You Don't Need Permission to Innovate

You Don't Need Permission to InnovateOne question that comes up all the time is: “how can I innovate when my manager won’t let me?”

The answer is one people usually don’t want to hear: “Innovate anyway.” But it’s true.

Here’s a clip from the Management Innovation Exchange of Jeffrey Pfeffer talking about how to create your own job – it’s short and well worth watching:

Jeffrey Pfeffer’s recommendations are based on research, but they are awfully similar to those of Seth Godin, which are based on experience:

The number of people you need to ask for permission keeps going down:

  1. Go, make something happen.
  2. Do work you’re proud of.
  3. Treat people with respect.
  4. Make big promises and keep them.
  5. Ship it out the door.

When in doubt, see #1.

My recommendations are based on a combination of experience and research.

When people ask me how to innovate when they don’t have permission, my answer is “how much can you get away with?” If you can sign of on projects worth $100 without your manager’s approval, then you can test out any new idea that costs less than $100.

When I started one of my management jobs a while ago, I read a few of books by Tom Peters and a few other people, and I wrote down 48 ideas that I could try with my new team. None of them cost anything more than time and energy to execute. Over the course of two years, we tested all but two of those ideas.

Not every one worked, but a lot of them did. Our team was responsible for recruiting students for a tertiary institute, and as we tried out those ideas together, our team got better and better at matching up people with the courses that interested them.

In our first year of experimenting, we increased enrolments by over 10%, which had about a $2 million impact on the bottom line. All from trying out ideas that cost nothing. That’s all that I had to work with in that job. After that year, I had a bit more slack.

The point here is that I didn’t ask permission. I was given the job to manage, and that’s what I did. I tried out as many new ideas as I could within the authority that I had. And I gave my team as much slack as I could so that they could try out as many ideas as they could. It was a collective effort.

That’s how you innovate when you don’t have permission.

So, how much can you get away with?


Join the global innovation community

Don’t miss an article (2,550+) – Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Innovation Excellence group!


Tim KastelleTim Kastelle is a Lecturer in Innovation Management in the University of Queensland Business School. He blogs about innovation at the Innovation Leadership Network.

Tim Kastelle

NEVER MISS ANOTHER NEWSLETTER!

Categories

LATEST BLOGS

The Evil Downside of Gift Cards

By Braden Kelley | June 21, 2007

This past holiday season I saw probably one too many articles trumpeting the value of gift cards to retailers and how they are a great thing for retailers. My skeptic side starts coming out as I see article after article appear, and I have to start asking “Is the increasing prevalence of gift cards as a holiday gift (primarily Christmas) a good thing for retailers?”

Read More

Why the iPhone will not succeed – Yet

By Braden Kelley | June 20, 2007

The new Apple iPhone is set to launch on June 29, 2007 and the press and investors are making it a darling. Investors have run Apple’s stock price up from about $85 per share before its announcement to $125 per share recently, but the iPhone still will not succeed – at least not yet.

Read More

No Comments

  1. Rafael Favereau on April 26, 2011 at 9:33 am

    God post, and real. In my earlier job (IT manager), I had permission to use resources up to US$5.000.- and we (as a team) do many innovations in network services to users, just prototiping and demostrating that with more resources we can escale this new service. Incredibly, bosses finally congratulates us even they say ‘don’t do again’…

Leave a Comment