Set the tone
Entrepreneurial spirit is often hailed as the key to getting a small business off the ground when a man and an idea come together to provide something the world wants like a car or a computer. But you also need that spirit in established companies to help work through major changes.
“You have to give your people in key leadership positions enough leeway that they can go out and try some things that don’t take some kind of blessing from the top all the time,” Reeg says. “These are the big projects, the big investments that we’re going to make.”
Going into MasterCard’s data processing platform project, the prevailing thought was that the system, which makes sure transaction data gets to the right place, would be built on a client server architecture.
“As we went forward with this, one of the people raised the concern that we’re talking about a huge number-crunching application and wouldn’t we be better off doing that on a mainframe and treating the mainframe as just a huge client server to transition the data,” Reeg says. “That was obviously a huge change from the architecture plan. But in hindsight, it gave us a much more robust and cost-effective clearing system.”
You have to give your in-house entrepreneurs a chance to show you new ways of thinking about a problem, but you also have to be methodical in how you sort through them.
“Once you get things like this going, you do get a lot of ideas to throw on the wall to see what sticks,” Reeg says. “You have to have some kind of process in place that can help keep you focused so you’re not trying to do 5,000 things part way where you could be doing 50 things really well.”
But if you don’t first create a culture where ideas can be freely expressed, you won’t have those things to choose from.
“You give each of those proposals a chance to make their case,” Reeg says. “It really comes down to which of the efforts look to have the best short-term and long-term potential.”
One of the best ways to encourage creativity is often to get teams together with people who haven’t previously dealt with the topic at hand.
“When you put someone on a team that hasn’t been directly involved with a particular opportunity you’re looking at, it gives them an ability to put a different perspective on the table than if you’re continuing to use the same people that have been involved with it on a day-to-day basis,” Reeg says. “You want people involved in looking at opportunities who have a deep knowledge of the area impacted, but you don’t want to be so overly focused on that as the only solution that you lose sight of what someone from the outside can tell you. It’s a matter of making sure you have both sets of views on a team.”
The key to making it work effectively is to have a purpose that everyone understands and through which employees’ thoughts and ideas can be channeled. The purpose behind the MasterCard project was to “make every transaction more valuable.”
“What are they doing in their individual development plan that will make them more successful in making every transaction more valuable?” Reeg says. “It goes back to, in our case, trying to help everybody be rallied around that one objective and how does the work they do day-on-day support that.”