High team performance is often described in terms of harmony — everyone pulling together. But in the workplace, this kind of harmony isn’t always healthy, and can be a sign of deeper problems. On innovation teams, high performance is defined not by harmony, but by its opposite: conflict; more specifically, high-performance in creative teams is defined by positive, healthy conflict.

By understanding how to foster and derive value from positive conflict, team leaders and members can create the foundation needed to solve hard problems, define their values, and create a sense of collective identity.

a true story of positive conflict, delayed

“We can’t let this fly. We…

When I ask what innovation is, I often hear the term “invention.” Sometimes I hear “design.” Almost never do I hear “execution.” And yet, without execution there is no product, no service, no impact. Overvaluing invention and undervaluing execution leads to poor resource allocation and underperformance in most innovation-focused organizations.

innovation is not driven by invention

The primacy of invention to successful innovation is a myth, as I’ve explored elsewhere in my writing. That is not because invention is unimportant — it is a critical step. But actual invention precedes high-impact innovation by years or decades, if not centuries. Rarely are the inventor and the successful…

Almost a decade ago, a mentor at Apple drew this chart on a whiteboard: A time axis at the bottom, and two crossing curves. The blue exponentially decaying curve is the influence of decisions in product development. The green exponentially rising curve is the cost of the project, and also the proportional cost of any intervention or fix.

It’s so simple, right? Things start out cheap, then quickly get more expensive. You have maximum ability to affect the outcome at the beginning, which declines quickly as you make decisions and close down optionality.

Trying to fix a product two days…

When doing innovation, don’t stack moonshots. It’s hard enough to get a single-stage rocket off the ground.

Time and again, I’ve worked with brilliant people who have lots of great, innovative ideas. Great ideas that are synergistic, that could work beautifully together. And they want to stack them all in one project, like the stages of a rocket. This is bad.

Like when the pioneers of Google Glass weren’t content to create a radical new consumer electronics product category and reinvent human-machine interaction in the mobile space. They also wanted to reinvent manufacturing and product retail at the same time…

introduction

So, I’m here to talk about money. Specifically, I’m here to tell you about a new kind of money, a locally issued UBI currency I call the LUD, and the ways in which this new kind of money could make for a stronger, better, more humane economy. Along the way, I’ll also talk about universal basic income and some ideas from modern monetary theory, but this is not the best place to learn about those concepts — see the references section at the end to learn more.

By the end of this article, I hope to convince you that while…

I was there, in the building, when the modern machine learning revolution got started at Google in 2011; It was called Project Brain, and it started at Google [X]. I’d like to tell you that I immediately knew that it would change everything, but that took several months. …

This essay is part of the “Managing Innovation” essay series that starts with “Innovation isn’t what you think it is.”

For years, my Alphabet business card said “Director of Rapid Evaluation and Mad Science.” With my name on over 70 issued US patents and titles like Engineering Director and CTO under my belt, you might expect that I would center my “bubbling test tube and sparking Jacob’s ladder” inventive contributions to the innovation process. I don’t. In fact, I credit my skills as a designer — communications design, product design, solutions design — as among my greatest strengths as an…

This essay is part of the “Managing Innovation” essay series that starts with “Innovation isn’t what you think it is.” A previous version of this essay was published with the title “The Seven Perils of Innovation.”

introduction

I’m no stranger to success and failure. I’ve turned a crazy idea and a scrappy team into billions of dollars in enterprise value at Google [X]. As a startup CEO I had to look my friends in the eye as I laid them off because I couldn’t close the financing. I’ve had titles that include CEO, CTO, and Engineering Director. I know what its…