adversity, it takes a lot of iron in your soul to step up and actually overcome the challenges and succeed at accomplishing the tasks at hand. It has been my good fortune to work with a lot of men and women who did overcome the adversity. A central lesson I took away is the value of innovation in success; whether in the military, government, or business, there are valuable lessons here. Let me explain how I arrived at that conclusion.
The central question for any leader, whatever the size or shape of his or her organization, is how to overcome adversity. What are the leadership and management tools that matter the most? There are many candidates: teamwork, drive, determination, civility, alignment, presentational skills, and strategic communications, to name a few; the list of useful tools and skills goes on and on. All are important. But at the top of my list is innovation. This was not a sudden epiphany that came upon me like enlightenment came to Paul on the road to Tarsus. Indeed, I came to the view that innovation is the critical ingredient in overall organizational achievement relatively slowly over the course of a couple of decades.
As you start out in the military, there is an enormous and obvious premium placed on repetitive training in order to improve. If a military organization wants to “up its game,” the normal prescription is lots and lots of practice, drills, and exercises. And of course this makes sense. To use a sports analogy, if you want a better jump shot, go out and shoot jump shots—thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Think of Larry Bird as a boy in his backyard in Indiana spending hour after hour shooting baskets. It works. Slowly. In that sense, many organizations—particularly military ones, with a predisposition for uniformity and conservative approaches, but also civilian and governmental enterprises—are seduced into regimes that focus almost entirely on repetitive training to improve.
But what if you added innovation to repetition?
Back to Larry Bird. How about new technology? Suppose he had been given a pair of brand-new, spring-loaded, light-yet-tough Nike Air Jordans. Would they have given the aspiring ballplayer that extra bounce, that modicum of support that could help improve his shots? You bet.
Or how about technique? What about a change in procedure, breaking the wrist in a more pronounced way, applying more backspin to the ball and a slightly higher arc, taking advantage of a “larger” target by a sharper angle of descent to the rim? Would that innovation in technique have a positive effect? Clearly it would.
The problem, of course, is that most organizations don’t devote enough resources to the innovation part of their games, especially to disruptive technologies or disruptive innovations—technologies or ideas that essentially create a new market by changing a fundamental value equation, thus reshaping an existing marketplace, usually rapidly and somewhat unexpectedly. Clay Christenson, a noted thinker and writer about innovation, has repeatedly pointed out the need to find, evaluate, and embrace disruptive innovations and technologies—even when it is not obvious that their time has come.
An example of disruption would be the arrival of the telephone during the era of the telegraph. Telegraph lines already crisscrossed the country, and there were trained operators, delivery boys to run the messages, huge investments, and lots of profit in all that. Why would anyone want to have a telephone? But the technology enabled the innovation of real-time conversation, thus reshaping the marketplace for communication. Such marketplace innovation has occurred often through history and seems to be accelerating in the twenty-first century.
I began reading and learning about innovation seriously about twenty years ago, and the more I look at big organizations and how leaders manage them, the more I believe in the need for it. The most important approach to innovation I’ve employed over the years is the use of “innovation cells.” This means simply carving out a few very bright and mildly untethered people from the organization and giving them the authority, resources, and above all the charter to find and try new ideas. I tried this first about fifteen years ago when I was a young captain at sea in command of a group of about a dozen destroyers. I had a good group of ship captains in command of the individual ships, but I saw no real innovators among them, so I asked each of the ship captains to propose a junior officer for my innovation cell. I did the same with the various aircraft squadrons that were part of my command. After interviewing all of the candidates, I chose five of them, attached them temporary duty to my staff, and told them to think about antisubmarine warfare and strikes at sea on enemy combatant ships.
“Your job is to make everyone upset with your crazy ideas,” I told them. “And don’t worry if most of your schemes fail. In fact, I expect most of them to fail. This is like baseball—if you’re hitting .250, and one in four of your ideas bears some fruit, you’re having a solid season. You hit on one in three and it’s .333—a career year for almost any ballplayer. Anything better than that is a Hall of Fame year, which I’m not expecting (but it would be nice).” I gave them a small budget, the luxury of time to work on their ideas, and turned them loose.
Many of their ideas were goofy and unmanageable. I remember one proposal to use old fifty-gallon oil drums tied together to simulate submarines for target practice. They tried to attach unclassified communication devices to our military systems in ways that would have violated every element of policy and regulation on the books. And they had lots of other unworkable ideas.
But they also came up with several new ways to employ our detection systems in synergistic ways, fusing the data. This means taking input from various sensors—such as a radar, which uses electromagnetic radio waves to measure a physical object; a sonar, which uses sound waves to do the same; and infrared detectors, which measure heat—and merging them together to create a coherent location and picture of a target. We did this both at sea and on the ground in Andean and Central American jungles.
The team did some superb work using emerging technologies, including tiny unmanned air vehicles dubbed “wasps” and real-time translation devices that we called “phraselators.” They also explored ways to attack very low radar cross-section high-speed patrol craft, an increasing threat in coastal warfare.
Above all, the innovation cell had a synergistic effect as people throughout my command—about three thousand folks in all—saw that the leadership valued (indeed demanded) innovation. People who were not part of the innovation cell started to talk about new ways of doing business as a matter of routine. Ideas were batted back and forth across the wardroom table and in the squadron ready rooms. It was an awakening of sorts. And of course we continued to do the basic blocking and tackling that comes with the job of military preparation. But by adding to our effort through innovation, we were able to bring our game up to a new level.
That experience made me a believer. In each of my subsequent jobs I set up an innovation cell of some sort and tried to encourage new ways of thinking, reading, writing, and sharing ideas on innovation.
For the military broadly, of course, all this came into sharp focus after 9/11 when we were suddenly confronted with a very new sort of opponent—essentially a network of opponents who were superb innovators. Gradually over the post-9/11 decade our own innovations began to kick in, and we were able to create new ways of thinking about conflict and the tools, techniques, and procedures necessary to construct our own networks (leveraging special operations forces); deploying new types of sensors (unmanned vehicles, especially armed drones); collecting intelligence through big data (the cyberworld); using existing platforms in new ways (intercontinental ballistic missile–launching submarines converted to Tomahawk cruise missile shooting platforms, large deck amphibious ships providing “lily pad” bases for special forces); describing and implementing new ways of looking at conflict through international law; and other innovations.
Indeed, after the 9/11 strikes on New York and Washington, it was clear that we—the military—needed to develop very new ways of thinking about conflict. I was asked by Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, to stand up an innovation cell. We built Deep Blue (after the IBM chess-playing machine and also a play
