Harvard Business Publishing

My last post described some of the highlights of the little innovation class that Michael Dearing and I taught to a diverse group of 11 Stanford students, Management Science & Engineering 282, a joint Stanford Technology Ventures Program and Stanford d.school class. We decided to see how creative the students could get by subjecting them to an absurdly hard final exam (suggested by one of the students, Sam Goldman): We asked each one to make a short video that summarized what they learned in the class.

We were impressed by how well they all did; but the best one just stunned us: "Back to Orbit," which you can see as a YouTube video:

It was made by Gus Bitdinger, who wrote an original song that combined both the lessons we learned in the class with one of the books we read, Orbiting the Giant Hairball by the late Gordon MacKenzie. Hairball is my favorite book about the challenges of doing creative things in organizations, the mindsets and methods that kill creativity, and the ways to overcome them. And somehow – in this little song – Gus captures most of the main ideas in the book and weaves together with much of what happened in class. It reminded me a bit of first reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and then hearing Woody Guthrie’s classic "Tom Joad," which summarizes so much of that long book so well in a short song. And Gus can sing too!

I have not heard many good songs about corporate life. I should also warn you that there is a bit of censoring of some names, as we thought it best to protect the identity of some of our corporate guests, who were so forthcoming about the challenges of innovating in large companies. But this is the best song I’ve ever heard about innovation.

It is the kind of thing that encourages us as professors to give our students really hard and really weird assignments. In general, one of the main lessons we’ve all learned in STVP and the d.school is that great successes follow when we expect “too much” from our students. Yes, incredible failures happen too – but that is why Diego Rodriguez and I love to say “failure sucks, but instructs.” It is also why Jeff Pfeffer and I emphasize that one of the best diagnostic questions for assessing if an organization is innovative and skilled at turning knowledge into action is “what happens when people fail?” When it is safe to fail, it is also safe to do remarkable –and risky – things like writing and singing "Back to Orbit."

Thanks Gus. I also want to thank everyone else in the class. The nicest thing for me as a professor was that the other students were so proud of Gus, and indeed, I believe that –although it is his original work – the other 10 students in the class deserve much of the credit for creating a setting where Gus could do something so stunning (again, we loved many of the other projects too, and appreciated the less successful ones as well, but Gus’s was the best).