Want to Run a Better Agency? Kill More Good Ideas

I’ve been reading Robert Sutton’s blog over at Harvard Business Review on a regular basis and really enjoying it. He’s a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford and his book, Good Boss Bad Boss: How to Be the Best and Learn From the Worst is on my reading list. I’m finding that he regularly generates good stuff.

My favorite Sutton post (so far) is about the importance of killing off ideas – even great ones. This comes from Sutton’s 12 Things That Good Bosses Believe post, and it centers on the premise that good bosses regularly kill ideas – even good ones. What he means is this: as leaders, an integral part of our jobs are to inspire and encourage our people to be innovative, and regularly create lots and lots of ideas and new concepts. But, as important as creativity and innovation are, especially when it comes to the success of any creative services agency, the ability to kill off the bad ideas is critical.

Equally important, says Sutton, and often harder, is the ability of a leader to walk away from really good ideas. Sound crazy? Not really. Sometimes great ideas are just too difficult to execute. And a good user experience or piece of experiential design that’s too difficult or too expensive to execute – well, that’s an idea that just doesn’t make sense. For any one great idea to succeed it needs a lot of time, attention, resources and ingenuity in order to reach its true potential.

Apple’s Steve Jobs is a big proponent of the importance of killing good ideas and calls the ability to do that the hallmark of a great company. Using the premise of Jobs’ argument, here are the metrics that Sutton suggests tracking:

1. How many good ideas are killed? If this number isn’t high enough, that is a bad sign. It means either that not enough ideas are being generated, or that important hard choices aren’t being made.

2. How many people are complaining — even leaving — because of good ideas being killed? This really is what makes the pruning so hard. It’s tough on the people who came up with ideas and are emotionally invested in them. Being the direct cause of their complaining, and even departure, is awful — and certainly doesn’t make you feel like a great boss. But if no one is complaining, that’s a worse sign. This kind of frustration is an unfortunate byproduct of an effective innovation process, and if your people don’t have enough pride and confidence to get upset when their innovative ideas are killed, then something is wrong with them — or your culture.

This makes sense to me. Killing good ideas. Making important, hard choices. And tracking them. My management lesson of the day.