Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovation. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
50 Ways to Foster a Sustainable Culture of Innovation - Idea Champions - Mitch Ditkoff
Note From Jim:
Are you innovative? Do you foster innovation? The 50 suggestions made by the very impressive Mitch Ditkoff are sure to assist your mastery.
Of these 50, my top 10 favorites:
2. Wherever you can, whenever you can, always drive fear out of the workplace. Fear is "Public Enemy #1" of an innovative culture.
5. Make new mistakes.
6. As far as the future is concerned, don't speculate on what might happen, but imagine what you can make happen.
14. Embrace and celebrate failure. 50 to 70 per cent of all new product innovations fail at even the most successful companies. The main difference between companies who succeed at innovation and those who don't isn't their rate of success -- it's the fact that successful companies have a LOT of ideas, pilots, and product innovations in the pipeline.
23. Make sure people are working on the right issues. Identify specific business challenges to focus on. Be able to frame these issues as questions that start with the words, "How can we?"
27. Make customers your innovation partners, while realizing that customers are often limited to incremental innovations, not breakthrough ones.
32. Avoid analysis paralysis. Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction
33. Before reaching closure on any course of action, seek alternatives. Make it a discipline to seek the idea after the "best" idea emerges.
35. A great source of new ideas are people that are new to the company. Get new hires together and tap their brainpower and imagination.
42. Give your people specific, compelling, and measurable innovation goals.
Best everyway & always - Jim
*****
Access Mitch's Article: http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/12/50_ways_to_fost_1.shtml
Mitch Ditkoff is the co-founder and President of Idea Champions, a highly acclaimed management consulting and training company, headquartered in Woodstock, NY. He specializes in helping forward thinking organizations go beyond business as usual, originate breakthrough products and services, and establish dynamic, sustainable cultures of innovation.
Educated at Lafayette College and Brown University, Mitch has worked with a wide variety of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies who have realized the need to do something different in order to succeed in today's rapidly changing marketplace. These clients include: GE, Merck, AT&T, Allianz, Lucent Technologies, NBC Universal, Goodyear, A&E Television Networks, General Mills, MTV Networks, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a host of others.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
HBR Blog Network.Where You Sit Determines What You See - Ron Ashkenas
by Ron Ashkenas
8:00 AM November 6, 2012
Excerpts:
... all of us have biases that influence how we interpret events. To some extent we see what we unconsciously want to see
If you assume that these people perceive the assignment or challenge in the same way that you do, you'll be severely frustrated or disappointed. In fact, you'll be on much firmer ground if you start with the assumption that each person comes to the table with a different spin on the situation.
... [with] different perceptions of "the problem" the team easily could have become trapped in unproductive blaming or hardened their positions. Fortunately, the team leader understood the different perceptions and encouraged everyone to listen, repeat, and appreciate each others' starting points. Eventually each side realized that both positions were valid, which opened up the possibility of joint problem solving.
Of course, overcoming perceptual bias is not a one-time exercise. Just because the people in our example learned how to work together on one project doesn't mean that they won't revert back to their earlier blinders when they reenter their regular environments. In fact, there is a Stockholm syndrome effect for most people in organizations, in which they take on the biases and attitudes of those around them.
All of us see the world in different ways — which may make alignment that much harder, but at least makes things a lot more interesting.
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.
More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas ...More on: Execution, Leading teams, Managing yourself :
http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2012/11/where-you-sit-determines-what.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
8:00 AM November 6, 2012
Excerpts:
... all of us have biases that influence how we interpret events. To some extent we see what we unconsciously want to see
If you assume that these people perceive the assignment or challenge in the same way that you do, you'll be severely frustrated or disappointed. In fact, you'll be on much firmer ground if you start with the assumption that each person comes to the table with a different spin on the situation.
... [with] different perceptions of "the problem" the team easily could have become trapped in unproductive blaming or hardened their positions. Fortunately, the team leader understood the different perceptions and encouraged everyone to listen, repeat, and appreciate each others' starting points. Eventually each side realized that both positions were valid, which opened up the possibility of joint problem solving.
Of course, overcoming perceptual bias is not a one-time exercise. Just because the people in our example learned how to work together on one project doesn't mean that they won't revert back to their earlier blinders when they reenter their regular environments. In fact, there is a Stockholm syndrome effect for most people in organizations, in which they take on the biases and attitudes of those around them.
All of us see the world in different ways — which may make alignment that much harder, but at least makes things a lot more interesting.
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.
More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas ...More on: Execution, Leading teams, Managing yourself :
http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2012/11/where-you-sit-determines-what.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Friday, February 10, 2012
CIOs as Revolutionaries? Technology Spurring Change Among Carriers - PropertyCasualty360.com
http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2012/02/09/cios-as-revolutionaries-technology-spurring-change
No longer supporting players, Deloitte views CIOs as leaders in innovation.
By ROBERT REGIS HYLE, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM
February 9, 2012
In its 2012 Global Insurance Outlook, Deloitte Research insurance leader Sam Friedman issues an interesting description of technology leaders in the insurance industry. He describes their work as “revolutionary,” and points out the important decisions CIOs make today are less about software or reengineering processes than they are about transformation.
“CIOs are evolving into key players within the C-suite to develop and execute strategy,” he says. “They are expected to be transformational.”
Technology today is viewed as a way to change the business culture within an insurance company.
“Maybe it’s a culture that’s insulated in the sense they always do things in-house, work with existing systems, and adapt the best they can with the systems in place,” says Friedman. “Now [CIOs] are being asked to come up with more ambitious game plans to change the culture and the approach—and not just technologically, but from a business operations standpoint. Technology facilitates the business operation.”
The C-suite within an insurance company has expanded in the last few years, explains Friedman. The CEOs, CFOs, and COOs remain lead players, but newer titles—chief risk officers, chief information officers or chief technology officers—are playing important roles in the enterprise.
“Their roles are not simply to take marching orders from the C-suite and execute strategies,” he says. “They have a more influential seat at the table in terms of setting strategy, planning how that strategy will be executed, and having a say on what resources will be available—particularly outside resources like software and the people involved.”
Because so much technology today is being outsourced—in part because of the current growth in cloud computing—technology leaders need to perform a tremendous amount of due diligence, explains Friedman. Outsourcing requires carriers to put a great deal of faith in the infrastructure and the personnel from outside the organization.
Friedman concedes it is difficult to look at insurance CIOs as revolutionaries since the insurance has been known as a less than revolutionary type of business.
“Insurance tends to change slowly,” he says. “Product development is incremental. You don’t have the introduction of a revolutionary product that changes the landscape very often. Technology is an area where you can bring transformational change within insurance. The whole decision to outsource to a cloud is revolutionary to many insurance companies that either kept patching their legacy systems or kept reinventing the wheel in house.”
Social media is not viewed as a transformative tool and is mostly used as a marketing tool for insurance carriers to interact with policyholders on social networking sites such as Facebook. But Friedman believes IT leaders need to look at social media as a collaboration tool within an organization, particularly for multi-state or multi-national carriers where employees are not in the same office or even in the same country.
Friedman points out that at Deloitte, the social media site Yammer is becoming an important tool the research firm uses to conduct business day to day. Deloitte facilitates knowledge management by setting up internal Yammer sites to discuss issues in real time rather than brainstorming on a conference call.
“Why do that instead of using the telephone?” Friedman asks. “What we found is on a call someone is leading it and sometimes people are hesitant to speak out. The experience we’ve had with Yammer is people are much more interactive in the social media platform rather than on the telephone. There seems to be more content generated and information exchanged than on the phone or in a live meeting. [Workers] seem to be more open on the social media platform.”
Friedman believes the same thing is happening within insurance organizations. For example, the person in charge of distributor relations at a carrier could hold a session to deal with their independent agents to discuss a new product or a new twist on an existing product like telematics, or strategic planning for product development.
“Rather than having conference calls and live meetings, maybe it’s less expensive and perhaps more effective through social media,” he says. “There are many other services out there. The software itself is secondary. It’s really about transformation for the business operation. The CIO can lead that.”
Most insurers have a social media policy in place, but Friedman wonders how carriers are quantifying and benchmarking what they are accomplishing—particularly in contrast to their competition. Carriers need analytics tools to answer those questions.
“There’s work going on to try and solve [benchmarking issues] through advanced analytics, it’s just a matter of what the field of information is going to be and how it is weighed against the competition,” he says.
Analytics is the wave that is overcoming any sort of internal objections, points out Friedman.
“It’s such a natural transition to the business,” he says. “My only surprise is it’s taken so long to take off. It’s being heavily leveraged to red flag inflated or fraudulent claims. [Analytics] always had a strong element in underwriting and with smaller accounts you can leverage it to make decisions and save the underwriter’s expertise for more complex accounts.”
Friedman also is excited by the new hardware for agents and consumers: the smartphone.
“Think of all the things you can do from a smartphone,” he says. “It is the most insurance-friendly device invented in a long time.”
Policyholders can document an accident with a still photo or a video, write all the details of the accident on the phone’s memo function and email it to the insurance company, and go online through the an insurance app and the GPS function will tell them where the closest repair facility is located. Customers also can get quotes on their smartphone.
“It’s an amazing device,” says Friedman. “It can transform how an insurance company does business and it’s all under the CIOs purview.”
Many functions also are delivered for tablets. A life salesperson can sit down with a prospect and rather than printing out policy details or having the prospect hunch over and look at the laptop, they can present the policy to the customer on their tablet.
“This is the revolution being led by the CIOs,” says Friedman. “CIOs are the ones bringing these ideas to the C-suite and the board of directors to differentiate [the insurer] from the competition. CIOs are no longer just middle managers.”
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2012/02/09/cios-as-revolutionaries-technology-spurring-change
Access Deloitte Insurance Outlook 2012: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deloitte.com%2Fassets%2FDcom-Sweden%2FLocal%2520Assets%2FDocuments%2FDeloitte-FSI-Global-Insurance-Outlook-2012.pdf&ei=ryU1T8TzHOP00gGHq-HQCQ&usg=AFQjCNFL42xA35uXRtec-ztP-jBYqqHJdg&sig2=gm9ZBcYvVVST9uZkJTD1JA
No longer supporting players, Deloitte views CIOs as leaders in innovation.
By ROBERT REGIS HYLE, PROPERTYCASUALTY360.COM
February 9, 2012
In its 2012 Global Insurance Outlook, Deloitte Research insurance leader Sam Friedman issues an interesting description of technology leaders in the insurance industry. He describes their work as “revolutionary,” and points out the important decisions CIOs make today are less about software or reengineering processes than they are about transformation.
“CIOs are evolving into key players within the C-suite to develop and execute strategy,” he says. “They are expected to be transformational.”
Technology today is viewed as a way to change the business culture within an insurance company.
“Maybe it’s a culture that’s insulated in the sense they always do things in-house, work with existing systems, and adapt the best they can with the systems in place,” says Friedman. “Now [CIOs] are being asked to come up with more ambitious game plans to change the culture and the approach—and not just technologically, but from a business operations standpoint. Technology facilitates the business operation.”
The C-suite within an insurance company has expanded in the last few years, explains Friedman. The CEOs, CFOs, and COOs remain lead players, but newer titles—chief risk officers, chief information officers or chief technology officers—are playing important roles in the enterprise.
“Their roles are not simply to take marching orders from the C-suite and execute strategies,” he says. “They have a more influential seat at the table in terms of setting strategy, planning how that strategy will be executed, and having a say on what resources will be available—particularly outside resources like software and the people involved.”
Because so much technology today is being outsourced—in part because of the current growth in cloud computing—technology leaders need to perform a tremendous amount of due diligence, explains Friedman. Outsourcing requires carriers to put a great deal of faith in the infrastructure and the personnel from outside the organization.
Friedman concedes it is difficult to look at insurance CIOs as revolutionaries since the insurance has been known as a less than revolutionary type of business.
“Insurance tends to change slowly,” he says. “Product development is incremental. You don’t have the introduction of a revolutionary product that changes the landscape very often. Technology is an area where you can bring transformational change within insurance. The whole decision to outsource to a cloud is revolutionary to many insurance companies that either kept patching their legacy systems or kept reinventing the wheel in house.”
Social media is not viewed as a transformative tool and is mostly used as a marketing tool for insurance carriers to interact with policyholders on social networking sites such as Facebook. But Friedman believes IT leaders need to look at social media as a collaboration tool within an organization, particularly for multi-state or multi-national carriers where employees are not in the same office or even in the same country.
Friedman points out that at Deloitte, the social media site Yammer is becoming an important tool the research firm uses to conduct business day to day. Deloitte facilitates knowledge management by setting up internal Yammer sites to discuss issues in real time rather than brainstorming on a conference call.
“Why do that instead of using the telephone?” Friedman asks. “What we found is on a call someone is leading it and sometimes people are hesitant to speak out. The experience we’ve had with Yammer is people are much more interactive in the social media platform rather than on the telephone. There seems to be more content generated and information exchanged than on the phone or in a live meeting. [Workers] seem to be more open on the social media platform.”
Friedman believes the same thing is happening within insurance organizations. For example, the person in charge of distributor relations at a carrier could hold a session to deal with their independent agents to discuss a new product or a new twist on an existing product like telematics, or strategic planning for product development.
“Rather than having conference calls and live meetings, maybe it’s less expensive and perhaps more effective through social media,” he says. “There are many other services out there. The software itself is secondary. It’s really about transformation for the business operation. The CIO can lead that.”
Most insurers have a social media policy in place, but Friedman wonders how carriers are quantifying and benchmarking what they are accomplishing—particularly in contrast to their competition. Carriers need analytics tools to answer those questions.
“There’s work going on to try and solve [benchmarking issues] through advanced analytics, it’s just a matter of what the field of information is going to be and how it is weighed against the competition,” he says.
Analytics is the wave that is overcoming any sort of internal objections, points out Friedman.
“It’s such a natural transition to the business,” he says. “My only surprise is it’s taken so long to take off. It’s being heavily leveraged to red flag inflated or fraudulent claims. [Analytics] always had a strong element in underwriting and with smaller accounts you can leverage it to make decisions and save the underwriter’s expertise for more complex accounts.”
Friedman also is excited by the new hardware for agents and consumers: the smartphone.
“Think of all the things you can do from a smartphone,” he says. “It is the most insurance-friendly device invented in a long time.”
Policyholders can document an accident with a still photo or a video, write all the details of the accident on the phone’s memo function and email it to the insurance company, and go online through the an insurance app and the GPS function will tell them where the closest repair facility is located. Customers also can get quotes on their smartphone.
“It’s an amazing device,” says Friedman. “It can transform how an insurance company does business and it’s all under the CIOs purview.”
Many functions also are delivered for tablets. A life salesperson can sit down with a prospect and rather than printing out policy details or having the prospect hunch over and look at the laptop, they can present the policy to the customer on their tablet.
“This is the revolution being led by the CIOs,” says Friedman. “CIOs are the ones bringing these ideas to the C-suite and the board of directors to differentiate [the insurer] from the competition. CIOs are no longer just middle managers.”
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://www.propertycasualty360.com/2012/02/09/cios-as-revolutionaries-technology-spurring-change
Access Deloitte Insurance Outlook 2012: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCoQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.deloitte.com%2Fassets%2FDcom-Sweden%2FLocal%2520Assets%2FDocuments%2FDeloitte-FSI-Global-Insurance-Outlook-2012.pdf&ei=ryU1T8TzHOP00gGHq-HQCQ&usg=AFQjCNFL42xA35uXRtec-ztP-jBYqqHJdg&sig2=gm9ZBcYvVVST9uZkJTD1JA
Friday, January 27, 2012
Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? - HBR Blog Network
by Bill Taylor
12:00 PM Thursday January 26, 2012
Comments (12)
Tom Kelly, general manager of IDEO, the world-renowned design firm, likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." What goes for novelists goes for leaders searching to craft a novel strategy for their company, a new product for their customers, or a better way to organize their employees. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders never stop learning.
Today, the challenge for leaders at every level is no longer just to out-hustle, out-muscle, and out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future and help your organization get there before anyone else does. Which is why a defining challenge of leadership is whether you can answer a question that is as simple as it is powerful: Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
Of course, learning new things is all about exposing yourself to new ideas. So if you want to learn faster, you've got to think differently about where new ideas come from. Here are a few ideas I've developed over the years about what turns leaders into learners — three "habits of mind" that will help you keep learning as fast as the world is changing.
[1] First, the best leaders (and learners) have the widest field of vision. After Steve Jobs died, I, like everyone else, read and watched as much as I could about his life and work. One of my favorite sources of insights was an old PBS documentary called "Triumph of the Nerds," in which luminaries of Silicon Valley talked about what inspired their innovations. As Jobs talked about the original Macintosh computer, he talked less about semiconductors and software than he did about painting, music, and art.
"Ultimately it [creativity] comes down to taste," he explained. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you're doing...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
Translation: You're not going to learn faster (or deeper) than everyone else if you seek inspiration from the same sources as everyone else. Educators know that we learn the most when we encounter people, experiences, and ideas that are the least like us. And yet, we spend most of our time with people and in places that are the most like us — our old colleagues, our familiar offices, our reassuring neighborhoods. If you want to learn faster, look and live more broadly.
[2] Second, and more tactically, the best source of new ideas in your field can be old ideas from unrelated fields. A few months ago, after I gave a talk about innovation to a gathering of executives from the world of food retailing, one frustrated member of the audience asked for some advice about dealing with her boss. "My boss likes to say, 'I want a totally new idea — and three examples of where that idea has worked before.'" The audience roared in recognition of the oxymoronic absurdity of the boss's sentiment, as did I.
But then I got to thinking...Often, it turns out, a powerful source of "totally new" ideas in one industry can be standard operating procedures from another industry — well-established practices that look downright revolutionary when you simply move them from one place to another.
For example, leaders at Lexus identified all sorts of new ideas to reshape the customer experience for luxury cars by searching for clues at brands such as Four Seasons and Apple — companies that were great at what they did, even though what they did had nothing to do with automobiles. Physicians and administrators from London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children redesigned many of their surgical procedures by studying how Ferrari's Formula One racing team handled pit stops.
Sure, there's always a place for R&D as research & development. But there's also a place for R&D as rip-off and duplicate. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom that have come to define so many industries.
[3] Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.
We all want to be better leaders. And the best leaders, it turns out, are the most insatiable learners. How are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, published January 4, 2011. Follow him at twitter.com/practicallyrad.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2012/01/are_you_learning_as_fast_as_th.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
12:00 PM Thursday January 26, 2012
Comments (12)
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Tom Kelly, general manager of IDEO, the world-renowned design firm, likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." What goes for novelists goes for leaders searching to craft a novel strategy for their company, a new product for their customers, or a better way to organize their employees. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders never stop learning.
Today, the challenge for leaders at every level is no longer just to out-hustle, out-muscle, and out-maneuver the competition. It is to out-think the competition in ways big and small, to develop a unique point of view about the future and help your organization get there before anyone else does. Which is why a defining challenge of leadership is whether you can answer a question that is as simple as it is powerful: Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
Of course, learning new things is all about exposing yourself to new ideas. So if you want to learn faster, you've got to think differently about where new ideas come from. Here are a few ideas I've developed over the years about what turns leaders into learners — three "habits of mind" that will help you keep learning as fast as the world is changing.
[1] First, the best leaders (and learners) have the widest field of vision. After Steve Jobs died, I, like everyone else, read and watched as much as I could about his life and work. One of my favorite sources of insights was an old PBS documentary called "Triumph of the Nerds," in which luminaries of Silicon Valley talked about what inspired their innovations. As Jobs talked about the original Macintosh computer, he talked less about semiconductors and software than he did about painting, music, and art.
"Ultimately it [creativity] comes down to taste," he explained. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you're doing...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."
Translation: You're not going to learn faster (or deeper) than everyone else if you seek inspiration from the same sources as everyone else. Educators know that we learn the most when we encounter people, experiences, and ideas that are the least like us. And yet, we spend most of our time with people and in places that are the most like us — our old colleagues, our familiar offices, our reassuring neighborhoods. If you want to learn faster, look and live more broadly.
[2] Second, and more tactically, the best source of new ideas in your field can be old ideas from unrelated fields. A few months ago, after I gave a talk about innovation to a gathering of executives from the world of food retailing, one frustrated member of the audience asked for some advice about dealing with her boss. "My boss likes to say, 'I want a totally new idea — and three examples of where that idea has worked before.'" The audience roared in recognition of the oxymoronic absurdity of the boss's sentiment, as did I.
But then I got to thinking...Often, it turns out, a powerful source of "totally new" ideas in one industry can be standard operating procedures from another industry — well-established practices that look downright revolutionary when you simply move them from one place to another.
For example, leaders at Lexus identified all sorts of new ideas to reshape the customer experience for luxury cars by searching for clues at brands such as Four Seasons and Apple — companies that were great at what they did, even though what they did had nothing to do with automobiles. Physicians and administrators from London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children redesigned many of their surgical procedures by studying how Ferrari's Formula One racing team handled pit stops.
Sure, there's always a place for R&D as research & development. But there's also a place for R&D as rip-off and duplicate. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions and conventional wisdom that have come to define so many industries.
[3] Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.
We all want to be better leaders. And the best leaders, it turns out, are the most insatiable learners. How are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
William C. Taylor is cofounder of Fast Company magazine and author of Practically Radical: Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, published January 4, 2011. Follow him at twitter.com/practicallyrad.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/taylor/2012/01/are_you_learning_as_fast_as_th.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Developing Mindful Leaders - Harvard Business Review - Polly LaBarre
HBR Blog Network.
3:32 PM Friday December 30, 2011
by Polly LaBarre
Comments (32)
Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pos" and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience? What if, instead of trying to fix people, we assumed that they were already full of potential and created an environment that promoted their long-term well-being?
In other words, what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda?
That was the question Todd Pierce asked himself in 2006 after years of experimenting with the full menu of trainings, meetings, and competency models in his capacity as CIO of biotechnology giant Genentech. He had just scoured the development reports of some 700 individuals in the IT department and found that "not one of them had an ounce of inspiration. I remember sitting there and saying, 'There's got to be a another way.'"
At the time, Pierce was benefiting personally from work with a personal coach and had recently woken up to the power of the practice of mindfulness. He called in a kindred soul, Pamela Weiss, a long-time executive coach and meditation teacher, to help design an experiment that would cast out the traditional approach to leadership development to focus instead on helping people grow.
"If you want to transform an organization it's not about changing systems and processes so much as it's about changing the hearts and minds of people," says Weiss. "Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant technologies for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings."
Pierce and Weiss distilled a set of principles that form the basis of what became the "Personal Excellence Program" (PEP), now heading into its sixth year inside Genentech (Pierce left the company this fall after 11 years to join salesforce.com). Together, these pillars offer up a short course in unleashing human capability, resilience, compassion, and well-being (and they're unpacked in even more detail in Weiss and Pierce's entry).
As PEP heads into its sixth year at Genentech, some 800 people have participated in the program. (Weiss added a graduate curriculum and a student training program to create "PEPtators" as few people want the journey to end.) The impact has been nothing short of transformative for individuals and organization alike. When Pierce took over the IT department in 2002, its employee satisfaction scores were at rock bottom; four years into the program, the department ranked second in the company and is now consistently ranked among the best places to work in IT In the world (even in the wake of Genentech's 2009 merger with Roche Group — always a turbulent and dispiriting experience).
Pierce attributes that to "the emotional intelligence of people and the capacity to change" developed in PEP. But don't take his word for it. The data-obsessed Pierce commissioned a third path impact report on PEP. It came in glowing: 10-20% increase in employee satisfaction, 50% increase in employee collaboration, conflict management, and communication; 12% increase in customer satisfaction; and nearly three times the normal business impact.
"Through PEP we have created a smarter, more agile, and more responsive organization," says Pierce. "The reduction of suffering, the capacity to deal with difficulties, the level of engagement — these things are very powerful and you can't call a meeting to get them or give people stock options and have them. These are skills and qualities you have to cultivate and practice."
So how's this for a new year's resolution for hard-charging leaders: turn every ringing, pinging, tweeting, and blinking thing off — especially your mind — and just breathe.
Polly LaBarre is the Editorial Director of the Management Innovation eXchange.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/developing_mindful_leaders.html
3:32 PM Friday December 30, 2011
by Polly LaBarre
Comments (32)
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Organizations invest billions annually on a success curriculum known as "leadership development," which ends up leaving so much on the table. Training and development programs almost universally focus factory-like on inputs and outputs — absorb curriculum, check a box; learn a skill, advance a rung; submit to assessment, fix a problem. Likewise, they leave too many people behind with an elite selection process that fast-tracks "hi-pos" and essentially discards the rest. And they leave most people cold with flavor of the month remedies, off sites, immersions, and excursions — which produce little more than a grim legacy of fat binders gathering dust on shelves.
What if, instead of stuffing people with curricula, models, and competencies, we focused on deepening their sense of purpose, expanding their capability to navigate difficulty and complexity, and enriching their emotional resilience? What if, instead of trying to fix people, we assumed that they were already full of potential and created an environment that promoted their long-term well-being?
In other words, what if cultivating a successful inner life was front and center on the leadership agenda?
That was the question Todd Pierce asked himself in 2006 after years of experimenting with the full menu of trainings, meetings, and competency models in his capacity as CIO of biotechnology giant Genentech. He had just scoured the development reports of some 700 individuals in the IT department and found that "not one of them had an ounce of inspiration. I remember sitting there and saying, 'There's got to be a another way.'"
At the time, Pierce was benefiting personally from work with a personal coach and had recently woken up to the power of the practice of mindfulness. He called in a kindred soul, Pamela Weiss, a long-time executive coach and meditation teacher, to help design an experiment that would cast out the traditional approach to leadership development to focus instead on helping people grow.
"If you want to transform an organization it's not about changing systems and processes so much as it's about changing the hearts and minds of people," says Weiss. "Mindfulness is one of the all-time most brilliant technologies for helping to alleviate human suffering and for bringing out our extraordinary potential as human beings."
Pierce and Weiss distilled a set of principles that form the basis of what became the "Personal Excellence Program" (PEP), now heading into its sixth year inside Genentech (Pierce left the company this fall after 11 years to join salesforce.com). Together, these pillars offer up a short course in unleashing human capability, resilience, compassion, and well-being (and they're unpacked in even more detail in Weiss and Pierce's entry).
1. Developing people is a process — not an event. "Development is all too often considered a one-time event," says Weiss. She and Pierce designed PEP as a ten-month-long journey that unfolds in three phases, with big group meetings, regular small group sessions, individual coaching, peer coaching, and structured solo practice.
2. People don't grow from the neck up. Too much training focuses on the the mind — it's about transferring content. "We talk about the head, the heart, and the body," says Weiss. In fact, they do more than talk about it — they enact it every day at the start of every meeting. The "3-center check in" is the gateway drug to mindfulness. As Weiss describes it: "You close your eyes for a moment and you notice, 'What am I thinking — what's happening in my head center,' then you notice, 'What am I feeling — what's happening in my heart center.' then, 'What am I feeling — what's happening in my body.' It's a way in which people start paying attention and practicing mindfulness without ever practicing meditation."
3. Put mindfulness at the center (but don't call it that!). Weiss and her team were careful to keep the language of specific belief systems and religions out of PEP. The program revolves around three phases: reflection on and selection of a specific quality or capacity you want to work on (patience, decisiveness, courage); three months of cultivating the capacity for self-observation; and the hard work of turning insight into deliberate, dedicated, daily practice.
4. It's hard to grow alone. "People grow best in community," says Weiss. "People don't grow as well just reading a book, getting an online training, or just taking in information. There's an exponential impact in having people grow and learn together." That's why the PEP "pod" (small 6-8 person group) is the main vehicle throughout the year.
5. Everybody deserves to grow. Pierce felt strongly that PEP should be available to people across the board — not just the usual "stars" — and that it should be voluntary. "The program is by application and not declaration," he says.
As PEP heads into its sixth year at Genentech, some 800 people have participated in the program. (Weiss added a graduate curriculum and a student training program to create "PEPtators" as few people want the journey to end.) The impact has been nothing short of transformative for individuals and organization alike. When Pierce took over the IT department in 2002, its employee satisfaction scores were at rock bottom; four years into the program, the department ranked second in the company and is now consistently ranked among the best places to work in IT In the world (even in the wake of Genentech's 2009 merger with Roche Group — always a turbulent and dispiriting experience).
Pierce attributes that to "the emotional intelligence of people and the capacity to change" developed in PEP. But don't take his word for it. The data-obsessed Pierce commissioned a third path impact report on PEP. It came in glowing: 10-20% increase in employee satisfaction, 50% increase in employee collaboration, conflict management, and communication; 12% increase in customer satisfaction; and nearly three times the normal business impact.
"Through PEP we have created a smarter, more agile, and more responsive organization," says Pierce. "The reduction of suffering, the capacity to deal with difficulties, the level of engagement — these things are very powerful and you can't call a meeting to get them or give people stock options and have them. These are skills and qualities you have to cultivate and practice."
So how's this for a new year's resolution for hard-charging leaders: turn every ringing, pinging, tweeting, and blinking thing off — especially your mind — and just breathe.
Polly LaBarre is the Editorial Director of the Management Innovation eXchange.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/developing_mindful_leaders.html
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Are Creative People More Dishonest? - HBS Working Knowledge
Research & Ideas
Published: December 7, 2011
Author: Carmen Nobel
In a series of studies, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely found that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative people. Furthermore, they showed that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior. It's a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking. Key concepts include:
.In his 1641 treatise, Meditations on First Philosophy, philosopher René Descartes introduced the concept of an "evil genius," a powerful force of nature who is equally clever and deceitful. Since then, the world has given us plenty of examples—Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, fictional Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko, and real-life Wall Street villain Bernie Madoff, to name a few. Not only were these classic bad guys unquestionably unethical, but all were inarguably creative in carrying out their bad behavior as well. Indeed, it's rare to hear anyone described as both evil and unoriginal.
This raises a question: Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?
"Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior."There certainly is, according to an article in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest," the authors report that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, they show that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.
It's a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking.
"In any organization, especially in contexts that are global and very competitive, there is so much focus on trying to be innovative and creative," says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. "But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they're doing is not morally wrong. So, Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior. Specifically, we decided to explore the idea that enhancing the motivation to think outside the box can drive individuals toward more dishonest decisions when facing ethical dilemmas."
Creativity and ambiguity
To begin their research, Gino and Ariely surveyed 99 employees across 17 departments at an American advertising agency, where some jobs—copywriting, for example—required much more creativity than others. In the anonymous survey, on a seven-point scale, the respondents indicated how likely they were to engage in various ethically questionable work behaviors such as "take home office supplies from work" and "inflate your business expense report." Respondents also evaluated scenarios describing a hypothetical person who has the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and then indicated, again on a seven-point scale, how likely they would be to behave unethically in each instance. Finally, the respondents reported how much creativity was required in their respective jobs, with three managers in the executive office rating the creativity level required in each department, as well.
Overall, the researchers learned, the higher the creativity required for the job, the higher the level of self-reported dishonesty.
Then, through a series of experimental studies, the researchers tested--and largely proved--the theory that creative people are more likely to exhibit unethical behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.
The first study tested the hypothesis that a naturally creative person is predisposed to dishonest behavior. (The week before the experiment, the participants, 71 university students, completed an online survey that included dispositional measures of creativity.) The experiment included a computerized task in which participants viewed 20 dots inside a diagonally bisected square. They were told to indicate whether there were more dots on the right side of the square or on the left, and that their answers would affect how well they would be compensated for taking part in the experiment: each "more-on-the-right" decision would earn them 10 times as much as a "left" decision.
In half the trials, it was obvious that one side of the square had more dots than the other—2 dots versus 18, for example. But in the other half, the task was a little more ambiguous, with several dots appearing near or on the line in the middle of the square. The researchers focused on the results of the "ambiguous" tasks, with the idea that these were the ones that allowed more room for interpretation—participants could easily misrepresent what they actually perceived and report "more on the right" in order to incur a higher payoff.
The results showed that participants who had scored high on the creativity scale were the most likely to fudge their answers for monetary gain.
"Ambiguity, having some room to justify our behavior, seems to be a really important component of explaining when and why we cross ethical boundaries, and these results show us that creativity helps with that process," Gino says. "It suggests that moral flexibility is the mechanism explaining why being in a creative mindset or being a creative person puts you more at risk to do the wrong thing."
The perils of inducing creativity
In another study, which included 111 university students, the researchers tested whether they could actively induce creativity, and whether doing so would temporarily induce dishonest behavior. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the "creative mindset" group and the control group. All were asked to construct sentences from sets of randomly positioned words. But in the creative mindset group, more than half of the sentences included words related to creativity: "novel," "imagination," "invention," "originality," and so on.
"We're not saying that creativity's bad, but we are saying that it can lead to problems."To test whether the creativity prime worked, the researchers asked participants to solve a cognitive puzzle created by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. Known as Duncker's candle problem, it presents participants with the task of affixing a candle to a wall in such a way that when lit, the candle won't drip wax on the floor. To complete the task, participants can use a box of tacks, a book of matches, and the candle. The ideal solution, which requires ingenuity, involves emptying the box, tacking the box to the wall as a candleholder, placing the candle inside, and lighting the candle with the match. The researchers found that 47.3 percent of participants in the creative mindset group solved the candle problem ideally, versus 26.8 percent in the control group.
Next, participants completed a series of computerized tasks, including the ambiguous dots-in-the-square task from the first study. The results showed that those in the creative mindset group were much more likely to give dishonest answers for monetary gain than those in the control group.
"These were simple studies, but they were powerful in showing that our ability to justify things is significantly greater if we are in a creative mindset or when we are creative people," Gino says.
That said, Gino is quick to add that she and Ariely are not suggesting that companies put the kibosh on innovation in order to keep dishonesty at bay.
"We're not saying that creativity is bad," Gino says. "But we are saying that it can lead to problems. And so the question from a manager's perspective is: How do you get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad outcomes?"
While "The Dark Side of Creativity" doesn't answer that question directly, Gino hopes that the research will remind innovative organizations not to give short shrift to ethics.
"As a manager, if you're highlighting the importance of being creative and innovative, it's important to make sure that you're stressing the presence of ethics, too," Gino says. "Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior."
About Faculty in this Article: Francesca Gino
Francesca Gino is an associate professor in the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School
Invitation to participate
Are you a manager at an organization that stresses the importance of creativity in the workplace? Do you have thoughts about how to encourage creativity while discouraging unethical behavior? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Francesca Gino directly at fgino@hbs.edu or follow her on Twitter, @francescagino.
Access Newsletter And Its Great Content: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6883.html?wknews=12072011
Published: December 7, 2011
Author: Carmen Nobel
In a series of studies, Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely found that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative people. Furthermore, they showed that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior. It's a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking. Key concepts include:
•In a series of experiments, the researchers found links between creativity and unethical behavior.
•Inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.
•Creativity is not necessarily bad, but managers would do well to consider how to structure the creative process to get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad ones.
.In his 1641 treatise, Meditations on First Philosophy, philosopher René Descartes introduced the concept of an "evil genius," a powerful force of nature who is equally clever and deceitful. Since then, the world has given us plenty of examples—Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, fictional Wall Street villain Gordon Gekko, and real-life Wall Street villain Bernie Madoff, to name a few. Not only were these classic bad guys unquestionably unethical, but all were inarguably creative in carrying out their bad behavior as well. Indeed, it's rare to hear anyone described as both evil and unoriginal.
This raises a question: Is there a link between creativity and unethical behavior?
"Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior."There certainly is, according to an article in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In "The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest," the authors report that inherently creative people tend to cheat more than noncreative types. Furthermore, they show that inducing creative behavior tends to induce unethical behavior.
It's a sobering thought in a corporate culture that champions out-of-the-box thinking.
"In any organization, especially in contexts that are global and very competitive, there is so much focus on trying to be innovative and creative," says Francesca Gino, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who wrote the article with Dan Ariely of Duke University. "But is creativity always good? We often hear of cases in which people use innovative behavior to create a sense that what they're doing is not morally wrong. So, Dan and I started wondering whether there is something about the creative process that triggers dishonest behavior. Specifically, we decided to explore the idea that enhancing the motivation to think outside the box can drive individuals toward more dishonest decisions when facing ethical dilemmas."
Creativity and ambiguity
To begin their research, Gino and Ariely surveyed 99 employees across 17 departments at an American advertising agency, where some jobs—copywriting, for example—required much more creativity than others. In the anonymous survey, on a seven-point scale, the respondents indicated how likely they were to engage in various ethically questionable work behaviors such as "take home office supplies from work" and "inflate your business expense report." Respondents also evaluated scenarios describing a hypothetical person who has the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and then indicated, again on a seven-point scale, how likely they would be to behave unethically in each instance. Finally, the respondents reported how much creativity was required in their respective jobs, with three managers in the executive office rating the creativity level required in each department, as well.
Overall, the researchers learned, the higher the creativity required for the job, the higher the level of self-reported dishonesty.
Then, through a series of experimental studies, the researchers tested--and largely proved--the theory that creative people are more likely to exhibit unethical behavior when faced with ethical dilemmas.
The first study tested the hypothesis that a naturally creative person is predisposed to dishonest behavior. (The week before the experiment, the participants, 71 university students, completed an online survey that included dispositional measures of creativity.) The experiment included a computerized task in which participants viewed 20 dots inside a diagonally bisected square. They were told to indicate whether there were more dots on the right side of the square or on the left, and that their answers would affect how well they would be compensated for taking part in the experiment: each "more-on-the-right" decision would earn them 10 times as much as a "left" decision.
In half the trials, it was obvious that one side of the square had more dots than the other—2 dots versus 18, for example. But in the other half, the task was a little more ambiguous, with several dots appearing near or on the line in the middle of the square. The researchers focused on the results of the "ambiguous" tasks, with the idea that these were the ones that allowed more room for interpretation—participants could easily misrepresent what they actually perceived and report "more on the right" in order to incur a higher payoff.
The results showed that participants who had scored high on the creativity scale were the most likely to fudge their answers for monetary gain.
"Ambiguity, having some room to justify our behavior, seems to be a really important component of explaining when and why we cross ethical boundaries, and these results show us that creativity helps with that process," Gino says. "It suggests that moral flexibility is the mechanism explaining why being in a creative mindset or being a creative person puts you more at risk to do the wrong thing."
The perils of inducing creativity
In another study, which included 111 university students, the researchers tested whether they could actively induce creativity, and whether doing so would temporarily induce dishonest behavior. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the "creative mindset" group and the control group. All were asked to construct sentences from sets of randomly positioned words. But in the creative mindset group, more than half of the sentences included words related to creativity: "novel," "imagination," "invention," "originality," and so on.
"We're not saying that creativity's bad, but we are saying that it can lead to problems."To test whether the creativity prime worked, the researchers asked participants to solve a cognitive puzzle created by the Gestalt psychologist Karl Duncker. Known as Duncker's candle problem, it presents participants with the task of affixing a candle to a wall in such a way that when lit, the candle won't drip wax on the floor. To complete the task, participants can use a box of tacks, a book of matches, and the candle. The ideal solution, which requires ingenuity, involves emptying the box, tacking the box to the wall as a candleholder, placing the candle inside, and lighting the candle with the match. The researchers found that 47.3 percent of participants in the creative mindset group solved the candle problem ideally, versus 26.8 percent in the control group.
Next, participants completed a series of computerized tasks, including the ambiguous dots-in-the-square task from the first study. The results showed that those in the creative mindset group were much more likely to give dishonest answers for monetary gain than those in the control group.
"These were simple studies, but they were powerful in showing that our ability to justify things is significantly greater if we are in a creative mindset or when we are creative people," Gino says.
That said, Gino is quick to add that she and Ariely are not suggesting that companies put the kibosh on innovation in order to keep dishonesty at bay.
"We're not saying that creativity is bad," Gino says. "But we are saying that it can lead to problems. And so the question from a manager's perspective is: How do you get the good outcomes of creativity without triggering the bad outcomes?"
While "The Dark Side of Creativity" doesn't answer that question directly, Gino hopes that the research will remind innovative organizations not to give short shrift to ethics.
"As a manager, if you're highlighting the importance of being creative and innovative, it's important to make sure that you're stressing the presence of ethics, too," Gino says. "Dan and I are of the hope that managers will start thinking about how to structure the creative process in such a way that they can keep ethics in check, triggering the good behavior without triggering the bad behavior."
About Faculty in this Article: Francesca Gino
Francesca Gino is an associate professor in the Negotiations, Organizations, and Markets Unit at Harvard Business School
Invitation to participate
Are you a manager at an organization that stresses the importance of creativity in the workplace? Do you have thoughts about how to encourage creativity while discouraging unethical behavior? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Francesca Gino directly at fgino@hbs.edu or follow her on Twitter, @francescagino.
Access Newsletter And Its Great Content: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6883.html?wknews=12072011
Friday, December 2, 2011
Procurement's Best-Priced Deal May Stifle Innovation- Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review
Michael Schrage
Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.
Procurement's Best-Priced Deal May Stifle Innovation
Every single innovation conversation I've had recently with business unit leaders, product managers and/or marketing executives invariably focuses on the importance of partnership and collaboration with their best suppliers and vendors. If anything, they wish their suppliers came forward with even more actionable and innovative ideas. Conversely, I have not had one conversation with a procurement executive or officer for whom an innovation partnership with vendors was mentioned as a corporate priority. What a disconnect.
When I politely point out procurement's role in selecting, shaping and paying for partnerships, the answer I get astonishes: We can reimburse our suppliers and partners out of another budget. In other words, innovation occurs when we bypass or disintermediate procurement. How healthy is that? What kind of cultural — and financial — signal does that send both to the firm and its vendors alike?
This dichotomy — schizophrenia is actually a better word — is a surefire invitation to conflict and dysfunction. Vendor/partners — who are compensated by procurement — end up having to explain away or conceal the bootleg or graymarket innovation projects they're billing for. Even worse, when suppliers seized by a great idea toil overnight and weekends to present it, procurement argues that this wasn't part of the budget and behaves (quite reasonably) as if it is going the extra mile to compensate the supplier.
This dynamic is unsustainable. Either procurement has to become a genuine facilitator, enabler and champion of the innovation ecosystem or companies have to downgrade and deemphasize the procurement process in order to make innovation a known corporate priority. Defining business processes and structures that inherently devalue and make difficult innovation opportunities is, quite literally, counter-productive.
Can strong procurement departments and strong innovation cultures co-exist? Yes, but only if the organization is honest about whether it creates more value by successful procurement or successful innovation.
The challenge is making procurement as explicitly accountable for enabling innovation as it is for controlling costs. Asymmetry is the enemy. Procurement's people have to enjoy comparable recognition and rewards for making a new product or service profitable as for, say, successfully consolidating a supplier segment or driving cost out of an outsourcing deal. Most organizations are excruciatingly aware when people get celebrated more for reducing spend rather than for procuring growth.
If this means that procurement has to be a better real-time partner to, say, manufacturing or marketing to make sure the money's there to pilot a reprogrammed machine tool or a Cloud-enabled social media promotion, then good. I have never come across a procurement department with a post-procurement "innovation budget" to fund emergent ideas or supplier-driven proposals. Procurement couldn't help but manage its selection criteria differently if it operationally lived with the knowledge that getting the best-priced deal was no longer good enough.
Similarly, other parts of the enterprise have to go beyond giving their requirements for procurement to turn into RFPs and engage in more productive collaboration. "Gaming" procurement to guarantee that a desired vendor becomes the "supplier of choice" is just as destructively manipulative as making "price" the centerpiece of a complex acquisition or marketing partnership. Successful partnerships mean that selection is the beginning, rather than the effective end, of how procurement's effectiveness is evaluated. In the same way that acquisitive organizations have become more savvy about TCO — Total Cost of Ownership — they should rethink TCP: the Total Cost of Procurement. If the monies saved on a contract significantly restrict or inhibit innovation-driven growth opportunities, then just how constructive was procurement's role?
The real-world drawback with this declaration of innovation interdependence is neither cultural nor operational. It's leadership. When procurement and marketing or procurement and operations disagree about what innovation opportunities truly offer value for money, the C-suite will frequently have to intervene. Realigning expectations around the most effective relationships between innovation and price is something top management must choose to do. This may seem counterintuitive in a time when executives are encouraged to delegate and empower. But, alas, the innovation disintermediation and disempowerment provoked by procurers with their eyes a little too focused on the bottom line have demanded this fundamental shift. If the C-suite isn't having candid conversations on precisely this issue, then the operational reality is that procurement is running innovation.
Michael Schrage Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2011/12/killing-innovation-in-the-proc.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Yves Rossy: Fly with the Jetman | Video on TED.com
Yves Rossy: Fly with the Jetman Video on TED.com
On May 7 of this year, Swiss pilot Yves Rossy stepped out of a helicopter 8,000 feet above the Grand Canyon and ... took off. Wearing a rigid wing powered by four model jet turbine engines, Rossy flew for eight minutes over the mile-deep trench, soaring over the red rocks before parachuting down to the Colorado River far below. It's the latest exploit in a life powered by one dream: to fly like a bird.
Wearing his single wing, Rossy really flies, steering with the movements of his body. In the last couple of years he has crossed the English Channel, flown over the Swiss Alps and performed aerobatic loops around a hot-air balloon; for his next quest, he is developing a new kind of parachute that will enable him to fly as low as 200 meters.
Amazing!
Video 14:49
Talks
Yves Rossy: Fly with the Jetman
SpeakersYves Rossy: Jetman
Strapped to a jet-powered wing, Yves Rossy is the Jetman -- flying free, his body as the rudder, above the Swiss Alps and the Grand Canyon. After a powerful short film shows how it works, Rossy takes the TEDGlobal stage to share the experience and thrill of flying.
Why you should listen to him:
On May 7 of this year, Swiss pilot Yves Rossy stepped out of a helicopter 8,000 feet above the Grand Canyon and ... took off. Wearing a rigid wing powered by four model jet turbine engines, Rossy flew for eight minutes over the mile-deep trench, soaring over the red rocks before parachuting down to the Colorado River far below. It's the latest exploit in a life powered by one dream: to fly like a bird.
Wearing his single wing, Rossy really flies, steering with the movements of his body. In the last couple of years he has crossed the English Channel, flown over the Swiss Alps and performed aerobatic loops around a hot-air balloon; for his next quest, he is developing a new kind of parachute that will enable him to fly as low as 200 meters.
"It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Yves Rossy!"
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-11-15&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email
Thursday, September 29, 2011
10 Clues to Opportunity - Booze & Company - Strategy+Business
Published: August 23, 2011
/ Autumn 2011 / Issue 64
Market anomalies and incongruities may point the way to your next breakthrough strategy.
During their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, transatlantic cruise lines such as the Hamburg America Line and the White Star Line transported tens of millions of passengers between Europe and the United States. By the 1960s, however, their business was being threatened by the rise of a disruptive new enterprise, namely, nonstop transatlantic flights. As it happened, the cruise ship lines had one potential strategy with which to save their business: vacation cruises. Starting in the 1930s, some of these lines had sailed to the Caribbean during the winter, thus using their boats when rough seas made the Atlantic impassable. And in 1964, when a new port was opened in Miami, Fla., the pleasure cruise business began to boom.
But the great cruise lines missed this breakthrough opportunity. They saw their profitability fall while dozens of startups, including Royal Caribbean and Carnival, retrofitted existing ships to offer pleasure cruises and built an entirely new travel and leisure category that continues to grow today.
Managers and entrepreneurs walk past lucrative opportunities all the time, and later kick themselves when someone else exploits the strategy they overlooked. Why does this happen? It’s often because of the natural human tendency known to psychologists as confirmation bias: People tend to notice data that confirms their existing attitudes and beliefs, and ignore or discredit information that challenges them.
Although it is difficult to overcome confirmation bias, it is not impossible. Managers can increase their skill at spotting hidden opportunities by learning to pay attention to the subtle clues all around them. These are often contradictions, incongruities, and anomalies that don’t jibe with most of the prevailing assumptions about what should happen. Here is my own “top 10” field guide to clues for hidden breakthrough opportunities, observed in a wide variety of industries, countries, and markets. If you find yourself noticing one or more of them, a major opportunity for growth could be lurking behind it.
1. This product should already exist (but it doesn’t). As the accessories editor for Mademoiselle magazine in the early 1990s, Kate Brosnahan spotted a gap in the handbag market between functional bags that lacked style and extremely expensive but impractical designer bags from Hermès or Gucci. Brosnahan quit her job, and with her partner Andy Spade, founded Kate Spade LLC, which produced fabric handbags combining functionality and fashion. These attracted the attention of celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow and Julia Roberts. Many well-known product innovations — including the airplane, the mobile phone, and the tablet computer — began similarly, as products that people felt should already exist.
2. This customer experience doesn’t have to be time-consuming, arduous, expensive, or annoying (but it is). Consumer irritation is a reliable indicator of a potential opportunity, because people will typically pay to make it go away. Reed Hastings, for example, founded Netflix Inc. after receiving a US$40 late fee for a rented videocassette of Apollo 13 that he had misplaced. Charles Schwab created the largest low-cost brokerage house because he was fed up with paying the commissions of conventional stockbrokers. Scott Cook got the idea for Quicken after watching his wife grow frustrated tracking their finances by hand.
3. This resource could be worth something (but it is still priced low). Sometimes an asset is underpriced because only a few people recognize its potential. When a low-cost airline such as easyJet or Ryanair announces its intention to fly to a new airport, real estate investors often leap to buy vacation property nearby. They rightfully expect a jump in real estate values. Similarly, the founders of Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s pioneering provider of outsourced information technology services, were among the first to recognize that Indian engineers, working for very low salaries, could provide great value to multinational clients. The company earned high profits on the spread between what they charged clients and what they paid local engineers.
4. This discovery must be good for something (but it’s not clear what that is). Researchers sometimes recognize that they have stumbled on a promising resource or technology without knowing the best uses for it right away. The resulting search for a problem to solve can lead to great profitability. One example was the founding of the ArthroCare Corporation, a $355 million producer of medical devices based on a process called coblation, which uses radio frequency energy to dissolve damaged tissue with minimal effect on surrounding parts of the body. Medical scientist Hira Thapliyal, who codiscovered this process, founded a company to offer it for cardiac surgery, but that market turned out to be too small and competitive to support a new venture. Undeterred, he looked for other potential uses, and found one in orthopedics, where there are more than 2 million arthroscopic surgeries per year.
5. This product or service should be everywhere (but it isn’t). Sometimes people chance upon an attractive business model that has failed to gain the widespread adoption it deserves. Two archetypal retail food stories illustrate this. In 1954, restaurant equipment salesman Ray Kroc visited the McDonald brothers’ hamburger stand in southern California, and convinced them to franchise their assembly-line approach to flipping burgers. In 1982, coffee machine manufacturing executive Howard Schultz visited a coffee bean producer called Starbucks in Seattle. He recognized the potential of a chain restaurant based on European coffee bars, and he joined Starbucks, hoping to convince the company’s leadership to convert their retail store to this format. When they didn’t, he started his own coffeehouse chain, later buying the Starbucks retail unit as the core of his new business.
6. Customers have adapted our product or service to new uses (but not with our support). Chinese appliance maker Haier Group discovered that customers in one rural province used its clothes washing machines to clean vegetables. Hearing this, a product manager spotted an opportunity. She had company engineers install wider drain pipes and coarser filters that wouldn’t clog with vegetable peels, and then added pictures of local produce and instructions on how to wash vegetables safely. This innovation, along with others including a washing machine designed to make goat’s-milk cheese, helped Haier win share in China’s rural provinces, while avoiding the cutthroat price wars that plagued the country’s appliance industry.
7. Customers shouldn’t want this product (but they do). When Honda Motor Company entered the U.S. motorcycle market in the late 1950s, it expected to sell large motorcycles to leather-clad bikers. Despite a concerted effort, the company managed to sell fewer than 60 of its large bikes each month, far short of its monthly sales goal of 1,000 units. Then a mechanical failure forced the company to recall these models. In desperation, it promoted its smaller 50cc motorbike, the Cub, which Honda executives had assumed would not interest the U.S. market. When the smaller bikes sold well, Honda realized it had discovered an untapped segment looking for two-wheel motorized transportation. (The campaign is still remembered for its catchphrase, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda.”)
8. Customers have discovered a product (but not the one we offered). Joint Juice, a roughly $2 million company that produces an easy-to-digest glucosamine liquid, was founded by Kevin Stone, a prominent San Francisco orthopedic surgeon. He learned about the nutrient from some of his patients, who took it for joint pain instead of the ibuprofen he had prescribed. Many doctors might have ignored this or even scolded their patients for falling prey to fads, but Stone recognized he might be missing something. He looked up the clinical research on glucosamine in Europe, where it was the leading nutritional supplement. (Veterinarians, he discovered, swore by it, and their patients fell for neither fads nor placebos.) Then he built a business around it.
9. This product or service is thriving elsewhere (but no one offers it here). In the early 1990s, a Swedish business student named Carl August Svensen-Ameln tried to store some of his belongings in Sweden while at school in Seattle, but found that all the local self-storage facilities were full. He studied the storage industry, already prevalent in the United States, and discovered a business model characterized by high rents, low turnover, and negligible operating costs. Yet self-storage, at the time, was virtually nonexistent in continental Europe. Svensen-Ameln and a friend from business school set up a partnership with an established U.S. company, Shurgard Storage Centers Inc. The resulting company, European Mini-Storage S.A., was the first of several such companies that Svensen-Ameln started in Europe, to great success.
10. That new product or service shouldn’t make much money (but it does). Established competitors are often surprised when upstart rivals do well. In his 2008 book, The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs (Penguin Press), Charles D. Ellis noted that for decades, Goldman Sachs partners had avoided investment management, which they believed generated lower fees than trading and investment banking. When Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. published its financial performance as part of a 1970 stock offering, Goldman partners were startled to learn that fees and brokerage commissions on frequent trades added up to a highly profitable business. Shortly thereafter, Goldman expanded into managing corporate pension funds, and aggressively built its business.
Incongruities like these can offer a critical clue about where your assumptions no longer match reality. From there, you are more likely to uncover the kinds of opportunities that you might otherwise have missed — and that your competitors still don’t recognize. Start by asking yourself, What are the most unexpected things happening in our business right now? Which competitors are doing better than expected? Which customers are behaving in ways we hadn’t anticipated? Take yourself through the list of top 10 clues. Leaders who consistently notice and explore anomalies increase the odds of spotting emerging opportunities before their rivals.
Reprint No. 11304
Author Profile:
- Donald Sull is a professor of strategic and international management at the London Business School, where he is also the faculty director for executive education. His books include The Upside of Turbulence: Seizing Opportunity in an Uncertain World (Harper Business, 2009).
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/11304?gko=ce28d&cid=20110927enews
Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen - Harvard Business Review
In the Economist review of our book, The Innovator's DNA, the reviewer wondered whether genius-level innovators such as Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs challenge the idea that working adults can really learn how to think differently and become innovators.
We don't think so. Remember, it was Steve Jobs who jump-started the now-famous "Think Different" advertising campaign as a way to inspire consumers and recharge Apple's innovation efforts. It worked. Reflecting back on the campaign, Jobs said "The whole purpose of the 'Think Different' campaign was that people had forgotten what Apple stood for, including the employees." And the best way to tell people what Apple stood for was to tell them who the company's heroes were. The campaign reminded everyone — consumers and employees alike — that the "crazy ones...see things differently."
Reams of relevant research (including our own) proves Jobs right. Innovators excel at connecting the unconnected. They engage in associational thinking. At Apple (or at any innovative company), they take a little bit of this, sprinkle in a little bit of that and that and that to churn out market-busting ideas such as iTunes, and the iPod, iPhone, and iPad (along with a few market disasters like the G4 Cube computer).
But neither Steve Jobs nor Apple nor any other high-profile innovator or company has a corner on the think-different market. In fact, our study of over 5,000 entrepreneurs and executives shows the opposite: almost anyone who consistently makes the effort to think different can think different.
Take Gavin Symanowitz, whom we recently met in South Africa. His original business, GetAGreatBoss.com, lets great managers showcase their skills to attract talent and boost their own careers by conducting a 360 review of the manager by his or her staff, and if the results are favorable, he links the results to job ads that the boss is trying to fill, making these job ads far more appealing. By connecting the unconnected — 360 leadership assessments and help wanted ads — Symanowitz forged an online business that sprouted in Africa and now grows globally.
Innovators (of new businesses, products, and processes) spend almost 50% more time trying to think different compared to non-innovators. In other words, non-innovators do occasionally think different (answering "at least a little bit" to questions like "I creatively solve challenging problems by drawing on diverse ideas or knowledge" to hit the 48th percentile in our global database). Yet compared to innovators, they just don't do it as often. Generating new business ideas that make a positive financial impact takes time. Innovators who spend more time thinking different (scoring in the 70-80th percentile) consistently engage in associational thinking by "agreeing"or "strongly agreeing" with questions like the one above and they deliver innovative results more frequently than those who don't. It's that simple.
If thinking different can make such a positive difference, why don't more people spend more time doing it? Researchers at Harvard Medical School opened our eyes to one compelling answer. Sixty to eighty percent of adults find the task of thinking different uncomfortable and some even find it exhausting. When adults must connect the unconnected through associational thinking, it wears them out. Why? Because most adults have lost the skills they once had (just watch almost every four-year old who relishes the chance to think different. And all of us were once four-year olds). We don't lose this skill because genetic coding automatically shuts it down on our twenty-first birthday. Instead, most of us grew up in a world where thinking different was punished instead of praised (at home or school). So while roughly one-third of anyone's innovation capacity comes from their genetic endowment, two-thirds of it is still driven by the environment. So here are a few simple suggestions to ratchet up your associating skills, the essence of thinking different.
Just do It. Nike's slogan is not a bad starting place when it comes to creative thinking. Do it by frequently forcing associations or connections across different ideas when they don't naturally emerge. John Hunt, Global Creative Director at TBWA Worldwide, told us how his company uses role-playing to help their clients think different. Clients assume the persona of an innovator from another company such as Apple or Virgin, a form of role-playing that encourages clients to look at a challenge from a different point-of-view.
Shake it up. When associations don't come naturally, try forcing them to surface unnaturally — by shaking things up randomly. For example, try the Idea Generator app, which randomly combines three words together when you shake your smart phone. Shake it again and three more random words show up. You can get even more creative combinations by adding your own words to the mix (including foreign ones) and seeing what you get. For example, we just shook up the app while writing this blog and got three words — perforated, bite-sized, and humane — which might help generate a new idea. Perhaps putting bite-sized perforations into a new product could make a difference. That's exactly what David Mullany did in 1953 by transforming a solid plastic ball into the Wiffle ball, a completely new product with bite-sized perforations in it.
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found that if adults practice associational thinking long enough, the task no longer exhausts but energizes them. Like most skill-based activities, if we slog away at it and practice over and over again, the task becomes not life taking but life giving. And that's when the most creative ideas pop out.
As a leader, how often do you think different? How often do you brainstorm? How often do you hunt for solutions in new environments? Thinking different is easier said than done. We don't claim that folks can jump from the low end of the bell curve of creativity performance to the high end just with practice. But when it's done frequently enough by just about anyone, it can transform good ideas (and not so good ones) into great ones that might even disrupt the world. We have found that most people can actually do this reasonably well if they choose to put in the time and effort that's required to think different. That's what disruptive innovators do, day after day. Do you? Can you? Will you?
Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen
Jeff Dyer is the Horace Beesley Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School, Brigham Young University; Hal Gregersen is a professor of leadership at INSEAD; They are the authors of the The Innovator’s DNA.
Access Source And Its Great Content: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/begin_to_think_differently.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Why Being Certain Means Being Wrong - Ted Cadsby - Harvard Business Review
Of all the headwinds we face as decision-makers, the power of one overshadows all others: our need for certainty. It is typically more important for us to feel right, than to be right — a difference that didn't matter much in the lives of our ancestors, but now matters a lot.
Certainty is the feeling of confidence we have when we've figured things out. Our physiology is geared to move us quickly to eliminate the uncomfortable tension of not knowing — the mild stress response our bodies trigger when we perceive that we have lost control because we don't understand. It is this tension that motivates us to figure things out like the mysterious rustle in the bush, the confusing betrayal of a friend, the promotion we didn't get — all the minor and major problems that confront us every day. Only certainty, in the form of the calm feeling of knowing, can replace the tension of not knowing. Settling on an explanation triggers a "lockdown" of our minds, in the same way that a fertilized egg locks out competing sperm.
As the female ovum floats down the fallopian tube, a few thousand sperm (of the 300 million that initially began the journey) search it out. One sperm will be the first to pierce the egg's outer wall, triggering a chemical reaction that makes the egg's wall harder and impenetrable to competing sperm.
The mind is like an egg; the sperm are the myriad possible explanations for any given problem the mind tries to solve.
Just as the few thousand sperm are stronger than the millions that perished along the way, some ideas are favored over others: our "fittest" explanations are those that cohere with all of our other beliefs and values — they are easily integrated with everything we already "know." But just as one sperm will get to the egg first, even if more genetically fit sperm are available, the urgent drive to reduce the tension of uncertainty pushes us to accept the first reasonable explanation we craft. Our mind becomes "fertilized" and the calm feeling of knowing instantly infuses us, stopping our search for alternative explanations.
The lockdown of our minds serves an important purpose: Generations of our ancestors wouldn't have survived had they constantly second-guessed their conclusions. In a harsh environment characterized by straightforward challenges that demanded quick responses, an indecisive caveman was a dead one. The rush to certainty became our standard operating procedure for two reasons: i) because we needed speedy thinking, and ii) because speed did not force a significant tradeoff in accuracy. The risk of interpretive error is low when you are confronted by a charging tiger or bush of lush berries because the cause-effect relationships in these straightforward situations are not convoluted or ambiguous. Even today, the majority of micro-decisions we make every hour are fairly straightforward, so there is no reason to second-guess or reflect on the limitations of our senses and intuitions.
But the whole speed-accuracy tradeoff falls apart in a world that tosses up complex problems. The need to be certain gets in the way of accuracy when it comes to problems that have multiple, interwoven causal factors that are difficult to unbundle. Complex problems require exploration, multiple perspectives, and a variety of possible explanations, before it is safe to draw any conclusions. Many complex problems can only be tackled with experimentation because they do not converge to definitive solutions. But a mind that is "fertilized" by the first satisfying interpretation is closed to the more subtle and complicated explanations that are often better. It is our mind's lockdown feature that makes certainty the #1 enemy of effective decision-making in the face of complexity. Think of all the business failures that were avoidable if it weren't for the hubris of leaders who were unwilling to revisit their faltering strategies, or the public policy failures that could have been mitigated, or our personal relationships that would run so much more smoothly if we weren't so certain that we were right all the time.
But there is an antidote to premature certainty: Adopting a mindset of "provisional truth."
Provisional truth requires that we think of our explanations as hypotheses — always subject to replacement based on new information or alternative ways of structuring existing information. Provisional truth means challenging our interpretations with disconfirming evidence and alternative perspectives. Provisional truth does not preclude drawing conclusions or taking action; but it demands that we be skeptical about our first reasonable explanations in the realm of complex problems. It keeps us humble and mentally flexible, constantly asking ourselves if we've really got everything figured out and responding, "Probably not."
Ted Cadsby is a corporate director, principal of TRC Consulting, former executive vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and author of two books on investing.
Certainty is the feeling of confidence we have when we've figured things out. Our physiology is geared to move us quickly to eliminate the uncomfortable tension of not knowing — the mild stress response our bodies trigger when we perceive that we have lost control because we don't understand. It is this tension that motivates us to figure things out like the mysterious rustle in the bush, the confusing betrayal of a friend, the promotion we didn't get — all the minor and major problems that confront us every day. Only certainty, in the form of the calm feeling of knowing, can replace the tension of not knowing. Settling on an explanation triggers a "lockdown" of our minds, in the same way that a fertilized egg locks out competing sperm.
As the female ovum floats down the fallopian tube, a few thousand sperm (of the 300 million that initially began the journey) search it out. One sperm will be the first to pierce the egg's outer wall, triggering a chemical reaction that makes the egg's wall harder and impenetrable to competing sperm.
The mind is like an egg; the sperm are the myriad possible explanations for any given problem the mind tries to solve.
Just as the few thousand sperm are stronger than the millions that perished along the way, some ideas are favored over others: our "fittest" explanations are those that cohere with all of our other beliefs and values — they are easily integrated with everything we already "know." But just as one sperm will get to the egg first, even if more genetically fit sperm are available, the urgent drive to reduce the tension of uncertainty pushes us to accept the first reasonable explanation we craft. Our mind becomes "fertilized" and the calm feeling of knowing instantly infuses us, stopping our search for alternative explanations.
The lockdown of our minds serves an important purpose: Generations of our ancestors wouldn't have survived had they constantly second-guessed their conclusions. In a harsh environment characterized by straightforward challenges that demanded quick responses, an indecisive caveman was a dead one. The rush to certainty became our standard operating procedure for two reasons: i) because we needed speedy thinking, and ii) because speed did not force a significant tradeoff in accuracy. The risk of interpretive error is low when you are confronted by a charging tiger or bush of lush berries because the cause-effect relationships in these straightforward situations are not convoluted or ambiguous. Even today, the majority of micro-decisions we make every hour are fairly straightforward, so there is no reason to second-guess or reflect on the limitations of our senses and intuitions.
But the whole speed-accuracy tradeoff falls apart in a world that tosses up complex problems. The need to be certain gets in the way of accuracy when it comes to problems that have multiple, interwoven causal factors that are difficult to unbundle. Complex problems require exploration, multiple perspectives, and a variety of possible explanations, before it is safe to draw any conclusions. Many complex problems can only be tackled with experimentation because they do not converge to definitive solutions. But a mind that is "fertilized" by the first satisfying interpretation is closed to the more subtle and complicated explanations that are often better. It is our mind's lockdown feature that makes certainty the #1 enemy of effective decision-making in the face of complexity. Think of all the business failures that were avoidable if it weren't for the hubris of leaders who were unwilling to revisit their faltering strategies, or the public policy failures that could have been mitigated, or our personal relationships that would run so much more smoothly if we weren't so certain that we were right all the time.
But there is an antidote to premature certainty: Adopting a mindset of "provisional truth."
Provisional truth requires that we think of our explanations as hypotheses — always subject to replacement based on new information or alternative ways of structuring existing information. Provisional truth means challenging our interpretations with disconfirming evidence and alternative perspectives. Provisional truth does not preclude drawing conclusions or taking action; but it demands that we be skeptical about our first reasonable explanations in the realm of complex problems. It keeps us humble and mentally flexible, constantly asking ourselves if we've really got everything figured out and responding, "Probably not."
Complex decision-making requires we defer the feeling of being right, by tolerating the tension of not knowing. It is hard to fight our physiology — the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution — but our innate craving for certainty undermines us in a modern, complex world. We are not hardwired to suspend judgment. We are not designed to explore multiple interpretations after arriving at one that appears to work. We are not constituted to resist concluding. We operate on the assumption that our thinking is objective, thorough, logical, and penetrating to the extent that it quickly and reliably gets us the right answers, no matter how complex the challenge is. If only it were so.
Ted Cadsby
Ted Cadsby is a corporate director, principal of TRC Consulting, former executive vice-president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, and author of two books on investing.
Access Content Source And Other Great Stuff: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/07/why_being_certain_means_being.html
Learning Optimism with the 24x3 Rule - Anthony Tjan - Harvard Business Review
One of my greatest mentors was the late Jay Chiat of TBWA Chiat Day, an iconoclast in the field of advertising with a constant imagination for possibilities in business and life. Jay embodied the three traits of a "lucky attitude" that I described in my last post: humility, intellectual curiosity, and optimism. Of these three characteristics, it was Jay's optimism which was perhaps his greatest lesson to me. He inspired people to embrace optimism — inside themselves, and also, as importantly, in others. It is a gift to understand how to project, share, and inspire with optimism. It is an even greater act of generosity to be inspired by optimism from others and to be willing to receive it.
The capacity to be a natural recipient of ideas and other peoples' optimism is what makes for the ultimate optimist. You may be open to experimenting with new things, but do you truly see the good in something before the bad? The order of this thought process is critical: to try and see everything good in an idea before seeing anything bad. While most of us like to think we do, and would therefore self-describe ourselves as optimistic, more often (if we are truly honest with ourselves) we are natural critics (even cynics). Experience brings wisdom, but its collateral damage is that it can jade one against new concepts, turning many of us into Pavlovian skeptics. Whether we openly say it or not, we often think of what might be wrong with someone or something before we try to understand what might be right or good. The temptation and reflex for cynicism is usually more common than a natural responsive optimism. Cynicism is indeed the enemy of optimism.
Here's a practical tool for the skeptic or cynic in all of us: the 24x3 rule. The next time you hear an idea for the first time, or meet someone new, try to wait 24 seconds before saying or thinking something negative. This reinforces a foundational skill of good optimists and good leadership. That basic skill is listening. As you gain the ability to listen and pause for a brief 24 seconds before letting the critic in you bubble to the verbal surface, move to the next level and try to do it for 24 minutes. At 24 minutes, you are able to give more considered thought to the idea and think more carefully of the many reasons why it might actually work, why it might be better than what is out there, and why it might just topple conventional wisdom.
And yes, you should also work towards the ability to wait 24 hours — one single day — before pondering or verbalizing the cons against something. Of course, most times this will not be possible. Our minds cannot compartmentalize so easily, nor shut off our past experiences. But the 24x3 rule is a type of reflective meditation for developing a more optimistic approach towards people and ideas. The simple guideline of 24x24x24 is just a good reminder that a prerequisite of optimism is to have a willing suspension of disbelief.
This is not saying in any way not to be a healthy critic — it is absolutely essential in business leadership to be a critic — but rather that inspirational leadership and effective mentorship require a bite-your-tongue, wait-to-be-a-critic mindset and attitude. Start with the pause button for 24 seconds and stretch it towards being able to ponder positively for 24 hours. Mastering the 24x3 rule will make you a more enjoyable and inspirational leader to be around. In increasing your generosity to receive optimism, you will be rewarded with new possibilities that others have prematurely dismissed.
Anthony Tjan
Anthony Tjan is CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball. An entrepreneur, investor, and senior advisor, Tjan has become a recognized business builder.
Friday, July 22, 2011
How to Reward Great Ideas | Inc.com
Your employees may never say no to a bonus, but that doesn't mean it's the ideal way to credit their work. Examples from Foursquare and other innovative companies show how to make your rewards as creative as the ideas they're rewarding.
July 19, 2011
Projet Créatif, video game developer Frima Studio's program for pitching product ideas, requires its employees to work for the company for a year before presenting an independent project. That was too long for David Moss to wait. Less than a year after joining Frima, Moss compiled a creative team to start designing Ravenmark, a mythological adventure for young boys set in fourteenth century Scotland.
Originally designing Ravenmark as a digital short, Moss and his team were inspired by the innovative nature of Projet Créatif to do more. "We thought, this is a creative project," Moss says. "We're supposed to be able to pitch about anything we want so let's make a TV show."
So in March 2010, the Ravenmark team presented its idea to a jury of their peers. "Everyone was kind of confused that we were pitching a television show," Moss recalls. "But by the end of the presentation, everyone's eyes lit up and they could see the potential."
The jury decided Ravenmark was a smart idea; Frima's upper management agreed. Moss and his team were given time and funds to develop Ravenmark. With Ravenmark ready to hit the market, Moss maintains ownership of his idea and will get part of its revenue throughout his career.
For plenty of creatives, Moss's opportunity is a dream come true. Frima, like many online creative companies, understands how to foster and reward its employees' ideas. But rewarding great ideas is vital to the success and productivity of any company. According to a study by employee motivation agency Maritz, 55 percent of employees strongly agree that the quality of their company's recognition programs affects their performance, but only 10 percent of those polled are satisfied with these efforts.
Especially at fast-growing small companies, ideas are king and should be acknowledged. But rewarding great ideas should include much more than a token bonus. There are lots of strategies for rewarding productive creativity; some are tangible, others are intellectual. Some recognition is public, some private. Determining the best reward programs for your company takes time and a profound understanding of your employees' motivations. But the right program will not only recognize great ideas but also bring more to the table.
Before You Start Rewarding, Foster an Innovative Culture
Long before your company can reward the great ideas, you must first foster the creation of those ideas. According to Maritz, driving performance requires companies to focus on their No. 1 asset: their employees. "What drives innovation?" Mike Barbee, COO at Maritz Loyalty and Motivation asks. "It's not coming from technology or processes. It's coming from people."
Programs such as Frima's Projet Créatif are an effective way to foster such innovation. Since it started last year, 10 ideas have been pitched, and six of them are in production. Ravenmark is the first to reach a marketable stage. At its core is the idea that employees judge each others' ideas without the initial influence of senior leadership. "Ideas don't just come from upper management," says Steve Couture, Frima's CEO. "You need a channel to listen to all ideas."
Other companies feature similar opportunities for idea pitches. At Foursquare, the company behind the location-aware app of the same name, employees in its New York City office are welcome to showcase ideas in the form of a venture capital pitch in what the company calls Demo Days. They're held almost weekly.
"People can show what they're working on just to get a fresh set of eyes on something or to propose a major new direction for the company," says Morgan Missen, Foursquare's head of talent. "Our employees love the opportunity to share what they're thinking, and as a growing company we don't really have a choice not to innovate. It's mutually beneficial."
Firstborn, a creative digital agency also based in New York City, also capitalizes on mutual benefit, allowing its employees to work on side projects so long as present their findings at a semi-regular open forum called Group Therapy. "It's not about giving people time to experiment," says Firstborn's president Dan LaCivita. "It's transferring knowledge to the rest of the company."
When ideas are flowing, it's time to decide which ideas are worth rewarding. The good ideas—the ideas that will improve, grow, or transform the company—deserve the most plaudits. But, distinguishing these ideas, especially when they require time to mature, is sometimes difficult. That's why produce delivery company The FruitGuys prefers a different method.
"We try to encourage and reward all ideas that come up," says CEO Chris Mittelstaedt. You want a culture that celebrates almost the wackiest of the ideas for the bravery in putting it out there."
Dig Deeper: 7 Steps to a Culture of Innovation
Points, Prizes, and Other Perks
When great ideas emerge, bonuses are the most common solution for companies with a large enough cash flow. Although an extra check is rarely unwelcome, many more creative options exist to reward employees in a meaningful way.
While Projet Créatif stands to showcase major innovations, Frima also recognizes smaller ideas with a rewards system call Frima Points. When an employee comes forward with a fresh idea, they earn points which can later be traded for tangible gifts. Frima's gifts, such as payment for babysitters, home repair services, and the like, emphasize work-family balance—a core value for Frima—while also fostering productivity.
"We've found that if people spend more time at home with their families than doing household chores on the weekends, they come back to work on Monday ready to do better work," Couture says.
At RockYou, a social game developing and advertising company, great ideas are recognized monthly with their You Rock Awards. Driven by peer nominations, RockYou awards employees for solving a problem, designing a game or otherwise showing innovation. You Rock nominees spin a wheel to choose an award such as concert tickets, an extra day off, or an iPad. All You Rock recipients also receive a golden bobble-head cow trophy.
"I don't actually know the relevance of the cow," RockYou's CFO Steve van Horne admits. "But it's a source of pride for employees to have on their desk."
At Firstborn, innovation is rewarded not by a trophy, but with a three-week vacation. Recognizing that their employees put forth great ideas on a daily basis, their accomplishments culminate in this extended paid time off after five years. "Whether you take a cooking class or go to Europe or sit at home and play video games, it's realizing people want to have that break to get a mental refresher," LaCivita says.
Dig Deeper: 5 Atypical Employee Benefits
Create a Culture of Acknowledgement
In many small businesses, spending money on extraneous prizes is not feasible, but other rewards options still stand. Especially in growing companies, employees are rewarded most through verbal acknowledgement for a specific idea or simply being part of a team that daily embraces innovation.
"In terms of traditional compensation rewards, it tends not to motivate our employees," says Missen about Foursquare. "It's not why a lot of us joined. We have a lot of unmitigated stars in the company that receive press and praise. Recognition and idea implementation are more important."
The FruitGuys, Mittelstaedt constantly reminds himself to call attention to those collaborating under him. Inspired by the "five R philosophy" his company employs with their customers, he makes sure his employees are remembered positively for their efforts. (The other R's include being respectful, responsive, realistic and responsible.)
"A leader is not the greatest person in an organization, so they shouldn't be the one getting the glory," he says. "Helping other people get the glory or acknowledge a success is in our unwritten code of conduct."
For smaller companies, like The FruitGuys' 25-strong, such personal recognition is manageable. Other alternatives like having employees nominate one another and training managers to recognize ideas as they emerge prevents upper management from overlooking great ideas no matter how small and also helps maintain a sense of intimacy no matter how large a company grows.
Dig Deeper: Rethinking Employee Awards
No Two Employees Are Alike
From its research and experience with clients, Maritz postulates that the best reward programs involve purposeful choice on the part of both employees and employers. Roughly only 30 percent of employees who want to be recognized in a certain way – for instance with cash bonuses, public recognition, or symbolic awards – are recognized in that way. Communication about what employees want versus what the company is able to provide helps determine the best options.
"Rewards always need to be meaningful, memorable and motivating, but there's not a one size fits all solution," Barbee says. "By offering choice to your employees you get much more engagement and can drive the kind of results that they want."
Open and frequent communication with Firstborn's 70 employees is a key part of how the agency determines its reward policies. "Some people need that time away more than others. Others may want a nice bonus instead," LaCivita says. "As a company you employ individuals and you are a team, but at your core you're still individuals with different feelings and different needs. You really need to talk to everyone and know who they are as people to really know how to reward them."
As important as honoring all your employees' accomplishments is, companies should be wary of overcompensation. At ngmoco (stands for "Next Generation Mobile Company"), a free-to-play gaming company, rewards are limited to those ideas that exemplify the core values of delight and ownership.
"Delight means setting and exceeding expectations, ownership means carrying a project through to its end," says Justin Hall, ngmoco's director of culture and communication. "If you just reward people for working long hours you're rewarding them for being inefficient and if you reward people for being on time, you're rewarding them for something expected. You have to make sure your expectations permeate across the organization so that the great ideas have a chance to be recognized."
With rewards and recognition natural sense of competition may arise, something healthy for companies seeking a truly innovative culture. Companies should recognize a group with great ideas when merited, but LaCivita maintains that there's nothing wrong with recognizing an individual doing something incredible.
"If a group comes to the table and one person has had the eureka moment that inspires everyone else, I don't think it's wrong to tell or show that person how much his work mattered," he says. "That's how innovation works."
Dig Deeper: 10 Tips for Boosting Employee Morale
Give More to Get More out of Your Workers
With one critical eureka moment often comes the expectation that more great ideas will follow. One of the easiest ways to both recognize innovation and guarantee more in the future is to let your most creative employees take on more responsibility.
At ngmoco, two engineers realized the benefits of creating a gaming platform that would allow downloads both for android and iOS devices. Today ngmoco's efforts center on that platform. The two engineers serve now as vice president of global technology and director of first-party technology, respectively. Similarly, The FruitGuys' head of customer service worked her way up from answering the phones thanks in part to her creativity in leading weekly meetings.
Added responsibilities do not necessarily translate to promotions, however. Given the freedom to choose their next projects or assignments allows great innovators to work in the most inspiring possible environments. "Foursquare's employees come in wanting to work on anything they think they could help the company improve," says Missen. "It's the low fruit, the slow gazelle, and they can fix it."
For Moss, Ravenmark has provided new opportunities for new creative projects. While Frima's jury considered Ravenmark's future for a week before reaching a decision, Moss estimates deliberations took ten minutes for his most recent pitch. "Just showing that level of trust and confidence in the fact that I know what I'm doing, that's all I need," he says.
The employee loyalty built by Frima's recognition of innovation turns any short-term costs long-term investment. "It's important to find creative people, great resources," Couture says. "But it's even more important to keep them when you have them. We keep them by rewarding them."
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