Innovation: The Who's Where's and How's

It occurred to me the other day that our business institutions are being run via the famous triple C's; command, control and communications. This insight came to me after a conversations I had with a friend when he asked me the question: Is your company accommodating your creative energy? I was surprised by the question and more surprised by the answer, which could be an entire chapter in an Innovation book. While this command structure works well in the field of battle, it does not in an environment where people are asked to exercise their creative impulse. This old-new relic from our military complex does - I dare say- the opposite; it refrains humans from fully exploiting their creative wellspring. Companies are simply not structured to accommodate the ever expanding energy of creative individuals. I am not sure what structures are the best in this regard - there are many - but this is one of the very things that the Innovation movement is trying to address. I think Google has i...

My last Saturday AM was very atypical. The call came in at 6AM informing me of a devastating earthquake in Chile where most of my family resides. I have lived through many earthquakes and thus I am intimate with all the facts around them. I have studied them, analyzed them and like most Chileans, have learned to live with them and dare I say dismiss them. This call from a Chilean friend was different. “This is a big one”, she said with a disconcerting shake in her voice as she also announce its magnitude “an 8.8.” Upon hearing these facts I went into emergency response and frantically and simultaneously turned on the TV, mobile phone and my PC. I accessed Facebook and twitter and started to seek information via the web, text, TV, all mediums. I called on the fixed line to try to reach my parents, both in their mid 80’s. I redialed several times; it was still early I told myself, so the lines will probably not yet be saturated. On the third try I did reach them. All is good and the fami...

I love new insights. I am hungry for them. They are a drug for me. If for no other reason than to try to get ahead of the future. Who would not want that? In my world, new insights are the basic ingredients for new ideas. Without them the status quo remains as is: static. With them, there is dynamism. The more insights, the more they can be mushed together to develop aggregated knowledge, theories, philosophies, products, platforms... Why can’t our political system understand this? Here is one source for them to check out www.ted.com. Here is a golden source of fantastic insights from global brilliant agents of change. Come on, go crazy. Whenever you are down, need inspiration, need to clear your mind, go and start your thinking anew…

The lament from a friend of mine went something like this: "I feel that I have been sold the wrong bill of goods for years now. From buying into the materialistic version of happiness, to being a participant in self-aggrandizing conversations as if I was here for no reason but to make other people’s egos bigger, to isolating myself and my family in the suburbs as if that is the center of the universe, to spending lavishly on my house and my lawn for what? I don't know. To spending more, ever more, to having to drive everywhere…it all is starting to feel hollow..." This got me thinking about the power of momentum and how hard is to stop and start a shift to a new way of seeing and being. The existing momentum has been going on for half a century now? The power of momentum can be so strong that it can eliminate ideas before they take root. Further, its power can be so strong that it can make natural, common sense ideas seem revolutionary. Case in point is the effort by Mich...

Here is the challenge. If a company is born from disruption, it is in their collective DNA. If not, I assert that companies have a “dormant” DNA sprouting in some islands of disruption that are fertile for exploiting, development and mentoring. So, how does one go about waking and growing a dormant DNA? First one accepts this fact and second one goes on a massive mind “finding” effort with a very clear understanding of the challenge. There is enough here for a nice and long juicy consultancy engagement from the likes of McKinsey, Bean and Corp and this is exactly what most companies do. They go and run for the hills, spend massively and force down ”brilliant” findings which are insights gained from internal resources in the first place. This need not be the case, however. Knowledge has truly been unleashed. It is everywhere and can be generated almost overnight. One need only go into LinkedIN, for example, start a group and ask questions. The results are simply mind blowing. The point...

Interesting research paper cited on Jan 16 Th edition of The Economist titled: Carrots dressed as Sticks. Basically, they experimented on ways to tweak and maximize the effect of economic incentives. It turns out that the value we attach to " possessions " is good for incentives if they are designed with this allure. So, think of it this way. Instead o f saying: "if you can achieve this goal, I will give you $1k at the end of the year", one should say: " The $1k are yours right now but you will loose it if you do not meet your goal." "The fear of loss was a greater motivator than the prospect of gain" The results were consistent and persistent according to the article. Funny thing, the human mind. And, further evidence that how one says things may be as important as to what is said.

In Daniel Pink’s latest book, Drive, he talks about the self determination theory (or SDT for short and in keeping with the “reductionism” trend). It turns out there is a global network of researchers working on this theory based on human needs. The big finding - quoted directly from the book – is that “Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined and connected to one another.” Further, the book states that when that drive is liberated, “people achieve more and live richer lives.” I thought about this claim and reflected on past projects that I have been involved with and further, looked at the “flow” of these projects. “Flow”, by the way, is another concept that Dan discusses in the book and that he challenges us to analyze in ourselves; how best do we achieve this flow and how can we enhance it, that is. I did this and found some interesting insights. My flow was severely restrained when I encountered breaks in communication - and I will go further and s...

How fair is a fight, when all the power of momentum, negativity and denial is tilted to one side? Ask Obama this question and his answer is: keep on fighting. At the end of the day his job is mind-shifting, a very difficult thing to accomplish in the age of outrageous right wing commentators and supreme court decisions. Not unlike what some innovators out here experience. In many instances the advancement of Innovation management theories in corporations can be a colossal fight. The combination of institutional momentum (what I call "stagentum" stagnation-momentum) , corporate antibodies and old guard practices can become formidable barriers to new ideas and innovation. How fair is the fight when the power of decision making is with people that don't believe in what one does? How fair is fight when we are ridiculed because we are doing things outside the box? Or we are to "touchy- feely "? Like I have said before, Innovation is as much an exercise in mind-shi...

I can't resist, when I discover an insight I tend to over analyze it. Excuse me if this may be one of those instances. In percolating Daniel Pink's new book "Drive" I find that his treatise of "economic" systems and "social" systems and the combustive clash of both, provides an effective analytical framework to analyze the specific cultural nuance of "genuineness". Consistent with other writings on this subject, there is a difference between the "what is in it for me" cultural ethos and the "I am a genuine human agent that will engage with someone because they inspire me or like them" ethos. So, hear me out... If you engage with someone in a social context and then try to transport that to an economic context for the "what is in it for me" ethos, that is not genuine. Period. I think the other way around is a genuine engagement because of the outward transparency and maybe , just maybe, if there is positive en...

So, here is the thing...communications is about sharing. We humans are “wired” to communicate. I read once (albeit about 10 years ago) that about 67% of what people talk about on mobile handsets is what they call “gossip.” Call it what you want; gossip is communicating and everyone participates in it. Hear me out. Take “THE media”, the big, scary media, they communicate to us inane things that we really don’t care about but yet they do such a good job of imbedding us with it via the many outlets that even people like me, totally devoid of any interest whatsoever in Tiger Woods and much less Golf, have me talking and writing about it. So there, gossip IS communications. So, back to Twitter; Twitter is about a new way to communicate and document. It is a new way to share with the World and a new tool for us to use judiciously. At first I was not seeing the value of Twitter but then I immersed myself in its potential and discovered that it was up to us – the human race - to use it in away...

Reflecting back on some of my writings about how Innovators have a distinct set of skills that are very different from what our MBA culture promotes, here comes affirmation of these thoughts from the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review and Mr. Christensen himself and his associates. The title of the piece is: “The Innovator’s DNA.” Yep, discovery skills are important and distinct and they are: Observing, associating, questioning, experimenting, networking. So, smash together Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole new Mind” + Frans Johansson’s book “The Medici Effect” + Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” and you get the same insights. ( A lot more work of course, but fun!) Proof yet again that new ideas are nothing but packed vectors emerging from the greater collective ethos and there really are no “pure” ideas. Perhaps, that is, for the wheel J

I get a kick out of people talking about hard vs. soft skills and the preeminence of the former over the latter. In a World of evolving globalization and all the derivations therein such as Glocal ; Global Village, Primitive Global, World Citizen, etc...the abilities to relate, build consensus , persuade across differing cultures and personal and business practices/nuances are more important than ever -the subject of multiple posts in this blog. I would say now that the preeminence is flipping to soft vs hard. Why? From my vantage point technology (hard) is nothing without creativity (soft) and value building/generation skills (soft). It reminds me of a conversation I had years ago with the Founder of a startup right after the tech bubble had exploded and I was looking for a gig. It was circa 2002 and I was trying to secure a business development consultancy. The conversation went something like this: "I would love to use you right now but now I need to focus on hard skills...

I hear in NPR this am about the transition that you, the movie industry, will have to go through with the digital revolution. As one that has been imbedded into your space over the last few years and living in your world; I can only say that it will be painful. I know this because we Telecom people have experienced the disruption that digital has caused on us over the last 10 years and we see many parallels with your industry. But, don’t despair fellow movie executives. We are here to help you if you will listen. We have been through this and we can give you a lot of advice and here is but one piece: Think of your industry not just as a provider of entertainment and look for other ways to categorize what you do. Play what/if scenarios and and/yes scenarios. For example, one of the big discoveries of what Telecom does (sadly retrospectively) is that we “enable creativity.” If we had known this at the beginning of the digital attack on our industry, who knows, perhaps we would be Google....

So, this is where this thought originated. I was talking to a colleague about how stupidly we have have organized ourselves inside companies. We " comparmentalized " our thinking and have created these static and vertical buckets: "product development", "product management", "public relations", "marketing"etc... What we have not created and need to create are "passion" and "creative" management theories that aggregate these skills/abilities into tiger/virtual teams with members that are passionate about the tasks at hand. In my experience, the first step in selecting a tiger team member is to find those that have the passion. How do you do this? You "shop" it around and those interested will raise their proverbial hands and will want to participate. Moreover, however, Innovation managers need to be very cognizant of the effects management policies will have on people's creative drives; the management et...

Last Friday I attended an early venture breakfast where young companies go on stage and present their business plans in an effort to secure funding. The audience was mostly venture capitalists, all with different investment stage philosophies. Some like to come into the early stages, some mid and some when companies are fully matured and are looking to scale after achieving cash flow positive status. I have gone to many of these over the years and it is a fascinating process that everyone in Innovation management should be exposed to; it presents us with a unique opportunity to experience a drastically different perspective and energy. It is, in short, a new ecosystem that needs to be understood well, specially if one works with young companies as I do. I found that these entrepreneurs could also learn a thing or two from other – more corporately focused "intrepreneurs." One is that they need to be much better at evangelizing their ideas and in the process of doing so words a...

Two thoughts. One on innovation management, the other on innovation casting: 1) In a globalized world where virtual and matrix management is becoming the rigor, we need to change how we manage processes and people. One thing is for certain, however. Personality, energy conveyance and the ability to stimulate, motivate and persuade are still relevant and I would argue more so. The only difference is that now these attributes need to be projected via digital means: video calls, conference calls, the written word on emails, etc…What does this mean? It means that communications and interpersonal kills are more important than ever and need to developed even more so. How to improve on these: attend improvisational sessions, take acting lessons, learn how other cultures communicate and take media training…This just for starters. 2) My wife and I were brainstorming yesterday as to why Facebook users have (some of them) this incessant need to update their profiles constantly. The answer we came...

Trying to tap into the zeitgeist is not an easy thing, but as someone said (paraphrasing): one can never be wrong in trying to bring the future forward. I am starting to hear and read a lot about empathy. (Yes, that human quality that rumor has it we all possess but has been somewhat suppressed by our acquisitive culture.) Books are being written about it and one that I read recently is www.wiredtocare.com/ , a book written by Dev Patnaik, an innovation consultant/guru and all around nice guy. So being someone that likes to look for evidence (anecdotal of course) in real life – you know, life is it happens here and now, visceral, raw, cultured & civil- I have been listening and have found evidence that people are thinking a little more empathetically. I won’t deny it, most of the people exhibiting this new found awareness are what I call “new life agents”; people that are a bit more advanced in terms achieving a holistic humanist vision regarding the whole spiritual/life/purpose/b...

One of the “global” themes that cut across my opinions and writings is that nothing will remain static and everything will becoming dynamic. From how we build cars to how we relate to our customers and children. Why? Because communications technology and Innovations are making it so and telecom carriers are a critical piece of the puzzle in enabling this “dynamism.” As such they need to continue to shift their thinking from “network based” to “creative enablement.” But I digress. Everything – and I mean everything - out there is subject to the static vs. dynamic dichotomy and enterprises need to adapt to this paradox. For starters we need to develop different and more dynamic KPI’s (key performance indicators). This became evident the other day in an exchange I had with some innovation colleagues on the question of entrepreneurs vs. "intrepreneurs" (those inside corporate environments “doing” innovation- iPhone anyone!) and which are more effective and which add more value to...

Well, you know what they say...Instead of complaining do something about it....Well, I have been complaining about the lack of "peripheral" vision that our executives and leaders have displayed over the last few years so I have been promoting the idea of acting and improvisational workshops for adults. Nothing new, really, but I think there is an untapped demand for such workshops here in Northern VA (NOVA), where we are somewhat guided by staid and stale thinking. The challenge, of course is to get people to recognize this deficiency and for them to come out and experience the mind shaping (and blowing) benefits of improvisational workshops. For those in NOVA and that are interested in attending; please direct your browser to www.creativecauldron.org , and search for "In the Moment" Adult workshop . The workshop will run every Thursday for a month. Full disclosure, I am a board member of Creative Cauldron and will be taking the class myself.