Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

How Companies Create Agile Environments

In any case, even when feedback was negative or not encouraging, exploration itself was always encouraged. More explicitly, tangible exploration was encouraged, a critical point to consider. So, what can you do in your work environment to support this kind of exploration from your most passionate and curious people and not penalize them for the time involved or for discovering dead ends? And once you've taken the first steps, how can you get others inspired as well?

Marching to a Different Drummer

An interesting caveat from HP's history—team evaluation isn't always accurate. An engineer named Chuck House developed an oscilloscope for HP, and David Packard explicitly told him to stop development. Stubbornly, House took vacation time and went across the country getting orders for his product before it existed. Confronted with actual sales, HP put the oscilloscope into production. House later received an award for "extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering." While this was an exception to the general rule, this story from HP's history is certainly indicative of a unique corporate culture.

3M: Make a Little, Sell a Little

One company that took an iterative approach is 3M, with its motto, "Make a little, sell a little." As we saw in Chapter 6, 3M has recently started to chase optimization to the exclusion of innovation. Prior to that, however, 3M had a tremendous track record with sales from recently developed products. ...