“That idea came from Jerome, the dishwasher”

A little over two years ago I had the opportunity to interview a well-known tech CEO for a profile I was writing for a local magazine in Silicon Valley. His company is now publicly traded, and at the time it was regarded as one of the fastest-growing startups in the country. 

This CEO wasn’t your stereotypical hoodie-clad twenty-something tech wiz. He was an older and experienced executive recruited to bring discipline to the company when it outgrew the abilities of its founders. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He had done this with a few companies previously and I estimated him to be approximately a billionaire. Or at least, if he wasn’t one when we spoke he certainly is now. 

His assistant led me to his office where I spent a moment studying the crudely drawn diagrams on his whiteboard while he finished taking a few bites of a sandwich. For a near-billionaire, he was friendly and unintimidating and he wiped some mustard from his face as he thanked me for coming. He asked a few polite questions about me and the magazine, and after a moment of chatting I pressed record on my voice memos app and we started the interview.

Most of the conversation was unsurprising. He spoke in vague visionary terms I knew all too well: this technology will change the world, I’m just here to help our talent focus, my job is to ask the right questions at the right time. There’s a language of executive clichés not dissimilar to the ones regurgitated by the Tim Robbins character Nuke Laloosh in the film Bull Durham, and as I took notes, I politely pretended I was hearing them all for the first time.

Near the end of my list of questions, I asked him about his philosophy for driving innovation. He thought about it for a moment. “I like to think of myself as a big believer in open innovation,” he told me. Then he leaned far back in his leather desk chair, locked his fingers behind his head, and rested his head on his hands

This was another cliché and I knew what it meant, but I wanted to hear his own words. “What do you mean by open innovation?” I asked.

“Well,” he began. “I believe that the best ideas in this company can come from anywhere, not just leadership. The people on the frontlines know our business better than anyone, and it’s all of our jobs to make sure we’re giving everyone a channel to share ideas so that they’re heard.”

“Are there any examples you can think of?” I asked.

He thought about this for a moment, then lowered his arm back to his desk and tapped his fingers. 

“Here’s one,” he said. “Last year, we completely re-engineered our data infrastructure. By deploying Kubernetes, we’re now able to utilize edge computing to increase our data center capacity while reducing routine processing expense by 30%. It’s allowed us to offer new services to customers, and we’re expecting some of these services to become major revenue streams by FY22.”

“That’s impressive,” I said. 

“You bet it is,” he said. “And you know what else? That idea came from Jerome, the dishwasher in our corporate cafeteria.”

“The dishwasher?” I asked.

“That’s right,” he said. “The kid’s full of ideas. Get this: He developed a program that shapes server traffic to improve performance during peak hours. He also made some brilliant recommendations on how we can repackage our services agreements to pass more onboarding costs to the client, which reduces time-to-profit for new accounts by an average of one and a half months.”

“That sounds – ” I started, but found I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. In the end, all I said was a disbelieving “Wow?”

“You have no idea! Jerome even suggested changes to the office elevator algorithm which reduced the average wait time by 19.4 seconds per trip. And he does a bang-up job with the dishes, too.”

“Wait!” I said, perhaps too outwardly taken back. “Are you telling me Jerome is still the dishwasher?”

“Oh, absolutely,” the CEO told me. “We feel that’s the best place for him to thrive.”

“But it seems to me,” I protested, “that this Jerome fellow is uniquely brilliant. Don’t you think there might be a better way to optimize his ability to contribute? Maybe a special projects role or something?”

“Absolutely not,” he said definitively. “And you can trust my two decades in the C-Suite on this. If you take a mind like Jerome and bring him into the cubicle farm and sit him in front of a little computer – tap tap tapping away at the keyboard all day – you’re gonna snuff the creativity right out of him, believe me,” he said. “Besides: I’ve got enough brain dead ex-McKinsey slobs slinking around here having meeting after meeting after meeting, the last thing I need is another twenty-nine year old MBA who thinks they’re in charge of something.”

“Say,” he continued. “Do you know why we even have a cafeteria?”

“To compete for talent?” I answered.

“Ha! I guess that’s one way to say it,” he snapped back with a laugh. “We have a cafeteria because half these overpaid rubes wouldn’t march their Allbirds in here in the morning if we didn’t have our own Beard Award-winning pastry chef on site. You’d think one of the two-dozen people in this building with the title Senior Business Analyst would have figured out by now that half our burn rate is Nitro coffee.”

“But,” he said with a deep exhale that made his mouth grow into a small smile. “Jerome is different. Jerome is special. Jerome hasn’t been spoiled. Jerome has never once used the word Learnings. And most importantly – Jerome’s ideas come from repetition. From getting his hands dirty. He scrubs away for a few hours and bing, the lightbulb lights up. Then he jots the idea down, walks it over to the CTO’s office, and they start prototyping right away. It’s open innovation because I’m leaving Jerome open to innovate.”

“That’s fascinating leadership,” I conceded. “Do you have any other examples of open innovation in action?”

He thought about it for a few long seconds, then pressed the call button on the phone on his desk. 

“Christopher,” he said. “Has anyone partaken in the open innovation program aside from Jerome?”

“No sir, at this time it’s just Jerome.” his assistant replied promptly.

“That sounds right,” the CEO said, gently biting the inside of his cheek. “It’s just Jerome.”

“So your open innovation strategy is just Jerome? The dishwasher? From the cafeteria?” I asked, and underlined the words Jerome the Dishwasher, open innovation, and overpaid rubes in my notes with a few long strokes of my pen.

“You said it yourself,” the CEO chuckled. “He’s uniquely brilliant.”