On "Out of the Box Thinking"

There is modern slogan in management, on the virtue of "Out of the Box Thinking".

It is similar to the notion of "Paradigm Shift" in philosophy of science, where a drastic change in basic assumptions must be changed in order to make greater advances in science.

Management with the "out of the box thinking" works on the same line of reasoning, that sometimes, a completely new way of thinking can change the nature of business drastically. Those who first achieve the new way of thinking tend to gain competitive edge in business.

So management want to recognize and promote "out of the box thinking" in businesses.

But in my experience, this is nearly impossible.

On the contrary, "out of the box thinking" are typically ignored and typically went unsupported, until many of such thinking die in management.

Why?

Because it is very difficult for people to recognize "out of the box thinking" from someone else.

When I was in management, when I had a truly new thought "out of the box", I knew I was "out of the box", because most of the other managers can't understand what I was talking about.

They were "in the box", and they couldn't see me any more, literally NOT knowing where I was coming from when I spoke of the new ideas.

They could not relate to my ideas any more, because I was "out of the box".

I have been in meetings, where I tried to convince 20 or so managers of new problems and new solutions, and I get 20 blank faces staring back at me.

Pure "out of the box" ideas simply do not work. No one can understand them, except the guy who thought of them. So no one will support them, devote time and money to them, or find ways to help them.

And because there are too many of these "out of the box" ideas, and not all of them will necessarily result in success.

In reality, what must happen is, the most successful revolutionaries of business managers, seek to keep "one leg in the box, one leg out of the box".

They must keep grounded in the box, and try to move a little bit out of the box over time.

This allows them to better convince their colleagues of the merits of their ideas, giving them something to relate to.

But this process is often too slow to be truly useful, as there is only so FAR that the "box" will be allowed to stretched, and so FAR a single person can keep his/her stance with "one leg in the box, one leg out". It limits the radicalness of the new ideas.

Some revolutionaries, like Edwards Deming, had to literally abandon the "box", and go find supporters among people who had "no box".

The lesson here, is that for management to truly embrace "out of the box thinking", they need to learn to make a few Leaps of Faith on the most radical of their employees.

Given that truly radical new ideas often cannot be understood by the average human being, it is not necessary for the management bureaucracy to "study" the New radical ideas too much. The simple reality is that "Studying" a new idea too much will kill the new idea with bureaucracy.

And for employees who might think that they have "out of the box" ideas, beware of management, and do not put too much hope in their slogan of "out of the box thinking".

Majority of new ideas will not receive any support from any management.

But do not give up hope either. The simple trick is, you have to try to sell your new ideas to a lot of different managements, until someone listens.

Sometimes your local managers don't get it, but someone else might.

It may require you to change your jobs to make the new ideas happen.

Or it may indeed require you to use your own expenses and resources to make them happen, without the help of any large corporations.

But that is the reality of "out of the box thinking". You should not be confused to think that just because "out of the box thinking" is a common corporate slogan, it will make it easier for innovators.

It remains largely a "slogan".

I never wanted to be a manager.

I always just wanted to be a simple engineer, to do what I do well, get paid, and don't want to be in charge.

I sought to run away from leadership roles as much as possible. Politics was not in my nature, I felt.

But all that changed five years ago.

My crazy story of how I started in management had to do with a rather unbelievable series of events.

First, the set up. I graduated from University of Florida with a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. Straight out of Master's program, Corporation hired me to their California site as a Product Engineer. Five years into it, I was still somewhat of a junior engineer, knowing enough to be independently dangerous, but rarely exposed to the limelight of leadership roles.

Second, the trigger. My boss in year four was a very capable and decent manager, an engineer with solidly respected reputation for honesty, integrity, and no non-sense work style. In year five, he took a mandatory sabatical of eight weeks. While he is away, another manager in our department made a "power play", and convinced the upper management to let him take over much of the responsibilities of my manager.

My boss came back from his sabatical to find that he's now reporting to his former colleague, a man he didn't respect too much. My boss decided then that he was going to get a new job elsewhere.

The following events. Soon after this political transition, commonly referred to as "management reorganization", I found myself working for a new boss, and he had managed to grab up a large portion of the department. So he had about 30 people working for him.

But soon it was apparent that there was little cohesion in his large team, and he was scrambling for help.

I was rather oblivious to all this. Or I should say that I knew what was going on, my awareness of the political situation was in fact extremely clear. But I had my work as an engineer, and I didn't care. Most of my colleagues didn't care either. Our philosophy was, let the managers fight it out.

But I was about to be put through a challenge of my life.

The Leap of Faith
The irony of management is, it is often a crapshoot, or as Forest Gump said, "like a box of chocolate".

One day I was just an engineer working on products for a large company. Then my manager intercepted me in the hallway, and asked me a simple question.

He said, "Chen, we are having some technical issues in the stress lab. We need someone to take charge of these issues. Can you do it?" (Or something to this effect)

By this "simple" question, I mean it is very simple in its vagueness. I had no clue as to what "issues" my manager was talking about.

But in my "simple" eagerness to please my new manager, I naturally wanted to give it an old college try.

So I replied collegiately, "I'll give it a try."

Then my manager said cheerfully, "Great. Thanks." He walked off briskly and happily.

Too happy. Immediately I sense that I was in some kind of trouble.

Sure enough, when I got back to my cubicle after about five minutes, there was a short email from my manager, broadcasted to the entire business group of 400 or so people, that "Chen is now in charge of the Stress lab", ie. "see Chen for all the problems, he's now the scapegoat".

Me and my big fat mouth!

I kept going back to that moment, and trying to figure out what exactly transpired. There seemed to be some strange collision of cosmic anomolies that took place. Conspiracy or Destiny?

I thought I was just "in charge of issues", I wasn't supposed to get a new job and become a manager! I mean, some ambitious junior engineer probably waited years to get into management, and I just took his/her spot! And I didn't want it! I never wanted it! Many people who wanted to be in management, studied for management, went to corporate training classes, go through new interviews, and still end up without any opportunities to become managers. But me, I get into management after a 5 minute hallway conversation! Unbelievable!

But it happened, despite my lack of interest, despite my avoidance of leadership, despite my refusal to try, it happened!

I could only conclude with some degree of paranoia, that it was pre-ordained in my cosmic destiny. Though I am a person of science, this was one of the few moments in my life, when God appeared, with all his mysterious purpose and design for my very strange so-called life.

And if this was God's will, who am I to question the wisdom in the events he chose to insert into my life?! If God took this much trouble to change my life/career, I should not refuse his gift.

I decided, I would take this Leap of Faith, to see where it leads me. If I was to fail, there is something important I was supposed to learn from my mistakes.

First Year Manager, Trial by Fire,
God has a funny sense of humor, and by funny, I mean, only God can see the humor in it.

For one, I didn't exactly get any rewards out of my advancement to management.

I ventured to guess, that it was because people expected me to fail within the first year.

For soon after I became the manager of the lab, I realized how bad of a shape it was in. A little bit of history told me, that this lab was the most politically unstable lab in all of the corporation. It had a long list of managers with short tenures, and equally long list of switching organization funding and structures. It had four employees, all technicians, and all demoralized.

Things were not getting done fast enough, the equipment are getting old, no one wants to fund the lab any more, and there were many serious mistakes in the work.

All of these bad things reinforced one another, and there were talks of dismantling the lab.

Three business groups paid for the lab and the salaries of the personnel, but two were threatening to abandon the joint venture.

All of this was creating a headache for my junior management inexperience.

Before I could even solve the major problem, I had a serious small scale problem. The most senior technician in the lab found a mistake in his previous timecards for the past 4 years, where he was not getting paid for overtime he put it.

It immediately became a labor dispute with the company. The backpay was in the amount of over $100K, and the legal department and the HR department was having a heart attack.

On the one hand, they can't pay him that much, or it was going to be a major accounting problem for the departments.

On the other hand, if they didn't pay him, it could turn into a lawsuit.

I had to get into the negotiation, and keep my technician calm, until the legal department had a chance to settle with him.

The end result was better than I hoped, which was a general avoidance of any ugly situation. Fortunately, my company was quite fair, and gave my technician a generous settlement package for the dispute, in return the technician agreed to sign a non-disclosure and no-fault agreement with the company.

This was actually the first time, where I learned something about negotiations.

After that, I negotiated with the two business groups and my