Hiring employees who fit the corporate culture and get along well with their peers sounds like a no-brainer. And, as Stanford University Professor Robert I. Sutton sees it, it probably is.

As companies make those types of safe management decisions, they can also stifle innovation, says Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering who offers unusual alternatives in his new book, "Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation."

The book's suggestions for innovation seem to go against conventional wisdom. Among Sutton's ideas are:

-- Hire people who make you uncomfortable, including some you don't like.

-- Find some happy workers and get them to argue with one another.

-- Decide to do something that will probably fail, then go about convincing everyone - including yourself - that it will succeed.

-- Don't try to learn anything from people who seem to have solved similar problems.

But Sutton made it clear in an interview at Stanford that his ideas are for companies - or departments within companies - that want to be innovative. He is not encouraging companies to embrace innovation so much that they ignore the parts of the business which made them successful.

"Most of what companies do and should do most of the time is routine stuff, " Sutton said. "I don't want experimenting to be done when they're doing an appendectomy on me."

But he points out in the book that as some companies grow, they unwittingly stifle innovation. He used the example of Lotus Development Corp., now part of IBM, which had tremendous success in the early 1980s with its 1-2-3 spreadsheet program, then began modeling its operation after Fortune 500 companies.

"By 1985 or so, around the time the company had grown to over 1,000 employees, many original members felt they no longer fit in at Lotus," Sutton writes. "Some were simply not competent, but most were creative people who couldn't find a place in the company and found their skills were no longer valued.

"Most of the new hires were cut out of the 'big company mold,' having worked for such firms as Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble and then going on to get MBA degrees. One disenchanted early hire described them as 'boring people who had never created a product or a company spirit.' "

As an experiment in 1985, Lotus Chairman of the Board Mitchell Kapor and the leader of organizational development and training, Freada Klein, pulled together the resumes of the first 40 people who joined the company - including Kapor - changed them slightly, then submitted them as potential candidates for employment. Many had the right kinds of technical and managerial skills, but also had more unconventional experience, like being community organizers, clinical psychologists and transcendental meditation teachers.

"Not one of the 40 candidates was called back for an interview," Sutton writes. "Kapor and Klein viewed this as a sign that Lotus was unwittingly screening out innovative people. All signs are that they were correct.

"The only hit product invented by the company after Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus Notes, was developed 20 miles from headquarters, as Klein put it, 'so the team could work unfettered by the narrow Lotus culture.' "

In the interview, Sutton said that companies need to understand that the same principles that could work for improving a production line or assembling a sales team can also make it more difficult to be creative.

He makes it clear, for example, that his chapter "Don't Try to Learn Anything From People Who Seem to Have Solved the Problems You Face" applies to innovation only - not to setting up corporate procedures or assembly lines. "One of the best ways to reduce risk is to copy things that have worked."

Sutton explained, though, that it still is essential to have some people who can look at a situation with fresh eyes. When anthropologist Louis Leakey hired Jane Goodall to do two years of intense observation of apes in Africa, he intentionally chose someone who did not have scientific training from a university so that her mind wouldn't be cluttered by theory.

Another way companies can get a fresh approach is by finding people from outside their field who have tackled similar problems. Sutton pointed to the way 3M worked on developing the safest surgical tape possible: People from the company talked with the veterinarians who had to care for high-priced thoroughbred horses.

Bosses certainly don't want people who make personal attacks or who argue about everything, but Sutton said creative disagreements should be encouraged. He pointed to Intel in Santa Clara as one innovative company that encourages people to disagree strongly about ideas, while at the same time making it clear that personal attacks are not allowed.

"That sort of difficult balance is hard to find," he said.

Sutton said even the most creative people usually have more successes than failures, and sometimes have trouble getting along with colleagues who -aren't so creative. He points to Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso as examples of people who failed frequently.

"It's not that they have a higher success rate than their peers; they just do more," Sutton said. "A high success rate and a high failure rate are crucial in the early years."

He said people who are afraid to fail won't come up with anything fresh. At best, they may take an old idea and try to present it as new. If they do fail, they will try to hide it instead of learning from it.

"You want the kind of culture where people forgive and remember," the professor said.

That may be why one of his favorite ideas in the book is the one about trying to do something that will probably fail, then convincing yourself that it will work.

"Most new products fail," Sutton said. "Most new companies fail. I have never really seen any models that tell you with any certainty which ideas are going to succeed or which ideas are going to fail."

He emphasized that you still have to know when to admit that a project has failed, but the early optimism is crucial in order to supply enough energy for the project to have a chance.

In the book, he has a quote from Burt Rutan, an aircraft designer and former test pilot who was developing the Voyager, which became the first airplane to fly nonstop around the world. Many said it wouldn't work, but Rutan told his engineers, "Confidence in nonsense is required."

Venture capitalists put money into more failures than successes, Sutton said in the interview, but the successes more than make up for the failures. That can be true in companies as well, he said, as long as the ideas are allowed to develop.

"There has to be a certain amount of self-delusion," Sutton said.