Start with why

Innovation Happens at the Edges
Dream teams are not always so dreamy. When a team of experts comes together
they often work for themselves and not for the good of the whole. This is what
happens when companies feel the need to pay mega-salaries to “get the best
talent.” Those people are not necessarily showing up because they believe in
your WHY, they are showing up for the money. A classic manipulation. Paying
someone a lot of money and asking them to come up with great ideas ensures
very little. However, pulling together a team of like-minded people and giving
them a cause to pursue ensures a greater sense of teamwork and camaraderie.
Langley pulled together a dream team and promised them riches. The Wright
brothers inspired a group of people to join them in pursuit of something bigger
than each member of the team. Average companies give their people something
to work on. In contrast, the most innovative organizations give their people
something to work toward.
The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a
leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the
people inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to
find new ways of doing things. The people who answer the phones and talk to
customers, for example, can tell you more about the kinds of questions they get
than can anyone sitting in an executive suite miles away. If the people inside a
company are told to come to work and just do their job, that’s all they will do. If
they are constantly reminded WHY the company was founded and told to always
look for ways to bring that cause to life while performing their job, however,
then they will do more than their job.
Steve Jobs, for example, did not personally come up with the iPod or iTunes
or the iPhone. Others inside the company did. Jobs gave people a filter, a
context, a higher purpose around which to innovate: find existing status-quo
industries, those in which companies fight to protect their old-fashioned business
models, and challenge them. This is WHY Apple was founded, it is what Jobs
and Wozniak did when they started the company, and it is what Apple’s people
and products have done ever since. It’s a repeating pattern. Apple’s employees
simply look for ways to bring their cause to life in as many places as they can.
And it works.
It is not the same at many other companies. Companies that define themselves
by WHAT they do instead of WHY they do it instruct their people to be

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innovative around a product or service. “Make it better,” they are instructed.
Those who work for Apple’s competitors, companies that have defined
themselves as “computer manufacturers,” come to work to develop “more
innovative” computers. The best they can do is add more RAM, add a feature or
two, or, as one PC maker has done, give people the option to customize the color
of their computer casing. This hardly qualifies as an idea with the potential to
change the course of an industry. A nice feature, for sure, but not innovation. If
you are curious as to how Colgate finds itself with thirty-two different types of
toothpaste today, it is because every day its people come to work to develop a
better toothpaste and not, for example, to look for ways to help people feel more
confident about themselves.
Apple does not have a lock on good ideas; there are smart, innovative thinkers
at most companies. But great companies give their people a purpose or challenge
around which to develop ideas rather than simply instruct them to make a better
mousetrap. Companies that study their competitors in hopes of adding the
features and benefits that will make 
their
products “better” are only working to
entrench the company in WHAT it does. Companies with a clear sense of WHY
tend to ignore their competition, whereas those with a fuzzy sense of WHY are
obsessed with what others are doing.
The ability of a company to innovate is not just useful for developing new
ideas, it is invaluable for navigating struggle. When people come to work with a
higher sense of purpose, they find it easier to weather hard times or even to find
opportunity in those hard times. People who come to work with a clear sense of
WHY are less prone to giving up after a few failures because they understand the
higher cause. Thomas Edison, a man definitely driven by a higher cause, said, “I
didn’t find a way to make a lightbulb, I found a thousand ways how not to make
one.”
Southwest Airlines is famous for pioneering the ten-minute turnaround—the
ability to deplane, prep, and board a plane in ten minutes. This ability helps an
airline make more money, because the more the planes are in the sky, the better
the company is doing. What few people realize is that this innovation was born
out of struggle. In 1971, Southwest was running low on cash and needed to sell
one of their aircraft to stay in business. This left them with three planes to fly a
schedule that required four. They had two choices: they could scale back their
operations, or they could figure out how to turn their planes around in ten
minutes. And thus was born the ten-minute turnaround.
Whereas most other airline employees would have simply said it couldn’t be
done, Southwest’s people rallied to figure out how to perform the unprecedented
and seemingly impossible task. Today, their innovation is still paying dividends.

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Because of increased airport congestion and larger planes and cargo loads,
Southwest now takes about twenty-five minutes to turn their planes around.
However, if they were to try to keep the same schedule but add even five
minutes to the turnaround time, they would need an additional eighteen planes in
their fleet at a cost of nearly a billion dollars.
Southwest’s remarkable ability to solve problems, Apple’s remarkable knack
for innovation and the Wright brothers’ ability to develop a technology with the
team they had were all possible for the same reason: they believed they could
and they trusted their people to do it.

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