创新驱动：信念>创造力

    在商界，“创造力”是个时髦词语，用来描述员工的一大优点。人们普遍认为，拥有创造性思维的员工可以提高整个团队的创新水平。创造力确实能够带来许多创意。然而， 一旦需要在企业内部推广这些创意，以及随后将它们推向市场，光有创造力还不够。信念更为重要。

    看看如今最受人尊敬的企业领袖就知道了。他们从不妥协，即使是在面对广泛质疑甚至客户抱怨的时候也是如此。年纪轻轻的Facebook创始人马克•扎克伯格因其准确的洞察力而著称，正是这种洞察力推动了Facebook的每次设计调整以及软件更新，尽管每次改变都必然会在7.5亿多Facebook用户中引发强烈不满（应该指出的是，用户的信念也有助于推动Facebook的持续创新和隐私政策的完善）。

    2010年，亚马逊（Amazon）创始人杰夫•贝佐斯在普林斯顿大学（Princeton University）的毕业典礼上发表演讲。他问毕业生们：“面对批评，你们是选择低头还是遵循自己的信念？”面对这些渴望追随其脚步的热切听众，贝佐斯没有罗列平淡过时的成功建议，而是提出了这个有力的诘问，也使我们得以一窥其创新风格，以及促使他将亚马逊从一家在线图书销售初创公司打造成为零售业巨头，成为苹果公司（Apple）畅销产品iPad及其iTunes服务的主要竞争对手的动力所在。

    不是只有公司创始人、CEO或者常春藤联盟毕业生才能从拥有强烈的信念中受益。最新数据显示，员工从事自己感兴趣的工作，能够在公司里推动自己的想法时，他们就会变得更加积极热情、富有创意。哈佛商学院（Harvard Business School）教授特丽萨•阿马比尔及其同事史蒂文•克莱默收集了7家公司238位管理人员的1.2万篇电子日记，他们在日记中描述了自己在日常工作中的心理状态。阿马比尔和克莱默藉此分析了这些人的工作动力，结果发现了一个趋势。9月，他们在《纽约时报》（New York Times）的一篇评论文章中写到，“在重要工作中取得进展”是让这些员工充满动力的关键。阿马比尔的研究显示，信念很重要。如果工作内容与员工个人的坚定信念相一致，他们就会动力十足。

    谷歌（Google）通过其“20%政策”来传导信念这种强大的力量。根据该规定，谷歌员工需要将1/5的工作时间用于他们感兴趣和热爱的项目。众所周知，正是这个规定催生了谷歌邮箱（Gmail）和谷歌地球（Google Earth）的飞行模拟软件。除了关于谷歌管理方式及其如何引导创新思维的大量论述以外，看看谷歌员工们自己如何看待这个规定也是有好处的。他们的博客和他们的话语就可以告诉我们答案。今年早些时候，谷歌安卓手机操作系统的工程主管戴夫•伯克在谷歌公司官方博客的一篇文章中，将这个规定称为“我的创新执照”。在谷歌这样的公司里工作，即使是拥有免费的食物、大量的资源、雄心勃勃的管理者和才能卓越的同事，可能也不足以产生渴望中的创新。个人热情足以改变公司政策，这样的企业文化才是值得效仿的管理战略。

    企业无论规模大小，都应该鼓励每个员工追求自己的信念，从最高管理者到低层雇员都不例外。他们不必一定要成为啦啦队长式的人物。实际上，各级管理人员都应该注意员工对效果不好的项目、产品或服务的强烈反应，这样做不无裨益。比如，在青蛙设计公司（Frog），许多人都抱怨公司的工作表现内部评估工具不好，说这个软件是多么的复杂笨拙，输入文本是多么的费时（是否听起来有点耳熟？）。管理人员注意到了这种不满，并欣然接受。显然，如果这么多人都对这个工具反映强烈，可能这个工具确实存在问题。这时，我建议说，假如我们的员工觉得这个工具不适合，干嘛不拿出改进方案呢？一位设计人员站出来，接受了这个挑战，设计出了一个新的工具取代了原有的工作表现评估软件。

    这件事情告诉我们的团队，公司愿意倾听员工的心声，重视他们的兴趣，并且不怕承担风险，愿意引导民心。青蛙设计公司的实践告诉我们，所谓员工至上的管理方式就是创造一种企业文化，始终让每个人都有机会向高管表达自己意见，不管是面对面的市政厅式会议也好，还是全公司范围内的季度电话会议也好。这样一来，我们就可以知道哪些员工有话要说，谁可以提出新的方法来改进我们的工作方式，以及谁的意见已经成熟，不怕在面向全公司的舞台上提出来。

    从最高管理者到行政助理，不管处于公司的哪个层级，受信念驱动的思考者希望分享他们的独特见解，而不是为了名声或权力。他们不只认为自己的想法很好，而且强烈地相信这些想法值得付诸实践。这类思考者（和实践者）的可贵之处在于，他们能够告诉组织内部和整个世界，他们为什么要开发自己正在着手开发的产品，为什么要启动自己正在启动的新方案。即使他们的想法可能并非首创（请记住，Kindle并不是第一款电子阅读器，iPod也不是第一款MP3播放器，谷歌也不是第一个搜索引擎，同样，Facebook也不是第一个社交网站），但他们改善世界或者公司职场日常生活质量的热情和想法是强烈的。他们同样可以充满动力。因此，他们会非常具有说服力。这种专注、动力和说服力的结合，而非仅仅只有创造力，才能将创意推向市场，并在正确的时间推向正确的消费者。

    多琳•罗伦佐是国际化创新公司青蛙设计（Frog）的总裁，该公司的母公司爱瑞森特集团（Aricent Group）的执行副总裁和总经理。多琳负责推动青蛙设计公司的企业战略并监督其全球运作。在为这家公司效力的14年里，她在公司重组中起到了重要作用，使其从一家传统的小型设计公司变成了世界上最著名的国际化创新公司之一，与众多的财富500强客户进行了广泛合作。她还是2011-2012世界经济论坛（World Economic Forum）新兴技术全球议程委员会（Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies）的成员。

    译者：千牛絮

    In business circles, "creativity" has become a buzzword to describe a desired trait among employees. It's widely believed that having creative thinkers on staff will boost overall team levels of innovation. Yes, creativity can lead to a surplus of original ideas. But when it comes time to sell those concepts internally, and then later take those ideas to market, creativity is not enough. More important is conviction.

    Look at the most-admired business leaders today. They tend to resist compromises, even when faced with widespread skepticism or even complaints from customers. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's young founder, is known for the exactness of his vision, which drives each design or software tweak of the social networking software that he created, despite the now-requisite uproar each change incites among Facebook's 750 million-plus users (whose own convictions, it should be noted, help drive subsequent iterations and privacy policies of Facebook).

    Consider how Amazon (AMZN) founder Jeff Bezos asked the graduating class at Princeton University during his 2010 commencement speech there, "Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?" A powerful alternative to reading a corny list of tips for success to an eager crowd hoping to follow in his footsteps, his tough question offered a glimpse into his own style of innovation, and what drove him to build Amazon from a start-up online bookseller to a retail juggernaut to a serious challenger to Apple's (AAPL) top-selling iPad hardware and its iTunes service.

    But it's not just company founders and CEOs or Ivy League grads that can benefit from having a strong sense of conviction. New data suggest that when employees pursue work that they feel strongly about, and can move their ideas forward within their organization, they are more enthusiastic and productive. Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and her colleague Steven Kramer collected 12,000 electronic diary entries from 238 executives in seven different organizations. They analyzed what motivated these everyday individuals, who described their daily psychological well-being at work. Amabile and Kramer saw a trend emerge: "simply making progress in meaningful work" [italics mine] was key for these workers to feel engaged, Amabile and Framer wrote in a New York Times opinion essay in September. What Amabile's research shows is that conviction is important. Work that appeals to employees' firmly held beliefs, which has personal meaning to workers, is what drives them.

    Conviction is the powerful force that Google (GOOG) channels with its 20% policy, which requires Googlers to devote one-fifth of their time in the office pursuing a project that they are personally interested in and therefore passionate about. This policy has famously resulted in products such as Gmail and Google Earth's flight simulator software. But beyond the hype surrounding Google's management style and how it leads to inventive thinking, it's helpful to see how individual Googlers themselves think of this concept, as evident on their blogs and in their own words. Dave Burke, an engineering director who works on Google's Android phone operating system, described the policy in a Google blog post earlier this year as "my license to innovate." Just working at a place like Google, with its free food, vast resources, ambitious managers and talented co-workers might not be enough to spark the desired innovation. A culture where personal passions matter enough to fuel a corporate policy, more than the policy itself, is the management strategy to emulate.

    Organizations of all sizes can encourage everyone, from C-level leaders to junior hires, to pursue their convictions. And they don't have to be of the cheerleading variety. In fact, it can be helpful on many levels for managers to pay attention to employees' passionate responses to projects, products, or services that are not working. At frog, for example, a lot of people were complaining about an internal tool we used for performance reviews -- how cumbersome the software was, how time-consuming the process was to enter text. (Sound familiar?) So, managers paid attention to this heated chatter and embraced it. Clearly, if so many people had such strong opinions about this tool, perhaps something was wrong with it. That's when I suggested that if our employees felt that it wasn't the right tool for us, why not propose an improvement? One designer stepped up to the challenge, and created an alternative to the performance review software in question.

    The exercise showed our teams that we are the kind of company that listens to employees, pays attention to the intensity of their interests, and is not afraid to take risks by channeling that intensity. So what we've learned at frog is that an employee-first management policy is about creating a culture that offers the opportunity for everyone to voice their opinions all the way to senior executives, at town-hall-style meetings in person, or on company-wide quarterly calls. This way we can also identify employees who have something to say, who might be able to offer fresh ways to improve how we do business, and whose opinions are so formed that they are not afraid to share them in a company-wide arena.

    Conviction-driven thinkers on all levels of an organization, from the C-suite to executive assistants, want to share their specific visions more than they seek fame or power. They don't just think they have a good idea, but they believe passionately that their concept is worth making real. The beauty of these types of thinkers (and doers) is that they can explain why they want to develop the products they're developing, and why they want to launch initiatives that they're launching—both internally and to the world. Even when their ideas might not be the most original (remember, the Kindle was not the first e-reader; the iPod was not the first MP3 player; Google was not the first search engine; Facebook was not the first social network), their passion and their vision on how to improve the world or even the everyday quality of life in your company's workspace are likely focused. They are likely engaged. As a result, they can be very persuasive. Such a mixture of focus, engagement, and persuasion, more than creativity alone, is what brings ideas to market, and also to the right audiences at the right time.

    Doreen Lorenzo (@doreenl) is the president of global innovation firm frog and an executive vice president and general manager of the Aricent Group, frog's parent company. Doreen drives frog's company strategy and oversees its worldwide operations. During her 14 years with the company, she has been instrumental in re-structuring the company, taking it from a traditional design boutique to becoming one of the world's foremost global innovation firms, securing broad-based arrangements with an array of Fortune 500 clients. She serves as a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, 2011-2012.