Author Archives: Robert B. Tucker

About Robert B. Tucker

Robert B. Tucker is a globally recognized business futurist and president of The Innovation Resource Group in Santa Barbara, California. He has advised clients in 54 countries and authored eight books, including the bestsellers Managing the Future and Driving Growth Through Innovation. Tucker’s insights have guided organizations from IBM, Citibank, and American Express to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Dubai government. As one of the founders of the Innovation Movement, Robert has appeared on Bloomberg, Channel News Asia, Network 18 India, PBS, and was a featured guest on the CNBC series The Business of Innovation. A regular contributor to Forbes.com, Robert’s latest book is Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration.

Building Your Personal Innovation Strategy

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Building Your Personal Innovation Strategy

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

Most of the discussion around disruption these days revolves around companies, but very little around individual careers. In a time of exponential change and dislocation, with job functions being automated and algorithms doing more of the work humans used to do, it’s more important than ever to develop a personal career road-map that keeps you on course, no matter what comes at you.

As companies get disrupted, their people do too. Hewlett-Packard, as it struggles to cope with product commoditization and cloud computing, has laid off 30,000 employees over the past five years. Publishing giant Pearson is cutting 4000 staffers as it attempts to deal with the meltdown in textbook publishing. Money managers, facing billion dollar withdrawals from actively managed funds, face diminution of their value proposition. Brick and mortar retailers face dislocation as consumers gravitate to shopping online, and thousands of retail employees are no longer needed.

The best way to avoid the trauma of sudden disruption is to develop a Personal Innovation Strategy — a written out plan that keeps you on course through good times and bad. Not only do you avoid personal obsolescence, you roll with the punches. And you build resilience. Here are six key components to building a personal innovation strategy:

1. Take time to develop your strategy.

A Personal Innovation Strategy is a well-conceived and written set of goals, habits, and daily actions that alert you to threats, helps you seize opportunities, and insures your viability over time. Whether you’re an independent contractor (part of the “gig” economy), or a corporate employee, think of yourself as You, Inc. Since the likelihood is almost 100 percent that you’ll be independent at some point, think of yourself in this context already.

Action step: Take at least fifteen minutes daily to strategize and invest time in contemplating your future. Make it a point to learn something new every day about the changing fortunes in your profession or industry. Collect articles, ask questions, read books, do research, and take notes. Lifelong learning begins here.

2. Rate your employer’s disruption factor.

A common lament of the dislocated: “we didn’t see it coming.” Busy executing and meeting deadlines, they ignored signals of change. They buried themselves in work, and hoped for the best. My advice: develop your early warning system starting right now. Do a deep dive into the viability of your company’s value proposition in light of technological, political, regulatory, consumer and social trends.

Action step: Rate your employer’s Disruption Factor by understanding how your company’s business model is holding up in today’s world of disruption and change — and how it’s likely to hold over the next three to five years. What are the analysts saying about your company? What threats are on the horizon? Don’t allow yourself to be blindsided when the signs were there all along.

3. Manage your future. Set both short and longer-term goals.

If you’re serious about taking charge of your future, start by daydreaming. Fantasize about the future as you want it to emerge. Let your imagination go. How do you want life to unfold in its most ideal form? Sketch out a portrait of your life on a day in the future five and ten years out. What’s the view over the breakfast table? What kind of leisure activities are you engaged in?

Action step: Ask yourself: how is what you are doing in your job and in your life right now helping you manifest the future as you most want it to be?

4. Prepare yourself by taking on new responsibilities.

In today’s world, if you’ve grown comfortable in your career, something must be wrong. If you’re feeling your work life is in stasis, it’s probably time to raise your game. Challenge yourself to plan your next strategic move by taking on new duties.

Even a lateral move in your company could enlarge your experience and get you into what I call Opportunity Mode. Volunteer to take on challenges that take you out of your comfort zone. Develop new aptitudes and attitudes. And remember: your next big break could be in your present occupation or in an entirely new context.

Action step: Get ready by regularly taking on new learning experiences.

5. Build soft skills.

Think about the skills you use regularly and how they can be improved: communication skills, technology skills, writing skills, functional skills and especially interpersonal skills. Part of your Personal Innovation Strategy should involve raising your game in each of these areas.

A recent study, “The Rise of Women in the High-Skilled Labor Market,” made a troubling discovery, if you happen to be male, that is. Over the past several decades, researchers found, high paying occupations – from physicians to software engineers to money managers – require increasing levels of interpersonal skills. Those professionals who only have cognitive skills (like problem-solving and analysis) are vulnerable to being replaced by those with a diverse set of skills where women tend to excel. Chief among them: empathy.

Action step: Continue to build upon both hard and soft skills.

6. Strive to become indispensable.

Your functional and technical skills are what got you your current job. But as industry disruption impacts more and more professions and industries, the most valuable skills you can add to your repertoire are not just soft skills but innovation skills. These skills include not just soft skills like empathy, but the ability to create the future.

As I often tell my audiences: Whatever your position, profession or industry, your ability to innovate – to find new and better ways to add value, to discover opportunity where others see only problems, to get new things done, to be entrepreneurial, to energize and motivate people around you, to build the buy in and gain consensus to move forward – these skills, will give you a personal competitive advantage that can never be outsourced. And they, along with your Personal Innovation Strategy, will serve you well in the years ahead. No matter how the future unfolds.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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Get Creatively Unstuck with These Seven Techniques

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Get Creatively Unstuck with These Seven Techniques

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

If you solve problems for a living, you’ve probably had it happen. Just when you least expect it — and just when you need to be brilliant — you’re suddenly blocked. You pour on the coffee and tell yourself you’ll power it out. But all you produce is the jitters. You try burning the midnight oil, and all you do is exhaust yourself. Face it: your “idea factory” has decided to shut down. You’re stuck.

The condition can be so jarring that authors have a name for it: writers block. For them, it’s the inability to produce satisfactory new work. In some cases, it can last for years, as it did for such luminaries as Stephen King, Harper Lee, and Truman Capote. For the rest of us, it’s usually a temporary condition, but no less frustrating if you’re coming up on an important deadline and your well is suddenly, inexplicably dry.

Getting stuck doesn’t have to become a personal crisis. Not if you have a few tools in your toolkit for just such times. Here are seven surefire ways to avoid the time- wasting, agonizing period of non-productivity known as being stuck — and get quickly back on track:

1. Recognize that you’re stuck. But don’t panic.

“Getting stuck is all part of the process,” the senior engineer at a defense contractor remarked recently. “It doesn’t scare me like it did when I was younger.” Don’t let it scare you either, but learn to recognize the symptoms. If you find yourself aimlessly surfing the Internet and avoiding the project you’re on, this could be a sign. If you draw a mind-map but can only come up with several options, this could be a heads up that you’re stuck. If you call a meeting to discuss solutions to a problem and silence fills the air –your team is stuck.

Try this: Interview yourself: why do you feel you are stuck? What’s happening in your work or your personal life that may have precipitated this state? What has worked for you in the past to get back on track? The simple solution might be to get a good night’s sleep. Focusing on something else for a day or two can also work. But if the condition persists, your strategy needs to be to shift and keep shifting until you get your groove back.

2. Consciously shift your environment.

Start shifting your environment, your perspective, and your approach to the problem you’re working on till you get back into a flow state. How? Start by changing where you’re working on the problem. Change your physical environment. Go work in the conference room, or at the coffee shop down the street. Work from home.

In a recent session I led for an engineering firm, one participant said this: “If stuck, I’ll put [the project] aside, take a walk, visit a museum, or sleep on it. I often awake with complete solutions. I keep paper and pencil next to my bed and in my car at all times.”

Other ideas: Visit a toy store with your kids and let them lead you around. Go to a museum. Go for a walk in the woods or take a spin on your bike. Nature is God’s environment to help get us unstuck. Use it.

3. Consciously shift your approach.

Tried and true problem-solving steps can sometimes be ignored as we try to cut corners and produce brilliant work on the fly. If you’re feeling stuck, revisit these steps: identifying the problem, setting goals, brainstorming possibilities, and assessing alternatives. Solutions to the bigger problems and projects often come, not when we command them to appear, but because we’ve incubated ideas for a period of time. They are the result of gathering inputs from others, mulling over alternatives, and seeking inspiration to carry us to a higher level.

Here are comments I’ve heard:

  • If stuck, I’ll talk with a creative colleague in another field.”
  • “If stuck, I work at my white-board or sketch pad. If I’m still stuck, I’ll switch to another task and allow the first one to go in the background for a while.”
  • “When I get stuck, I walk out and clear my head and then query somebody on the idea. This isn’t easy at my company because I have to find someone with enough technical knowledge to understand what I’m talking about. And they’ve got to have a mind open enough to hear something that is not completely thought out.”

4. Shift your perspective.

“If stuck, I try to bounce the problem off others, thinking out loud,” observed one manager. “This always worked for me when I used to do software development.” Assumption assaulting is necessary because the human brain is designed for efficiency. It takes what neuroscientists call “perceptual shortcuts” to save energy. Only by forcing our minds to move beyond habitual thinking patterns can we imagine truly new solutions.

Years of experience in an industry, profession or job can give us invaluable experience. But they can also be a block. “It’s always been done that way” or “we already tried that” are often a sign that you and your team need to shift perspective to move beyond habitual thinking blocks in order to imagine alternate possibilities. To get unstuck and spawn fresh thinking, ask such questions as “I wonder if we…” or “what would an entirely different way of handling this situation look like?”

Try this: Bombard the brain with alternatives and possibilities. Actively challenge assumptions. Invite new thinking.

5. Avoid using the pressure of deadlines to ignite creativity.

Harvard professor Teresa Amibole studies creativity in the workplace. At the end of each day, she asks participants in her studies to report on their creative experience, by writing about it in their journals. After reviewing over 12,000 days of diary entries, Amibole made a surprising discovery. She found that people universally believed they were most creative when they were working under severe deadline pressure. But their diaries showed otherwise. They were actually least creative when fighting the clock. “Time pressure stifles creativity because people can’t deeply engage with the problem,” Amibole told one interviewer. “People need time to soak in a problem and let the ideas bubble up.”

Key message: We’ve all used a tight deadline to motivate us to get creative. But suppose you wait till the last minute and develop a case of stuck? Research indicates this is a bad habit worth breaking.

6. Develop creative muscle.

For much of my professional life, I’ve been involved in an ongoing study of the creative habits of highly successful innovators and the organizations they lead. In personal observation and countless interviews, I find they develop what I call creative muscle almost every waking hour. That is to say, they have or develop a conscious internal process to stimulate the input, throughput and output of ideas on a constant basis. They use a series of routines, habits, and techniques to keep their idea factories operating at peak levels day in and day out.

To take one example, Silicon Valley marketing guru Regis McKenna told me about his personal process for generating ideas. Whether attending board meetings, relaxing with his family, or conversing with colleagues, he takes along a moleskin idea notebook and jots down ideas as they occur. “You’re sitting there in that meeting, and something is said that relates to something else you’re working on, and boom – you get an idea. I’m always in this mode of looking for better ways of doing things.”

Action step: Become “idea-oriented” as you go through your day. Ideas are everywhere. Avail yourself to them by observing and being curious.

7. Know when to multitask and when to unitask.

It’s important to recognize the difference between being stuck, and simply being distracted. We may think we are more productive when we work on multiple projects at once, but research shows otherwise. Comparing multitaskers with non-multitaskers, Stanford professor Clifford Nass concluded that multitaskers performed poorly on a variety of tasks, were easily distracted, and had difficulty focusing.

It’s a challenge to cut out multitasking when creative concentration would serve us better. We all get a sense of being productive from being able to keep several balls in the air at once. But sustained periods of multitasking can lead to burnout, and increase the risk of getting stuck. So if you’re doing routine work, multitask to your heart’s content. But when you’re doing important non-routine work, make it a point to eliminate distractions and work on one project at a time. During these periods, put your phone on silent mode; close all web browsers and shut your door. Even when your thoughts wander, or you get sidetracked, remind yourself of the importance of focusing singularly rather than scattering your mental force across multiple issues.

Conclusion: There are lots of different ways to get unstuck. Use the ones that work for you.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Unsplash

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Six Practical Strategies For Discovering Your Next Opportunity

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Six Practical Strategies For Discovering Your Next Opportunity

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

To seize an opportunity, you must spot it first. As the pace of change continues to accelerate, the skill of trend tracking and opportunity spotting will gain in importance. Businesses — and individual careers– will rise or fall based on the ability to anticipate and creatively respond to new technologies, changing customer needs, shifting market forces, and geopolitical currents.

Use this six-step trend-tracking process to spot your next opportunity, and avoid being blindsided by change:

1. Observe trends in your daily life. Innovators notice more. They take in more information. They read voraciously. They ask questions. They question assumptions. So step one is to start noticing more wherever you are, wherever you go. Track consumer trends, technology trends, social trends, global trends, economic trends and political trends.

2. Project out ahead. Challenge yourself to envision “where will this trend be three, five and ten years out?” Today, artificial intelligence is at the same stage of development as the Internet in the mid-1990’s. The industry is expected to surge from $8 billion in revenue today to $47 billion by 2020. While trying to predict the velocity of a trend is difficult, projecting out ahead can give you perspective to shape your response as the trend develops.

3. Consider the larger impacts of the trend, technology or disruption. In other words, who’s going to be affected? Who will benefit from this development and who might lose? Ten years ago driverless cars were the stuff of science fiction. Today, semi-autonomous vehicles are available for purchase. So what are the impacts going to be as we all “go driverless.” If you’ve got young children; will they even need a driver license? Will people choose not to own a car? Perhaps the younger generations will simply order a ride with their smartphone on demand. And how about auto insurance companies? With fewer and fewer accidents, what happens to them? And what will our roads and transportation systems need to do differently? By considering the societal impacts and implications of a trend or technology, you broaden and “future proof” your perspective.

4. Do a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis. The next step is to think about the trend from the perspective of your career, your family, your team and your organization. Take, for example, the 3D Printing trend (also called additive manufacturing). If you’re a manufacturer, what are the threats if you don’t act on this development? According to the Harvard Business Review, the U.S. hearing aid industry converted to 100 percent additive manufacturing in less than 500 days, and not one company that stuck to traditional manufacturing methods survived the shift. Concludes HBR: “Managers will need to determine whether it’s wise to wait for this fast-evolving technology to mature before making certain investments or whether the risk of waiting is too great.”

5. Research early responses to the trend. As part of your SWOT analysis, do an internet search. In today’s connected world, by the time you identify a trend or development, somebody somewhere is probably already acting on it. They may be in Madagascar, or right in your back yard. Seek them out and exchange ideas. There may be a conference on the topic already. Your learning curve and response to the trend can benefit from their experience.

6. Embrace the opportunity mindset. Come back to the “O” in the SWOT acronym. After you review your firm’s strengths and weaknesses, and after you’ve sized up the threats inherent in the technology or the trend, lay your findings on the table, and then let your creative juices flow. Challenge yourself and your colleagues with a series of questions. How might we capitalize on this trend? How can we add value to the customer vis. a vis. this trend? If it’s a disruption bearing down on you, the question might be: how can we take these lemons and make lemonade?

In today’s world, it’s all too easy to get blindsided by trends we just didn’t pay attention to, or respond adequately to. Just ask Blockbuster, Blackberry, Nokia, Kodak, Circuit City and a host of others. By incorporating these six strategies into your daily routine, you’ll not only avoid disruption — you may just stumble upon your next breakthrough idea.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pixabay

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Six Innovation Leadership Skills to Master

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Six Innovation Leadership Skills to Master

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

You don’t need a crystal ball to see that the world of work is changing. According to an important new study from McKinsey Global Institute, almost half the jobs people currently perform have the potential to be automated by currently existing technology. It sort of makes you wonder: what kind of work will be left for humans to do?

The answer: innovation. Clearly, to thrive in this new world of work will require different skill-sets, mindsets, and tool-sets. Chief among them: the need to bring people together as a team. The need to demonstrate deeper empathy. The ability to get new things done.

Innovation in the next economy is about much more than inventing. It’s about figuring out how and where you can add unique value. It’s about how fast you can unlearn, relearn and master new skills. It’s about how you engage others at a deeper, more humanistic and passionate level.

Here are six critical leadership skills that will help you turbocharge your career in the coming days:

1. You Continuously Embrace The Opportunity Mode Of Thinking

Innovation in the new workplace is not what you do after you get your work done; it’s how you approach your work. In its simplest form, innovation is coming up with ideas and bringing them to life. To solve problems. Create opportunities. Instead of innovation being a department (new product development, research and development, IT, etc.), it is quickly becoming everybody’s business.

In Opportunity Mode you are passionately alert to possibility, to unmet needs, to the power of imagination, and to the thrill of turning vision into reality. Where others see problems, you sense potential. When others stress over details, you see the big picture, the progress being made, the vision of how things can be but are not yet. You realize that your perspective and attitude determines everything. And you know progress will happen, if only you keep the mood right and press ahead.

Action step: Exercise your imagination muscle. To shift perspective at any time during your day, invite yourself to come up with additional solutions to a challenge you currently face. Ask yourself (and your team members): what are five alternate ways to address this problem? What 10 things are working well in my life, team, job or organization right now? Learn to be aware of what mode of thinking – Defeatist, Dreamer, Sustainer or Innovator – you are in at present, and invite yourself to shift.

2. You Are Adept At Assaulting Assumptions

Assumptions are like barnacles on the side of a boat; they slow us down. In my work with hundreds of teams, ranging from C-suite executives to graduate students to mid-level managers and front line employees, I’ve developed some simple but powerful techniques to help people blast away at assumptions. This proactive bombardment of new stimuli is essential because the brain, left to its own devices, routinely takes what brain researchers call “perceptual shortcuts” to save time and energy.

Years of experience in an industry, profession or job can also be a deterrent. “It’s always been done that way” or “we already tried that” are often a sign that you and your team could use a technique to move beyond habitual thinking blocks in order to imagine alternate possibilities. Innovation begins where assumptions end. In today’s hypercompetitive world, we can either assault our assumptions, or somebody else will do it for us and reap the benefits.

Action steps: Consciously challenge personal, professional and industry assumptions. Do this to spawn fresh thinking. Asking such questions as “I wonder if we…” or “what would an entirely different way of handling this situation look like?”

When the thought that “there’s got to be a better way” pops into your mind just remember, there probably is. Nudge yourself to envision that better way. Experiment with alternatives and possibilities. In such moments, you are challenging the assumption that the status quo is the best or the only way – and you invited new thinking.

3. You Develop Empathy For The End Customer

Jennifer Rock worked in the marketing department at Best Buys’ Minneapolis headquarters when she was tapped to oversee the company’s intranet. The intranet was used to push policy changes out to the company’s 1500 stores, but Jennifer and her team transformed the intranet into a two-way communications vehicle. They began hosting weekly online surveys with store employees and managers. They created online discussion sessions for employees in disparate locations. And they hosted agenda-less town hall meetings where employees can interact with senior leaders.

When I asked Jennifer about why she took these steps, she spoke of her passion for the end customer – in this case, the company’s employees. “We wanted to do something about the disconnect between management and the field,” she explained to me in an interview. At the beginning of Jennifer’s journey to make the intranet a two-way communication vehicle, Best Buy’s employee turnover rate was over 80%. Today, it’s less than 50%.

Action steps: Strive to understand the business you’re in on a deeper level. Develop empathy for your end user, whether that customer is internal or external. Try to walk in their shoes. Seek to understand their pain points. Listen deeply to what that customer wants to accomplish, what problems they face, and how you and your organization might take on their problem. Step outside the bubble of your culture. Interact with more people. Wrap your brain gently around what they are trying to express.

4. You Proactively Think Ahead Of The Curve

Ever try walking around in the dark without a flashlight? It’s an unsettling feeling and can often lead to injury if you walk straight into something you couldn’t see. In today’s hyper-changing world, you need your own version of a flashlight. Things happen fast when we aren’t paying attention. Responding to issues on the home-front and in your personal life, and myriad other distractions and deadlines in the workplace can blind us to important societal, technological and other external changes. We can miss important trends, disruptions, and technologies. With your “flashlight” in hand, however, you will find things do not happen quite so suddenly.

Action steps: Your flashlight, as I tell my audiences, is your ability to illuminate the trends that surround you. Every innovator I’ve ever met has a voracious information diet: books, articles, alerts, reports. Developing the ability to track emerging trends is a skill. You get better at it with practice. It involves projecting out where these trends will go. Connecting the dots. It involves looking at what you must do or can do proactively to prepare for the future. By assessing and interpreting changes as they relate to your world, you position yourself to transform them into new opportunities.

5.You Continuously Fortify Your Idea Factory

Everybody has ideas. But only some people know how to keep their “idea factories” fortified to churn out a wealth of them on a consistent basis, when and where needed. Only a rare few know how to fuel their work with a constant flow of ideas from “ah ha” to “done.” This ability to “ideate” and invite ideas on purpose using tools like mind-mapping and simple brainstorming is an essential skill of the dawning world of work.

Action steps: Always consciously manage your mental environment so that you’re able to recognize the ideas that flutter into your life. Enhance your creative environment at home and at work. Turn your office into a creative place. Or, make efforts to seek inspiration outside the office. Practice encouraging creativity in the people around you. Compliment them for their “brilliant” suggestions and watch more of them appear. Remember: creativity is not a gift from the gods, but the result of preparation, routine, discipline.

6. You Are Adept At Building The Buy-In

In a world where everything seems to “go viral” instantly, we sometimes forget that persuading other people – colleagues, the boss, customers, our spouse – is an essential and developable skill. In studying breakthrough products and business models, I often find a whole lot of selling going on behind the scenes that helped the idea succeed.

For example, the 3M team responsible for launching Post-It Notes was growing desperate when senior management threatened to kill the product as a loser. Nobody was buying it. Retail stores were indifferent as nobody was requesting the funny little pads. So the team took action. They handed out Post-It Notes and showed people how to use them. They sent them to the administrative assistants of top CEOs, who began using them on documents. That was the turning point. Eventually, people started sticking them everywhere and began asking for them at retail stores. The new product took off.

Action steps: Strive to get better at communicating the merits of taking a certain course of action. Selling new ideas is about surmounting obstacles, overcoming objections and gaining commitment for (your) new way of doing things. Always focus on the benefits of adopting the new way, and avoid getting caught up in the features and technical details. Solicit feedback from friends, mentors and others you trust to sharpen your message. Watch the television program Shark Tank to understand how not to sell ideas. Always think about the individual or individual you’re presenting your ideas to. For instance, if your idea buyer is numbers oriented, use plenty of charts and graphs. If more aspirational, don’t bog down with details, and show how this enhances the brand. And be persistent: building the buy-in for a change often takes time and patience.

This article originally appeared in Forbes
Image credit: Pexels

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