A breakthrough in management thinking, 'weird ideas' can help every
organisation achieve a balance between sustaining performance and
fostering new ideas.
Creativity, new ideas, innovation - in any age they are keys to success.
Yet, as Stanford professor Robert Sutton explains, the standard rules of
business behavior and management are precisely the opposite of what it
takes to build an innovative company. We are told to hire people who
will fit in; to train them extensively; and to work to instil a
corporate culture in every employee. In fact, in order to foster
creativity, we should hire misfits, goad them to fight and pay them to
defy convention and undermine the prevailing culture. Weird Ideas That
Work codifies these and other proven counterintuitive ideas to help you
turn your workplace from staid and safe to wild and woolly - and
creative.
In Weird Ideas That Work Sutton draws on extensive research in
behavioural psychology to explain how innovation can be fostered in
hiring, managing and motivating people; building teams; making
decisions; and interacting with outsiders. Business practices like 'hire
people who make you uncomfortable' and 'reward success and failure, but
punish inaction', strike many managers as strange or even downright
wrong. Yet Weird Ideas That Work shows how some of the best teams and
companies use these and other counterintuitive practices to crank out
new ideas, and it demonstrates that every company can reap sales and
profits from such creativity.
Weird Ideas That Work is filled with examples, drawn from hi- and
low-tech industries, manufacturing and services, information and
products. More than just a set of bizarre suggestions, it represents a
breakthrough in management thinking: Sutton shows that the practices we
need to sustain performance are in constant tension with those that
foster new ideas. The trick is to choose the right balance between
conventional and 'weird' - and now, thanks to Robert Sutton's work, we
have the tools we need to do so.
