Brilliant Noise

Diversity breeds creativity--ecosystems are richest where habitats and species overlap. With more connections and diversity comes more creativity: diverse communities are more interesting, more provocative, and more stimulating.

In 2005, Google set a formula for distributing its engineering efforts: 70-20-10. Seventy percent of Google’s resources are devoted to improving search and advertising, Google’s primary source of revenue and profits. Twenty percent is allotted as free time for people to pursue projects of their own choosing. And ten percent is invested in scaling up the most promising ideas that emerge from the 20% time, the wild cards that could develop into whole new lines of business.

Jack Welch, GE: “Size either liberates or paralyzes. We tried every day to remember that the benefit of size was that it allowed us to take more swings.”

Eric Schmidt, Google: “Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time and effort than anyone else in the world.”

Jeff Bezos, Amazon: “You need to set up and organize so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible.”

The more things you try, the better your chances of discovering something valuable.

For emergent strategy to be successful, there must be enough autonomy, freedom, and slack in the system for people and resources to connect in a peer-to-peer way, like they do in Silicon Valle

Employees at Mailchimp, an email marketing company with about 100 employees, decide on new features and services in a similar way. If someone has an idea, they attempt to recruit another person to help them work on a prototype or to help convince others. At Mailchimp, people get excited by good ideas, and they are trusted, so they have the autonomy to follow their instincts. To be recruited, a person must consider it more interesting or useful than the things they are already working on. Like the ants, recruitment turns to escalating commitment over time as more people are recruited to the project. When enough people are recruited, a team is formed and commits to seeing the project through to completion. In this way, ideas compete for resources and the best ideas end up bearing fruit.