Feature: Chip Heath
Chip Heath is a Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a NYT bestselling author – along with his brother, Dan – of three best selling books:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/chip-heath
Elizabeth’s Live Interview with Chip Heath
A. What suggestions would you offer to an intrapreneur – within a large established organization – who is trying to pitch an innovative new product idea to risk-averse higher ups?
The best advice we have from Made to Stick is that you have to talk in very concrete ways about the person who is using the product and what the product is going to do. There is a story in the book about Melissa Studzinski, a 28 year old who has been newly hired as a brand manager at General Mills. She is pitching a large team on the idea that they should dramatically simplify their Hamburger Helper product lines. That is a big change for the organization. In her pitch, Studzinski has a concrete picture of the Mum who is going shopping for her kids and is lost in the grocery aisle, trying to find her kids’ favorites among more than 30 possible Hamburger Helper flavours.
Unless you can picture an idea in your mind very clearly, it feels risky. But as soon as you can picture it in your mind – the customer and the product suggestion – it feels more understandable and certain. That is the single best piece of pitching advice and so many people don’t do it.
B. Given what you describe in Switch, how would you suggest that intrapreneurs with little organizational power go about encouraging innovative change within their organizations?
I think one piece of advice is the idea of free spaces in the Rally the Herd chapter of Switch. If the majority of people are going in the wrong direction, you have to create a space where a group of people can conceive of doing things differently. Insulate them from the social conformity of the majority.
In Germany – in the unionization movement – it was the beer hall taverns that provided the people the free space to talk. In the Civil Rights Movement, it was the Baptist churches. In organizations, you can call it a skunkworks or innovation team. You need to get the people together who can think of a different way than the prevailing movement.
C. Why do so many people in power positions seem to their employees to be resistant to change?
Frankly, I suspect that in many of those cases it is the employees who are making the mistake. The mistake is that when you are excited about an idea, you tend to have a confirmation bias about that idea, so you can think of all kinds of reasons why your idea is going to be great.
A manager is in charge of taking a broader view of the organization and integrating the different viewpoints of a broader swath of the organization. Things that look good from a narrow perspective are going to look less good – by regression of the mean – when you consider a broader swath of the organization.
So, part of the trick for the intrapreneur is to be able to make the case from the manager’s perspective and from the organization’s perspective. If you can do that, then chances are you have a good idea.
D. Creative people – entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs – are often brimming with ideas. How might the WRAP process from Decisive help them to choose a focus for their business?
I think the part of WRAP that helps most is the stepping back and gaining some distance. There are lots of things that seem good at the moment, but when you step back and think: ‘is this worthwhile?’ you get a different view of the situation.
So, we might have a great research conversation and it’s fun to talk about and one of the things that I’ve been telling my graduate students is that “this is a really fun conversation. However, in my experience, studies take around 4 years to actually get to the point of a journal.” That is sobering for people.
Entrepreneurs are like this. If you do a 10/10/10 analysis: how will we feel about this 10 minutes from now, 10 months and 10 years? Or maybe it’s 3 minutes, 3 months, 3 years. And that 3/3/3/ frame may provide a lot of clarity. Is this worth doing if it takes 3 years to make inroads?
Pitching
The major mistake I see in pitches is that entrepreneurs want to talk about a broad field that they are going to claim and they end up being so abstract that they end up losing their listeners. Don’t pitch a revolutionary technology for tracking objects in your workplace. Pitch a system for never losing mail between the mailroom and your office door.
The WRAP Process
http://heathbrothers.com/ot/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The_WRAP_Process_one_pager.pdf