"Community Equity", enterprise and how service providers can help.

The cat is so totally out of the bag that it is not even funny. Open Innovation is here to stay and service providers must respond in kind and able to assist our enterprise and media customers in this process. Why? because service provides are at the intersection of all relevant forces.

Take the enterprise markets as an example. As they discover the twin powers of community building around their brands and Web 2.0-type mechanisms to converse with their communities, they are increasingly seeking holistic solutions from service providers that understand these dynamics best. Bringing these two disparate worlds together is not easy and requires entities that understand the power of combining evolving communications technology with applications. Further, it must be done in a consultative manner and via an interactive dialogue.

In order to most efficiently do this, service providers must be conversant with Innovation methodologies that can accelerate the process of creating, advancing and packaging these solutions and further, that have the vision to see and anticipate technological and market evolutions.

I hold that Telecom carriers are in a unique position to provide these holistic solutions to enterprise since they are present at the intersection of all these forces.

With the realization of this fact, and the proper adoption of open innovation theories and new business models, carries could easily play a critical role in capturing "community equity" for our customers.

In order to germinate this idea further, let us start by rebranding the industry from: Telecommunications to "Telecreation"

Innovation Orbits and the Perils of Success

Like it or not as we grow doing what we do we create orbits around us.

If one is working in Innovation one must take tangents to learn about Innovation management and the latest thought provoking ideas on how best to design our enterprise systems and people. While in this tangential process of discovery one realizes that there is so much we don’t know that needs to be explored and in this journey one creates an orbit of like-minded people on the same mission and with the same intentions. Or, are they?

At the risk of using a cliché, all is connected and there are many relevant intersections to learn from. For starters there are economic, organizational and leadership theories. Further, there is psychology and brain research. There are also human nature theories and political economic theories. In short, there is lots of fertile ground to intersect and interact with via conferences, books, exec training, research papers, one-on-one meetings, videos, etc…

Engaging in this process is quite thrilling, thought provoking and to some extent addicting. For some of us this can become a life mission: and why not? The process of anticipating the new and from there uncovering reasonable ideas that one can package and create a product or service that is marketable, is an immensely complex process fraught with many hurdles and challenges.

So, there are a lot of positives from the orbit that one creates during the journey (any journey for that matter). But unfortunately, there is the negative side as well, mostly driven by the human element and its primitive emotions lying dormant in our reptilian minds.

I think they call it “the perils of success”? Once a certain success is achieved, there is never a shortage of people that will take credit where there is none or discredit one’s progress without provocation and justifications. We all know this happens in all circles be it enterprise, academic, political, etc…The interesting thing about human nature is that its governance is indiscriminant to fields of endeavor, and if not managed correctly can derail the success of an innovation project.

It will be awhile before we humans evolve into non-ego centric leadership models and our brains evolve to support true collaborative eco systems. Until then, we must guard against these developments by being aware of the orbits that are created in the pursuit of an idea and one must have a plan to deal with the negative spin offs.

More importantly, one must leverage these perils to once advantage in the pursuit of an idea and project success….And, herein is where the trade secrets lie…

Dynamic Communications and Transformation

I was asked to participate in an Innovation management survey the other day regarding the question of Transformation and how well companies handle this very important condition. I call it a “condition”, because transforming the way a company thinks (which by extension means transforming peoples mindsets) is a very difficult task that I have had some experience with.

Someone once said that 80% of the World’s problems are caused by miscommunications. I believe this to be true. We humans are very imperfect when it comes to processing information. We need to synthesize and we need to have artificial constructs in order to make sense of things. Add to that cultural differences and we really are in difficult territory interpreting things. This leads to massive “lost in translation” issues.

One of my deep insights in working in Innovation environments is that communications plays a massive role. How one communicates internally with colleagues differs extensively from how one communicates to those immediately outside one’s group but that you depend on to get things done (I call these Innovation touch points). How you communicate to the next internal corporate layer, also differs. How you communicate to your partners and how you communicate to the market at large differs as well.

You get the point; communications is highly relevant and must be dynamic, fresh and prescient. I have lots of lessons learned here that would exhaust the size of this blog, but I will throw a couple of concepts and practices that I have recommended and adopted internally. The first is simply this: repetition.

There is the old saying that repetition is the mother of learning; well, my dear beloved audience, this is absolutely true. We have seen immense positive results from applying this very easy concept (more difficult to execute of course). One example here is training. Training is communicating new concepts, isn’t it? (the training ethos - and in general our teaching ethos- has been corrupted and accelerated by “death by PowerPoint” and static teaching mechanisms that convey information but don’t really “teach.”)

In keeping with the repetition recommendation, here is on practice that pays dividends. Don’t hold one big training session, but multiple smaller ones that are more tightly integrated with smaller groups of like-minded individuals intended to isolate the naysayer’s and enhance the learning energy of those in the audience.

Acceptance (capitulation?) before Creation

This weekend I was reading an interview in the Atlantic magazine with a Chinese money manager – Gao Xiging - who controls about $200 Billion of China’s wealth; wealth that is basically keeping our nation from collapsing and that was obtained from American’s out of control consumption.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker

The interviewer was James Fallows, a fantastic journalist with immense international experience, specifically in Asia. The Chinese gentleman was educated in the USA as a lawyer and graduated from Duke University and had worked in the USA before moving back to China to take on this role.

His vision therefore is a broad vision composed of US-based and Chinese perspectives. The interview was about the financial crisis that in large part was precipitated by us and our “pragmatic” American attitudes; a pragmatism that in my view is hurting us.

What really caught my attention, however, was his statement about what our new President needs to tell the American people. Here it goes:

“This is wartime; this is about the survival of our Nation. It is not about our supremacy in the world. Let’s not talk about that anymore. Let’s get down to the very basics of our livelihood”

This statement is not so different than when a company- faced with survival caused by disruptive technologies – needs to do in order to rise again. Accepting the truth is the first must- have. The second is capitulation.

The important innovation lesson here is that minds must accept and internalize the disruption before they can deal with new creations. Or, as a great Zen expression states:

A closed mind rejects what they see.
A wise mind rejects what they think.

Good advise indeed.

Innovation, Leadership and "Street Sense"

I know it has been a long time…

Google, as I understand, is brutal on us bloggers that do not keep up their blogging activity, so I guess search result may not be picking this up until I get going again.

Time to catch up.

In any case, I wanted to pick up on the theme from my last entry. That is, that nothing will forever by static and everything is becoming furiously dynamic.
Witness the incredible pace of change and how fast things are happening. Witness how quickly wild capital can collapse economies and event countries. Witness how quickly the greed-based subprime mess/contagion is collapsing industries and how quickly old, stale, static leadership is being proven wrong, false, cruel and in the end- hyper-irresponsible.

Exhibit one: GM. This albatross is where it is partly due to shockingly bad leadership totally devoid of foresight. It does not take a genius (or maybe it does) to figure out that GM was too big, had too many brands and had leadership unwilling to make the tough choices. Witness the Hummer brand; need we say more?

Given the furious pace of change, one thing that all of us in Innovation need to be aware of is the “now future”. I call it the now future, because glances of what the future will be are all around us if we take the time to listen and take note. We need to be totally ON and aware of trends as we build and evolve products on a daily basis.

The interesting thing is that the pace of change and technology is moving so fast that it is changing us, further accelerating developments. I have talked about his before extensively and have given presentations on this issue. We have to get better at sensing this now future and here is another thought that perhaps can help get us there.

We need to teach our executives and leaders “street sense.” This idea arose from a coffee grab I had with a bunch of international colleagues that were brought up abroad and that had very varied backgrounds and experiences. They had this “street sense” and were commenting on the fact that there seems to be a lack of this quality in American business cultures.

So, this got me thinking of course.

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing I have been told that I have “good” street sense (what “good” means is subject to definition but let us leave this aside for now and please flow with me on this). So I started looking for answers and I think the answer may lie on our backgrounds. In my case, I was raised in four different “social cultures” (Chile, El Salvador, Mexico and USA) and four different business cultures (American, British, German and Latin American).
Having this multiplicity of exposures, I surmise, gives our brains multiple experiences that are basically stored in our minds not as active memories, but as latent memories always serving as a check to whatever event is presented to us. ( I would love to partner with brain researchers on this in order to prove the theor empirically.)

So, the huge challenge then is how to package this insight to teach our emerging leaders? We can try the approach used in the movie Matrix, but we are not quite there yet where we can upload new learnings via a port in the back of our heads.

I have said many times that immersive travel is one answer. Immersive travel is very, very unique but most people are scared by the prospects. Another trick is participating in improvisational workshops; I have done a couple of these and they really work in waking the mind and presenting it with new dimensions.

While I think of other ways to accomplish this, I invite you to think about it as well...