Drive innovation
Lunenfeld put out a challenge to his people: Form cross-functional groups of five and create a mobile-based idea to help people connect better with each other or with brands. But it wasn’t simply said in a meeting and forgotten. The winning team won $50,000 to split.
“A lot of companies like Google, they have their 20 percent rule — 20 percent of your time should be working on something that’s outside the company that’s one of your passions or interests,” he says. “Other companies have similar types of ways. For us, this was a way to get collaboration and really just show everyone that every individual person has the power to come up with something, be an entrepreneur, create it, and the company really wants to back it.”
Driving innovation in your company is the first key to nurturing change.
While money may be tight, he says that this is one area that you can’t afford to skimp in.
“If you’re not dedicated to putting resources there, whether it’s people, money or investment dollars, you’re not going to achieve it,” Lunenfeld says. “It’s not just going to happen, no matter how hard you try, because everyone’s going to be focused on the business at hand, which is what we tend to do. We focus on what’s in front of us, especially in times of crisis and in times of economic downturn. … It’s just like working any other relationship or anything else in your life. If you’re not dedicating time to do so, it’s not going to just happen naturally.”
Beyond having competitions, Lunenfeld has also found a daily way to drive innovation by having his employees embrace Sunao, a Japanese word meaning “the untrapped mind.”
“[It’s] more of a philosophy of not being afraid to adopt an idea that might fundamentally change the way you do something today,” Lunenfeld says. “It’s about not being locked in to either a product or service or just a way that you get things done and trying to encourage that culture of change.”
Sunao is not just a mindset but also the name of a group within the company that he created and charged with looking for trends and new ways of doing things. The group is also charged with looking at emerging technology and toying around with new products to find ideas. You may think it’s wasteful to dedicate people to solely looking for new ideas as opposed to doing the work already at hand.
“If it’s not your primary job to do something, you usually do that last, and that usually means, when push comes to shove, it falls off your plate,” he says.
When you create something like this, you also have to set expectations.
“From a business aspect, it’s a leap of faith, and you have to be very clear when you’re doing a group or starting something like that,” he says. “There are deliverables you expect, and those deliverables may not always be billable ones.”
For example, at Moxie, the group is expected to put out a monthly trend-spotting newsletter and quarterly reports. While the group has a lot of freedom, having expectations has yielded results, which has allowed the group to grow from just one person to more than 20.
“It’s things that you want that group or whoever’s leading that to have very solid deliverables,” he says. “Even though it’s more of a conceptual position, deliverables are real and their measurements are real. That actually does turn into profitable, billable project services that pay off, and the group will begin to fund itself.”
