GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Thoughtstarters have the strategic talents of thinking and conceiving that keep us all more inquisitive and progressive. Visionary and analytical, they’re all about theory, big ideas and direction. They seem to be driven by a natural need for knowledge and reason, and they’re at their best when they’re up against a philosophical challenge.

To the Thoughtstarter, ideas are more important than action, logic more important than emotion. Expertise is what Thoughtstarters strive for most, as they have a core need to perfect their abilities, which center on strategy, vision, and ingenuity.

A Thoughtstarter’s thinking is purely rational, highlighted by philosophy, theories, and concepts; these are their lifeblood and the tools they use to influence others.

At the team level, look to the Thoughtstarters to stimulate new ways of thinking and approaching problems. Constant forward progress toward a grand vision drives them, and any talk of details and practicality only work to deflate their day.

Thoughtstarters have hungry minds, forever seeking knowledge at all levels, and for them, the day is not complete unless they’ve learned something new.

The Thoughtstarters’ broad themes of natural excellence derive from the logical, spatial and linguistic aptitudes, and run along the lines of:

Optimizing: Creating excellence and maximizing competence; achieving the highest levels of performance

Directing: Strategically establishing chains of command; structuring plans to provide direction

Strategizing: Comprehensively considering all contingencies and alternatives to chart the best course of action

Analyzing: Critical thinking; relying on cold logic and sound reasoning; identifying causes and influences

Envisioning: Painting compelling pictures of the future to inspire and guide action; long range planning

Inventing: Engineering and prototyping; devising working models of new solutions and methodologies

Theorizing: Hypothesizing, conceiving and testing new frameworks of thought; experimenting with ideas

Investigating: Perpetually increasing scholarly knowledge; continually questioning; researching; studying

Designing: Architecting and blueprinting ideas and concepts into structural models and working systems

Synthesizing: Combining and composing seemingly unrelated components in a clear, cohesive system

Keeping in mind that we all have some Thoughtstarter in us, are you a natural born Peacekeeper?

Try this: print the list above. Put a checkmark on each talent area that comes easily to you. Then put a checkmark on each one that you truly enjoy. Put a third checkmark on each one at which you demonstrate excellence.

If the majority of themes have all three checkmarks, consider yourself a Thoughtstarter.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

One of the most frequently asked questions I get is, “How can we unleash innovation all across our company?” Through the course of working with dozens of different organizations and teams, I’ve noticed four common traps that are all too easy to fall into, and nearly always get in the way of building a culture of constant innovation. I call them temptations, because they are the siren call to many an innovator.

They’re quite intuitive, and thus very hard to resist.

1. Swinging for fences.

In sports we worship the game-clinching grand slam home run, the three-point field goal at the buzzer, the blinding slapshot in overtime, the “Hail Mary” pass, and the hole-in-one. Likewise in business, we worship the killer app: it’s impressive, it’s newsworthy, and it puts us ahead of the competition for a time.

But moments like these are rare. There are no baseball teams with a roster solely made up of home run hitters, and the most accomplished home run hitters generally have a low batting average and a high strikeout rate. In business that translates to huge risk and is usually accompanied by high cost.

Therefore, it might just make more sense to have the whole team focus on making it to first base every time at bat.

2. Getting too clever.

This is the “bells and whistles” trap which can easily get out of control in an effort to outdo competitors. It carries with it the danger of complexity and customer alienation. How smart is your phone, really? Great pictures, music, video, but wouldn’t you love to be able to make a call without the call ever dropping?

Mention “innovation” and people immediately think technology. The pace of technological progress sweeps us off our feet, and we get all caught up in the gizmo while losing sight of the why behind the what. The simple truth is that business innovation is about value, not gadgetry. People don’t want products and services, they want an elegant solution to their problem.

3. Excluding the everyman.

A lot has been written about how innovation should go beyond incremental improvement, and how it entails seeking and taking big risks. How it’s all about big ideas and radical departures from convention. How it means completely scrapping the old system, and how you need deep pockets just to play the game.

Those biases are limiting at best, and only serve to inadvertently exclude the everyman from innovating. If you want company-wide innovation, you need to define innovation in a way that includes everyone, irrespective of function or role. As I’ve said many times before, I like the definition of innovation given by JetBlue founder David Neeleman: “Innovation is trying to figure out a way to do something better than it’s ever been done before.”

This simple definition wrestles to the ground a complex concept and makes it accessible to everyone at every level.

4. Incentivizing creativity.

Combined research from the Employee Involvement Association and Japan Human Relations Association reveals that the average number of ideas submitted per employee annually is 100 times greater in Japanese companies than in U.S. companies. Why is this?

For one thing, the Japanese culture promotes mastery. For another, Americans reward the wrong thing in the wrong way. The average reward in Japanese companies is 100 times less than the average U.S. reward of nearly $500. But we have it backwards because we reward only accepted ideas. This has all but killed the creative drive of corporate America. Dan Pink in his book Drive makes the point quite eloquently.

History has shown that sustainable business innovation isn’t as much about throwing the Hail Mary pass as it is about running a solid ground game. Companies that have truly mastered innovation know that it can be “derisked” by making a number of small bets across a portfolio of ideas, rather than one big bet-the-farm gamble on a would-be killer app. And to win consistently over the long haul takes strong disciplines and solid routines for solving problems and chasing opportunities.

But how do you know if you’re heading in the right direction?

RESISTING TEMPTATION

One answer is to look around you, use your power of observation, and start solving the little problems you see that reside in your sphere of control, expertise, and responsibility. In the words of Malcolm Gladwell, “little things can make a big difference.”

Take the case of Sakichi Toyoda.

The story begins in Japan, in 1888, twenty years after the country opened its doors to the outside world (known as the Meji reformation), and two years into the Japan Patent Law.

A young man living in a rural farming community watches his mother slave all day in the rafters of their humble home to bring a little extra money into the household by weaving clothing on a manual spinning loom and selling it to a village merchant. She uses a primitive tool unchanged for centuries. It pains him to see her scrap a hard day’s work because of a single broken thread in the finished garment.

Barely 20, inventive, energetic, and eager to change the world – carpentry is his trade, but not his calling. Ignoring elder disapproval, he challenges himself to build a better loom, sketching prototypes, building test models, and applying his woodworking skills in creative ways that others view as eccentric.

In just two years time, he receives a patent for a foot-powered loom that improves quality and productivity dramatically. He’s not satisfied. He turns his attention to developing a power loom.

By 1898, a decade into his quest, he perfects Japan’s first steam powered loom, which allows textile mills to quadruple productivity and halve costs. His looms are the highest quality, lowest cost, and easiest to use – putting the finest German and French looms to shame.

Business booms, and his star rises quickly in Japan. His quest to perfect drives him ever forward, creating a string of tiny innovations in rapid succession.

30 years into his search, he designs a mechanism to automatically halt the loom whenever a thread breaks. Nearly a lifetime in the offing, Sakichi Toyoda finds the elegant solution. It changes the world. It takes five more years to perfect.

And so from small but steady improvements with radical results and a strong desire to help people is born Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, the precursor to Toyota Motor Company.

The story of Sakichi Toyoda is not about invention, or about the technological development of the automatic loom in Japan. It’s about one man’s nearly spiritual quest to solve a very real problem facing the world around him. It’s about true innovation, and the discipline of artistry at work.

In his own words, just before he died at the young age of 60:

“In those days, spinning and weaving was not a thriving business as it is today. The work was done by old women sitting at home and weaving the cloth by hand. Although everybody in my village was a farmer, every house also had its own handloom. I began thinking about ways to power the looms so that weaving could be done faster, and more cloth could be made more cheaply. People could then buy cotton goods for less, and that would benefit society substantially.”

Sakichi Toyoda did not live to see his son Kiichiro start the car company, which began in a far corner of the loom factory.

That’s how you resist the temptations of the innovator. Do it, and you may just change the world forever.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

We’ve all heard the cliches: “If you’re going to do something, do it right,” and “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Change one word — “right“ to “artfully“ — and the view of work as art is not the far reach it may appear to be.

But allow me to state my case more, er, artfully.

Like art, work can pull every feeling from our emotional palette – it can move us, confuse us, inspire us, frustrate us, and change us. It can give us joy, or bring us to tears. Regardless of whether our work is presiding or parenting, we spend more waking time than not in our work, and it is through our work that we can employ our creative sense and enrich our lives fully.

Work remains our best chance to be artful – our best opportunity to be fully involved in an activity that expresses who we are, to call forth our creative spirit. If we let it, work can be a wonderfully rewarding experience of challenge and curiosity in which we discover daily new depths of our identity and imagination.

The “art” is in the individual details and everyday doings of whatever work we perform, and is revealed through our ability to put our fingerprints on it in our own original way.

Work is, in the end, a license to create. But the license is not one granted freely. It is one we must claim for ourselves.

And like art, to be engaging and moving, for ourselves and for others, our work must have the basic characteristics of good design.

Our work must have form – depth and dimension – to avoid the fatal flatness that ruins our attempt at creative expression. Without form, we may not have a clear idea of the real worth of what we do.

Our work must also have contrasting tones and shades of color – vitality and passion – to avoid the drab weariness that can dampen the full impact of what we hope to achieve. Without color, we may not experience the positive emotions that lift our spirits and inspire our performance.

Our work must have composition – balance and proportion – to avoid overpowering and impinging on the other domains of our life. Without composition, we may miss some of the most profoundly rewarding moments of life.

Our must have perspective – focus and direction – to avoid losing sight of a clear horizon line. Without perspective, we may wander down blind alleys, unable to see the bigger picture.

Finally, our work must have a frame – alignment and boundary – to provide the necessary line between reality and imagination. Without the proper frame, we may lose touch with what is realistically possible, given our talents and intents.

Anyone who has ever arranged flowers in a vase, decorated a Christmas tree, wrestled with a stubborn hairdo, or fretted over the perfect wardrobe ensemble for a special occasion, knows something of the creative struggle to get these qualities just right. A splash of red here, more tinsel there, an extra coiffure for good measure…the process is one of feeling our way to the perfect proportions – adding and adjusting, mixing and matching, tinkering and tailoring, then standing back to look at the overall effect before diving in again to make things just so.

My point: We don’t have to paint, sketch, sculpt or compose – or even dream of one day doing so – to face the kinds of problems that define the artist’s life!

I believe that all of these essentials can be realized to some degree in any occupation – the artistic magic is in the uniquely personal harmony achieved. Attempting to formulate laws to apply to the mix misses the point, and doing so may cause us to lose the essence of what makes us different and interesting. Historically, many have tried and failed to decode such fixed rules by studying the styles of the great masters, even as those masters managed to defy the code and create something never before imagined.

And, we can’t always come at these facets directly and expect things to change overnight. Getting them into the right blend rests upon principles that run far deeper than the visible components, more toward the bedrock of our identities. It is not the practices, techniques or recipes that hold the key, but the underlying personal process.

If I know anything, it’s this: Launching a dramatic assault on ourselves in an attempt to surface our underlying creative spirit will only make us grip tighter to old patterns – it’s our human defensive response to abrupt shifts in our equilibrium, even if they are self-inflicted.

The simple truth is that most of us cringe at the thought of change. At the heart of every failed attempt at a radical makeover is this conundrum, the repeating lesson learned being that sustainable personal renaissance is usually only successful through more inward-looking means.

Still, to begin thinking about our work figuratively in these artistic terms is to launch the journey toward creative excellence, for they are the goal and endgame, and without any one of them in good measure, individual artistry will remain elusive.

If these, then, are the collective caliber by which our work might be considered art, the focus must now shift to the pathways that take us there.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Charles Darwin was on to something. Business innovation has a lot in common with his theory of evolution, about the origin of species.

Oh, but how easily we forget, neglect, and even disrespect evolutionary innovation, and how easily our attention is riveted by ever-so-sexy revolutionary innovation.

Allow me to unpack the parallels between Darwin’s theories and business innovation a bit. I see a few important touchpoints.

First, there’s Darwin’s notion that everything can be traced to a common ancestry. Business translation: every idea has elements of the past. Take Henry Ford’s famous assembly line, which revolutionized manufacturing. It was in reality one part continuous flow borrowed from mills and canning factories, one part standardized parts borrowed from machine tooling, and one part conveyor belts borrowed from meatpacking and brewing industries. Mix, stir, bake.

Second is Darwin’s idea of similar traits converging into one new organism. That’s smartphone technology, which combines telephony, software, text messaging, email, internet browsing, voice recording, music, touchscreen, video and photography. Convergence is everywhere.

Third is Darwin’s survival of the fittest, which says failure to make small adaptations leads to extinction. It’s the difference between Blockbuster and Netflix. It’s why Adobe will no longer sell its Creative Suite as something you can own. The subscription model is what’s next. Hard media is all but extinct.

All of which is to say, there’s not much new under the sun. Most of the so-called revolutionary breakthroughs are in reality smaller ideas combined, synthesized, and adapted to a new application. It’s nearly impossible to find a big innovation that isn’t based on something else already in existence.

Da Vinci’s Dilemma

Let’s think about the lone genius for a minute. Leonardo Da Vinci was never at a loss for big, original ideas. Brilliant, ingenious ideas centuries before their time filled the pages of his legendary notebooks. And that’s where they remained. Until the innovators in another lifetime took them and shaped them into something actually workable.

History continues to repeat the lesson. It’s common knowledge that Apple didn’t dream up its graphic interface, Xerox did. But Steve Jobs pirated the idea and made it a commercially viable concept. Apple stuck with it, continued to perfect it, and produced world-changing solution.

Da Vinci-like ideas rarely if ever work as originally conceived. Are they valuable? Of course. The point is that without the evolutionary innovation that makes them useful, the gap between the idea and the application is so wide that people don’t get it, can’t see it. They resist it, so the invention remains a novel brainstorm, until you scale it back, scope it down, sculpting and honing it into something more manageable, acceptable, and useful.

Da Vinci-like ideas are few and far between. They have huge lead times. They have enormous carrying costs if you try to commercialize them right out of the gate. You absolutely need them to pepper the advance into new eras of industry. But for the mainstream business that seeks to achieve and sustain continuous success through steady progress, the real power of innovation lives in the more plentiful and more immediately actionable smaller ideas.

Still, continuous, incremental, evolutionary innovation gets little attention, much less respect.

Dissing the Ground Game

Many managers hold the view that evolutionary innovation is more trouble than it’s worth. They sell short the balanced portfolio power generated by a large and steady stream of smaller scale ideas in favor of the hunt for killer apps. That’s a mistake for the same reason you “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” by investing every dollar in a single stock, as economist James Tobin advised in his 1981 Nobel Award-winning thesis on portfolio selection and diversification. It leaves you at the mercy of the market with no hedge against the bet. It’s risky and foolhardy.

So why the disrespect? I can think of a few reasons.

First, there’s the tunnel vision focus on revenue growth, which is far more exciting than profit improvement. But let’s not forget some basic balance sheet gymnastics: you’d have to double your top line to equal the impact on the bottom line of small process improvements that save 10% of your overall costs. And that’s not even including the huge investment you’d have to make up front to design, develop and test a new product or service that will grow revenue 100%. Meanwhile, it’s the innovations aimed at the bottom line that yield the very profits that fund investment in new products and services.

Then there’s business history. “Continuous improvement” happened to be one of a flurry of quality efforts in the mid 90s, which all flamed out for the same reason: the silver bullet syndrome. Aka, magic pills for business ills.

Different labels–total quality management, lean thinking, reengineering–were trounced out as the new program, and neither embraced as a serious discipline nor internalized. Consequently, there was no deep learning, and no new capability built. Managers wanted excellence, but didn’t want to put the hard work in. They wanted cheap, quick hits to show results. It was a reactionary stance focused on compliance and correction, on fixing defects, not a search for the ideal or optimal way to do something.

There was wholesale failure at building the necessary critical mass of more proactive and forward looking individual and team projects. Managers viewed continuous improvement as something separate from innovation, and when the low-hanging fruit was picked clean, and the painstaking work of instilling a true system-wide routine for finding and solving tougher problems began, they went searching for a new silver bullet.

Finally, there’s the issue of business literature. All too often, innovation as a topic is about the great successes, not the many foibles and failures, and covered either as a groundbreaking event of rare genius, or a fortunate accident. Few researchers or authors want to report on the often boring and always painful process behind the breakthrough. The stories are all about the master stroke, the final outcome and the strategic implications.

Result: we’re still fairly clueless on the rigors and rewards of evolutionary innovation.

Innovation must be disciplinary and institutionalized, not programmatic or pocketed. It can’t be relegated to a department. It can’t be reserved for top level management. It can’t be just about eliminating defects. It can’t just be about killer apps. It can’t be about more bells and whistles.

It must be the creative core to the daily work of everyone in the organization, not a sideline event or activity. It must be about progress. It must be universally understood to be the path to a future everyone has a stake in. Everyone involved has to own it.

That kind of discipline requires a fundamental mindshift. That’s what makes it so very, very hard. There is no easy way. Most of us will count ourselves lucky if we get the chance to understand and practice innovation as a discipline, a way of life. Because it happens only over time and through experience. You have to do it over and over again to get it.

Innovation isn’t something to take time out from your daily work to participate in, it is the work. Or should be, anyway.

Small and Steady

Evolutionary innovation–smaller ideas experimented with daily–builds the capability needed to achieve a cross-company culture of innovation. There’s no real downside to growing a strong portfolio of small ideas. Dealing in smaller currency lets you experiment more, get results quicker, and learn faster, without fretting over risk and exposure.

The more ideas you test, the more patterns and possibilities emerge. Which in turn gives you more opportunities to combine and multiply ideas into bigger ones. The multiplier effect of compounding ideas is enormous. And when the big idea hits, which it will when the time is right, it’ll be your evolutionary innovation chops that will sustain your competitive advantage and protect you from fast followers.

How? Easy. Your portfolio will remain secret sauce, because routine ground singles don’t catch the eye of scholars, competitors or the media like homeruns do. And by the time your competition catches on, you’re on to something else.

Those who fail to evolutionary innovation are destined to be the eternal followers. Either that, or eternally outsource their innovation. That’s okay for some, even many. But refuse to adapt, and the near future may include the auction block. Adaptation is all about evolution through incremental progress.

And lest you think you’ll run out of things to improve or an irrational fear of diminishing returns kicks in, rest easy. Because the world keeps changing.

There’s no more logical way to consistently achieve breakthroughs than through a discipline of increments.

So think “Darwin,” and remember: it’s the relentless pursuit of something better that drives all successful innovation.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Lady Gaga is one of the most well-known pop artists in the world, which is no surprise given her vocal talents and often bizarre wardrobe. She’s sold 23 million albums, won five Grammy awards, and been named by Forbes as one of the world’s most powerful celebrities.

But behind the public persona lies a shrewd and calculating business professional, a marketing machine which has turned music lovers into a worldwide legion of diehard fans eager to buy her music, her concert tickets, and any and all products related to her. Is this simply a classic case of loyalty marketing and customer cultivation? Perhaps. Apple aside, few businesses can claim a base of zealots anywhere near the same scope and scale.

In Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics, author Jackie Huba argues that Lady Gaga has not only created a brand, but is cultivating a fanatical group of consumers that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond.

In four short years, Lady Gaga has built an army of passionate fans that numbers in the tens of millions around the globe. According to Huba, Lady Gaga didn’t become the success she is today based solely on her talent. She did so through the message she inspires and the community she has built around that message.

The Loyalty Playbook

Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach, which, while individually effective, become a solid business blueprint when taken together:

1. Focus on Your “One Percenters”: Gaga spends most of her effort on just one percent of her audience, the highly engaged super-fans who drive word of mouth.
2. Lead with Values: Create an emotional connection with customers by showcasing what you believe in.
3. Build Community: Connect your most loyal customers with each other to strengthen their bond with you.
4. Give Fans a Name: Gaga calls her fans her “Little Monsters.” A name gives customers a way to self-identify as part of the group. In fact, Gaga now has her own social network, little monsters.com.
5. Embrace Shared Symbols: Shared symbols help customers bond by creating a collective experience.
6. Make Them Feel Like Rock Stars: Become a fan of your fans and find ways to make them feel special.
7. Generate Something to Talk About: Make your business “word-of-mouth-worthy” by continually giving your fans reasons to talk about you.

5 Insights to Gaga

While these seven lessons seem sensible enough for a pop star, they beg a bit of insight and explanation in order for businesses to learn from them. Here, Huba answers a few questions:

Lady Gaga has such a specific brand and audience. What can the average businessperson really learn from her?

Gaga’s business of show business may be very different from the “average” business, but her focus on growing through devoted customer loyalty is a universal business objective. Most business people know that it’s far cheaper to keep a customer than to get new one. Gaga gets the math. It’s her overarching philosophy to focus on her core advocates, the super-fans, the “Little Monsters.” These advocates will ultimately be evangelists who bring in new customers on their own. This customer philosophy is one that businesses would do well to learn from Gaga.

How do more practical companies partake in her business philosophies without going over the top?

The best ideas sometimes come from the unlikeliest sources, and whether you love her or hate her, you can’t ignore what she has accomplished. I think it’s important to study what she does, how she does it and why, because there are ways to replicate her success in more traditional business settings. In every lesson from Gaga in the book, I highlight how traditional companies—from Whole Foods to MINI—are applying her methods to their customer bases, without having to wear any dresses made from meat.

You call her Little Monsters “One Percenters.” Can you explain this concept a bit more?

The idea of the One Percenters comes from our research during the early days of online community and social media. I looked at online communities and tracked what percentage of members in those communities created content—in other words, who was most engaged.

I found it amounted to just 1 percent of the total community members. This was surprising. The amount of super-engaged community members did not follow the usual 80/20 rule. We discovered that the volume of content creators was much smaller, at just 1 percent. That’s a very small part of the community, and yet it was creating most of the value for the entire community. Our thesis is that these One Percenters are a business’s most diehard customers—the ones who really love the company, buy new products as soon as they are released, give them as gifts and evangelize the company to everyone they know.

“Little Monsters” is a great fit for Lady Gaga, but can you give an example of how a business might “give fans a name”?

One of the best examples of a brand naming its fans is Maker’s Mark, the premium bourbon company out of Loretto, Kentucky. Bill Samuels, Jr., son of the founder, was looking for a way to better connect with the brand’s fanatical customers and created the Maker’s Mark Ambassador program.

Ambassadors are brand evangelists who volunteer to tell others about the product, and encourage bars that didn’t carry the brand at the time to do so. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of Makers Mark Ambassadors who receive custom business cards and fun holiday gifts from the brand, and gather for events at the distillery in Loretto each year.

What’s the most surprising thing you learned while studying Lady Gaga?

Lady Gaga’s business sense impresses me, but her passion for changing the world for the better through any means possible is what truly inspired me to study her. She is influencing an entire generation of young people to stand up for each other, to be more tolerant of differences and to be brave in the face of difficulty.

I have spent hours and hours reading fan comments about how she has changed lives for the better. I have cried watching YouTube videos of kids saying they thought about hurting themselves or ending their lives, but that her belief in them, a woman they don’t even know, kept them from doing it. They listen to her music, especially “Born This Way,” and they feel better about themselves. I believe that if there was ever a candidate to continue Oprah Winfrey’s legacy of inspiring people to live their best lives, it’s this five-foot-one, 26-year-old in a studded bikini.

Give Monster Loyalty a read, because there’s a lot to learn from Lady Gaga. It is trust that engenders loyalty, and there isn’t a business or individual on the planet that couldn’t improve their trust quotient.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

When I speak to groups or meet with prospective new clients, one of the most frequently asked questions I field is: What’s my first step in creating a culture of company wide innovation?

I love the question because I believe that innovation must occur at every level of the company. Now, that doesn’t mean (necessarily) that the receptionist is going to create your next breakthrough product. But it does mean that everyone must look for and find a way to do their work better than it’s ever been done before, to look for and find new and better ways to deliver value to customers, and to do that at as often as possible, even every day.

For many companies, and perhaps even most, I believe there’s a pre-step: understanding that innovation is everyone’s job. Think about it: where does the greatest cumulative potential reside? On the front lines. Not in the C-suite. There are simply more people on the front lines, more working with your system every day, more interacting with and serving customers daily. So it all starts with understanding that building a portfolio of cross-company ideas is like building any other high-performing portfolio: it’s a numbers game.

The challenge then is how to draw out the creative power of people in an organized, systematic way that provides a safe haven for everyone involved, declaws the fear of failure, and begins to embed a real discipline around finding and solving problems. That’s the first step.

My suggestion is to shy away from big programs bent on massive disruption at first, and start with a single team—one manager and a natural work group. Let’s say that manager is you. (The strategy is the same whether you’re CEO or a first-rung supervisor, but from my experience, change spreads and happens faster at the front lines.)

You now strike a deal up front. Meaning, you agree to to say “yes” to your team’s idea or solution, one they choose, if it meets the right criteria:

1. The team is to work in the general territory of something you feel needs attention—something of concern or that clearly advances a current business objective. (It’s probably something that keeps you up at night).
2. The idea theme must concern something within your base of responsibility, power and control—something you can sanction immediately without further approval.
3. The team is to develop a no- or low-cost solution that can be piloted quickly.
4. The team works on a problem they all touch and have working knowledge of.
5. The project must result in a clear value enhancement: quality, cost, speed, etc.
6. The project is an experiment, and nothing gets broad execution until the learning is captured and there’s a compelling case for feeding it forward.

But—(you knew this was coming!)—there are a few don’ts (many of which become irrelevant once you become a competent innovator):

• Don’t address an area where there is no consensus on the issue’s importance to the company or customers.
• Don’t head for an area lacking good visibility.
• Don’t work on something where results won’t show up for several months.
• Don’t pick an area fraught with controversy inside the company.
• Don’t select an area lacking strong interest.
• Don’t select something beyond the control of the team.
• Don’t target an issue already undergoing study or change.
• Don’t use this as an opportunity to execute an already developed solution.
• And here’s the big one: don’t head for anything that doesn’t play to the team’s real strength.

As the manager and champion, you’re NOT part of the problem-solving team. You’re the sanctioning body. A big part of your role is answering the two questions that will be foremost on their mind: Why am I here? and Why are we doing this? So you need to provide the context, issue the challenge and convey the importance of the team. You need to talk about the importance of improving things for your customers.

One of the best ways to do all of that is to talk about the gap between today and tomorrow, as you see it. Tell the team why they have been chosen. Tell them the scope and direction of where you’d like them to exert their best thinking. Tell them that you have no preconceived solutions, that the specific problem addressed or project chosen is up to them, but that you’re looking for a simple, inexpensive solution that they can easily test out quickly.

Tell them that their engagement and thinking are more important than the outcome, and that the goal is to learn. Tell them they will run the test of their own solution and report the results, that you’re not looking for just a recommendation. Tell them that you look forward to hearing their idea, and how it worked or didn’t work in the real world. Show your appreciation in advance for the hard work.

These are some of specifics behind how I answer the question of how to take the first step in building a culture of everyday innovation: one team at a time, one manageable idea at a time.

The key is local autonomy.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

A few days ago a reporter for Investor’s Business Daily contacted me by email, asking several questions about innovation. I didn’t have the time to answer all of them, so I asked him what he really wanted to know. He replied that what he really wanted was a bottom line answer to the question of what makes the most difference in a company’s ability to innovate. As is my inclination, I reframe such questions to be about what isn’t there, versus what is.

Here’s my reply:

If I think about “why Johnny can’t innovate,” i.e. the things that prevent a company from cultivating a companywide culture of innovation, it would come down to a half-dozen things:

1. Innovation identity crisis.

If you assume that the consultants at Booz & Co are correct, there are perhaps three distinct approaches to innovation: needs-based, market-driven, and tech-centered. The first is the “humanist” approach good designers take. The second is the “capitalist” approach…the fast followers that optimize…like a Hyundai, or in many respects Toyota. They capitalize on Clayton Christensen’s “innovator’s dilemma,” quickly copying and even improving on game-changing innovations as they hit the market. The third is the “technologist” approach, like an Apple. Many big companies simply don’t know or can’t easily conceptualize which of these categories they fall into, or should fall into, given their bench strength. They end up “kitchen-sinking” it, scattering and squandering their attention and efforts.

2. Unclear innovation strategy.

Trying to be all things to all people just doesn’t work, and big outfits have a tough time articulating the answers to the questions my friend Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School and coauthor of Playing to Win, likes to ask: given your chosen approach, where will you play and how will you win?. It’s a question of focus, which is something different (albeit a nuanced difference) than prioritization. It’s the ability to identify what you’re going to say NO to. Steve Jobs was great at this, and you’re now seeing the clear picture under his rule become blurry. He said he was always proudest of the thousands of things Apple said no to.

3. Inaccessible definition of innovation.

When I speak to groups I ask them to show their hands if they consider themselves good problem solvers. All hands raise. I ask for a show of hands for the learners. All hands up. Then I ask the true innovators to raise their hands. Less than 5% raise their hands. It’s because people hear innovation and think: gizmo. Or app. Or code. Or product. Or service. Or feature. They think of innovation as a noun rather than a verb. Best definition of innovation I’ve ever heard is by JetBlue’s founder David Neeleman: “Innovation is figuring how to do something better than it’s ever been done before.” Dirt simple, and it doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or administrative assistant…you can innovate. Without the clear definition of what’s considered innovation, you can’t ask people to innovate and expect an intelligent response.

4. No common methodology.

We’re not taught in school to innovate. Just the opposite. The very effective ethos of curiosity we’re born with and utilize during our first 5 years of existence–which is all about observation, experimentation, and play–gets schooled out of us. We’re taught to get the right answer for the teacher. Then the right answer for the boss. We lose our natural born capacity to learn and create new knowledge. So you have to unlearn the ways of business execution and reteach what came naturally: define a problem by observing or experiencing it, guessing how to solve it, creating a solution based on that guess, and quickly seeing if what you assumed might work actually does. Without a common methodology, everything is ad hoc, hit or miss.

5. Methodology doesn’t feature experimentation.

Beyond not having a common method, you’ll often find the de facto “innovation method” in reality being mostly an idea execution process, rather than a more scientific one. The mindset can’t be “I know what will work and I’m going to ensure it does.” It has to be “I think this may work so let me try it out.” Scientists work on hypotheses, which is a fancy term for guesswork. If people aren’t getting their hands dirty out in the field with users and customers, testing early low-fidelity prototypes and adjusting a solution, they won’t be able to truly innovate. For some reason, the hardest thing for those charged with innovation is get out of the office, out of their data reports, and do what the Japanese call genchi genbutsu (go look, go see): muck about with customers and users. I learned how important it is to do this while working with Toyota. Innovation is a contact sport. So beware the pretty process that looks sterile and linear rather than loopy and chaotic.

6. Mismatched talent-to-task fit.

Companies love to move “high potential managers” into roles related to innovation. Bad move. Those folks are great at plans and budgets. They’re great at execution. But what do you think they’re going to do when you move them into the messy and uncertain world of creating something new? They’re going to try to plan, budget, and execute. Innovation is about divergence, rapid prototyping, testing and failure. Big outfits might go to school on Lockheed’s Skunk Works…Steve Jobs sure did when he broke away from Apple to start Macintosh. You have to do what Kelly Johnson, Lockheed’s maverick Chief Engineer did: break away from the main operation, steal away the hip thinkers that many many consider the lunatic fringe, and set up shop in secrecy to essentially get back to the garage, with the charge being to design a working prototype under a few intelligent constraints. If you don’t, can’t or won’t, you’ll end up hiring an outside firm that’s set up to innovate for you. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just doesn’t help your efforts to build innovation competency. It allows people to stay in their power zone of planning, budgeting, and executing.

All these things are required for a culture of innovation to flourish. That’s why innovation is so simple yet so hard. Hope this helps, and good luck with your article!

I’m not sure if he’ll use any of it, but I hope he does.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Innovative thinking. Human power. Sustainable energy. Endless possibility. Bicycles.

These are a few of my favorite things. I have that in common with the folks at Toyota’s Prius Projects. There’s no question that Prius is an innovation that changed the world.

A short digression by way of backstory that some may not be aware of.

When Toyota debuted the Prius at the Kyoto Conference on global warming in December 1997, Detroit carmakers were taken by surprise. The Prius was far beyond concept and production-ready—it was “line off,” meaning in production. Delegates were offered rides in the several new Prius models on site. Ford’s own William “Bill” Ford was one of them. With half the CO2 emissions and twice the fuel economy, the Prius garnered high interest and acclaim.

According to those in attendance, Detroit execs at the Conference were visibly shaken. Japan had committed to a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2010, while the United States had refused to commit at all. The Prius was launched immediately following the conference.

Toyota’s decision to pursue eco-friendly alternative energy systems had begun nearly a decade earlier in 1990, when Eiji Toyoda issued the challenge of taking action immediately to restructure Toyota’s entire approach to research and development by saying, “I doubt that Toyota will survive in the 21st century without changing its way of doing R & D.” The resulting shift away from model-based research represented the single greatest restructuring in the company’s history. Advanced Energy Development was one of four new technological centers to emerge from the move.

Detroit’s reaction? Participate in a $1.2 billion government project sponsored by the Clinton administration’s General Accounting Office called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles to find a breakthrough automobile that could achieve 80 miles per gallon. Fine, except that the conclusion by the Partnership in 2000, the very year that Prius first hit U.S. dealer showrooms, was: “An adequate market for a lighter-weight, fuel-efficient vehicle does not currently exist, nor is it expected to develop in the near future.” Oops.

Back to my topic. Innovative thinking requires a good bit of “what if?” It’s how Prius Projects began the Prius Concept Bike, stating:

“Innovation. It defines what is possible, it is our potential, and it promises a better and brighter future. It’s what is changing the way we drive, and it’s what made the Toyota Prius what it is today.There is a choice to be made every time something is built. It can either be done the way that is tried-and-true, or you can venture into the unknown in hopes of making that something better than it was before. This is the path taken by the Toyota Prius and its designers. Building upon the familiar foundations of a car, the Prius is an optimized version of something we were already familiar with. By blending cutting-edge technology with simple, sustainable materials, the Prius became a benchmark of efficiency, a testament to those who innovated and dared to make it so, and the cornerstone of a philosophy that is changing the way we drive today.”

“But striving to innovate more efficient and sustainable means of transportation is a goal that we believe should reach beyond the four-wheeled vessels we have become so accustomed to. So we asked ourselves: What if the Prius were a bicycle?”

Prius Projects (and Saatchi LA) enlisted the help of Boston-based bike builder Parlee Cycles and the innovative design studio Deeplocal to build the Prius X Parlee (PXP) concept bicycle in under three months. As Prius Projects describes it, the PXP is…

“…imbued with the spirit of Prius, this aero-road bike is also a purpose-built machine that blends simplicity with the complex to become a better, more efficient version of something that already exists. Each innovation, feature and process used in and on the PXP was inspired by the Prius and serves to make it more efficient while emphasizing ease of use. Its monocoque carbon-fiber frame keeps the PXP lightweight while increasing its durability and rideability. Its brakes were molded into the fork and bottom bracket to increase aerodynamics, along with countless other tweaks that were tested and validated in the wind tunnels at MIT. A built-in dock for a smartphone enables riders to view information about their speed, cadence and heart rate.”

All of these features and more come together to produce a bike akin to the Prius. But to truly encapsulate what the Prius stands for, more forward thinking was applied. Designed by Deeplocal, a neurotransmitter-packed helmet and interface empowers the PXP’s rider to shift gears, as if by magic, just by thinking about it.

A successful result of a collaborative exploration, the PXP proves that there is always room for improvement. Like the car it was inspired by, it is able to go farther for longer and serves as a demonstration of what is possible when we look to the future and improve upon what we have already accomplished to get there.”

Take a look!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was upset about some directional shifts and looming job shuffles swirling around their company. As I listened to the lament, I recognized the fact that they were focusing on the symptoms of the issue. All of his reactions and proposed courses of action in response to the unsettling circumstances didn’t address what I could tell was something deeper.

My friend had lost the raison d’être for his work. The connection to a higher purpose, or a deeper cause, simply wasn’t there any longer. The solution, according to my friend, was to immediately leave. While in the end it may play out to be the right thing to do, the problem-solving coach gene in me couldn’t resist butting in.

“Have you ever done a 5 Whys on your work?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” came the reply.

I explained how The 5 Whys is a simple but powerful problem-solving technique that allows you to dip below the surface level of a problem to uncover and identify the root cause of the issue. It’s something I learned and mastered at Toyota, and have been teaching ever since.

It’s simple enough to employ. You begin with a statement of the problem, then ask a series of childlike “Whys” to get to the bottom of the issue. Let’s say your son or daughter comes home with a D in Math on their report card. For most parents, that’s a clearly defined problem. The 5 Whys goes something like this:

“Why did you get a D in Math?” After much “I don’t knowing” and shoulder-shrugging:

“Because I didn’t do all my homework assignments.”

Note that if you stop right there, the solution goes something like: “Get in your room and do your homework–no TV, no computer, no iPhone, no iPad…in fact, no dinner until you’re done.” Incomplete homework is mostly likely not the real issue, though. So you need to press on.

“Why didn’t you do your homework?”

“I hate math.” (Ugly face, like they just swallowed Drano.)

“Why do you hate math so much?”

“Because I suck at it.” (Getting perturbed.)

“Why do you think you suck at it?”

“I don’t just don’t get it.” (Throwing hands in the air. Sometimes accompanied by backtalk: “OK? Are you happy now? I said it. I’m stupid.”)

Aha. Now the solution looks quite different: “Get in your room and understand it.” (Just kidding!) Seriously, your child needs extra help with Math. Maybe that’s you, maybe it’s a special school program, maybe it’s a tutor. The possibilities emerge once the root cause is discovered.

Now, there are a few things to note about this. First of all, it didn’t take five Whys, it took four. There is no magic around the number 5, contrary to popular belief. It’s a heuristic, a guideline, not an algorithm. With a well-framed problem, it may only take a couple Why? questions. If, however, you go beyond 5, it’s a good bet you need to rescope your initial problem statement, because it’s not specific enough.

Also, The 5 Whys is not a horizontal inquiry. In other words, you’re not asking “Why else?” time after time. Rather, you’re feeding off the previous answer to a Why? question. It’s a vertical dive. And as such it’s much like drilling for oil: sometimes you get it, sometimes you don’t. You may be solving the wrong problem, or your Whys don’t hang together logically. Sometimes they become circular.

If, say, you had asked one more Why? ala “Why didn’t you ask for help?” the response may have just taken you back up the chain–your child hated Math so much the thought of spending more time on it was distasteful. (Or perhaps another response to the same fifth Why? might have opened a whole other can of worms: “I was afraid to ask for help.”) So there’s a bit of an art and skill (which simply comes from regular practice) to deploying the right set of Whys?

One trick, a test, really, is to make sure all your answers to the Whys make as much logical sense going up as they seem to going down. In other words, in the homework case, starting at the bottom and working your way up: your child doesn’t understand Math, so they perform poorly at it, which results in them not liking it. And because they don’t like it, they avoid doing their homework, which results in a D on their report card.

Makes sense down and up.

I’m constantly amazed at how few people still aren’t aware of the technique, despite it’s appearance in many domains. The renowned product design firm IDEO used it in interviewing dieting women around the country to understand their attitudes and behaviors around weigh loss. Dozens of books (including one of my own) cover it.

Back to my friend. I told him the story of how a colleague of mine at Toyota years ago used The 5 Whys to create his own first job. His manager in Japan told him, after his initial training, told him: “go dig your own job.” So he set off in search of a problem to solve, which he did, discovering that a contentious relationship existed between Toyota and General Motors with respect to the supply of parts to joint Toyota/GM operations in the U.S. (this was back in the early 1990s). Why the bad relationship? Because there was no formal supply contract. Why was there no contract? Because Toyota and GM couldn’t agree to terms, so there was no basis for a contract. Why couldn’t they agree? Because there were serious misunderstandings regarding Toyota policies, such as parts pricing. Why the misunderstanding? Because Toyota had never really explained the rationale behind their policies regarding the supply of parts, and would not negotiate parts pricing, much to the consternation of GM. Why no negotiation? By talking to both parties using his bilingual skill, my colleague quickly came to the conclusion that the root of the problem was to be found in the general lack of communication between Toyota and GM. Communication was not occurring because neither party knew how to explain their position–they simply did not speak the other’s language.

I could see my friend’s mental wheels spinning. I suggested he might use The 5 Whys to find his own personal and professional “root cause” in life. I suggested he should find some quiet time for reflection, and gave this example of how it could work:

Start with your job description, what you get paid to do. Let’s say, for hypothetical purposes, that you’re a census taker. You collect nationwide household information and compile thorough reports. Then it’s a matter of peeling the onion. Why is collecting nationwide household information important? Because it gives the government current information on our nation’s population. Why is that important? Because we can then understand our population trends. Why is that important? Because it helps our government make informed decisions. Why is that important? Because it enables the government to improve the social welfare of the nation. And there’s the real “cause”: improving the welfare of the nation.

The beauty of using The 5 Whys to understand your real work–work with a capital W–is that it frees you to accept a wider variety of jobs, because you can remain true to your cause regardless of the form your Work takes. Designers call this “form following function.”

By getting to the bottom of the simple question – Why is my work important? – a manager might begin to view their real work as helping people improve their performance, not just running a department. A factory worker in an automotive plant might begin to view their real work as protecting families as they travel, not just operating machinery. A coffee shop counterperson might view their real work as helping busy people get a nice start to a hectic day. A golf course greenskeeper might begin to view his work not as lawn maintenance, but rather a creative challenge: enabling golfers to shoot their best round.

I don’t know if my friend actually did The 5 Whys, but I hope they did.

Do you use The 5 Whys? If so, how and when and where? I’d love to hear stories!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

In the era of tablet computing, one thing that might have been predictable amidst the rapid proliferation is specialization. To wit, the QOOQ tablet, pictured here, designed for a fairly narrow function: cooking.

Why might you need a special tablet for your kitchen, you ask? I can think of several reasons. First, cookbooks are not user friendly. They aren’t designed for use in the kitchen, by and large. Mostly because they’re, er, large. They don’t wear well, and don’t stand up to grease stains and spills of different kinds. (One good tip of a glass of red wine, a mandatory accessory when cooking, and the page is done.) In my house, I bet we have 2 dozen cookbooks on a shelf, along with hundreds of recipes downloaded from various and assorted online sites and printed out on separate sheets of paper…some with pictures, some just text. We keep them all, but only use a few recipes. The good ones. 100 pounds of paper for a few ounces of value isn’t very effective or efficient.

Why not use a tablet like an iPad, loaded with a few apps, like Epicurean? Trying spilling something on an iPad. Try cleaning grease out of seams. Try constant exposure to heat and humidity and all things oily. Try getting just the right viewing angle. Try knocking it off the counter. Try finding a very focused bit of content, complete with video guides by great European chefs, without a good bit of hunting, pecking, scanning, and waiting for video download.

The QOOQ is kitchenproof, with a touchscreen  specifically designed to be used in the kitchen. It resists humidity and heat, can be used with hands covered in flour or fat, and can easily be cleaned with a damp cloth. Its screen is treated to be splash proof, and is 60% thicker than other tablet touchscreens. The buttons are waterproof, the legs have slip proof studs, and there’s a retractable support the QOOQ leans on.

Content-wise, the QOOQ allows you to access premium culinary services and content–thousands of recipes and videos from over 100 renowned chefs–directly in your kitchen and follows you through the preparation of your recipes. With a swipe you can choose recipes, link them with a meal and a particular day in the calendar, and then create a shopping list accordingly. The QQOQ will automatically generate that list, organized by supermarket aisles, which you can email, print or view on your smartphone.

And here’s what I love: the QOOQ reduces waste, because you know exactly what you need and you can buy just what you need. Just in time, just enough grocery shopping is something that requires a good bit of discipline, and the QOOQ actually helps. And, it’s smart: the more you use it, the more it gets to know you, and offers a completely personalized accompaniment adapted to your tastes and you culinary level.

For the hassle and excess it appears to bannish, the $399 price tag seems justified. With the holidays approaching, this might just be the perfect gift for the high-tech chef.

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