Innovation: Saying No to the Status Quo
An Unlikely Story about Moral Mortgages
Rocket Mortgage FAQ:
Q: Is Rocket Mortgage easy to use?
A: Yes.
Q: Can I really just push a button and get one?
A: No.
Q: Then why is it your slogan?
A: “Push multiple buttons” doesn’t sound as good.
So went one of the television ads for Rocket Mortgage—arguably the most important and necessary technological advancement the mortgage industry has seen since . . . well, ever.
For those of you who don’t own a television, or who have lived under a rock, or who have lived under a rock without a television, Rocket Mortgage is an app-based mortgage application process backed by Quicken Loans, which as of the time of this writing is the largest mortgage lender in the United States.
When I first saw Rocket Mortgage debut its “Push Button, Get Mortgage” simplicity, the millennial in me celebrated. The truth is, in the technologically advanced world of the twenty-first century, there is simply no excuse for going through the traditional, unbearably arcane and tree-killing process of getting a mortgage. I feel about mortgages the same way I feel about voting: if the phone knows who we are, can take and verify all our personal information, and can communicate effortlessly and at lightning speed with whatever zeros and ones it needs to produce an outcome, then why in the world wouldn’t we use this wondrous technology to solve these inefficient systems? The trouble is, as I like to warn clients and teammates alike, Don’t bring logic to a gunfight, because that’s an easy way to get yourself killed.
But, unwilling to cling to the status quo, Quicken Loans somehow pushed through the industry’s old-school ways and completely transformed the way we get a mortgage. In the process of overtaking Wells Fargo as the number-one mortgage lender in the country, Quicken credits its Rocket Mortgage product for helping it claim the throne, given that 98 percent of the company’s mortgage volume accesses the Rocket Mortgage platform during some or all stages of the mortgage process.1
Naturally, I wondered how the privately owned Quicken Loans—battling against mighty, publicly traded, mortgage-providing giants like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, Citi, and U.S. Bank—was able to innovate and dominate its industry. I suspected, and indeed hoped, that Quicken Loans might help me prove the connection between organizational honesty and industry-dominating innovation; however, I never expected to find how deep that connection proved to be once I dove into the inner workings of the Detroit-based enterprise.
Unsurprisingly, I found, in a nutshell, that the late Peter Drucker must have been talking about Quicken Loans when he remarked, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” One doesn’t have to look very long or hard inside the Quicken Loans organization to see the thick, principled manner of its corporate culture, which champions the art of innovation in every layer of its operations and decision-making.
Sound familiar?
WHAT MAKES A CULTURE OF INNOVATION?
As Quicken itself admits, “There is no secret sauce,” but there are ingredients. Quicken calls its ingredients “ISMs,” which are “ideals we live by . . . more to do with who we are than what we do.”2 The ISMs are promises—to each other, to clients, and to the communities in which Quicken operates:
1.Always raising our level of awareness.
As Yogi Berra said, “You can see a lot just by looking.” Keep your head up. Look. Be curious. Notice what is actually happening around you. Really notice. Listen. Listen to your clients. In fact, listen to everyone. Everything starts with awareness. Being alert. Being awake. Tuning in to the frequency. It’s a perpetual choice to both stay aware and raise your level of awareness. Our future, growth, innovation, and success start with the thousands of eyeballs of our team members. That’s you.
2.The inches we need are everywhere around us.
If a company does one big thing better than their competition, it becomes fairly easy for their competition to level the playing field: they can just imitate that one thing. But if a company does thousands of little things better than anyone else, they become nearly impossible to imitate. We call those thousands of little things “inches.” We’d never be able to foresee all the things that should be noticed or improved. Instead, we drive a culture that motivates our team members to find the inches we need all around us. We are all empowered to find the opportunities to make an impact everywhere; one inch at a time, these inches all add up to greatness.
3.Responding with a sense of urgency is the ante to play.
Urgency is your inner compulsion and drive to get things done in a timely yet thoughtful manner. On this team, we return all phone calls and emails the same day. We’re on the lunatic fringe. We’re obsessed with answering inquiries ASAP. Not just to clients and partners, but to each other! There’s no other way, and no other option. Urgency motivates us to ensure we communicate all news fast, both good and bad. We take care of things, especially our clients . . . NOW!
4.Every client. Every time. No exceptions. No excuses.
Clients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Could it be any clearer? A great company is built one client at a time. If you AMAZE every client every chance you get, then they are satisfied and so are you. There’s no feeling good around here because 90 percent of our clients were satisfied. Every client means 100 percent of our clients, and not some of the time. Amaze them EVERY TIME. No exceptions. No excuses!
5.Obsessed with finding a better way.
Our never-ending mission is to find a better way for every process and everything we touch. If it’s good, let’s make it great. If it’s great, let’s take it to an even higher level. Don’t settle for less. In fact, don’t settle at all. Finding a better way is not something we do on the side or when we get the time. Rather, it’s a key priority for every one of our team members. It’s our passion . . . our way of living . . . our obsession. We don’t just work IN our business—we work ON our business.
6.Ignore the noise.
We’ve found it’s not always skill and long hours that lead to greatness. It’s also the ability to ignore the noise. Noise could be from naysayers, something going wrong, sun in your eyes, ball took a bad bounce, dog ate your homework, someone cut you off on the way to work, etc. A lot of things that seem serious at first glance turn out to be noise. Will you allow it to keep you from winning? The noise may fluctuate in volume, but your determination to press on in spite of it (ignore it!) will make all the difference to you and our Family of Companies. There’s not a human on the planet who does not experience noise. The winners have developed an ability to ignore it and press on.
7.It’s not about WHO is right; it’s about WHAT is right.
There is no place at our company for typical corporate arrogance. WHO is right (or WHO is wrong) is irrelevant and inconsequential to WHAT is the right decision or best outcome for the issue at hand. All decisions should be made with a single motivation: the right or best decision for our clients, team members and company. Think about how much a company compromises itself by basing decisions on WHO is in favor or against something instead of WHAT is the best and right decision. The WHAT trumps the WHO in our shop.
8.We are the they.
There is no “they.” We are the “they.” Just open minds and an open culture rooted in trust. The leaders within the Rock Family of Companies trust you to make decisions, and, if you make an honest mistake, it’s OK! We trust you will learn from your mistakes. It’s a foreign concept to most organizations, but for us, it’s crystal clear.
9.You have to take the roast out of the oven.
A wise man once said, “Taking longer to make a decision doesn’t increase your chances of making a better one.” Perfection is not the goal when it’s time to make a decision. Focus instead on constant improvement and innovation. Overanalyzing can kill an idea and make you miss an opportunity. Don’t fear failure. If our environment did not tolerate failure, then innovation would die, creativity would die, and eventually, so would our business.
When there’s a decision to be made, there are three possible outcomes:
•You make the right one—Great!
•You make the wrong one—Hopefully you learn something valuable from it.
•You make no decision—You haven’t made the right one, and you haven’t learned a thing.
Always make new mistakes. Make decisions. And, when you believe that roast is pretty much done, pull it out of the oven.
10.You’ll see it when you believe it.
Nothing significant in this world has ever happened without someone believing in it first. It’s only the passive observers of life who say “I’ll believe it when I see it.” We take the opposite approach, and lead with our hearts and minds. We know the truth: If we truly believe in something, we can—and will—affect the outcome. If we believe in ourselves first, we dramatically increase our odds of success. If we believe it can happen, then it will.
11.We’ll figure it out.
We don’t need to have all the answers before we take on a project or launch a new and innovative idea. We have faith that when it comes to some of the details, we’ll figure it out along the way. If we wait to cross every “t” and dot every “i” before proceeding with an idea, concept, or improvement, then we wouldn’t make much progress at all. It’s our belief in each other and ourselves that gives us the confidence to find new solutions to keep us moving forward. Sometimes a game-changing project will be held up because of a small detail that doesn’t matter. Should we solve for the exception and delay the launch of a project that could otherwise make a huge impact? No! Instead, we take the roast out of the oven and figure out the exception as we go. That’s how we roll. We know that building something new or creating something special is messy, and that greatness doesn’t always come in nice, tidy packages. This is an advantage, not a hindrance. As long as we continue to love the idea and trust the process, then we truly believe we’ll figure it out.
12.A penny saved is a penny.
Your uncle’s advice, “A penny saved is a penny earned,” is the worst financial advice in history. Choose to value your time. Invest it chasing pennies, and you will find pennies—and pennies never add up. Invest it in ideas, improving your skills, innovation, developing your talent, design, marketing, and technology, and your return will be more than just pennies. Stop wasting your time with the silly pursuit of pennies. Instead, invest your valuable time creating dollars. The choice is yours.
13.Numbers and money follow; they do not lead.
Money and numbers are a measurement of actions. They don’t have value in themselves. They are neither the ends nor the means. Ironically, the vast majority of those who chase money will never end up with much of it. Instead, chase the great ideas. Chase the design, engineering and development of the product. Those who are motivated by building, improving and developing unique ideas and knowledge are the ones who acquire wealth.
This also applies to individuals. Invest in developing your skills, knowledge, and creativity. Become an expert. Pursue your vision with uncompromising passion, and become the best. Numbers and money follow successful accomplishment. Become great at something or build something great. Chasing numbers and money first will leave you chasing your tail.
14.We eat our own dog food.
Tying the threads and leveraging ideas and connections within our Family of Companies is what it’s all about—that’s what we mean when we say “eating our own dog food.” The basis of all wealth is found in the strength of relationships. Create them. Seek them out. Build upon them. Be loyal to them. If your level of awareness is high, you will find an endless amount of “dog food” around you. The more you give to these relationships, the more you will get from them. So start giving—now.
15.Simplicity is genius.
Sometimes the “intellects” of the world believe that if it’s too simple, it can’t be good. Nothing could be further from the truth. Simplifying things in this fast-moving, complicated world isn’t just good—it’s GREAT. Simple design. Simple process. Simple communication. When we communicate with others, we cannot assume they know exactly what we know. You are you, and they are them. We must start at chapter one, not chapter five. Simplicity doesn’t just clarify; it creates wealth in the process. Because if there is anything in this world that everyone can agree upon (outside of the “intellects,” of course), it’s that simplicity makes things better for everybody. That’s why simple is something we strive for in everything we do. All day. Every day. It’s as simple as that.
16.Innovation is rewarded. Execution is worshipped.
Ideas are fundamental to who we are. We encourage them. We love them. But ideas alone don’t mean much. It takes both ideas AND execution to make things happen. Great ideas get you to the fifty-yard line; outstanding execution gets you into the end zone.
17.Do the right thing.
The high road is not a shortcut. Stick to the highest standard of integrity, without compromise. Character is what you do when no one is looking over your shoulder! Doing the wrong thing is never worth it. How can you go wrong doing the right thing? Remember, eventually three things always come out: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
18.Every second counts.
You will always invest your time somewhere doing something. As long as you are alive, it’s not a choice whether you invest your time or not; the only choice is what you will do with it. Time, not money, is the most valuable commodity of all. Time can never be replaced. Never trade significant amounts of time for small sums of money. How will you invest the 31,536,000 seconds you are gifted each year? Choose wisely.
19.Yes before no.
It’s critically important that we live the culture of YES. This does not mean that every single idea, question, suggestion, or recommendation will ultimately be met with a big thumbs-up. It means that we respond to all curiosity with the mindset of YES first. Our bias is to the YES side of life. This is in stark contrast to the too common approach of an automatic NO to any expression of an inquiring mind. Saying NO is easier, but the status quo is not our favorite state. We live in the land of growth, possibilities, ideas, innovation, positive impact, and results. The only path to that place is through openness to the unknown. So YES before NO, and NO only if we have done the work and exhausted all the potential of YES first. In other words, KNOW before NO.
When I first investigated Quicken, I came armed with the question, How did Quicken Loans ever come up with Rocket Mortgage? The answer: with everything Quicken believes in, there is no universe in which it could have failed to develop a new mortgage technology and fallen behind its competitors, competitors that you and I both know don’t have belief systems anywhere close to Quicken’s. What strikes me are the little things: acting with a sense of urgency, saying yes before no, putting emphasis on what is right over who is right.
Those last two are particular afflictions that scar the business world. The challenge is clear, the tactics are doable, yet the organization just can’t move. Why? The dictator-in-charge has created a culture of saying no, relishing in the status quo, and controlling every decision with their own personal biases instead of honestly assessing the objective merit of new ideas and acting with the urgency that innovation requires.
CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE INNOVATION THRIVES
With Quicken’s remarkable values in hand, I reached out to Jay Farner, the CEO of Quicken Loans, who’s so proud of his culture that he was more than happy to share his insights about it so others could learn.
The ISMs started as a loose set of guidelines that came out of the values of Quicken’s founder, Dan Gilbert. As Farner said over the phone en route from one busy engagement to the next, eventually “we had to take the time, if this is the core of who we are, to package them up in a way people can understand them, and relate to them, and make them comfortable, so people knew that honoring these guidelines was something we really believed in. If you slap something up on a one-pager and don’t give it time and attention, people won’t see that it’s something you believe in.” Farner explained that early on, Gilbert realized “that most companies focus on what they do, and you can’t do anything good if you don’t first focus on who you are.” When you’re confident about who you are, that identity gives employees a framework to operate in, just like The Ritz’s Waterfall Culture. “We take our team through training sessions and talk about who we are. That gives them a lens to make good decisions,” Farner explained, “and they run all decisions through that lens.”
Innovation—the art of looking ahead to the future and developing products, services, and systems that will help your organization succeed over the long term—is a character trait, not a pursuit.
While some popular thinking recommends starting with why, the leaders in this book and I agree that starting with who makes a lot more sense. Innovation—the art of looking ahead to the future and developing products, services, and systems that will help your organization succeed over the long term—is a character trait, not a pursuit. Innovative leaders create innovative outcomes, and becoming an innovative leader is not only possible but formulaic, as long as you’re willing to start with honestly assessing who you are, documenting what you believe in, and using that basis of identity as a starting place for innovation. I mean, think about it: if you don’t know who you are, how the hell are you supposed to know why you’re doing what you’re doing?
In the aptly titled “It’s Who We Are—Not What We Do: Ideas Are Supported by Belief” video on YouTube,3 one Quicken employee recounts how she presented ideas to her boss, only to be abruptly cut off. “Go do it, and tell me about it later,” she recalls her boss saying. I’d estimate that most bosses would indeed cut off their direct reports’ ideas—usually in order to squash them, not to encourage their development without proper sign-offs (whatever that means). With a culture of people who all deeply understand who they are individually and who they are organizationally, Quicken’s managers feel confident that their people will make sound choices that will lead to successful outcomes—if not this time, then at some inevitable point in the near future.
The slow, methodical process of building a culture of innovation takes patience, which is why Quicken depends on both a formal and informal process to keep its culture of innovation strong.
Quicken’s founder started with only twelve ISMs in 1985 when the company was founded; they expanded and evolved over time. Farner said ISMs get formally changed through a diligent process and are only added when an idea is already bubbling up through the ranks as a modus operandi. “If we see that trend continue over a significant period of time, we’ll add an ISM,” Farner noted, “and sometimes we’ll take an ISM away if we think it’s not as relevant, or even if it’s so ingrained in our culture that it’s not going anywhere, so we can remove it safely.”
The slow, methodical process of building a culture of innovation takes patience, which is why Quicken depends on both a formal and informal process to keep its culture of innovation strong.
The slow, methodical process of building a culture of innovation takes patience, which is why Quicken depends on both a formal and informal process to keep its culture of innovation strong. Formally, Farner explained, his Z Team—named after one of Quicken’s original leaders, who sadly passed away from cancer—is his executive leadership team, which actively discusses culture at every single meeting. They talk about how it’s going, if there are any opportunities for improvement, and what, if anything, has been bubbling to the surface from the organization at large.
But perhaps even more importantly, Quicken’s people—the emphatic backbone of the company—are all informally responsible for maintaining the cultural code, day in and day out. If trends arise, it is everyone’s responsibility to flag those trends and ask about modifying, adding, or deleting ISMs accordingly. And like most entrepreneur-led organizations, those ISM decisions are juried by the guardian of the ISMs, founder Dan Gilbert, who has a firm belief that if Quicken has great people who know who they are—as individuals and as an organization—success will take care of itself.
DESIGNING THE FUTURE REQUIRES LONG-TERM THINKING
As Sprint’s Dan Hesse noted, quarterly constraints can put a damper on such long-term thinking, since creating a thoroughbred culture full of the right people takes time, energy, and a long-term mind-set. That’s why it may not surprise you to learn that Quicken Loans is a privately held organization that doesn’t have to report to Wall Street. To date, Farner has been with Quicken for almost a quarter century, and Dan Gilbert has been with the firm since its founding in 1985. “We’re not thinking about what happens next quarter,” Farner admitted, “we’re thinking about what happens three to five years from now, because our mission is to make an environment in which people can grow and communities are positively impacted . . . that creates a situation where we’re always pushing for what’s next.” If you want to innovate and lead your industry, the idea of innovation must permeate your culture and create the same sense of urgency that Quicken deliberately highlights in its ISMs. “I won’t call it fear,” Farner continued, “but I will say there’s an entrepreneurial spirit that creates the feeling that if we’re not creating something new, we’re not doing our job.”
Just as Dan Hesse and Warren Buffett believe, the executive team at Quicken is all about taking the long-term view, which is a pursuit that echoes within every “honest” leader out there who has managed to remove all traces of corporate bullshit and replace it with simple ideas like taking care of people, letting them pursue innovation, and creating an environment to foster both. To Farner, that means forgoing duct-tape solutions and opting to always play the role of disruptor. “Whenever there’s a problem or opportunity presented,” he explained, “the question we ask is, How do we change that completely? How do we eliminate that? It’s never about how we adjust the process slightly” to maintain the status quo.
“I won’t call it fear, but I will say there’s an entrepreneurial spirit that creates the feeling that if we’re not creating something new, we’re not doing our job.”—Jay Farner, CEO, Quicken Loans
This notion of rejecting the norm and establishing new protocols is critical to a company’s growth. It’s the art of the mythological phoenix: living purposefully to destroy and re-create in a never-ending cycle of how do we become better? I should know—this catalytic mind-set is how we launched our newest company, a technology platform, out of our communications agency. For years our vision was to disrupt the marketing industry, but we never stopped to ask ourselves how we could possibly accomplish that vision by being a traditional agency. Once we opened up our blind spot, we realized that we needed to completely change the way we did things if we truly wanted to change the way things are done. Pairing that internal insight with the external insights of listening to what customers wanted, we developed the ingredients to innovate. Mind you, innovating meant deliberately trying to put our existing platform business right out of business. But if we don’t face the truth, someone else will do it for us, right? And I won’t lie: admitting those truths staring us right in the face was hard. But once we accepted it, knowing what to do with the truth was relatively easy.
THE FLAWED DIAMOND AND THE EXECUTIVE MIRROR: ALLOWING INNOVATION TO SHINE THROUGH
Lest you think Quicken fosters a free-for-all every day where employees run amok, worry not. The company has a critical, guiding question for its innovative decisions: What’s our superpower? If Quicken doesn’t have a real advantage it can use to make a particular idea work—a superpower for that situation—then it will often forgo an idea because the team (honestly) assesses that other companies can and will execute better than Quicken will. In a company where innovation is rewarded and execution is worshipped, innovation often hinges on this litmus test of whether Quicken believes it can execute or not. Because, take note, it will execute when the idea is right.
That’s not to give leaders everywhere an excuse to kill the ideas of their people; in fact, the companies I’ve seen that innovate and dominate hold beliefs almost identical to Quicken’s “yes before no” and “it’s not about who is right, it’s about what is right.” Take, for instance, the cultural code of entrepreneurial banker Vernon Hill, founder of Commerce Bank. In his world, it only takes one person to make a “yes” decision, but two people to say “no.” Committed to doing what is right, Hill thought of bank branches as retail stores and placed a premium on customers’ needs. While other banks were pushing customers to the banks’ “less costly” online service options, Hill did the opposite, giving customers a phenomenal in-store customer experience with longer banking hours, friendly staff, and the full suite of services in-store. He even welcomed dogs into his banks, because, duh, lots of people own a dog and often take Rover along to run bank errands. With such a huge emphasis on giving customers what they wanted (instead of what was cheap and easy), Hill grew Commerce Bank from one branch to 470 between 1973 and 2008, delivering investors a staggering 23 percent compound annual return for three decades. Being honest about what your customers want—and thus telling them “yes” instead of “no”—makes a difference.
The Flawed Diamond and Executive Mirror
Gilbert, Farner, and Hill all recognize that their roles aren’t to innovate, per se, but to create innovative cultures that in turn create innovative products that handily dominate industries. To help illustrate why this style of management produces industry-leading results, consider a framework I call the Flawed Diamond, as shown in the Flawed Diamond figure.
The idea is simple and relates directly to the Inverse Triangle. The reason a diamond sparkles so brilliantly is that light passes into the diamond at the top, reflects and refracts off the shape of the stone, and then returns out through the top of the diamond, having been split into its array of colors just like a prism. When the diamond is properly shaped and—most importantly—doesn’t have any flaws in it, the diamond shines brilliantly in a dazzling rainbow of color.
As we saw with the Inverse Triangle, the flow of information and communication has forever changed. When we look at the new flow of information, it looks an awful lot like a diamond: information and insights pass from the top, in this case starting with the customers. They filter through employees, middle managers, and finally to executives. Then it’s up to executives to decide what to do with the information.
The executive role, in this equation, has fundamentally different responsibilities than before. Whereas before an executive had a responsibility to create information and insights and push it down through the organization, now the executive has a responsibility to absorb and reflect that information so it can become a weaponized asset to the organization, its people, and its mission. Essentially, just like a good diamond has no flaws to interrupt the reflecting light, effective executives today must be honest with themselves, get out of the way of their people, and eliminate any barriers to this flow of information, time, energy, ideas, and innovation within the organization.
I call the new executive role the Executive Mirror, which describes how executives today do well when they act like a filtering mirror—taking in information and insights, deciding which pursuits accurately reflect their culture and mission, and then allowing that “light” to pass back up through the ranks—to middle managers, back to employees, and finally back to customers in the form of innovative new products and services.
Notice I say, “which pursuits accurately reflect their culture and mission,” not “which pursuits the leader feels or thinks is the right one.” Most organizational leaders embrace the latter, while the leaders at Quicken Loans, who say yes before no and allow their employees to run with ideas, choose to act as filtering mirrors to their people, ensuring that the ISMs are upheld and the mission is being appropriately pursued.
In essence, Buffett gives his CEOs a code to follow, leeway to innovate just as Quicken gives to its employees, and the encouragement to act like owners empowered to take bold action for the long term.
Industry-beating investor Warren Buffett unsurprisingly uses the very same framework in his companies. “At Berkshire,” Buffett said in his 1998 shareholder letter, “we feel that telling outstanding CEOs, such as Tony [Nicely of GEICO], how to run their companies would be the height of foolishness.”4 Instead, Buffett hires wonderful CEOs to do their jobs and knows that his own role is to let them run unconstrained, even though Buffett’s technically their boss. Instead, he focuses on making those CEOs (who are essentially Buffett’s employees) as effective as possible by eliminating “all of the ritualistic and nonproductive activities that normally go with the job of CEO,” like reporting quarterly guidance. He then gives each CEO “a simple mission: Just run your business as if: (1) you own 100 percent of it; (2) it is the only asset in the world that you and your family have or will ever have; and (3) you can’t sell or merge it for at least a century.” In essence, Buffett gives his CEOs a code to follow, leeway to innovate just as Quicken gives to its employees, and the encouragement to act like owners empowered to take bold action for the long term. Are you picking up a theme here? If you ask me, anything else is just plain dishonest—about how the business world really works, about what your others are really feeling, and about your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader.
“In this environment of freedom,” Buffett wrote proudly, “both Tony and his company can convert their almost limitless potential into matching achievements.”
INNOVATION IS AN ACT OF OMISSION
Find the right people, put them in positions to succeed, and then get out of their way. Innovation isn’t a thing your organization does; it’s what naturally occurs when roadblocks vanish so the right ideas can emerge, just like that bright-ass diamond. It all sounds so simple, yet few organizations allow for this sort of flow. Instead, egomaniacal managers put up giant roadblocks while asserting their whims and staking their territorial boundaries. The fact that Berkshire Hathaway follows our more honest philosophy speaks volumes to its effects; the fact that Quicken is set up like a Flawed Diamond (sans flaws) clearly shows that it was only a matter of time before Quicken created Rocket Mortgage. When companies have forward-thinking, honest cultures, innovation and domination are inevitable . . . as not only Quicken Loans but also Domino’s Pizza, The Ritz-Carlton, and Bridgewater Associates attest.
“In other cultures,” Farner told me, “people may be nervous to share ideas that may be disruptive or different; here, you’re probably more at risk bringing an idea to the table that’s only a slight adjustment, and you’re safer bringing ideas to the table that are disruptive.” And in true Flawed Diamond style, Quicken brings thousands of interns into their culture every year so that, in Farner’s words, “we can stay up on what matters to them . . . and let them ask questions like, “Why does it have to be so hard to get a mortgage? Why can’t I just get it right now?”
In fact, those last two questions are exactly where “Push Button, Get Mortgage” came from. It came from Quicken’s community of “intrapreneurs,” who were keen to ask “dumb” questions and create the next level of thinking that Quicken needed to keep pushing boundaries. Quicken puts not only its employee time but also its money where its mouth is, routinely launching new companies led by employees who come up with great ideas. Farner’s message to innovators is simple: “If you bring your great idea, you get the platform from Quicken to go build that idea. Instead of people having to go build a business on their own, come leverage the strength of our platform and come build it here!” Farner knows that if he can get his people thinking entrepreneurially all the time, Quicken will get first dibs on any innovative ideas that have the potential to move Quicken forward into the future.
Farner knows that if he can get his people thinking entrepreneurially all the time, quicken will get first dibs on any innovative ideas that have the potential to move Quicken forward into the future.
Not enough can be said about the inverse relationship between innovation and roadblocks. Every single management layer of every organization has a responsibility to be a gatekeeper; unfortunately, most take that responsibility as a license to kill instead of a license to empower. The ideas are there—right there in front of every manager. But the decision every gatekeeper makes about which ideas live and which ideas die directly relates to the structure and culture of the organization. Fortunately, implementing a better structure can eventually transform a risk-averse culture. Any organization can gain unprecedented competitive advantages by simply having a consistent, dedicated forum for tossing around new ideas. Such a forum needs to incorporate multiple management layers so that no one person gets to nix an idea because of politics, bias, risk aversion, or even personal opinion. When one gatekeeper can’t block industry-dominating insights, the entire organization wins. Not to mention, employees will rejoice knowing that their direct manager can’t squash their vision, steal it, or otherwise prevent well-meaning insights from benefitting the greater good.
I asked Farner what leaders, managers, and employees in organizations large and small can do to help grease the wheels of innovation within their own industries. “I have these conversations all the time,” he admitted, “because we’re always making changes in our organization and we’re always dealing with challenges. Nothing is ever perfect, so acknowledging that reality and embracing the fact that every day you wake up you get to make a difference is the starting point. Don’t try to boil the ocean, just start. Start making a cultural revolution within your small team and start there.”
“To create, sometimes you have to have patience and you’ve got to be committed to a longer vision, and that can be really challenging for leaders.” —Jay Farner
In all the industries and clients I’ve worked with, what I’ve never found, ever, is a lack of ideas. But oh! have I found roadblocks preventing the execution of those ideas. Everyone wants to innovate, but few want to adopt the experimentation and patience that innovation requires. “To create, sometimes you have to have patience and you’ve got to be committed to a longer vision, and that can be really challenging for leaders,” Farner asserted. “They’re forced to hit such immediate results, while they’re not able to invest in long-term strategies and transformational goals, and it’s unfortunate.” He trailed off, “Maybe that’s the world we’re living in today.”
But it’s not the world Farner and Quicken Loans are living in. May the mortgage world be on notice: if you’re unable to get honest about what it takes to develop a truly innovative organization, Quicken Loans is coming for you. And there’s no need to guess how they’ll do battle.
They’re sending rockets.
QUESTIONS FOR HONEST REFLECTION
1.Look again at Quicken Loan’s ISMs. As you read each one, ask yourself, How do their beliefs compare with mine, and compare with those of my organization? Which set of beliefs—Quicken’s or mine—is more honest?
2.How can you start small, within one team or department, with a program to encourage new ideas and execute on them?
3.What roadblocks might be getting in the way of innovation at your organization? How might you be a roadblock to new ideas, and what can you do to make sure you’re not accidentally getting in the way?