Innovation is Everyone’s Business

Take a poll in your firm on whether people feel responsible for innovation in their jobs or in their departments, and I’ll offer an educated guess on the outcome. Those involved in engineering, design, marketing and product management will feel a strong sense of responsibility to innovate.  For others in supporting or operations-focused roles, the need or ability to innovate will be rated towards the low end of perceived priorities or even capabilities.

That’s a shame.  A good innovator and good innovations are terrible things to waste, regardless of functional role.

This “I” word has been a hot topic for several years now, giving rise to entire shelves of books and legions of consultants, and yet the majority of people that I connect with in organizations from small to large, tend to view innovation as someone else’s job. This view ensures that some of the best ideas and solutions to vexing problems for internal and external customers are left behind in the pursuit of the urgent day-to-day work of many employees.

It’s time to alter organizational and leadership thinking about the concept of innovation and get more leaders and people doing the right things to push out of their transactional modes in search of new ways to create value.

First, A Working Definition of Innovation for All of Us:

In interviewing individuals inside of a number of small and large firms that have successfully fostered cultures where innovation is viewed as everyone’s business, the definition that emerged was:

Innovation is solving vexing problems in unique and reproducible ways

While the continuous improvement group might be quick to claim some of that real estate, the intent of the “innovators” offering up that definition was to look beyond incremental operational improvements to solving significant problems that adversely impacted an internal or external customer group.

The adoption of the definition helped create awareness that everyone was responsible for recognizing upstream or downstream problems and pulling together the people and resources to find solutions.  Solutions include process changes, technology adoption, new products and new approaches.

8 Suggestions for Jump-Starting an Innovation Focused Culture:

1. Challenge leadership to stand-up and own this one. Leaders at all levels own the responsibility for fostering an atmosphere or working environment that encourages innovation in all corners of an organization. While there’s no simple formula for building a successful innovation culture, it starts with the simple, but significant leap of faith for leaders to say, “Yes, we want all of our people thinking beyond tasks and looking for problems to solve and new ways to better serve their customers.”

2. Promote situations that jump-start the right thinking. People don’t innovate on command, so, it’s imperative that leaders and managers create situations where typically transaction-focused individuals can step back and look at the bigger picture of their work.  Choose simple but important questions and conduct ideation sessions around the topic, such as:

• What gets in the way of serving our (internal/external) customers?
• What in our working environment frustrates you?
• What are our customers telling you that they wish we could do for them?
• If you could fix one thing about how we do our work, what would that be?

4. Create an outside-in view. Move beyond the functional four walls and invite customers in your value chain to sit down and share their insights, observations and needs.  An example might be the order-processing group engaging with sales, shipping and manufacturing to gain a better understanding of how things flow and where the opportunities are to change and improve.

5. Go beyond process and promote innovation as a way to compete.  The most innovative teams that I’ve worked around include a few marketing communications groups and professionals that found ways to out-promote, out-maneuver and out-perform much better heeled competitors, while operating on a shoestring budget.  The push to innovate, adopt new technologies and to put a spin on traditional activities to shake up the customers was a core part of this organization’s success.

6. Celebrate innovation victories. It’s fun and easy to celebrate the blockbuster new products, but the type of innovation we’re describing is much less visible to the outside world.  People are people, and the recognition that their work is making a difference in someone’s job or life reinforces positive innovation behaviors.  Don’t skimp on the opportunity to celebrate.

7. Incorporate innovation activities and challenges into professional development activities.  Making this part of the PD plan reinforces the cultural imperative to innovate.

8. More work for leadership.  Once started, the innovation machine needs care and attention.  Your role transitions from getting things going to providing on-going support and enabling capabilities.  You need to challenge yourself to step-up and recognize the need to both channel the innovation as well as to let it run on occasion.  And remember, your job is to knock down barriers.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Critics of this proliferation of innovation thinking typically suggest that too much distracts from the business of execution.  And while I’ll agree that a culture of the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” is a problem, it’s up to leadership to ensure that the intent and approach here stays true to the mission of getting more people focused on solving the right problems for the right customers. Difficult, but not impossible, and well worth the investment in leadership capital.

Rethinking Talent, Leadership and the Organization

Note from Art: This post is intended to push you in the direction of thinking about “what if?” and “why not?” and “how?”  If you’re not thinking about possibilities and new approaches, you’re not really thinking.

Anyone involved in leadership and responsible for the development of leaders should read the recent BusinessWeek article, “Can GE Still Manage?” The article offers a fascinating look into GE’s traditional leadership and high-potential development practices, and raises an interesting question of whether these practices still hunt in a very different world than when they were conceived.

As someone that grew up in business during the era of Jack Welch and the emergence of GE’s Crotonville programs as perhaps the pinnacle of talent and leadership development programs, it’s interesting and a bit alarming to suddenly wonder whether the approach of convening for weeks at a time with other high-potential leaders and learning, debating, and engaging together, might just be passé in many ways.

While I’m not qualified to critique GE’s approach, the article certainly begs all of us to be thinking about or rethinking everything that we take for granted in how we find and cultivate talent and how we deploy our resources.

Questions that Must Be Asked and That Might Be Uncomfortable:

• What are the skill sets required for success tomorrow?

• What do we keep and what do we jettison from 20^th-Century talent and leadership thinking and systems?

• How can individuals that don’t know a tweet from a twit possibly comprehend the macro shifts occurring in how information flows, how opinions are formed and how people connect?  Whether the individual applications live or die is largely irrelevant…the seismic shift has already happened and many are still waiting to read about in the newspaper.  The point is that you need to be immersed in it to even begin to understand what is going on.

• Most of the contemporary leadership writing and content focuses on universal leadership truths…those skills and activities that effective leaders have understood for literally thousands of years.  GE’s approach to cultivating leadership talent may be the modern representation of how to best develop around the universal truths.  It may just not be enough any longer. What’s next?

• Is the best way to cultivate talent, simply (ha!) to hire smart, diverse (gender, ethnicity and skills/aptitudes) individuals and give them the freedom to create.  Has Google’s model replaced GE’s?

Organization and Management Speculation? In Search of Tomorrow’s Enterprise and Talent:

OK, while I’m speculating on innovations in talent development, let’s begin rethinking our traditional management systems.  Some potentially not too-far-fetched thoughts:

• It’s not too hard to imagine that tomorrow’s enterprise must be mostly all-different than yesterday’s.  Everything that we do must enable interaction, communication, learning, knowledge sharing, idea generation and simplified paths from idea to implementation.  Today’s management systems and organizational structures often confound those objectives.

• Every employee is a brand builder for himself/herself and for the firm. Every employee has a distinct voice inside and outside of the firm…and the boundaries are increasingly blurred between personal and professional.

• Functionally, everything changes. Just to pick on a few, classically trained and focused marketers are museum-pieces.  IT organizations that aren’t ahead of the power curve on figuring out how to leverage the new media and technologies will be blown up and reinvented or outsourced.  HR organizations that fail to enable talent development in support of strategy as their prime directive will join their obsolete IT counterparts.

• The role of a leader becomes fluid, with a person assuming this for one initiative and acting as follower for others. The skill sets for business and career success are increasingly oriented towards coalition building, project management and learning that begets actions.

• Some form of Collins’ Level 5 and a Servant Leader emerges to head organizations…or larger parts of organizations.  Humility…not to be confused with weakness, plus fierce resolve are the core criteria for top leaders.

• It appropriately will become increasingly difficult to draw an organization chart.  Given the fluidity and constantly shifting nature of the organization, the traditional boxes and lines approach to showing hierarchy and responsibility will die.

The Bottom Line for Now:

While perhaps I’ve pushed the envelope on creativity and speculation, the excellent GE article referenced above was the catalyst here. There is much of human nature that appears to remain constant over time, however,  our tools change constantly.  Finding ways to use new tools to create, connect and compete requires a good healthy rethinking of everything.   This is truly exciting.

7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization

Dan Ariely offers an interesting piece in the April, 2010 Harvard Business Review on “Why Businesses Don’t Experiment.” In this brief essay (only available for a fee as of this writing), he offers two main reasons for the lack of experimentation:

“…experiments require short-term losses for long-term gains.  Companies and people are notoriously bad at making those trade-offs.”

“Second, there’s the false sense of security that heeding experts provides.  When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct.  We tend to value answers over questions.”

I’ve certainly observed the impediments to experimentation that Ariely highlights and a good many more.  In some organizations, there are so many systemic and cultural disincentives to experimentation that it’s a wonder that executives and employees are able to decide what to have for lunch today that was different from yesterday.

In spite of the natural inertia towards the sure thing or the shortcut (external advice in lieu of more risky and time-consuming experimentation), I’ll offer my few cents worth on why and how you and your firm can use experimentation as a means of building value and confounding competitors.

Why Experimentation is Healthy for Your Business

• Great strategies don’t spontaneously generate, take root and grow on their own, based on the magical beans provided through a consultant’s input.  Value creating ideas and approaches are most often the output of enlightened trial and error…and sometimes unenlightened trial or just plain fortunate errors.
• If your firm and your teams are not experimenting, your firm is slowly choking off the supply of future innovation.  Most often, the deteriorating quality of ideas that turn into valuable offerings is met with what Jim Collins describes as the “Undisciplined Pursuit of More.”  This flailing about is an attempt to rapidly make up for the dearth of good ideas created by a rigid culture and leadership.  Instead of a pipeline of ideas, firms grasp at straws and all ideas can be rationalized as potentially good.
• Teams that fail together in pursuit of experimentation stand a better chance of succeeding in the end.   While that might seem like a “call to failure,” it is intended as a call to learning.
• Facilitating a culture of experimentation is a great way of facilitating a culture change away from command and control leadership, particularly if experimenters are given the opportunity to own ideas.  It’s a great sign when a firm embraces reality that top leaders aren’t there because they have the best ideas.

Rethink Everything to Stimulate Experimentation

The obvious areas for experimenting include your products and services and tweaking with various elements of your marketing mix.  Before you go too far down the experimentation path however, remember that your business is a system and virtually every part of how and what you do is worth rethinking.

Other opportunities for experimentation include: organizational structure, project approach, strategy formation and execution, talent development, cross-functional collaboration, promotional approaches, engaging with customers, thought-leadership strategies and so many others that don’t involve impacting your product.

7 Ideas to Stimulate Experimentation in Your Organization:

1.  Build the expectation into your culture that experimentation is part of the job. Think 3M, Google and others that expect their employees to spend some significant amount of their time on items unrelated to their core job or their current task list.  Part of successfully pulling this off is genuinely providing the time and supporting resources.

2.  Create systems for experimenters to turn ideas into processes, offerings and approaches. This of course requires you to ensure that the decision-making process is uncomplicated or made less complicated and that when the time is right, there is money and support available for next steps.

3.  Put your top leaders on the hook for fostering innovation by monitoring over time how their efforts contribute to innovations that make money, cut costs or differentiate.

4.  Quit emulating your competitors. Too many firms suffer from competitor envy and move through time monitoring and reacting.  I’m all for a healthy amount of monitoring and improving upon or outflanking, but the cases of pure raw emulation that I’ve seen are remarkably counterproductive and unprofitable.

5.  Embrace social media! If you are blocking access to social media, wake-up and recognize that there has never been a more fertile source of innovation than the discussions being shared and ideas emerging on Twitter and via blogs.  And the ability to research, experiment and gain insights from specific audiences in near real-time fashion is unparalleled.  It’s time to knock down the social media firewall and free your people to think and engage!

6.  Recognize that for some offerings and processes, the best approach to innovation might come through external collaboration efforts. Your partners in the value chain are looking for opportunities to experiment as well, and these types of collaborative relationships can be fertile grounds for experimentation and innovation.  Having said that, be aware that making these work is a nontrivial task.

7.  Build a new hero class in your culture, where experimenters and experiments that yield successful outcomes are celebrated and become part of the folklore of the firm.  Be careful not to trivialize this issue with dumb employee or team of the month awards.  Use some finesse and create heroes.  And find ways to remind people that everyone is invited into that club…all they need to do is earn their way in on their own or as part of a team.

The Bottom-Line for Now

When walking into a client organization, one of the areas that I assess is how rich or poor the culture is when it comes to experimentation.  Healthy cultures and winning organizations encourage experimentation and the opposite generally holds true.

And when seeking to facilitate a culture change, remember that these things don’t happen as a result of an executive order, they happen over time with tons of support, reinforcement and a constant refueling of the pioneer spirit.

Now, ask yourself: what are your people doing today that may just build a new future for your organization?

Leadership Caffeine-It’s Time to Get Serious About Learning from Your Twenty-Somethings

One of the recurring themes in my writing and teaching activities is the importance of blending the generations in the workplace. I’ve been a cheerleader for this cause for the past few years and I truly believe that good managers everywhere must find opportunities to leverage the unique perspectives of experience, pragmatism and idealism available from this fascinating mix of time travelers.

I’ve now moved beyond my polite encouragement for managers to find ways to adapt and cope with what seem to be the foreign habits and foreign viewpoints emanating from the more youthful in the workforce. It’s time to get serious about learning and benefitting from this younger generation. What has been treated in the media as a mostly fun topic that describes the foibles of “Helicopter Parents” and the endless flood of childhood “Participation Trophies,” is now a critically important issue and opportunity.

Consider:

• We now live and work in a networked, always-on and increasingly virtual world.  For those of us with experience, this is new and exciting, yet in many instances, we struggle to make sense of it, particularly as we seek to develop strategies based on yesterday’s thinking in a world that we no longer recognize.  Alternatively, the generation that is coming of age right now understands this world as their own. They are comfortable in its complexity and “virtualness” and capable of moving and navigating seamlessly through it, focused on their mission and not awestruck by its complexity and speed of change.

• Experience is a powerful teacher for all of us, and yet, we are tackling tomorrow’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions.  And yes, those that don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it, but we face all new problems that demand newly created solutions using technologies and approaches that have no historical equivalent.

• From the school of the obvious, in yesterday’s world, you could choose to ignore much of the globe. Alternatively, today’s world is filled with unimaginable perils and nearly infinite possibilities.  Technology brings the people of the world closer together and there is no group of people better prepared to leverage the new tools and work across cultures with others to solve problems, create new offerings and serve customers.  Remember, this young generation plays video games with their friends around the globe, understands how to manage complex social networks in real time from the tips of their thumbs and has grown up in an always-on environment.  Talk about some great training for success!

• And while I hesitate to offer social commentary, I can’t help but observe after spending a few years in classrooms with both graduate students and undergraduates in several great institutions in Chicago, that the biases and prejudices of our parents and grandparents seem to be melting into the past. One can hope that I’m right in this observation. I see no evidence of the youth that I work with caring about color or creed.  It is my observation that they care about people and each other and evaluate each other on merits and insights and skills. This is as it should be.

Challenges and Opportunities:

• We are running today’s business and dealing with tomorrow’s problems with yesterday’s management approaches.  The science and art of management must advance to both cope with the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities of this new world.  As a side-note, ask a twenty-something to design the style of organization that will work best in this emerging world, and I’ll guarantee that it won’t include functional silos.

• Age and experience count, but those fortunate enough to have both don’t necessarily have all of the right answers. However, with age and experience comes wisdom, and this valuable resource when combined with the fresh perspectives of youth should be a dangerous combination for solving problems and creating opportunities.

• In my opinion, much of the training that needs to take place is not for the twenty-somethings, but rather for the tremendous number of 30 to 60-somethings that are fearful of or paralyzed by new technologies and new social conventions.  If you are old enough to remember life before e-mail, you are also old enough to have lost your edge in learning to leverage new tools.  I’ve written this before, but if you don’t know what twitter is, don’t read or write blogs, think social networking is a cocktail party, and have no idea why anyone would play a video game on-line, then you need help.  Stat.

The Bottom Line for Now

It’s time to quit talking about the trophy kids and the oft-repeated stereotypes that are dogging the millennial generation. It’s up to those of us that currently hold the reins of leadership to recognize this opportunity for what it is and to get on with the business of preparing to turn over those reins.  Judging by the condition of things in the world today, this group has arrived just in the nick of time.

Leadership Caffeine-Develop a Big Picture View or Risk Becoming a Carp

Far too many leaders that I encounter lack awareness of the broader forces swirling around their firms, their customers and those shape-shifting clusters that we describe as industries.

Given the hurricane like market and societal forces buffeting our globe today, a strategy of boarding up the windows and hunkering down is tantamount to committing corporate suicide. Yet, mostly by the sin of omission, this is exactly what I’m observing inside too many organizations.

I cannot rationalize why some firms lack the systems and cultural elements that encourage environmental scanning, assessment and action formulation, but I can empathize just a bit.

The world is a complex place and increasingly, planning and managing businesses for value creation has become a “Wicked Problem” where the volume of contradictory and conflicting information is overwhelming.  Ignoring this complexity and focusing on controllable issues and digestible problems is an understandable human response.  In many cases, taking an Occam’s Razor approach is much better than falling victim to the malady of complexity induced organizational paralysis.  However, in cases where a firm marches along oblivious and/or unresponsive to the swirling forces constantly reshaping the world it is a wholesale failure of leadership.

There are no miracle cures or silver bullets for making sense out of the chaos, other than the hard work of paying attention, assessing and either reacting or pro-acting as the occasion merits.

Building a learning culture is essential to survival, not just success. For real-time examples of firms that don’t and did not get it, pick up any newspaper.  And while the smaller firms in our economy don’t grab the headlines, the failures and the failing are epidemic here as well.  At least part of this epidemic stems from a failure of top leaders to comprehend the destructive power of the broader market forces until right after these force have flattened their firms.

How the Lowly Carp Fits Into this Story:

The physicist and author, Dr. Michio Kaku uses the following personal anecdote to challenge people to think beyond the confines of their current four dimensions into the possibilities of a much more complex and much larger universe:

“When I was a child, I used to visit the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. I would spend hours fascinated by the carp, who lived in a very shallow pond just inches beneath the lily pads, just beneath my fingers, totally oblivious to the universe above them.

I would ask myself a question only a child could ask: what would it be like to be a carp? What a strange world it would be! I imagined that the pond would be an entire universe, one that is two-dimensional in space. The carp would only be able to swim forwards and backwards, and left and right. But I imagined that the concept of “up”, beyond the lily pads, would be totally alien to them. Any carp scientist daring to talk about “hyperspace”, i.e. the third dimension “above” the pond, would immediately be labeled a crank.

Today, many physicists believe that we are the carp swimming in our tiny pond, blissfully unaware of invisible, unseen universes hovering just above us in hyperspace. We spend our life in three spatial dimensions, confident that what we can see with our telescopes is all there is, ignorant of the possibility of 10 dimensional hyperspace.”

–

While fascinated by the opportunities and possibilities of 10-dimensional hyperspace, the comparison in this post is to those that operate in the confines of their firms and traditional industry boundaries, without sticking their heads out of the pond to observe the broader world and the impact that it is having on their personal pond.

9 Suggestions for Not Becoming A Carp (Or Improving Your Team’s External Awareness and Chances of Survival):

• Establish the audacious goal of creating a cultural evolution to increase your team’s/firm’s external awareness AND ability to act.  Many of the following support this goal.

• Let people know that it is their job to monitor…customers, competitors and partners.  Reinforce this by creating systems to do something with the lessons learned and insights.

• Create forums to discuss the external world and ensure that these forums don’t succumb to the powerful gravitational pull of internal stuff.

• Challenge business units and leaders to define “learning” strategies. Challenge IT to create systems that enable collection, translation and dissemination.

• Ask and require answers to the question: “What does this mean for us? Our customers? Our future?

• Connect external factors and internal hypotheses to improvement and innovation actions and then measure and report the results of these efforts.

• Run strategy reviews with an emphasis on connecting what’s happening externally to how resources are being used/invested internally.  If there is no connection, blow up the project.

• Recognize the need to use the tools of management…especially structure as a means to create value out of changing forces.  While your current processes and culture might not support responding to change by building the product that will cannibalize your business, a dedicated project team, a spin-out or an acquired firm might enjoy a higher probability of success.

• Seek out varied perspectives. Constantly. Remember, asking another carp in the pond about the world outside the pond will only get you another perspective from the pond.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

This topic invariably invites debate and a fair amount of criticism, especially from top leaders that feel that my observations are an indictment of their efforts.  And while I am most definitely offering criticism, my primary purpose is to encourage you as a leader to live up to your billing as a sentient being.  While a carp may perceive the outcome of an environmental change, you alone plus your team members are capable of assessing and taking action to survive and ideally prosper.

Vow not to become a carp this year or any year.

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