Monthly Archives: January 2015

Is working smarter for suckers?

Work Smarter Manifesto

Last night I dreamed about the extremely unbalanced view of work in our societies, and woke up wondering whether working smarter is for suckers.

Why is that we lionize the workaholics among us and penalize those that find ways to be more efficient?

Why is that we say “thank you for working so hard” to someone who takes sixty hours to complete a task and penalize the person who figures out how to do it in twenty hours by giving them more work to do?

Out of one side of our mouth we talk about the importance of work life balance and out of the other side we praise those who worked the weekend. What’s worse, we often also speak behind the back of those who find a way to leave promptly at 5 PM every day, and look down upon them instead of admiring them.

There is the old saying “Work smarter, not harder”, but what’s the point when you get punished for doing so?

Where’s the reward?

We reward companies for getting more efficient and more profitable by raising their stock price. Where’s the reward for the individual for finds a way to get more efficient?

And why do people who work neither hard or smart get a free ride?

I am reminded of the saying “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.”

The attitudes about work in our society that make this quote a truism, along with the penalties for working smarter, make it nearly impossible to achieve work life balance in our culture unless you’re lazy and difficult to fire.

People marvel at how much I seem to achieve between working full-time, traveling the world delivering keynotes on innovation and change, writing books and articles, helping to run Innovation Excellence, and getting ready to launch a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit.

The only way I’m able to pull it off is by doing my best not to explode while I work harder at working smarter.

Books like Essentialism by Greg McKeown (and many other similar ones) serve as a great continuing education and gentle reminders for the legions of us trying to working smarter.

My wife also helps keep me focused only on the ground in front of me and becoming comfortable with whatever forward progress I’m able to make on my content creation efforts as I move through the world and all of the requirements and expectations that I’ve signed up for. The importance of family also lead me to protect evenings and weekends against potentially encroaching work.

Work Smarter Not HarderBut many organizations, and our culture at large, definitely doesn’t make it easy by inflicting their own inefficient processes, policies, and expectations on us.

So, what could we do better as organizations and leaders to teach people how to be more efficient in their jobs and have the foresight to let them use that improved efficiency to allow them to go home at a decent hour to their families?

We must remember, all parents have another job to go home to, and single employees have passions to explore that work probably is not fulfilling.

Help your employees work smarter and let them reap the rewards and you too will be rewarded with a stronger next generation of employees, increased employee retention, and MORE INNOVATION. Not a bad deal, right?

P.S. For my part soon I will be releasing a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit to help organizations work smarter by planning their change initiatives (and projects) in a less overwhelming, more human way that will help literally get everyone one the same page.

I’m looking to select a handful of companies to teach how to use the toolkit for free and feature their experience in my next book on the best practices and next practices of organizational change. If you would like to get a jump on the competition by increasing your speed of change (and your ability to work smarter), register your interest here.


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Microsoft Stomps on Google Glass

Microsoft Stomps on Google Glass

Wow!

I have to start that word, because I’m not sure how else to describe what has just emerged from Microsoft Research in the new Microsoft HoloLens.

And as I say in the title, if you watch the video below you’ll clearly see that Microsoft has just busted Google Glass – both lenses.

I said from the beginning that Google Glass would never catch on as a consumer product, because they look dumb, cost a lot of money, and don’t really fit into most people’s lives (or add much of anything to them). Recently Google shut down its consumer facing Google Glass program while they try to fix its shortcomings.

Microsoft’s HoloLens on the other hand, if you’ve ever read Innovation is All About Value (if not, follow the link) then you’ll quickly see after watching the video above that Microsoft’s new potential innovation ticks all three boxes in my innovation success prediction framework:

  • Value Creation – Takes 3D objects from your screen and brings them to your physical environment AND lets you interact with them (my mind races thinking about the possibilities).
  • Value Translation – Watch the video. If you don’t see how this might fit first into many professions out there and enable some amazing rapid prototyping without building anything (watch out 3D printing companies!), and possibly also into your personal life, I’ll be shocked.
  • Value Access – Microsoft is already engaging partners to add more value to what is essentially a platform, not a product.

Microsoft HoloLens

Microsoft is being intentionally coy about saying when it will be releasing the Microsoft HoloLens, but some people are predicting it will be available in the Windows 10 launch timeframe, which Microsoft is also being vague about saying only “later in the year” – which for my money usually means Q4 (or maybe Q3) depending on how the preview version does in the wild.

So what do you think of Microsoft’s new HoloLens?

I for one will be reaching out to my friends at Microsoft (you know who you are) to get a personal preview for a further write-up in Innovation Excellence (the world’s most popular innovation web site), so stay tuned!


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation Keynote and Change Planning Workshop Special

January Innovation and Change Planning Toolkit Special

To kickoff January with a bang I thought I would make a special offer to companies and event organizers who would like to get an excellent innovation keynote for their company or event attendees AND get a jump on your competitors by getting trained on how to use my new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit before they do.

This will be a great way to help innovation, change and project managers build strong momentum and results early in 2015.

Here is the offer:

Stoking Your Innovation BonfireBook me between January 21 and March 31, 2015 for either a:

  • 60-90 minute Innovation Keynote
  • 2-4 hour Innovation Workshop
  • 1 Day Innovation Masterclass

… and your attendees will at no additional charge:

  1. Be one of the first groups to get their hands on my revolutionary collaborative, visual change planning toolkit
  2. Get a 1 Day Workshop focused on organizational change and how to use the change planning toolkit

Buy an innovation keynote and get a full-day change planning toolkit workshop for free!

What could be better than that?

Book Braden Kelley for your event

P.S. If you missed my recent webinar ‘Innovation is All About Change’, click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording (link expired).


Accelerate your change and transformation success

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Agile Change Management is Coming

Agile Change Management

How fast is your organization capable of changing to continue to remain relevant and successful in the marketplace?

The world is changing at an accelerating pace as new technologies are discovered, developed, released and adopted by consumers faster than ever before. At the same time companies are rising to global scale faster and large, successful companies are disappearing faster too.

In this new reality that we all face, organizations of all types are going to need to:

  • Change how they change
  • Increase their organizational agility
  • Increase the flexibility of the organization
  • Become capable of continuous change
  • Inhibit the appearance and/or growth of change gaps that can doom your company

It is because of this tidal wave of change and a recognition that there is a need in the marketplace for more human change processes and tools that make change seem less overwhelming, that my next book for Palgrave Macmillan will focus on the best practices and next practices of organizational change (aka change management), and I’ve developed a new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit to go with it (but more about that later).

One way to do all of the items in the bulleted list above is to take more of an agile approach to change, to adopt some of the values and principles of the Agile Software Development methodology and use those to create a set of what could be described as Agile behaviors within the organization. If you are not familiar with the Agile Software Development methodology, I have included below the Agile Software Development Manifesto from http://agilemanifesto.org that details the values and principles of Agile Software Development. As you read through the manifesto I hope you’ll see that the values and principles can easily be applied to other endeavors outside of software development, whether that might in the project management discipline of your organization, or within your larger change initiatives.

Manifesto for Agile Software Development

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.

Through this work we have come to value:

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items in bold more.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

We follow these principles:

  • Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
  • Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
  • Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
  • Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
  • Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
  • The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
  • Working software is the primary measure of progress.
  • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
  • Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
  • The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
  • At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

Agile and Constant Change

FIGURE 1

You will see in FIGURE 1 that constant change sits at the center, Agile Values providing the initial direction for an organization with a committed goal of becoming more agile. Radiating out from Agile Values as we pursue success in coping with constant change will be our Agile Principles. But, ultimately we can’t live our values or follow our principles if we don’t exhibit behaviors that personify those values and principles. Unless our organizations begin to behave in a more agile way then the potential of truly becoming more agile will remain just words, and go largely unfulfilled.

It is because of the challenge of behaving in a new way that I encourage all of your to make a move towards a formal pursuit of organizational agility. To help you in this pursuit, I will soon be releasing my brand new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit for companies to use on their own (with free training for a select few who agree to use it and document their experience for the book). In addition I will be launching separate training for consultants so they can use the tools with clients in their change management and project management practices. Please register your interest here.

Using this new set of change planning and execution tools and processes will not only make change seem less overwhelming, but it will also help you build alignment behind your effort, help you work through as a group how to LITERALLY all get on the same page for change, and create a more agile organization as adoption of the tools spreads.

Stay tuned for more great change content coming soon!

In the meantime, check out the different ways to get involved.


Accelerate your change and transformation success


SPECIAL BONUS: You can now access my latest webinar ‘Innovation is All About Change’ compliments of CoDev with passcode 1515 (link expired)


Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Innovation is All About Change – Webinar Recording

Innovation is All About Change - Webinar RecordingThe hardest part of making any change is taking that first step. We may point our shoulders in the direction we want to travel, but planning our change journey and mapping the steps to get there can still feel overwhelming. This is true for co-creation and open innovation projects, change programs — even personal change.

Often it helps to be with others who are on a similar path. It also helps to have tools that simplify steps and offer motivation. I’m delighted to invite you to view an exclusive conversation/webinar with me and my friends at CoDev (including host Cheryl Perkins of Innovationedge) that we recorded on January 15, 2015.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)

In this interactive 60-minute session, I share key tools and guidelines from my new, not-yet-published book from Palgrave Macmillan and give you some insights into what is in my new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit.

I discuss:

  • How organizational change and project/ portfolio management tie together
  • Useful frameworks to move from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’
  • Best (and next) Innovation practices
  • Roles and responsibilities based on the Nine Innovation Roles (from his last book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.)
  • How innovation is all about change

I encourage you to view the webinar recording with other members of your senior management team, and anyone else you think might have interest in the intersection of change initiatives, project management, and innovation.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)


Build a common language of innovation on your team

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Is Jibo Joining Your Family?

Is Jibo Joining Your Family?

I wrote a couple of months ago about the Amazon Echo, the latest piece of hardware to emerge from the South Lake Union headquarters of one my city’s largest employers. A piece of hardware that follows in the wake of the successful Amazon Kindle and the failed Amazon Fire Phone.

The Amazon Echo aims to get you to put a computer in the center of your living room and to talk to it as if it were a person, building on the increasing comfort we have in talking to Siri, or Cortana, or Google. My previous article highlighted how this growing area of technology in phones, and increasingly in what is apparently a new wave of consumer devices, has the potential to disrupt the business model of Google and Bing, and potentially change our relationship with our devices.

Where Amazon Echo invites you to name their new computing device and speak to it, another rival technology (that was actually announced BEFORE the Amazon Echo) has recently come to my attention that is being positioned almost like a pet or a new member of the family. It’s called Jibo, and it was launched as an IndieGogo campaign and it quickly hit its $100,000 goal in four days, and raised $1 million in its first seven days. To date they’ve raised $2.3 million (pre-selling about 4,800 units) according to their myjibo.com web site, but as of yet they are still not shipping the device.

By comparison, according to Amazon’s web site, the Amazon Echo will be in stock on January 17, 2015.

Rather than trying to explain what the Jibo is, I’ve embedded their promotional video below (8 million views and counting):

So, what do you think, are you ready for Jibo (or the Amazon Echo) to become part of your family?

And you believe this new class of devices (and our increasing reliance on Siri and Cortana) have the potential to disrupt Google and Bing’s ability to make money?

Innovation or Not?

Sound off in the comments.

UPDATE to banner: You can now access a free recording of this webinar using PASSCODE 1515 here (link expired)


Build a common language of innovation on your team

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.