In Memoriam Bill Boggs: Managing Mavericks

All my working life, I’ve worked with and managed mavericks – highly creative individuals who don’t fit well into the corporate mould.

For many years this was in ad agencies. They rarely produce outstanding work if they don’t have some mavericks on staff. And they won’t join unless there are signals that it’s OK to be different. It’s the same for all organisations that are committed to creating breakthrough of one kind or another.

When I joined the innovation consultancy, Synectics, one of my American colleagues, another recent joiner, was Dr Bill Boggs. And it didn’t take long to discover two things.

One was that most of my colleagues did not appreciate Bill’s ways. He was difficult, self-obsessed, driven, irreverent and disruptive. There’s no doubt that he thought that corporate rules, even ones he personally participated in shaping, applied to others, not to Bill.

The other thing that I discovered was that Bill was uniquely brilliant, creating completely new ways of working and producing far, far more business for our firm in the USA than anyone else – in effect bringing the revenue that paid many colleagues’ salaries. And he was on his day the finest facilitator of creativity I ever saw.

All this seemed to make no difference to colleagues’ attitudes to him and many thought he should be fired – and said so frequently.

Somehow or other we held on to him for several years, but in the end he went. What he discovered then was that in reality he needed the relatively secure home that we provided. He was nowhere near so effective without us.

But then we were so much less without him.

Put bluntly, the issue for organisations is: how to recruit and retain the mavericks who can and will drive their future – and have colleagues appreciate their value. It’s not easy, but it may be vitally important.

Huddles R Us

Whenever I run an innovation masterclass with a group of managers, I always kick off by asking them what are the things that really work well in their organisations and what problems they are encountering around innovation.

A constant refrain is that their company’s “culture” is not supportive of creativity, innovation and risk-taking, whatever the corporate mission statement (or the CEO) says.

This was a massive problem confronting Archie Norman and Allan Leighton when they took over the running of the major British supermarket chain, Asda. From the beginning they ran creative sessions with their leadership team aimed at finding ways to transform the culture. And among the ideas that they decided to implement was “team huddles”. Everyone. Every day.

These were (and are) opportunities to come together in functional teams for a few minutes at the start of the working day, to discuss what’s working and what’s not, to get fired up for the coming day, to connect personally with colleagues, to be briefed on anything new. Usually these are stand up, not sit down, occasions.

Of course, like so many innovations of this kind, the practice evolved in the USA, initially in sports teams, then in many American businesses. It’s also used a great deal in Japan. But it was (and is) quite unusual in major European organisations.

In the UK, huddles are fairly common nowadays in newer, smaller firms, in hi-tech and communications, but the idea that it should be applied in a vast business like Asda, with its 170,000 employees, was totally radical.

Together with a handful of other important organisational and cultural changes, Allan and Archie turned around a vast and previously sinking ship, so that it became (and remains) one of the great success stories of British business, and was voted “Best Employer” in the annual Sunday Times survey.

Do you have huddles? What’s your experience of them?