Terri Griffith blogs

Birth of Innovation Patronage Culture

TerriGriffith — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:31:50 +0000

Over the weekend I posted about the Synergy Aircraft Kickstarter project. I'm happy to say that they are just over half way to their funding goal right at the halfway of the funding period. Is this a glass half full or empty? Some Kickstarter projects jump at the beginning, while others need a final push to become reality (discussion from the Kickstarter blog). The Synergy Aircraft project is not a pre-order situation where if funded you get in early to buy something at a special price (be it a festival ticket or iPhone case). The Synergy project is funding a full-scale prototype. It's an activity, not a product or performance. You're funding knowledge development. You're not taking one home at the end of the work - though I'm looking forward to the time that you can.

To be sure the Synergy project has nice rewards and the possibility of a flight in the prototype. But the two people I know who funded at the $100 level did so to be part of the process and to help the team keep making progress.

I'm wondering if this is the beginning of a visible innovation patronage culture. Certainly past times had patrons for innovation - but not at this reach or accessibility levels.

I think back to how I felt during the during the CableKeeps Kickstarter project. I also have a Storify version of the outpouring of support the project received during production delays (click on the image below for the full story).

Be part of both the new innovation patronage culture and aviation history. Take a look at Synergy Aircraft's project and think about what it will be like to say you played a role in changing the shape of general aviation.

Crowdfunding the Synergy Aircraft

TerriGriffith — Fri, 18 May 2012 14:52:02 +0000

We're closing in on true innovation in general aviation. For example, this week Synergy Aircraft was able to convince crowdfunding platform Kickstarter that its project was appropriate (story on initial rejection). The result is that Synergy is almost half-way to their $65k goal and the ability to build a full-scale prototype.

Fund at the $100 level and be in line for a ride in the prototype... I did!

Bob Waldron, innovation follower extraordinaire says,

We need to promote the Synergy Kickstarter project so they hit their funding goal and create more interest within the aviation community and the Kickstarter community for aviation innovation Kickstarter projects!

I'm in complete agreement with Bob. A kickstarter success for Synergy opens up a world of opportunity for experimental aircraft. We've seen foundations, NASA, and Google have success with electric aircraft competitions. Crowdfunding lets the rest of us get involved with aviation innovation.

Social Media & Supply Chain: Volerro

TerriGriffith — Mon, 14 May 2012 22:00:15 +0000

I’ve recently found myself in the company of supply chain experts. I enjoy the supply chain industry as it is relatively mature, so changes are more visible, and it has seen giant innovations in the past. (The Box is an excellent story of the rise of containers in shipping.) Last week I had the chance to check in with Kevin Lynch, CEO of the supply chain startup Volerro, and talk with him about the role social media is playing in the industry.

Volerro’s unique take on social media is that companies can be nodes - rather than people as is normally the case. This is a business graph rather than a social graph that Facebook might talk about. The focus is not on friends, but rather are you a supplier or a client?

Lynch says:

We model supplier client relationships — the business graph — we make the node the company and assign relationships (clients/suppliers) so you can now distribute content along business processes. For example, you build a group to do a request for proposal [RFP]. There are five suppliers [that are the] nodes in the network and they don’t have a relationship to each other. Everyone can see the RFP, but their material can’t be shared or their identities even acknowledged.

The key is that the expected level of transparency/privacy for this type of relationship is built in, rather than relying on the expertise of people tweaking more general collaboration tools for this purpose.

Lynch acknowledges that some of this capabilities exists in current supplier networks. GE, for example, uses Aravo but the suppliers have to individually go into the system and update their profiles — Volerro takes advantage of the fact that much of that information is already on the Internet to be leveraged.

One angle is that Volerro enables buyers to monitor profile updates and other activity streams from a single individual, a single company, or across an entire network. Just like you might want to dig deeper into a company you’re considering working for by monitoring the activity on LinkedIn (are people joining or leaving), this can have value for business intelligence around your suppliers as well.

I’m impressed by Volerro’s approach in that it treats social media both as a platform to use to connect and as a platform from which to learn.

Supply chain community: Do you have more examples of how social media (very broadly defined) is affecting your industry and internal company activities? Please comment here, and/or join us at the Social Media in the Supply Chain and Annual Collaboration Banquet. I have the pleasure of keynoting and would love to continue the conversation.

GoPro

TerriGriffith — Thu, 10 May 2012 02:59:54 +0000

Nick Woodman, founder and CEO of GoPro, opened tonight's Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship talk with the main idea behind GoPro: Documenting your life when you're most alive. They make tiny hardened cameras that can film your experiences, including Nick cutting the umbilical cord at the birth of his son, Hugo. He showed us that video, and made the key point that the filming hadn't gotten in the way of the experience -- he wasn't holding the camera, he was wearing it.

They've grown to 210+ employees and their products are sold in 75 countries. As Nick talked about the growth, he made the connection that even with smartphones, we still find value in using a GoPro given the different way we use it (or I should say, I wish I used it... I'm waiting on a SCUBA optimized version)... You wear a GoPro, you don't shoot with one like a normal camera. New form factor, new opportunities.

The GoPro has given us a "spark" to do different things. Nick talked about how happy he is when he gets notes saying that GoPro videos have given people the inspiration to get away from the game console and go outside to do something cool.

People, technology, and the GoPro organization have created an explosion of amazing video. They have over 2 million Facebook fans -- far more fans of the videos than current owners of the cameras.

The original inspiration came from his wanting to film a surf trip. It started with a wrist strap to attach a disposable camera. Next leap was when he realized he could get the camera off his wrist and do even more -- spurred by a trip to Infineon race track and a race car driving school.

His summary for how to realize your idea:

Be willing to commit yourself 100%
Focus (obsession is ok)
Leverage existing technologies
Don't let money be a barrier to getting started

There are over 200 people in this auditorium all stoked (using Nick's lingo) about entrepreneurship, about videoing their passions, and keying off the power of problem solving for creating great ideas.

The Future of Tablets & The Possibility of NewWork

TerriGriffith — Mon, 07 May 2012 22:04:50 +0000

We had a wonderful panel at InterOp on the future of tablets. Michael Dortch led Tom Henderson, Craig Mathias, (Maribel Lopez had to miss due to illness), a very active audience, and me through a set of four starter questions.

What is the most important single thing business decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?
What is the most important single thing technology decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?
What is the most important single thing tablet technology vendors can or should do (or NOT do) when attempting to promote their products to business technology buyers and users?
What is the single most important near-term future development for which everyone in our audience should begin preparing NOW?

You can see my draft answers in this post, but the answers from the platform were far more diverse, especially given the technical expertise of the 200+ standing-room-only audience. We covered the importance and variety of ways of achieving security, the notion that however much bandwidth you have, you will use it; that Bring Your Own Device is likely to be the rule unless you have a credible Choose Your Own Device plan.

My favorite response, however, came in from a colleague before the session started:

Robin Gareiss made a similiar point in the session proceeding ours when talking about the future of handsets, basically saying that they won't be handsets.

The pace of technology change will outpace the comfort of many organizations with the possibilities.

This idea led me to offer that this is IT's chance to shine. IT has the opportunity to lead organizations to what I'm calling NewWork.

NewWork is the evolution of the anytime, anywhere workforce. The evolutionary step is that the pressure is finally coming from all angles:

IT has ideas and access to technology that can enable our work freedom - tablets, glasses, secure connections and apps, and whatever the future and employees bring into the organization.
Employees are demanding the freedom and transparency to do a great job. Many of these same employees are acknowledging the responsibility that comes with this freedom and transparency.
Management is seeing the value of supporting empowered work design and the most plugged-in managers are mentoring their employees to do NewWork well.

Ray Wang has talked about the personas of a modern CIO: Chief Infrastructure, Intelligence, Integration, and Innovation Officers. IT leaders who can move across these personas can strategically offer the rest of the organization a brave new world. I suggest that IT leaders look for examples of companies already moving in this direction, Salesforce comes to mind (who else would you add?), and then share some possibilities that will affect the business heart of their own company. Business reception to IT ideas may be different than it's been in the past. Take this opportunity and offer to lead.

Want to hear more?

Four Questions on the Future of Tablets

TerriGriffith — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:07:26 +0000

I'm headed to InterOp to talk about tablets. Michael Dortch is leading a panel including Tom Henderson, Maribel Lopez, and me. Our goal is to raise key issues around the massive growth of tablets in organizations, and what to do as this trend continues. Michael posed four prep questions and I'm providing the drafts of my answers below. I'll follow up with the key features of the audience discussion later in the week.

What is the most important single thing business decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?

How quickly to weave together their people's knowledge, skills, and abilities; technology tools; and organizational practices. This is a money and focus question and should not be done in an ad hoc manner. General strategies about how to do this mixing is at the heart of my book, The Plugged-In Manager, and I only wish I'd foreseen the explosion in tablets so I could have explicitly covered it there.

What is the most important single thing technology decision makers need to address when considering or pursuing support of tablets at their companies?

BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) - The consumerization of workplace computing isn't limited to mobile phone and laptops.

We're bringing all of our technology to work. Tablets, like mobile phones, become extensions of our capabilities and either the organizational device needs to sync seamlessly to the personal device or they need to be one and the same.

What is the most important single thing tablet technology vendors can or should do (or NOT do) when attempting to promote their products to business technology buyers and users?

Two things: Don't put walls around the garden and avoid any design decisions that limit the possibility of off-line productivity. Google, this means we need off-line doc editing back now!

What is the single most important near-term future development for which everyone in our audience should begin preparing NOW?

Requests for all work to be tablet-friendly. The people in this room have been working from anywhere and have used their technical skills to find creative ways to generally be connected. Tablets give this capability to the rest of the organization who may not have that war driving culture and ability to be always on. Legacy systems that get in the way of a tablet mode of work will be challenged.

Those are my thoughts around Michael's questions. We are leaving a fair amount of time for discussion. Anything we should be prepared for?

Reality Check: Computer People

TerriGriffith — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:23:39 +0000

A few months ago I wrote a post about the growing use of smart phones, iPads, and mobile credit card payment systems - from taxis to gluten-free doughnut vendors. This week I had a reality check and it took place about a hundred yards from the location of my first post. Saturday I walked toward San Francisco's Ferry Building and stopped at Justin Herman Plaza to checkout the street vendors. Luckily the vendor I'd been looking for had returned and these lovely necklaces are my reward for the walk. It was also rewarding in that our discussion was a reminder to me of the range of technology interest and understanding, even in tech savvy San Francisco.

As I was preparing to open my negotiations, I mentioned that I had a credit card or an ATM card. Turns out the only payment option at this booth was cash - no credit card reader. When I got back from the ATM machine and finished my transaction I asked they'd thought about "one of those credit card readers that hooks up to your phone." The response was a good reminder:

Oh, we're really not computer people. I know there is Square [and Intuit's GoPayment], but we just have a regular cell phone.

The cost of the smartphone was part of the issue, but it was also that there "aren't enough teenagers around" [to help with setup and maintance]. She beat me to my suggestion -- and made me realize how plugged-in she and her husband are to their personal people, technology, and organizational options.

Our conversation was a reminder that being plugged-in is not about being "plugged-in" to every technology around. It's about making effective choices: being plugged-in -- understanding -- your people, technology, and organization such that you know when and how to say yes and no to the setups that work best for you in a given situation.

As always, I'm looking for examples of people making good and bad choices in how they design their work from the foundations of people, technology, and organizational practice. As this post shows, all industries and outcomes are open game. ...and look for Crocheted Wire Jewelry on Saturdays and some Tuesdays in Justin Herman Plaza. Disclosure: The vendors don't know I wrote this post and I did pay the full list price.

Standards for Working Documents in Collaborative Work

TerriGriffith — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 16:19:26 +0000

I'm looking for your feedback. Many years ago I wrote a post entitled, Alpha Drafts and Team Work. I proposed that as we think about collaborative work that there is value in transparency - even with work in progress. I argued that we can signal the stage of development and set expectations about the formality and quality of the product. The outcome should be greater synergy across the parties and better understanding of the outcome. With the ability to creating living, collaborative documents, has the standard for formality and perfection changed still more? Are we ok that many of our documents will always be "working documents" or "works in progress?"

At the time of the Alpha Drafts post, I don't believe you could collaboratively edit in real time as you can now with tools like Google Docs, Office 365, and OneDrum. Last night, at least five of my colleagues and I were working on documents we will send to our University leadership today. We were using Google Docs and had the chat bar open to help our coordination. This was a level of writing collaboration I had not experienced -- and it worked. Only once was there a request to let someone "finish a thought" before tweaking.

What feels odd is that we are now sending these documents up the chain as PDFs.

While I understand the benefit of signaling that these are final documents, I'm not sure that they are. I expect there will be comments and useful questions from our leadership, but they'll be made on top of a static document. There is also some irony in that the documents are about communication and collaboration tools and process at our University.

Our organization is just beginning our journey to a more collaborative work environment. For those of you who have been in collaborative environments for a while: How do you treat reports of a committee recommendation? Does it still make sense to have a static version at a transition point, do you just signal what version was used at the decision point, or something else entirely?

Afterword: We are getting to redesign work and work product, but we need to be aware of the past as well. One of our members is the University archivist. Our University is over 150 years old with a rich set of documents available about its history. I'm looking forward to learning how archivists manage these new documents and methods.

Monitoring Your Own Performance

TerriGriffith — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 17:00:44 +0000

Recently the Wall Street Journal published, Employees, Measure Yourselves: Encouraging workers to keep track of what they're doing can make them healthier and more productive by H. James Wilson. The article is a great resource of tools for individuals and suggestions for managers (e.g., support, don't demand participation). I was thrilled with the article as it promotes self-responsibility and I see responsibility as the flip side of transparency and autonomy in organizations.

The responsibility theme also came up during a great South by Southwest session: Truths of Working Smarter. The issue was the responsibility we all need to take on when we have the opportunity to make our own decisions about where and how we organize our work. Many of us are gaining new freedom at work, but it comes with responsibility.

Music to my ears as I have declared 2012 as the year that's up to us (my 2012 outlook post). There I suggest:

Learn through commentators who provide you with good examples (I hope you see this blog and my GigaOM posts as sources).
Give yourself permission to take time for professional development. Give your team members the same gift.
Stop-Look-Listen, just like crossing a street, before making choices about how you do your work. This includes evaluating your choices. If you went to work in the Starbucks - were you effective? If you decided to leave your laptop at home and only take your tablet with you on a trip, did you make adjustments to your workflow so you would be productive?
Share your approach to work design with your colleagues. Many things are more fun in a group (thus the proliferation of exercise tools that let you signal to your friends) and work is generally more effective if you're all moving in the same direction or at least understand the choices made around you.

We have new abilities to learn about our work and work styles. It is our responsibility to learn how to use this new information to do our work better. This is evidence based management applied to our own work and lives.

I'll be thinking about a post with some suggestions. The Wall Street Journal article gives us some ideas of what and how some people have learned. Have you used "auto-analytics" to improve you own work? What area do you think have the most opportunity for improvement?

Women, Improv, and Risk

TerriGriffith — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 02:48:00 +0000

Last night I was honored to speak at the general meeting of Women in Consulting. They pushed me out of my general management frame by asking me to focus on plugging-in with clients and partners. I headed for home happy with the framework we'd developed to organize their already deep expertise. I also left thrilled with the new colleagues I'd gained.

Kathy Klotz-Guest of keepingithuman was my coach for the session. We had the chance to share ideas over dinner and she spoke of the value of improvisation for people in business. Kathy has over 20 years of experience in comedy and improvisation and now teaches improv to business students, as well as being a marketing guru.

The connection was clear when I had the chance to read a post Kathy has on women and risk taking. She notes:

The bottom line is that “risk” matters, especially in careers and comedy. This lack of bigger “game” risk-taking has longer-term economic implications for women and explains, in part, the gender wage-gap that still exists today. According to an April 2010 report released by the Labor Department, that gap though narrowing, is 21% for equal work. Yes, women are more likely to take time out from the workforce to have and raise children than their male counterparts, and this accounts for some of the gap. However, research also tells us that women are also less likely to take risks in negotiating pay, better benefits, and promotions, and in taking “risky” projects that also come with high visibility in the organization. In the end, less risk-taking in a woman’s career leads to a lifetime wage gap estimated to be greater than $500,000. Click here for the full post.

Not the first time this week that the gaps between men & women's pay has come up. Gina Tripani, creater of ThinkUp and founder of LifeHacker, has pointers to the Equal Pay App Challenge (sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor) and Narrow the Gapp.

I think Kathy's post is on the mark. At least part of the problem is that you have to ask to get more. If you don't get on stage, you can't get laughs. If you don't negotiate, you'll get what you're given. My colleague at Stanford, Prof. Maggie Neale, has a great talk on YouTube, "But First, You Have to Ask." She points out that though fewer women negotiate their pay - it's not tied to our gender, but rather our perceptions of power. Watch the talk and learn. I know I'll be thinking about power and getting on the stage the next time I need to negotiate.

Photo credit: Lucie Newcomb, NewComm Global