Innovation and Creativity - Idea Challenges – you get what you give

In contradiction to what many people think, Idea Challenges are not about getting, they are about giving. Your employees will not automatically start sharing great, useful and relevant ideas to your organisational needs. As an organisation, you must give a lot before you get anything at all. And I do not mean prizes or money.

In this blogpost I will describe a number of important elements that you must give attention to when doing an ‘Idea Challenge’ amongst your employees. The extend to how much attention you give each of the elements, is a strong determinant for your initiative’s success.

Give support: Senior management The first thing you should have covered when starting an Idea Challenge is to have the support from senior management or equivalent. If your CEO does not agree with this new method of gathering ideas or the fact that all employees will be spending some time on this activity, you are very likely not going to succeed. If you can get senior management to endorse the initiative to all employees, you are half way to a successful Challenge.

Give a reason: Relevant Challenge theme When your organisation starts an Idea Challenge, you will get a lot of input from your crowd. Therefore you should always have a good reason to start an Idea Challenge in order for the input to be useful. Do not start a Challenge simply because your competitor is doing one amongst its employees too. You will have to give your crowd a good reason why you are looking for ideas and how these will help everyone. Relevant themes for Idea Challenges are typically deducted from your innovation domains or your organisation’s strategic goals.

Give a promise: Challenge sponsorship When asking your employees for ideas, there must be someone requesting the ideas; this is the Challenge sponsor. 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. The best way to do this is to show trust in the crowd by already stating in advance that budget will be allocated and the best idea(s) will be further developed.

Give information: Challenge information Somewhere during the process you will need to inform the crowd what the challenge is about, what you are and what you are not looking for, what the overall process will be like, how ideas will be evaluated etc. By communicating all these steps in advance will give the crowd confidence that this time, they are being taken seriously. If these aspects are not communicated clearly, or your crowd does not have enough information on what you are looking for, you will not only get many irrelevant and useless ideas you will also disappoint your crowd by not using their input eventually. The Challenge question is the element that will be communicated mostly throughout the crowd. This question must be triggering for people to be willing to participate, it must be broad to allow for diversity of ideas but not to broad to spark irrelevant and useless ideas.

Give an example: Supporting Challenge team The Challenge team is there to streamline dialogues, activate the crowd and stimulate the growth of ideas. They are an essential element in the success of an Idea Challenge. They take the role of the first follower in order to stimulate activity to the tipping point for Challenge participation as well as idea enrichment.

Give a tool: User-friendly and intuitive software Obviously you must have a tool in place on which your crowd will be sharing their ideas and knowledge with each other. Giving your crowd a user-friendly and intuitive platform will lower the barrier for participation and increase participation and will raise the number of ideas. The more people you have participating in the Idea Challenge, the more valuable it can become. Well designed ideation tools should allow everyone within your target group to participate without obstacles. Well designed software should not only support high quantity of ideas by lowering participation barriers but also support increasing the quality of ideas. Idea Challenge software suggests other contributors to ideas and allows for active crowd management. A low barrier of participation and high user involvement will be another step forward to a successful outcome.

Give arguments: Idea evaluation An important element of the idea Challenge is to evaluate all the ideas based upon predetermined criteria. Because you presumably cannot develop all the ideas that arose from the Challenge, you will need to make a well-founded decision on which ideas to pursue and which ideas are going to be put on the shelve. Without sensible arguments on why certain ideas go through to the next phase and why others don’t, you will loose the crowd’s moral and motivation for upcoming initiatives so be clear and transparent in this step.

Give action: Follow up of ideas Your employees have been putting a lot of effort in their contributions. Your crowd has been very dedicated and they have not only kept to working hours. They have been active during the week, but they might have also submitted ideas late at night and enriched other’s ideas during the weekend. Therefore you must always give a lot of attention following up the ideas.

Give a story: Communication One of the most important elements is a solid communication plan. It endorses many of the above mentioned elements. A well thought through and executed communication plan will play a major role in making the Idea Challenge a success.

Get your success If all of the above elements are given enough attention and you have a dedicated and enthusiastic team, chances are high you will get a successful Idea Challenge. You will probably not only get many great and useful ideas but you will also get a lot of highly motivated employees who are feeling part of the innovation process and taken seriously. You have just created a sustainable crowd, one that you have earned the favor of asking them for input on more challenges.

image credit: Jan Martijn Everts 

Jan Martijn Everts is Innovation Consultant @ Innovation Factory in the Netherlands. Jan Martijn has worked on a variety of projects, ranging from Heineken’s annual idea contests to PostNL’s ongoing innovation programme. Due to his uncommon background of both Engineering Physics and Business Administration he has great association skills, 

via innovationexcellence.com

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Creative Direction - 8 Ideas for When Creativity Is Too Easy or Hard - Mike Brown

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There’s a story I saw once (which, if you’ll notice, is how most apocryphal stories start) about Salvador Dali where an art patron inquired it were difficult for the famed surrealist painter to paint a picture. Salvador Dali answered, “No, it’s either easy or impossible.”

You can’t deny that it’s a great creativity quote.
Unfortunately, it’s a worthless perspective when you’re on the hook to deliver personal creativity on a consistent basis in a work or organizational situation. Suppose your work-oriented creative effort seems easy to you. If it does, it’s likely the creativity you are producing is ho-hum, at least to you. To the contrary, when your creative effort seems to be an insurmountable challenge to complete, you’re faced with the realization that it’s touch to get any credit for stunning creative thinking that can’t be brought to creative reality.

If the two creative extremes Salvador Dali offered aren’t very good answers, what can you do to move your creative reality somewhere in between? You want to have  strategies to turn both creative extremes into challenging, workable creative successes. Here are four strategies for each creative extreme.

Four Creative Direction Ideas When Creativity Seems Easy

1. Critique Your Creative Successes

Rather than resting on your creative laurels, push yourself to be dramatically stronger creatively. Use what seemed creatively strong from the past, look for small imperfections others would never see, and make creative masterpieces of them! Better integrate them with your strategy, discover more elegant creative simplicity, or find a way to express your extreme creativity in new ways. Pushing yourself to the heights of extreme creativity more than you ever have may be a creative challenge, but will yield creative dividends.

2. Put Yourself on the Extreme Creativity Hook Publicly

You (and by “you,” I probably mean “I”) could be prone to creative sandbagging through deliberately setting expectations at a relatively low, comfortable level you can easily meet without pushing yourself too hard creatively. Forget about taking the path of least creative resistance by sharing an extreme creativity goal – sort of your very own JFK and “Put a man on the moon.”  Sharing an extreme creativity goal with people who will hold you accountable to it clearly puts you on the creative hook. This will demand you embrace extreme creativity as a step toward creative success.

3. Put More Creative Risk into the Mix

 Suppose you have all the resources and know everything that’s required to make your creative objective a reality. Decide to deliver your own creative stumbling block by forsaking a major chunk of your creative resources. Slash the time for your creative project by beginning later than expected or agreeing to finish it earlier. If you are part of a creative team working on a project, release one team member to work on another project, pushing the other team members to new extreme creative heights. Driving your effort to the creative extreme will make you develop alternative creative muscles to realize your creative objective.

4. Significantly Modify Your Creative Direction

Bruce Springsteen is a great example of this idea. Although successful with the E Street Band, he altered his  creative direction musically several times – an acoustic, home-recorded solo record, other “solo” records with different supporting musicians, and a completely new band to chronicle songs by Pete Seeger, a legendary folk musician. With every new creative direction, Bruce Springsteen continually avoided “easy” creativity in favor of using unfamiliarity to spur new creative directions.

Four Creative Direction Ideas When Creativity Seems Impossible

1. Lower Your Expectations

If your overall creative task seems daunting, lower your expectations. Look for what smaller parts of the project seems possible amid a total effort which seems impossible. Consider what is the real downside if the entire effort didn’t come to fruition. After identifying workarounds for whatever might be impossible on your project, go all out achieving what is achievable creatively.

2. Put a Creative Project on Hold

Being pressured to be immediately creative can stifle creative abilities. Instead of being pressured to advance directly to implementation, take a time out and actually THINK. Strategize. Brainstorm. Find someone who will add to the creative thinking you’ve done. Take some time to consider something entirely different. Take advantage of a creative pause to let your mind wander where it will, making unconscious creative connections to instigate a fresh creative strategy.

3. Find Implementation Assistance

Maybe your perception of creative impossibility arises  from weaknesses in your personal capabilities. If that’s the case, launch your creative effort by seeking out talents you need to turn the impossible into the possible. Put together the best team to start, generate, and bring what would have been previously daunting creativity to life.

4. Modify Your Creative Game

If the creative task you are facing seems impossible, go ahead and redefine it. Instead of thinking about what the creative activity is, look at what type of goal you’re trying to accomplish instead. Next, look at the whole variety of ways you can accomplish your objective in some other way. Redefining the creative game is often just what’s needed to get into another game you’re much more likely to win creatively.
Use these eight strategies as needed so you can depend on producing outstanding creativity on a daily basis! - Mike Brown via brainzooming.com

 

Tom Peters: Ten Questions on Excellence

In the 20-odd months since In Search of Excellence was published, I have spoken to some 400 audiences. They were in Maui, Hawaii; and Geneva, Switzerland. They were representatives of old industries like steel and forest products, and of new industries like software and gourmet chocolate-chip cookies. They included everyone from a top wholesaler of plumbing and electrical fixtures in Sweden to the owner of the world's largest dairy store, in Norwalk, Conn. Among them were 5,000 city managers, 1,000 bakers, and the senior management of Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc.

Surprisingly, despite the diversity of the audiences, they all asked similar questions. What follows is a distillation of those questions -- and of how I try to respond.

1. Excellence focused on large companies. But is there anything you learned that relates to the particular problems and opportunities of smaller companies?

There is a lot of advice and writing on the transition a small company must go through as it grows. It suggests an inevitable cycle of deterioration, an evolution from a highly charged, entrepreneurial, customer-intensive enterprise to a bureaucracy. The implied message is: "You're going to become calcified; it's just a matter of how soon."

There is a germ of truth in this. There is no doubt that the $15-million company, no matter what the business, needs a more highly articulated set of procedures for controlling things than the $100,000 company does.But most of the scenario is hogwash. The magic of W. L. Gore, Dana, Emerson Electric, 3M, Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Milliken, and Johnson & Johnson -- in other words, the companies we hold up as excellent -- is that they have all retained a much higher share of their "small company" simplicity and vitality than their less effective competitors have.

The message of Excellence is that the key to corporate success lies in superior customer service, continuing internal entrepreneurship, and a deep belief in the dignity, worth, and potential of every person in the organization. There is no iron law that says you must lose those virtues as you grow; in fact, the principal job of senior officers of a small corporation is to maintain them. The tools may be different for a Disneyland than for a one-park, 20-acre establishment. But the intensity of customer focus can and must be maintained. The personal touch -- we call it Management By Wandering Around, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard -- can also be maintained. Giving up MBWA is not an imperative of size. But the sad news is that small companies can lose touch very easily and that the basics of Excellence are at issue from the start.

2. Excellence also focused on the concerns of people who are building companies, using models of enterprises that have been people-oriented and innovative since inception. But what can you do if you inherit a company that has been bureaucratic or lackluster for decades?

Successful turnarounds are a tough act, but what is perhaps most interesting about them is that they follow exactly the same form as the new-company building efforts. The greatest turnaround artists work repetitiously on creating distinctive strategic skills. They are tireless.Each, above all, believes in the power of a thousand little things done just a bit better.

A handful of stories come to mind. Rene McPherson inherited, as chairman, a then-$1-billion (now more than $3-billion) business in Toledo -- Dana Corp., a manufacturer of such products as brass propeller blades and axles, a company he described as "having the rottenest product line ever granted by God to a Fortune 500 company." In the 1970s he turned it around to the point at which it became the number 2 company among the 500 in return to investors. McPherson radically decentralized. He gave the factory managers autonomy and the tools to do the job: finance, personnel, purchasing, computers, etc. He created an exciting, no-nonsense, competitive environment with a ceaseless focus on practical productivity improvements. His focus was the people on the line -- "the boss of their 25 square feet," in McPherson's terms.

More important was McPherson's approach to change. When he is asked to comment on the importance of any particular program in his productivity-improvement process, he shoots back with: "It is damned important. Another feather on the scale."

A different sort of turnaround is PepsiCo Inc. Fifteen years ago it was a sleepy, second-rate competitor to The Coca-Cola Co. Today it is a vital, entrepreneurial, $7.5-billion company. The magic has been brute persistence, never assuming that the job is complete.President Andy Pearson's strategy, while in the field with a division, is to avoid the executive suite like the plague. He first zeros in on the young assistant brand manager, and he always asks the same damned questions. "What have you learned in the last 96 hours? What's going on in the test market? What are you up to?" That's the PepsiCo magic. Every one of Pearson's talks is, at best, another feather on the scale.

The theme is incredibly consistent, regardless of the company, yet each variation of the theme is unique.Successful turnabout artists are, pure and simple, no more and no less, broken records. No stone is left unturned. No stone is especially important. Yet no stone is unimportant.

3. One of Excellence's premises is that a company's attitudes about people, products, and its way of doing business are defined by its founder. The book holds up Tom Watson, the founder of IBM Corp. and the inspiration for many of IBM's characteristic values and practices, as a model. But what if the founder of your company lacks Watson's stature?

There are several ways to answer this question. Most important is to challenge the notion that the people who run the socalled excellent companies are 17 feet tall with well-honed tap-dancing skills. It's not so. Some are extroverts. Many are introverts. Tom Watson Sr. was, in his own words, an "avowed showman." On the other hand, if you're more than seven inches away from Bill Hewlett, you have a tought time hearing him. But they all have one thing in common.Almost all are obsessives.

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Jim Woods is principal and founder of InnoThink Group. A strategic innovation consulting firm engaged to catalyze bottom-line growth. He has worked with government, U.S. Army, MITRE Corporation, Pitney Bowes, Whirlpool, and 3M. Jim’s business experiences, extensive research on competitive strategy and innovation have given him a fresh perspective on improving individual and organizational performance. Jim is a prolific speaker on strategic innovation, creative leadership, uncertainty and competitive strategy. Speak with us for consulting or speaking engagements call 719-266-6703 or click here for more information.  Follow us @innothinkgroup LinkedIn Facebook

 

The secret to competitiveness—competition

A study by the McKinsey Global Institute¹ recently examined labor productivity in Germany, Japan, and the United States in nine representative manufacturing industries: autos, auto parts, metalworking, steel, computers, consumer electronics, processed food, beer, and soap and detergent. Adjusted both for differences in product quality and for fluctuations in the business cycle, the results are illuminating—not only for the facts they debunk or establish, but for the explanations that lie beneath them. The inescapable conclusion: global competitiveness is a bit like tennis—you improve by playing against people who are better than you.

Several key findings emerged from our research:

• Japan leads in five industries: autos, auto parts, consumer electronics, metalworking, and steel.
• The US leads in four—computers, processed food, soap and detergent, and beer—and has closed much of the gap in autos.
• Remarkably, Germany leads in none and is a distant third in six—including autos and auto parts, where it is often cited as exemplary.
• Because more Japanese are employed in producing food than in steel, autos, auto parts, and metalworking combined, the weighted average of Japanese worker productivity across these nine case studies is actually lower than that in the US and only a little higher than Germany’s. With US worker productivity used as an index of 100, Japan measured 83; Germany, 79.

Exhibit 1 presents an overview of these comparisons. Additional detail is provided in the nine individual industry summaries (see pp. 32–40).

Large gaps

Some of the individual industry productivity gaps are surprisingly large. Japan still leads the world in steel productivity, by almost 50 percent. Productivity in the US food industry tops Japan’s by nearly 70 percent. And the German beer industry, even adjusted for differences in quality, trails that of the United States by more than 50 percent.

Such disparities are worth noting. With technological knowhow and capital freely mobile between Germany, Japan, and the US, and with their workers enjoying similar levels of educational attainment and health, it would seem reasonable to expect that by 1990—45 years after the end of World War II—productivity in industries in these three countries would be close. To understand why that is not the case—and to discover whether the large productivity gaps offer any opportunities for the laggards to catch up—we investigated the causes of the productivity differences within each of our nine industries.

Conventional explanations, such as different manufacturing technologies and economies of scale, do play some role in explaining the gaps in metalworking, steel, food processing, and beer. But elsewhere these factors do not go far in accounting for the gaps. Nor can the differences be attributed to the education and skill of front-line workers, which are more or less equal across the three market economies. Nor does the cost of raw materials—which varies little from one country to another—have much effect. High productivity, it seems, flows chiefly from the ability of managers to invent new and ever more efficient ways of making products and from engineers’ proficiency in designing products that are easy to make (see Exhibit 2).

Whether in the food industry in the US or the auto industry in Japan, managers and engineers do not arrive at these innovations because they are smarter, work harder, or have a better education than their peers. Rather, they do so because they must. They are subjected to intense global competition, where constantly pushing the boundaries of productivity is the price of entry—and of survival.

The converse is equally true. Most of the lower-productivity industries have been protected by governments from the rigors of global competition. The nine industries in the survey speak with one voice: global competition breeds high productivity; protection breeds stagnation (see Exhibit 3 and Exhibit 4).

The degree of "global exposure" depends on the laws and regulations governing trade and investment, and on the structure of the market for corporate control. Of the three countries, the US was the most exposed to trade, transplants (foreign direct investment), and foreign mergers and acquisitions. Although the Japanese heavy manufacturing and consumer electronics industries are not significantly exposed at home through trade or the capital markets, they are substantially exposed in other markets through trade and foreign direct investment.

The low-productivity Japanese manufacturing industries, by contrast, have virtually no exposure to global competition. The same is true of Germany, for whose manufacturers competition is largely confined to Europe. The European Community’s voluntary restraint agreements with Japan provide substantial protection for the automotive and metalworking industries, for example. In addition, procedural barriers make transplants difficult to establish in traditional industries in Germany. And finally, the shareholdings and voting-right proxies of the main banks in Germany result in a capital market that is virtually closed to foreign mergers and acquisitions. As a result, German manufacturers primarily compete regionally, not globally. The pressure to innovate is low.

Innovations

Foreign direct investments, not trade, play the pivotal role in moving innovations around the world and boosting productivity

What of the innovations themselves? The mechanism for transferring productivity improvements from company to company and nation to nation is significant. Foreign direct investments—transplant factories—play the pivotal role in moving innovations around the world. In fact, foreign direct investment has been far more powerful than trade as a force for improving productivity, especially in Germany and the US.

Transplants from leading-edge producers have several important influences. They:

• directly contribute to higher levels of domestic productivity;
• prove that leading-edge productivity can be achieved with local labor and many local inputs;
• put competitive pressure on other domestic producers; and
• transfer knowledge of best practices to other domestic producers through the natural movement of personnel.

Exhibit 5 compares the impact on productivity of transplants and trade. Another characteristic of foreign direct investment is that it has provoked less political opposition than trade because it creates jobs instead of destroying them. This makes it likely to grow faster than trade in years to come.

Japanese automobile assembly transplants in the US have been important in stimulating US producers, especially Ford, to improve their productivity. Computer transplants from the US have had a similar impact in parts of Europe. With their substantial production presence established right from the beginnings of the industry and building up to a production share as high as 56 percent in 1990, they are largely responsible for the fact that Germany’s productivity in computers is nearly equal to that of the US and Japan. Furthermore, multinational soap and detergent companies, including Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, have substantial production facilities in almost all markets, rendering national boundaries virtually irrelevant.

Competitive threat

Big differences in productivity in international industries mean big opportunities for those companies that can achieve high productivity levels

While productivity gaps point to real opportunities for trailing industries to learn and adopt best practices, they also point to a profound competitive challenge. Big differences in productivity in international industries mean big opportunities for those companies that can achieve high productivity levels. Using foreign direct investment, such leading-edge global producers could not only take huge market share and profits from local industries, but actually raise standards of living in the host countries. Their higher productivity eventually translates into higher wages, better jobs, and increased job security for workers in the transplant factories and the surrounding areas.

Government protection, and even local consumer loyalty, are not durable foundations for long-term economic health or the survival of unproductive regional companies. Eventually the battle will be won by the most productive.

About the Authors

Bill Lewis is Director of the McKinsey Global Institute and Hans Gersbach, Tom Jansen, and Koji Sakate are consultants in the Washington, DC office. This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in the Wall Street Journal on October 22, 1993.

via mckinseyquarterly.com

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If you're not irate in the first 10 minutes of reading, if I don’t provoke you to revolutionize your management and leadership from think to execute, if you aren’t teetering on the brink of reaching for the Maalox, if you don’t innovate like a banshee, then I have failed you. 

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How To Develop A Growth Mindset - Innovation on Low (or No) Budget

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner can seat up to 250 passengers and haul a half-million pounds. The Boeing (BA) jet has a range of up to 8,200 nautical miles and reaches a maximum speed of nearly 650 miles per hour. Its development required an investment of some $30 billion.

The new Big Dinner Box from Pizza Hut (YUM) can haul two medium pizzas, eight wings, and five breadsticks. It has a range of a few zip codes and reaches a maximum speed of what the delivery driver can get away with. Its development required, well, a different kind of cardboard box.

My point? How simple some innovations can be. You don’t have to have a monstrous research and development budget (or even a test kitchen, for that matter) to innovate. You just have to be alert to your customers’ needs and wants—and creative and responsive in addressing them.

Some innovations do require many years and billions of dollars to develop; witness the Chevy (GM) Volt, which took nearly four years and more than a billion dollars to go from concept car to street legal. (The verdict is still out as to whether it will become a commercial success.) Contrast that with Dr Pepper 10, a soda that targets men who don’t like the taste (or the idea, perhaps) of diet soft drinks. By using a different sweetener and throwing in a tad of good, old-fashioned high fructose corn syrup, Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS) came up with a formula that is showing such positive initial returns that the company is already expanding the concept to five of its other brands.

“A Better Way to Deliver Value”

The key to innovation is to not wring your hands about what you don’t have—a giant research budget and staff of PhDs—and focus on what you do have: a relationship with your customers.  Saul Kaplan, founder of the Business Innovation Factory, defines innovation in very simple terms: “a better way to deliver value.” In a recent interview, Kaplan explains what he means: “It is not an innovation until it solves a problem that a customer is having—it delivers value in the real world, solves a problem, and helps get a job done that a customer is trying to do. A lot of people confuse innovation with invention, and think that they just need new technology to solve a problem. But an innovation is not the same as an invention.”

He’s right. Inventions are almost always innovations, but innovations don’t have to be inventions. They just have to be a better way to deliver value. This Christmas, many personal-care product makers such as Procter & Gamble (PG) and Unilever (UL) are putting together gift boxes of toiletries as prosaic as deodorant and toothpaste. If that sounds like the contents of your medicine cabinet, it is. Still, by packaging their products as “affordable luxuries,” these companies are meeting consumers’ needs for simple, inexpensive stocking stuffers. That may not work so well in neighborhoods with circular driveways, but for the rest of us, it’s a gift we could really use. And while our gift-giver stretches his or her budget by (literally) getting a package deal, the manufacturers get to increase exposure and move more product.

Who would have thought a handful of personal-care items would make a great Christmas gift? Not me, but some enterprising packaged goods makers were paying attention to what highbrow cosmetic brands have done for years and have simply applied the concept to their own customers. That’s a helpful template for fostering creativity in innovation—combining two previously unrelated ideas into something refreshing and new. Dr Pepper found something refreshing by combining a diet soda and a regular soda and positioning it for people whose desires weren’t being fully met by either. P&G discovered something new by combining consumer staples with fashion thinking to create a simple, practical gift for challenging economic times. Pizza Hut combined a delivery box with a confectioner’s sampler so it could sell more of every kind of product it serves. You may read this splendid article in entirety via businessweek.com

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Jim Woods is president and founder of the InnoThink Group. He is a no nonsense "tell it like it is" author, speaker, and a strategic management, innovation, commoditization and hypercompetition expert to business and government. He advises clients with an objective view of their competitive capabilities and defines a clear course of action to maximize their innovation return on investment to achieve profitable growth. To build your capability for ongoing innovation across your company or to secure a riveting speaker for your next event - Call 719-649-4118 or email us for more information on hiring Jim. Check Availability. 

Steve Jobs: A Genius, Yes; A Role Model for the Rest of Us, No Way - Scientific American

I happened upon this article this morning in Scientific American on Steve Jobs and Leadership. In stating the obvious I am a fan of Mr. Jobs. However, while there are certainly aspects of his life to emulate, there are many others to denounce. For example, consider emphatic leadership. This is not an attempt to demoralize a gifted man. For turning around a business or career depends on which you choose. Jim Woods

 

The nearly three weeks since Steve Jobs’s death has been like an extended tribute to the first global head of state. The memorial ceremonies worldwide, the special commemorative issues and, today, the release of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, all bear testament to the Apple founder’s legacy. Jobs deserved it. As Isaacson pointed out on CBS’s 60 Minutes last night, Jobs transformed personal computers, telephones, even retail stores, among others—and he would have probably taken on television, if he had lived long enough.

Many heads of state assuredly do not merit such eulogies. Gaddafi is dead. And when the Turkmens turned out to mourn Saparmurat Atayevich Niyazov in 2006, they were probably secretly celebrating at least the recovery of the month of January, as Niyazov had renamed the first month of the year after his personal honorific, Türkmenbaşy.

One thread among the encomiums suggests that the world would be a better place if we just had more Steve Jobs in high places. Consider this from Thomas Friedman: “The melancholy over Steve Jobs’s passing is not just about the loss of the inventor of so many products we enjoy. It is also about the loss of someone who personified so many of the leadership traits we know are missing from our national politics.”

It would be unfortunate if the remembrance of Jobs spawns a legion of Steve wannabes. Jobs, in geekspeak, was an “N of 1.” Jobs’s perfectionism and design sense helped establish Apple’s signature “iBrands,” but these traits also transcended, to some extent,  a toxic personality that could have served as a model for the Kevin Spacey character in the movie “Horrible Bosses.” In the film, Dave Harken implies that a promotion awaits one of his employees but ends up awarding it to himself. The Jobs equivalent: stiffing early Apple employees out of stock options when the company first went public. The guy was a…

In the weeks since his death, Jobs has been compared to Einstein and Edison. Maybe so. But the problem with using his interpersonal style as a management role model is that the rest of us, to parrot Apple advertising, will assuredly blow it. In business, the control freak boss—the emblematic Jobs model—is a recipe for unintentionally delivering your best employees as new hires to your closest competitors. Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.

Millions of people have to manage others, and this challenge doesn’t necessarily bring out the best in us. A 2005 article by two psychologists from the University of Surrey, “Disordered Personalities at Work,” found that senior British executives were more likely to demonstrate histrionic personality disorder (grandiosity and lack of empathy among other traits) than criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor Special Hospital in Berkshire, England, and they were equally likely to show narcissistic (perfectionism and a dictatorial bent) and compulsive tendencies. Is it that this type of person is attracted to the job or the workplace encourages this type of behavior? Who knows? But entreating subordinates to “insanely great” levels of performance, to quote Jobs’s hyperbolic rhetoric, is more likely to initiate a collective bargaining drive than produce the next iPad.

Even Jobs may have been at his best when he left behind the persona of the old Steve. New Yorker writer James Surowiecki and author of The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, noted in that magazine how Jobs loosened up in recent years on his insistence on totally closed architectures. The old Steve might have forbidden MP3s on iPods and apps for iPhones and iPads. Giving up a modicum of control eventually propelled the company to heights it had never before experienced—and cemented Jobs’s legacy in the most histrionic terms imaginable.

via blogs.scientificamerican.com

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For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118

 

America's Healthy Infatuation With Entrepreneurs - David A. Shaywitz

REUTERS

America has fallen hard for entrepreneurs.

The aesthetic appeal is easy to understand. Compare the Fortune 500 CEOs interviewed on the HBR IdeaCast talking about Campbell's Soup or Coca-Cola (podcast here) with the entrepreneurs at the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Seminar Series discussing Pandora and Instagram (podcast here). The big company CEOs sound just like you'd expect. They are competent, factual,  and in control. But while most of them presumably have strong interpersonal skills and a high EQ, they come across as dry, unemotional, and focused on the "core business."

In contrast, the entrepreneurs presenting at Stanford wear their hearts on their sleeves. They are vividly passionate. They exude emotion. They are selling themselves, with a kind of animated desperation. They tell student to "do what you love." It's an appealing message, and you can see why it catches on.

These two personalities generally reside at opposite ends of the business spectrum, presumably reflecting two very different business needs. It's essential to be brash and irrationally exuberant to start a business. But to sustain a large multinational corporation, you've got to be calculating and rational.  It's also a well-described phenomenon that as start-ups evolve into progressively larger companies, their character changes, and their needs evolve, or "mature."  Mature organizations are supposed to act predictably, responsibly, unemotionally. The qualities embraced (or at least tolerated) at the start-up level can become liabilities. Many start-up CEOs hand over the reins at this stage, or at least share them (as Google did for years when Brin and Page hired Eric Schmidt), explicitly acknowledging the need for an "adult in the room." Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.

While many large organizations might similarly benefit from having a kid in the room -- someone who is energetic, passionate, emotional, excitable - it's hard to envision a corporate phenotype that would be more doomed: the environment just doesn't support it.  Sure, companies trot out bromides about "cultivating entrepreneurship," while HR departments sponsor group training sessions on innovative thinking. But the reality is that the culture of most big companies is geared to performing established activities in increasingly efficient ways. Simply stated: doing the old things better takes precedence over doing new things well enough. Most employees (and certainly the ones who last) figure out extremely quickly how you're supposed to act at work (Sir Joseph wasn't far off). You could say most large organizations have elected to trade the passion of young love for the predictability of adult relationships.

And perhaps this is why we look so wistfully at entrepreneurs. They seem to exude the raw passion that experience has taught us to modulate, the vivid emotion that we've learned to suppress, the intense energy that we learn must be channeled, the unreasonable audacity that has been replaced by sensible objectives.  We cheer for them because they represent our youthful hopes, our idealism, our ambitions and our dreams. And when these entrepreneurs defy the extraordinary odds, and succeed, we rejoice, for at the moment we can sense, if only fleetingly, the exceptional untapped potential within each of us. We rejoice, and wonder: what if?

It would be easy to dismiss our infatuation with entrepreneurs as misty-eyed revisionism, the way we might selectively recall and invoke treasured childhood memories while forgetting the many painful challenges of youth and adolescence. The day-to-day reality of getting a new company off the ground is generally far less glorious than the inspirational experiences trotted out by the small minority of ultra-successful entrepreneurs who are routinely invited to share their stories. There's a significant selection bias here, to say nothing of the urge to write oneself into a heroic cultural narrative.

But I'd argue that if we had to find a group of people to admire and admittedly idealize -- and you know we're going to -- we could do a lot worse than taking our inspiration from impassioned, dedicated individuals seeking against all odds "to make a dent in the world." via theatlantic.com

Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation  

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships. 

For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118

 

How To Avoid Commoditization - Scott Dadich on Designing Wired Magazine

Today Lipitor the world's best selling drug will become generic. Sadly, so will most businesses. That is called commoditization. Commoditization is ordinarily mind numbing despite well intentioned. In a business it is when not enough people salivate for your product; when customers go elsewhere. Commoditization is a greater scourge than the economy. Avoiding it can be the sought after accelerator out of the Great Recession. Below Scott Dadich of Wired Magazine provides a simple way to meangifully be distinctlybetter. Eh - Let's just call this what it is. Hmmm. How about innovating? That'll work. Talk to us about our 28 day program to strengthen your innovation capabilities to drive growth.  

 

via youtube.com

Consulting, Speaking & Coaching. Driving Growth through Innovation  

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy. Where many consulting firms are reluctant to bear risks or tie their rewards to project outcomes, we decided to build a better model. We align our success with yours. We’re outcome obsessed, outcome paid, putting over a third of our fees at risk subject o hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships. 

For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries contact: 

CEO Jim Woods

+1 719- 649-4118

Without A Nimble Competitive Advantage Design is Meaningless

It is really all about competitive advantage. Truthfully, designing and strategizing aren't that different. Both activities include methods to create a plan in order to achieve a specific goal. And design(-ing) goes into everything: isn't someone (designer or not) constantly creating something in an organization? Design is all around us, and there is no way around it. Of course, in this volatile age, it is encumbered upon designers to disrupt their fields and niche with insatiable products. Without a plan to innovate competitive advantage in design and strategy a product if you will, remains anemic at best where owners lament an ecnomoy laced with opportunity more than disruption.  

Since design is there to stay, the challenge really is about designing not well, but obsessivley well:

• Strengthening the significance of design strategy at the leadership level and throughout organizations
• Be competitive. Create designs that speed to market
• Create designs that are adaptive and responsive to change faster than competitors. 
• Applying its methods consciously and effectively during decision-making, problem-solving, and co-creation Talk to us about leveraging your capabilities.
• Including design in investment and optimization efforts
• Hiring design talent that can support change in culture and business models

Together with management, design should be an essential part of the overarching force of a holistic system and trickle through the entire organization. Designing right from the inception is crucial in achieving differentiation and a competitive advantage, wowing customers by engaging on an emotional level, and ultimately creating stakeholder value.

 

 

Note: Be different isn't enough today. You have to find something new to say and a better way of saying it. Jim Woods

 

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. Thank you!

 

 

The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time - (Not Quite)

Below are ten ceremonious "accidental innovations." Certainly these are wonderful stories. Actually, though, while we delight in retelling such Horatio Algier like successes, I would not really label these "accidental innovation." The innovation itself can't really be said to be "accidental," even though it involves accident. For it takes a considerable capability to see the value in an accident, and to build upon it to create even more value. Jim Woods

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1. The Microwave - Percy L. Spencer
Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon after his WWI stint in the Navy, was known as an electronics genius. In 1945, Spencer was fiddling with a microwave-emitting magnetron—used in the guts of radar arrays—when he felt a strange sensation in his pants. A sizzling, even. Spencer paused and found that a chocolate bar in his pocket had started to melt. Figuring that the microwave radiation of the magnetron was to blame (or to credit, as it would turn out), Spencer immediately set out to realize the culinary potential at work. The end result was the microwave oven—savior of eager snackers and single dudes worldwide.

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2. Saccharin - Ira Remsen, Constantin Fahlberg
In 1879, Ira Remsen and Constantin Fahlberg, at work in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, paused to eat. Fahlberg had neglected to wash his hands before the meal—which usually leads to a quick death for most chemists, but led to him noticing an oddly sweet flavor during his meal. Artificial sweetener! The duo published their findings together, but it was only Fahlberg's name that made it onto the (incredibly lucrative) patent, now found in pink packets at tables everywhere. That is to say, Remsen got screwed—he later remarked, "Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him."

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3. Slinky - Richard James
In 1943, Navy engineer Richard James was trying to figure out how to use springs to keep the sensitive instruments aboard ships from rocking themselves to death, when he knocked one of his prototypes over. Instead of crashing to the floor, it gracefully sprang downward, and then righted itself. So pointless—so nimble—so slinky. The spring became a goofy toy of many childhoods—that is before every kid inevitably gets theirs all twisted up and ruins it. 300 million sold worldwide!

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4. Play-Doh - Kutol Products
Before being found ground into the rugs of child-rearing homes everywhere, Play-Doh was ironically created to be a cleaning product. The paste was first marketed as a treatment for filthy wallpaper—before the company that produced it began to go down the tubes. The discovery that saved Kutol Products—headed for bankruptcy—wasn't that their wall cleaner worked particularly well, but that schoolchildren were beginning to use it to create Christmas ornaments as arts and crafts projects. By removing the compound's cleanser and adding colors and a fresh scent, Kutol spun their wallpaper saver into one of the most iconic toys of all time—and brought mega-success to a company headed for destruction. Sometimes, you don't even know how brilliant you are until someone notices for you.

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5. Super Glue - Harry Coover
In what have been a very messy moment of discovery in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover of Eastman-Kodak Laboratories found that a substance he created—cyanoacrylate—was a miserable failure. It was not, to his dismay, at all suited for a new precision gun sight as he had hoped—it infuriatingly stuck to everything it touched. So it was forgotten. Six years later, while overseeing an experimental new design for airplane canopies, Coover found himself stuck in the same gooey mess with a familiar foe—cyanacrylate was proving useless as ever. But this time, Coover observed that the stuff formed an incredibly strong bond without needing heat. Coover and his team tinkered with sticking various objects in their lab together, and realized they had finally stumbled upon a use for the maddening goop. Coover slapped a patent on his discovery, and in 1958, a full 16 years after he first got stuck, cyanoacrylate was being sold on shelves.

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6. Teflon - Roy Plunkett
The next time you make a frustration-free omelette, thank chemist Roy Plunkett, who experienced immense frustration while inadvertently inventing Teflon in 1938. Plunkett had hoped to create a new variety of chlorofluorocarbons (better known as universally-despised CFCs), when he came back to check on his experiment in a refrigeration chamber. When he inspected a canister that was supposed to be full of gas, he found that it appeared to have vanished—leaving behind only a few white flakes. Plunkett was intrigued by these mysterious chemical bits, and began at once to experiment with their properties. The new substance proved to be a fantastic lubricant with an extremely high melting point—perfect at first for military gear, and now the stuff found finely applied across your non-stick cookware.

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7. Bakelite - Leo Baekeland
In 1907, shellac was commonly used to insulate the innards of early electronics—think radios and telephones. This was fine, aside from the fact that shellac is made from Asian beetle poop, and not exactly the cheapest or easiest way to insulate a wire. What Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland found in instead was—get ready—polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, the world's first synthetic plastic, commonly known as Bakelite. This pioneering plastic was moldable into virtually any shape, in any color, and could hold its form against high temperatures and daily wear—making it a star among manufacturers, jewelers, and industrial designers.

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8. Pacemaker - Wilson Greatbatch
An assistant professor at the University of Buffalo thought he had ruined his project. Instead of picking a 10,000-ohm resistor out of a box to use on a heart-recording prototype, Wilson Greatbatch took the 1-megaohm variety. The resulting circuit produced a signal that sounded for 1.8 milliseconds, and then paused for a second—a dead ringer for the human heart. Greatbatch realized the precise current could regulate a pulse, overriding the imperfect heartbeat of the ill. Before this point, pacemakers were television-sized, cumbersome things that were temporarily attached to patients from the outside. But now the effect could be achieved with a small circuit, perfect to tuck into someone's chest.

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9. Velcro - George de Mestral
A dog invented velcro.
Alright, that's something of an exaggeration, but a dog did play an instrumental role. Swiss engineer George de Mestral was out for a hunting trip with his pooch, and noticed the annoying tendency of burrs to stick to its fur (and his socks). Later, looking under a microscope, Mestral observed the tiny "hooks" that stuck burrs to fabrics and furs. Mestral experimented for years with a variety of textiles before arriving at the newly invented nylon—though it wasn't until two decades later that NASA's fondness for velcro popularized the tech.

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10. X-Rays - Wilhelm Roentgen
Okay, yes, x-rays are a phenomenon of the natural world, and thus can't be created. But sshhh! The story of their discovery is a fascinating one of incredible chance. In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen was performing a routine experiment involving cathode rays, when he noticed that a piece of fluorescent cardboard was lighting up from across the room. A thick screen had been placed between his cathode emitter and the radiated cardboard, proving that particles of light were passing through solid objects. Amazed, Roentgen quickly found that brilliant images could be produced with this incredible radiation—the first of their kind being a skeletal image of his wife's hand.
Eureka is our week-long meditation on the wonders of invention, inventors and genius.

Illustration by our contributing illustrator Sam Spratt. Check out Sam's portfolio and become a fan of his Facebook Artist's Page. via gizmodo.com

New Solutions to Attract and Retain More Customers

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group; a leading Strategic Management and Innovation Consulting Firm in Denver, Colorado. He is an author, speaker, and a strategic innovation and hypercompetition expert to profit, non-profit organizations and municipalities. He advises clients with an objective view of their competitive capabilities and defines a clear course of action to maximize their innovation return on investment to achieve profitable growth. Build a capability for ongoing competitive innovation across your company. Call 719-649-4118 or complete our form: contact us for more information on hiring Jim to advise or speak for your next event.

Stephen R. Covey Book Review: The Soft Stuff Is the Hard Stuff

In my 35-year corporate journey and my 60-year life journey, I have consistently found that the thorniest problems I face each day are soft stuff — problems of intention, understanding, communication, and interpersonal effectiveness — not hard stuff such as return on investment and other quantitative challenges. Inevitably, I have found myself needing to step back from the problem, listen more carefully, and frame the conflict more thoughtfully, while still finding a way to advance the corporate agenda empathetically. Most of the time, interestingly, this has led to a more promising path forward and a better relationship, which in turn has made the next conflict easier to deal with.
Stephen Covey provides a more direct approach to successful problem solving in the excerpt below from his new book. From the outset, his “3rd Alternative” approach engages everyone involved in an issue to advance the agenda in a winning way. The soft stuff will forever be the hard stuff, but leveraging 3rd Alternative thinking can make the soft stuff significantly easier to resolve productively.

— Douglas R. Conant

An excerpt from Chapter 3 of The 3rd Alternative: Solving Life’s Most Difficult Problems

If you’re a 3rd Alternative supervisor, you’ll neither flee nor fight. You’ll look for something better [when conflict arises], a solution that will provide your employee with a huge emotional payoff and create for the firm new and significant value.
A friend of mine explained how a 3rd Alternative leader dealt with exactly this situation in his life:

I was new at the job and had come in hoping for a better salary. I settled for something a lot less than I’d hoped for just to get in the door. But after a couple of months, it was clear that my family was struggling. We couldn’t get by because of some medical expenses. Besides that, I felt more and more that I was getting paid too little for the work I was doing. So I took a real risk and went to talk to the big boss about a raise. I didn’t know her very well and she didn’t know me. I had no real track record yet with that company.

But she invited me into her office and I explained why I was there. I was kind of surprised when she said, “Tell me more.” I told her about my family situation. She just listened, and I talked quite a lot about what I’d been doing for the firm. She asked me what I thought about the company, its customers, its products. It was odd. We had this long conversation that I thought was going to be about my pay, but instead was about me — how I was doing, what I thought, what I’d learned in my few months at the company.

Then she asked me about a certain customer I’d been working with. She wanted to know my ideas for expanding our business with that client, and I actually did have some thoughts that I shared.

A couple days later, she invited me back into her office. Three or four other people joined us, and she had put up on a whiteboard my ideas for this client. We had quite the discussion, and a lot more discussions after that. I was excited. Finally, they offered me an expanded job with higher pay and responsibility for a new level of service to this important client.

For my friend, these discussions were just the beginning of a swift rise in that company; he eventually became a partner to the “big boss.”
I’ve rarely heard of a wiser leader than this woman. She had a fine capacity for 3rd Alternative thinking. How easy it would have been for her either to fight my friend or just to give in to his request. Instead, she sensed the possibility of a dramatic win-win. Rather than haggling over the existing pie, she could envision the prospect of a much bigger pie. She suspected that combining my friend’s needs and energies with the client’s needs might well produce growth for everyone. The eventual result was a whole new line of business and a partner who increased his worth to the company every year. From what I know of this young man’s contribution to his firm, he was ultimately responsible for doubling its size. via strategy-business.com

Strategic Management and Innovation Solutions 
Traditionally, when facing low-cost competition companies try to cut costs or innovate. This trap leads them in never-ending cycles of competitive disadvantage. Survival requires smarter and subtler responses. Contact InnoThink Group to discuss your options or call 719-649-4118. We are a leading Strategic Management and Innovation Consulting Firm.