Got a good idea? Watch out for this guy

There seems to be a Mr Khaki Blueshirt in every company

“At most organisations, the bottleneck is at the top of the bottle.” – Peter Drucker

Once upon a time, in a bustling little town, there was a company called BrightTech Solutions which wanted to be known for its brilliant ideas but never got many big wins.

At the helm of BrightTech was Mr Khaki Blueshirt, a well-meaning but cautious manager who believed in sticking to what worked and avoiding anything that felt a little too risky.

One day, a young engineer named Lily burst into the office with an idea to revolutionise the way people communicate. Her device could fit in the palm of your hand and let you talk to anyone, anywhere, just like magic. She called it the "myChat." Lily explained to Mr Khaki Blueshirt how myChat could help people share their thoughts, ideas and even their daily adventures with others.

Mr Khaki Blueshirt, although impressed by Lily's enthusiasm, hesitated. He worried about the risks. What if it doesn't work as intended? And what about the costs? The company would need to invest a lot of resources into the project.

As time passed with no movement from the management on the myChat, Lily's excitement turned into frustration. She knew that taking risks was part of the game, but every time she had an idea, it was met with apprehension.

Meanwhile, a different company saw potential in Lily's idea. The fearless manager of GlobeTech Innovations, Mr Jeans T-shirt, recognised the groundbreaking nature of the myChat device and gave his team of passionate engineers the freedom to explore Lily's concept wherever it might lead. A year later, GlobeTech had a prototype ready, which it proudly released to the market. It was an immediate hit.

As you’ve probably already guessed, Mr Jeans T-shirt is a cartoonish version of Apple and its former chief executive Steve Jobs. Obviously, the myChat device is the iPhone.

Apple isn’t a perfect company. But the iPhone was an enormous success largely because Jobs had a vision and the management drive to build it. The iPhone was effective in a way that Apple's design philosophy had not been able to replicate in the PC market. The iPhone continues to dominate both market and mind share. Apple has been the top smartphone innovator for more than a decade with no real second place.

And that's the problem.

By any objective measure, Microsoft, Motorola, Rim, Palm, HTC, Huawei, Google, etc. have failed in the smartphone industry. The Android system is an also-ran. Sure, Samsung gained a lot of market share in the US, but only because Verizon had the best telecommunications network and Apple didn’t offer a CDMA phone for many years. But what about the rest of the world? The iPhone still controls these markets so many years after the first edition was released.

The problem with those other smartphone companies is this: How hard is it to simply copy the iPhone? I mean that literally.

It would be a great internal R&D project for Samsung to see if its engineers can duplicate the iPhone, its responsiveness, its power consumption and all of its little technical details. Don’t try to change the iPhone interface, just copy it pixel for pixel.

The point would be to see if Samsung’s engineering teams can do it. I bet they can't. Even with the answer right in front of them, with full knowledge of which features to leave in and which to leave out, I bet none of those companies could duplicate the iPhone version 1.

If they could, they will immediately discover the clever things Apple did to get the iPhone to work the way it does. After they reverse engineer the iPhone, the engineers could tweak things to differentiate their product from Apple's, like creating a browser with plugins or a media player that plays media.

The reason the other smartphone companies don't experiment in this way is not because they lack the skills. Those technology companies are full of smart people. The problem is management.

Every one of those companies is staffed by Mr Khaki Blueshirt at all levels of management. It doesn’t matter how many intangible assets a company has, if Khaki Blueshirt is managing the delivery of those assets and micro-managing the engineers, then the company has no chance of beating an innovative design shop like Apple. As the management consultant Peter Drucker said, the bottleneck is always at the top of the bottle.

Mr Khaki Blueshirt is focused on his career and his job. He has learned that it is better for his own internal career advancement to create a different smartphone product that in no way threatens the iPhone.

(In fact, someone should check Apple’s share register because the inferior quality of rival smartphones certainly looks like the Mr Blueshirts have stock in Apple. That’s the only explanation for the constant stream of non-threatening and unsexy smartphones they keep producing.)

Even though Mr Blueshirt graduated from engineering school 25 years ago, and has been a manager for most of the time since, he still likes to tell people that at heart he's an engineer. He's not a designer. But that’s just an excuse he uses to cover up for his real goals. Mr Blueshirt’s goal is to build an internal company fiefdom, so he plays not to lose. He plays it safe.

That's why these managers all wear khakis and a blue shirt – no one gets fired for wearing those clothes to work. It's a safe uniform. Jeans and a t-shirt? Most companies don't allow jeans at work, which means those companies would never have allowed Steve Jobs to work there and be himself. And that should tell you something about why Apple never really had any competition.

Of course, this isn’t to say that clothes are a deciding factor in innovation. Far from it. But clothes are an outward representation of inner thoughts and feelings. Rigidity and discipline have their place in every company, but nothing is for free. The cost of these good traits can be an equivalent loss of imaginative thought. And the kinds of people who prefer to play it safe will naturally flow into companies that are more risk-averse.

A Goldilocks Zone exists here: not too hot, not too cold. In this sense, too much freedom of thought can lead to chasing ghosts and procrastination. On the other hand, worshipping innovation can be just as destructive for companies.

Nevertheless, intangible assets may turn into liabilities if mid-level managers (or even CEOs) don’t have the courage to leverage them correctly. Managers must find that sweet spot, the Goldilocks Zone, of not too much rigidity and not too much blue-sky thinking (and maybe change the colour of their shirts?)

Whatever his faults, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs figured out a way to occupy this Goldilocks Zone and he created one of the world’s most profitable and innovative companies. There’s a lesson in there.