No idea is a bad idea: Making the most of Inovateus Solar’s Friday think-tank sessions

This post marks the final installment in the 10-part blog series excerpting my recently published book, Building A Brilliant Tomorrow. Along the way, I hope you’ve enjoyed the discussion of Inovateus’ core values embodied in the acronym PEACE—which stands for peace, engage, ambition, creativity, and esprit de corps—and found some ideas you might be able to apply to your business practices and culture. In this last blog post, I’d like to talk about something that has become an essential part of Inovateus’ ongoing educational and corporate development mission: the Friday morning think-tank sessions. Each week, we hold wide-ranging conversations about teamwork and related topics, often inviting local and regional leaders from the worlds of business, sports, public service and entertainment to share their insights. It’s one of my favorite parts of the week, and if you happen to be in the South Bend area, we’d love for you to come by and attend one of our think-tank sessions.

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In the fall of 2015, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Verne Harnish at the Fortune Growth Summit, which focuses on growing companies. I thanked him for sharing the Rockefeller Habits information, and I shared with him the story of Inovateus, including some of the challenges and struggles that my father and the company faced. Verne told me that one of the reasons he started Gazelles International was to help entrepreneurs have access to the tools and resources they need to be successful. His father was a busi­nessman who had experienced the extreme highs and lows of entre­preneurship, and Verne wanted to help others avoid that rollercoaster. After I shared some of our stories and my insights, I was invited to speak to the audience of more than 1,000 attendees at the October 2015 event.

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Other ideas we’ve implemented on the leadership level at Inovateus include a Friday think-tank session. Every Friday at 9 a.m. we get the company together for a breakfast session to talk about different topics. There are only two rules for these sessions: (1) we don’t talk about what we are doing today, and (2) no idea is a bad idea. Sometimes these sessions include guest speakers, who have ranged from local community leaders, area businesspeople, and U.S. senators to Andrew Berlin, a partner of the Chicago Cubs and owner of the South Bend Cubs; Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend and a friend of mine; Mike Brey, the head coach of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish basketball team; Chris Stevens, cofounder of Keurig Premium Coffee Systems; and many, many others. We got some great teamwork concepts and insights from all of them. In fact, we’ve been able to come up with many creative ideas in the think-tank sessions that we end up implementing within the company.

The idea for the think-tank sessions was modeled after a practice I read about in the late Sarah Caldicott Miller’s book, Midnight Lunch: The 4 Phases of Team Collaboration Success from Thomas Edison’s Lab. Miller was Thomas Edison’s great-grandniece. The concept is based on the practice that after the workday ended at Edison’s company (which eventually became GE), the inventor would buy food and drink for anyone who volunteered to return to the office in the evening for a brainstorming session. Those sessions created camaraderie among the team and led to ideas that became breakthroughs at the company.

I invited Sarah to speak to a small group of Inovateus leaders, and she shared more insights on the midnight-lunch concept with us. Soon after, we started our think-tank sessions, and today we have a following of people from outside Inovateus who regularly attend those sessions. These “fans” include professors from area universities and leaders from a local utility company. It reminds me a little of my days playing in a band, when we created a fan base for our music. People in the community talk about our sessions, and others in the solar industry have heard about them. Visitors to our offices often attend the Friday sessions.

One of the most recent changes we’ve made is to formalize our organizational structure. We’re very different from many companies; we don’t follow the norm in terms of our structure and our operation. I liken us to the Grateful Dead of the music world. I’m a big fan of the band’s music, but I also love the band’s business innova­tions. They didn’t follow the rules and the guidelines set forth in the music industry; they were true to their music first, and they let their processes and procedures build on that. It’s the same with Willie Nelson, a musician who was considered an outlaw because he didn’t fit the mold for a country musician. His music was part blues, part jazz, and so on. He was true to the music first, and upon that he built his processes and procedures.

In a similar way to how the Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson have stayed true to their music first, you could say the same thing about Inovateus and our passion for solar. We don’t really fit the mold of a “conventional” company. We’ve stayed true to our primary mission of building a brilliant tomorrow, and have built a unique and evolving set of processes and procedures to help us achieve our goals.

Thanks for reading these excerpts from my book. And if you haven’t done so already, I encourage you to buy a copy of Building A Brilliant Tomorrow: The Transformation of Inovateus Solar and the Energy Revolution, so you can learn more about the history of our small Midwestern solar company with big ambitions and our novel ways of doing business.

By TJ Kanczuzewski, president/CEO, Inovateus Solar

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