7 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top to revenue within three years. Every employee’s annual performance review was tied to short- and long-term success at meeting these goals and to the quality of the business plans and implementation work that went with them. For senior leaders, financial incentives were high; a third of their pay was directly linked to what came out of the innovation pipeline. For rank-and-file employees, the rewards were team based and designed to be mostly intrinsic. “The reward,” Whirlpool explained, “is recognition by your peers.” Learning Officer Nancy Snyder explained that Whirlpool employees were excited by the challenge. “We had no idea how motivating this would be … People at the bottom were saying, ‘Finally someone gets it!'” But having a lot of fresh ideas was only the start. As Snyder put it, “Our CEO would go out and talk to thousands of people and say ‘we are going to have innovation from everywhere and everyone. If you have a concept, put it for- ward.’ But we didn’t have the systems in place to react to this.” A persistent barrier to innovation was Whirlpool’s extremely conservative budget control process that helped control costs, but tended to place a stran- glehold on new ideas. To fund innovation, Whirlpool needed to change this overly bureaucratic process. As with most organizations of that era, budget- ing was done annually, and once the process was completed, the budget was locked in. This meant that if someone came up with a great idea, there was no money to fund it. To create flexible funding, Whitwam initially had each region set up a seed fund for innovation and told the senior team that they had to fund all of the ideas that came forward, with no exceptions. If they turned someone down, the CEO told employees to come directly to him. This “end run” created an information organization structure, alongside the formal organization structure. In just two years Whirlpool’s “innovation pipeline” went from $1.3 billion to $3.3 billion. By 2005, seven years after launch, Whirlpool’s share price was at an all-time high, and the company was posting record results. Roughly