14 innovators

Fortune Magazine November 15, 2004

Starbucks – Howard Schultz
1. On screwing up: Magazine Joe – flopped… Schultz keeps copies in his office to demonstrate having the courage to fail is okay even if it costs a fair amount of embarrassment.
2. Frappuccino was invented when store manager was fooling around with her own blender
Patagonia - Yvon Chouinard
1. If you want a company to be around for a while, you haveto constantly embrace change and even create an artificial sense of stress or crisis.
Williams-Sonoma – Howard Lester
1. We talk a lot here about being a shoekeeper, running your business as if you have only one store. You’re passionate about every detail on that store.
2. It is as important what we don’t sell as what we do sell.
Google – Eric Schmidt
1. The way you manage innovative companies is you people excited about the cause. It’s part of the reason we serve meals: If you feed people it’s a family.
2. Passion motivates more than money. We try to tap that by allowing engineers to spend 20% of their time working on independent projects.
Virgin – Richard Branson
1. Most people leave companies because they aren’t allowed to make a decision, or somebody keeps saying no instead of yes. We give people the freedom to give it a try.

Large problem – How big companies innovate

People tend to prefer working in smaller organization that have more focus and less bureaucracy.
The problem with large companies isn’t that they fail to do large and seemingly ambitious projects; it’s that they fail to do small, quirky, controversial projects – truly innovative project that wouldn’t be accepted by the organization at large but have potential to grow.
Some rare individuals seem to have the ability to encourage great innovation even in large organizations. Steve Jobs is the most obvious example.
Most companies can set aside money to explore ideas. And if, after searching the world, you find the same idea already, just buy it! In a networked world, being innovative means being a Cisco.