The Weekly Screed (#572)

Confessions of an “innovation” ghost
by David Benjamin

By the time the 2012 election cycle has run its course, one of the words we’ll all be ready to flush down the sewer and hope never to hear again is “innovation” (this year’s Republican panacea for all economic problems).

Where did we get this word? Is “innovation” just “invention” with an extra syllable? No. It’s worse than that. It’s a corporatespeak mantra that usually refers to new — largely useless, often confusing, always expensive — features added to old products. But “innovation” is also perceived, by corporate types, as a “process” by which creativity can be “managed” so that pointy-haired bosses with no imagination, and no idea what “imagination” is, can capture it (creativity), organize it, “scale” it and “innovate” over and over again, like making pancakes.

Here’s the truth: “Innovation” is like a no-hitter. You can only do it if you don’t mention it.

I won my Purple Heart in the innovation wars through a ghostwriting project at a famous consulting company (which will remain nameless). Egged on by a flamboyant public relations chief, the company contrived an innovative project: We were gonna write a “popular” book (about innovation), targeted dead-on for the coveted New York Times bestseller list.

Of course, we had written books before, on scholarly topics that ranged from CAD/CAM to ESOPs. But never before had this great, gray New England institution authored a book that could be read and understood by a mythical “little old lady in Dubuque” whom my “authors” kept talking about (condescendingly).

Our proposed book (although a flagrant imitation of In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.) was a wild and crazy departure for a consultancy where anyone not dressed head-to-toe in tweed was considered a flower child. Nonetheless (thanks to the innovation-book trend triggered by Peters and Waterman), we wangled a whopping advance from a publisher and assembled a crack team of “experts” eager to plumb the mysteries of innovation in a panoply of corporate endeavors, from lawn chemicals to consumer electronics to pharmaceuticals. We even extended our inquiries into yuppie pastimes, like windsurfing and Club Med. We were determined to chart precisely how clever and “counter-intuitive” (one of our favorite words!) notions “bubbled up” from “corporate culture” and exploded into “breakthroughs.”

God, it was heady stuff! Suddenly, our lunch chat was crackling with terms like “intrapreneurial,” “executive championing,” “creative bootlegging” and that old standby” — “serendipity.” We began to casually sneer the names of innovation theorists like Edward B. Roberts, Eric von Hippel and the deliciously impenetrable George Polya, fully confident that we were gonna debunk and one-up every one of these dilettantes. We chose our roster of "breakthrough companies." We held meeting after catered meeting — each session (twenty Ph.D.’s in the same room, puffing, spouting and pontificating simultaneously!) a veritable “skunkworks” of shared insight, brainstorming, hypothesizing, constructive skepticism, mild recrimination and, eventually, name-calling and food-throwing.

Soon, we were slogging through a travel and luxury-hotel schedule — Italy, London, Marina del Rey, Japan, Paris, Morocco, Amsterdam, even Troy, Ohio — that would have paupered a maharajah and exhausted Phileas Fogg. But we dared not flag — for discovery was our mission, revelation our gonfalon!

There were, well, teensy glitches. Time spent working on the “innovation book,” as it turned out, was not “billable.” This especially applied to consultants’ secretaries, whose time typing chapters of the “innovation book” couldn't be billed, and therefore could not be done (except by the ghostwriter) (me). Billability also affected schedules. Each consultant had to squeeze the “book” into spaces between billable projects. Hence, our research ran nine months past deadline and we missed our publisher’s “spring list” by two entire seasons. (But then, among consultants, a nine-month delay is regarded as impetuous haste.)

One curious aspect of corporate “innovation” that we uncovered was a sort of narrative dissonance among “breakthrough managers.” For example, while Sony’s charming tyrant, Akio Morita, took fulsome credit for conceiving and marketing the Walkman tape player, he could neither name the engineer (Mitsuro Ida) who built the first (accidental) prototype, nor explain how the idea of turning it into a consumer product evolved. Morita told a good story, of course, but it was no closer to reality than Disney’s version of “Pocahontas.”

By and by, our “innovation book” suffered the same disconnect (call it the Morita Gap) between corporate fancy and cold fact. When my two “authors” charged out into the book-promo circuit, they muddled (or forgot) the names of their “breakthrough heroes” (because they hadn’t yet read their own book) and made up stories that never happened. When the corporate chiefs of our consulting company were appalled at the book's “counter-intuitive” conclusions, my two loyal authors nimbly reversed themselves, renouncing 18 months’ worth of obscenely expensive research and disowning roughly 80,000 words published in six languages under their purported parenthood.

“OK, we admit we wrote it. But we didn’t MEAN it!”

For my part, I regard any endeavor that ends ironically as a moral and intellectual triumph. In order to deliver the ms. only five months late, for example, I ended up behaving like one of the “revolutionist” inventors whom I profiled in the book. To get the job done, I hid in my office, pounded my IBM Selectric and fired off reams of diversionary CYA memos which, I knew, would never be read.

My richest irony dated back to early days in our project, when my two authors banned me from quoting a book, The Sources of Invention by John Jewkes. This gag order proved prescient. If I’d given credit — in our “innovation book” — to Jewkes’ invention book, our “discoveries” would have seemed redundant. For in the end, we recorded nothing beyond what Jewkes had articulated 30 years before — that the “innovator” is a poor businessman. He’s obsessive, isolated, anti-social and rather queer in his personal habits and hygiene. Your typical inventor, Jewkes noted, is an odd duck who only gets along with the people who make an effort to get along with him. He is, in both fact and fiction, Victor Frankenstein.

As Jewkes wrote, “If he tries to work in an organised institution, he may waste his energy battering against the ordered arrangements surrounding him.”

The only thing we could have possibly added in our book — but didn’t — to Jewkes’ idiosyncratic “sources of invention” is that real inventors never “brainstorm.” Nor would one of them, not even to save his life, set foot in a “skunkworks,” whatever that is (we never found one). Nor would Dr. Frankenstein insult his own monster by sinking to Romneyspeak and calling it an “innovation.”