Comments on: Yahoo! Brickhouse Post – Take 2

By: Ben Clemens

Ben Clemens — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:38:43 +0000

I worked in the same office and did some of the early org work for the space, but I was not directly involved in brickhouse, just a spectator. I worked on a project there for Yahoo that was canceled, my fault as much as anyone’s (and as for Yahoo’s troubles, I agree there’s something very wrong there, but all I could say would be the same things other people have said). But for this stuff, I gotta say, I’m scratching my head. You’re clearly very smart and fearless about ideas on this area, but I’m surprised you’d write this if you really do know some folks who worked there; it was much more convoluted than that. One of the people who got it funded said it was akin to working in developing countries; lots of pointless delay and difficulties, strange, off-base reactions of different interest groups, valleywag-bombs, patience of a saint and enthusiasm needed to put up with it all. This post looks at the entire thing through the lens of big company resources and big company politics, which was just baggage, not the motive for the group at all. They tried to make something new, which is hard, then they ran out of time. Inventing things is arbitrary; it looks like failure until there’s a success (and if one of those extremely talented people had hit on something, we’d all be talking about exactly the same decisions as smart). I’d try to look at it from that angle instead of attempting to read Yahoo politics, or infer some broader point about organizations and innovation, etc. The truth is closer to a “every unhappy family is unhappy in it’s own way” thing, not really applicable to much else unfortunately…

By: David

David — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:56:38 +0000

This seems true w/ Microsoft Research. If you read their output there’s so many awesome ideas / insights that never seem to get productized. But I’m sure there are examples of a centralized “innovation incubator” that has worked – maybe Phillips?

By: Jamin Hegeman

Jamin Hegeman — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:21:58 +0000

I’m curious what your thoughts are on Adaptive Path’s R&D projects, which, it can be argued, divert talent from AP’s revenue generating projects.

By: Trav

Trav — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:27:28 +0000

There are interesting comparisons here and I’d like to see more of the reasoning behind them.

“Steve Jobs … killed the Advanced Technology Group, because the bulk of its work was going to waste, and that creative energy needed to be focused on the main products. It seems to have worked well for Apple.”

Here I am to understand that a specific part of Apple’s success would not have happened if they hadn’t killed that group. Your line of reasoning is one of the things that make people think you are in a cult. I’d really like to understand where you got this.

I don’t know Brickhouse too well, but your description of it is almost identical to Google’s 20% time, which I believe incubates Google Labs. Most of those projects never come to anything either. The major difference is that Yahoo tried to get specialists into their group, which they do a lot (anyone remember the Tiger Team c. 2005?) and that actually *increases* the accountability of the group members.

I imagine you can probably just follow the money (Yahoo doesn’t print it as easily) and the management style (when I consulted there it was pretty bureaucratic/unpopular) to understand this closure. The idea is usually the same all over, and the devil is usually in the details.

By: kyle

kyle — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:15:26 +0000

Hi Peter,

Good comments all around(both Brickhouse posts). As a now former ‘hoo, I completely agree with your thought on Brickhouse and integrating innovation into the rest of the company.

I’ve spent some time thinking about this subject as well. I think Google is in a rather unique position with their 20% time. I can’t think of too many other organizations where the 20% model would work as well as it does Google, primarily because Google is so engineering focused. This focus makes it much more likely that the same people who spend 20% of their time working on side projects are also the same people who are going to build, code and ultimately have ownership over them. If you tried this at Yahoo!, or especially any other media/product/design focused company, you would get a large imbalance of ideas from product managers/designers/etc., who would still need to rely on engineers to build and code their ideas. I think this would make a Google-like environment much more attractive to engineers, and would stall 20% time at other companies.

Don’t really have a solution to it all, but I do think it’s an interesting problem to think about.