The most difficult thing is the decision to act; the rest is merely tenacity.
—AMELIA EARHART
YOU MAY NOT know that you know her. But if you or your children were ever spooked by Goosebumps, entertained by The Baby-Sitters Club, or had your mind bent by Animorphs, you have Jean Feiwel to thank. Currently senior vice president at Macmillan Publishers, she has been behind the scenes creating the imprints and platforms that brought Harry Potter and Captain Underpants to the world.
But unlike many prolific editors, Jean’s creativity has expanded beyond bookends. Throughout her career, she has challenged traditional publishing business models. Her most recent innovation is Swoon Reads, which today is the leading crowd-sourced platform to help undiscovered romance writers refine their manuscripts and find their audience. It has been lauded in the industry press as an uncommon example of an established publishing company introducing the kind of innovation we usually expect from Silicon Valley. CNN called it “a new way to hear what readers want,”
Publishers Weekly has called it a “pioneering publishing model,” and the
New York Times says it “is upending the traditional discovery process.”
1I have chosen her story to illustrate the IN-OVATE model because it is so thoroughly representative of the process successful internal innovators seem to follow. It did not come out of an R&D lab or a corporate-sponsored innovation group. It is built on technology, but it’s not the kind of technology story we so often hear. It was born out of the passion of an unlikely internal innovator who sensed a need and intuitively managed the process to navigate a solution through the sprawling bureaucracy of a 175-year-old corporation.
Jean is the middle child of an eclectic family of teachers, designers, and computer programmers who found her passion for literature and free thinking at Sarah Lawrence College. When she interviewed for a job at Avon Books, she failed the typing test. But her would-be boss at Avon saw that she “had a great reading background, loved books, and could talk intelligently about them,” as Jean told me, and took a chance on her. She rose quickly to senior editor at the age of twenty-eight and was asked to build Avon’s children’s book business.
But Jean soon ran up against the dilemma many internal innovators confront. Sometimes your organization’s leaders say they want innovation when in reality they are uncomfortable diverging from the status quo. Jean left Avon for Scholastic.
Scholastic afforded her more freedom to innovate. They were interested in expanding from textbooks to general-interest books that could serve book clubs. That required a new rhythm of publication, long series of books, a blend between a book and a magazine. Jean structured such a program, Ginny’s Babysitting Job, and it sold very well in their book clubs year after year and was the inspiration for Ann Martin’s The Babysitter’s Club.
As her stature in the industry grew, other publishers began courting her. They wanted her to innovate for them as she had for Scholastic. She eventually left Scholastic “not of my own choosing,” as she told me, after being at the company for twenty-two years and being the architect for their trade publishing program. She joined Macmillan, which seemed to be an organization that “encouraged entrepreneurship and innovation.” They didn’t hand her spreadsheets with targets; instead, they gave her the latitude to “make it great, make it wonderful.” And that mandate eventually produced something entirely, stunningly new to the publishing world.
The path to innovation begins when someone sees an opportunity and takes action on it. Finding opportunities is not hard; they surround us. The difficulty is that most people fail to recognize them or, if they do, choose not to move on them. There could be any number of reasons for this, but the most common one is this: somehow they never take the first step. Jeff Bezos says, “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.”
2 Most employees have heard “no” more often than they can stomach, so they have simply given up trying.
The first necessity, the first step on the path, is what I have called “intent.” I chose this word as it alludes to “entrepreneurial intention,” a concept well established in entrepreneurship theory, which I refer to later in this chapter. It could just as easily be called “commitment,” “determination,” “tenacity,” “resolve,” or “perseverance.”
Stepping into the Kitchen
Kat Cole is the chief operating officer and president of Focus Brands, a conglomerate that owns numerous restaurant brands, including Schlotzsky’s, Carvel, Cinnabon, Moe’s Southwest Grill, McAlister’s Deli, and Auntie Anne’s. Before that, she was the CEO of Cinnabon, which sells branded baked goods through 1,200 stores in forty-eight countries.
Kat started her career as a waitress serving chicken wings and beer at a Hooters restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida. Her mother was a single parent struggling to support three kids, so Kat had to work full time.
Her impressive rise from waitress to CEO can be traced back to a single incident that happened while she was still at Hooters. The cooks at the store had decided to walk out. The remaining staff responded in two ways. Many staff members, figuring there was no food to serve, took off their aprons and went home. Cole and several others walked into the kitchen and began to cook. “You could see the divide immediately,” she shared in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton.
3That divide neatly illustrates the moment at which someone decides whether to act like an internal entrepreneur or like a conventional employee. When faced with an unexpected challenge or opportunity, do you step into the kitchen or go home?
Defying the Boss to Serve the Company and the World
Chuck House was an engineer at HP in the early 1960s, working on a project to build large-scale electrostatic displays. He described these to me as a “big TV connected to a computer.”
When David Packard visited House’s lab, he didn’t like House’s project at all and told him that he didn’t want to see it in the lab when he returned next year. Of course Packard meant he wanted to kill the project. But House chose a different interpretation. He took this to mean that the project had to be launching in less than a year.
On his own time, during the holidays, he took a prototype to potential buyers and returned with orders. His boss at the R&D lab was furious, saying, “I thought I told you to kill this thing.” To which House replied, “No, sir. You said when you came back, you didn’t want to see this in the lab. It isn’t. It’s in production.”
By making an unconventional choice—to “go into the kitchen” so to speak—House laid the foundation of a technological revolution. His technology became the first commercially available computer display. Had House not made this choice, we would not have seen Neil Armstrong land on the moon.
Two decades later, HP awarded House the “Medal of Defiance,” which was “awarded in recognition of extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty…. Charles H. House, using all means available—principally pen, tongue, and airplane to extol an unrecognized technical contribution, planted the seeds for a new market.”
4Seeing and Seizing Opportunities
When I started digging into how intention works, I thought its role would be straightforward: someone sees an opportunity and either acts or decides to let it pass because the person doesn’t want to seize it. In other words, that person either possesses or lacks intent. But I discovered the influence of intention is far more profound and pervasive that you might think.
In a fascinating study, Richard Wiseman,
5 a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, studied two groups of people: those who considered themselves lucky and those who considered themselves unlucky. He asked each to look through a newspaper and report how many photographs were inside. On average, unlucky people took two minutes to come up with their count and lucky people took seconds. What was the difference?
On the second page of the newspaper was a message: “Stop counting—There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The message took up half the page and was written in large type, so no one should have missed it. Yet unlucky people tended to overlook it.
His research, encompassing this study and others, concluded that “lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.”
6It is as if lucky people step into a situation with the intention of finding luck—so they find it. Those without such an intention fail to see opportunity even when it is staring them in the face.
Lee Pilsbury was born with intent. Fresh out of the hospitality management program at Cornell University, Lee had found himself working as an assistant manager at a Marriott hotel in Houston. Shell was relocating its headquarters from New York to a new building several blocks from his hotel. So when Lee met the Shell executive responsible for managing the relocation, he immediately spotted an opportunity.
He offered Shell a nightly rate of $24 per room, whether single or double. Shell booked the hotel for its employees. Lee was proud he had brought such a significant deal to the company after only a few months on the job, so he was shocked when his manager told him he had made a mistake.
The Marriott’s rates at the time were $19 a night for a single and $21 a night for a double, the manager told him. There were cards on every door clearly stating that the maximum rate for every room was $21. Lee was told to go back to Shell and revoke the deal.
Instead, Lee spent the weekend personally changing every card on every door. His boss reluctantly accepted Lee’s idea. Lee’s intent drove him to lead innumerable innovations within Marriot, such as guaranteed late check-in and 30-minute room service delivery, propelling a rapid career rise. He went on to become the executive vice president for Marriott International and to found one of the largest hospitality private equity firms.
7Seizing Opportunities
Even if you recognize an opportunity, the lack of intention will make you unlikely to move on it. Shaun Neff’s decision to act on an opportunity sowed the seeds for what has become one of the most exciting activewear brands in the world, sold in thousands of shops in more than forty-five countries, with an impressive list of corporate partners such as Disney, The Simpsons, Nickelodeon, and Richard Sherman, and celebrity collaborators such as Snoop Dogg, deadmau5, Wiz Khalifa, Mac Miller, Kate Upton, and Scarlett Johansson. Even my own twelve-year-old aspiring snowboarder reaches for his Neff beanies before hitting the slopes.
While still a freshman at Brigham Young University, Shaun set a goal of building a global activewear brand centered around snowboard culture. His best path to achieving this, he decided, was Neff-branded T-shirts. He gained some traction pasting stickers on signs around town, toting around a backpack of T-shirts to show buyers at snowboard shops, and wooing local influencers. But his efforts were falling short of his aspirations. For his brand to break out, he concluded, he needed nationally renowned snowboarders to wear his shirts.
Shaun counted numerous competitive snowboarders as friends. But when he asked them to wear his shirts, the most successful ones declined. They would love to help him out, but they were under exclusive contracts with other brands.
Shaun was frustrated but determined. So one day he asked several of his professional snowboarder friends if he could take a look at their contracts. That night he stayed up late, studying the contracts, looking for a way out of his dilemma. Suddenly he realized that none of the contracts mentioned headgear. So he decided, literally overnight, to abandon his T-shirt business and become a headgear company.
Time was not in his favor. There was a tournament coming up in just a few days, not enough lead time to manufacture his branded headwear. So he went to the dollar store, bought a few white beanies, and wrote “Neff” on them with a black Sharpie. He convinced several competitors to wear his Neff hat at the competition.
At the end of the tournament, two of the medalists standing on the podium were prominently wearing “Neff” beanies. For Shaun, it was a magical moment. “The heavens opened…I am no longer Neff clothing; I’m Neff Headwear.”
8You will see this same pattern repeated at the beginning of many great innovations. Kendra Scott started a hat store, but when customers started asking for her jewelry more often than hats, she decided she was a jewelry store. Today her company operates more than seventy-five stores throughout the United States and is valued at more than $1 billion.
9 Chuck House at HP, and Elliott Berman at Exxon and other internal innovators we will meet in later chapters all experienced the same pattern. When a roadblock presented itself, they held strong to their intention, found an opportunity, and moved quickly to seize it.
When you hold fast to your intention to innovate, you are more likely to see and seize opportunities. It’s critical, therefore, to identify and erase whatever may be dimming your intention. If you feel your intention lacks power—if you are thinking “I’d like to innovate when I get the chance,” instead of “I am passionately committed to changing the world”—research suggests that one of three kinds of beliefs may be at play.
Three Blockers of Intention
You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.
—RABINDRANATH TAGORE
What is going to stop you from taking the initial action that will put you on the path to innovating from within? What is stopping your people from seeing and acting on the opportunities around them?
The research points to a clear answer.
Alan Carsrud and Malin Brännback, two of my mentors and thesis advisers, are leading experts on the topic of entrepreneurial intention. The topic is fascinating and complex, certainly worthy of deeper study, but here I will attempt to summarize what you need to know.
Intention precedes the recognition of opportunities and the taking of action to pursue those opportunities. Let’s say that again: Intention comes first; all else follows. If you have ever found yourself either missing an opportunity you should have recognized or holding back from taking action on an opportunity when you should have, you were probably stopped because your internal dialogue was having one of three conversations: it won’t work, you can’t do it, or it’s not socially acceptable.
Academics use slightly more formal descriptors.
10• Behavioral beliefs: whether you believe that the actions that would be required would result in a desirable outcome. You are asking yourself “Would this work?” and answering yes or no.
•
Control beliefs: whether you believe that you are capable of taking the actions that would achieve the outcome—that you can accomplish the task, that you have the self-efficacy required.
11 You are asking yourself “Am I capable?” and answering yes or no.
• Normative beliefs: how you believe other people will react if you take the actions necessary, and the degree to which that influences you. You are asking “What would my colleagues or friends or mother say?”
Five Ways to Overcome Blockers
Rather than constantly questioning and challenging our beliefs and being willing to think differently about the opportunities that are out there, we withdraw into what we’ve done before. And in a world that’s rapidly changing, that’s a formula for vulnerability.
—JOHN HAGEL III
Over the years working with teams of innovators, I’ve come to appreciate how profound this framework is. Here is a five-step process that has proven quite effective at removing whatever beliefs may be holding you or your people back.
First, identify what stops you from taking action. To do this, try to picture yourself inside a movie. Imagine that you are presented with an opportunity to innovate, but in the end you decide to pass. Maybe you have been invited to join an ad hoc team working on a new initiative. Perhaps you have discovered an unmet customer need and thought, “We should do something about that.” Maybe you have come up with a new way to improve a process within your organization. Whatever specific scenario fits your life, in your movie you feel a moment of excitement, but then you decide not to pursue the possibility.
Now think about what you were telling yourself when you decided to pass. Which of the following sets of statements, which I have pulled from my interviews, sound closest to your internal dialogue?
Behavioral Beliefs (“This won’t work.”)
• They will never listen to me.
• You just can’t innovate in the company.
• We are too stuck in our ways.
• We move too slowly.
• It’s too hard.
• It’s unlikely to succeed.
• I can’t be sure it will work.
Control Beliefs (“I am not capable.”)
• I don’t have what it takes.
• I’m not an entrepreneur; I’m not innovative.
• I don’t know enough; I lack the technical knowledge.
• I’m not that kind of person.
• Who am I to think I could do this?
• I don’t have the right mind-set.
• I’m not the kind of person willing to take the risk.
Normative Beliefs (“People won’t approve.”)
• What would people say?
• I would look weird.
• My colleagues or friends would laugh.
• This could hurt my career.
• What would happen if I failed?
• This could be embarrassing.
• That is not the kind of thing that people like me do.
Step 2: Be Willing to Choose Your Beliefs
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
Once you realize which types of unhelpful beliefs are at work, it’s time to start replacing them. It helps to recognize that beliefs are not necessarily true. They are rules humans adopt to help explain what has happened in the past and to give us the sense of security that we know what will happen in the future. Beliefs often seem to be true because they can become self-fulfilling. If you believe something is impossible, you will attempt it and fail, thereby proving that it is impossible.
Dr. Amanda Foo-Ryland (formerly Amanda Mortimer), a performance coach based in Portugal and New Zealand, has coached executives throughout the world on dismantling unhelpful beliefs—what in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) are called “limiting beliefs.” She is an expert in NLP, hypnotherapy, and timeline therapy, and has been one of my personal coaches for a number of years. She puts it this way:
The first thing to establish is that our beliefs, whether they’re limiting or empowering, aren’t the truth. They’re just things we think. They feel real to us. Other people have different beliefs, which feel real to them. None of these beliefs are objectively true.
Limiting beliefs are the things you believe about yourself that limit your abilities, and especially your ability to make the most of the opportunities that come your way. Sometimes we’re aware of these negative beliefs, while at other times we’re not because they’re unconscious. They may be founded or unfounded. But limitations are actually a product of the mind. In reality there are no limitations on a person. Anything can be done if you put your mind to it.
12
To loosen your attachment to unhelpful beliefs, be willing to consider, if only for the next thirty minutes, that the belief(s) you identified in step 1 above may not be true. Can you find any examples in the past of someone proving this belief is not true? Has anyone ever done something that contradicts the belief? Rarely do our beliefs hold true 100 percent of the time.
Step 3: Feel the Cost
Foo-Ryland has created a process that enables clients to start deconstructing beliefs. It helps to work with a coach, but you can do it on your own as well. It not only clarifies the limiting belief; it also demolishes the destructive thought pattern. She calls it the Sherlock Holmes Technique, because you become something like a “detective” of your thoughts—you’re observing yourself as closely as Sherlock would, and as objectively. Try it for forty-eight hours, and I think you will notice your behavior and outcomes change for the better. All you need is a notebook and a sense of playfulness.
1. Every time you have a thought about taking an innovative action, ask yourself, “What is it I believe about myself that caused me to think that?” Notice what comes up for you and write it down in your notebook.
2. Every time you feel bad, ask yourself, “What do I believe about myself that caused me to feel that?” Notice what comes up for you and make a note of this.
3. Each time you do either one, physically move yourself away from where you were sitting or standing and in this new position ask the question again (What is it I believe about myself that caused me to think that? or What do I believe about myself that caused me to feel that?). Ask in a playful way, as if you have caught the limiting belief by surprise.
4. At the end of your forty-eight hours, look at your list and ask yourself two questions about each item on it:
• What has been the cost of having this belief?
• What will be the cost of living in this belief for the next five years?
When calculating “cost,” think about the monetary value of your time and energy, and put a real dollar value on it. Think also about the emotional costs—to your relationships, to your sense of fulfilment, to your career, to your capacity to have an impact in the world.
Step 4: Assess the Payoff
Of course, a fair assessment of a belief involves payoffs as well as costs. Ask yourself, “What is the benefit to me of holding onto this belief?” Does it reduce your risk? Does it help you avoid embarrassment?
Often this payoff is something you are not comfortable admitting to yourself. For example, if you are being limited by behavioral beliefs (“This won’t work”), your payoff may be that you don’t have to admit you are simply too scared to try. This one is widespread, as leading management thinker Dr. Pankaj Ghemawat, points out: “ ‘The system made me do it’ is the perfect cop-out for today’s managers.” If you are limited by control beliefs (“I am not capable”), you may be avoiding taking full responsibility. If you are limited by normative beliefs (“People won’t approve”), your payoff may be that you avoid the jealous eye of others who see you succeeding at something they were too scared to try themselves.
Step 5: Choose a New Belief
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
—STEVE JOBS
Finally, think of a new belief you might use instead. Don’t necessarily choose something that feels like a directly opposite belief. For example, if your belief is “I don’t have what it takes,” don’t pick “I do have what it takes.” Instead consider “I have fun innovating” or “I am a passionate person” or “I am driven to have an impact on the world.” Imagine how your life would be in five years, and then in ten years, if you lived this new belief. What would your career look like—your level of fulfillment, the impact on people around you, the role model you set for your children, your customers, your level of energy, your health, and so forth?
Using the Sherlock Holmes Technique, “catch yourself” living in this new belief. Congratulate yourself. The more the new belief runs, the stronger it becomes, just as the limiting belief did.
Once you have chosen a belief that leads you to the future you want, you will find that the old belief starts fading and the new one starts taking hold. You will notice opportunities you didn’t see before and take actions you would not have considered before. You will start exploring the world with an intention to innovate and affect what you care about.
A Final Word
We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
As Jean’s story from the publishing world illustrates, great internal innovators don’t enter new situations content to merely keep doing things right. They carry with them the intent to do things differently and better. Their innovations come not from one-off sparks of insight but from an ongoing drive to look for and pursue new opportunities.
If that does not describe how you, or your people, are wired, there is something you can do about it. You just need to activate the intention to innovate.
Without an intention to innovate, we tend to overlook opportunities and avoid taking actions to pursue those opportunities. If your intention is missing or restrained, this is likely because you believe it won’t work, believe you’re not capable, or believe it’s not socially acceptable. But if you identify the belief holding you back, and then deconstruct and replace it, you will naturally create the intention to innovate. You will start seeing and acting on new possibilities.
Moving forward with clear-eyed intent, Jean Feiwel began to create something the book-publishing world had never seen.
