Kip does a great job summarizing what I’ve come to believe is an inescapable problem in our industry (particularly for those on the client/services side): how do you maintain a creative and innovative environment, and attract people for whom that is a draw, when it becomes increasingly more difficult to offer the opportunity to flex one’s creative muscles outside of the realm of client work.
Puff pieces about Google and their renowned “20 percent time” only add to the frustration people feel when their companies don’t offer that kind of flexibility. I think Kip is particularly deft at pointing out that a) Google’s position in the market is so unique that few can realistically try and draw a comparison and b) have they really, beyond Search, shown that this “culture of innovation” has led to any other market leading applications?
Might it be a case that, like the New York Yankees, through good decisions and good timing, they’ve gotten to a point of such financial disparity that they can take chances on products without worrying too much about the return on investment (or the research and development time it took to get them built)?
I guess that would be the equivalent of the Yankees throwing $80 million dollars at Carl Pavano and getting about 20 games out of him. A decision like that would cripple the Kansas City Royals for a decade, but the Yankees can essentially brush it off and pretend it never happened, just like Google Bookmarks.
There’s probably not an agency or tech-UX company that hasn’t talked several times about adopting Google’s 80/20 rule. In the search for ways to become innovative, this is the one technique everyone seems to know and understand, at least at some level.
But, it seems like most attempts to pursue this idea suffer an early death in the face of billable reality: we need our agency folks to be billable, or we have too much work to do to hit our next set of goals. As a result, the implementation gets watered down (do what you want, but make it billable to the client), shrunk (90/10, 95/5, monthly brainstorm), or transformed into good old-fashioned pluckiness (after you work 50 hours, you can spend 10 more hours in the office on whatever you want). The simple fact is, devoting 20% of your workforce’s time is very hard to do unless you’re fabulously profitable, are tasked as an innovation engine (in which case the ratio would be reversed), or have incredibly patient money.
Read the whole piece here: kip/bot/blog » Can Mere Mortals Really Learn Anything from Google right now?
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