A while back I read The Brompton – Engineering for Change by Will Butler-Adams (the CEO of Brompton Bikes) and Dan Davies (former blogger at Crooked Timber and author of The Unaccountability Machine, which I will have to write more about later). It’s the story of how Brompton Bikes came to be, how it’s evolved over time, and how the company thinks about running itself. There’s a quote from it that I think about all the time (this is Butler-Adams):
I’ve always allocated a sum of money at the start of every year for people in the company to have ideas with. One day this may get institutionalised and then we’ll have a fund with a grand name like Greenford Innovations or Brompton Future or something, but at the moment it’s personally under my control and it’s called the ‘Fuck-It Fund’, because that’s what I generally say when giving someone permission to try something. The fund has grown over the years, but the principle is always that if someone has an idea that they’re passionate enough about to approach the chief executive with, and it won’t damage the brand or cost an absurd amount of money if it all goes wrong, then they can do it.
And when it comes to new ideas, we don’t do corporate planning, discounted cash-flow forecasts and returns on investment. I did a few of those at ICI when I was an engineering project manager, making investment cases to go up to the committees that decided on new equipment or facilities for the Melinar plant. The experience taught me that if someone wants a project to go ahead, they can fudge a spreadsheet to deliver the required returns; conversely if they want to kill a project they can fudge numbers the other way. Since the returns calculation is always more or less dependent on how much someone wants to do the thing, you might as well cut out the middle stage. Not only do you save time and effort, but you avoid the issue of accidentally running a training course for your employees in how to lie to you.
