Individual companies like Apple and Google do something even more impressive: They re-invent themselves time and again, becoming corporate giants while remaining nimble enough to ward off the hordes of startups at their gates.
Would you like to transform your own company, division or department—into a mini Silicon Valley? Well, forget it: Can't be done. The secret formula for replicating the San Francisco Bay Area has eluded countless governments, companies and individuals—for decades.
However, you can integrate key components of the Silicon Valley magic. That allows you to move in that direction, improving innovation, time-to-market and cost-efficiency.
Here are my seven top tips:
1. Embrace The People Mashup
One key to Silicon Valley's success is that different kinds of people are brought together, not only in functional positions but in leadership ones, too.
More than half of all successful Valley startups have immigrants as founders, CEOs and in other senior positions. Working in small groups, workers from different disciplines—e.g., engineers, designers, marketers, journalists and social scientists—collaborate on product development and other core functions.
Bringing together and empowering people of diverse backgrounds is one key to Silicon Valley's success that can be replicated in your company, at least to some degree.
2. Embrace The Product Mashup
Some of Silicon Valley's best ideas are actually the refactoring of existing ones.
Instagram—famously acquired for a billion dollars by Facebook—is one example. It emerged when location-based social network Foursquare was growing fast. To use Foursquare was to "check in" to a location, with an optional photo. Instagram simply reversed that: To use Instagram was to post a photo, with an optional check-in.
Additionally, the founders added easy photo filters, another idea "borrowed" from other products. To a large extent, Instagram's success was based not on ground-breaking, patentable inventions, but on how existing features could be combined.
Sometimes, your company's product or in-house application can be transformed simply by mashing up existing products or features.
3. Remove Stigma From Failure
Silicon Valley is obsessed with the power of failure. The reason is that success comes from experience, and experience comes from failure.
Everyone in the Valley fails. A common slogan is: Fail early and often. A typical Silicon Valley hiring manager will view an applicant's employment at three failed startups more highly than having worked at three moderately successful non-startups.
Failure is an education, and should be treated as such in your company. NetApp's own mantra is: Fail Fast.
4. Ready, Fire, Aim
Imagine a spectrum of organizational agility, spanning from the highly bureaucratic—governments, universities, etc.—to the super-agile Silicon Valley startup. Where do you want to be on that spectrum?
One secret to being more agile is to get something into the hands of users as fast as possible, then adjust your plans based on user feedback and actual usage.
Whether it’s for customers or internal users, there will always be massive resistance to the idea of putting something into production that isn't fully baked. The ability to overcome this resistance is one important key to organizational agility.
5. Zero-Base Everything
The Silicon Valley mindset assumes that if something exists, it must already be obsolete. Not only "things," such as products, but paradigms, categories, labels and ideas.
The futures of long-existing business models for banking, insurance and healthcare are being invented as you read this. Roomfuls of Silicon Valley twenty-somethings are assuming that anyone with experience in these fields has it all wrong.
The reason they believe this is that these fields exist, and therefore everyone involved must be trapped in an obsolete institutional mindset. Instead of asking, "How can we improve banking?" they ask "Why do people use banks? What do they really want?” And they proceed from there.
This instinct for starting from zero is a Silicon Valley mindset you can learn and use for any decision-making process.
6. Embrace Impossible Deadlines
The obvious purpose of impossible deadlines is to motivate people to move faster. But more importantly, it's to focus the organization.
Short schedules squeeze out the needless and give priority to execution—over everything else.
7. Make Work Fun
If you've ever been to Google, you'll know that their headquarters looks like cross between Disneyland and a Chuck E Cheese’s for grownups. There are multicolored bikes, slides as an alternative to stairs, brightly colored bean-bag chairs, and games everywhere.
Silicon Valley companies are fun. Employees want to be there. It works.
The Bottom Line
You can't replicate Silicon Valley. But you can improve morale, agility and execution.
Do it by understanding what makes the Valley work, and bringing some of that into your own organization.
What's your best tip? Weigh in with a comment below...
By Mike Elgan (@MikeElgan)
Image credit: Mike Dierken (cc:by)
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