How Can Organizations Remain Innovative?

The challenge of maintaining innovation within organizations is multifaceted and complex. In my extensive experience detailed in Beyond Eureka!, I often recount the tale of Arthur, a standout employee whose mindset expanded my perspective on who innovates.

Fundamentally, innovation doesn't originate from the companies themselves but from the people within them. So, when you hear about companies having difficulties innovating due to their corporate structure, reframe the problem. Who within these companies restricts and obstructs new ideas, and why? This is particularly perplexing given that most CEOs claim that innovation is key to their organization's future growth. Companies don’t fail because they aren’t disruptive enough or because they have been disrupted. They fail because the people managing them refuse to acknowledge that creativity knows no rank, or are too caught up in the corporate machinery to encourage the generation of new ideas or even listen if one of their subordinates proposes something novel.

Innovation management must embrace a "management by exception" philosophy, focusing on identifying and nurturing creative thinkers. Innovation is not about maintaining the status quo; thus, we must abandon conventional thinking if we want to encourage and support innovative individuals.

I realized the value of this approach early in my career, and since then, I have encouraged every company I've led or consulted for to find their own "Arthurs."

Arthur was unique in every sense. Everything about him was different—from his outfits to his florid vocabulary. An early user of my first company’s main product, a relational database for Apple’s Macintosh, he would storm into our office with the most unexpected bugs, apologizing profusely for being a pain in the neck, using all kinds of made-up words and poetic metaphors to describe his problem. As exotic as he was, we made the decision to hire him in tech support even though he wasn’t looking for a job. We didn’t regret this decision.

Customers loved him. The interesting part is that after his workday, he would stay at the office focusing on his hobby, databases on large systems, until, one day, he proudly declared that we should create modules connecting our database to all the large mainframe computing systems. The rest of the team was not exactly enthusiastic. First, our realm was the Macintosh, a fairly insular world in the 1990s. Second, we would lose a critical resource in a tech support team that was already stretched. Finally, it was doubtful that large organizations, who at the time were for the most part anti-Apple, would even accept that a Macintosh could be connected to anything.

We dragged our feet for a while, but Arthur wouldn’t give up, re- counting what he’d learned with his epic tone every day at lunchtime. Anybody who listened to him would have believed that operating systems like Unix, Ultrix, and OSF/1 were heroes in a comic strip. Finally, to the displeasure of the rest of the team, I bought Arthur a Digital Equipment VAX machine to help him test interface modules connecting our database to larger systems and vice versa. Of course, the system was as unfriendly as you can possibly imagine, but Arthur, installing it and reading through pounds of manuals, was like a kid in a candy store. His passion was so contagious that he roped in other employees, and we created interfaces for all the major mainframe databases. This ended up being a phenomenal move for the company. Corporate accounts couldn’t connect their PC databases to their mainframes, but lo and behold, that ugly duckling, the Macintosh, was something they could use, and many customers forgot that it was an Apple product.

The lesson here is clear: Identify and nurture your "Arthurs"—those with the imagination and determination to innovate. If they are overlooked or suppressed, they will leave, driven by frustration, and your organization will lose immensely. These are the individuals who will likely design and build the AI agents that will transform your business and your workplace.

PS—Arthur’s real name was André Lepetit (but was known to most as Arthur Lepetit). He died of cancer in January 2016. This post is, in large part, a repost of an article I wrote in 2019.