A leading cause of departmental siloes is that everyone is accessing and possibly creating their own data, and inefficiency is created by making the action of sharing, compiling and then assessing this data an action at all. There is rarely a widely accessible central hub for everyone to automatically feed their data into, thus many people rely on manual feeding and office email to compile data. It only takes a few people to be on holiday, or to have left the company without immediate replacement, for whole systems to deliver serious inconsistencies or grind to a complete halt. In many businesses data is reported but not actioned for so long that the action of sharing is deemed worthless and stopped.

I love this quote! It is an excellent and concise explanation of a virtually universal choke point within all types of organizations. If leaders and managers are going to make a change from where they are today to where they need to be, it will help if they first recognize what state they are currently in. It is worth taking some time to understand the depth of the meaning in the quote above.

For some context, go read the entire article. I think it is a great read. The author posted this in response to watching Scott McCorkle's keynote at ExactTarget's Connections 2011 conference. After reading the article, it left me wondering how long it will take most higher ed marketing folks to catch up to this leading edge of data-driven marketing that we are in the midst of today.

A day might be coming when the power of Facebook means that major companies no longer bother with their own Web sites.

That was the startling if self-promotional possibility sketched out by Stephen Haines, commercial director of Facebook's U.K. operation, while speaking today at the Technology for Marketing and Advertising conference here. Essentially, Haines argued, companies' interactions with their customers could take place so often on Facebook that company Web sites would fall by the wayside.

To bolster his argument, Haines showed statistics comparing how many times Facebook users have clicked a company's "like" button with how many times per month people visited that company's Web site. For Starbucks, a top Facebook advertiser, the ratio was 21.1 million likes to 1.8 million site visitors. For Coca-Cola, it's 20.5 million compared with 270,000; for Oreo, 10.1 million compared with 290,000; and for Dr. Pepper, it's 4.1 million compared with 325,000.

There is a tradeoff with putting so much emphasis on Facebook but it is hard to ignore when Starbucks get ten times as many likes per month as they get visitors to their company website and Coca-Cola is almost 100 times more. Will higher ed tap into this vast wealth of information? Could Facebook replace a school's internal CRM?

Why did almost every institution do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way? Because we have only one way of thinking about higher-education excellence in this country. We are all entranced by visions of the academic city-state, the palace of learning on the hill. That's where the administrators and faculty who populated the former normal schools came from, and where they wanted to return. If their alma mater wouldn't have them, a copy would do.

Clayton Christensen, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and others examine the vulnerability of older institutions—and the very real threat posed by new ones—in a recent report called "Disrupting College: How Disruptive Innovation Can Deliver Quality and Affordability to Postsecondary Education," just published by the Center for American Progress. Christensen sees online higher education, currently used by nearly one-third of all college students and steadily rising, as a potential "disruptive innovation."

The day of reckoning has been delayed in higher education because many of the most obvious disrupter candidates, for-profit colleges, have spent the past decade feeding on the federal student-loan system rather than delivering high-quality courses to students at a low price. But as the raging debate over for-profits shows, the era of easy money and lax regulation is ending. If federal officials do their job right, future for-profits will have to reorient toward high-quality classes and competitive prices. It will be very hard for traditional institutions to respond. (Emphasis added by me)

1. they generally make possible the emergence of new markets,
2. they appear to be financially unattractive to existing organizations, and
3. they do not meet current customers needs.

According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in. They couldn't help but be open-minded.

Such lapses in attention turn out to be a crucial creative skill. When we're faced with a difficult problem, the most obvious solution—that first idea we focus on—is probably wrong. At such moments, it often helps to consider far-fetched possibilities, to approach the task from an unconventional perspective. And this is why distraction is helpful: People unable to focus are more likely to consider information that might seem irrelevant but will later inspire the breakthrough. When we don't know where to look, we need to look everywhere.

Just saw a tweet with a link to this article. Lines up nicely with the post I made the other day from Kevin Kelly. Also lines up very well with design theory and design thinking principles. There is no one right answer. Creativity comes from being willing and able to look past the first idea or concept that comes into our heads. I have experienced the benefit of this concept on many occasions. The American Pickers dudes call it "freestyling", where they just drive down old country roads and let their intuition (and experience) lead them to an awesome pick. If they tried to plan it all out, they would have missed some of their best finds.

Too much change can get out of hand, and too many rules--even new rules--can lead to paralysis. The best systems have this living quality of few rules and near chaos.

Every organization is dysfunctional to some degree, but innovative organizations, in their moment of glory, tend to slide toward uncoordinated communication, furious bouts of genius, and life-threatening disorganization.

The price for progressive change in maximum doses is a dangerous (and thrilling) ride to the edge of disruption.

Sustaining innovation is particularly tricky since it flows out of creative disequilibrium.

I wonder how many leaders in organizations aspire to move away from order and towards chaos, knowing that it is a prerequisite to innovation? Clayton Christensen often talks about disruptive innovation. What does it disrupt? The status quo. The norm. The current standards.

Innovation is swimming against the flow of order, structure, rules, and algorithms. An organization cannot be heading in two directions at the same time - successfully. Where is the precious balance? What degree of fraying and unraveling is just right? The first step in the process of becoming an innovative individual or organization is recognizing and accepting this constant state of organized chaos.

Maybe I can use this next time as the reason for leaving my shoes in the living room, coat on a chair, or glass on the coffee table. "I was just trying to be more innovative!" Probably not, but at least I will think about it a little differently from now on.

How about you? Does this resonate with your understanding of innovation? Got any good examples or stories?

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11253518@N07/2477086735/sizes/m/

I think the big company corporate slogan is like heavy paper on the annual report, white space on the billboard and a suit on the sales rep. It's a signal, a sign that the company is big, that it's able to waste time dreaming this stuff up and waste money yelling about it. No one actually reads the slogan (at Yoyodyne, the internet company I founded in 1992, our stolen slogan was, "Where the future begins tomorrow." It was written on our business cards and everything. I don't think 1 person in a 100 commented on it).

Not everything you do actually gets a response. In fact, most of it doesn't. But each effort is a tiny brick in the wall of perception, even when it appears to be dumb and even senseless.

I got a chuckle out of this excerpt from Seth Godin's blog the other day. Of course, I immediately started thinking of other silly (fictional) slogans. Here are a few I came up with. Let's see what you come up with.

- Tomorrow starts the day after today.
- What happens in Vegas stays in the past.
- When everyone's a winner, you can still tell who the losers are.
- If you are giving more than 100%, who are you taking it from?