Weird Ideas That Work

Have you ever wondered why some companies seem to churn out breakthrough ideas while others get stuck repeating the same outdated practices? In Weird Ideas That Work, Stanford professor Robert I. Sutton argues that true innovation requires more than hard work and efficiency—it demands a deliberate dose of weirdness. According to Sutton, the very practices that make organizations successful in routine work—such as consistency, predictability, and control—are often the same ones that kill creativity. To keep innovation alive, you need to turn traditional management wisdom upside down.

Sutton’s central claim is that innovation thrives on three conditions: variance, vu ja de, and breaking from the past. In routine work, managers strive to minimize variation and enforce control so people can repeat proven processes. But when it comes to generating new ideas, what organizations actually need is to amplify variance—by bringing in diverse people, fostering conflicting viewpoints, and rewarding intelligent failure. People must also cultivate what Sutton calls the vu ja de mindset: the ability to see familiar things in fresh ways. Finally, companies must break from their own past successes, or risk being trapped by comfort and tradition.

The Logic Behind the Weird

Sutton’s premise rests on a simple but counterintuitive insight: if you organize for perfection, you will kill discovery. A flawless production line minimizes mistakes, but innovation requires risk, failure, and experimentation. He contrasts two types of work—exploiting old ideas and exploring new possibilities. Exploitation thrives on hierarchy and stability. Exploration, however, demands unpredictability and play. For instance, Disney’s “cast members” run theme parks like a tight performance, following scripts word for word. In contrast, the company’s “Imagineers” at Disney Imagineering are tasked with dreaming up rides that have never existed before. Their job is to be constantly curious, flexible, and irreverent toward rules.

Sutton borrows from organizational theorist James March, who famously described this balance as the tension between exploitation and exploration. Many companies falter because they excel at repetition but avoid the discomfort and chaos that come with genuine creativity. The hallmark of innovative organizations is that they make room for deliberate disorder: they tolerate dissenters, hire misfits, and reward failure alongside success.

Variance: The Power of Productive Chaos

When you want to spark innovation, increasing variance is key. Sutton illustrates this with examples from IDEO, the legendary Silicon Valley design firm known for its culture of wild experimentation. IDEO designers might generate 4,000 toy ideas in a single year, reduce them to 230 working prototypes, and sell only about twelve. Most ideas fail—but every success owes its birth to a mountain of misfires. Similarly, Capital One succeeds by running 45,000 simultaneous experiments in its credit card business. The lesson: if you want one great idea, you need to test hundreds of bad ones.

This principle echoes the research of psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton, who found that creative geniuses like Mozart and Picasso weren’t necessarily smarter than others—they were simply more prolific. They generated more total work, good and bad, which raised their odds of achieving brilliance.

Vu Ja De: Seeing the Familiar Anew

If déjà vu is the sense of having seen something before, vu ja de is its opposite: the sensation of seeing the familiar as if for the first time. Sutton argues that people with a vu ja de mindset—curious, observant, and unattached to convention—can spark new ideas by reframing old realities. When Hewlett-Packard pioneer Richard Hackborn moved his printer design team to Idaho, far from headquarters, it broke them free from conformity and let them see old technologies with new eyes. Similarly, designer Ettore Sottsass used bold, disruptive colors and forms to provoke emotional reactions, compelling users to rethink what “functional” design could mean.

In other words, seeing anew is not about acquiring new data but shifting your perception. Thomas Edison practiced this by filling his workshop with a “pile of junk”—seahorse teeth, cow hair, odd bits of machinery—so his inventors could repurpose discarded ideas for new inventions. (Modern equivalents include design labs like 3M’s “junk rooms” or IDEO’s walls covered with prototypes.)

Breaking from the Past: Escaping the Success Trap

Sutton warns that past success can become a company’s worst enemy. What once worked becomes enshrined as sacred dogma, preventing adaptation. He calls this pattern the success trap: the tendency to keep repeating winning formulas long after they’ve stopped working. Kodak clung too tightly to film; Swiss watchmakers ignored digital movements; and Smith-Corona couldn’t imagine a world without typewriters. Sutton points to Intel’s decision to abandon memory chips—the product that made it famous—and focus on microprocessors, a bold act of self-cannibalization that kept it ahead of competitors. (Clayton Christensen captures this dynamic in The Innovator’s Dilemma.)

By rejecting the comfort of the old, innovators create space for the new. They act, as Sutton puts it, “as if they’ve never been here before.” That may mean experimenting recklessly, rewarding intelligent mistakes, or hiring people who defy the company’s cultural norms. It’s weird—but it works.

Why Weirdness Matters

So why do Sutton’s prescriptions seem so strange? Because most of us are conditioned by corporate logic—the belief that minimizing error equals maximizing success. But innovation requires the opposite logic: to increase success, you must tolerate, even encourage, failure. To move forward, you sometimes have to break what already works. Sutton challenges you to question your assumptions: What if your company hired people it didn’t need? What if your team rewarded failure more than success? What if you encouraged employees to ignore their bosses? These ideas sound absurd in a traditional business context—but within innovative organizations, that absurdity is what leads to breakthroughs.

By deliberately turning norms upside down, Sutton invites readers to embrace discomfort, defy logic, and reframe failure as the cost of progress. In the world of innovation, being weird isn’t just permissible—it’s essential.

If your company only hires people who fit in, you’ll end up with clones, not creators. Sutton’s early “weird ideas” focus on hiring the wrong kind of people—at least by conventional standards. He argues that to spur innovation, you must hire slow learners of the organizational code and people who make you uncomfortable.

Slow Learners: Rebels with Purpose

“Slow learners” aren’t lazy or dim—they’re independent thinkers who resist conformity. These are the Richard Feynmans of the workplace: brilliant but immune to subtle cues about what’s “appropriate.” Feynman, the Nobel-winning physicist, epitomized what Sutton calls the low self-monitor—someone who acts on inner convictions rather than on social pressure. When asked to join the Challenger disaster investigation, Feynman ignored bureaucratic rules, dunked an O-ring into icy water, and revealed the true cause of the explosion. His disregard for authority exposed the flaw everyone else missed.

Similarly, Xerox researcher Gary Starkweather persisted with his idea for a laser printer despite resistance from bosses who insisted Xerox was “in the copier business.” His persistence paid off—the 9700 printer became one of Xerox’s most profitable products. These slow learners don’t adapt quickly to corporate culture—and that’s the point. Their stubbornness prevents innovation from being snuffed out by conformity.

Hire People You Don’t Like

Sutton goes further with what he calls Weird Idea #1½: hire people who make you uncomfortable. We naturally prefer colleagues who share our background and worldview. But this “homosocial reproduction” (a term from sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter) breeds sameness and groupthink. Instead, innovation thrives on cognitive friction—the agitation caused by different perspectives rubbing against each other.

He illustrates this with Will Vinton Studios, producer of the Claymation “California Raisins.” Founder Will Vinton initially hired only artists, resulting in creative brilliance but financial chaos. When he finally brought in ex–Goldman Sachs banker Tom Turpin—a person he initially disliked—the studio’s profits soared by 50 percent. Sometimes, the people who annoy you most fill your biggest blind spots.

Similarly, David Kelley of IDEO believes discomfort signals growth. When designers complained about an outspoken new hire from marketing, Kelley laughed: “Good! That means he’s what we need.” Innovation, he insists, happens where comfort ends.

Hire People You Don’t Need (Yet)

Sutton’s Weird Idea #2: hire people you probably don’t need. At first glance, this sounds wasteful. But firms like IDEO and Homestead hire “scouts”—people with skills beyond current needs—to explore future directions. IDEO once hired a computer-aided design (CAD) expert before any client even used the technology. When CAD later became the industry standard, IDEO was miles ahead.

Companies like Design Continuum and Xerox PARC similarly brought in anthropologists, sculptors, and even children to expand their palette of ideas. Though many of these hires don’t generate immediate ROI, they create fertile ground for serendipity—the cross-pollination that leads to breakthrough ideas.

In a nutshell, hire people who disagree, who confuse you, or whose skills seem irrelevant. You’re not building a mirror of your current company—you’re building the next version of it.

Once you’ve hired defiant minds, you must give them permission to disobey. Sutton’s Weird Idea #4—encourage people to ignore and defy superiors and peers—is one of the most provocative principles in the book. He argues that innovation often arises not because employees follow rules, but because they break them.

Defiance as a Design Principle

The history of business innovation is littered with rebels. At 3M, engineer Richard Drew defied a direct order from CEO William McKnight to stop tinkering with an adhesive compound. His insubordination led to masking tape—and later, Scotch tape, one of 3M’s most profitable products. Hewlett-Packard celebrated similar defiance when engineer Chuck House continued developing a display monitor that management had canceled. When the monitor became a hit, HP’s founder awarded him a medal for “extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”

Sutton notes that creating a culture of healthy rebellion doesn’t mean chaos—it means granting autonomy to pursue ideas without excessive oversight. Companies like Pixar, Corning, and 3M institutionalize defiance through explicit policies: 3M’s “15 percent time” and Corning’s “Friday afternoon experiments” encourage employees to spend part of their week on secret side projects. Many breakthrough products, including Post-it Notes, emerged from such unofficial work.

Weak or Backward Socialization

Another radical method is what Sutton calls backward socialization—newcomers teaching veterans instead of the reverse. At Hewlett-Packard, new IT hires trained seasoned managers in modern enterprise software, upending traditional hierarchies. This kept the organization adaptable and immune to “we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” syndrome.

Forward-thinking CEOs like Lou Gerstner at IBM and Carly Fiorina at HP were hired precisely to shatter tradition. They wore blue shirts in a white-shirt culture, centralized decision-making, and reshaped corporate DNA. Others, like Apple’s returning Steve Jobs, demolished entire product lines to rebuild the company’s soul. Sutton’s message is clear: to reinvent your future, you must sometimes burn your present.

Defiance isn’t disloyalty—it’s devotion expressed differently. As Jobs himself implied, “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

This might be Sutton’s most counterintuitive—and powerful—idea. Weird Idea #6 proclaims: reward success and failure, but punish inaction. Innovation lives on experimentation, and experiments fail far more often than they succeed. As IBM’s founder Thomas Watson Sr. once said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

When Failure Teaches Faster

To kill innovation, simply make failure shameful. Sutton describes how Business Week once suggested firms “reduce flops” early in product development—a disastrous idea. Doing so eliminates the very experiments that generate game-changing discoveries. Instead, Soichiro Honda declared that success represents “one percent of your work resulting from the 99 percent that is called failure.” Honda’s lesson: fail fast, learn fast, and move on.

At companies like IDEO and Skyline, this philosophy is embedded in daily operations. Skyline designers crank out 4,000 toy ideas knowing only twelve will sell. Yet they see themselves not as failing 99% of the time but as constantly learning. Creative triumph emerges from the quantity of output, not the hit rate.

Forgive and Remember

Sutton urges organizations to “forgive and remember,” not “forgive and forget.” When Microsoft hired Richard Belluzzo after a failed CEO stint at Silicon Graphics, they viewed his mistakes as valuable education “paid for by someone else.” Similarly, hospitals that discuss surgical errors openly build trust and psychological safety. As surgeon studies show, forgiveness makes people more honest about mistakes—leading to collective learning rather than cover-ups.

But forgiveness alone isn’t enough. Companies like Netscape and Corning encourage teams to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones. The mantra: “If it ain’t broke, break it before someone else does.”

Punish the Statue: Inaction Is the Real Enemy

Sutton argues that the worst kind of failure isn’t trying and failing—it’s not trying at all. Action, even when wrong, is the oxygen of creativity. Managers trapped in the “smart talk” syndrome mistake eloquence for progress. They hold endless meetings, draft polished slides, and proclaim visionary goals without actually building or testing anything. Sutton likens this paralysis to an engineer forbidden to prototype, doomed to watch competitors beat him to market.

To fix this, leaders must actively reward doers and demote talkers. As Jim Goodnight of SAS says, “The only smart thing is knowing when to stop digging.” Celebrate smart failures as learning investments—and treat inaction as the only unforgivable sin.

Innovation isn’t polite—it’s passionate. Sutton’s Weird Idea #5, “Find some happy people and get them to fight,” teaches that productive disagreement fuels creativity. When people argue about ideas—not personalities—they refine and strengthen their thinking. The most innovative teams, he says, combine joyful energy with intellectual conflict.

Good Fights, Bad Fights

Not all conflict helps. Emotional feuds drain energy. Intellectual battles sharpen insight. At Xerox PARC, Bob Taylor encouraged engineers to “attack ideas, not people.” In his legendary “Dealer” meetings, luminaries lounged on beanbags and ruthlessly debated the technical merits of innovations. Personal attacks were banned—but fierce critique was mandatory. Out of that friction came the personal computer, Ethernet, and the laser printer.

The Role of Humor and Optimism

Conflict works best among “happy warriors.” Research shows people in good moods are more flexible thinkers. So Sutton recommends filling creative spaces with laughter. At Handspring, director Peter Skillman famously rings a bell when someone blurts, “That idea sucks!”—a humorous reminder to fight fairly. Studies of top management teams confirm that humor diffuses tension and helps teams voice tough truths without triggering defensiveness.

Optimists, Sutton argues, bounce back from failure faster. Psychologist Martin Seligman calls this resilience “learned optimism.” Creative work is a constant cycle of failed hypotheses; only optimists have the stamina to persist.

In short, hire upbeat fighters. Encourage strong ideas, loosely held. And make sure every argument ends not in resentment—but in progress.

Weird Idea #7 captures Sutton’s paradoxical wisdom: decide to do something that will probably fail, then convince yourself and everyone else that success is certain. Because no one can predict which ideas will work, the only rational strategy is to take irrational confidence seriously.

History’s breakthroughs often came from “cuckoo clocks”—people dismissed as dreamers or fools. Geoffrey Ballard’s decades-long crusade to develop hydrogen fuel cells made him an outsider in science circles, but his unrelenting belief turned his company into a multibillion-dollar success. Likewise, Burt Rutan’s team built the first plane to circumnavigate the globe without refueling because, as Rutan told his crew, “Confidence in nonsense is required.”

Confidence Creates Reality

Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term self-fulfilling prophecy to describe how beliefs shape outcomes. When teachers expect certain students to excel, those students actually perform better. (Similar effects have been documented in military boot camps and corporate teams.) Sutton applies this principle to leadership: leaders who show unwavering confidence help teams convert false hope into real achievement.

Steve Jobs mastered what colleagues called the “reality distortion field”—his ability to make impossible goals feel inevitable. Filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola did the same on the chaotic set of Apocalypse Now, convincing his exhausted crew they were part of cinematic history. These visionaries blur the line between belief and delusion—but that’s often the price of transformative success.

The Ethics of Delusion

Sutton acknowledges a tension here: optimism borders on deceit. Leaders who inspire hope around doomed ideas can waste fortunes (as Motorola did on its Iridium satellite venture). Yet without that same delusional faith, no one would attempt the impossible. The key is to know when to quit—learn from failure fast but lead with courage.

As Honda’s founder might have said, failure is inevitable, but despair is optional. Successful innovators plan for failure but persist as if success is guaranteed.

Perhaps Sutton’s most sobering lesson appears in Weird Idea #11: Forget the past—especially your company’s successes. Organizations die not from ignorance, but from competence. Their greatest achievements calcify into barriers against change. Psychologist Ellen Langer calls this mindlessness: acting on autopilot because things worked once before.

Success Traps and Corporate Fossils

Ken Kutaragi, the “father of the Sony PlayStation,” faced ridicule for pursuing digital technology in Sony’s analog empire. Executives told him it was taboo. Only by evading headquarters’ oversight did he build what became a multibillion-dollar business. Sutton calls this the remedy for success traps: create pockets of rebellion far from corporate orthodoxy.

General Motors did the same when launching its Saturn division in Tennessee, a thousand miles from Detroit’s bureaucracy. Employees got “one-way tickets”—no return to the old system—forcing full commitment to new methods. Similarly, Hewlett-Packard’s “Cowboys in Boise” quietly built the printer division that saved the company. Distance breeds freedom.

Institutional Forgetting

To forget the past, Sutton recommends “institutional amnesia”: constant reinvention through rotation and disbanding. At Denmark’s Oticon, teams are dissolved every few years to prevent stagnation. At AES and Lend Lease, employees are moved across roles intentionally—they’re kept uncomfortable to stay alert. “The minute you systematize something, you suck the life out of it,” says one AES engineer.

Even randomness can help. Sutton tells of the Naskapi Indians, who used caribou shoulder bones cracked over a fire to decide hunting directions. This ritual, though seemingly irrational, prevented them from repeating failed hunts—an early form of randomness-based innovation.

To create continuously, a company must learn to forget gracefully. As Andy Grove of Intel warned, “Only the paranoid survive.” The rest become monuments to their former selves.

In his final chapter, Sutton distills all his weird ideas into one principle: get out of the way. The best management is often no management at all. Innovation happens when leaders create safe spaces for intelligent risk-taking—and then have the humility to let others lead the way.

Do No Harm

Drawing from Jeffrey Pfeffer’s advice that managers should operate by the physician’s oath (“First, do no harm”), Sutton shares stories of leaders who knew when restraint beats control. At 3M, when an HR manager threatened to fire a scientist caught napping under his desk, R&D head William Coyne stepped in: “Next time you see him asleep, get him a pillow.” That scientist went on to develop some of 3M’s most profitable products. Innovation, Sutton explains, thrives under trust, not tyranny.

The Wisdom of Noninterference

Sometimes leadership means silence. Basketball coach Phil Jackson won multiple championships by calling fewer plays, letting players improvise. He described his role as “doing less so they can do more.” Similarly, MTV executives defer to 20-something producers because they know their market better than anyone. As one manager joked, “If I love the idea, that’s a red flag—I’m too old for the demo.”

Even in corporate innovation, light touch beats micromanagement. Sun Microsystems’ executives wisely “backed off” as the Java team argued and experimented their way to success. Great managers, like great gardeners, know when to stop pulling weeds and let wildflowers grow.

Sutton’s closing invitation is simple but radical: manage less, trust more, laugh often, and create a workplace where the weird ones thrive. In the long run, those weird ideas are what keep your company alive.