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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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. 

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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

 

A Maze Of Tunnels Made Only Of Packing Tape, Suspended In Mid-Air

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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

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Scott D. Anthony: 3 essential ways CEOs can innovate now - Fortune Tech

Leaders often perceive innovation as the province of the few, isolated to white-lab coat wearing research scientists or "out-of-the-box" thinking marketers. That's not so.

By Scott D. Anthony, contributor

FORTUNE -- Leaders often perceive innovation as the province of the few, isolated to white-lab coat wearing research scientists or "out-of-the-box" thinking marketers. That's not right. In today's quickly changing world, innovation should be a corporate-wide capability.

Isolating innovation hurts a company's ability to compete. After all, shrinking product life cycles driven by globalization and rapid advances in communications technologies means that competitive advantage is increasingly a transitory notion. Companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) go from darlings to also-rans seemingly overnight. Widespread innovation capabilities improve a company's ability to incrementally improve today's offerings and create tomorrow's offerings.

Further, it isn't just the way in which companies compete that needs to change; it is the way in which people fundamentally do their work. Think about the rise of communications technologies such as Yammer (the corporate equivalent of Twitter) and WebEx or collaboration tools like Campfire. It seems as soon as you master a new tool, a new one starts to emerge. A corporate-wide innovation capability helps an organization's employees more readily adopt and adapt to these new technologies.

Companies like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) seem to have innovation in their DNA; others like Procter & Gamble (PG) and General Electric (GE) have spent decades developing systems to support innovation. If you are just starting your innovation journey, consider the following three tips.

MORE: How Microsoft grew into a giant

Forming and spreading a common language of innovation.
While innovation discussions often carry mystical tones, innovation is really nothing more than finding new ways to solve problems. But when people define innovation differently, it inhibits an organization's ability to have productive discussions on the topic. And makes it more difficult to identify, understand, and respond to innovation challenges -- or opportunities.

Here's a simple test to determine if your organization is lacking a common language. Ask a group of people to write down and read out their definition of innovation. Odds are there are material differences in the definitions, which can lead to confusion and frustration. Beyond a basic definition, consider detailing the different types of innovation strategies you plan to follow. For example, P&G has four distinct types of innovation strategies, ranging from commercial (marketing and promotion methods to drive trial and use of existing offerings) to disruptive (ideas that have the potential to create entirely new categories). Precise definitions of each strategy help bring clarity to innovation efforts.

Once you have a common language, spread it through formal and informal mechanisms. Agrichemical giant Syngenta (SYT) demonstrates the payoff that can come from an investment in a common language. In 2006, a small team of dedicated trainers created an innovation course targeted at project and leadership teams. The course's goal was to provide language and tools that would help the company improve the productivity of its $1 billion annual investment of R&D. Over the course of five years the training spread to all of Syngenta's geographic regions, helping the company reorganize its product groups while launching geographical units focused on finding solutions to specific customer, climate, and crop problems in each region.

The result has been an explosion of new products that not only boosted land productivity but also the personal productivity of farmers. Syngenta benefited not from just one or two new products but from a repeatable way to bring to market successful new hybrid seeds and new ways to protect soy, barley, wheat, sugarcane, corn, apples, and flowers from droughts and disease. Between 2006 and 2011 revenues increased by 45%, net income doubled, with new products contributing $700 million in global revenue at twice the company's overall growth rate.

MORE: The future of innovation

Frame specific innovation challenges
There's a misbegotten notion that chaos and innovation are friends. In fact, the best way to accelerate innovation is to constrain it. That is, to tightly define the problems that you are seeking to solve. These problems can be broad strategic challenges, such as "How do we win in China?" They can also be tactical challenges, such as "How do we make the process of filling in time sheets less onerous?" The more specific the problem definition, the better.

Then determine which employees are best equipped to handle the problem. Some challenges are ready-made for "spare time" thinking from broad groups of employees. Others require a more dedicated approach. Don't fall into the trap of assuming complicated challenges involving the creation of new business models can be solved by people in a fraction of their time. Most new businesses fail, and that's with an entrepreneur spending every minute of every day thinking about a problem.

Many companies think that the best way to get employees to participate in innovation is to give them financial incentives. However, research summarized in Daniel Pink's helpful book Drive shows that financial incentives actually decrease performance on creative tasks. Pink instead counsels giving people autonomy, providing them opportunities to develop mastery, and instilling a sense of purpose in their work.

Role-model desired behaviors
Innovation is an unnatural act at many companies. Leaders need to regularly role model desired behaviors to help shape their organization's culture.

MORE: Computing's next milestone is "thinking"

Consider prudent risk taking. While innovation is more predictable than many perceive, not every innovation effort is going to work out. The best innovators follow a process of careful experimentation, and accept that course-correction and failure are natural parts of the innovation process. However, it is hard to follow that process if people perceive that they will get punished if things don't pan out. Leaders can help to encourage the right behavior through the way in which they drive disengagement from projects, how they treat managers who work on commercial flops, and how they humanize the topic by describing their own failures.

For example, noted entrepreneur Jeff Stibel created a "failure wall" in his company. The wall combined memorable quotes about failure with personal examples describing individual failures and lessons learned. Stibel himself detailed three of his most memorable failures -- and signed his name to those failures. You don't get clearer signals from leadership than that.

* * *

Innovation is the challenge, and the opportunity, of our times. Developing a common language, framing pertinent innovation challenges, and role modeling desired behaviors are straightforward ways to help make innovation a more widespread capability in your organization.

Scott D. Anthony is Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, of Innosight, an innovation and strategy consulting firm. He is the author of The Little Black Book of Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

 

via tech.fortune.cnn.com

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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.