Innovations Being Held Back
It's a bit of a truism that senior executives like bold innovations and audacious goals. Whether or not they secretly envy Steve Jobs' "make a little dent in the universe" philosophy, the reality is that boldly and audaciously innovative executives garner plaudits from investors, business press, customers, and more.
In a recent Leadership IQ study on goal-setting, nearly two-thirds of executives said that they pursue goals that others describe as audacious. That's probably not surprising, but what might be unexpected is that only 33% of managers pursue audacious goals. And that's less than the 37% of frontline employees who go after big audacious goals.
Middle managers appear to be trapped in, well, the middle. Caught between fears of getting punished for making a mistake and their executives' desires for bold thinking, stuck between exerting operational control and empowering employees, many managers understandably opt for caution and the status quo. In far too many organizations, there's more punishment for bad decisions than there are rewards for great decisions. Add in humanity's natural bias toward loss aversion, and it's no wonder that a fair number of potentially brilliant innovations die on middle managers' desks. To be clear, this isn't an attack on middle managers' personal character; rather, this is a symptom of a systemic problem.
A change that can potentially alleviate this problem comes from Dr. Randy Schekman, a Nobel Prize winner and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at UC Berkeley. Dr. Schekman is no stranger to bold innovations; his prize-winning work revealed how our cells regulate the transport and secretion of proteins (shedding light on the chemistry of life). While his personal research was incredibly bold and groundbreaking (see this Forbes article for more), he also honed a management approach relevant to companies that need their managers to foster more innovation.
For as long as any of us have been alive, prestige in academic publishing has been dominated by a few journals, notably Nature, Cell and Science. As Dr. Schekman notes, "These luxury journals are supposed to be the epitome of quality, publishing only the best research. Because funding and appointment panels often use the place of publication as a proxy for quality of science, appearing in these titles often leads to grants and professorships. But the big journals' reputations are only partly warranted. While they publish many outstanding papers, they do not publish only outstanding papers. Neither are they the only publishers of outstanding research."
So in a very bold move, Dr. Schekman became the first editor of a new open-access journal called eLife, funded by the Wellcome Trust, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society. As he shared with me in a recent conversation, "Our goal was to wrest control of the scientific literature from the commercial concerns and the professional editors who dictate what gets published."
While the very notion of an open-access journal competing with Nature, Cell and Science was bold enough, Dr. Schekman took things a step further. In a commercial journal like Nature, the editor's name does not appear on the article. If the selected paper is terrible and gets retracted, nobody knows which editor to hold accountable. And if the selected paper is brilliant, no particular editor gets credit for having the foresight to select this particular research.
As Dr. Schekman explained to me, "In journals that are run by scientific societies, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), every paper has a byline of the editor who handled the paper. That byline essentially tells the reader, 'here's an expert in the field who has affirmed that this work passes muster by the standards of the journal.' That's how it works at eLife and PNAS, but it's not the case at Nature, for example. There, the professional editor who handles the paper is known to the author but is held anonymous to the larger community."
Dr. Schekman's innovative approach at eLife adds much-needed accountability, but it also provides an incentive for editors to select, and stand by, great work. "Why aren't the professional editors at these commercial high-profile journals like Cell allowed to have their name there?" asks Dr. Schekman. "I think it's about control. I don't think they want the editors to get credit. If I were one of those editors, I would want to be recognized for the choices that I've made about which papers get published."
Think about Dr. Schekman's insight in the context of middle managers in a corporation. If middle managers were receiving credit not just for hitting their budgets but also for selecting bold innovations, would your company see more innovation? Of course. Innovators are far more likely to be recognized for their big ideas than are the managers who selected those ideas. Yet, if a company doesn't have smart, bold and active idea selectors—managers willing to push for big innovations because they're also getting credit for choosing and supporting those ideas—there will be dozens or hundreds of brilliant ideas that never see the light of day.
When eLife started, Dr. Schekman was able to assemble a stellar group of people to serve on the editorial board. His star power didn't hurt the recruiting efforts, but an equally powerful draw was the chance to have an outsize and fully-recognized impact.
