Creativity, Innovation, KM and French Management

How and Why 1 Year Differs from 365 Days & How many dates did you have last month?

2012-01-23T10:29:00.000+01:00

The first half of the above title comes from an article in the Journal of Consumer Research, which was brought to my attention by The Daily Stat from Harvard Business Review dated January 20, 2012. As one of the main parts of the MBA module I teach on Creativity, Innovation and Change has to do with heuristics (rules of thumb) and knowing oine's cognitive biases, I was immediately interested. The second half of the title will become evident in the second part of this blog post.

Here is how the Daily Stat described the research:

Be More Credible by Stating Your Promise in Fine-Grained Numbers Research participants predicted that a battery touted to last up to "two hours" would function for just 89 minutes, but they believed, on average, that a battery with life up to "120 minutes" would last 106 minutes, say doctoral candidate Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan. Consumers are more likely to believe that a company or product will deliver on its promise when the promise is conveyed in fine-grained rather than coarse units, the researchers say.

The article is by Y. Charles Zhang and Norbert Schwarz. Below is the abstract from the Journal of Consumer Research:

The same quantity can be expressed at different levels of granularity, for example, “1 year,” “12 months,” or “365 days.” Consumers attend to the granularity chosen by a communicator and draw pragmatic inferences that inﬂuence judgment and choice. They consider estimates expressed in ﬁner granularity more precise and have more conﬁdence in their accuracy (studies 1–4). This effect is eliminated when consumers doubt that the communicator complies with Gricean norms of cooperative conversational conduct (studies 2–3). Based on their pragmatic inferences, consumers perceive products as more likely to deliver on their promises when the promise is described in ﬁne-grained rather than coarse terms and choose accordingly (study 4). These ﬁndings highlight the role of pragmatic inferences in consumer judgment and have important implications for the design of marketing communications.

The article in itself is very interesting, and should be of immediate value to any person who has to communicate about product attributes. As often happens when I'm reading one article it reminds me of another. In this case the Zhang and Schwarz article reminded me of a passage in Daniel Kahneman's recent book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow" which shows how important it is to organize not only the content of what we say, but the order in which we say it.

Here is an excerpt from that section of Kahneman's book titled 'The Mood Heuristic for Happiness', and which gives an example of what Kahneman describes, in his vast discussion of cognitive biases, as 'substitution'.

"A survey of German students is one of the best examples of substitutions. The survey that young participants completed included the following two questions:

How happy are you these days?

How many dates did you have last month?

The experimenters were interested in the correlation between the two answers. Would the students who reported many dates say that they were happier than those with fewer dates? Surprisingly, no: the correlation between the answers was about zero. Evidently, dating was not what came first to the students' minds when they were asked to assess their happiness. Another group of students saw the same two questions, but in reverse order:

How many dates did you have last month?

How happy are you these days?

The results this time were completely different. In this sequence, the correlation between the number of dates and reported happiness was about as high as correlations between psychological measures can get. What happened?

The explanation is straightforward, and it is a good example of substitution. Dating was apparently not the center of these students' life (in the first survey, happiness and dating were uncorrelated), but when they were asked to think about their romantic life, they certainly had an emotional reaction. The students who had many dates were reminded of a happy aspect of their life, while those who had none were reminded of loneliness and rejection. The emotion aroused by the dating question was still on everyone's mind when the query about general happiness came up."

The New French VAT Tax: a headache for business, the example of the boulangeries

2012-01-06T20:10:00.001+01:00

In the cafés in Paris this morning the conversation, larded with jokes about government incompetence, was about the risible and unworkable VAT conundrum which the French public finance people have saddled on French businesses, especially the boulangers and people who sell take-away food or food for home delivery.

The French daily Libération carried an article about the situation this morning, underlining the lack of logic in the new measures, under a great colloquial title, 'La nouvelle TVA: un casse-tête pour le casse-croûte', which I can, unfortunately, only translate into the prosaic: The New Tax: a headache for snacks.

The products the small French baker sells, baguettes, pastries, tarts, cakes, etc. were previously taxed at 5.5%. Since January 1st, some of the products are still subject to a reduced VAT rate of 5.5%, but others will be taxed at an increased rate of 7% (this is in the effort to save France's 'Triple A' financial rating with Standard & Poor's). The inventory of goods and services concerned by the hikes, published in the French Official Tax Gazette is obscure, to say the least.

Libération says that Tax Gazette, "...contains anything and everything, in that order. On the first page, for example, you learn that syringes for insulation injection will be taxed at 5.5%, as will elevators for the handicapped, and meals in school canteens and nursing homes."

"In contrast to that, the new rate of 7% applies to the purchase of tickets in concert halls where 'one is likely to eat or drink during the performance', to horse riding lessons and to caviar. Take-out food or 'food that is delivered to the home and designed for immediate consumption will also be taxed at 7%'. This is where it gets funny. The baguette will still be taxed at 5.5%. However, a sandwich or a salad, if it is sold with a plastic fork and knife or a dressing, will be taxed at 7%. Cakes and pastries land in the group of 'products that are not intended for immediate consumption', so they will continue to be taxed at 5.5%, as will yoghourt (sold “with or without a spoon”), pieces of fruit (“even if sold singly”) and bags of potato crisps. The VAT situation if one buys a quiche or a slice of pizza or tart can vary: 5.5% tax if the food is sold cold, but 7% if it is heated up in the microwave oven.

Philippe Conan and his wife, Maryse, who have owned their boulangerie for the past 18 years open their eyes wide as they say, 'Can you imagine the client’s face if I ask for an extra three cents for heating up the tart?’ They learned about the new rules for VAT while watching television. 'Even the bakers’ trade association wasn’t warned about what was going to happen. We had no time to get organized. I called the person who looks after our cash register and he just can’t handle all the requests he’s getting.'

“We’ll have to put new keys on the cash registers, modify the sales tickets so that the client always knows which VAT rate has been applied. The register has to be brought up to date manually,” says Michel Guyot, the owner of a small company that equips cafés, bistros, restaurants and bakers’ shops with cash registers. 'In restaurants, it's relatively simple. The VAT rate goes up to 7% for everything. But for bakers, it’s a totally different story. Have you read the legislation? They couldn’t have made it more complicated if they’d tried. I don’t know how the boulangers are going to be able to manage all this.' This little consideration was no doubt beneath the notice of the people who administer the public finances.

One solution could be to apply the 7% rate to everything, but bakers have to stay competitive and customers may balk at paying more for their heated up pastries.'

Bookstores will also be affected by the VAT increase, but the increase in VAT for them has been put off until April 1st (April Fool’s Day, if any reader of this blog needs reminding).

The extraterrestrials have made contact, and they call themselves the Hungarians: tacit knowledge

2012-01-02T12:30:00.001+01:00

One of the first things students learn when they decide to study Knowledge Management is that there is a distinction between 'tacit' and 'explicit' knowledge. Once they have absorbed that, one of their subsquent discussions is likely to be whether there is a difference between "explicit knowledge" and 'information' or if they are one and the same thing. The person we can thank for these debates is Michael Polanyi.

In the December 15, 2011 edition of the London Review of Books there was an excellent review of Mary Jo Nye's "michael polanyi and his generation", by Steven Shapin. Below are a couple of excerpts. To read the whole review online you will have to pay for the single article or, if you are feeling flush this New Year, do as I do, and subscribe to this excellent periodical.

"If you want to invoke the idea of ‘tacit knowledge’, Polanyi is your reference of choice. You’ll probably cite his major book Personal Knowledge (1958), maybe the earlier Science, Faith and Society (1946), maybe the later The Tacit Dimension (1966). ‘We know more than we can tell’ was Polanyi’s dictum. We know how to ride a bicycle, but we can’t write down how to do it, at least not in a way that allows non-cyclists to read our instructions, get on their bikes and ride off. We can reliably pick out a familiar face in a crowd, but we can’t say just what it is about the face that we recognise. And, crucially, since Polanyi is now known mainly as a philosopher of science, a scientist can’t adequately describe how to do a bit of science through any version of formalised ‘Scientific Method’. Whether the craft is cooking, carpentry or chemistry, the apprentice learns by watching and doing. Where knowledge and skill are concerned, it’s not all talk.

Citing Polanyi in these connections is itself a sort of craft convention for historians and sociologists who want to say something about the nature of scientific practice. They do it to indicate that there is a history to appreciations of the informal, perhaps unformalisable, dimensions of science, supposedly the most rationally specifiable practice that we have. Yet the citations don’t index the extent to which the texts are actually read. There isn’t a lot of current interest in who Polanyi was and how he came to hold the views he did. Mary Jo Nye’s excellent and richly researched book aims to tell us and, along the way, uncovers a genealogy for the notion of tacit knowledge that situates it in the force fields shaping much 20th-century thinking about politics and economics as well as science. Two biographical strands run through the book: first, before Polanyi was a philosopher, he was a physical chemist, abandoning the laboratory when he became convinced that telling the world about science was more important for him than doing science; second, he was an émigré Hungarian intellectual whose thinking was forged in the crucible of Central Europe between the wars.

In wartime Los Alamos, there was a conversation piece known as the Fermi Paradox, posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Given the high overall probability that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe, why hadn’t the extraterrestrials made contact? ‘They are among us,’ Leó Szilárd replied, ‘but they call themselves Hungarians.’ The story was told by the Hungarians themselves and it went like this: the Men from Mars were a restless sort and, in search of new worlds to colonise, they long ago came to Earth, landing on the banks of the Danube. They had effectively concealed their true identity, but there were several signs that could give away their Martian origins. One was their wanderlust: they loved to travel and they readily upped sticks; second was their language, which had no known earthly relation; and third was their supernatural intelligence – they knew things, and could think in a way, that no other people did. One could add a corollary: though they often had a profound understanding of the whole spectrum of mere earthly culture, they seemed to understand it, as it were, from the outside. When one of the Martians, the mathematician John von Neumann, was appointed to the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the age of 29, a story went around that he was ‘a demigod but had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly’. In Britain and America, the Martian-English accent was much loved and, sometimes, much played up by its speakers, adding both to its charm and its otherworldly weirdness."

To read the whole article go to: An Example of the Good Life

L’évolution des différences entre le management français et américain

2011-11-12T13:46:00.001+01:00

I would like to say "Un grand merci!" to Zeugma for his magnificent translation of an article of mine that has been available on the net for more than eight years now: The differences between French and American Managers.

Zeugma's translation is available on the French AGORAVOX citizen journalist site, under the title: L'évolution des différences entre le management français et américain. Zeugma prefaces his translation with some very apt comments, which very aptly identify my own personal management biases, but then goes on to say that, although the article was written nearly ten years ago, its conclusions still hold up. Encore une fois: merci, Monsieur!

Here is Zeugma's preface to his translation of my article on recent changes in French and American management styles:

J'ai trouvé cet article datant de 2003 sur un site américain, qui tentait à l'époque de comparer le management à la française au management à l'américaine. Je ne pense pas que l'auteur ait tort concernant la description qu'il fait de notre système, on pourrait au pire lui reprocher une certaine partialité parfois.

Je vous laisse comparer si, presque dix ans après, la situation a changé ou non dans nos entreprises. J'ai l'impression personnellement d'une certaine porosité du système français aux méthodes américaines, notamment dans l'obsession récente à favoriser le profit à cours terme au mépris du développement à long terme. Par contre je ne crois pas que nos défauts aient disparu, notamment la prédominance des réseaux et du « qui êtes-vous ? » sur le « qu'avez-vous fait ? », comme le dit le texte.

Here is Zeugma's translaton of the article "The Differences between French and American Managers":

Traduction :

Les différences entre les managers français et américains

Les tentatives françaises pour conquérir le marché américain

(Auteur : John Gaynard)

Très peu de livres ont été écrits sur les rachats franco-américains ou américano-français. L'un d'eux a été écrit en 1997 par Guillaume Franck, professeur de gestion internationale à HEC, probablement l'école de commerce française la plus influente. Il y dresse un bilan, souvent humoristique, des acquisitions françaises aux États-Unis. Le livre devrait être une lecture obligatoire pour toute entreprise française souhaitant acheter aux États-Unis ou pour n'importe quelle compagnie américaine qui souhaiterait acheter en France. Le titre du livre est "A la Conquête du Marché américain" et il est publié par la maison d'édition parisienne « Éditions Odile Jacob ».

Le livre est composé de recherches sérieuses. Il est également riche d'anecdotes : dont l'une d'entre-elles à propos des cadres français, envoyés aux États-Unis par une maison-mère, qui avaient de hautes compétences techniques mais aucune qualité humaine. Les cadres supérieurs américains dont ils dépendaient ont refusé de les mettre à des postes plus élevés que de la gestion usuelle, et ils ont même hésité à leur donner ce type de responsabilité sur leur personnel. Ou bien il cite une autre anecdote à propos de l'étonnement provoqué dans un département français de Ressources Humaines par des managers américains qui ont refusé des postes clé qui leur étaient proposés parce que les contrats n'étaient pas assez détaillés. Un simple contrat d'une page suffit à contenter un cadre français car il est habitué à bénéficier des lois françaises très strictes sur le travail. Or sur le marché du travail américain un travailleur doit se préoccuper de son propre intérêt, et un solide contrat avec la société est la meilleure façon de le faire. Même lorsque les employeurs français se rendaient compte que ces refus de postes pouvaient tous être attribués à des différences de culture, ils se mettaient en colère devant le manque de confiance que leur accordaient les dirigeants américains. En France, tout est basé sur le relationnel privée.

Axa

Un succès notable français fut celui du rachat d'« Equitable Life » par AXA (bien que le magazine Fortune daté du 14 Juillet 2003 suggère qu'AXA pourrait se brûler les doigts à fournir des assurances à Hollywood). Ce fut également un succès qui a délivré son lot d'anecdotes. Claude Bébéar, le président d'AXA de l'époque, a été très vite adopté par les cadres américains qui l'ont accueilli, non seulement comme un chevalier blanc mais aussi comme une personne qui a démontré des compétences pratiques organisationnelles. Bébéar a voulu apporter à ses gestionnaires américains des méthodes qui avaient été couronnées de succès pour lui en France, comme une invitation annuelle à une équipée, sans leurs conjoints, dans un recoin exotique du monde : parfois, le désert du Ténéré, ou d'autre fois l'Ouest de l'Inde ou la Chine.

Culpabilité américain quand il aucun espace pour les conjoints

Cependant, les dirigeants américains se sentaient coupables à l'idée de se promener à travers le monde et de s'amuser à un moment où la société Équitable était dos au mur. Quelques-uns d'entre eux ont refusé l'invitation pour le désert de Gobi, mais ils furent poussés à accepter un voyage pour la Grande Muraille de Chine. Une fois en Chine, le complexe de culpabilité WASP pris le dessus et les gestionnaires américains décidèrent de faire sauter les séances de copinage. Leur idée était que si AXA n'avait pas pris de dispositions pour le travail c'est que ce devait être un oubli de la part de l'un des lieutenants de Claude, mais peu importe ils allaient s'en occuper eux-mêmes. Ils ont donc décidé d'entreprendre une étude sur le marché de l'assurance chinois. Ils ont mis en place des réunions avec des dirigeants chinois et ont parlé des risques et des opportunités tandis que leurs homologues français renforçaient leurs relations avec Bébéar. Bébéar, néanmoins, s'est montré un rapide apprenti. Ce fut l'occasion pour lui de se rendre compte du fait que les gestionnaires américains font des distinctions très fortes entre le travail et les loisirs. Pour eux, si les conjoints avaient été inclus, le signal aurait été donné pour la mise en place d'un événement à caractère social. Mais parce que les conjoints étaient absents, ce voyage aux frais de la princesse devait signifier autre chose, c'est-à-dire du travail. Sur les événements sociaux suivants incluant les gestionnaires américains, Claude Bébéar décida d'y inclure les conjoints.

Accor

Le livre de Franck détaille beaucoup d'autres expériences. L'une de ces réussites est celle d'Accor, la chaîne d'hôtel. A l'origine elle s'est mise dans une mauvaise passe en offrant aux gestionnaires de « Motel 6 », la société qu'elle avait racheté, un beau package d'avantages basés sur le maintien des profits trimestriels et annuels sur une période de trois ans, période au bout de laquelle les gestionnaires de l'époque pourraient quitter la société. Introduisant un thème qui est le fil conducteur du livre, Franck détaille cet exemple de l'« aléa moral" : car les responsables américains de Motel 6 ont immédiatement arrêté de gérer la société dans l'intérêt de l'actionnaire et leur seul but est devenu l'augmentation des profits à court terme pour s'arroser eux-mêmes avec les plus hauts bonus possibles. L’investissement fut stoppé, la maintenance préventive disparut, les chambres ne furent plus redécorées. En fait, dans beaucoup de motels, les chambres n'étaient même plus balayées ou nettoyées. Les clients réguliers ont commencé à préférer dormir dans leurs voitures dans les parkings d'en face plutôt que de dormir dans des chambres infestées de poux et de rats dans un Motel 6 désormais connu comme un repaire de trafiquants de drogue.

Lorsque Accor a réalisé ce qui se passait ils ont envoyé Georges Le Mener pour renverser la situation. Il avait été engagé après n'avoir reçu qu'un faible enseignement professionnel le couronnant d'un simple certificat de gestion d'hôtel. Cependant, il avait par la suite bénéficié du système de formation interne Accor, l'un des meilleurs en France, dont il était sorti avec les honneurs. Comme Guillaume Franck l'écrit dans son livre, Le Mener est arrivé au Motel 6 en ayant confiance en lui, mais sachant peu de choses sur les États-Unis et encore moins sur le marché hôtelier américain. Contre toute attente, il réussit. En faisant un succès de Motel 6, Le Mener fut un lucratif retour sur investissement pour la confiance que les managers senior d'Accor avaient placé en lui. Sans lui Accor n'aurait jamais fait d'autre acquisition aux États-Unis, et grâce à lui ils ont ensuite acheté « Red Roof Inns » pour posséder maintenant plus de 10% du marché hôtelier économique des États-Unis.

Accor envoie ses managers dans un centre de formation situé à l'extérieur de Paris dans lequel le client est roi. La société recrute son personnel en dehors des grandes écoles de l'élite française. Pechiney, d'autre part, utilise son réseau d'anciens au maximum. Pechiney a acheté « American Can » au terme d'une célèbre affaire de corruption et est un parfait exemple de tout ce qui peut aller mal avec le style de gestion à la française. Le Mener ressemblait à n'importe quel gestionnaire américain typique plutôt qu'à tout autre gestionnaire français décrit dans le livre. Beaucoup d'autres dirigeants français mentionnés ont été incapables de fonctionner à 6000 miles de leur réseau de soutien issu d'une "Grande École" et ils ont dû être rapatriés honteusement, car dans un certain nombre de cas leurs subordonnés et collègues américains les percevaient comme étant tellement arrogants qu'ils ne pouvaient simplement pas travailler avec eux.

Les écoles de l'élite française et leurs modifications récentes

La plupart de ces clones inefficaces, suggère Franck, sont malheureusement typiques d'un enseignement élitiste à la française et d'un système d’État qui a plus à voir avec l'ancienne méthode de préparation aux responsabilités des mandarins chinois qu'à une école moderne préparant aux règles des entreprises. Les meilleurs diplômés de ces écoles d'élite, dans lesquelles l'éducation est plus ou moins gratuite, sont une poignée de chanceux destinés à passer leurs vies à servir l’État. Au cours des dix dernières années, toutefois, les bénéficiaires de ce système ont commencé à refuser ce destin les menant droit à une bureaucratie sclérosée et certains ont même préféré rembourser l’État immédiatement après l'obtention de leur diplôme plutôt que d'effectuer leur service minimum de cinq ans dans un abrutissant emploi de haut niveau au service d'un État qui n'a même pas entendu parler de la gestion moderne des ressources humaines. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, le Premier ministre français nommé l'année dernière, est une exception à ce réseau d'écoles vieillottes et a durant longtemps travaillé comme consultant dans le secteur privé. En France, le « qui êtes-vous ?" (le réseau social auquel vous appartenez) est traditionnellement plus important que le « qu'avez-vous fait récemment ? ». Des managers de seconde zone sont protégés par leurs réseaux et déplacé d'un échec "subventionné par l’État" vers un autre, détruisant à chaque étape une grande entité économique (pensez à Bull et au Crédit Lyonnais). Il est encore un peu tôt, mais Raffarin semble avoir l'intention d'améliorer ce mode traditionnel de gestion contrôlée par l’État (j'écris ceci le 04 Juillet 2003).

Réunions

Après les fusions et acquisitions franco-américaines, il faut avouer que gestionnaires français et américains ne se voient que rarement face à face lors de mêmes réunions. Les managers français utilisent les réunions pour bâtir des réseaux avec les autres et essayer de donner du sens à ce qui se passe dans l'environnement politique de l'entreprise. Les gestionnaires américains ou britanniques utilisent généralement des réunions pour décider des plans d'actions, faire des vérifications d'étape et organiser des examens structurés. Selon Franck, beaucoup de gestionnaires américains dans son livre ont perçu les réunions avec leurs collègues français comme des discussions interminables. Les managers français perçoivent leurs collègues américains comme incapables de contrôler leurs allants, comme étant trop impulsifs devant des situations problématiques n'étant pas suffisamment comprises ou encadrées.

La tendance du gestionnaire américain à privilégier la production, en négligeant la recherche et développement.

Dans les cas où les acquisitions françaises ont été un succès, les gestionnaires américains étaient heureux de voir que leurs homologues français étaient prêts à dépenser plus d'argent à la R&D et aux investissements de capitaux que les propriétaires précédents. Avant l'achat, la plupart des usines américaines avaient été administrées presque au jour le jour, et vidées de leurs investissements. Trop souvent, semble-t-il, un gérant américain qui sait qu'il occupera un emploi pour seulement deux ou trois ans aura tendance à éviter les dépenses à long terme. L'argent ainsi « économisé » sera ramené à la production. C'est parce que le gestionnaire sait qu'il ou elle est jugée sur les chiffres du bénéfice trimestriel. Malheureusement, son successeur devra recoller les pots cassés, en ignorant les lois sur la pollution, faire face à des accidents du travail ou à tout autre de ces dangers multiples qui auraient pu être évités par la maintenance préventive.

Cette attitude à court terme pour les investissements est un anathème pour les ingénieurs français et les gestionnaires qui se targuent de mettre en valeur les concepts d'hygiène et de sécurité, d'entretien des usines et de qualité du produit. Ils ont été étonné de voir combien les entreprises américaines acquises ont été gérées de manière à produire énormément dans des usines maintenues ensemble comme avec du ruban adhésif.

La supériorité du gestionnaire américain en marketing et en service clients

Les gestionnaires américains, d'autre part, enterrent les français quand il s'agit de marketing et de service à la clientèle. En France, les managers de ligne n'ont aucun contact avec les clients. Aux États-Unis il semble constamment parler au client, ou bien à son propos. C'est là que les Français savent qu'ils ont le plus à apprendre. Il n'y a que dans l'industrie du luxe que les Français ont la même réputation, la même notoriété, la même influence et aussi un bon système de distribution et de connaissance du besoin client équivalent à celui des Américains.

La comparaison de Franck des styles américains et français de management l'a conduit à la conclusion que les méthodes de gestion américaines s'exportaient mieux à l'étranger que les méthodes françaises. Les entreprises américaines imposent plus ou moins les mêmes cultures d'entreprise et les mêmes structures de reports quantitatifs sur l'ensemble de leurs filiales, et ce quel que soit l'emplacement géographique. Ainsi, une société américaine venant en France pour la première fois sait qu'elle doit apprendre à lire et écrire le français, mais ignore qu'elle doit se transformer en une société avec une culture nationale française et son approche égalitariste entraîne le fait qu'elle a souvent moins de problèmes liés au travail que ses concurrents français nationaux. Les entreprises françaises, d'autre part, ont des cultures d'entreprise qui sont des ramifications des écoles de commerce ou d'ingénieurs particulières, dans lesquelles les managers ont été formés et continuent à recruter. L'idée que se fait la France des relations au travail est politique, conflictuelle et basée sur les classes, et non pas comme dans les entreprises américaines structurée en fonction de l'offre et de la demande.

De nombreuses entreprises françaises sont dirigées par des gestionnaires qui sont sortis d'écoles d'élites, et qui ne se sentent à l'aise qui s'ils peuvent imposer leur système national sur une acquisition à l'étranger. Par conséquent, les entreprises françaises n'ont ni la culture ni un modèle de gestion qui s'insère facilement dans d'autres cultures nationales. Après acquisition, les entreprises françaises tentent souvent d'imposer à la société acquise une élite sur-qualifiée, qui doit son succès à un système éducatif binaire qui élève ou qui exclue. Jusqu'à récemment, cette élite était trop culturellement déterminée pour être exportable et elle a sérieusement commencé à plomber sa compétitivité par son absence de variété sur des marchés en constante évolution. Les entreprises françaises qui ont récemment réalisé des acquisitions réussies aux États-Unis ou au Royaume-Uni ont réussi parce qu'elles ont réalisé, parfois très douloureusement, qu'elles avaient à gérer leurs filiales avec des gestionnaires qui utilisent la manière américaine.

Il n'est pas surprenant que les entreprises françaises qui font aujourd'hui l'acquisition avec succès d'une culture d'expansion, comme Accor et L'Oréal, soient les entreprises qui se révèlent les meilleures à moderniser leur gestion sur leur sol d'origine français.

As a practitioner, who prefer to spend more time "doing" than writing, I would like to acknowledge, once again, my debt to Professor Guillaume Franck, whose writings, most notably A la conquête du marché américian, have had quite an influence on the development of my thinking about French and American mangement styles, ever since soon after I became a consultant in France. Whenever I have come across a particularly thorny problem between French, Belgian, Dutch, British, Italian or American management styles or cultures I have always found it worthwhile to consult the books of Philippe d'Iribarne: La logique de l'honneur and L'étrangeté française. Some day I may have the time to write a book that will show how my experience, linked to reflection on their work, has resulted in my own ideas. In the meantime, the best way to get an idea of my present thinking about French Management can be found by clicking on the "France" label in the right sidebar of this blog, in the section "Subjects covered in this blog".

An article on Zeugma's own website which I find particularly interesting, at a time when yet another politician (this time the French ex-minister Rama Yade, last time the German Baron von Googleburg) has been accused of plagiairizing the work of an academic, is Plagiarism and Incompetence: Ukraine Affected at the Very Top: Plagiat et incompénce: l'Ukraine touchée au plus haut niveau.

The five most popular posts on this blog

2011-11-09T19:47:00.000+01:00

I started this blog back at the end of 2008. Below are links to the five blog posts that have been most read during that period.

Prospect Theory: three practical examples of its use. For example, why is there no Nato in Asia? Published January 19, 2009.

$US 27,600: the cost of registering a patent in not even half of the 27 countries of the European Union. Published October 12, 2010

Google and Innovation: Accept Failure, But Fail Fast and Fail Smart. Published May 27, 2009

Cows to Kilowatts: Biogas Innovation Ibadan Nigeria. Published December 4, 2009

Can high-IQ people be less creative than people of average IQ? Published May 26, 2009

Thinking, Fast and Slow

2011-10-21T21:54:00.000+02:00

On David Brooks's New York Times blog, in an article dated October 20, Brooks pays tribute to the work of Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky. Kahneman's forthcoming intellectual biography, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" will be excerpted in this weekend's Times Magazine on Sunday.

The paragraphs below will give you an idea of Brooks's article and why Kahneman's work is so important to students of cognition, creativity, problem-solving and decision-making.

Before Kahneman and Tversky, people who thought about social problems and human behavior tended to assume that we are mostly rational agents. They assumed that people have control over the most important parts of their own thinking. They assumed that people are basically sensible utility-maximizers and that when they depart from reason it’s because some passion like fear or love has distorted their judgment.

Kahneman and Tversky conducted experiments. They proved that actual human behavior often deviates from the old models and that the flaws are not just in the passions but in the machinery of cognition. They demonstrated that people rely on unconscious biases and rules of thumb to navigate the world, for good and ill. Many of these biases have become famous: priming, framing, loss-aversion.

Kahneman reports on some delightful recent illustrations from other researchers. Pro golfers putt more accurately from all distances when putting for par than when putting for birdie because they fear the bogie more than they desire the birdie. Israeli parole boards grant parole to about 35 percent of the prisoners they see, except when they hear a case in the hour just after mealtime. In those cases, they grant parole 65 percent of the time. Shoppers will buy many more cans of soup if you put a sign atop the display that reads “Limit 12 per customer.”

Kahneman and Tversky were not given to broad claims. But the work they and others did led to the reappreciation of several old big ideas:

We are dual process thinkers. We have two interrelated systems running in our heads. One is slow, deliberate and arduous (our conscious reasoning). The other is fast, associative, automatic and supple (our unconscious pattern recognition). There is now a complex debate over the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two systems. In popular terms, think of it as the debate between “Moneyball” (look at the data) and “Blink” (go with your intuition).

Read the whole of Brooks's article:

Who You Are - NYTimes.com

Consumer Product Innovation

2011-09-23T11:16:00.000+02:00

Eric von Hippel, author of Democratizing Innovation, continues to research consumer innovation. In the latest edition of the MIT Sloan Management review, writing with Susumu Ogawa and Jeroen P.J. de Jong he has an article titled: The Age of the Consumer-Innovator. I encourage you to check out the article. Below are three paragraphs from it:

IT HAS LONG BEEN assumed that companies develop new products for consumers, while consumers are passive recipients — merely buying and consuming what producers create. However, a multidecade effort by many researchers has shown that this traditional innovation paradigm is fundamentally flawed: Consumers themselves are a major source of product innovations.

Recently, this consumers-as-innovators pattern has led to the framing of a new innovation paradigm, in which consumers play a central and very active role. Rather than seeing consumers simply as “the market,” as the traditional innovation model has long taught, this new paradigm centers on consumers and other product users. It explains why consumers are very important innovators who often develop products on their own.

In this article, we begin by reporting on the large extent and scope of consumer innovation, as documented by first-ever national surveys. Next, we explain how the survey results lend support to a new user-centered innovation paradigm. Finally, we discuss implications of the new innovation paradigm for both consumer-innovators and companies.

Different Uses of Creativity Workshops

2011-09-16T10:00:00.000+02:00

I find that clients wish to introduce a creative problem solving approach and creativity techniques to many activities they would have hitherto addressed through traditional meetings or quality or strategic management approaches. Creativity techniques have always been a vital component of new product, service or process workshops, but they can also be very useful in activities such as facilitating a management team to use Porter's Five Forces approach to analyze the industry and how to thrive in it.

Recent creativity workshops I have facilitated have addressed challenges and opportunities as wide as:

The 2015 vision for a global company, which wishes to increase its margins by selling solutions instead of just hardware. Coming up with a shared vision, identifying the constraints, identifying ways to get around or eliminate the constraints, mapping out the path to realizing the vision while bulletproofing possible obstacles and getting the company's teams on board.
What practical steps to put in place to address concerns raised by clients all over France in a customer satisfaction survey. Identification of 21 quick wins that could be put in place immediately and identification of longer-term efforts that will take more planning.
Mapping out a process and capturing the tacit knowledge of experts each working independently, identifying which tasks need to be updated and what training processes need to be put in place to bring younger experts up to speed.
How to extend the life cycle of a successful, but ageing, product long enough to allow its more innovative replacement to be tested and put into large scale production.

Why it's important to be the one who initiates relationships and supplies social support at work

2011-08-05T11:02:00.000+02:00

I just received this from the Harvard Daily Stat, which shows the benefits for everybody in the workplace created by true work altruists, including themselves:

Employees who are the most unwilling to develop workplace friendships seem to be the least likely to be promoted, according to research by Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage. In a blog post on HBR.org, he says he divided employees into quartiles on the basis of their willingness to initiate work relationships, such as by inviting coworkers out for drinks. Just 5% of the bottom quartile were extremely engaged in their work, and just 7% had been promoted in the past year. About 40% of employees in the other quartiles had received promotions.

Source: What Giving Gets You at the Office

How to Use Creativity Techniques to Facilitate Strategic Management Sessions

2011-06-10T12:06:00.001+02:00

I facilitate models like Porter's Five Forces, SWOT, STEEPV (or whatever model seems relevant after I have had a preliminary discussion with the CEO) with creativity techniques such as 'brain writing pool' and mindmapping.

For example, show the Porter model on a powerpoint slide, explain it in a maximum of a couple of minutes, and then ask everybody around the table to write down on post-its, without speaking, which individuals, technologies or firms they see as new entrants, at whatever level of importance. A group of 20 people can easily come up with two hundred ideas. Then categorise and prioritise all the new entrants on a giant mind map (made up of four pieces of flipchart paper) according to:

How many times they have come up on the 'radar' of the management team (i.e. in the post-its)
The localisation of each potential new entrant (local, regional, national or international)
The level of threat of each potential new entrant.

Then have an in-depth discussion about what to do with potential threatening new entrants, along a continuum ranging from ignoring them to buying them out.

A similar exercise can be done with every one of the five forces. This produces a satisfying day of collaborative work and co-creation in which the people who are closest to the coal face (the appropriate level of management, not 'expert' consultants) can actually scan their whole internal and external environments, talk through them, and come up with an action plan to put in place a feasible strategy.

Creativity: How to Make the Most of the Gaps Between Innovators and Adaptors

2011-06-06T23:10:00.005+02:00

I have written quite a few times in this blog about the differences between creative innovators and creative adaptors (notice I use the word 'creative' in both cases). Innovators are often people who find creative solutions by challenging present ways of consensual thinking (this is where you get the term 'thinking outside the box') while highly creative adaptors are usually people who know the inside of the box better than anybody else and come up with creative solutions that respect guidelines, present manufacturing possibilities, budget envelopes and any other organisational constraints and that also fit easily into their colleagues' ways of thinking while appearing new to the customer.

I never disparage people who look for solutions 'inside the box' because if we take a good hard look at creativity and innovation we see that most of what is new comes from adaptive creativity. The sign of a creative adaptor is that s/he comes up with feasible solutions to problems.

Creative innovators are very often (but not always) abrasive and, in organisational settings, this factor of their personality is what prevents them from getting their ideas adopted. Another weakness is that they may not be able to express themselves in practical language. They are 'seeing' something new for which the language won't exist until they have produced the final product. The words 'iPod' or 'iPhone' are now understood in a very practical way by most of the world's younger population, but what did adaptive people understand the first time they heard Steve Jobs mention them? We often forget that high innovators sometimes have to create a new vocabulary before their contribution can be understood, while more adaptively creative people usually work with the vocabulary that already exists.

The way to measure whether one is relatively adaptive or relatively innovative is to use the questionnaire developed by Michael J. Kirton. Doctor Kirton doesn't like his KAI (Kirton Adaptor Innovator) questionnaire to be used any old way (see my article on the danger of unprofessioal assessment centers) and that is why he puts people through a rigorous certification process before he allows them to use it.

The result of the questionnaire, at first sight, look like a simple measure running from 32 to 160. The average score is 95.

However, with feedback from a skilled practitioner the measure gives the person who has replied to the questions a high level of knowledge about him or herself and the way s/he best works with creative projects, teams and with organizations. Every year I have inventor/entrepreneur students who do an MBA while starting up a business or growing it and one of the things that interests them the most is the difference between their creative styles and the, usually, more adaptive people they have working for them or who are needed to provide finance.

One such student asked me a couple of weeks ago to say some more about how to bridge the inevitable gaps in comprehension between people at the extremes of the KAI continuum. Below is my reply (slightly adapted):

The KAI is a continuum so everybody is 'relatively more adaptive' or 'relatively more innovative'.

When there is a gap of 10 points between two people the difference in decision making/problem solving/creative styles is noticeable. When there is a gap of 20 points it can be very difficult for two people to understand each other, unless they have experience in working with people of different styles and value their differences. Thus if you have a person with an adaptive score of 64 (I have found that in people working in, say, accounts receivable or production engineering) and another person with a score of 84 there will be a noticeable difference in styles.

The person with the score of 64 will see the person with a score of 84 as highly innovative and conceptual. The person at 84 will perceive the person at 64 as being very adaptive.

If we take the case of a conceptual person who has a score of 120 (quite common in national marketing directors, but not so common in people who do day-to-day operational marketing) and s/he wishes to get her/his thinking/decisions understood by staff who need to get supermarkets to actually stock a new product it is useful to have a team that ranges across the continuum. The conceptual thinker with the score of 120, another with a score of 105-110, a third with a score of 90-95 and the fourth (the detail-oriented guy who puts the stuff in the shelves) with the score of 80. The people, in this case, at 105-110 and 90-95, will be bridges between the two more extreme scores in the team. A person with a score of 105 will, with some effort, be able to take the conceptual language/style of the 120 score innovator and put it into the more practical language needed by the person at 90-95 and the person at 90-95 will be able to make it even more practical for the person at 80.

And vice-versa: the detailed thinking of the person who scores 80 on the KAI measure will need translators/bridgers to make it conceptual enough for the person at 120.

I am not saying that people with scores at each end of the continuum cannot work together. In fact the most effective teams contain people at both ends of the continuum, managed by a person who understands the strengths and weaknesses of each style.

A major danger, because more adaptive people feel comfortable with adaptors and more innovative people feel comfortable with innovators there is a tendency to hire people like oneself. In that way we lose 'cognitive diversity'. With loss of 'extreme' opinions a team can work together more comfortably and make quicker decisions, because its members all have a similar decision making style, but by losing the viewpoint of people at the other end of the continuum, the quality of their decisions may well be poorer. Kirton has numerous exemples to show that good leaders are the ones who can manage teams that contain a large range of cognitive diversity.

One of the best ways of bridging the gap is by having respect for the talents, skills and decision that the person of the other style brings to the table. High innovators are good at coming up with ideas that challenge present ways of thinking. People in the 'average' scores are usually good at prototyping, coming up with workable models and making the innovator's ideas feasible. People at the adaptive end of the continuum are usually good at incremental improvements and producing quality products and service. And there continually need to be feedback loops. The adaptors who put the innovators' theory into practice, see useful changes that can be made to improve quality and efficiency. Adaptors can learn from innovators when to stop making incremental improvememnts to a product or service that is obsolescent or needs a total change or overhaul.

But, unfortunately, unless people do the type of analysis of creative style found in this MBA module, either through study or learning from experience of working constructively with colleagues, they can end up calling another person 'bad' or 'difficult' when in fact the other person only has a different decision-making/problem solving/ creative style to their own style, and which they sorely need.

Creativity and Innovation: the 'elegance' test: doorbell that tricks burglars into thinking you're at home

2011-06-06T13:01:00.001+02:00

On the 'Creativity and innovation' MBA module which I tutor there is mention of Arthur Koestler's term 'bisociation', which is the bringing together of two disparate facts as a stimulus to invention. Creativity, and creativity techniques such as bisociation, have an important place in the subject of innovation because successful innovation often depends on the coming together of an inventor (the person who has the creative idea) and the entrepreneur or innovator who can make it happen.

Over the weekend I came across a very interesting article about a 13 year old who had the idea of making an 'intelligent' burglar alarm by linking up a doorbell and a mobile telephone.

See the article in the English Daily Mail newspaper

Doorbell that tricks burglars into thinking you're home

Below is is an excerpt from the article: (excerpt 1)

A schoolboy is on course for a £250,000 windfall after inventing a doorbell that fools burglars into believing somebody is home at an empty property. Smart Bell, designed by 13-year-old Laurence Rook, dials the home owner's mobile phone when pressed, allowing them to talk to whoever is outside their front door.
The device even produces a small amount of white noise to give any unexpected guest the impression they are speaking to someone inside the house on an intercom system. The invention, which uses an inbuilt SIM card and existing mobile-phone technology, would also allow homeowners to give instructions to drivers making deliveries at their property.

However, the full story of how the invention got to market can only be understood if we take into account the person with whom Laurence teamed up:

Excerpt 2:

Laurence had the idea for the Smart Bell after his school challenged pupils to come up with an invention for a Dragons' Den-style competition. Laurence, who won a scholarship to attend private Trinity School in Croydon, South London, was initially unable to enter the contest because he didn't have a working prototype. But his parents, James and Margaret Rook, then showed his plans to family friend Paula Ward, who was crowned the world's top female inventor in 2004 for designing a web chatroom safety system.

Laurence said: 'Paula thought it was brilliant and sent off the designs to China for it to be made into the actual product.
I was gobsmacked that she thought it was so good.'

Less than 12 months after the prototype was developed, Commtel Innovate is preparing for the wholesale release of the product and High Street giants B&Q, PC World, Currys and Comet are now set to stock the Smart Bell, which will cost £40.

In my experience innovation does not have to be complex. Is is often the most simple ideas that are the most effective. My litmus test for whether an innovation will work or not has to do with how elegant it and this invention/innovation certainly passes the elegance test.

Do you have similar or parallel examples of creativity/invention/innovation.

The similarities between Algerian and U.S. home owners who can't prove they own their homes

2011-05-30T17:17:00.002+02:00

Not all destruction of past innovations is creative.

Dead Capital by Hernando de Soto is one of my favorite books. I have offered copies of it to countless friends since it was published. The thesis is quite simple: because of the lack of legally enforceable transactions on property rights most of the emerging world is sitting on a pile of wealth that cannot be transformed into working capital. People build homes month by month, brick by brick, from savings because there are very few emerging countries that have banking systems equipped to issue mortages. Once the house has been built the owner cannot use it for collateral if s/he, say, wishes to start a business and it is very difficult to sell on. In Dead Capital de Soto presented the system of North American land registration and property rights, which had grown piecemeal (by incremental innovation) and state by state into a system that was the envy of the world. The 30-year mortgage that used to be available to many young couples in North American was a way of allowing them to live in decent accomodation and build wealth from a very young age.

One thing de Soto regretted about the American system is that there is very little detailed historical material in the archives to explain exactly how the innovations came about. The knowledge of how it was done has been discarded. If such knowledge did exist in an explicit form it would be a very useful base for developing countries today who wish to put in place a system of legally enforceable property rights.

If we look back at why and how the Romans invented a universal system of law, between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century CE, we can see that the respect for private property and its transmission are closely linked to acknowledgement of the person as an 'individual'.

I have often worked in Algeria and to keep up my knowledge of the country I read El Watan at least once a week. In the Wednesday May 11 edition there was an article describing the enormous black holes in the official register ('le cadastre') of the quantity, value and ownership of real estate. Many of the new buildings, and even towns, that have sprung up around Algiers over the past few years are not registered. Therefore, owners are sitting in apartments they cannot sell. Every owner who wishes to sell now has to present a 'real estate booklet' to the potential buyer. In theory this is provided to him or her by the state authority responsible for registering property. However, in spite of the fact that registration officials are said to have visited these buildings and areas, they are not on the register and, therefore, because they do not exist legally cannot be sold.

In the May 2 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek there is an article by Hernando de Soto, The Destruction of Economic Facts, in which de Soto argues that 'the financial crisis wasn't just about finance--it was about a staggering lack of knowledge'. Here is an excerpt:

During the second half of the 19th century... hundreds of creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."

The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account—all the relevant knowledge available, whether intangible (stocks, commercial paper, deeds, ledgers, contracts, patents, companies, and promissory notes), or tangible (land, buildings, boats, machines, etc.). Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."

In the rest of the article de Soto makes a convincing case for the fact that 'Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts... Mortgages have been granted and recorded with such inattention that homeowners and banks often don't know and can't prove who owns their homes. The result...today...is that about 60 percent of the U.S.'s residential mortages are now recorded in the name of MERS (a shell company, which pretended to own mortages) rather than the bank, trust or company that actually has a meaningful economic interest in the repayment of the debt. For the first time in the nation's history, there is no longer an authoritative, public record of who owns land in each county.'

In the article de Soto goes into detail about six sectors in which economic facts and knowledge and the innovations of previous generations have been destroyed:

Mortgage bundling
Default Swaps
Exemptions (i.e. from 'mark to market')
Off-Balance-Sheet-Accounting
Government Use of Swaps and Repo Markets
Rating Agencies

Whereas Algeria is trying to put in place a national system of registration for property rights and suffering the inevitable problems associated with such a gargantuan task necessary to the modernisation of the whole country, North American and European financiers and regulators seem hell bent on destroying everything that has slowly grown to constitute the lever of North American wealth over the past four hundred years.

Schizotypal Personality and the Advantages of Disinhibition in Personal Creativity

2011-05-20T11:51:00.000+02:00

On April 14, Scientific American published an article by Shelley Carson titled "The Unleashed Mind: Why Creative People are Eccentric" The subtitle is "Highly creative people often seem weirder than the rest of us. Now researchers know why."

When you teach on a creativity course you learn that individual creativity comes in many shapes and forms and that we need to distinguish between adaptive creativity, the sort used by engineers, for example, at the Michelin tire company or at Boeing to transform everyday objects little by little, and the innovative type of creativity that allows a certain type of personality to come up with "out of the box" ideas. Unfortunately that type of personality can also find itself a "refugee from large organisations", because of its abrasiveness. Many innovatively creative ideas never get into production because of the personality of the person proposing them.

For me the Scientific American article is a contribution to the debate on individual creativity, but it would have been useful to see it contrast its eccentric creative people with a control group of "sensible" creative people containing individuals such as, for example, Claude Shannon or Freeman Dyson. Where I do agree with the article is when Shelley writes of the need for disinhibition in creativity.

Both creativity and eccentricity may be the result of genetic variations that increase cognitive disinhibition—the brain’s failure to filter out extraneous information.

If a person feels too inhibited to present his or her ideas that is also a way of making sure they never come to anything.

Below is an excerpt from the Scientific American article:

The incidence of strange behavior by highly creative individuals seems too extensive to be the result of mere coincidence. As far back as ancient Greece, both Plato and Aristotle made comments about the peculiar behavior of poets and playwrights. (Aristotle was also the first to note the relation between creativity and depression, an association that has been substantiated by modern research.) More than a century ago Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso catalogued the bizarre behavior of creative luminaries in his book The Man of Genius and attributed this behavior to the same hereditary “degeneration” that marked violent criminals.
In the past few decades psychologists and other scientists have explored the connection using empirically validated measures of both creativity and eccentricity. To measure creativity, researchers may look at an individual’s record of creative achievements, his or her involvement in creative activities or ability to think creatively (for example, to come up with new uses for ordinary household items). To measure eccentricity, researchers often use scales that assess schizotypal personality.

Schizotypal personality can appear in a variety of forms, including magical thinking (fanciful ideas or paranormal beliefs, such as Schumann’s belief that Beethoven channeled music to him from the grave), unusual perceptual experiences (distortions in perception, such as Dickens’s belief that he was being followed by characters from his novels), social anhedonia (a preference for solitary activities—Emily Dickinson, Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton, for example, favored work over socializing), and mild paranoia (unfounded feelings that people or objects in the environment may pose a threat, such as Hughes’s legendary distrust of others).

You can check out the whole article, and make up your own mind, at:

The Unleashed Mind

Engineers working at start-ups are worth half a million to one million

2011-05-18T13:00:00.001+02:00

When I talk about Intellectual Capital to my students, and how much it is worth, I often mention the calculation the French company Alcatel used to make a few years ago when acquiring high growth companies in the United States. The worth of the sort of company that interested Alcatel typically came to about $4 million per engineer.

I was reminded of this when reading the New York Times this morning. An article by Miguel Helft titled For Buyers of Web Start-Ups, Quest to Corral New Talent describes how companies like Facebook are buying Start-ups just to get new employees.

Below is an excerpt:

AN FRANCISCO — Sam Lessin sold his Web start-up to Facebook for millions last year, and Facebook promptly shut it down. All Facebook wanted was Mr. Lessin.

That is what it has come to in bubbly Silicon Valley. Companies like Facebook, Google and Zynga are so hungry for the best talent that they are buying start-ups to get their founders and engineers — and then jettisoning their products.

Some technology blogs call it being “acqhired.” The companies doing the buying say it is a talent acquisition, and it typically comes with a price per head.

“Engineers are worth half a million to one million,” said Vaughan Smith, Facebook’s director of corporate development, who has helped negotiate many of the 20 or so talent acquisitions made by Facebook in the last four years. The money — in the form of stock — is often distributed among the start-up’s founders, employees and investors. The acquired employees also get a rich salary and often more stock options, which makes this a good time for entrepreneurial engineers.

To read more go to the New York Times website.

Where good ideas come from: the hive mind

2011-04-25T13:59:00.000+02:00

A September 27, 2010 Wired article features a conversation between Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly. This is how the article began as follows:

Say the word “inventor” and most people think of a solitary genius toiling in a basement. But two ambitious new books on the history of innovation—by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, both longtime wired contributors—argue that great discoveries typically spring not from individual minds but from the hive mind. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson draws on seven centuries of scientific and technological progress, from Gutenberg to GPS, to show what sorts of environments nurture ingenuity. He finds that great creative milieus, whether MIT or Los Alamos, New York City or the World Wide Web, are like coral reefs—teeming, diverse colonies of creators who interact with and influence one another.

Seven centuries are an eyeblink in the scope of Kelly’s book, What Technology Wants, which looks back over some 50,000 years of history and peers nearly that far into the future. His argument is similarly sweeping: Technology, Kelly believes, can be seen as a sort of autonomous life-form, with intrinsic goals toward which it gropes over the course of its long development. Those goals, he says, are much like the tendencies of biological life, which over time diversifies, specializes, and (eventually) becomes more sentient.

Wired brought these two big brains together in New York, and the result was a conversation that covered everything from technological evolution to retweets to the value of Internet crap.

Read the conversation between the two men at:

Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson on Where Ideas Come From

The Power of Nonviolent Revolution

2011-02-18T10:42:00.001+01:00

The element of President Obama's recent speech about Egypt that enthused me the most was the stress he laid on the power of nonviolence in bringing about major change. The credit for the nonviolence in Cairo's Liberation Square and elsewhere in the country is entirely due to the the intelligence and bravery of the Egyptian people involved in organising and assisting at the demonstrations, but a February 16th article article in the New York Times shows the influence that Gene Sharp has had over the years among people who search for nonviolent ways of overthrowing dictatorial regimes. It is titled Shy U.S. Intellectual Created Playbook Used in a Revolution

You can find Sharp's books, freely available, in many languages, at his organization's website:

Below are some excerpts from the article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

BOSTON — Halfway around the world from Tahrir Square in Cairo, an aging American intellectual shuffles about his cluttered brick row house in a working-class neighborhood here. His name is Gene Sharp. Stoop-shouldered and white-haired at 83, he grows orchids, has yet to master the Internet and hardly seems like a dangerous man.

But for the world’s despots, his ideas can be fatal.

Few Americans have heard of Mr. Sharp. But for decades, his practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia andEgypt.

When Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement was struggling to recover from a failed effort in 2005, its leaders tossed around “crazy ideas” about bringing down the government, said Ahmed Maher, a leading strategist. They stumbled on Mr. Sharp while examining the Serbian movement Otpor, which he had influenced.

When the nonpartisan International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which trains democracy activists, slipped into Cairo several years ago to conduct a workshop, among the papers it distributed was Mr. Sharp’s “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action,” a list of tactics that range from hunger strikes to “protest disrobing” to “disclosing identities of secret agents.”...

He has been watching events in Cairo unfold on CNN from his modest house in East Boston, which he bought in 1968 for $150 plus back taxes...

Read the rest of the article on the New York Times website.

Entrenched Boundaries, Culture Clashes, Turf Battles Impose Limitations on Innovation

2011-02-18T09:19:00.000+01:00

Extract from the MIT Sloan Management Review article Flat World, Hard Boundaries – How To Lead Across Them

...Technological innovations have revolutionized the workplace, bringing the competitive power of emerging economies’ fast-growth organizations into closer alignment with their developed-world counterparts. Paradoxically, at the same time that these developments have made doing business across borders easier, relational barriers — obstacles to productive human interactions — not only remain largely unchanged but in some cases have deepened.

Consider the hurdles faced by those who lead functionally diverse teams across levels of management — often involving a variety of organizational partners who may be based in different countries. These leaders’ jobs are made easier by the technological advances that help to close gaps involving distance and knowledge. But the leaders also are confronted with entrenched boundaries such as residual bitterness between historical enemies, culture clashes, turf battles and generation gaps. Such boundaries invite conflict, impose limitations on performance and stifle innovation...

I encourage you to read the rest of this article and a whole host of other good management information at the Sloan Management Review website

Biomimicry as a Creativity Tool

2011-01-31T11:46:00.002+01:00

In the MBA creativity course on which I tutor, or when I do creativity consulting, one of the creativity techniques I now favor is Excursions, which I have begun to expand from the way it is used in TRIZ.

I have found that it is very effective to combine excursions with biomimicry. I thus spend a couple of minutes explaining what I mean by "excursion" and then I give a couple of examples from biomimicry, before I ask the participants to go for a walk and come back with something from nature that has "talked" to them.

Examples of creativity from biomimicry can be found in fields from architecture (e.g. R. Buckminster Fuller's "geodesic" dome) to self-cleaning surfaces inspired by Lotus Plants. Here are a few more examples:

Economic clusters inspired by both Michael Porter and the rainforest
Businesses inspired by nutrient cycling
Bacterial control inspired by red algae
Building Material from CO2 inspired by mollusks
Fog harvesting inspired by a desert beetle
Economic cluster inspired by the mangrove forest
Vaccines without refrigeration inspired by resurrection plant
Fiber manufacture inspired by golden orb weaver spiders
Water purification inspired by the marsh ecosystem
C02 capture inspired by algae

A full list of "Nature's 100 Best" can be found at :

Nature's 100 Best

What Would Happen (in France) if We Placed our Confidence in Entrepreneurs?

2010-12-26T12:36:00.004+01:00

That is the title of a new book by Xavier Fontanet, the President of Essilor. The full title in French is "What Would Happen if we Placed our Confidence in Entrepreneurs: the French Firm and Globalization."

Essilor manufactures ophthalmic lenses and optical equipment and is one of the best performing French companies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Sales have been multiplied by 110 in 37 years and the stock market valuation of the company has been multiplied by 196. Essilor's main competitor is the Japanese company Hoya Vision Care. The French business magazine Challenges carried excerpts from Fontanet's book in its December 9th, 2010 edition.

I have just ordered the book on Amazon, but I thought it would be useful to share with you some of the quotes from it that have been excerpted in the Challenges pages.

On Competition

"If you want to manage a company, to invent, to stay healthy, to make progress and grow there is nothing better than competition... A (tennis) player becomes a champion by taking on other champions. Without an adversary there is no champion. It is not by batting balls back and forth that you make progress, it is by playing the big finals. If you are unopposed you no longer exist."

On Meaning

"Everybody (in France) knows the story of the stone breakers. It dates from the Middle Ages, during the building of Chartres Cathedral. The laborers were asked what they were doing. They gave three sorts of reply:

"I am breaking stones," said the first
"I am forming objects from stone," said the second.
"I am building a cathedral," said the third.

Meaning could therefore be said to be only a question of perception, but imagine the differences in enthusiasm and energy that come from the approach you have to your work. In the first case, the worker is a robot, in the second he becomes an artist, in the third case he is an artist participating in a great adventure. In the third case, the laborer writes his personal history in the history of the world and passes down to posterity.

Let us take the example of an auditor. One of the main responsibilities of an auditor is to make an inventory of the firm and to certify its accounts. Counting the number of pairs of shoes or bottles of perfume in a soulless warehouse can be a daunting task. Of course the auditor puts his signature to the accounts, but his real mission is to inspire confidence in the numbers and, in this way, to contribute to the health of the economy."

I will probably write another post about this book, when I have had time to read it. Essilor is a great example of the the power of entrepreneurship. It has not only had to measure itself against Hoya Vision Care but, probably the greatest adversary of all, the bureaucratic mindset of the centralized French State.

How to Find the Very Best Innovation Blogs

2010-12-25T12:36:00.008+01:00

There are now thousands of blogs about innovation. Most of them are very superficial and do no more than revolve around simplistic articles such as "The Top Ten Barriers to Innovation" or "Five Steps to Innovation Excellence", which show that the bloggers are either scribbling off the tops of their heads or paraphrasing another blog or a magazine article. It is immediately apparent that they not only have no personal experience as practitioners of innovation but that they have not studied writers such as Burns & Stalker, Clayton M. Christensen or Henry Chesbrough.

The number of blogs that can be useful to Master's level students of Creativity and Innovation is limited. For students at this level, who are also holding down a full-time managerial position, time is short and unfiltered information is plethoric. One way to decide which are the really useful blogs is to look for many of them with Google Blog Search, pick up their RSS feeds from the first page, combine the RSS feeds in an aggregator such as Google Reader and see over a period of a few weeks which feeds systematically bring articles useful to serious students of innovation. Delete all the feeds that produce nothing original and you will soon find yourself with just five to ten useful feeds from blogs that add real value. This method is not that different to the diverge and converge phases in the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) "idea generation" stage.

In the diverge phase of CPS, you generate five hundred ideas in the expectation that out of the five hundred there will be a couple of small, gold nuggets. In the converge phase you use filtering techniques to get rid of all the dross and find your nuggets.

As a systematic reader (and discarder) of innovation blogs, I have no hesitation in saying that one of the top five, world wide, is Blogging Innovation, hosted by Braden Kelly and featuring writers like Stefan Lindegaard and Jeffrey Phillips, both of whom host blogs of their own (although Stefan's personal blog is at the moment in hibernation as he devotes his winter's resources to his new Open Innovation Blog : 15inno).

Another blog I have found systematically useful, although it is much more specialized (in Triz methodology), is Real Innovation. To keep up with innovation in Social Media I have found that Mashable, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb all systematically provide good and timely information.

A Strategy+Business Interview with Ikujiro Nonaka

2010-12-04T13:52:00.001+01:00

There is an exhaustive interview with Ikujiro Nonaka on the Strategy+Business website that will be useful to anybody who is interested in Knowledge Management. It was done in conjunction with the appearance of Nonaka's new book "Managing Flow - A process-based theory of the Knowledge-Based Firm". After reading the interview I immediately checked out Amazon to see how much the book cost and I must admit I was shocked to see a price of $67.50 (it is even more expensive on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.fr) but I gritted my teeth and bought it anyway.

Below are a couple of excerpts from the interview:

The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka...

...In Managing Flow, Nonaka summarizes and extends a body of work that could change the prevailing view of knowledge management in most companies from a branch of information technology to an enabler of in-depth learning...

Nonaka’s work first came to the attention of those within U.S. management circles in 1986 with an influential Harvard Business Review article titled “The New New Product Development Game,” coauthored with Hirotaka Takeuchi, who is now dean of the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University and a visiting professor at Harvard Business School. That article, Nonaka’s first to explore organizational knowledge creation, was followed in 1991 with another Takeuchi-coauthored HBR article, “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Their 1995 book, The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (Oxford University Press), laid out a comprehensive theory on developing collective intellectual capability.

“Jiro is quite simply the father of knowledge management,” says Takeuchi. “His research over the last 20 years opened up a whole new field and set the stage for how the best organizations understand human capital today.” Although Nonaka cites mostly Japanese companies in his research, says Takeuchi, “his model is universal. That’s why he’s the only Asian on the Wall Street Journal’s list [published in May 2008] of the 20 most influential business thinkers.”

The Flip Side of Knowledge

But Nonaka’s perspective also runs counter to conventional corporate practice. Most companies assign knowledge management to their information technology departments, which focus on codifying best practices that can be captured, stored, indexed, and retrieved as efficiently as possible. Nonaka views all this data management as a minor, almost incidental aspect of the capability development that enables business success.

“Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create,” he says. Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional “inputs” into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. “It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.”

I advise any person who is serious about keeping up to date with management practice to take out an email subscription to Strategy+Business. Not only is its content at least as good as anything produced by the Harvard Business Review or the MIT Sloan Management Review, it is also FREE. I usually see the print version of Strategy+Business in the Relais newspaper shop in the Brussels Gare du Midi train station, on my way to tutorials. Unfortunately, like many U.S. print publications we find in Europe it is expensive, €15 in the case of Strategy+Business. But you can find online everything that is in the print version.

Check out the whole interview with Nonaka here:

The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka

How to Discover Your Core Character Strengths

2010-12-03T11:26:00.001+01:00

Part of my role as a tutor on an MBA Creativity module is to help students learn how to use psychometric instruments to analyse their personal creative style.

In addition to the work I do with KAI Theory, over the years I have become very interested in the positive psychology movement and the work that has been done by the Via Institute on Character to develop questionnaires that help people to discover their core character strengths.

To see how core character strengths are defined, check out the VIA CLASSIFICATION.

If you are interested in taking any of the surveys, you can find them at: VIA Institute Surveys

The French version of the VIA Strengths Survey is still being tested (based on the initial translation done by my son, Eoin Gaynard, when he did an internship with me) so it would be great if any French-speakers among you could fill it in and thereby help in the developmental testing.

How Does a Systems Perspective on Creativity Apply to Mark Zuckerberg and Other Young Entrepreneurs?

2010-11-28T13:24:00.008+01:00

At a B822* creativity tutorial last Saturday, that concentrated on individual creative style and organisational creative climate, I talked about Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's "systems perspective on creativity". In a groundbreaking paper Csikszentmihalyi stated:

"...Creativity is a process that can be observed only at the intersection where individuals, domains and field interact.

For creativity to occur, a set of rules and practices must be transmitted from the domain to the individual. The individual must then produce a novel variation in the content of the domain. The variation must then be selected by the field for inclusion in the domain."

An important part of Csikszentmihalyi's thinking has to do with the importance of experience and intuition. Usually the field "gatekeepers" (say the experts in the company in which the individual works) only sign off or give credence to the individual's intuitions and allow him or her to connect with the domain (through peer-reviewed papers, conferences, etc.) if the individual has had 10-15 years experience in the field.

One of the students engaged critically with the model (i.e. he said it was no longer relevant) and illustrated this by citing the youth of creative people involved in new domains of knowledge, such as social networking. I had recently seen the film The Social Network, which tells the story of how Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook while a very young student at Harvard. I could analyze the film through Csikszentmihalyi's systems perspective as far as regards the individual, the field and the domain.

At the individual level: Mark Zuckerberg was a very creative programmer at a very young age.
At the field level: He was immediately recognized for that creativity by five or six knowledgeable student friends (i.e. the field gatekeepers, some of whom subsequently became enemies) at Harvard who were even willing to pony up relatively small sums from their allowances to fund him and the domain quickly recognized him
At the domain level: the strongest example of this in the film is that when Sean Parker saw Zuckerberg's first version of Facebook, on the PC of a girlfriend studying at Stanford, he immediately traveled across the country to meet Zuckerberg and then had no problem in helping Zuckerberg get venture-capital funding for Facebook. Sean Penn's credentials for being part of the social networking "domain" that recognizes the individual contribution to knowledge or practice at the world level are that he was the brain behind Napster, and then co-founded Plaxo and Causes.

But, what no longer seems to work in Csikszentmihalyi's model is the emphasis on the need for years of experience, to underpin the creative intuitions, in either the field or the domain, especially when people like Zuckerberg and Penn (and the youngsters who founded Google, Twitter or 4chan ) are creating a new domain. Creative Individuals in social media and social networking are being recognized by the field and the domain in a matter of months, these days, and no longer in a matter of years. A three or four month track record is good enough, although, to get the funds and professional support to scale up, you may still need the support of a guy like Sean Penn (who does now have years of experience in the domain and whose intuitions are trusted by venture capitalists).

To the student who asked me that question, thank you!

See Mark Zuckerberg's Take on the Social Network
*B822 is shorthand for the Open University MBA module "Creativity, Innovation and Change", on which I tutor to a group of manager-students in Brussels.

The Fastest-Growing Company Ever

2010-11-20T22:21:00.001+01:00

Image via Wikipedia

The November 17th edition of the New York Times carried an interview with Eric Lefkofsky, who "has an impressive entrepreneurial track record, one that recently led Forbes to estimate his wealth at $750 million." The article was titled: A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media. Groupon has "grown from a handful of employees to more than 2,700 over the past two years. This year alone (it has) expanded into 29 new countries.

Excerpt:

Groupon, the social-coupon Web site that (Lefkofsky) bankrolled and started in 2008 with Andrew Mason (is) a venture that has been called the fastest-growing company ever. Groupon offers its followers a deal-of-the-day coupon, sponsored by a local business, that the followers are encouraged to share with their social networks. The local business gets customers, and Groupon takes a share of the coupon proceeds — a business model that has led to talk that Groupon, still privately owned, could be worth as much as $3 billion. More recently, Mr. Lefkofsky and Mr. Keywell started an investment fund with $100 million of their earnings. It’s called Lightbank, and it invests only in early-stage technology companies that are built around social media. The following is a condensed version of a recent conversation with Mr. Lefkofsky.

I encourage you to read the interview with Mr. Lefkofsvky here:

Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media

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