Making Ideas Happen (21 page)

Employees don’t often quit Zappos. And if they do leave, it is likely that they were paid to do so. Zappos provides a lump sum payment to any new hire who is wil ing to quit before the end of the training period. Part of the reason is that if you aren’t real y happy to be working at Zappos, it’s likely to be reflected in the service you provide to customers.

The same principle guides the company’s training programs, internal recognition award programs, and other perks; al initiatives are designed to foster happiness—not the ephemeral sense of happiness that comes from a midday game of Ping-Pong, but a deep satisfaction that comes from making progress in your life and being celebrated for your achievements.

Conspicuously absent at Zappos is an equity compensation plan or a revenue-sharing bonus structure for employees. While most entrepreneurial companies try to foster a sense of shared ownership among employees through stock plans and intricate incentive plans, Hsieh believes the answer lies in creating a sustainable culture.

“Most companies think that the number one motivator for employees is pay,” explains Hsieh. “But if you ask our employees, I think it’s number four or five, and above that are things related to culture or your manager or vocation and believing in the company’s mission or vision. . . . This is one of the advantages we got from moving out of Silicon Val ey where the mentality is very much ‘I’m going to work four years, and then retire a mil ionaire.’ . . . I think what we have here are people that truly believe in our long-term vision and also real y feel like this is not just a job. . . . At the end of the day, it real y comes down to what we are trying to maximize for employees, and [at Zappos] we are trying to maximize happiness as opposed to dol ars.”

At Zappos, happiness serves as a form of compensation without limits or tangible costs. Not only is it a core value of the culture, but it frees up financial resources that can be used in other ways—perhaps to lower prices for customers or pay for free overnight shipping. Happiness is the company’s most valuable currency.

As you push ideas forward, you should make use of alternative rewards that keep you —and your team—engaged with your long-term pursuits. The traditional methods for acknowledging progress—financial rewards and celebrity among them—are unlikely to be available to you in the early stages of making ideas happen. Putting an emphasis on happiness changes the types of goals you pursue as wel as how you hire and manage people along the way.

The Motivational Reward of Play

When Condé Nast’s
Portfolio
magazine published its “Wal Street Is Dead” issue in late 2008, the photo editors were faced with a major chal enge: the cover. Every mainstream newspaper and magazine around the world was talking about the tanking economy and the rampant fraud and recklessness on Wal Street. The wel of ideas for visual y presenting the economy was running dry. In need of a fresh perspective, the editorial team turned to Ji Lee.

Ji Lee is a polymath of creative pursuits. As the creative director of Google’s Creative Lab, he has developed and executed plans to promote products like Google Maps, the Chrome Web browser, and the Gool ery (Google plus gal ery) initiative, a Web site that col ects and showcases some of the most creative Google-inspired projects by people around the world. Outside of his day job, the prolific Lee has also completed dozens of personal projects that span the worlds of guerril a art, il ustration, and advertising campaigns—al contagious designs that engage consumers and passersby alike.

Perhaps the most famous of Lee’s creations is the Bubble Project, in which he placed blank thought-bubble stickers on advertisements on the streets of New York. As Lee explains, “The bubbles were left blank, inviting passersby to fil them in. The project instantly transformed the intrusive and dul corporate monologues into a public dialogue.”

Launched in 2002, the project quickly spread around the world as other “ad-busters”

adopted Lee’s playful method for provoking guerril a commentary. Print and television journalists as wel as bloggers took note of the project, and it was ultimately cataloged in an eponymous book.

A more recent venture of Lee’s is the “WTC Logos Preservation Project,” an attempt to capture photos of signage and products around New York City that stil display the city’s skyline in its pre-9/11 incarnation. Like the Bubble Project, the WTC endeavor has evolved into an open col aboration in which participants navigate the streets of New York with an ongoing chal enge to find and capture an undiscovered logo from a previous era.

As for Condé Nast’s brief for the “Wal Street Is Dead” cover, Lee imagined the death of the iconic bronze sculpture
Charging Bull
by Arturo Di Modica located near the heart of Wal Street. His inspiration became a doctored photograph of the bul lying dead amidst the flurry of New York activity.

Lee is an especial y prolific idea generator who consistently executes ideas in remarkable ways. Like most creative minds, Lee has tons of ideas, but when it comes to actualization, he consistently beats the odds. Lee’s fundamental secret for staying loyal to projects both in and out of the office is incorporating “an element of fun.” For the Bubble Project, the experiment was kept alive through a playful relationship with the mainstream news media, who were captivated by Lee’s masked anonymity. With the WTC logos endeavor, the project became an ongoing game as Lee attempted to find at least one old NYC skyline logo every day. “Games,” Lee explains, “keep things simple and keep people engaged.”

While play is useful for keeping oneself motivated, it’s also a crucial tool for leaders.

Both at Google and with his students at the School of Visual Arts, where he teaches regular classes, Lee uses games to foster learning, creativity, and motivation. One game he plays with his students and col eagues throughout the day involves an ongoing e-mail exchange of links—little findings that stretch the mind in some way. The game is the hot pursuit of the most clever and engaging or surprising link. The process is both playful and deliberate. “It’s real y fun, but at the same time it’s very important, because I think it breaks the routine of their work flow and brings their brains to something total y different,” Lee explains. “That’s how creativity usual y works.”

To stay engaged, Lee advocates an overal balance in the types of projects he takes on. “Living at either end of the spectrum—spending your energy exclusively on al personal projects or al professional projects—wil make you either poor or jaded,” he explains. Instead, Lee is always working on multiple projects at the same time—up to four projects at work and six that are personal. From the outset, Lee searches for the element of fun and then makes it central to the project overal . The mediums he uses, the titles he selects, and the other people he engages al play into the element of fun that keeps the project sticky.

As you lead creative pursuits, find ways to incorporate elements of fun that keep you and your team motivated and engaged over time. Every creative effort has a project plateau where momentum is most often lost. Just as Tony Hsieh uses happiness as a form of engagement, Ji Lee finds and amplifies the fun and gamelike components of every project as a mechanism for short-term rewards. By placing a value on play and enjoyment, Lee is able to consistently conceive ideas and stay engaged long enough to fol ow through. The innate human desire for amusement is a powerful force that you should use to foster commitment and progress.

The Reward of Recognition

In a field that is particularly notorious for hoarding ownership and credit for ideas at the top of the organization, Joshua Prince-Ramus, president of REX, is an architect with something entirely different in mind. Upon the debut of his firm’s first large-scale project, the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre in Dal as, people gathered at the Wyly largely expecting a momentous announcement that would place Prince-Ramus in the spotlight as a hot, emerging architect. Instead, he went onstage with a different kind of message: “We, not me.”

According to an article in
Fast Company
, Prince-Ramus went on to say, “The genius sketch is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together. . . . Success usual y has more to do with dumb determination than with genius.”

And Prince-Ramus was not just talking the talk. When one of the firm’s clients printed a brochure that attributed the credit for a REX building to Prince-Ramus, he demanded that the brochure be reprinted with an alphabetical list of the architects who were involved with the project.

Prince-Ramus’s “we”-oriented approach contrasts sharply with that of the typical credit-hoarding executive. Years ago, I had occasion to meet the head of marketing at a start-up that was encountering some early success. Thomas, as we’l cal him, had helped lead a number of start-ups and had dealt with his share of ego-driven CEOs. “It is pretty predictable,” he explained. “When ideas prove to be great, the CEO takes tremendous pride. When things are rough, it becomes a blame game.” Then his demeanor stiffened a bit and he further qualified his statement: “We have a great CEO.

A real creative guy. But he thrives on his success and only truly recognizes the role of our team when dealing with something that goes horribly wrong.”

Thomas’s story il ustrates what happens in a more typical top-down environment where higher-ups hoard al of the credit. The recognition accorded for the completion of successful projects is most powerful when it’s distributed. As we see with Prince-Ramus and many of the leaders I have interviewed, success is more than a personal reward for leaders; it is a valuable currency that can be distributed to the team. The only bank account that the shared credit depletes is the leader’s ego.

Recognition is a powerful reward that, whether or not money is tight, can help further engage those who play a role in making your ideas happen.

THE CHEMISTRY OF THE CREATIVE TEAM

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR
the chemistry of your team can be just as effective as retooling rewards for emboldening your creative pursuits. You are the steward of the chemistry in every project you lead, starting with who and how you hire. As you cultivate a productive work environment, you must strike a balance between flexibility and expectations, idea generation and execution, and helpful disagreements and consensus.

Your team’s chemistry is a reflection of your ability to strike a harmonious balance and constantly make smal tweaks in the service of making ideas happen.

During my visit with Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, it was clear that a potential employee’s culture-fit and commitment to serving customers are as important as the technical skil s required for the job. To demonstrate this core value, Hsieh tel s the story about a key technical hire—a top executive—whom the company recruited and moved from Los Angeles to Zappos’s headquarters in Las Vegas. Upon arriving to solve some critical technology chal enges for the company, the new hire made it clear that he wasn’t interested in doing any direct customer support. The company fired him, losing quite a bit of money in the process. The reason? Zappos considers interest in customer support as a basic expectation, a prime element of the company’s DNA.

As you build a high-performing creative team, you wil want to look beyond technical skil s and develop a chemistry that wil transform ideas into remarkable accomplishments.

Engage Initiators in Your Creative Pursuits
Building a team of enthusiastic and talented people is one of the greatest chal enges for leaders. A resumé gives little indication of a candidate’s true mettle. Rather than focusing exclusively on an individual’s experience, truly effective managers instead measure a prospective employee’s ability to take initiative.

People who jump into whatever interests them, even if sometimes prematurely, power productive teams. A tremendous amount of energy and endurance is required to make ideas happen. As we now know, simply being interested in new ideas is not sufficient.

Those who consistently take initiative possess tenacity and a healthy degree of impatience with idleness.

Not surprisingly, the best indicator of future initiative is past initiative. For example, consider a candidate applying to join your team who led an astronomy club in col ege and later helped found a not-for-profit that introduces astronomy to inner-city youth.

Regardless of the nonastronomical nature of your project, this candidate is likely to take initiative if you can inspire interest in your pursuit. I have come to cal these people “Initiators” based on their tendency to attach themselves to an interest and then relentlessly push it forward.

Earlier we heard from Jon El enthal, the president of Walker Digital, the unique R&D

intel ectual property firm behind such innovations as Priceline.com and a number of other successful patented inventions. El enthal and his team pride themselves on hiring Initiators rather than superstars. “I always try to hire people with a high level of intrinsic motivation,” El enthal explains. “I don’t want to spend my time trying to get people to do something. Ideas never get made unless everyone makes it their business to do so.”

More than anything else, El enthal strives to unearth Initiators. “I recal the days when I was a resumé snob,” he says. “[But now] I would trade experience for initiative and the raw desire to do stuff in a heartbeat.”

As you assemble teams around creative projects, probe candidates for their true interests—whatever they may be—and then measure the extent to which the candidate has pursued those interests. Ask for specific examples and seek to understand the lapses of time between interest and action. When you stumble across an Initiator —someone who has passion, generates ideas, and tends to take action—recognize your good fortune. Nothing wil assist your ideas more than a team of people who possess real initiative.

Cultivate Complementary Skill Sets

Just as you should build a team of Initiators, you should also foster a chemistry of complementary expertise. Diego Rodriguez, a senior partner at IDEO, the design consultancy discussed earlier, cites the “T”—where the long horizontal line at the top of the letter represents an individual’s breadth of experience, while the tal vertical line represents a depth of experience in one particular area. “At IDEO, we look to hire and build teams of ‘T’ people,” Rodriguez explained to me. His expectation is that each person on a team should have both a general breadth of skil s that supports col aboration and good chemistry and a deep expertise in a single area, such as graphic design, business, or electrical engineering. “The benefits of having ‘T’ people on a team is that everyone is able to relate across boundaries while also covering depth in one particular area.”