Is ‘Do Nothing’ Leadership the Key to Your Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Success?

Can you achieve more by doing less? Can you achieve much, much more, by doing very little? What if you actually were to do nothing? What would be the results? We know the answer to this don’t we? Your projects, your department, the things you are in charge of would come crashing down around you and you would be out of a gig… Or maybe the exact opposite would happen.

This year, at the second annual TopCoder Innovation Summit that was held in Orlando, FL, we invited the business author and award winning professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Professor Keith Murnighan, to address our audience of enterprise innovators on the aforementioned topic of “Do Nothing” leadership. His topic and talk coincided with the June release of his new business book by the same name. So what gives with this title and why in the world would a company like TopCoder, one who champions innovation and productivity & open  innovation via a global community want this type of message at our innovation summit? Like much else in life, it’s in the details and the deeper meanings of Keith’s messaging align extraordinarily well with how you can achieve great success in Open Innovation. Below is a fantastic video of Professor Murnighan’s performance at the TopCoder Innovation Summit and here are just a few things to keep in mind as you watch. Below the video are a few points tying “Do Nothing” leadership to the type of leadership needed to succeed in this era of Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing.

- The act of doing and the strokes of leadership that propel incredible achievement (created by doing) can be very different and often in conflict with another

- In order to do less, you must trust more and this entails letting go of “things” that may at first make you very uncomfortable

- As a leader, your job is not to do, your role is to facilitate, orchestrate and help others succeed in doing

- To “Do Nothing” and be successful, you must figure out who is exceptional at specific tasks, and allow them to to take over

- Arm Wresting – Well, you’re going to have to watch the video to understand this great leadership lesson!

You can find “Do Nothing!”, Professor Murnighan’s stellar leadership book here.

The parallels drawn from “Do Nothing” leadership that tie to your Open Innovation success are quite evident. They depend on your ability to communicate clearly your wants while avoiding micro-management of the actual work, your ability to orchestrate and facilitate teams that accomplish for you in a massively parallel fashion, and your ability to provide the “doer’s” with what they need, as they require it (and anticipating these needs before they are even requested!).