Most companies are overwhelmingly populated with Operators, not Inventors. This is because the invention of new products, services, and processes is a less frequent occurrence than the daily, weekly, and monthly execution required to run the core business.
Inventors are mostly found in early-stage companies where the entire focus is on product creation. The skills required to be a great Inventor are hard to acquire via experience—most people are simply wired this way (or not).
This challenge is amplified at the top of companies: If your senior leaders have spent their entire careers in the Operator mode, they have little to no first-hand experience with true innovation and disruption.
This raises a critical question: How can senior leaders who have never been Inventors know how to lead, nurture, and scale a culture of innovation?
To succeed in the long-run, a company needs both. Without the Operator, you have no efficient engine to scale today’s business. But, inevitably, that business will be disrupted or decay. Without the Inventor, your company’s health-span is reduced.
Part of resolving this tension is that Operators need to think of invention as a continuous process. Companies that succeed are those that build durable management systems to address this. During my time at Amazon, the primary mechanisms that enabled us to have both types of leaders were
1. Creating separate, single-threaded teams
2. The Working Backwards PR FAQ process.
Some single-threaded teams were 100% operators focused on operational excellence and scaling. Other single-threaded teams were focused solely on new product invention in totally new arenas, like the Web Services and Digital Media teams in the mid-2000s.
In both cases, we expected innovation at the product and process level, and we developed a mechanism to enable this: the Working Backwards PR FAQ process.
What is your experience with successful examples of innovation at other companies?
