11. To Hire Consultants or Build Internally—That Is the Question

There are many talented product development firms throughout the world, but not all companies know how to integrate outside product development skills with in-house expertise. This chapter discusses how companies can leverage the skills of product developers, both as internal employees and as external consultants. What do they do, how can they do it for you, which firm do you hire, and how do you manage it?

Binghamton, NY. At the monthly meeting with top management, Paul Dinaro was chosen to head the new design initiative the company wanted to develop. The CEO called him in and told him personally, adding that it was possibly the most important thing he could do for the company. The first two things Paul asked himself was whether this was a promotion, and what it meant for his future career. Paul had been in advanced research with a promising career to become VP—if not at the current company, then certainly with a competitor. But his company did not have a history of making design a priority. He was given no instructions, and there were no guidebooks to go to for this one. What to do? Should he find an outside firm to work with? Should he propose a budget to hire a design staff, one focused on product rather than technology, internal to the company? Would he have to be the one to figure out where the budget would come from to pay for all this?

This would be either the most significant growth step in his career or the establishment of his career plateau, and there was nothing and no one he could turn to to figure out which one it was. He decided to give it three months, but he was also going to call his headhunter to put his name back on the active list. The problem is he knew that companies are not plugging management in and out like in the 1990s, so the opportunity for advancement by corporate hopping was no longer the sure way to go.

A big problem from Paul's viewpoint was his company's uncertain commitment to design. The current CEO liked design, but the CEO was relatively new to the company. He had vision, but his vision was not yet part of the company culture; it was still just a vision. He was simply not sure if the company's commitment to design was a long-term one or just in a trial period. The company designed products, sure, but its true technology was focus.

The Power of Design

Problems such as Paul's are pervasive in companies as they seek new paradigms of innovation. Right now, there is increasing interest in product development, and managers are faced with the challenge of changing their company from a project-based one to a product-based one. Businesses have long been familiar with the world of engineering, but business is still learning to understand other members of the product development team, such as the role of product development consultants and industrial designers.

As an example of the evolution of the interaction of business and industrial design, consider how Business Week's editorial page editor, Bruce Nussbaum, became interested in innovation. Nussbaum is a frequent flyer, and it was a particular flight that sparked his interest in better understanding innovation. Near him was a mother with a young child, the worst potential challenge to a quiet and uneventful flight. As he anticipated, the child started to cry, and his mother gave him a bottle to quiet him down. Usually, Nussbaum would have settled back in his seat to get back to reading, but he noticed something different. The child was holding the bottle in a unique way. The bottle was split in the middle and formed an integrated handle that the baby could more easily hold than the diameter of a conventional bottle shape. He wondered who was responsible for the innovative shape. The Evenflo bottle Nussbaum had observed led him to become an advocate for good design. As an editor for Business Week, he started to write articles about design for the magazine. This eventually led to Business Week's sponsorship, along with the Industrial Designer Society of America (IDSA), of the annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA).

Nussbaum's groundbreaking articles have been instrumental in expanding the understanding of the role designers play in new product development, and he has probably done more to introduce this type of innovation to the business community than any other contemporary writer. In the summer of 2004, Nussbaum wrote a Business Week cover story, “The Power of Design,” an article that has struck a major chord in the business world. Along with his role as editorial page editor, he has been the design editor for the past decade. Even though his articles have always helped connect design and business, this article somehow made a deeper penetration than the others. The timing of the article recognized the emerging theme of design and innovation as the new force in American business and major corporations throughout the world.

Using Product Development Consultants

This chapter is devoted to the struggle that companies face when deciding whether to hire external product development consultants, internal staff, or both. Because the best approach is “both,” the real issue is to understand what to expect from external consultants and internal employees. Although the internal-versus-external issues apply to consultants other than those who help with product development, the nature of our subject matter leads us to narrow our focus. Though product development requires integrated contribution from engineering, design, and marketing, at times in this discussion we focus even more narrowly to discuss industrial design in particular, because this component is still the least known to traditional business audiences in spite of increased interest in design.

Paul's dilemma, shared earlier in this chapter, is one that managers in many companies face. We have seen companies struggle with the decision of who to hire, how to hire, where to hire. One midsized company spent significant resources looking for a manager of interaction design, a new position because there was only one industrial designer on staff. This company was shifting its resources toward the direct consumer purchase market, and it realized it needed to be more customer-focused. Design was a competency the company had always purchased through consultancies rather than developed internally. This new hire would get the chance to build the in-house team and to work with external consulting groups. The management hired a senior designer who had experience in consumer electronics. But the company did not quite understand how to integrate the new design focus with its existing skills and capabilities; nor did the firm even know what inputs were needed for design or what outputs to expect from it. For instance, the design manager was well-paid, but the company did not make the financial commitment to hire needed support staff. Nor did the design manager know how to work in the existing company culture of engineering and marketing; he was accustomed to working with design peers. As the newly hired design manager began to instill change into the existing culture, the engineering group resented the new approach and environment. The design manager alienated the marketing group by usurping their previously held responsibility of hiring and working with design firms; he requested that all design services, internal and external, be coordinated by him. As a result of the internal conflict, he ended up leaving his position, putting the company in the position it was in just three months earlier.

Another example we have seen is a company that chose to work with a well-recognized design consulting firm on a major product redesign. For some reason, the product (not technology) that the consultants designed just did not work well. The core product was designed with an integrated add-on feature. Most of the consumers would purchase the product with the add-on, but the company also had to compete with a core stand-alone product for trade show comparisons. The consulting firm designed the add-on element but did not create a look that would have made the combined product as elegant as the base, the product itself. This was a classic case of something lost in translation. A thorough brand analysis conducted for the company was not given to the consulting firm, so the new product did not create continuity with the look and feel of an existing product. In addition, the interface, which is so critical to the product's use and acceptance, was also disconcerting in relation to the required performance of the device. Was it the fault of the consultancy or the company? It turned out to be the fault of both. The company did not properly articulate the product requirements. The marketing group that hired and directed the consultancy was hands-off from the technical and interaction requirements, and the engineering group didn't deliver the correct details to the consultants. The consultants took what was given to them with little question or further research of their own to understand the full context of the product's use. No department took responsibility for the whole project—only for “its” part.

These brief situations highlight some of the trade-offs of building in-house design groups and the proper use of external product consultants. Some companies have achieved this balance. Whirlpool creates in-house teams committed to becoming experts who can support the wide range of needs of a particular brand. At the same time, Whirlpool's VP of Global Brands, Chuck Jones, has success-fully partnered with the best design consultancies in the world. This allows him to complement the internal knowledge and understanding of other internal organic capabilities with the awareness and methods of the best outside talent. Jones realizes that complacency is the danger of relying solely on in-house groups and that lack of continuity with the company and market is the inherent challenge with consulting groups. If blended properly, the strength of both can keep a company in the best state of innovation.

Some companies exclusively hire external consulting groups to turn their technology into complete-product solutions. This is especially true of small companies that cannot afford the resources to hire an in-house staff. The first step in properly using consultants is to understand their capabilities and methods. To help with your understanding of product consultants, we describe what is arguably the most recognized product consultancy in the United States and possibly the world: IDEO.

Nussbaum's Business Week cover story article also focused on IDEO, because it is clearly one of the most exciting product design firms in the world today. In the broader eyes of business, IDEO's success has repositioned design consulting firms from being extraneous services companies to being core players in the innovation process. According to Nussbaum, IDEO and other similar consultancies combine a new approach to mining customer insights with a more effective integration of translating those insights into product criteria and product form. This process, if coordinated properly, strengthens a product's position in the marketplace, clarifies its brand identity, satisfies the end customer and other stakeholders, and generates greater profit. It is the process of innovation as used by Dee Kapur, Chuck Jones, and Edith Harmon from Chapter 1, “The New Breed of Innovator.” If companies such as New Balance, Whirlpool, and Ford are using the process of innovation and are seeking to grow organically, why do they also work with consultants?

Organic growth does not mean that every aspect of expansion needs to happen from within. It does mean that growth needs to be consistent throughout product lines and that new directions need to be understood, embraced, and championed from within. Organic growth is not about who performs the work; it is about whether the growth in the company is consistent with its identity and abilities. Sometimes new abilities need to be grafted on; the scenario at the beginning of this chapter illustrates the possible dilemmas when that happens.

IDEO: The Starbucks of Product Design

IDEO is now one of the biggest design consulting firms in the world, but it competes with companies such as Accenture and McKinsey in influence if not in economic scale. IDEO is a design firm for giants such as Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Eli Lilly, and Pepsi and little-known companies such as Zinio, ApproTEC, and Picaboo. An ABC Nightline show titled “The Deep Dive” exposed the company to the world at large, featuring IDEO's redesign of a shopping cart in one week's time. IDEO has also worked on sophisticated medical equipment, designed special effects for movies, and developed toys for children at all cognitive levels and types of activity.

IDEO, now an international consulting company with offices in Munich and London, has its world headquarters in Palo Alto, a city a short distance from San Francisco, where many design consulting firms started in the 1970s and 1980s to support the rapidly exploding digital age in Silicon Valley. IDEO was founded by David Kelley in 1978 with an engineering focus. The company soon found itself in the middle of three-way product trade-off negotiations between itself, its clients, and the industrial design firms that were also hired for projects. The focus of many of these battles was the tradeoff between aesthetics and technology. The clients finally turned to Kelley to ask him to just deal with the whole issue. At the time, he was good friends with Bill Moggridge, head of ID Two, an industrial design consulting firm. Moggridge was a pioneer in the new field of design for digital products. He coined the term interaction design, which has since evolved into one of the biggest new areas of design, involving the fields of computer science, human-computer interaction (HCI), and communication design. Kelley and Moggridge were also friends with Mike Nuttall, another industrial designer who had spun off his own firm from ID Two. Kelley's view, and the one he used when first starting his business, was that if he were going to expand his capabilities, he would work with friends and enjoy the process. In 1991, he approached Moggridge and Nuttall with his idea, and together they formed a left brain/right brain combination that would lead to the biggest design consulting firm in North America. The combined effect was far greater than the sum of the parts. This was one of the early examples of merging engineering and industrial design into a comprehensive product development consulting firm. Over the past several years, IDEO has evolved beyond product design into a consultancy that designs services, environments, and digital interactions. IDEO provides qualitative market research, helps companies talk with their users, and teaches companies how to be more innovative. One of its biggest clients is P&G. Not surprisingly, P&G's CEO A. G. Laffley is one of IDEO's biggest fans.

Raised in a blue-collar town in Ohio, David Kelley studied electrical engineering in college. Like Kapur, Jones, and Harmon from Chapter 1, Kelley has a balanced comfort between art and science. He chose to study at Carnegie Mellon because the school had a top engineering program and a top art program. He was a generalist who never wanted to dig narrowly deep into a field of engineering. Instead, he took many art classes and was exposed to the multidisciplinary atmosphere that has been the hallmark of the university (again, the theme of innovators having that balanced left and right brain). After finishing school, he worked at Boeing and then National Cash Register and then went to Stanford for a unique (at the time) master's degree program that combined engineering with an industrial design-balanced creative approach. The program stressed creative qualitative problem solving and gave Kelley an entirely new dimension to add to his engineering education to date. He then became a doctoral student during the Silicon Valley boom. He found himself consulting with all the high-tech companies and soon decided that product development practice was more his calling than an engineering Ph.D., so he formed IDEO.

Soon after forming his new company, Kelley and his team designed the first mouse for Apple. The core technology had been invented at SRI (Stanford Research Institute), but it was too unwieldy to use, too expensive, and too prone to failure to be sold in high quantities. Kelley's group focused on interaction of use and production and developed a mouse that could be cost-effectively manufactured with subtle ergonomic features, such as covering the ball in rubber. No one had ever held an interface to a computer in their hands before, so it was a new world. Today, IDEO has more than 400 employees and has designed thousands of products.

There are many reasons for IDEO's success. Kelley says that real innovation comes from understanding humans and their needs as individuals and groups. IDEO's approach is to understand how people interact with the world around them and to balance that with technology and business points of view. IDEO hires a wide mix of people with a variety of backgrounds. Social scientists, for example, are key to understanding real users and real needs. At IDEO, the culture of innovation is above all else.

To enable that culture, IDEO hands over responsibility to the work teams. IDEO is divided into small groups, each of which is responsible for its own profit and loss, which directly affects bonuses. In IDEO's view, the more decisions that teams can make themselves, the better. People need to control their own decision space and understand those parts that they cannot control. If a boss dictates the rules, the team cannot understand them or be part of them, preventing buy-in to the philosophy of the rules. When IDEO is called in to a client organization to audit its innovation capabilities, hierarchical structures are often the main deterrent. As Kelley says, “Creative people don't like the boss' boss' boss affecting their lives.” Rules lead to less creative cultures. Put differently, giving teams responsibility sets up the proper incentives for them to perform. In IDEO, for example, a team is responsible for its own rules on coffee clubs. If coffee is free, the team's profits are down, but free coffee is a benefit that encourages interaction. On the other hand, if the team charges for coffee, that money can be used to buy equipment, improve the office environment, or be donated to charity. Although this example is seemingly trivial, this and other more far-reaching decisions are made by each group, empowering the team members to create the environment in which they want to work.

IDEO also believes in an innovation process that provides a framework for design without precisely dictating each step. The team does need to work through specific steps to accomplish the process goals laid out. But each step cannot be so precisely specified that there is no, or even little, room for exploration and change. The process IDEO uses must be as dynamic and innovative as the results. This does fly in the face of most companies, which look for and try to lock onto one process that must replicated. IDEO even finds itself adapting the best practices from its client companies and others to improve its own innovation process.

Finally, Kelley says that the biggest deterrent from innovation is fear. If everyone is afraid of being fired, of having your boss or even colleagues chastise you for mistakes, you move to survival mode with layers of protection. When you are in survival mode, where you don't want to make mistakes, you are no longer innovative, because innovation requires risk.

The Consultant Menu

IDEO for product design is like Starbucks for coffee. Other great product development firms exist and can be hired. Many predate IDEO. But IDEO has created a brand and quality level that is recognized throughout the world. It offers a premium product at a premium price. It keeps innovating, offering new skills and services for its clients. Pittsburgh, home to two of the authors, has several Starbucks coffeehouses. But there are also a suite of other excellent choices, local brands that have followed Starbucks' lead but created their own personality and product offerings. Many services of these coffeehouses are good, just as good as Starbucks (if, at times, not better), or offer an interesting variation. But none of them offers the range of goods or consistency in experience that one finds in Starbucks throughout the world. Many of them are less expensive than Starbucks.

The same is true for product design firms. IDEO is the spearhead of a movement that is sweeping the best companies and product consulting and strategy branding companies. Many talented product development firms throughout the world and in every local community offer creative and complete services, even if they don't have the visibility of IDEO. For many companies, local product development firms can provide services that otherwise are not afforded through in-house support. Many of the larger firms can provide insights and results that establish a strong brand presence in any market.

Not all companies can afford to hire IDEO, but all companies can afford many local specialty firms that can similarly provide high-quality services that meet the needs of a growing organization. What is important is to recognize that, whether grown in-house or purchased externally through consultants, these capabilities are critical to the success of innovation-driven companies. Recall the problem that the company discussed earlier in this chapter had with its lack of communication with its consultants. Whether innovation is sought in-house or externally, a company must understand the tools of innovation to succeed.

So, what are some of the various product-related consultants? What can they do for your firm? An ad agency controls all channels of communication, including print, Web, and television. It also coordinates communication design services. You might want to hire a brand development company that specializes in branding. It focuses on a company's identity and branding message and overlaps with advertising companies on the services they provide. Branding firms focus more on identity, whereas advertising firms focus on the distribution of your message. There are product development firms that vary from turnkey consultants who can do every phase for you, such as IDEO and Product Insight (discussed next), to specialists who are engineering-focused or industrial design-focused. These services vary significantly. Engineering firms tend to be highly specialized by area, such as heat transfer or structures, diagnostics, and manufacturing. Industrial design firms vary by type of product and scope of service. Some industrial design consulting firms specialize in medical products, and others in toys, and some other firms focus on consumer products, computers, and digital equipment. Still other firms just specialize in point-of-purchase or even trade show booth design. The trend for most consulting firms is to try to offer a greater range of design services. Many industrial design and engineering groups are merging and offer full product development services. The biggest product development firms also provide research, packaging, and point-of-purchase design. Many other firms offer communication and graphic design services. These companies can design logos and identities, but at a different scale and cost than branding companies. Some firms just specialize in Web design.

Product Insight: Customer Research and Design

An important element that should underpin any of the tasks mentioned in the previous paragraph is customer/user research. Some hired consultants expect that the firm will provide the research, whereas other consultants conduct the research themselves. The research itself can even be outsourced; there are firms that specialize in the type of research that is critical for product insights, like ethnographic tools developed by anthropologists. Ethnographic methods include observation, in-depth interviews, and other methods of qualitative user research. These techniques are complementary to marketing tools and are especially effective in the early stages of product development and for maintaining a healthy dialogue with customers. Companies vary significantly on how well they integrate these consumer research techniques with the standard quantitative large sample techniques traditionally used by marketing.

Consider Product Insight in Boston. At Insight, Elizabeth Lewis heads one of the largest customer/user/people-centered research groups in the United States. Most projects at Insight start with Lewis and one of her teams. Lewis is an ethnographic researcher. She has her degree in anthropology and started her career under the direction of Liz Sanders, one the pioneers in the field of product ethnography, while working at Fitch in Columbus, Ohio. Fitch did some landmark work with companies such as Xerox and Texas Instruments. Both Lewis and Sanders left Fitch, Sanders starting her own firm, Sonic Rim, and Lewis moving to Boston to work at Product Insight.

Product Insight is one of the few companies that can routinely sell its product research as a core competency. Although Insight is a complete product development firm, companies often just hire it to conduct research to find emerging opportunities. Lewis learned to apply her anthropology education to design better products and services. She went from studying subcultures in a nonapplied context to using her education to determine how to design better products and services. She also learned how to effectively hand off research insights to a product development team. One difficulty many firms have is making that conversion, understanding how to convert the product research findings into features and form. Their process is similar to IDEO, and Insight realized that the research teams should have industrial designers and engineers as well as psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. Many industrial designers can conduct product research because they have backgrounds in human factors. But they also have excellent observation skills. Social scientists are trained to observe human nature and infrastructure and convert those findings into observed patterns and tendencies of behavior and preferences. Engineers bring an additional perspective to the research through task analysis, functional reasoning, and statistical analysis. Together, the group understands what the product development team needs to turn this research into product or service features and form. No one ever asks Lewis to look for cheap insights to lower the cost of their products. Instead, the group is always looking for observations that will lead to innovative shifts in the way products function or look in a marketplace.

Lewis and her team at Product Insight were approached by the Aearo Company to look for new insights into how people wear respirator masks. The company was looking for a way to use innovation rather than cost cutting to compete with its main rival, 3M. It seems that 3M not only owns the tape and Post-it markets, it also owns, the low-cost end of the respirator mask business. 3M's ability to control the price of material cost allows it to drive the cost so low that competitors cannot compete at a profit. Aearo was wondering how to stay afloat. It did not just hire Insight to design a new mask; Aearo hired Insight because it also has the talented user research group so important for this task.

Lewis and her team observed mask users and had several insights. They studied people who wear their masks extensively throughout the day. It was not a big deal to find out that people hate to put their masks on in the morning and take them off at night. Most masks have thin headbands that tangle hair and put annoying pressure on the wearer's scalp. The surprise came from watching these workers on breaks. Because of the awkwardness, no one wanted to take the mask off during every break. Instead, they slid the mask down onto their neck, moving the tension onto their throat. People can take 5 to 10 breaks a day. Most breaks are for smoking cigarettes, an irony not missed by the team at Insight. The opportunity was to make the mask easier to deal with on breaks, as well as to put on and take off. The solution was an award-winning mask with an ergonomic insight that allowed Aearo to charge more for its masks and get the sales. Product Insight developed an innovative release latch that allows the wearer to release the front of the mask, thereby relieving the tension. Because the wearer lifts the mask back onto the face by closing the latch, the attachment around the head does not have to be made of thin elastic material that pulls over the hair. A cup at the back of the head keeps the mask in the right orientation for closure and helps maintain a more comfortable position while worn. The mask costs more to make, but the profit margin for Aearo is far greater than anything it could have made while trying to compete with 3M by cost.

In the case of Aearo, Product Insight helped save a company and made the respirator mask industry more competitive by driving up the value of innovation. The most important outcome of this design project for the worker is that more people will wear their masks. Compliance with wearing masks was previously found to be a big problem. If a mask design is better and more comfortable, the compliance of employees, and the possible reduction in insurance rates, will more than pay for the higher cost of the mask. The employees' improved working experience may also mean fewer sick days and reduced turnover, both major problems for industries that require respirator masks. The cost implications of these problems have far greater impact on the bottom line than a slight price increase per mask.

Hiring to Balance Soft and Hard Quality

The type of design developed at Product Insight, IDEO, and other top-notch consulting firms is a new level of practice, a meta level above the subfields of design engineering, industrial and communication design, marketing, and computer science. On the one side, there is product design, communication design, interface design, interior design, and architecture; on the other side are computer science and HCI, systems engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, materials engineering, and civil engineering. These two categories have long been viewed as polar opposites, with marketing, sales, finance, and strategy somehow living in the corporate space in between. The companies that are making a difference today are taking the structure of the modern corporation and developing a new model, a model in which these disciplines work together in cohesive, semiautonomous teams. It is a model in which people are central, where project teams practically become entrepreneurial start-ups, a veritable set of small companies within the larger company. This approach allows the product teams to get close to the customer. This must all be coordinated in a way that allows the larger corporation to manage the corporate identity and connect in more significant ways to society at large.

We consider two dimensions, or qualities, of innovation—the hard and the soft. Hard qualities are the more traditional engineering qualities, such as manufacturing, technology, environmental, and ergonomic specifications. Soft qualities are the emotion, aesthetic, brand identity, social, and interaction aspects of a product or service—those that integrate into and define lifestyle.

Companies that integrate both dimensions of innovation have a significant competitive advantage. The challenge is to make room for the company's soft-quality aspects—those that create the look, feel, and emotion of products and services. There are several dimensions of soft-quality management to consider. The first is economic. Soft quality is not a cost; it is its own profit center. This psychological and philosophical shift is important. Whirlpool, Nike, Apple, VW, and BMW understand this, and so does P&G. Starbucks started that way. The automotive industry has been working to balance soft and hard quality ever since Harley Earl's new designs for GM in the late 1920s forced Ford to close down to respond to the infusion of design and market segmentation. Other companies tend to go back and forth at the whim of the current CEO, with design growing and shrinking every few years. HP bought Compaq because it could not grow consumer innovation internally. The main thing is that budgets and companies need to be realigned to understand the investment (not cost) of doing business in an emotionally driven world.

Whether developed internally or hired externally or both, soft quality is not seen as integral to corporate strategic planning, nor is it viewed as an essential component of an entrepreneurial start-up proposal for venture capital. Companies are not measured by the ability to be innovative as a subset of economic success. There is a need to develop new types of measures to effectively determine success of innovation and its direct impact on the bottom line. These measures need to be core to the planning of any company, regardless of scale. Investing in innovation will yield return. It is essential to sustained growth and brand continuity. This is not a cost that companies can debate whether to include, but a new line item that must be allocated to support growth. When computers became a standard in business operations, companies invested inordinate amounts of human and technical resources to improve efficiency. During quality initiatives such as Six Sigma, companies also invested heavily in consulting and the development of internal quality policy procedures and human resources to improve manufacture. The need for these initiatives was clear and the principles fairly easy for executives in companies to learn and adopt. Today, companies must invest in soft-quality initiatives to excite customers and integrate into their lives.

Managing Design

The next issue is who leads soft quality in the company. Companies vary on how they manage soft quality. It may be centralized or decentralized. Companies can have one VP in charge or allow division managers to hire and coordinate design and branding as independent agents. A vice president or director from marketing may be asked to take on the design and branding assignment, or a new person from design, branding, or advertising may be brought in. Design and branding may be split with the former under the auspices of engineering and the latter marketing. Most of the senior management in companies today have been taught and worked under hard-quality (manufacturing-based) and cost philosophies. A major problem facing companies today is that few engineers, particularly senior engineers, and few in marketing and sales have the skills to manage the range of product design services, in the broadest sense, that are needed to develop a comprehensive approach to innovative organic product and service development. Yet industrial designers have not been taught how to effectively navigate or manage within the business context. As well, when industrial design managers are hired, they often seem like an immigrant landing in a foreign country. They speak a different language and find a culture that works based on completely different assumptions.

Looking at the military for an analogy, we know that the best strategy of defense is a combination of land, sea, and air (and cyberspace as well). One of the biggest problems in World War II was getting the different branches of the U.S. armed services to work together, never mind to coordinate with the Allies. You would never take a general and make him an admiral. In sports, how many NFL football coaches could manage basketball in the NBA? Many companies think they can do this without hesitation. The ability to grow managers for the new innovation culture is a tremendous challenge facing companies. It is not just adding services, but managing the existing hard-quality divisions with an understanding of the new soft-quality playing field. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have to be intermilitary in their approach to battle to be effective. In World War II, D Day was the biggest logistics event in history, led by Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of the most enlightened military leaders and arguably the definitive new military leader for the modern era. Every company today faces the same logistical and political challenges facing the military. The ability to combine logistics, politics and, from a global sense, cultural awareness into a coordinated strategy is the key to success in global markets.

Some companies have turned to the use of innovation festivals and mini-conferences. Experts are invited to come in and throw buckets of innovation water at thirsty but overworked employees who are forced to add this new demand to an already overburdened schedule. At the least, it means reeducating a significant number of employees and hiring new types of workers. It is not surprising that directors of product programs often find it easier to put their trust in a creative turnkey consultant group. Even with that alternative, the need to manage and direct external innovation teams and connect them with internal brand issues is another type of challenge. The basic question is how many executives are willing to relearn how to manage in an era driven by innovation?

The world of sports offers insights that are an appropriate reference for integrated management. One reminder is the importance of the team, and the other is the role of the coach. Consider the Chicago Bulls of the 1990s. The Chicago Bulls won championships because Michael Jordan was a team player who excelled as an individual for the betterment of his team. When the Bulls won their first championship, it was because Jordan made the perfect bounce pass, not because he made the winning basket. The pass was made in a split second with just the right touch of reverse spin so that John Paxson got the ball at the perfect height and speed to follow through just the way he liked it. The team's precise execution produced the desired outcome. Jordan's success reached its greatest fulfillment when he realized that no matter how good he was, he could not win a championship without helping to make everyone around him the best they could be. As the result of personal commitment and team integration, Jordan not only led the Bulls to six championships, he also became an international symbol of excellence.

Yet it was not Jordan's talent alone that helped the Bulls succeed. For behind the individual players was coach Phil Jackson, who turned a group of talented, egocentric individuals into a high-performing team. Jackson taught Jordan to partner with Paxson, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman (the “bad boy” of the NBA at the time), among others. Then, Jackson won three more championships with the LA Lakers and the talented egos of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal.

The challenge for managing innovation teams is not finding the talented individual Jordans (although they are always welcome), but integrating the existing talent into a high-performing team; that is the management style of the new breed of innovator. Each individual must be recognized for his or her strengths, and each individual must respect the strength of the others. Forget the Donald Trump factor of who is fired and who fits the mold, and get with the Phil Jackson factor: Figure out how to make the most of the talent you have, and produce something extraordinary!