Where to Put Down Roots

Quoting from Kevin Ashton :

Getzels-Jackson effect : organizations don't like creative people. (Tell me about it :)

Decision makers and authority figures in business, science and government all say they value creation. But, when tested, they do not value creators. Why? Because people who are more creative also tend to be more playful, unconventional and unpredictable. And all of this makes them harder to control. No matter how much we say we value creation, deep down, most of us value control more. And so we fear change and value familiarity. Rejecting is a reflex.

Definitely explains Moses Rubinson and DK.

Another nugget :

Kelly Johnson and Robert Galambos are examples of what mgmt scholars Larry Downs and Paul Nunes call "truth tellers". TTs are genuinely passionate about solving big problems. They harangue you with their vision and, as a result, they rarely stay in one company for very long. They are not model employees. Their true loyalty is to the future, not next quarter's profits. They can tell you what's coming but not necessarily when or how. TTs are often eccentric and difficult to manage. They speak a strange language, one that isn't focused on incremental change and polite businessspeak. Learning to find them is hard. Learning to understand them and appreciate their value is even harder. TTs are bit like the glia of organization - long overlooked, yet essential for regeneration. They may not be popular. The truth is often awkward and unwelcome and so are people who tell it. 

The hallmark of a creative org is that it is much more receptive to new thinking than the world in gen. A creative org does not resent conflicts over concepts, it resolves them. To most orgs, great thoughts are great threats. 

Rituals of doing :

What to learn from Skunkworks and Kelly J - the most creative orgs prioritize the rituals of doing. The least creative organizations prioritize the rituals of saying - the most common of which, is the meeting. Meeting is an euphemism for talking. Therefore meetings are an alternative to work. Despite this, the average office worker attends six hour-long meetings a week - almost a full working day. If an org uses Microsoft Outlook to automatically schedule meetings, their employees attend even more meetings - nine hour-long meetings a week. There is no creating in meetings. Creating is action, not conversation. Creative orgs have external meetings - with customers, as Lockheed did - to win its wartime contracts to make planes. But, the more creative an org is, the fewer internal meetings it tends to have and the fewer people tend to be at those meetings. Much of what happens at meetings is planning, but planning is of limited value - coz nothing goes according to plan. Kelly had little use for plans and did not need to know the details of how things were going to happen before doing them. Engineering plans are important for getting a product built - but engg plans are doing, not saying. You cannot control the future. Being too rigid about making things happen the way you plan stops you from reacting to emerging problems and causes you to miss unexpected opportunities. Have high expectationss about what and few about how.

Reed H, Jason Fried and General Patton would all agree.

The Hidden Curriculum - a dirty secret as Jack W. might put it : 

As a child, you faced a choice - be yourself and be alone or be like others and be with others :) Education is homogenization. This is why nerds are targets and friends move in herds. We carry this lesson for life. Education may be forgotten, but experience gets ingrained. High-school, college, work are a continuum. The hidden curriculum operates in all institutions. Jackson says :

As institutional settings multiply and become, for more and more people the areas in which a significant portion of their life is enacted, we will need to know a lot more than we do at present about how to achieve a reasonable synthesis between the forces that drive a person to seek individual expression and those that drive him to comply with the wishes of others. Orgs are a competition between compliance and creation. The leaders of our orgs might ask us to create sometimes, but they demand that we comply always. Compliance is more important than creation in most orgs no matter how much they pretend otherwise. If you comply but do not create, you may be promoted. If you create but do not comply, you will be fired. When rewards are given for compliance, not contribution, we call it office politics. We are required to comply not with what the org says, but with what the org does. The CEO stands up and gives a pres about his love of innovators and risk takers and then allocates most of his co's money to the old product groups and gives all his promotions to the people who manage them, he sends a clear signal to anybody who understands the hidden curriculum : do what the CEO does, not what he says. Talk about innovating and taking risks, but do not do it. Work in the old product groups and focus your actions on old products. Leave the risky and innovative products to less organizationally adept and more creative people who will be fired as soon as they fail and who will fail because they are not given enough resources.