts in the near term.

“If you hear a voice within you say, ‘You cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” — Vincent van Gogh

When I was very young, I couldn’t read. But then, in second grade, I was lucky enough to have a brilliant teacher who took me under her wing and brute forced reading into me. After that, I never had a book out of my hands. Even though that problem was fixed, by year 10 I’d convinced myself – with the help of some pretty terrible grades – that I couldn’t do math. Once again, a brilliant teacher stepped in and brute forced me. And now I can do math and can even program computers a little bit…

The point is, lots of people and companies describe themselves as “not innovative”. But there’s no such thing as “not innovative”, no matter who you are. First, just try. You may or may not succeeed, but if you fail, then get a brilliant teacher. Sometimes, brute force – just a little bit – is all that’s needed.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”—Clay Shirky

Now, this is a very interesting take on things. Normally, one imagines that institutions perserve their answer to problems no matter the cost. That’s what decent, steady managers are suppposed to do, right? But Clay’s quote goes right to the heart of things. Good, steady managers have a vested interesting in making sure their problem sticks around to preserve their own interests. I love this quote, because it perfectly encapuslates the reasons why being an innovator is just such hard work: you’re not trying just to improve or change things your organization is doing right now, you’re trying to reframe its whole environmental context.

“The only thing all successful people have in common is that they’re successful, so don’t waste your time copying “the successful strategies” of others.” -Seth Godin

And the only thing successful innovators have in common is they’re successful. There is some value in best practice, and copying what’s worked someone else, but in the end, each innovation problem is fresh, new, and deserves its own solution. How could it not be? Innovation is a people problem and if there’s one thing about people, and groups of people, they’re always surprisingly unique.

“The stone age didn’t end because they ran out of stones.” – unknown 

And industries aren’t disrupted because they’ve run out of widgets. For the caveman, the failure was to fail to see the coming age of bronze. For we modern innovators, the failure is to fail to remember that after broze came iron, then steam, then, then and then…

It is easy, and short term it is less risky, to pretend the only threat to your present secure situation is making sure you have enough stones.

“I am not afraid…I was born to do this.” – Joan of Arc

Show me an innovator who does not take risks, and I will point to a line manager who does not innovate. There is significant personal risk involved in trying to change things. You either accept it, and try anyway, or you accept the status quo.

It is  reasonable to be aware of – and fearful of – consequences. What’s unreasonable is to be unfearful of the status quo, which for most companies and most people is a much greater threat than change in the long term.

So, succumbing to the hype, I rushed out the other day and bought myself one of those new Nike FuelBands.

I first saw one on the wrist of my colleague Gareth, who pronounced it the deus ex machina of exercise and weight loss reduction.

I saw it and imagined myself tipping into a mid life crisis.

I didn’t want to be one of those getting-on guys who wear all those charity bands, surround themselves by young music-festival goers, and buy cars which are far, far too young and sporty for them whilst smothering themselves in slightly-too-late moisturiser.

I certainly wasn’t going to be one of them, and it seemed this stylish little black band was, well, the first tenuous step in that direction.

For those unfamiliar with the actual gadget, it is a rubberised band with accelerometers in it that tracks how much you move. It has all these lights and fireworks that happen whenever you reach certain goals, and syncs up with an iPhone if you have one so you can have more lights and fireworks on your device as well.

So, in other words, it’s a pedometer. And a pricey one at that.

But here’s the thing.

Fuelband is much less about measuring than it is about turning exercise into a game. A social game at that, one in which you compete with your friends.

So, every day, you have to reach this goal (fireworks, if you do), and you compare your progress to those of your other mid-life crisis friends who have also succumbed to FuelBand.

For the record, Gareth and every other person on my leaderboard are some years away from a mid-life crisis. But I digress.

The leaderboard is a surprisingly powerful motivator and I push the little button on FuelBand about 10 times an hour just so that last stair climb to the office is recorded and broadcast to everyone.

I am competitive, you see, so I like to be at the top of the leaderboard. I can imagine myself walking out of a meeting and running around the block if any of my fuel-band colleagues started to get close to my daily score.

So, obviously, this little game has got me to be much more active than I was before.

Let me come, now, to the point of this post.

I often go into meetings- especially when we’re trying to sell our innovation software (and therefore, every statement you make is somewhat suspect because you’re trying to sell something) – and find myself having to justify that making things fun at work is a good attribute in systems.

This has lately become such an issue that I’ve given up using the words “gamification” and “game dynamics” in favour of “psychological dynamics” which seems a much less confronting way of saying the same thing.

But I find myself having a déjà vu moment, because these were the types of discussions I was having a year or so ago about design.

You’d get all these people saying “design is much less important than function”. They’d argue that the disgustingness of, say, the SAP user interface was perfectly acceptable in the light of all the very complicated things the software could achieve.

Everyone has pretty much gotten over that now, even if the current argument is that systems which are nice to look and do lots of things well is a justification for boring.

As innovators, this is the next great frontier in my mind: addressing the boring.

Getting rid of the boring is going to be table-stakes in system acquisition by year end. I suspect  this will be the case as I think my experience with exercise and FuelBand are not that dissimilar to those of other nearly-having-mid-life-crisis people that make systems decisions.

Because even though we may be getting around to be the old people in the office, we still like a bit of fun in our lives, and will cheekily sneak it into things if we can get away with it.

I’d like a bit of fun in my next accounting system, thanks.

We’ve launched ICON.

It has almost 200 companies signed up in less than 2 days. We’re feeling hopeful we have something people will really value. If you’ve already had a go of the tool, thank you. If not, signup is free, so please do try it.

Today, I wanted to talk about the process of getting a brand new product from idea to production. It was a cycle that’s had all the standard behaviours any company goes through when it attempt to do something new.

Are you surprised a company that does innovation for a living is really no different internally to any other company when it comes to doing innovation?

It is why doing innovation is hard. Here’s the inside story on the germination of Icon at Spigit.

Triggering The Innovation Antibodies

As I’ve written before, every genuinely new thing you suggest in an organization creates winners and losers. The losers quickly form groups to defend their territory.  There’s nothing aggressive or bad about this, it is just human behaviour.

But you have to be ready for it.

When we proposed a freemium offer internally a year ago, many people in our company were horrified.  In particular, revenue generating folk were strongly opposed. Their concern, obviously, was we’d cannibalize revenues from our enterprise idea management platform, Engage. How would they get paid on something that was free? And, they wanted to know, what would they tell their customers?

Icon, as it stands today, is pretty much in a separate space from our other products, but at the start, it wasn’t clear to everyone what our intentions were.

Here’s the problem you face: invariably, those with the most to lose are the ones who worry the most. They’re also the most vocal. Unless you’re careful, your concept gets shut down before you even start.

Vocal people with established business lines tend to have quite a bit more pull than a small group with a bit of an idea.  Furthermore, it simply isn’t reasonable to expect everyone in a company – even an innovation company – to be in an innovation-preferred segment. There are still late majority and laggard personality styles to contend with.

They’ll object to anything that deviates from the established trajectory, because these are the people you pay to make sure the established trajectory delivers. It isn’t malicious behaviour, they think they’re doing their jobs.

Actually, they are doing their jobs when they object.

Lesson 1: People will object. They’ll try to shut it down. Be ready with decent, non-confrontational arguments. Be prepared to take a longer term view, and create a momentum of agreement. Eventually, you get enough people on side your idea will become real.

The Attack Dogs Rise

As an idea gains momentum, and it looks as if it might actually start to happen, new behaviours start to assert themselves. This is especially true when resources start to get assigned to moving things forwards.

Spigit is still pretty much a startup, so our resources, especially in dev and design, are not unlimited.

But we’d decided with this product we wanted a beautiful user interface, one that people would look at and go “wow” no matter what device they were on. So that meant that we sucked up every graphic designer and UI developer in the company.

And then we wanted to make sure we had a beautiful backend, one that we could be proud to expose to the world eventually as an API. And that meant we sucked up the best engineers in the company as well.

In the meantime, other products still had their requirements too. And we’d taken many of the best the resources to do something that was gong to be “free”.

We were at the stage when people understood we were making an important play, but  couldn’t see anything except how inconvenient we were making things for everyone else.

This, too, is true of innovations in any company of any size. The pain that precedes any result is usually quite substantial, and you have to somehow show people that the stuff which will come out the end will be worth it.

We were lucky, though, that our engineering team decided to use an agile methodology for the build. It meant we had stuff to show very early.

Actually, one day, I walked past Paul’s office (our CEO) and discovered he’d been showing prospective customers our early wireframes.  Firstly, I was surprised he’d even gotten them, and then piqued that he was showing stuff that early.

But the point is, he had something to show. We were causing significant upheaval in the company but at least people could see early results. It is what saved our project from the attack dogs who wanted it shut down, or scaled back, or diluted to something that wouldn’t have been nearly as effective.

I don’t mean to be critical when I use the term “attack dog”, by the way. But as a person who studies innovation for a living, that really is the best characterisation of what happens when groups of people are threatened by something new. They form packs to defend their territory, and can be vicious when they don’t get what they (think) they need to perform their own jobs.

Again, I must emphasize that in companies with established businesses, this is what you pay these people to do.  You can’t possibly run a repeatable business without them.

On the other hand, of course, they’re the reason doing innovation so hard. Even for an innovation company.

Lesson 2: The attack dogs will rise. Your only defence is to have results early, something to show. Otherwise, it is all pain and no gain, and you will either be shut down or watered down. Be ready with great evidence of progress.

The Success Cats Come In

Eventually, you get your new thing to a point where even the most vocal objector can see there’s enough momentum that cancellation isn’t an option. At this point some of these folks even convert to the vision.

It is tempting, when everyone starts getting excited about the new thing, to relax and breathe a sigh of relief.  This is a mistake.

Two years ago, in my book “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank”, I wrote:

“Implementing innovation is a process of managing compromise… everyone will propose changes and enhancements to support their particular agenda. This results in dilution of the original idea which justified investment in the first place. Carefully select the compromises you allow so you have sufficient political capital to reject ones which have a dilutive effect on the initial proposition”.

There is a correlation between the amount of excitement your new product generates and the number of people and groups who want in on it. Success breeds success, obviously, but what you don’t want is a whole pile of new stuff introduced late.

As we got closer to the end and a launch, there were lots of suggestions made about product changes we should make and features we should add.

Now, I hasten to say, some of these were excellent.

But that is irrelevant.

Introducing things late is almost always a mistake. You have to hack your engineering and design, and invariably, the lack of thinking about implications bites you.

We had this a few times, and in the end had to make certain compromises to fit stuff in. For example, we had to limit the browsers we could support in order to free up development and QA time. The only version of IE we support right now, for example is IE9.

Most corporates don’t even have IE9 yet. So this was a significant and painful compromise. We’ll get to supporting IE8 and others, but since our target market is corporates, we hated having to do it.

Also, I think we made some pretty unreasonable demands on our wonderful development, design, and QA folk towards the end. I don’t really know how they lived through it, myself.

Perhaps if the team and I had managed compromises better, some of the scramble at the end would have been less painful than it was.

Lesson 3: Everyone wants to be a part of something that looks like it will be a success. To get their name on things, they’ll try to change your product in some way. Carefully manage this, and don’t accept stuff that will muck up the overall product if you can avoid it.

Out the Door

So we launched 2 days ago, and adoption is looking good.

People are feeding back positive things.

And we’re about to start the whole next development cycle, which will have icon do some more exciting things in June.

I’ll post back then with stories of how the second dev cycle went, and what we did differently this time around.

Idea management has gotten quite boring lately. Everyone, it seems has a tool. And they all do the same old thing.

Put your idea in. Vote a few times..

Be irritated when no one cares.

Repeat until you shut down idea management in disgust.

I’ve been dark for the last month or so on this blog, because I’ve been involved in imagining and building a fresh look at the problem.

Our realization was social interactions online are all very good, but they’re only useful for individual communications and one to many broadcasts.

If you’re trying to find the golden nugget, that gem of an idea that changes everything, you need a different unit of aggregation than individuals. You need to get quick, accurate consensus across groups.

So we built Icon, our new platform for collective intelligence. It’s a game with serious intentions.

Firstly, it’s a social network, but one with a difference. The basic unit of work is your expressed preference for one of you’re colleagues ideas over another. Instead of voting, you say “I’d rather have this, than that”.

Secondly, it is a game. Internally at Spigit, we’ve been using it for a month, and people get addicted quite quickly. Anyone can ask a question on anything, and expect to get quick results. Today, for example, someone started a whole thing on the best Super Power to have, and why?

At Spigit, the crowd is presently saying:

1. The power to turn socially awkward situations into song and dance routines from Chicago
2. The power to steal the super powers of others
3. The ability to f**t glitter (this was suggested by one of our brilliant designers).

This from a field of lots of suggestions, most more serious than No. 3

Now, you’d think this was all spammy and time wasting, but actually, it is really good fun. Sometimes you need fun when you’re dealing with other questions which are presently running, such as

“What are the top product enhancements or bug fixes to enhance the customer experience” – Spigit Says “Enhance Idea Merge and Combine”

or

“Delocalizing Spigit- How best to work across timezones”, for which Spigit Says “Support a Shift System”.

What we’re doing with Icon is implementing “[Your Company] Says” for any question that anyone inside asks.

That’s an important new capability, and one that I think lots of people would like to have.

I invite you all to try Icon, and I’d love to hear your feedback. Its free.

What’s the reason so many great ideas turn out to be terrible ones once they’re out the door?

Over time and many years, I’ve learned there are only a few reasons:

“I did that”

You know these people: they’re great at self promotion and talking loudly, but very poor at doing much else. They take meetings and create relationships, but you can’t pin them down to much actual achievement.

They never get fired though, and here is the reason: they’re very good at introducing small, often insignificant, changes; changes which let them claim they’ve had a material impact on whatever it is.

For an innovator, the key discipline is working out which small changes make no difference (and hence let you keep such individuals on side) and which you must fight against to preserve the integrity of your initial concept.

The clever innovator knows how to pick the battles which matter.

“That’s Mine”

Watch out for empires – those non-collaborative silos that are more loyal to themselves than the organizations they’re supposed to serve.

Empires are usually fiercely protected by whomever owns them, because, more often than not, they’re defined not by their own capabilities, but the empire itself.

Into such a mix, inject something brilliant which, if implemented, will force the empire to move, however insignificant such a move might be.

The reaction is predictable: the owner of the empire changes the idea in ways which allows them to ensure it is logically incorporated into the empire rather than isolated from it.

A lone guy with an idea is usually not in any position to fight an empire, so the clever innovator knows how to hide things from empires until it is too late to change them.

“That’s Bad”

Any new idea polarizes everyone into two camps: those who will benefit and those who will lose.

The losers will do everything they can to change the idea so they’ll lose less. They’ll likely do this by painting the idea as something that is bad.

What does that mean?

It means the thing that made the idea brilliant in the first place is going to get changed. There’s nothing malicious about this: everyone tries to protect their positions when threatened.

But for an innovator, there is really only one defence: you have to motivate those who will win to stand up on your behalf.

Rule of thumb: you need a vocal winner for every loser you can identify, and then a few more on top to account for the political foes you have that are clever enough not to show themselves up front.

“That’s Too New”

People have preferences for adopting new things. In most organizations, the preference for newness is pretty normally distributed, which means approximately half the organization will be open to new ideas, and half won’t.

The half which isn’t open, of course, will try to introduce compromises which will make your idea less new, more like what already exists. They’ll try to water down your idea in (what they say) are the best interests of everyone.

Clever innovators realize they can’t convince people who don’t like new things to like their idea, no matter how brilliant it is. What they can do, though, is make sure their ideas are introduced in such a way that the amount of change is gradual – gradual enough not to threaten those who hate change.

Have you had any experiences of your idea turning into nothing because of the compromises you’ve had to deal with?

These days, my job at Spigit has me spending 50% of my time in London, and the rest in California at our head offices in the East Bay area. This is very interesting, because it really illuminates the difference between startup world in both places.

Firstly, the obvious: London may be a hot place to start something in Europe, but it lacks the scale of the community in the Valley.

But the real differences are all about attitudes to the way things are done.

The UK is a much, much less business friendly environment than the US. The amount of red tape involved in doing anything is absurd, and you don’t realize it till you have seen the two compared.

Let me give you an example. Here at Spigit, we have our employees provide themselves the mobile phone they want to use, and expense the costs back to us. It sounds sensible, right?

In the US, this is all fair and good, but in the UK, we have to report that as a benefit in kind to the tax office. Then, what happens is the employees all get these coding notices from the tax office saying they owe additional tax because they had a personally owned phone paid for by their employer. Most of the time they only use the phone for business calls, but that, apparently, isn’t the important test of taxability.

Our CFO, based here in the US, made a very sensible suggestion: just pay their tax bill. But no, we can’t do that either. The payment of the tax bill, apparently, would be another taxable benefit.

So, instead, we have to work out a way of taking over all their phones, which are all with different operators, just so our employees won’t be out of pocket when they do our business.

Stuff like that happens all the time. I was on the phone to some unhelpful people in the UK’s tax office the other day and made this point, and discovered, somewhat to my horror, that they hadn’t yet discovered Britain no longer had an Empire.

I’m also not the first person who’ll make this observation: there is a stigma attached to being in a startup that doesn’t work in Europe, whilst trying and failing in the Valley is celebrated.

In London in particular, this is a big issue. The idea that you’d leave a relatively senior job in a big company and go to a startup and not succeed is something of a career limiting move.

It says, if you ever wanted to go back, that you can’t run projects, you can’t manage budgets, you know nothing about marketing, and have poor networking and people skills.

To get that kind of taint in a large European organization, you’d have to screw up repeatedly over the course of years. But Europeans, and the UK in particular, don’t celebrate failure as a learning exercise: it is just failure plain and simple. And as a leader, you get associated with it personally.

Here is the real challenge of the startup scene in London: it is an all-or-nothing bet. You are either completely off the career track in large organizations and doing startups, or don’t go there in the first place.

I think this might be more true for people who are at my stage in their career than those who are coming into this earlier on. It encourages major risk aversion, which, lets face it, is the number one inhibitor of innovation.

I do have this piece of advice though: startups are exciting, and they’re exhausting, but they put zest back into your work life. I used to get really annoyed with people who carried on in large companies about work/life balance, and I have come to realize something: it is only people who don’t like their jobs that rant on about it. Everyone else finds a way to make it work, because they want it to work.

The whole question of work/life balance is one that comes up only when there is a huge disparity between the amount of joy you get in what you do for money and what you do for life.

A startup, in my experience so far, has the chance to bring the two closer together than anything else I’ve tried so far.

I can’t, however, say, that the comparison between the Valley and London is all bad, though.

Europe, and London in particular, has phenomenal talent, and lots of it is available now that being a banker is so much less an attractive career choice.

The thing in the Valley is the best people are all in huge demand, and you have to be either exceptionally hot or exceptionally rich to get them.

In Europe, there aren’t so many great places for the talent to go. It is sad, but true. So, when you want XYZ skill, you can usually get it, and you can usually get it for a substantial discount on the rates you’d have to pay in the Valley. That’s wonderful for companies like ours who have operations in both places, of course. And it will continue to be so, I think, until the rest of the Valley works out what a phenomenal place for talent Europe is.

I suppose the interesting question is whether my experiences are typical or not.  So let me end this post by asking the question: if you work in both places, which is better? Or, like us, do you prefer to have the best of both worlds?

On Twitter, Paul Vincent (@cybersecurer), one of the very few IT Security people I know who can claim their title isn’t Business Prevention Officer, asks this:

Paul is referring, I think, to something I said in the book, namely:

In the book, I go on to argue that since customers and competitors always seem to find ways to get around patents, copyrights and trade secrets (Look at the patent wars going on right now in the mobile space, for example), there is little remaining competitive advantage in trying control of intellectual property.

This is the basis of the twist, of course: you should focus on getting competitive advantage by having the most users, and especially in the case where each user incrementally improves the overall value proposition of the product.

But back to Paul’s point.

To be honest, it is something I hadn’t thought about before his tweet, but now I have, there are clearly some ramifications for IT security.

But not as many as you might thing. Firstly, if the point of IT security is to preserve the privacy and security of individual customers and their relationships with a supplier (and each other of course), then, in a Sidestep and Twist world, security becomes one of the most important disciplines there is. You’re hardly going to have the most customers (the basis of a Twist competitive strategy) if you’re not trusted in the first place.

Recent semi-scandals, such as the one Path and others are presently embroiled in (they were uploading people’s address books without permission) would probably not have happened if those organisations had been advised properly by their information security people.

On the other hand, if the intent of IT security is to preserve corporate intellectual property and trade secrets, then investing significantly to keep competitors out is something of a losing strategy.

In Sidestep and Twist , I recount the story of Open Cola, a Coca Cola clone, where principals of open source development were used to reverse engineer the most famous trade secret of all time. Nothing really that the Coke company could do about it, had they tried.

And there are countless other examples of situations where spending millions to preserve some unique way of creating or making have come to naught in our connected new world. Napster and record companies, for example.  Open source clones of Microsoft Office, and the list goes on and on.

So in answer to Pauls question, my view is this: for Sidestep and Twist implementing companies, the role of IT security is protection of customers, not protection of corporates. I am not certain if that is a reversal of the way IT security people think about their roles, or not.

What do you think?

Over at Management Matters, David Chassels has this to say about my guest post on my new book, Sidestep and Twist:

David is the CEO of a software company called Procession Software. He made a pitch to me and my team when I was Chief Technology Officer at the DWP. He continues in his comment to say this about it:

David is entitled to his opinions of course, which he went on to express vocally to our then-Permanent Secretary and others after we concluded our evaluation.  However, I would just say this: I was under no pressure at all to ignore breakthroughs, nor to deal with only incumbent suppliers. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Actually , a focus on innovation and dealing with smaller suppliers is government policy, and one I fully supported in my time in government, obviously so since I got into more hot water for doing so than anything else I ever did whilst there.

But I think, since it has been a year or more since I was in Government, I can now more freely make some comments about what it’s like to deal with some suppliers – especially ones who run the British Innovation tag line – when you’re in government.

As a senior civil servant, you are especially wary of two things.  One is appearing in the media because some decision you’ve made – right or wrong – gets called into question. The other is being caught up in politics, the sort with a Capital P.

Into such a mix, add an “innovative” technology supplier who believes they’re being locked out of government procurement, for whatever reason.

Several things follow when you make an unfavourable (to them) decision based on a business case or technical assessment.

Firstly, they’ll threaten to “use their network”, which invariably means they’ll go to any authority they can get to listen. Such threats need to be heeded by anyone who makes decisions, and usually kick off a pile of additional work needed to defend a position in case a Minister or Permanent Secretary asks.

The Civil Service, by the way, does not make arbitrary decisions without consideration. So many people participate in everything significant that “arbitrary” is a practical impossibility anyway. The glacial slowness of the public sector is one ramification of this; the other is you usually get the best decision available within whatever constraints exist.

And there are always constraints. Such as, for example, large legacy technology estates which would cost millions (often billions) to change at tax payers expense.

A case in point was reported by Computer Weekly and elsewhere.  It was a situation where despite the fact the technology was good, in the overall context of the department, we couldn’t get the business case to work.

Ultimately, this supplier then went off to the Public Accounts Committee and suggested we were in thrall to our big suppliers who could basically control purchasing decisions if they “harmed the interests of incumbent suppliers”.

Actually, as I explained then, the real reason was we had so much existing stuff that we’d have to rip and replace we couldn’t get the numbers to stack up.

I fully understand the disappointment, but I don’t know how the taxpayer would have reacted if we’d decided to spend millions now for savings quite a bit less than that.

The point of this post is this: what motivation does anyone of seniority in the public sector have to stray from conventional and predictable contracts when the personal downside for taking a risk on British innovation – particularly from small suppliers –  is substantial?

Taking pot shots at any one with any profile in government service seems to be de rigour in Britain, actually. After I left the DWP to join Spigit, for example, one of Spigit’s competitors decided to use my ex-position to harm us as we were starting our operations here. As I blogged then, much of the information reported was wrong, but there were very real risks to Spigit, and consequently, to my own employment with the company.

Now, I do not for one moment suggest there should a reduction in oversight of the operations of government, or that the work of the civil service should be clothed in secrecy.

I will say this though: if you want government to adopt British innovation, to work with smaller companies with great products, and to take a few risks, then you have to accept also that there will be failures, and occasional wastage of tax payers money, and in particular, decision making that requires protection of the individuals who made the decisions.

In corporate world, these are fundamentally understood principals for any organisations that’s serious about innovation, but nothing like that presently exists for Civil Servants. The media, in particular, loves a story about anyone in the public sector who is seen to “have gotten it wrong”.

Whilst I really enjoyed working for the UK Government, there is one lesson I’ve learned from all this; the only innovation that can be introduced by civil servants with a long term career plan to stay is that generated from within.

Media-driven perception to the contrary, there are plenty of bright people working in the public sector in the UK with plenty of big ideas who are more than up for an innovation challenge, by the way.

It is to them that we must look if we want a brilliantly working public sector, since the private one – especially smaller suppliers who have an axe to grind – are building minefields in their misguided attempts to “get a level playing field”.

I’ve just completed reading Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky. Other reviewers elsewhere have noted it is a quick and easy read, and it does offer some fascinating insights into a company we all follow slavishly, no matter our feelings about its products.

I read this book having completed Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs a few weeks ago, and I would advise anyone intending to read both to put a greater distance between  the two reads.

For me, the difference in access the two authors had is jarring: whilst Isaacson is able to speak directly to the thoughts of Jobs with the authority that comes from direct interviews, Lashinsky is forced to do with the second hand tales of ex-employees, employees who can’t or wouldn’t speak on the record, and off-cuts from meetings with senior Apple leaders retold through the lens of outsiders.

For Lashinsky, this leads to a book which is padded with a considerable amount of opining on the future fortunes of Apple, the way the company works now and then, and other matters for which direct evidence is not available.

Having said that though, there is good material here. Some of the stories are truly informative: the emphasis that the company places of packaging design (100s of prototypes in a lab specifically for the purpose) for example,  or mechanics of a product-launch, as told by participating partners are all fascinating insights.

But for me, the most interesting thing about this book is the contrast it draws with modern management practice and thinking about how companies should be run.

First and foremost, in something quite jarring for me personally, Inside Apple explains how the company is not an especially nice place to work. It describes a confrontational dog-eat-dog environment. One where winning it all costs is the norm. Where making sure you don’t get beaten up by the boss is the number one thing you have to do every day.

I have spent the latter part of my career trying to create work environments the complete opposite. In this, I think I am rather typical of managers who have valued people and talent and believed that happy people are the gateway to corporate success.

If the way things work at Apple is anything to go by, happiness is not only not a prerequisite, it can have the effect of taking the edge off an organisation altogether.

Practically speaking the stellar performance of the company suggests that modern management practice – concerned as it is with happiness of stakeholders and work life balance – could use an update.

The nub of the book, though rests in a single question: did Apple work because of Steve, or did Apple work because it was Apple? It is a question which, I think, Inside Apple does not answer.

So, should you read Inside Apple?

The answer is yes, if only because there is little else that purports to explain some of how Apple does what it does.

But if you have the stomach for only one book about Apple, then I say wait.

Because, having read Inside Apple, it seems quite a few executives in the company are awaiting their time in the sun. And if that’s the case, it is surely only a matter of time before someone with greater access to the company writes a book with all the details which are only tantelizingly hinted at here.