Presenting at the ODN – Long Island Annual Conference April 8
March 31, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The ODN Long Island Chapter is hosting its annual conference on April 8, 2010 at the Marriott Residence Inn, Plainview, NY . The focus is on building stronger, better organizations so that they can not only succeed but thrive as we work our way out of the Great Recession. More details here.
My topic is: Manufacturing Magic – The Hard Work of Creating an Innovation Culture
In the phrase, “we need to be more innovative”, lies a universe of misspent time, energy and political capital. As the popular media love affair with the notion of innovation continues, and leaders begin looking for answers to their businesses’ economic health beyond those actions necessary to survive the Great Recession, many organization development professionals are being tasked with making their organizations “more innovative.” Unfortunately, it seems that the concept of innovation has been coupled with that of creativity and unless we deliver something bright, shiny and magical, we’re going to disappoint.
Creating an innovation culture is not easy. As with change initiatives that have come (and gone) before, it is fraught with miss-comprehensions, false starts and dead ends. With the right effort applied to the appropriate leverage points in your organization, you might just be able to deliver the results you and your leadership seek.
This presentation, backed by current research in innovation best practices, will provide a rapid overview of the different entry points to begin creating an innovation culture. It will highlight key concerns, critical decisions, potential problems and the planning necessary to begin the process of making an innovation culture that fits your organization’s needs and wants. It will also address the business value to be obtained in terms that are clear and meaningful. While creating an innovation culture may be costly and hard work, the key question to ask is – what is the business impact and cost of lack of innovation?
Teaching a Person to Fish – Learning and Development for Innovation
March 30, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Why learning how to innovate is as important as the act itself
Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.
- Sarah Caldwell
It’s like any muscle – you have to use it or lose it
Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and they will eat for a lifetime.
- Chinese Proverb
Learning is physical. At its most basic level, learning is the process of changing the structure and actions of neurons so they retain information in long-term memory in both the temporal and parietal lobes of the cortex. Increasingly, neuroscience will play a larger role in our understanding of the process of learning.
This doesn’t mean to say that there is still not a wealth of information to be gleaned from cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and social psychology as they relate to the way in which people learn. Neuroscience will simply afford us another window into the way our minds work. And what will we do with that knowledge?
What both the behavioral observation of learning and the physical understanding of learning agree on is that for learning to be lasting it must be practiced. In fact, the best learners not only practice, they study – hard. Malcolm Gladwell proposes that for true excellence to emerge the magic number of hours required to dedicated practice and ever-increased proficiency is 10,000. Less than that and the learning may be substantial but will not result in elevated performance. The same can be said of innovation. Unpracticed innovators make fewer cognitive leaps, fewer bold choices, have fewer insights and their innovations are poorer for it.
The approach of IDEO, the design shop headquartered in Palo Alto, takes the concept of the learner even further and describes “T-shaped” people. These are learners who have not only gone deep into an understanding of a particular field of interest (the perpendicular stroke in the “T”), they have also developed a broad awareness and understanding of many subjects (the horizontal stroke in the “T”). A consistent attention to both types of learning increases the utility of these people in the design and innovation domain. Perhaps the Gladwell number needs to be an equation, i.e., 10,000 x 1000 x n? Where “n” is the number of separate domains of learning pursued?
Think differently for different results
Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
- Chinese Proverb
Innovation fosters new thinking, including the way we learn to think. The way we create the promoters (activities or environmental factors) that support learning is a key component to improving learning and development outcomes. Did you know that there are five key promoters to consider? They are:
1. Innate learning programs (the things we just know, you know?) (Gallistel, 2002)
2. Repetition of information. (Repetition of information – get it?!) (Squire and Kandel, 2000)
3. Excitement at the time of learning (Woo Hoo!) (Cahill & Gorski, 2003; LeDoux, 2002)
4. Eating carbohydrates at time of learning (A personal favorite) (Korol, 2002)
5. 8-9 hours of sleep after learning (To sleep perchance to dream) (Kuriyama, Stickgold, & Walker, 2004)
Very few learning programs actually consciously accommodate one or two of these promoters, let alone all five. Is it any wonder that the process of learning may seem draining and even futile at times? To maximize the learning and development outcomes change the nature of the learning environment, change the perspectives of the participants, and change the delivery mechanism. All can be achieved in simple ways. Use a rapid prototyping method – what can you change in under an hour for less than $100 (or less than $10)?
When considering learning and development focused on innovation practices the inclusion of elements that actually promote learning might be worthwhile, might it not? Take two innate learning programs for example; the first allows us to rapidly associate words and labels to objects within situations, and a second enables us to compute social status and insults to social status. If we acknowledge and fold into our learning and development activities these innate learning programs we can structure experiences that capitalize on them. Improvisational activities, like improv theatre games, could help us unlock the influence resident within these learning programs so that the experience fosters increased innovative behaviors (resilience, risk-taking, generosity, etc.)
Letting go and leaving justification behind
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
- Benjamin Franklin
Lessons learned are not necessarily procedural or systemic, they are predominately behavioral and social. One of the key learned behaviors is that with success comes praise and possibly adulation. Well, the process of innovation actually requires that we be less-than-successful at times. Yes, we sometimes have the glorious opportunity to fail (perhaps not the first time, bust certainly more publicly than we would like.)
There are two essential behaviors to learn and develop in order to “make it” as an innovator. The first is the ability to let go of an idea. The concept of ownership within corporate organizational life is one that people learn early. The people with the best ideas not only “win” they also receive the reward of advancement. That may mean access to things previously unavailable, i.e., the offer of increased responsibility, or even greater compensation, perks and benefits.
A successful innovator needs to understand that her idea may actually find greater success when used by another or in conjunction with another person’s idea. They also need to understand that while their idea might be a great idea, if there is no passion for it among the people who need to capitalize on it and bring it to market then it is as good as dead and useless to all. Letting go is an essential learning that is counter to so much we have learned in order to survive in organizations. But letting go is not the hardest lesson to learn for many.
Perhaps a more damnable habit to break is that of justification.
Justification is the hard-earned ability to defend your position in the face of withering opposition. It brooks no alternate view, nor does it easily accommodate modifications to its core or demarcated essential truth. The power of justification is that it makes ideas unassailable (especially when carried out by a master or mistress of the art.) The only problem with justification is that as a practice it allows no room for the new, the additive, or the tangential. Justification creates cul-de-sacs in which innovation goes to die.
Learning how to combat holding onto an idea too tightly and justifying an idea to the point of lunacy are essential practices. Which leads us to the role of exactly that in innovation – practicing what we have learned.
Practice makes permanent – practice with feedback makes perfect
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
- Douglas Adams
Most have heard of that old aphorism, “practice makes perfect.” My experience, and the firm word of a former business associate, Tom Doyle, is that practice does not make perfect, “practice makes permanent; only practice with feedback makes perfect.”
In order to become better at the art and substance of innovation it is necessary to work on it. In working on this skill set it is also critical to receive feedback and coaching. The application of observational assessment and associated feedback to an innovator enables them to see their mental models reflected in the words of others as well as the way a life time of habits influences how they not only see the world, but seek to change it in the present.
Having a subject matter expert observe and provide feedback, even if they are not a practiced innovator, may be of great benefit to those seeking to innovate. The critical eye is an essential ingredient in improvement. To borrow another Gladwell-popularized concept, that of the maven – a trusted specialist or subject matter expert connected to other like-minded practitioners across a community – it is a given that mavens make the best mentors. Their deep expertise, and the authority with which they can observe, mean that the feedback that they provide can not only provide clear opportunities for growth but may also provide ways to create a step-change in our approach to innovation and the challenges at hand.
After all, while it has been said that those who can – do, and that those who cannot – teach, it is preferable to think on Seneca:
While we teach, we learn.
Innovation Culture: Analytical and Intuitive Thinking
March 21, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Innovation Culture: Analytical and Intuitive Thinking Framing Post
This post is to trigger dialogue on innovation in the moderated Twitter #innochat on Thursday, March 25 at Noon, EST (USA) – all interested parties are welcome to join in. Follow #innochat to join at that time.
Fred Collopy, a professor at the Case Western Reserve University in the Weatherhead School of Management, explored the architect/artist/designer Maya Lin’s design method in a great chapter in the book, Managing as Designing. The quote that struck me as being very apropos for innovators is from Lin, when she stated, “My creative process balances analytical study, based very much on research, with, in the end, a purely intuitive gesture.” I see that this combination of approaches to innovation challenges, marrying the analytical and intuitive, as essential to discovering and creating the best solution to meet the existing need.
Below is a scan of the map that Collopy developed to describe Maya Lin’s process. (Click to enlarge)
An innovation culture is one that strives to create solutions to its most pressing challenges, including (perhaps, especially) those of its clients. It is a robust, searching culture. Intellectually curious and driven to results, it rides a line between the discovery of the new and the direct and specific application of that discovery to meet a present need.
Innovators act differently than analysts or decision-makers. They act differently than artists. Innovators need to borrow from both to be successful. Innovation can be an extreme practice. It tends to call on all of the faculties of those engaged in it. It is driven by the immediate context. It is driven to specific outcomes. It engages the whole person’s mind. It doesn’t reside solely in the domain of analysis or solely in the domain of creativity. It straddles both, or better yet, leans into one or the other as necessary for the task or challenge at hand.
That balance is key.
Questions to ponder:
1. Do you agree that innovation demands both analytical and intuitive thinking? (Why?)
2. How do you combine both of these practices in your innovation work (with clients in particular)?
3. What challenges do you experience in trying to accommodate both ways of thinking (and acting)?
Additional readings in the following links if you’d like to explore further:
A series in John Nofsinger’s blog at Psychology Today on Analytical/Intuitive Thinking
Part I – Determine your thinking process
Part II – Know yourself
Part III – Risk aversion
Part IV – Patience
The home of the website supporting Managing by Design at the Weatherhead School of Management
Knowledge Management – the Engine for Innovation
March 20, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
In advocating for innovation it seems as though “innovation happens” is the mindset carried by many mistaken adherents to the cause. You just have to trust it and it will come, they say (or not). This is the equivalent of saying “magic happens” when faced with a “Mechanical Turk”. Data goes in one end, magic happens, and a desired output comes out the other end. I’m sorry – innovation is not based in gold-pooping unicorns, nor is it something that should be left to the whims of inevitability or caprice. Innovation needs to be specifically and studiously fed a fuel of knowledge in order to succeed. And if knowledge is the fuel, then knowledge management is the engine that drives innovation.
It’s not what you know, it’s what you do with what you know
Of central importance is the changing nature of competitive advantage – not based on market position, size and power as in times past, but on the incorporation of knowledge into all of an organization’s activities.
- Leif Edvinsson Swedish Intellectual Capital Guru
When Peter Senge defined The Fifth Discipline (as opposed to The Fifth Element) in 1994, one of the tenets of embracing the concept of becoming a “learning organization” was the use of effective knowledge management. Knowledge management in his model was a way to accelerate the performance of the organization so that it might better think holistically and systemically, and thereby design better solutions to its challenges faster. It required that organizations not only attract and retain bright people, but that they harness the thinking of those bright people in such a way that their efforts could be captured and populated across the organization.
The issue with knowledge in organizations is not that it isn’t available; the problem is that knowledge is not readily available at the time and point of need. As this dilemma relates to innovation, it is an even bigger issue. Innovation places huge knowledge demands on organizations. To be truly effective it must reach across all knowledge sources both internal to the organization and increasingly, thanks to open innovation practices, external to it. Knowledge must be easily and freely available for recombinant thinking approaches and to be applied directly to pressing challenges. Unfortunately, many knowledge management solutions sacrifice ease and access to the twin overlords or taxonomy and ownership.
Permission-based knowledge management systems, the ones that sequester information into functional groups with associated administrative and rights management restrictions, do not foster and promote the kind of knowledge transfer for which the learning organization calls. They kill it. Is there a place for intellectual property protection and management? Absolutely. But knowledge management need to head towards greater freedom to be of better value for innovation.
Groups filled with big brains and bright ideas applied to thorny issues equals…
Imagination is more important than knowledge
- Albert Einstein
What is the promise of knowledge management? For one thing it enables organizations to leverage their tacit knowledge more broadly among their members. By applying knowledge management to key data sources, and capturing the experience of organization members in an explicit and coordinated manner, the opportunities to decrease the innovation cycle time are correspondingly increased.
To better coordinate knowledge management, via systems and processes not only technologies, user-led innovation communities may be created. Innovation communities when people within an organization who work together explore and create new approaches and then implement them. They are usually a subset of communities of practice or information communities (both of which are commonly tied to functional expertise.) Communities of practice are communities or networks of individuals and/or organizations that coalesce around an information commons, usually a body of knowledge that is open to all on equal terms. The Project Management Institute is one such community of practice.
Knowledge management will never work until corporations realize it’s not about how you capture knowledge but how you create and leverage it.
- Etienne Wenger
From communities of practice, innovation communities may form to directly apply their shared knowledge in new and interesting ways. As the costs of diffusing knowledge are getting steadily lower, as computing and communication bandwidth expand, the geographic dispersion and cultural diversity of these groups may increase, too. This makes the notion of having the big brains all in the same room for innovation to occur (e.g., the Manhattan Project) is no longer a necessity. But as a proponent of both knowledge management and face-to-face communication (and relationship-building) I see a place for them both to continue to coexist.
Dick Brandon once said that, “documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is still better than nothing.” In a sense, knowledge management exists in a similar vein. Some, no matter how rudimentary, can be helpful in the development of innovation. The challenge is to “wire up” knowledge so that it is readily available to inform innovation practices, such as, design thinking, ethnographic study, and prototyping. That process is often best addressed at the human interface level.
The innovation wisdom of individuals, crowds, communities, countries
Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of an ass.
- Japanese proverb
The purpose of knowledge management is to help an organization marshal and management it’s knowledge for the best gain. Knowing who to connect and what to connect them to is a part of the wiring up previously mentioned. It takes a clear understanding of the social network at play in an organization to understand who those people might be that can most benefit from both access and connection. It takes a form of organizational wisdom that many organization’s lack.
In a previous post I discussed a variety of impacts that may be felt through an over-reliance on the formal power resident in the organization chart. Knowledge management cannot fall prey to the turf battles that organization charts so often represent. Instead it must be liberated so that the cross-pollination often necessary for the greatest innovations might occur. Because even if you manage your knowledge carefully – you organize it, structure and store it, within an inch of perfection – if people aren’t using it to help make your organization more effective, efficient, and successful, what’s the point. A better filing system is not the heart of creativity. But knowing and using what you know?
There’s genius lurking in those files. It is just waiting for the right people to use it.
There’s no such thing as knowledge management; there are only knowledgeable people. Information only becomes knowledge in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.
- Peter Drucker
Customers in Innovation – Sound and Fury Signifying…
March 12, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The watch words for innovation at present are “open innovation” and “customer-centricity”. The idea that the customer should not only be invited into the innovation process, they should be at its very heart, is of paramount significance. The oft-quoted Henry Ford, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse,” for years held sway over product development. The thinking was that customers don’t know what they want until we tell them and sell them. That may have worked in the era of Mad Men, but customers’ access to data and ability to wield it to their own purposes means that that they can be excluded from product and service innovation at a producer’s peril.
We don’t know what we don’t know
If you’re not serving the customer, you’d better be serving someone who is.
- Karl Albrecht
The fact remains that most companies producing products and services have only a limited perspective on their customers’ needs (as those needs relate to their set of offerings). Which means often the stewards of innovation are flying blind. Recently April Dunford, of Rocket Watcher, posted on why it might be important to run a customer advisory board. Her directives speak to the need to include a customer perspective in the mix that not only provides insight into the customer experience of your products and services, but one that also reaches beyond the horizon to provide a glimpse into potential new markets.
Without customers’ perspectives it is very hard to know limits of what you do and do not know. Inviting them into the mix means that even if you can’t name the dragons at the end of your world (read: market) you can at least see them. The other opportunity to be created by including customers’ views in your thinking is that not only will the community that they form will feed you new ideas and innovation options, that same community will also generate the goodwill that comes from an expanded network. You can create the opportunity for customers to share and network with each other, which may not have an immediate benefit to you, but you better believe it will have a positive return.
One of my personal guides as I ventured into the world of consulting services many years, Nancy Truitt Pierce (the Founder and CEO of Woods Creek Consulting Company in the Seattle, Washington state area) was a great proponent of the customer advisory council. She actually turned the advisory council concept on its head and made networking the heart of its reason for being. She now has a model of consortia that encompass the needs of her customers: technology sector executive peers, senior executive peers, sales executive peers, and CFO’s. Each group meets to share insights, advise each other, and Nancy moderates. Long term many members have become Nancy’s clients and she brings their insights back into her firm to innovate her service offerings
Our customers don’t know but they can show us
Be everywhere, do everything, and never fail to astonish the customer.
- Marshall Field
For many companies though, the customer cannot conceive what they need because they are too close to their issues. No matter how hard they might try to articulate their concerns they fall short. This leads to poor communication and inadequate responses on the part of market to meeting their needs. This is not satisfactory for anyone.
Again, the key is to get closer to the customer so that the path to innovation is as pain-free as possible. The design power-house, IDEO, when working on product design opportunities for their clients uses ethnographic study (targeted, field-based observation) to achieve this end very readily. They have perfected a multi-layered approach to observing the customer experience, that may include questioning, but more often than not involves direct experience of customer’s challenges live, in real-time. Sometimes it involves their staff essentially moving into the home of a customer in order to glean first-hand experience. One of IDEO’s partners, Proctor & Gamble has actually adopted this concept and uses it to drive their own innovation processes.
P&G’s approach is called the “Living It” program. Living It creates opportunities for P&G’s ethnographers to live with customers (willing participants), to observe how they go about their everyday lives. The ethnographers get to rapidly identify customers’ needs first hand by seeing what their customers are trying to do, and how they might be hampered by their environment or the inadequacy of their tools. They can then use these insights to identify potential new products that would make customers’ everyday lives easier. This focus on understanding customers’ needs through jobs and desired outcomes is absent from the question and answer-based innovation process that passes for customer involvement in many companies today.
Opening innovation to the customer experience
The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
- Peter F. Drucker
The next step beyond experiencing the customer live and in real-time is to actually open the innovation process so that they are not passively observed; open innovation brings customers into the mix to co-create and design solutions that meet their needs without the filter of internal enterprise interpretation. This kind of inclusion would have been considered nightmarish in past generations. “Invite the customer to develop their own products?! Why the heck would I do that?!” might have crossed the mind of more than one researcher or product developer. The inherent fears at play driving that reaction were loss of control and like Nosferatu, once they were invited into the process they might never leave. The shock was that not only did customers behave themselves, but given their vested interest in the design outcome, they were enthusiastic collaborators.
Stefan Lindegaard, the founder of innovation consultancy 15inno based in Copenhagen, is one of the most vocal proponents of the open innovation model. His advocacy for open innovation is breaking open the discussion about its utility for all types of companies. Previously open innovation was reserved as the practice of larger companies with the funds to develop a customer engagement model (see P&G above), yet Stefan is making the case that open innovation should not only be embraced by all companies, no matter how small, but that it should tap the widest global network possible. His reasoning, why limit yourself when who knows where you might make the best solution connection?
Not every suggestion warrants action (but they all warrant a response)
Innovation comes from the producer — not from the customer.
- W. Edwards Deming
What happens when your open innovation network comes with ideas that are not the right fit for your organization? One of the failings of inviting the customer into the innovation experience is that companies do not actively manage that experience. If you think a customer having a poor purchasing experience can cause havoc you haven’t seen anything until you have seen a customer relationship poorly managed when it is invited into a closer discussion about product development and is ignored, or worse yet, discounted.
Including the customer in your innovation processes requires just as much planning and management as your marketing and sales management processes. To neglect this preparation, or poorly implement the management of the customer experience as you bring them into your organization’s systems and processes can not only damage the immediate client relationship it can actually damage their total lifetime value to your enterprise.
Before a customer suggests an idea that you know you cannot and will not implement, develop a plan to address that potential problem. Either, remove the circumstances in which that request might be formed by developing a set of clearly defined and constantly visible expectations against which you can manage their experience. Or, develop contingent strategies that acknowledge their contribution and defuse its impact. Failure to do so might result in disastrous consequences. Losing customers while trying to meet their needs is certainly not a good result from your innovation efforts.
After all, you are trying to meet their needs not create new ones that they will seek another provider to solve!
Afterlife: An Essential Guide To Design For Disassembly, by Alex Diener – Core77
February 1, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
What if we take another run at the idea that everything has a life beyond its immediate life? What if we decided that things must be reparable, recoverable, recyclable, re-purpose-able? How different would then be our innovation and design approaches? Our disposable society must be disassembled.
Afterlife: An Essential Guide To Design For Disassembly, by Alex Diener – Core77.
Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? (A call to arms from Seth Godin)
January 26, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
A genius looks at something that others are stuck on and gets the world unstuck.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin
Genius Marketer Markets Book Ingeniously
If Seth Godin was doing anything with his past books it was perhaps leading a trail of breadcrumbs to this current book, Linchpin. Where Tribes (2008) was a call to finding a following and to stake out a territory as a leader, Linchpin, released today (January 26th – Happy Australia* Day and Happy Republic Day in India, by the way) is more a call to arms. It reaches out, grabs your lapels (or collar, if you don’t have lapels, or neck if you don’t have a collar) and gives you a good shake. Linchpin directly addresses the anxiety of our time and offers a self-directed path away from that experience. It points toward a future where we can control how and where and with whom we will make meaning. And it does so with a joy and enthusiasm that are all Seth’s own.
I’ve long been an avid reader of Seth (to call him Mr. Godin, while proper, seems inappropriate given the long acquaintance we have had, however one-sided as it has been.) I’ve succumbed to the Ideavirus; I’ve Dipped; and, I’ve fallen for a Purple Cow. When the opportunity arose to make a donation to The Acumen Fund (established by Jacqueline Novogratz – featured at the number two slot on the book jacket blurb) in order to receive an advance copy of this book, I jumped at the chance. Contribute to a good cause? Read the latest from a favored author? What’s not to love? The genius of this is that I talked about the unique promotion of the book widely. I talked about my anticipation as I awaited my advance copy. I talked to people as I read the book. And now, I’m fulfilling my final obligation (willingly) as part of the original promotional bargain, I’m writing about the book. Like I said, ingenious genius.
Recognizing that what worked isn’t any longer
I have a background in education and have long recognized that the structure of much Western education continues to represent a response to the needs of the newly Industrial Age. I cannot begin to count the number of ages that have been (and gone) since that time. When Linchpin identified that educational indoctrination as something that prevents as from achieving our potential, in all its self-fulfilling messiness, I crowed. Finally, arguments long had in academic circles were to receive a wider airing and I couldn’t be happier.
If an aversion to risk is hardwired into us, taking that to its extreme and designing and living a system of education that only prepares us for managing that risk is a crying shame. Seth’s response, that we have created and continue to create a dispensable, interchangeable workforce when the present cries out for something much more robust, is refreshing to say the least. If we are what we do, then let’s do something new, because what we used to do won’t do any more. In short, Seth is inviting us to each become a “linchpin”.
Choosing to be something new and true
Keith Ferrazzi in his book, Never Eat Alone, talked about the power of abundance and notes that, “the currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.” Seth takes this concept of the power of generosity and, instead of applying it to networking, he applies it to personal insight, productivity and market growth. Being generous, being capable, and being indispensable – in short, being a linchpin – “leads to more opportunities and ultimately a payoff for everyone involved.”
In this book, Seth wrestles with what it means to be a linchpin. It isn’t glamorous. It isn’t necessarily singular. What it is, is essential to organizational success. With the linchpin an organization frays and begins to fall (in some cases fly) apart. Linchpins, through their perseverance, talent and charm, create organizational momentum. Their self-awareness of their capabilities, combined with the application of that knowledge and the soundness of their judgments make their contribution to organizations exponential in terms of impact.
On the benefit of hard labor
Perhaps where Linchpin seemed to really come into its own for me was when Seth began to re-frame the concept of work. He offers up the concept of hard work as something physical, or boring, or mundane; then he concludes that perhaps the important work, the investment of our emotional selves in our efforts, is a more important form of hard work. The emotional life of the workforce is often relegated to the backwaters of Human Resources practices, something around which everyone should tread lightly. Seth, gloriously wades into the middle of this and calls out emotional labor for what it is.
Having done my share of work both in the human resources domain and in the volunteer world, where emotional laboring is the order of the day, to have someone describe that work accurately as “a gift” is wonderful. It requires engagement. It demands the best of us. It draws on our creativity, or passions, our insight, our willingness to take risks and to be generous. I love that this kind of work lies at the heart of being a linchpin in Seth’s eyes.
The job is not your work; what you do with your heart and soul is the work.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin
Make your own way – make art through connection
One of the only challenges I would have had with the linchpin concept was that for all its generosity of spirit this was obviously only going to be an individualized call to action. What I wanted, certainly needed, was an understanding of how being a linchpin connected to others. After all, that’s what a linchpin does, it holds stuff together. Just when was getting worried, I was granted comfort when read into the chapter “The Culture of Connection” with the lead sub-header, “The Linchpin Can’t Succeed in Isolation.”
After all, for a linchpin to be effective, they need the connection of others. Because if they are not connecting, and giving, what the heck are they doing? Take a look at Linchpin, I think this book is not only an invaluable tool I think it is a great and necessary call to action.
*The Sir Donald Bradman reference (p.62) was especially appreciated, Seth.
Bill Gates’ 2010 Annual Letter focuses on Innovation
January 25, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Gates: This is my second annual letter. The focus of this year’s letter is innovation and how it can make the difference between a bleak future and a bright one.
2009 was the first year my full-time work was as co-chair of the foundation, along with Melinda and my dad. It’s been an incredible year and I enjoyed having lots of time to meet with the innovators working on some of the world’s most important problems. I got to go out and talk with people making progress in the field, ranging from teachers in North Carolina to health workers fighting polio in India to dairy farmers in Kenya. Seeing the work firsthand reminds me of how urgent the needs are as well as how challenging it is to get all the right pieces to come together. I love my new job and feel lucky to get to focus my time on these problems. The full letter is here.
Innovation Is Not A Strategy
January 19, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Why Blue Sky Thinking Does Not A Blue Ocean Make
Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.
- Sun Tzu
One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
The confused merging of strategy (specifically strategy formulation) and innovation in business circles is alarming. Both strategic thinking and thinking about innovation require a disciplined approach, especially if we desire to improve our practice in either area over time. By conflating these two associated, yet separate concepts, we are denying the clear role that each plays in the ongoing success and health of an enterprise. Unfortunately, by positing that (re)separation we are swimming against the tide.
Strategy should provide a picture of the organization as it want to look in the future. Strategy is vision directed at what the organization should be, and not how the organization will get there. We define strategy as the framework which guides those choices that determine the nature and direction of an organization.- Charles Kepner & Benjamin Tregoe
While strategy, in its purest form, is a clear demarcation of what an enterprise wants to become as defined by what it will and will not do, innovation is different in that it is focused directly on the activities to create and enact something new. Does innovation tie to strategy? Absolutely. Strategy is an essential antecedent to innovation. Without it an organization’s resources may be miss-spent or wasted in fruitless pursuits. Strategy points the way and innovation is one of the ways in which its vision is accomplished.
The Desire To Swim In A Deep Blue Sea
One of the most compelling ways in which innovation may be seen to be directly derived from strategy may be found in the work of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne the authors of, Blue Ocean Strategy. In this book they describe a pattern of behavior identified in action over 100 years and across 30 industries in which strategy is driven not from “me-too-ism” but from truly unique differentiation. The companies they describe have successfully created “blue oceans” of uncontested market space priming themselves for growth. Such strategic practices, which the authors termed “value innovation,” have helped these companies build tremendous leaps in value for both themselves and their buyers; their actions render rivals obsolete and unleash hidden demand.
The kind of innovation that Kim and Mauborgne describe demands a fundamental understanding of the business that you are in to be able to develop a clear strategy to achieve your “blue ocean.” They propose a lens for assessing your business that is tied to a specific sequence of questions relating to: buyer utility (the reason why a mass of people might buy a product or service), price (its accessibility to buyers), cost (linking cost to produce to the profitability of your strategic price), and adoption (the hurdles to the business idea represented by the blue ocean.) Armed with answers to the questions they propose you can then determine where and how best to innovate.
We’re Going Down, Way Down
One of the primary tools for determining the level of investment as a result of the strategy formulation is a relatively simple nine box matrix called the Product / Market Matrix. This tool was originally developed by Igor Ansoff in 1957 in his article in the Harvard Business review titled, “Strategies for Diversification”. The matrix identifies a range of options for investment based on the core competencies of the organization. It facilitates deep introspection so that a commonly held vision of the organization’s key capabilities, critical concerns, and commitment to act can be understood. This tool allows an organization’s strategic stakeholders to essentially put the organization “on the couch” to conduct the business equivalent of a psychoanalysis and arrive at the truth of what is and is not feasible.
Within the Product/Market Matrix you can also clearly see where “blue oceans” might be found or created. Look to the bottom right of the matrix. You can also see how great the level of effort it may be to create a “blue ocean” from scratch in this context. It will require a significant commitment of the organization’s resources in order to make the desired market a viable reality. And that requires being able to answer the hardest question in strategy formulation…
What Won’t You Do?
The most important question that can be asked to test the limits and value of a strategy is,
“What won’t we do as we implement this strategy?” In the answer to that question lies the extent and value of the focus that strategy formulation represents. If the answer is, “Nothing. We will do anything,” then the strategy may be deemed to be worthless. All strategy formulation should enable the strategic stakeholders to clearly define what success looks like and what will be done to accomplish that goal.
The mark of a valuable strategy, one that will help you define the focus of your organization’s resources, time and energy, is one that more clearly tells you and your organization what you will not pursue. It tells you in which products and services to invest. This assessment of emphasis will also determine how much effort, resources, and commitment the organization will put behind specific parts of the business in order to achieve the strategy. It will set priority for your implementation efforts, including the innovation focus.
How Will You Get There From Here
Too many organizations confuse strategy and innovation. They conflate them unwittingly, or worse yet, don’t know the difference and treat them as interchangeable synonyms. That is simply not the case. One must follow the other. And they each require the other to be in place for them to be effective. Without a clear strategic framework to guide decision making and resource allocation most attempts to innovate will result in failure. And without the clear application of innovation thinking and execution, the likelihood of an organization’s strategic goals being attained is minimal at best.
Ignite Princeton – March 2nd – 7:00pm – Nassau Inn, Princeton NJ
January 19, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
What is Ignite?
If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers. This is Princeton’s first Ignite Event.
Be there! It should be a fun night.
Attend Ignite Princeton – Click here!
For more on Ignite events go here.
Twitter: DrewCM
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