Holy Toledo - In another long boring meeting on innovation.

In a long, long meeting thinking. If I were at the helm, I'd fire everyone but the girl at the front desk. I think she is the only one who gets it around here. This stuff isn't rocket science. Just fire all the consultants and middle managers to get down to accelerating customer expectations.
How can you truly be an innovative company if you and HR do your best to abolish the “revolutionaries, rebels, zany, weird, freaky, and “Hey boss this is a STUPID idea” people? Jim Woods

P.S. Human resources are the least innovative people in an organization with an opportunity to hire the most innovative people in an organization. 
I have got a boatload more ideas here - at "Boatload of ideas." 

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

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.  

Click here to arrange for Jim to speak to or consult with your organization. On Twitter Jim is @hyperinnovation and @innothinkgroup

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.

David Brooks: Competitiveness Vs Creativity: GE vs Apple

   How is your business achieving top line growth in the downturn? 


In an interesting NYT column, The Creative Monopoly, David Brooks contrasts competitiveness and creativity in individuals: a bright young man called Peter Thiel could have been a highly competitive lawyer, but instead, he left the law, created PayPal and later became an investor in Facebook and other celebrated technology firms.
Brooks agrees with Thiel, now a lecturer at Stanford, that

“we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value…Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.”

A focus on competing in existing markets, says Brooks, leads us down pre-determined paths that are antagonistic to creativity, innovation and value-creation.

“First, students have to jump through ever-more demanding, preassigned academic hoops. Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests… Then they move into a ranking system in which the most competitive college, program and employment opportunity is deemed to be the best. Then they move into businesses in which the main point is to beat the competition, in which the competitive juices take control and gradually obliterate other goals…. Competition has trumped value-creation. In this and other ways, the competitive arena undermines innovation.”

Brooks’ thesis is also borne out by the current trajectories of two American icons: GE [GE] and Apple [AAPL].
GE, by competing in existing mature markets, has lost 40 percent of its share value in the last ten years, while Apple, by rejuvenating and opening up markets, has gained around 4,500 percent in its share value in the last ten years.

 

The sad case of GE

In a short-term financial sense, GE is doing just fine. GE’s quarterly earnings per share were 34 cents compared to Wall Street’s expectation of 33 cents. GE has $86 billion in cash on hand. GE ranks as the 6^th largest firm in the U.S., the 14^th most profitable and the #7 company for leaders as ranked by Fortune. It is the #5 best global brand according to Interbrand. It is #15 most admired company (Fortune), and #19 most innovative company according to Fast Company. GE’s work in Ecomagination has been saluted as innovative and environmentally friendly. 
Although GE has been through some hard times during the financial meltdown, some analysts say that GE has “turned a corner.” “Hope at last” said Barron’s in 2011. “General Electric is ready to revive.”
So why has GE lost 40 percent of its share value in the last ten years, and more than half its of its share value since Jeff Immelt became CEO? Why doesn’t the stock market see much of a future for GE?

A culture of the bottom line

Obviously, the results of any large company are caused by many moving parts, but one of the root causes of GE’s decline is what CEO Jeff Immelt revealed in his 2006 conversation with Harvard Business Review (“Growth As A Process”)

“At GE, the only things that move the culture are ones that show up in our income statement. It’s just the way we were raised.”

GE is the quintessential company that is run by the numbers, focused on making money for the shareholders. Because GE does it as well as anyone, its fate can tell us where this approach leads.
For a start, what it means, as Steve Jobs once explained, is that the people who are at ‘the white-hot center of the company’s daily life’ are the salesmen, the accountants and the money men. They are the ones who can ‘move the needle on revenues’, not the the engineers, the designers and the creative people who add real value to customers.
As a result, the quality of the product and the value for customers become less important in the firm’s activities than whether the firm is making money in the quarter.
It is thus no surprise to find, when you look more closely to see how GE ‘made its numbers’ in the last few quarters, that revenues were up but margins were down—a sign that GE has to lower prices in order to make its financial targets.
When you have the accountants and the money men searching the firm high and low to find new and ingenious ways to cut costs, the activities dispirit the creators, the product engineers and the designers, and also crimp the firm’s ability to add value to its customers. But because the accountants appear to be adding to the firm’s short-term profitability and making the firm ‘more competitive’, they are the ones that are as a class celebrated and well-rewarded, even as their activities systematically kill the firm’s future.

Why the bottom line kills innovation

Once a company focuses on the bottom line, innovation suffers as a matter of mathematics. As Gary Hamel points out, “Typically any incremental investment has about a 90 percent chance of earning a solid return. Yet by definition, when we undertake basic innovation, most of the ideas that we start out with are going to have less than a 25% probability of success.” Since R&D is expensed rather than capitalized, cuts in R&D spending yield immediate increases in profit. Moreover, gains in basic innovation may take years to materialize whereas cuts in spending or incremental improvements often take effect immediately. So in any contest for the allocation of resources, basic innovations have little chance because:

• The returns have a much lower chance of success
• The returns take longer to materialize
• The costs which are expensed rather than capitalized weigh more heavily and immediately on the bottom line than capital expenditures.

GE exits from ‘mature sectors’

We can see this process steadily unfolding at GE, as the management finds it easier to milk existing cash cows or get out of “slow-moving sectors” rather than add new value to customers.
Thus CEO Jeff Immelt sold GE’s insurance business and said in 2011 that he wishes he “had sold our insurance business right after 9/11. We just had no business being in [insurance] at all.” Heavy losses “just created a headwind for the rest of the portfolio.” There is no indication of any thought as to why an insurance firm like Arch Capital Group Ltd (ACGL) has grown the share value of its insurance business by 300 percent in the last ten years.
Similarly, when GE acquired NBC in 1986, NBC was the top rated network. Under GE’s management over several decades, it became the fourth-ranking network. In 2011, GE gave up on the management challenge and sold a majority interest to Comcast.
Immelt would like to get rid of its home and business division which enjoys low profit margins. However in this case, GE can’t sell it an attractive price, so Immelt makes the best of a bad situation: “Nobody can run it better than we can… I just think selling it doesn’t create shareholder value.” There is no indication of any rethinking the business from the customer’s perspective so as to create new opportunities for growth.
Over recent years, Immelt has gotten rid of other “poor performing sectors”, including plastics and subprime-lending operations. The result is a firm now focused on infrastructure businesses, in particular energy, water and health care, to go along with aviation and transportation. The result, Immelt contended in 2011, “is the best portfolio I’ve had since I’ve been CEO.”
The real issue is whether mere “positioning of the portfolio”, by getting out of slow moving sectors is enough to create new value for customers.  Can the inside-out thinking that couldn’t see any upside in insurance, television or plastics be able to create a strong upside in the remaining businesses?
Looking at the world from the perspective of what the firm can deliver to its bottom line automatically narrows and cramps the imagination. So long as the thinking is taking place within GE’s bottom-line culture, rather than from a customer-focused value-adding perspective, the business possibilities will always look very limited.

Apple rejuvenated mature sectors

By contrast, Apple took four slow-moving, ‘mature’ sectors—desktop computers, music, mobile phones and tablet computers—and turned them into explosively growing markets by adding new value to customers. When GE looked out in the 2000s, it saw only slow-growing sectors. When Apple looked at slow-growing sectors, it saw opportunity.
Apple continues to shine. Quarterly profit at Apple Inc (AAPL) almost doubled after a jump in iPhone sales. Apple shares jumped 10 percent today to $615.40.
“Another amazing quarter from Apple that is single handedly driving markets this morning,” wrote Peter Boockvar, an equity strategist and portfolio manager at Miller Tabak in New York in a note today.
Why doesn’t GE amaze us like Apple? Obviously in any firm as large as GE, there pockets of innovation. The Ecomagination program is one positive sign, Maybe there are others. Based on the information released by GE, we don’t know the full story.
What we do know is that it is only when GE management as a whole adopts outside-in perspective of adding value for customers, rather than feeding the financial bottom line, that the myriad business possibilities available to GE will become visible and we will be seeing genuine imagination at work.

GE’s main problem today: 20th Century management

GE’s main problem today is thus a 20^th Century management mindset focused on making a profit by pushing products and services at customers. It was a way of managing that worked reasonably well, decades ago, when the marketplace was dominated by a few oligopolies (customers lacked both options and information about the options) and most work was semi-skilled.
Today that world has all but vanished. The reality is that we now live in the age of customer capitalism. As a result of epochal shift of power in the marketplace from seller to buyer, the customer is now in charge. Making money and corporate survival now depend not merely on satisfying customers but delighting them. To prosper, firms must have knowledge workers who are continuously innovating and delivering a steady supply of new value to customers and delivering it sooner. The new bottom line of business is: is the customer delighted? It’s a fundamental shift from outputs to outcomes.

Creating blue oceans rather than finding them

The strategy that Brooks describes for individuals is applicable to businesses as W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne explain in Blue Ocean Strategy (2005) where they illustrate the high growth and profits that an organization can generate by creating value for customers in an uncontested market space, i.e. a “blue ocean”, rather than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers in the bloody shark-infested waters with known customers in an existing sector.
By looking at the world from the customer’s point of view,  a firm doesn’t find new ways to delight the customer: it creates them. Thus the Cirque du Soleil was able to enter a dying industry—circuses—and by eliminating animals, deemphasizing individual stars, and combining extreme athletic skill with sophisticated dance and music, created a high growth business appealing to all ages.
Similarly, by looking at the world from the customer’s point of view and finding ways to delight the customer, Amazon [AMZN] was able to take several fully “mature” sectors—retail book, second hand books, computer storage, and retail generally—and turn them into high growth businesses.
By looking at the world from the customer’s point of view and finding ways to delight the customer, Apple [APPL] has been able to take “mature” low-margin sectors—retail computers, music, and mobile phones, tablet computers—and turn them into huge money-makers.
In strategic thinking, we have learned that there is no such thing as a mature industry: there is only an industry to which imagination has yet to be applied.
The critical element is to apply the imagination from the point of view of the customer. When looked at through the lens of what the firm is currently doing, value-adding opportunities will look narrow and risky. When imagination is applied from the perspective of the customer, the opportunities are boundless.

Welcome to the Creative Economy!

The economy is thus undergoing a transition from an industrial economy to a  Creative Economy, where, as David Brooks suggests, the big gains come from creativity rather than competitiveness. The Creative Economy is an economy in which the driving force is innovation. It is an economy in which organizations are nimble and agile and continually offering new value to customers and delivering it sooner. The Creative Economy is an economy in which firms focus not on short-term financial returns but rather on creating long-term customer value based on trust, as described in Richard Florida’s classic book, The Rise of the Creative Class (2003).
A firm like GE with a culture focused on the financial bottom-line is ill-equipped to compete in the emerging Creative Economy. GE is still operating within a factory mindset oriented to economies of scale. It is still focused principally on maximizing short-term shareholder value. It is not organized for continuous innovation. This way of managing is unlikely to mobilize the full creative talents of its employees. GE is sitting on $86 billion and unable to find productive uses for its money in a stagnant economy. So long as GE stays imprisoned by its culture of the bottom line—which even Jack Welch says is “the dumbest idea in the world”—it will have difficulty in stemming its decline.
To thrive in this new world, GE must master the management principles needed for continuous innovation and delight customers. To delight customers, a radically different kind of management needs to be in place, with a different role for the managers, a different way of coordinating work, a different set of values and a different way of communicating. This is not rocket science. It’s called radical management.
Apple [AAPL] is not alone in showing the way. Amazon [AMZN] or Salesforce [CRM] are other examples. Firms that opt not to change are unlikely to survive, let alone thrive. The economics will drive the transition. The choice is steadily becoming clearer: delight or die.
Read also:

Inside Apple: Can It Thrive Without Steve Jobs?

Apple’s Retail Stores Are More Than Magic

Is The US In A Phase Change To The Creative Economy

Don’t Blame Green For GE’s Problems

The Five Surprises of Radical Management

________________________

Steve Denning’s most recent book is: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Follow Steve Denning on Twitter @stevedenning
Want to learn how to make the entire organization Agile? Check out the innovative three-day workshop in Washington DC on May 21-23, 2012

via forbes.com

How well are you growing your business in the multi-polar economy?

Steps to Becoming a Disciplined Disruptor: Innovation

Some companies lose themselves in trying to grow too quickly. In the fight to get ahead, they forget where they came from – the core tenets that made them unique, and gave them the ability to compete and win.

This can be particularly true for start-up executives, who often find challenges in discovering their company’s true advantage. As they attempt to grow, they sometimes have a tendency to want to branch out beyond that advantage. In many cases, this approach to growth lacks discipline and does not take into account what actually makes their company special – its offerings, yes, but also its core philosophies. If this is the case, the growth process can lead down uncertain paths that include the creation of disparate product offerings, unhappy employees, and disenchanted customers and a lack of competitive advantage.

The business landscape is littered with large and small companies that started doing one thing and then got distracted by bright, shiny objects – the concept of “Hey, wait a minute – if we can do THIS, then certainly we can do THAT, too!” Startups will often try to reach beyond core capabilities, but, unfortunately, in far too many cases this means diluting the focus that initially made the business great, to the point where mediocrity reigns across the board.

Then, there are organizations like Atlassian, a Sydney-based software company. Its website describes the corporate culture and make-up as “geeks, beer drinkers, nerf herders, fraggers and Wolverine-wannabes.” And that could very well be. But Atlassian is also very, very good at creating issue tracking and collaboration software. That’s the company’s focus, and it’s committed to doing it well. It’s why Atlassian has grown from a handful of employees in 2002 to more than 400 today.

There are, of course, examples of larger companies that have done well by applying a laser-like focus and disciplined approach. Over the past five years, Apple has been extremely focused on delivering quality content through the iPad, iPhone and more. Its M.O. is to deliver attractive, cool devices that are fast and user-friendly. While its primary rival Google is intent on offering many services and products in a multitude of areas, getting further away from its core service offering (search), Apple seems content to provide a singular, focused experience. Needless to say, the approach has worked well for the company.

Contrast that with companies like Research in Motion (RIM) or, going back even further, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). RIM’s troubles within the mobile space have been well documented, but they stem from one common mistake made by many companies: not listening to the customer base. At one point in time, RIM was an innovator; it provided businesspeople with communications devices the likes of which had never been seen before. But when customers declared they wanted a better browsing experience and applications, RIM balked and stubbornly refused to provide either. The company moved away from a core aspect of its business – providing innovative mobile devices – and have since stagnated.

DEC’s an even more cogent example of a company that had everything yet lost its way. DEC started off by focusing on the microcomputer market, eventually growing into one of the biggest technology organizations on the planet. But the company strayed from its roots, incorporating new and varied products, different distribution models, and more, to the point where DEC became a behemoth without focus, one that could not support its own weight. Slowly, the company that once proudly announced that it had never undergone a layoff began breaking apart until, in 1998, the remaining assets were sold to Compaq – a sad end to a once-promising company’s epic decline.

But for every DEC, there is a Red Hat. For every RIM, there is a SalesForce.com. And for every startup’s inspiration, there is an Atlassian and others like it. All of these organizations have successfully found the sweet spot between growth, discipline, and differentiation by not only identifying and honoring uniqueness, but by also keeping customers happy.

The good news is that discipline is an attitude that can be fine-tuned and adopted.

Kevin B. Thompson

Kevin B. Thompson is president and CEO of SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a provider of IT management software. He has served in that role since March 2010. Prior to that, Mr. Thompson was the company’s COO, as well as CFO and treasurer. He has also held positions at SAS Institute and Red Hat,, and serves on the board of directors of NetSuite.

via chiefexecutive.net

 

After X Years, the CEO Should Go

The thought behind this essay began in an unlikely, noncorporate place.

I was checking the proofs of the latest book by my wife, Meredith Hooper, published for the centenary this year of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott’s fateful last expedition. She describes how the death of Scott and his four companions returning from the South Pole (having been beaten to it by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) overshadows and rewrites the whole story of the expedition: “Accounts of what happened shifted to take account of what was to happen. Writing, and thinking, accreted ‘hindsight bias’: understandable, unavoidable and insidious. No one wished to challenge the overriding narrative. To dislodge the tone and beat of the powerful and moving story that had swept into the imagination of a world audience.”

It suddenly occurred to me that chief executives sooner or later, after x years, inevitably fall into the trap of hindsight bias. Consciously or unconsciously, they become more concerned with justifying yesterday’s decision and creating the ”overriding narrative” of their legacy than with making the optimal decision for tomorrow. Yet, the best decision for the company’s health tomorrow may require acknowledging that yesterday’s decision was a bad one. At some point then, irrespective of performance, might not the CEO begin to be a liability?

Nonexecutive directors like me are, according to Britain’s Combined Code, probably past our sell-by date after six years: “Any term beyond six years for a nonexecutive director should be subject to particularly rigorous review and should take into account the need for progressive refreshing of the board.” Could this not be equally true of executive directors?

I was discussing this idea with a chairwoman recently, and she made the point that it is not just the individual CEO’s problem. She pointed out that over time the whole company “becomes lined up behind the CEO’s idiosyncrasies.” When I mentioned this to Joel Kurtzman, the editor in chief of Briefings, he immediately thought of the considerable amount of research devoted to Groupthink, the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives.
Hindsight bias overlaps with another form of bias. We process data in skewed ways. Information that supports existing views is welcomed, while that which does not is rejected. This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias.

If you accept that the CEO should go after x years because of the growing dangers of hindsight and confirmation bias and Groupthink, then what is the value of x? It is probably in the range of five to seven years — which is when nonexecutive board members in Britain are encouraged to move on. Among other reasons, it is thought that they become too close to management, losing objectivity and distance from the canvas.

I believe that the CEO should depart after a fixed term irrespective of performance. Boards and shareholders (not to mention CEOs) may find this a step too far. But there are a number of good reasons. Hindsight and confirmation bias are insidious. They do not happen suddenly; they creep up on the organization and may not become visible until it is too late. In managing the CEO’s expectations, the chairman and board may find it useful to state up front on appointment that the CEO should expect a term of around, say, five years. This obviates the need for difficult, surprising and embarrassing discussions with the CEO around Year 4.

There are two problems with my argument — one almost the inverse of the other. A predetermined tenure could lead a CEO to focus only on short-term goals, seeking to ensure that he or she is a hero after x years through profit-pumping. This could actually jeopardize the longer-term future of the company. It is often said that a great engine of the German economy has been the small and medium-size Mittelstand companies and that their success can be attributed to long-term thinking. Such companies are often family-owned, and the CEOs have clear motivation to leave the companies in great shape for sons and daughters in succeeding generations.

The second problem is known in the City of London as “kitchen sinking” and concerns the behavior of the new CEO. A new chief executive may be motivated to pour scorn on his predecessor and to initiate one-time accounting actions to clean up unsuccessful past actions. Such steps reduce profits and the share price, but improve the outlook for the CEO’s own share options and future heroism. A recurrence of this every five years would damage the accretion of shareholder value.

There is no obvious solution to this conundrum. Awareness of it would be a good start. All of us on boards should be actively and continuously aware of the power of hindsight bias, confirmation bias, legacy building and Groupthink in ourselves and in others.

Indeed, boards and chairmen should sharpen their skill at foresight bias. Niccolo Machiavelli got it right in 1532: All wise princes ”consider not only present but also future discords and diligently guard against them; for being foreseen, they can easily be remedied, but if one waits until they are at hand, the medicine is no longer in time as the malady has become incurable; hectic fevers ... at their beginning are easy to cure but difficult to recognize, but in course of time when they have not at first been recognized and treated, become easy to recognize and difficult to cure.”

-----------------

Richard Hooper has devoted his career to the media and communications universe, having held senior executive posts in the BBC, government research and development, British Telecom, new media and satellite television. He was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006 for his service to the communications industry.
 

via kornferryinstitute.com

How To Build Loyal Customers In A Dog Eat Dog World

In this dog-eat-dog world of savvy customers and relentless competitors, managers should seek to be the hunters, not the hunted. Customer service can be the most effective weapon. 

Bear in mind, in our lean economic times Apple has continued to exceed competitors by “selling” products considered non-essential. How? They relieve an unmet desire to such a degree competitors want to become customers. 

Here are five things you should do: 

1. Stop being a victim. Assume complete responsibility for changing your situation.
2. Identify your best customers, recognize their importance to your overall profitability, and understand who your competitors’ premium customers are. 
3. Figure out what would most please your best customers and bind them tighter to your business. Also figure out what might attract your competitors’ best customers to you. Determine what approaches would create the greatest economic payoff for you.
4. Build the capability, test it, adjust it, roll it out, and further build it. Ask questions. Talk to your customers. Get their feedback. Make them part of the process. This is about their relationship with you.
5. Recognize, happy employees contribute to loyal customers.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our free innovation and competitive advantage newsletter.   Don't miss a single new business idea!

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Solving Family Business Conflicts Before They're Out of Control: Alan E. Fishman

The strong personalities and wills that make family businesses successful are also the roots of family conflicts.  Too many of these conflicts have been allowed to grow out of control and have wound up in litigation, causing major rifts in families as well as in the businesses. They usually cause major strain on family relationships through one party buying out another or by family members continuing to work with each other in an atmosphere of tension. 

Often I have heard comments such as, "My sister wants to keep our company small and is fighting a controlled growth," or "Dad won't let go of the control," or "My brother and I are paid the same and he doesn't carry his weight."

Family members usually have different levels of involvement and will rarely agree on what those levels are, or how to set fair compensation for different levels of involvement.  Are the perks reasonable?  What about the children of the non-active family member?  Should the business be required to give them good jobs as well?  Can it afford to?  These conflicts get much worse if a divorce takes place.

One way to avoid lawsuits is to agree to binding arbitration.  This means that you let a third party decide who is right after the party hears arguments and sees evidence from both sides. 

Another alternative dispute resolution approach is the so-called "rent-a-judge" method.  Family members hire a judge who gives a binding or, depending upon the wishes of the parties, a non-binding opinion.

Some family disputes are being solved by using a confidential-non-binding process in which the attorneys representing the family members give condensed arguments to an expert advisor.  This process, called a mini-trial, lets family members look at the strengths and weaknesses of both sides and facilitates a settlement through the exchange of information.

Of course, the best solution is always to try to avoid disputes of this scale altogether, by structuring the ownership and responsibilities in a family business to suit the abilities and personalities of the family members involved.  The sad reality is that these disputes are inevitable.  When they do occur, the key is to acknowledge and address them right away, usually through an objective third party.  The sooner you can act on a problem in your family-run business, the better your chances of avoiding the knockdown drag-out family feuds that cause the downfall of many businesses and the disruption of many families in business. 

Allen E. Fishman founded The Alternative Board® (TAB), the world’s largest franchise system providing advisory board and executive coaching services to business owners, Presidents and CEOs. TAB’s worldwide business advisory network operates in over 1,000 cities in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Venezuela.

Fishman is also the author of several books in which he shares his business insights to help business owners, including two best-sellers: 7 Secrets of Great Entrepreneurial Master: The GEM Power Formula for Lifelong Success (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and 9 Elements of Family Business Success: A Proven Formula for Improving Leadership & Relationships in Family Business (McGraw-Hill 2008).

via blogs.thealternativeboard.com

Rethink Your Business Approach. Driving Top Line Growth through Effective Innovation 

Strategies defining business in the 20^th Century no longer work in meeting today’s challenges. Companies are reinventing how they respond to consumers, employees and suppliers. At InnoThink Group we help companies find new methods of increasing top line growth and achieving competitive advantage. 

With InnoThink Group as your innovation partner, your company will create and implement growth strategies that work.

Innothink Group is a strategic management and innovation consultancy.

Our Guarantee. 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 nearly two thirds of our fees at risk subject to hitting predetermined milestones. More than a guarantee we wanted from the outset to create true partnerships with shared responsibility. See a few of our clients. 

We will enable you to: 

1. Effectively create an Innovation culture that drives top line growth
2. Total customer responsiveness
3. Develop creative leadership
4. Create uniqueness
5. Turn manufacturing into marketing weapons
6. Pursue fast paced innovations
7. Set qualitative innovation goals
8. Develop an inspiring vision
9. Create a sense of urgency
10. Demand total integrity
11. Exceed shareholder expectations
12. Increase top line growth

 For speaking, coaching or consulting inquiries complete the  contact form >>> or call719-649-4118.

Also: 

• Define an Innovation and Growth Strategy
• Build Innovation Capabilities 
• Learn to avoid commoditization
• Generate Customer Insights
• Blueprint Business Model
• Prototype and Model

Email: CEO Jim Woods

Call: +1 719- 649-4118

 

How To Build Loyal Customers In A Dog Eat Dog World

In this dog-eat-dog world of savvy customers and relentless competitors, managers should seek to be the hunters, not the hunted. Customer service can be the most effective weapon. 

Bear in mind, in our lean economic times Apple has continued to exceed competitors by “selling” products considered non-essential. How? They relieve an unmet desire to such a degree competitors want to become customers. 

Here are five things you should do: 

1. Stop being a victim. Assume complete responsibility for changing your situation.
2. Identify your best customers, recognize their importance to your overall profitability, and understand who your competitors’ premium customers are. 
3. Figure out what would most please your best customers and bind them tighter to your business. Also figure out what might attract your competitors’ best customers to you. Determine what approaches would create the greatest economic payoff for you.
4. Build the capability, test it, adjust it, roll it out, and further build it. Ask questions. Talk to your customers. Get their feedback. Make them part of the process. This is about their relationship with you.
5. Recognize, happy employees contribute to loyal customers.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective hypercompetition strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability. Subscribe to our free innovation and competitive advantage newsletter.   Don't miss a single new business idea!

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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!

 

 

Old fire truck turned into rentable guest room

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The Inshriach House offers beautiful accommodations tucked away on the countryside of northern Scotland. The Edwardian country house is situated on the Cairngorms National Park, creating the perfect backdrop for weddings and other special events. The house can fit 17 people, but if your party just couldn't shake off pushy Aunt Sally, there's a special place for her to stay.

Not too far from the main house sits a 1956 fire truck that underwent a total makeover to become a quirky guest room. Outfitted with its own sitting area and kitchen, the fire truck lodging ensures pesky relatives stay out of your hair and still have a grand time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via Design Mom. Inspiring design. via holykaw.alltop.com

Searching For New Solutions to Attract and Retain More Customers? Looking for a Strategic and Innovation Advisor to work on retainer? A riveting speaker?

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.

When NASA dreamed Bigger

 

In the age of disco and inspired by putting a man on the moon, NASA dreamed big as these photos from their archives so thrillingly demonstrate.

Amongst their many projects at the time, NASA Ames proposed massive spaceships that would orbit communities of 10,000 people around the earth--planned communities in space--and they commissioned a series fantastical artistic renderings of the vision. “These orbital space settlements could be wonderful places to live; about the size of a California beach town and endowed with weightless recreation, fantastic views, freedom, elbow-room in spades, and great wealth,” describes Al Globus, Senior Research Associate for NASA Ames.

Check out the gallery in the NASA archives and show the kids; maybe they’ll end up being the dreamers we need to once again be inspired on this kind of scale.

 

 

 

 

 

Full story at NASA via FastCo Design.

Visions of NASA.

via holykaw.alltop.com

Hire Jim To Speak to Your Organization!

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.

Drucker: Innovation Nation—Or Stagnation?

Nothing’s new in the kitchen. All the appliances, apart from the SaladShooter, were invented decades ago. The automobile isn’t much changed since the Model T.  All we’ve been doing is adding new ornaments to old innovations, and the days when technology gave rise to millions of new jobs are long gone.

That, at least, is the argument of economist Tyler Cowen in his new book, The Great Stagnation. A “PBS NewsHour” segment this week explored Cowen’s argument and posed a provocative question: “Why hasn’t recent technology created more jobs?”

Cowen’s answer is simple: We’re inventing new things, but not enough of them. We’ve picked the low-hanging fruit.  “The rate of progress has slowed down,” he said. “And this is our central economic problem today.”

But Erik Brynjolfsson, who runs MIT’s Center for Digital Business, sees plenty of innovation in the United States. “Tyler Cowen and a lot of the people who are focused on the great stagnation, I think, are sort of backward-looking at the mature technologies that are at the peak of their S-curve, rather than the new technologies that are just emerging,” he told the NewsHour. In other words, inventions abound, but they’re just getting off the ground.

Image source: dreamstime.com

Peter Drucker—though he well understood the notion of the S-curve of technologies, a notion first analyzed by Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff in the early 20^th century—would have probably had an altogether different take on the matter. “The high-tech industries . . . have so far not been able to generate more jobs than the old industries have been losing,” Drucker wrote in his 1985 classic, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. “All projections indicate that they will not do much more for long years to come, at least for the rest of the century.” via thedx.druckerinstitute.com

Want to out compete your competitors? Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Need a compelling speaker? Hire Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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The Steve Jobs Way and Leadership

Illustration by Jack Unruh

Steve Jobs’s business feats were legendary long before he died in October 2011. Apple Inc., considered a niche player for much of its history, is the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization as of this writing. Most business leaders would be thrilled to achieve Jobs’s level of market success, but should they aspire to lead like him? Before doing so, they should dig into his management style. Jobs the leader was at once dynamic and controversial, and his success relied heavily on the genius of Jobs the innovator.

Many other prominent leaders leave legacies that become clear only with time; however, we can evaluate Jobs’s leadership with tremendous clarity already today. This is thanks to Walter Isaacson’s masterful, eponymous biography of the entrepreneur (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a 600-page account that rarely feels flabby or boring. Jobs pursued Isaacson, a former CEO of CNN and managing editor of Time, for five years (the first of many examples of Jobs’s persistence in the book), and then gave him a free hand (a much rarer occurrence), promising: “It’s your book. I won’t even read it.”

The leader Isaacson portrays could have illustrated the Great Man theory popular in the mid-19th century, with its heroic leaders whose decisions and sheer force of will determined the world’s course. Steve Jobs was certainly a willful and driven leader, and the products and services he directed his companies to develop and commercialize changed the way many of us live, as well as the course of a diverse set of industries, including computing, publishing, movies, music, and mobile telephony.

At the same time, Jobs’s leadership style was complex. He was intensely focused when committed, confident enough to take risky leaps, and charismatic enough to enlist legions of employees and customers in the relentless pursuit of his aspirations. He was also interpersonally immature well into his adult life: impatient, stubborn, and hypercritical, if not downright cruel at times. Jobs may have been, as Isaacson says, “the greatest business executive of our era,” but he was a mercurial, demanding, and tyrannical one. All too often he was the antithesis of the “servant leader” model popularized in the 1990s (the giving, caring organizational mentor who in many ways contrasted with the hero model of a century prior).

However, Jobs’s seemingly destructive behaviors sparked peak performance as much as they undermined it, depending on where and how he applied them. They also helped shape the unique and powerful cultures Jobs seeded — twice at Apple, as well as at NeXT and at Pixar. (And few would have predicted Pixar’s runaway success in movie animation. Certainly not the Walt Disney Company, which eventually bought Pixar to secure its hit-making abilities, an action that made Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder.) Far better than most leaders, Jobs intuitively understood the power of cultural influence in sustaining the strategic capabilities implicit in his perpetual vision of creating, as he put it, “an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products...a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now.” It’s hard to argue with that aspiration; time will tell whether Apple makes it happen.

Jobs’s volatile approach to leadership is both fascinating and perplexing. For instance, Jobs had a fickle commitment construct — he fell in and out of love with people much too easily, both personally and professionally. In his relentless pursuit of top talent, he was able to create highly skilled organizations. But he also missed the potential contribution of many people who were not yet (and perhaps never would be) so-called A players. It is surprising, however, that many of the people Jobs abandoned along the way retained a grudging respect for his positive qualities — and a few even came back for more of his particular brand of abuse. via strategy-business.com

Want to bring new products and services to market faster? Want to be more agile? Need a compelling speaker? Hire Innovation and Growth Speaker Jim Woods. Jim works confidentially with start ups, governments as well as profit and for profit enterprises.

Visit our website:www.innothinkgroup.com Executive and Business Coaching: http://ow.ly/anBpK

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A global management consulting firms specialized solely in helping organizations of all sizes in all industries catalyzing top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. To arrange for Jim to speak at your next event or devise an effective growth strategy email or call us at 719-649-4118 for availability.james@innothinkgroup.com

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Follow us on LinkedIn: http://ow.ly/anyJu

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