The Anti-Establishment Innovator

Centered Leadership: Posnanski: The rise and fall of A-Rod

2013-02-22T11:35:00.001-08:00

No discussion on innovation is complete without leadership. Conversely, one cannot properly discuss leadership without authentic i.e. centered leadership (see Stephen Covey if in doubt).

Which is all the more reason why this morning's story by Joe Posnanski captured my attention; the word, "ANYTHING." What will you do to obtain niche supremacy? Are you willing to sell your soul? In the movie "Oh Brother Where Art Thou," the famed guitarist Tommy Johnson is blasted for selling his soul to the devil. He replies, "I wasn't using it anyway."

There is a wonderful quote by Tom Peters I have used often in presentations, "There is no such thing as a minor lapse of integrity." In the long run what one does echoes through an organization as well as ourselves removing a little more of our once treasured veneer a little here and little there. I highly encourage the reading of this magnificent article on a once great man who happened to be a baseball player. See any similarities in yourself or other leaders? Here are several notable failures. But don’t be misled. Such falls from grace are in businesses of all sizes in all niches. I'd like to hear your thoughts below. If you'd like me to speak for you contact me here at my website or call 719-266-6703. Thanks. Jim

Leon Halip / Getty Images

Allard Baird would say he was literally shaking. Baird is not a demonstrative person — he’s the sort of man who would call the best meal of his life “good” or, perhaps, if he was feeling especially forthcoming, “really good” — and this is why the word “literally” matters. He would remember “literally” shaking as he sent in his report on a high school baseball player named Alex Rodriguez.

Baird was a young scout — this was before he became general manager of the Kansas City Royals, long before he became vice president of player personnel for the Boston Red Sox. It was 20 years ago. He had been coaching baseball — “on the field,” as baseball people like to say. He grew used to locating players’ weaknesses and working on them.

With Alex Rodriguez … Baird could see no weaknesses. The kid was perfect.

Read more of the story via nbcsports.msnbc.com

7 Signs Your Small Business Is In Trouble - Innovate or die

2013-02-19T11:55:00.001-08:00

Things change rapidly in life. Personally, this happened to me in May 1995 when I woke up with blurry vision. A few days later, I was diagnosed with diabetes. That day changed my life forever.

Small business fortunes can also “turn on a dime.” It’s a constant roller coaster where one day your company is on top of the world. Customers will buy anything, people are paying their bills on time and everyone wants to work for you. The next day, you can’t give your product away, your computer systems crash and your best employee leaves without notice.

Like people, healthy businesses can become "sick" very fast. This is why the stock market places so much emphasis on quarterly earnings reports. Things can change in a matter of months—more of this is likely to happen in the current weak economic recovery.

So what are the early signs that your business is in trouble?

1. You do not understand how profit is generated in your business. Which products or services are the most profitable (not just the best selling)? Can they be divided into primary and secondary streams where one sale depends on the sale of the other? For example, in a software company, annual maintenance, upgrades or add ons will never sell if the original product isn’t first purchased.

2. You do not know the gross margins of your major products (sales minus cost of goods sold). Remember, it is a lot easier to make money with an 80 percent gross margin than a 20 percent gross margin. In most service oriented businesses, gross margins must approach 50 percent to make a healthy bottom line profit.

3. You do not know what your prices are based on. Are they set based on their value to customers, competitive pressures or historical trends? Do a sensitivity analysis to find out how much flexibility there is to charge more for the same products. Most small companies especially early in their life charge too little for their products rather for fear of being rejected and not having any customers.

4. You don’t understand your cash flow statement. Every other financial statement can be “fudged” except for this one. You need to know exactly where cash comes from and how the money is spent. How much of the monthly profit reported on the income statement actually gets retained as cash in the business?

Click here for more small business strategies to out innovate and out compete.

5. You do not know how current your accounts receivables are. Find out your company’s biggest offenders. Remember that customer credit is a privilege, not a right, and it’s available only to those who earn it. A customer is only a customer when they pay.

6. You don’t know if the problem your business solves is still relevant to your customers. If the nature of the pain for these customers is beginning to change or be substituted by other solutions, you may have a problem. For example, pay phones were needed when people wanted to make phone calls outside their homes. Portable cell phone technology killed this industry.

7. You don’t know where and how you spend your time.You need to focus most of your energies on generating revenue for your company rather than on administrative duties. In fact, look at what the people in your company do who aren’t generating income and continually justify it. Escalating fixed overhead kills many companies when economic conditions change. via openforum.com

What to do next? What are some other signs of trouble in your business

In a rapidly changing marketplace, innovation isn’t optional. It’s essential. We’ll teach you how to cultivate innovation within yourself and within your organization. We’re patient experts that will teach you skills and techniques you can apply within your organization to bring powerful ideas forward. We’ll enable you to integrate innovation and competitive strategy into the core of your organization.

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Atoms Versus Bits: Where To Find Innovation

2013-02-19T04:35:00.001-08:00

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters,” says Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. Thiel made billions from PayPal and Facebook, but he says the pace of innovation in the broader world has slowed way down.

Is Thiel right? The answer depends on whether you mean innovation in the world of atoms (physical things) or innovation in the world of bits (software).

• Atoms: slowing. The Boeing 747 first flew in 1969, yet it still is the main jet carrying people across oceans. Automobiles still travel 70mph on our highways. They use less fuel and are safer, but the pace of improvement is nothing like it was 100 years ago.

• Bits: accelerating. The cellphone was the size of a brick 30 years ago. Six years ago it was much lighter, though still mainly a phone. Today it’s a camera, radio, television, credit card and disease diagnostic tool.

The most fertile areas for innovation become clear in this atoms versus bits view. If the atom world is slow to change, how can bits replace atoms or change the way we use them? Newspapers have transitioned from atoms to bits. Trickier are classrooms and health diagnostics, but they’re moving, too. Finally, bits will never replace such things as cars or airplanes (unless you think Scotty can beam you up), but they’ll change the way we use those things.

Take classrooms. I predict that 50% of colleges will fail during the next decade. The high ROI that a diploma once guaranteed is no longer certain. That’s because the “I” has grown way out of control, a result of decades of 7% annual price increases. Employers now have other and cheaper ways to test for intelligence and drive.

Online education got serious in 2012. Two open-enrollment online colleges–Coursera and Udacity–each raised more than $10 million in venture capital. Both have excellent parentage, started by professors from Stanford. Coursera plans to make money by selling certificates for around $100, verifying course completion. If you can earn a certificate for completing an artificial intelligence class taught by a Stanford professor, gee, where does that leave the math professor at the underfunded liberal arts college?

A second, less noticed kind of education revolution is aimed at replacing traditional corporate training. The Apollo Group, which owns the University of Phoenix, has made a big bet to create the Innovator’s Accelerator and has signed up noted Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and others to teach corporate teams how to become more innovative. I was allowed a sneak peek at Innovator’s Accelerator; it looks like something George Lucas would have cooked up had he turned his creative talents to education. The Innovator’s Accelerator–or something like it–will soon change the $50 billion corporate training market as we know it.

A third way bits can transform atoms is to change the way we consume and value atoms. An example in air travel is XOJet, which has made private-jet travel cheaper.

XOJet, owned by Texas Pacific Group, was able to use TPG’s credit to buy scores of late-model jets on the cheap after the financial crisis. XOJet’s chief, Blair LaCorte, then imported strategies and tactics from two other businesses owned wholly or in part by TPG: low-cost air carrier Ryanair and resorts operator Harrah’s.

“We got people to think of private jets as nice hotel rooms to rent, not resort homes to fractionally own,” LaCorte says. XOJet owns 75 jets but has only three types: the Challenger 300, the Hawker 800XP and the Citation X. “We know how to maintain these three types,” he says. That’s crucial, because XOJet gets 1,200 annual hours of use from each jet, as opposed to 600 hours for the average fractional jet and 250 hours for the average privately owned jet.

XOJet’s volume means that you can rent a Challenger to go from Van Nuys, Calif., near L.A., to Teterboro, N.J., near Manhattan, for as low as $23,000. The more custom your needs–say, Santa Monica to White Plains at a precise time–the more the price will go up, of course. But thanks to the Internet and some clever analytics, XOJet is able to price each request, offer a smart deal and make money. Yes, it’s still a jet, but bits have transformed how the jet is being used.

via forbes.com

Click here for more ideas on how to use innovation as a competitive strategy.

The Heart of Innovation: Go Beyond Analysis Paralysis

2013-02-18T15:52:00.001-08:00

via ideachampions.com

Among Great Companies Leadership Is Simply The Difference

2013-02-14T14:00:00.000-08:00

Simply Profound

Saw a great quote about the obvious by Carol Hymowitz:

“Good governance depends primarily on leaders who put integrity and the interest of their companies ahead of their self-interests. These executives are willing to grapple with difficult decisions that may involve personal sacrifice.”

Which reminds me of the Hay Group Best Companies survey.

Hay Group's John Larrere said, "Rapid changes in the world are impacting how organizations do business, and as a result, the old rules of how organizations select, develop and retain good leaders have been turned upside down causing the future of leadership to look very different. ... It's about getting them (people) to be passionate about their work and grooming them to handle the challenges ahead."

These findings fall in line with those of Peter Drucker in the “The Effective Executive,” who highlight "Inspiring" and “Leaders have a commitment to community and to change lives.”

Jim Collins highlights - Their drive and passion isn’t about themselves. It’s about the work, the organization, the purpose. Their purpose isn’t just making money or increasing shareholder value. “You have to have a reason to struggle, a reason to endure,” and they are willing to do whatever it takes for the organization, within the bounds of their values."
Franklin Covey 2013 Her Point of View Weekly Planner, Design (Google Affiliate Ad)

The most effective leaders focus on people as well as profits. They treat employees as assets not commodities as in the Jack Welch management dictum fire the “C” players. The truly great leaders have figured out how to select, build, and maintain people's belief that they are being honestly and competently led in today's unpredictable business world. Jim

Einstein on The Simplicity of Innovation - Bam!

2013-02-14T09:30:00.000-08:00

This Einstein quote nails innovation. Not to mention glowing mission statements that nary an employee nor manager are able to recite.

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Gaining a New Understanding of Risk

2013-02-14T04:30:00.001-08:00

In these days of uncertain markets – and an uncertain economy – risk can seem almost omnipresent in business. But how do you manage risk prudently – yet still grow your company?

That timely question reminds me of an interesting talk I heard this past summer by Harvard Business School professor (and MIT alumnus) Robert S. Kaplan. Kaplan is perhaps best known for his work codeveloping the Balanced Scorecard concept.

But, as Kaplan explained to a Harvard Business School Executive Education class this summer, he began exploring the topic of risk management in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, after he saw venerable firms such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns collapse – despite having risk management functions.

Here are a few of Kaplan’s insights on the topic of risk management.
There are three categories of risks. The first category, Kaplan said, are risks from employees’ undesirable and unauthorized actions. “These risks are the ‘known knowns,’ and the organization gets no benefits from allowing them to occur,” according to Kaplan. So, he advised, “enterprises should strive to completely avoid ‘Category I’ risks.”

Category II risks, on the other hand, are the kind of risks a company can’t avoid: the risks of not achieving the enterprise’s strategic objectives. “All interesting strategies have some kind of risk,” Kaplan pointed out.

And the third category of risk, according to Kaplan? Risks from certain uncontrollable external events, such as a volcano eruption that affects air travel — or a tsunami that affects your supply chain. Many companies, he observed, don’t even know that they don’t know about how such external events can undermine their strategies.

Learn from close calls. When it comes to Category I risk from employee actions, “you’ve got to look at…‘near misses’ and why they occur,” Kaplan observed. In particular he noted, as your business expands and gets more complicated, your internal auditors may not have the control systems and competencies to understand your new businesses – which can be a problem, because new business are where you’re more likely to have problems. In Kaplan’s view, the recent trading failure at UBS, which cost the CEO his job, is an example of a Category I risk that should have been avoided.

“If you have high-powered incentives, you’d better have even higher-powered control systems,” Kaplan said – to make sure the way people achieve the goals is consistent with the company’s mission. (One analogy Kaplan gave: What determines how fast you can drive a car safely is not just the size of the engine – but also the power of the brakes.) Strategies for dealing with risk from employee actions, he observed, start with mission statements and values and extend to strong internal control systems.

Ask: What are the risks associated with your strategy? When it comes to mitigating Category II risk associated with strategy execution, it’s important to identify what could go wrong, Kaplan observed – and what could prevent the organization from achieving its strategic objectives.

One option Kaplan described for increasing awareness of Category II risks: a key risk indicator scorecard that seeks to give advance indications of when a significant risk to the organization’s strategic objectives has become more likely or more consequential. He also described how the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) holds risk review meetings – with a risk review board created for each of its complex projects.

On the other hand, it’s not easy measuring risk – something Kaplan acknowledged. What makes risk management so hard, he observed, is that you’re trying to quantify things that may have never occurred and may never occur. “You can’t rely totally on measurement,” he said.

Ask yourself what different scenarios for the future would mean for your company. When assessing Category III risks – risks from noncontrollable events in your external environment – scenario planning can be helpful, according to Kaplan.

via sloanreview.mit.edu

Jim Woods is a strategy consultant and CEO of InnoThink Group. Leading advisors on strategy and innovation helping leaders make decisions based on innovative and unconventional insight. Read more.

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Commoditization Not Innovation Destroyed Kmart?

2013-02-13T09:30:00.000-08:00

I spotted a not so surprising story by Kim Peterson on "Is it time to close Kmart?." Anyone perusing the anemic aisles of Kmart in the past 5 years or more must be astounded how a once number two retailer in the world could tumble.
In 1999 having read an article in Newsweek on Wal-Mart's challenge to Sears and Kmart, I penned a congratulatory letter to Sam Walton founder of Wal-Mart. This new upstart Wal-Mart, had used technology and nimbleness to breathe down the necks of these two perennial “Two big to fail” giants. How this occurred should be of paramount importance.
Today, we recognize Sears and Kmart’s problems as commoditization. A few aspects are noted here:
1.    Speed and nimbleness.
2.    Responsiveness to change and competition
3.    Low entry competitors
4.    Technology
5.    Price
6.    Speed
7.    Innovation. Recognition that no advantage is unassailable.
8.    That size is a detriment.
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First, Let's Fire All the Managers. The Real Reason You Are In Peril - Gary Hamel

2013-02-10T01:43:00.001-08:00

Management is the least efficient activity in your organization.

Think of the countless hours that team leaders, department heads, and vice presidents devote to supervising the work of others. Most managers are hardworking; the problem doesn’t lie with them. The inefficiency stems from a top-heavy management model that is both cumbersome and costly.

A hierarchy of managers exacts a hefty tax on any organization. This levy comes in several forms. First, managers add overhead, and as an organization grows, the costs of management rise in both absolute and relative terms. A small organization may have one manager and 10 employees; one with 100,000 employees and the same 1:10 span of control will have 11,111 managers. That’s because an additional 1,111 managers will be needed to manage the managers. In addition, there will be hundreds of employees in management-related functions, such as finance, human resources, and planning. Their job is to keep the organization from collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. Assuming that each manager earns three times the average salary of a first-level employee, direct management costs would account for 33% of the payroll. Any way you cut it, management is expensive.

Second, the typical management hierarchy increases the risk of large, calamitous decisions. As decisions get bigger, the ranks of those able to challenge the decision maker get smaller. Hubris, myopia, and naïveté can lead to bad judgment at any level, but the danger is greatest when the decision maker’s power is, for all purposes, uncontestable. Give someone monarchlike authority, and sooner or later there will be a royal screwup. A related problem is that the most powerful managers are the ones furthest from frontline realities. All too often, decisions made on an Olympian peak prove to be unworkable on the ground.

Third, a multitiered management structure means more approval layers and slower responses. In their eagerness to exercise authority, managers often impede, rather than expedite, decision making. Bias is another sort of tax. In a hierarchy the power to kill or modify a new idea is often vested in a single person, whose parochial interests may skew decisions.

Finally, there’s the cost of tyranny. The problem isn’t the occasional control freak; it’s the hierarchical structure that systematically disempowers lower-level employees. For example, as a consumer you have the freedom to spend $20,000 or more on a new car, but as an employee you probably don’t have the authority to requisition a $500 office chair. Narrow an individual’s scope of authority, and you shrink the incentive to dream, imagine, and contribute.

Hierarchies Versus Markets
No wonder economists have long celebrated the ability of markets to coordinate human activity with little or no top-down control. Markets have limits, though. As economists like Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson have noted, markets work well when the needs of each party are simple, stable, and easy to specify, but they’re less effective when interactions are complex. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, how a market could precisely coordinate the kaleidoscopic array of activities at the heart of a large, process-intensive manufacturing operation.

That’s why we need corporations and managers. Managers do what markets cannot; they amalgamate thousands of disparate contributions into a single product or service. They constitute what business historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr. called the visible hand. The downside, though, is that the visible hand is inefficient and often ham-fisted.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve high levels of coordination without a supervisory superstructure? Wouldn’t it be terrific if we could get the freedom and flexibility of an open market with the control and coordination of a tightly knit hierarchy? If only we could manage without managers. via hbr.org

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Getting Back to the Human Side of Human Resources: How to Make Online Recruiting More Effective | Idea Climatology

2013-02-05T12:51:00.001-08:00

By my new cool friend Tony V who really gets it! I strongly encourage you to subscribe to his blog. Jim W

By Anthony Vengrove

Recently, the Wall Street Journal featured a piece that caught my attention, Software Raises Bar for Hiring. For the past several months I have been privately fuming over how silly the job application process has become. Evidently, Peter Cappelli (Wharton School of Business) seems to agree with my feelings on this subject.

Via The Wall Street Journal:

In an essay in this newspaper last fall, Peter Cappelli … challenged the oft-heard complaint from employers that they can’t find good workers with the right skills. ”The real culprits are the employers themselves,” he asserted.

“For every story about an employer who can’t find qualified applicants, there’s a counterbalancing tale about an employer with ridiculous hiring requirements,” [Cappelli] says. In many companies, software has replaced recruiters, he writes, so “applicants rarely talk to anyone, even by email, during the hiring process.”

Read more at milesfinchinnovation.com

Tupac Shakur "Think Different" by Apple - Welcome the Crazy and Quirky Innovators

2013-02-04T19:04:00.001-08:00

The bigger picture for this post is YOU. How are your products and services distinctly innovative. Think about that for a moment. Most singers are just like another. Most managers operate from the same playbook. Again, Think about it.

I am often asked to describe what I do. The follow up question is then who are my target audience. This tribute video by Apple of Tupac summarizes in superb details our energy and intent for our clients. This is what separates us from others. Thank you Tupac, for we aim to help our clients to become a splinter in the eyes of their competitors and good enough as well. Be different or go home. The world is intensely competitive. Ho do you stand out and then deliver on your promises?

via youtube.com

If ideas are the seeds of innovation…Eureka! Innovation Ideation.

2013-01-29T22:54:00.001-08:00

Image courtesy Robert Brands

Innovation is a product of human activity. Innovation keeps life interesting, yet it begins first, with ideation. The creation of a new thought or idea.

If ideas are the seeds of innovation, idea management is the formalization of the processes involved in gathering, sharing, analyzing and executing the ideas generated within an organization and its collaborative networks.

Ideation and idea management pack the front end of the New Product Development (NPD) funnel with a wealth of viable concepts. Since only a fraction of ideas actually reach fruition, ideation should be harnessed by a process with dedicated resources and with both NPD & LTD (Long Term Development) teams working together.

Ideations can take many different forms. They can be solutions; where there is a problem, there is a solution waiting to be found. They can be evolutionary by modifying an existing product or adding a feature to it. Ideations can be symbiotic; combining multiple ideas, using different elements of each to make a whole. They can be revolutionary (a brand new perspective). Ideations can be serendipitous; where the intended idea is generated by the unexpected. They can be targeted; dealing with a direct and planned path to discovery, or they can be artistic, disregarding practicality and allowing ideas to flow without constraints.

Click here for more information on how uncertainty and competitive strategy impacts the quality of innovation.

Whichever form your ideas take, how you manage them dictates the outcome of each endeavor. Frequent and intelligently facilitated ideation sessions lead to successful new products… and the much sought after AHA! or Eureka! moment.

Here’s a fun little side fact for you: The Eureka moment is said to be named after the myth that the Greek mathematician Archimedes, having discovered how to measure the volume of an irregular object, leaped out of a public bath, shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” Or, translated: “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”

Now, getting back to the business of ideation, here are some idea management tips:

Tear down the walls or create dedicated ideation space – Break up teams into people who know each other but are not “that friendly” with each other in order to minimize group think.

Provide a framework to capture ideas – Accept ALL ideas and get them written down on the board. You never know when a concept can be recycled for future use.

Setting and Location – Create a positive environment to delivery pitches, but vary the format as well as locations and times of ideation sessions. Predictability can kill ideation. Mix it up to get people out of their comfort zones.

Info Alchemy – Create and maintain your idea inventory & review it regularly. Build a database of ideas from which new combinations and solutions can be derived.

Include a diverse group of people – In addition to your team, include members such as the sales team, people who interact directly with customers, and maybe even a few select customers themselves to offer their insight into the meeting.

Establish rules of engagement – At some point during the ideation process you will need to inform your team what you are, and are not looking for. Communicate what the overall process will look like, and how ideas will be evaluated.

Recognize and reward contributors – Instill a sense of urgency in every employee about what needs to be done; give them the support they need to feel their good efforts will be rewarded.

Encourage the creative process – The Challenge sponsor must promise that the crowd’s efforts will not be for nothing and that the ideas will all be taken seriously and some will be further developed.

Last but not least start with White Boarding or Brain writing versus just Brainstorming that should follow… ask your Innovation Coach about this.

For additional Tips on Idea Management, see Robert’s Rules of Innovation ™ by Wiley, Spring, 2010.

via robertsrulesofinnovation.com

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Jim Woods is an expert on competitive strategy, uncertainty and innovation. Jim is president and CEO of InnoThink Group, a strategy and uncertainty consulting firm designed to maximize the potential of leaders and organizations. For more on Jim check out his website and follow him on Facebook.

For over 25 years Jim Woods has helped organizations and individuals achieve their goals, maximize their effectiveness, become more productive, develop confidence, and overcome the fears holding them back. Click here to schedule an appointment.

Why The Tumult of Johnson and J.C. Penney Is Less About Innovation, More About Commoditization

2013-01-29T02:40:00.001-08:00

This story by Abram Brown a Forbes staff writer on the continuing woes of J.C. Penney is remarkable. A few months ago one of the top stories on Forbes was of former Apple store innovator Johnson would wave his magic to transform competitors to little more than usurpers. The article was dead wrong. One can't disdain Johnson of dispassionate innovation. A lesson for the proliferation of innovation aficionados forgetting that in a world of intense competition there is innovation and there is effective innovation. However, the money isn’t in the innovations it is in salivating customers who remind their friends hw great you are.

Hence, J.C. Penney chief Ron Johnson's problems aren't innovation. I repeat. It’s commoditization stupid. The most feared enemy of business. I'd appreciate your comments. Jim W

J.C. Penney’s decision to return to gimmicky promotions—a sale for friends and family, 2o% off!—reflects how mightily that company is struggling under the direction of new CEO Ron Johnson.

Starting this week, the 110-year-old department store chain will bring back some of the sales that it swore off last year, the Associated Press reports. Meanwhile, J.C. Penney will feature new price tags next to merchandise that shows how much customers save by shopping there.

It’s exactly what Johnson said he wouldn’t do. He pledged to give up promotions, part of an grand scheme that would change nearly every aspect of the company. The reversal shows he misunderstood J.C. Penney’s customers at the start and that his ambitious plan isn’t taking hold.

What else has gone wrong? By scrapping sales—coupons too—J.C. Penney alienated its core customer base. The middle income shoppers who went to J.C. Penney no longer feel comfortable there. Nor will they recognize the place soon. Johnson plans to dramatically renovate J.C. Penney’s 1,110 stores, widening aisles and adding flashy technology. Coffee bars will, perhaps, make it a hang-0ut spot. Yoga classes and hair salons, too.

All this hasn’t gotten J.C. Penney far. It probably just booked its fourth consecutive quarter of losses. Sales have fallen, too, likely off more than 20% in the past year. Shareholders wiped away half the company’s value in a year, the debt downgraded to junk status.

Continue the article via forbes.com

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How To Help Someone Get Started on Twitter - Social Media Tip

2013-01-25T15:45:00.001-08:00

Courtesy of Tweet Smater. See them for more ideas.
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Prepare to be amazed by “People are Awesome 2013” [video] Innovation

2013-01-23T13:03:00.001-08:00

Great promotional video from the UK band Hadouken. This will inspire you.

The song is 'Levitate' by Hadouken, out now on iTunes:http://bit.ly/WJxu0y
It is taken from the album 'Every Weekend' available on iTunes:http://bit.ly/W0U745
You can also order signed copies of the album and merch bundles at http://bit.ly/W7zm3Q
UK Tour on sale now http://bit.ly/S4MLMH

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Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived - Innovation

2013-01-23T11:16:00.001-08:00

Check out this website I found at stumbleupon.com

How To Innovate Fast

2013-01-21T02:27:00.001-08:00

72% of employees detest their jobs. Here is how to make your company a Best Place to work.

Write this on your wall with a red bold Sharpie!

"As my employees go so goes my customers. As my customers go so goes my company.

If my employees are ever treated less than partners I stand the risk of my customers receiving less At all times I will remember the names (including spouses) and birthdays of my employees as I do my customers.

Effective leadership in great companies is not a "seat of the pants activity." Jim

Hire Jim Woods. 25 Years of Consulting and Coaching Success.

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Steve Denning - The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: The Death—and Reinvention—of Management: Part 1

2013-01-17T06:51:00.001-08:00

I have prepared a synthesis of the thinking in a whole host of recent management books that propose the reinvention of management, including: Reinventing Management by Julian Birkinshaw, Reorganize for Resilience by Ranjay Gulati, The Power of Pull by John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison, Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, Peak by Chip Conley, Employees First, Customers Second by Vineet Nayar, Drive by Dan Pink, The Design of Business by Roger Martin, The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith, Empowered by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Open Leadership by Charlene Li, Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee, Succeeding with Agile by Mike Cohn, Buy-In and A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter, as well as my own book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management.

While doing full justice to none of the books individually, the article draws out the common themes in all of the books so as to make this stream of thinking more accessible to a broader audience.

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THE DEATH—AND REINVENTION—OF MANAGEMENT

What are we to make of a rash of recent books suggesting that management as we know it today is seriously problematic? According to Matthew Stewart, management is “a myth”. Professor Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School tells us that management has “failed”. According to Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, we are looking at “the end of management”, while CEO Jo Owen has written about “the death of management”.

Gary Hamel tells us that ““Management was originally invented to solve two problems: the first—getting semiskilled employees to perform repetitive activities competently, diligently, and efficiently; the second—coordinating those efforts in ways that enabled complex goods and services to be produced in large quantities. In a nutshell, the problems were efficiency and scale, and the solution was bureaucracy, with its hierarchical structure, cascading goals, precise role definitions, and elaborate rules and procedures... Equipping organizations to tackle the future would require a management revolution no less momentous than the one that spawned modern industry.”

Five Fundamental Shifts in Management Practice

Overall, we have strong evidence that current management practices represent a set of economic, social and political problems of the first order,[i] which are unlikely to be resolved by a single fix, such as getting more employee buy-in, or instilling a sense of urgency, or introducing new technology platforms.

In reinventing management, five fundamental and interdependent shifts need to occur:

1.      The first shift stems from a monumental transition in the power balance between seller and buyer: to management's astonishment, the buyer is now in the driver’s seat. As a result, the firm’s goal has to shift to one of delighting clients: i.e. a shift from inside-out (“You take what we make”) to outside-in (“We seek to understand your problems and will surprise you by solving them”).

2.      The second shift stems from the first transition, as well as the epochal transition from semi-skilled labor to knowledge work. Again to management's astonishment, traditional hierarchy suddenly doesn’t work anymore. The role of the manager has to shift from being a controller to an enabler, so as to liberate the energies and talents of those doing the work and remove impediments that are getting in the way of work.

To support and sustain those two shifts, three other shifts are necessary:

3.            The mode of coordination shifts from hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking, i.e. to a way of dynamically linking self-driven knowledge work to the shifting requirements of delighting clients.

4.            There is a shift from value to values; i.e. a shift from a single-minded focus on economic value and maximizing efficiency to instilling the values that will create innovation and growth for the organization over the long term.

5.            Communications shift from command to conversation: i.e. a shift from top-down communications comprising predominantly hierarchical directives to communications made up largely of adult-to-adult conversations that solve problems and generate new insights.

Individually, none of these shifts is new. Each shift has been pursued individually in some organizations for some years.However when one of these shifts is pursued on its own, without the others, it tends to be unsustainable because it conflicts with the goals, attitudes and practices of traditional management. The five shifts are interdependent.

When the five shifts are undertaken simultaneously, the result is sustainable change that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.

Shift #1: New goal: From inside-out to outside in

Traditional management has encountered problems, not because managers have forgotten how to manage, but rather because the world has changed and management practice hasn’t. Among the most important changes in the marketplace is the shift in the balance of power from seller to buyer. Fifty years ago, large corporations were essentially in control of the marketplace. No longer. The advent of global competition, customers’ access to reliable information and their ability to communicate with each other has meant that the customer is now in command.

To succeed in this marketplace, Reorganize for Resilience makes the case that firms must shift from an inside-out perspective (“We make it and you take it”) to an outside-in perspective , “We seek to understand your problems and will surprise you by solving them.” The shift goes beyond the firm paying more attention to customer service: it means orienting everyone and everything in the firm on providing more value to customers sooner.

The shift was foreshadowed in 1973, by Peter Drucker when he wrote: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. . . . It is the customer who determines what a business is. It is the customer alone whose willingness to pay for a good or for a service converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. . . . The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence.”

In 1973, it was enough for an organization to have a customer—someone who is willing to pay for the good or service. In today’s more intensively competitive world, merely having a customer who is willing to pay for the good or service is a precarious existence for any firm. The key to an enduring future is to have a customer who is willing to buy goods and services both today and tomorrow. It’s not about a transaction; it’s about forging a relationship. For this to happen, the customer must be more than passively satisfied.

Different writers have described the shift in different terms but still related to this outside-in perspective. In one version, the firm must delight the customer (The Leader’s Guide To Radical Management). In another, the firm must deliver happiness (Delivering Happiness) or even joy (Peak). In essence, what all these writers are saying is that the organization must do more than meet customer expectations: the firm must generate a continuous stream of new value to its clients that generates surprise by meeting needs that the customers may not even know that they had.Time assumes a new importance: if value can be delivered sooner, it is more likely to generate delight. As reformulated, the goal of the firm accurately mirrors the fundamental transformation in the power structure of the marketplace—or as Roger Martin has called it, a transition from shareholder capitalism to customer capitalism.

In this perspective, the purpose of the firm shifts from making money for shareholders to client primacy. The firm makes money, but this is the result of delighting the customer, not the goal. As Martin has pointed out, when the firm aims single-mindedly at making money for its shareholders, then it is drawn towards doing the very things that will lose money for the shareholders in the medium term. As Reinventing Management notes, the principle of obliquity applies: an indirect goal (delighting clients) is more apt to make money than a direct focus on money-making.

Continuously generating more value for customers is not just the goal for the CEO or the marketing department: it becomes the operational goal of everyone in the organization.

For most people, the most familiar example of the shift will be Apple, which over the last ten years has with a stream of products—iPod, iMac and iPad—has delighted its customers and increased its market capitalization more than tenfold. Increasingly, the way to delight customers is not just to offer a product, like a phone, but to offer a phone like the iPhone which is a platform on which users can choose their own Apps and so customize the product to their specific needs.

An exemplar on a smaller scale is Zappos.

Zappos is a web-based shoe store that became a billion dollar company in ten years by focusing on delighting the customer. Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, explains how this works: Zappos runs its warehouse 24/7 which isn’t the most efficient way to run a warehouse but it is the way in which Zappos can delight its customers. When a customer orders by midnight EST, and asks for (free) two-day shipping, they are pleasantly surprised when the order shows up on their doorstep eight hours later. Everything that happens in Zappos is aimed at creating a “Wow!” experience for their customers.

In the business-to-business world, Reorganize for Resilience cites Lafarge North America as an exemplar. (Lafarge is a French industrial company specializing in cement, construction aggregates, concrete and gypsum wallboard. It currently is the world's largest cement manufacturer by mass.)

Lafarge North America went from an inside-out attitude (You buy the cement we sell) to an outside-in perspective of solving customer problems. As they learned more about their customers’ needs, they discovered a mix of products and services that would help solve customers’ problems, as well as opportunities to create new offerings. Some offerings were customized for particular customers, while others were scalable platforms for large groups of customers.

Some writers assume that if management gets out of the way then empowered workers will automatically direct their energies towards adding new value for clients. However a more sustainable approach recognizes the reality that human beings are a varied bunch. Several books, including The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management and The Ultimate Question insist that the firm should trust but also verify, by making the goal of adding new value for clients explicit and systematically measuring whether it being met.

Shift #2: New role for managers: From controller to enabler

Focusing on continuously adding new value for clients requires a change in the way work is carried out, because a traditional bureaucracy was not designed for innovation or delighting clients. It was designed to produce consistent performance from largely non-skilled workers. This is one reason why efforts by traditional management to enhance customer focus have tended to flounder. The other is that as work increasingly became knowledge work, bureaucratic practices undermined a key ingredient of productivity: worker morale.

To reach the new level of performance, the organization has to empower those doing the work, so as to facilitate collaboration, rapid learning and innovation. The result is a dramatic shift in the role of the manager from controller to enabler. Instead of the workers reporting to the managers, the managers are accountable to those doing the work and for removing any impediments that are hindering the work. This reversal of polarity recognizes that the engine of productivity, innovation and creativity resides in the energy and ideas of the people doing the work, working together across boundaries, drawing on new technology, to become more productive and innovative. Enabling talent unlocks passion and energy. This means that managers must inspire, motivate, encourage collaboration and make the workplace meaningful.

20th Century thinking drew a distinction between leaders (who articulated goals and inspired change) and managers (who got things done). In the new role for managers, the distinction dissolves: managers have to be leaders. They must articulate goals, inspire change and remove impediments. It is the workers--those doing the work--who get things done.

An exemplar of the approach is Vineet Nayar, the CEO of HCL, a software services company headequartered in India. Nayar saw that the people doing the work were the ones who created value for the customers. Taken together they created the value zone within the organization. Without them, the firm was nothing but a shell, layers and layers of management and aggregators who had nothing to offer to the customers. The management didn’t live in the value zone or anywhere near it. Often, management got in the way of creating value. Management had to stop wasting the employees’ time by requiring them to make endless presentations about irrelevant things and write reports about what they had or had not done and start supporting them and enabling them to create more value for customers. In this way, the value zone becomes the center of the organization.To implement his thinking, Nayar introduced a number of changes, including allowing all staff in the organization to make inputs into the evaluation of managers at all levels.

Another example is Li & Fung:

Li & Fung is a $15 billion company, headquartered in China and orchestrating 14,000 factories in China and around the world. Li & Fung owns practically nothing. Its role is to figure out a way to orchestrate factories, so that by coming together, they can achieve performance that they could never achieve individually. All are working on extreme specialization. For example, to manufacture a particular garment, Li & Fung might source the yarn from Korea, dye it in Thailand, weave in Taiwan, cut it in Bangladesh, assemble it in Mexico, and bringing zippers from Japan and come up with something that is better than anyone else in the world can do.

The language used to articulate the new role of managers is varied and includes: "scalable learning and collaboration through open pull platforms in which people are encouraged to get access, attract resources and create" (The Power of Pull); “networks of self-organizing teams” (The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management); “putting employees first” (Employees First, Customers Second); “autonomy” and “intrinsic motivation” (Drive); "design thinking" (The Design of Business) “distributed, democratic, self-managing” (Open Leadership); “empowerment” (Empowered). Despite the differences in terminology, the common theme of all these books is the idea of mobilizing the energies and talents of those doing the work so that they become more productive, more creative, more collaborative, and more able to learn and innovate quickly.

The raison d’être for the very existence of the firm shifts from the reduction of transaction costs behind walls and tight control to scalable collaboration, learning and innovation.

Shift #3: New coordination: From Bureaucracy to Dynamic Linkage

One of the great achievements of the modern firm was disciplined execution with scalability. Very large numbers of people could work together and achieve consistent results. Through the use of detailed plans, rules and processes, management specified both the goal and the methods for achieving that goal was to be achieved; progress was systematically tracked by reports to managers, so that any deviations could be identified and if necessary punished.

In today's workplace, this leads to several major problems. First, bureaucracy is inherently demotivating, and in knowledge work, motivation is the key to productivity. Secondly, this way of working is not good for innovating in a world in which innovation is critical. Third, bureaucracy isn’t agile enough to delight clients, cope with social media or adjust to the quicksilver changes in today’s marketplace. As a result, efforts by firms to become more customer-focused or to establish autonomous teams tend to come undone when they encounter the bureaucratic methods of coordination used by traditional management.

To mesh the efforts of autonomous teams and client focus while also achieving disciplined execution requires a set of measures that might be called “dynamic linking”. The method began in automotive design in Japan and has been developed most fully in software development with approaches known as “Agile” or “Scrum”.

“Dynamic linking” means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work should be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback. The most complete articulation of the practices of dynamic linkage in software development are set out in Succeeding with Agile, and as applied to general management in The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management.

As The Power of Pull points out, one proceeds “by setting things up in short, consecutive waves of effort, iterations that foster deep, trust-based relationships among the participants… Knowledge begins to flow and team begins to learn, innovate and perform better and faster.… Rather than trying to specify the activities in the processes in great detail.., specify what they want to come out of the process, providing more space for individual participants to experiment, improvise and innovate.”

Shift #4: From Value to Values

Given its goal of making money for shareholders, the traditional organization was preoccupied with value, rather than values. Douglas Smith, in On Value and Values notes that “[v]alue connotes a pointed estimation of current or anticipated worth never too distant from monetary equivalence. There is no value that is not a dollar value….The plural, ‘values’, is very different from the singular, ‘value’. Values are estimations not of worth but of worthwhileness. Unlike value, talk of values ignores money; it opines on timeless appraisals instead of transient ones. There is a deep backward- and forward-looking quality to values. If value is what makes us wealthy, values, we assume and regularly assert, are what make us human.”

In the traditional organization, a preoccupation with value encouraged firms to cut costs and eliminate the very things that are needed to generate the future and instead to pursue “bad profits”, i.e. profits made at the expense of customers. Such tactics are dangerous in today’s world: when customers know everything about a company, the increased transparency has effectively changed the rules of business forever.

When the firm's goal shifts from making money for shareholders to providing more value to customers, there is a necessary shift from a preoccupation with value to a preoccupation with the values that will grow the business by generating innovation and customer delight.

The Power of Pull, Open Leadership, The Dragonfly Effect, and The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management thus point to the need for consistent adherence to values that are aligned both with delighting the client and motivating autonomous teams—radical transparency and continuous improvement, trust, honesty, caring for the environment and openness to outside ideas.

Shift #5: Communications: From command to conversation

In his classic study of 1992, anthropologist Alan Fiske pointed out that three elementary social relationships dominate human relationships in all cultures: social norms, authority ranking, and market pricing.[ii]

The challenge for managers today is that in trying to elicit the energies, imagination, and creativity of their workers, they need to communicate predominantly through the langauge of social norms, against a history in organizations of relationships dominated by hiearchy and to a lesser extent by market pricing.

The tensions among these three domains are significant. The hard, sharp edges of money-based discussions or the sneer of cold command can slice through the warm, convivial world of social norms like a knife and kill it on the spot.

To be operative, social norms have to be front and center at all times in the relationship. That’s because social norms are allergic to communications that smell of hierarchy or market pricing . Studies show that the mere mention of money or pulling rank is enough to kill the warmth and conviviality of a social relationship. Even thinking about money is enough to make people less willing to help others.

Consequently management in the 21st Century requires a shift in the mode of communication from command to conversation, with adult-to-adult interactions, human being to human being, using stories, metaphors and open-ended questions. Authentic leadership storytelling has an important role to play, particularly in dealing with social media.The type of communication is discussed in Open Leadership, The Dragonfly Effect, and The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management.

Bottom line: Alignment

None of these five shifts is new in itself. As The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management shows, what is new is putting all five shifts into operation at once.

If a firm tries to achieve customer delight through a bureaucracy, it doesn’t work. If the firm tries to harness the creativity of autonomous teams without an explicit focus on customer delight, the risk of misdirected effort is high.

If a firm embraces customer delight and autonomous teams, without dynamic linkage, it runs the risk that bureaucratic procedures will undermine all its efforts.

Even if a firm embraces the goal of customer delight, autonomous teams, and dynamic linkage, it will still face problems unless it also has the appropriate focus on values rather than value and communicates those values and goals through conversations rather than commands.

The agenda of five simultaneous shifts is strenuous but it offers significant benefits. When well executed, it generates simultaneously high productivity and continuous innovation and disciplined execution and deep job satisfaction and client delight.

In the end, the gains are accomplished by a transition from a focus on things to a focus on people—a people-centered goal, a people-centered role for managers, a people-centered coordination mechanism, people-centered values and people-centered communication.

Should we be surprised that the 21st Century is not about things, but about people?

You may continue the atricle via stevedenning.typepad.com

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China and India Clamoring For Your Job

2013-01-16T00:20:00.001-08:00

In an age of global uncertainty and complexity I thought this quote apropo.

When I was growing up, my parents used to say to me: "Finish your dinner—people in China are starving." I, by contrast, find myself wanting to say to my daughters: "Finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your job."
—Thomas Friedman/NYT/06.24.2004

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What Motivates You and Your Employees - Adapted From Dan Pink

2013-01-15T19:14:00.001-08:00

When I speak to leaders, the conversation invariably focuses on how to engage employees whether it’s a top performer who needs to be motivated to stay within the organization (and not lost to the competition) to middle performers who would do even better if they would take things to the next level. Then eventually, to the "C" or underperforming people. So what actually motivates people? What motivates you?

Take a look at this video adapted from Dan Pink's book, "Drive."

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Jim Woods is an expert on competitive strategy, uncertainty and innovation. Jim is president and CEO of InnoThink Group, a strategy and uncertainty consulting firm designed to maximize the potential of leaders and organizations. For more on Jim check out his website and follow him on Facebook.
For over 25 years Jim Woods has helped organizations and individuals achieve their goals, maximize their effectiveness, become more productive, develop confidence, and overcome the fears holding them back. Click here to schedule an appointment.

Woody Allen’s Success Secret - Leadership and Innovation

2013-01-15T18:31:00.001-08:00

Our discussion today in preparation for a speech centered around the minutia of what makes effective people successful. My assistant who is best when forgetting I am the figure head, no seriously, happened upon this article from Persistence Unlimted.

"80 percent of success is just showing up" — Woody Allen

I often think about that quotation. It may sound easy to shrug off, but not
if you look a little deeper. It doesn’t just mean show up for job interviews or
to work for an 80% increase in success. Showing up also means
starting.

For instance, did you show up at the gym today? Just showing up means you’re
80% of the way to a good workout. The hard part of fighting yourself to get
dressed in workout gear, dealing with traffic and the worry about pain you might
experience is over. Now all that is left is to just do the workout. Pretty
simple huh? Even a child could do it.

Same thing with opportunity. It’s easier to make significant progress on a
project if you simply show up to do it. Candidly, one of my hardest tasks of
the day is "showing up" for development Visual Studio. It seems simple
enough..just double click on an icon. But if I think too much about about the
seemingly 10,000 things I have to do once I launch it, I am much more likely to
"accidentally" launch my web browser or fiddle with e-mail.

But once I’m in there, the work is typically easy and fun. Some days I can
knock out more tasks than I planned. And I feel like a success at the end of
the day.

You can be or do whatever you want just by showing up. If you want to be an
author, show up to write your manuscript every day, show up to writing classes,
show up to phone calls to editors. Doesn’t it make sense that someone who
arrives at the door of opportunity has more success than someone just sitting at
home?

So increase your chances by 80%. Show Up!

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Executives Who Wake Up Early - Business Insider

2013-01-14T05:18:00.001-08:00

Getting up early is a no brainer for most executives.
It means being awake during a part of the day when there are few distractions. It means reacting to the biggest news of the day while others are dreaming. And in the evening you have the option to work late too — or to get to sleep early while others are partying and watching TV.

From Jack Dorsey to Indra Nooyi, this is habit is common to tons of famous leaders.

Whether they were born early risers or learned good sleep habits, these people know how to seize the day.

GE CEO Jeff Immelt

Immelt told Fortune that he gets up at 5:30 in the morning every day for a cardio workout, during which he reads the papers and watches CNBC. He claims to have worked 100 hour weeks for 24 straight years.

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns

AP Images

Burns uses early morning hours to get caught up on emails, getting up at 5:15 and sometimes working until midnight, according to Yahoo Finance.

She also uses the time to fit in a workout, according to Laura Vanderkam's "What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast," Burns schedules an hour of personal training at 6:00 A.M. twice a week.

Fiat and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne

Marchionne wakes up at 3:30 in the morning to deal with the European market, according to a 60 Minutes profile on his turnaround of Chrysler.

Referring to his schedule and work ethic, one exec is quoted in the FT as saying "Sergio invented an eighth day and we work it." In that 60 Minutes special, another exec said "When it was a holiday in Italy he'd come to America to work. When it's a holiday in America he goes to Italy to work."

PIMCO Co-founder Bill Gross

Bloomberg TV

Runnning the world's largest bond fund in the world from California, pretty much guarantees early mornings. According to Fortune, Gross wakes up at 4:30 in the morning to check out the markets, and gets into the office by 6.

Square CEO Jack Dorsey

Flickr/david_shankbone

Dorsey described his morning routine to New York Magazine, revealing that he wakes up at 5:30 in the morning to meditate and go for a six mile jog.

He kept up that routine during a period where he shuttled back and forth between Square and Twitter, spending around 8 hours a day at both companies.

Richard Branson, founder and chairman of the Virgin Group

richardbranson via YouTube

In an interview with Business Insider's Aly Weisman, Branson revealed that he wakes up at around 5:45 in the morning, even when staying at his private island, leaving the curtains drawn so the sun gets him up.

He does his best to use those early hours to exercise before an early breakfast and getting to work.

PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi

YouTube

Nooyi wakes up as early as 4:00 A.M., telling Fortune that "They say sleep is a gift that God gives you ....that's one gift I was never given."

In a speakers series at Pepsi, she revealed that she's at work every day by no later than 7.

General Motors' CEO Dan Akerson

GM website

Akerson told the AP he will "rarely sleep past 4:30 or 5," waking up so he can talk to GM Asia before it gets too late. He calls it the best job he's ever had: "It's complex and interesting and exciting."

But the stress gets to him too, leading to "a lot of sleepless nights."

Virgin America CEO David Cush

Getty Images

Cush described his morning routine to the AP: Wakes up at 4:15 a.m., sends emails, calls business associates on the East Coast, and that's before listening to Dallas sports radio, reading the paper and hitting the bike at the gym.

Apple CEO Tim Cook

AP Images

Cook is known for getting up and sending out company emails at 4:30 in the morning, according to Gawker's Ryan Tate. By 5 AM he can be found in the gym. And he works late too, priding himself on being the first in the office and the last out.

Read the rest of the story via businessinsider.com

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For over 25 years Jim Woods has helped organizations and individuals achieve their goals, maximize their effectiveness, become more productive, develop confidence, and overcome the fears holding them back. Click here to schedule an appointment.

Innovation - Removing Risk from Bold Aspirations

2013-01-14T03:07:00.001-08:00

The conventional wisdom about innovation is that companies should be less risk-averse. If this means they should try to increase their share of courageous employees who are willing to stand up and fight for ideas, then I would agree. However, when we move from the individual level to the corporate level, the challenge becomes quite different. After all, do we really think companies should be taking more risks? If anything, many firms have been far too willing to make big, risky bets on ventures that ended up losing billions of dollars – GM’s ill-fated EV1 project and Motorola’s Iridium phone are two examples that come to mind. I would argue, therefore, that the real challenge for organizations is not how to take more risks but how to de-risk bold aspirations.

One way to do that is to work from the future back. At the outset, an innovation goal might be so big and outrageous that it almost seems impossible. You need to break it down into a stepwise migration path that begins to make the impossible seem do-able. Ask yourself: What is it going to take to reach that goal? What specific kinds of knowledge, experience, and skills do we need to acquire? And how do we stage our way there by building and acquiring these competencies in a sequential manner? Search for the last few steps needed to get where you want to go, and then fold the future successively back into the present, working out a series of realistic checkpoints for tackling these challenges one at a time.

Click here to learn how uncertainty and complexity can undermine ieven the best nnovation programs.

An analogy I often use is John F. Kennedy’s goal to “land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade.” We may take it for granted today, but in the early 1960s that was an enormously bold aspiration which involved really huge risks. The only way for NASA to take Kennedy’s ambition and make it reality was to stage the whole program in a series of mission-critical steps, working from the future backward. Through the Mercury program, followed by the Gemini program, and ultimately the Apollo program, NASA successively tested human spaceflight, earth orbiting, long-duration space missions, how weightlessness affected humans, how to dock two vehicles successfully in space, the Saturn V rocket launch vehicle, the Apollo command module (first in Earth orbit then in lunar orbit), and finally the lunar module. Along the way, they also created, tested and perfected a space suit that would allow an astronaut to get out of the pressurized landing craft and survive in the lunar environment. Only after applying all the learning from these preliminary missions did NASA launch Apollo 11, which put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon and brought them back safely back to earth, just a few months before the end of the decade.

In other words, NASA turned the “race to the moon” into a multi-stage experimentation process, de-risking it at every step, learning from the successes and failures of each experiment and consolidating the progress, all the time making the end goal less and less daunting.

It’s the same approach many Olympic athletes follow when mapping out their four-year training path to a record-breaking gold medal. And it’s exactly the same process you need to follow in business, when pursuing seemingly unattainable and potentially high-risk innovation goals.

Take, Toyota, one of the world’s undeniable innovation champions. As Hirotaka Takeuchi, Emi Osono, and Norihiko Shimizu point out in their book “Extreme Toyota”, the Japanese automobile giant has found that the way to achieve near-impossible goals is to “think deeply but take small steps” – breaking down a big goal into manageable challenges. This, for example, is how Toyota approached their hybrid motor project in the early part of this decade, eventually resulting in them stealing the show in environmentally-friendly cars.

What we learn here is that to achieve revolutionary goals, you need to take a series of evolutionary steps. That’s an important way to minimize the risk associated with radical innovation.

Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller Innovation to the Core and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

via innovationexcellence.com

Leadership - What Makes A Leader Effective

2013-01-06T12:02:00.001-08:00

I speak frequently on the subject of leadership and rarely get the question on what's new and trendy but rather what's effective. I like what you mentioned about leaders make others think the sun will come up the next day. I believe the most effective leaders are those that by example paint a picture of reality that helps others to achieve their dreams, advance their goals, and see themselves as an integral part of forward progress especially when they are in a situation of uncertainty or uncomfort.

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Guy Kawasaki: Advice from an Apple Veteran on Making Your Venture Successful

2013-01-04T04:45:00.001-08:00

Via Guy Kawasaki Success Magazine

Guy Kawasaki is just like any other Hawaiian-born, hockey-playing, trendsetting, jet-hopping corporate evangelist, entrepreneur, author, columnist, blogger, venture capitalist, new media creator next door. He says success starts with a proper mantra.

“Almost every entrepreneur begins by creating a mission statement. Wrong,” the brash 55-year-old Silicon Valley veteran tells SUCCESS. “Mission statements are too broad and boring. No matter what kind of organization you are starting, what you first need to do is develop a mantra. Keep it two to four words max. You may never have to write your mantra down, publish it in your annual report or print it on posters. Indeed, if you do have to enforce your mantra in these ways, it’s not the right mantra.”

Kawasaki’s personal mantra: “Empower People.” The mantra of Garage Technology Ventures, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist firm he co-founded and directs, is “We start up startups.” Some other good examples Kawasaki often cites: Target—“Democratizing Design”; Nike—“Authentic Athletic Performance”; or Starbucks— “Rewarding Everyday Moments.”

Of course, the mantra is just one step in starting a business. Kawasaki stays in great demand relating the rest of the story. Author of the best-selling entrepreneurial how-to guide, The Art of the Start, published in 2004, and the detail-packed Reality Check in 2008, he shares lessons forged from his high-flying days at Apple Computer, his own startups and venture capitalist experience.

Finding Meaning

In speeches and interviews, Kawasaki plays off his candid persona, prompting USA Today to refer to him as “a head-banging bruddah from a tough blue-collar neighborhood in Honolulu.”

His books are chock-full of specific advice for entrepreneurs, but ground zero for Kawasaki is “the one question you should ask yourself before starting any new venture: Do I want to make meaning?” That is followed by other queries in the same vein: Do I want to make the world a better place? Increase the quality of life? Right a terrible wrong? Prevent the end of something good?

“We meet with entrepreneurs all the time and they tell us what they think we want to hear, that they want to make money,” he says. “When we hear that, it’s so depressing. It took me 20 years to come to this understanding, but the companies that are successful are the ones who create meaning. Create the next curve; don’t improve on sameness.”

That said, Garage is in a money business, and “revenue is the single-biggest challenge to entrepreneurs today because no one is buying anything,” he says.

“The least likely company to make a sale is a startup,” he says. “In these times, corporate employees are not likely to risk their career buying from a startup. There’s no magical answer on how to overcome that. It takes perseverance.”

While the home run has eluded Garage, it has nurtured a number of success stories, including D.light Design, which makes cheap, solar-powered lights intended for use in the developing countries of Asia and Africa, and individual investor champion The Motley Fool. The firm’s portfolio company, information-sharing site Kaboodle, was sold to the Hearst Corporation. PC Magazine named another client, job search engine and recruitment advertising network Simply Hired, one of its “Top 100 Websites for 2009.”

It’s a very different game today than before the dot-com bust.

“In today’s economy and tight credit markets, there is a much greater emphasis on getting to revenues fast and more emphasis on business models than before,” Kawasaki says. “You also meet companies that are further along. Whereas, a few years ago the accepted practice was you raised a bunch of money, then you went away for a year and built your software. You needed the money to hire people, buy tools and all that kind of stuff.”

It’s Not as Bad as It Seems

Aside from the fact that no one is buying anything, Kawasaki explains this may be one of the best times to start a company. “If you look at the factors a company needs—people, marketing, tools and Web services, storage, bandwidth, those kinds of things—the basics are extremely affordable,” he says. For instance:

Marketing is basically free with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Tools are basically free because of Open Source.

There is an abundant, cheap workforce because of all the people out of work.

Inexpensive services are available—with cloud computing, for example, basically for $500 you can get a lot of storage and bandwidth.

“The cost of starting a company is lower than ever, which means you can go longer without venture capital,” he says. “It also means, however, that when you do need venture capitalists, they expect you to show up with more done than just a PowerPoint.”

In addition to Garage and writing books and columns, Kawasaki has set his sights on new media communication as co-founder of Truemors, a free-flow rumor mill Web site that NowPublic acquired in 2008, and Alltop, an “online magazine rack” for the Web that collects and posts the headlines of the latest stories from sites and blogs it considers the “best.”

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“The content and advertising businesses are very difficult ,” he says. “Someone explained it to me this way: If you look at a tech startup, most people try to go after elephants. A good elephant would be a Salesforce.com kind of company, right? Other people happen to bag whales, such as Google. So you have everyone hunting elephants and whales, but it’s more reasonable to go after deer. A deer is big enough to fi ll you but not so big you kill yourself going after an elephant or a whale. But most tech companies today are going after rabbits and prairie dogs. I can make the case that even more Web companies are going after plankton.”

The greatest benefit of founding Truemors (which cost less than $13,000 to launch) was that it led to Alltop, Kawasaki says. “We noticed so much traffic came from popurls [an Internet aggregator launched in March 2006], which inspired us to do Alltop.” Truemors had no business plan, no venture-capitalist pitch, and only 7 1/2 weeks to launch. He registered 55 domain names. Software development cost $4,500.

Nononina, the company that owns Alltop, is Kawasaki’s “two guys and a gal” garage band—or more accurately, a team consisting of “one guy in home offi ce (Will Mayall), one gal on a kitchen table (Kathryn Henkens) and one Guy in United Airlines seat 2B (Kawasaki).”

The New Information Sage

Alltop, which receives the bulk of Kawasaki’s focus today, tries to offer a robust information shortcut. “There is no such thing as too much information,” he explains. “I think there is no limit to the amount of information you can have. The question is, does it limit you from acting? The amount of information can be beside the point if you don’t have enough courage to make a decision.” Alltop is a snug fit with his internal wiring, which is always searching, learning and regurgitating, living as he directed in his 1999 book, Rules for Revolutionaries: “Eat like a bird; poop like an elephant.”

“It has been a joy to do this company because the blogs and sites are thrilled to be on it,” Kawasaki explains. “For the people who use it, it is like a breath of fresh air. If you were to Google travel, you would get over a billion matches. That’s not really useful. At Alltop, you would get a few hundred where we’ve aggregated and displayed the latest stories. Instead of some computer algorithm, it’s a curated site—a human has decided what should be there.”

Immersion is part of his household’s wiring as well. When Kawasaki’s kids became enamored with hockey after attending a San Jose Sharks game, his wife Beth, whom he met at Apple, insisted that if the kids were going to play, Kawasaki “couldn’t just be one of these venture capitalists on the sideline playing with a BlackBerry and that I had to take an active part.”

Now, if Kawasaki is not traveling, he plays hockey every day of the week. “I play more than they do,” he says.

Hockey analogies pepper his conversations (he often talks about how if he’d accepted the job as Yahoo CEO when it was offered to him in the late ’90s, he could own the San Jose Sharks right now—“what’s a billion here or a billion there?” he playfully asks). One of the things he says he’s learned with Apple, Truemors, and Alltop “is that success is a grind.”

“Many people, especially young people, think success is event-related,” he explains. “You announce. You ship. And then life is good and you go straight to the moon. Instead, what happens is you ship with bugs in the software, and people don’t like your product. Then you fi x and fi x and fix, and you keep shipping.

“I suppose there are some instant successes, but that’s principally an oxymoron. That’s like saying [Pittsburgh Penguins captain] Sidney Crosby was an instant success in the NHL. Well, sure, in his first two years he did very well, but that ignores the 17 previous years he practiced or played hockey five hours a day. There’s no instant there, or here.”

Although he acknowledges he shares the entrepreneurial trait that is always looking for the new thing, the next challenge, not being content to stick to one thing, he insists he can be satisfied.

“If I were to sell Alltop for, say, $10 million, I would disappear from the face of the earth,” he says with a laugh. “You’d never see me again.”

His track record indicates otherwise. via success.com