GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

Great leaders blaze new trails, inspire new ways of thinking, and lead their organizations with purpose. In order for any company to meet its goals and to achieve sustainable Innovation, leaders need to inspire their teams, top to bottom, and bottom up.

Leaders must involve their entire organization in the vision, and promote an honest and open climate to achieve a meaningful shared vision of the future. While it may be easy to focus the lens inward, leadership is never about you… it is about them. The people you lead, and the teams who put their trust in your tenure.

One person I have always looked up to is Danny Meyer. Meyer leads his hospitality teams with constant, gentle, pressure. He learned early on that leadership is not about being in control. His role as a leader was not to become frustrated with his staff when they failed to execute his vision perfectly, but instead to lead with consistency, purpose, and vision.

“It’s my job, and consequently the job of every other leader in my company, to teach everyone who works for us to distinguish center from off center and always to set things right. I send my managers an unequivocal message: I’m going to be extremely specific as to where every component on that tabletop belongs. I anticipate that outside forces, including you, will conspire to change the table setting. Every time that happens, I’m going to move everything back to the way it should be.

That’s the constant aspect. I’ll never re-center the salt shaker in a way that denies you your dignity. That’s the gentle aspect. But standards are standards, and I’m constantly watching every table and pushing back on every saltshaker that’s moved because excellent performance is paramount. That’s the pressure.”

Over time, organizations and employees will take on the essence of its leadership, but how can teams represent the philosophy of its organization if the attitude, culture, and processes are not continually reinforced? Organizations whose teams are not trained and coached in its own unique approach to the imperatives of innovation are destined to amass a litany of failed projects. Proper hiring, training and coaching is essential to finding and keeping the right people for the right job, and having them trained in their role in order to perform their personal best.

According to Amy Cosper, Editor and Chief for Entrepreneur Magazine, “leadership is your contribution and your service to your company. It’s your survival, and that of those you lead”.

Training and coaching doesn’t just stop after the initial phase. Continuity is key. New techniques, processes and best practices should always be shared to foster a constant culture of Innovation. Even the trainers and coaches themselves need ongoing training and coaching to prevent their practices from going stale. This is especially true when attracting new talent from Millennial talent pools. Sustained Innovation is a constantly evolving process, and as a leader you help to spearhead the process.

To reinforce and enhance a creative company culture and mindset, effective training and coaching must not be forgotten. Any company that wants to stay in business needs a sustainable Innovation program. Here are some Training and Coaching tips to help your product development process:

• Share the Joy: As well as the frustrations – communicate what is working and not working.
• Pick the Right Coaches: Not everyone has the psychological makeup to be the coach.  Knowledge is key, obviously.  But the coach needs to be able to motivate, mediate, and create camaraderie and a sense of selflessness.
• The One-On-One Touch: Individual coaching provides the privacy and attention that breeds success.  I’ve found that discussions regarding areas for improvement are received and acted upon much better in a private session, away from peers listening in.  This can be especially critical with new employees and/or team members.
• Basics First: Make certain project management basics are taught, applied and re-taught.

To get results in Innovation, a structured, repeatable process is essential from start to finish. Look to all the imperatives of Robert’s Rules of Innovation – but be sure you know how to implement them. – See more at: https://

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GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

Innovation experts love making lists – and we love reading them.

I’ll be the first to admit that Fast Company’s “World’s Most Innovative Companies” is one of my favorite annual reports. I’m also a big fan of Forbes’ list which takes into account investor confidence and ranks companies by their innovation premium; the difference between their market capitalization and their net present value of cash flows from existing business.

As great as these lists are, they come with one big caveat. For the most part, they do a lot more looking back than they do forward. Companies are often ranked for innovation on their results with the idea that they will provide a good indication of future performance. Because performance is always easier to measure by assessing data that is readily available, rankings often focus on lagging indicators such as total sales, sales growth, and R&D spending (the worst of the bunch). But the truth is, lagging indicators often do not provide enough information to guide future predictions on their own. Don’t get caught making the same mistake with your own business.

Leading indicators signal future events and can provide a more accurate depiction of future success. They show you where you are going and what is coming next. Bear in mind, leading indicators shouldn’t be used simply as metrics for current conditions. Instead, use them to develop an organizational initiative toward continual improvement of product development, and operating procedures. Examples of leading indicators include: The number of new products ideas that your company has in the hopper and/or is working on, total patents filed, and the number of team members involved in NPD (New Product Development).

Success in product development is seen as one of the top indicators of the future performance of a company. To sustain Innovation, companies need to continuously improve their new product development capabilities. Quantitative and qualitative measurements of new product development will lend insights into a company’s strengths and weaknesses.

For any leading indicator to be effective, it must have certain characteristics.

It should be:

• Unique to your business environment
• Objective and easy to measure
• Able to provide reliable indications of the level of performance
• Understood by both management and the team whose performance is being monitored – As Richard Lannon for Project Times points out, it is important that your team not only identify KPI’s, but can also recognize the potential business impact indicated by them.

The most successful innovative companies observe and measure both indicators for successful development and execution of their quarterly and annual plans. By observing both, you gain a holistic and well-rounded view of your company’s performance.

Recently, Kalypso and the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business launched the Innovation Index™. “A first of its kind, forward-looking, comprehensive measure to benchmark innovation potential against aggregate data.”  In other words, an index to predict future innovation success.

According to the site, “The Innovation Index is different because it focuses on leading instead of lagging indicators. This is especially important for companies that want to improve the results of their innovation initiatives.” Interested in participating in the project? Learn more here!

Aside from fueling the right leading indicators, it is absolutely essential to make sure people and departmental objectives are aligned. But even more important , aside for the objectives, incentive and reward alignment is imperative to ensure common goals and desired results.

Remember, what gets measured gets done. Innovate and thrive!

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GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

Here’s to a New Year of Innovation!

Goodbye two-thousand and fourteen – Hello to the New Year! Typically with the passing of a year, I spend the first few hours feeling nostalgic. Facebook has their “year in review,” news outlets have their “best of 2014 lists,” and we all take a look back at last year’s resolutions.

For the first time in a long time, I am more interested in what is coming than reflecting on what has passed. This year, rather than thinking in terms of imperatives – I am thinking in terms of what is new – novel – and kinetic. I am thinking in terms of implementation, and a changing workplace environment. It’s exciting!

Today’s workplace is largely made up of three generations. Born in the early 60’s to 80’s – Generation X is sometimes referred to as the “lost” generation. They grew up in a time of political turmoil, and technological advancement. Generation Y represents those born in the late 80’s and early 90’s; Millennials. Coined by progressive business media brand Fast Company, Generation Flux is neither here nor there. Gen Flux as mentioned in my last post is a generation not defined by age, race, or location. For Generation Flux distance is not defined by meters or miles – but by the distribution and dissemination of information. For GenFlux, progress is chaotic. – And that’s a good thing.

Today’s younger business colleagues approach their professional life differently than those before. The latest breed of workers do not fear change and feel at home with quickly changing technology. Failure to understand the new forces at work in the 2015 workplace will impede your efforts in creating the top-down bottom-up alignment needed for successful and sustainable innovation. You will need to create a place of work that attracts talent from all three generations. Whereas in years past, the organization’s culture would shape the individual employees, today it is the value system of the individuals that, collectively, define the organization’s style and mores.
In this environment, how can you best create an eco-system that allows today’s talent to flourish?

Consider these steps:

• Cross-Pollination: For optimal innovation, your organization must be a paradigm of communication, one that fosters intra-organizational idea exchange and collaboration.

• Potential vs. Expertise: Which is the most important innovation team attribute- is it potential, or expertise? Trick question – The answer is both! With a new wave of applicants in today’s job market, you’ll want to select some candidates with potential as well as some with direct industry expertise. You may find that those with less real-world experience, but significant upside potential, may prove to be valuable, out-of-the-box thinkers that can step to the plate as tomorrow’s innovators and company leaders.

• Time to Think: In 2015 it is imperative to structure your environment in a way that permits thinking time. Time specifically set aside for working on innovation, aside from typical job duties. Some companies host off-campus innovation retreat, or a “hackathons”. The idea is to not only permit, but to push your folks to move their innovation projects forward and give them the time they need to do it.

• Failure IS an Option: Innovation means risk and with risk, success is never guaranteed. Failure, therefore, must be tolerated. Without the freedom to fail, your team’s collective courage to push the status quo will quickly evaporate and freeze your innovation efforts.

To get results in Innovation, a structured, repeatable process is essential from start to finish. Look to all the imperatives of Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

No Risk No Innovation

Over five thousand failures for just one success:  When Thomas Edison discovered the light bulb it took him 5,999 tries to get it right. Edison is quoted as saying, “Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward.”

Of the ten imperatives to Roberts Rules of Innovation, “No Risk… No Innovation” is arguably one of the most important. There are many possible roads to innovation, and unfortunately many of them lead to a dead end. Successful innovation means defining your own road, and learning to celebrate the wrong turns that ultimately lead to victory. It is inevitable that every success sees failures along the way. Sustainable innovation requires a strategy from start to finish, and an acceptance (if not celebration), of failure.

An effective innovation leader should encourage well-reasoned creativity and risk taking, while also practicing tolerance for failure. Fear of failure is an innovation killer, so let your team feel safe to fail, but empower them to do their best work.  Clearly communicate the risk profile you are asking your people to adopt and state why it is important to the organization’s success. Know your tolerance for risk and failure in the pursuit of innovation. The key to effective risk taking is to make failure a “learning experience”.

It is a known fact that as humans we are innately risk averse. Nobel Prize winner and  behavioral economics pioneer Daniel Kahneman explains in his bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, that when we compare losses and gains, we are evolutionarily wired to weigh losses more heavily. Like many innovators, you may find yourself struggling to innovate in a decidedly uncertain business arena.

According to Tory Higgins, professor of psychology and director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University, people are wired in one of two ways. We either see our goals as opportunities to maintain the status quo (prevention-focused) or we see our goals as opportunities to make progress and end up better off (promotion-focused). Prevention focused individuals are associated with a “robust aversion to making mistakes and taking chances”. Promotion focused individuals are motivated to make risky choices if they hold the potential for profitable gains.

Using Higgins’s model:

Promotion-focused people

• work quickly
• consider lots of alternatives and are great barnstormer’s
• are open to new opportunities
• are optimists
• plan only for best-case scenarios
• seek positive feedback and lose steam without it
• feel dejected or depressed when things go wrong

Prevention-focused people

• work slowly and deliberately
• tend to be accurate
• are prepared for the worst
• are stressed by short deadlines
• stick to tried-and-true ways of doing things
• are uncomfortable with praise or optimism
• feel worried or anxious when things go wrong

Understanding what motivates your team can help you make innovation a sustainable and repeatable process, and can lessen the aversion to risk. Team members need to be trained and coached to constantly improve their skill set, and this attitude should be continuously reinforced. Develop it step-by-step by building consensus, reinforcing ideas, underscoring the need for accountability, and asking the right questions.

Robert’s Rules of Innovation gives ten imperatives to create and sustain innovation. They are:

1. Inspire
2. No Risk No Innovation
3. New Product Development Process
4. Ownership
5. Value Creation
6. Accountability
7. Training and Coaching
8. Idea Management
9. Observe and Measure
10. Net Result Net Reward

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GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

Ideation and idea management pack the front end of the New Product Development (NPD) funnel with a wealth of viable concepts. One of the toughest processes in innovation is idea prioritization. Idea prioritization is about how you invest your company’s product development resources.

Most companies have too many projects underway for the limited resources available. Today’s business environment focuses on doing more with less, and providing the best value possible to shareholders. Time, human resources, and development dollars are closely guarded. Resources are too scarce to waste on moving the wrong projects forward.

Here is an Idea Prioritization Video Clip:

Prioritization is key. Intelligently facilitated ideation sessions that involve fresh perspectives from multiple departments lead to sustainable innovation and successful ROI. It is best if the progression of ideas is not just top down.  Top down mandates lack organizational ownership and buy-in. Ultimately ownership must extend beyond a single person to be embraced by the whole organization.  It is important to make sure your team knows that the best ideas do not always come from management. According to Marcus Erb for Entreprenuer.com, “a highly participative workplace yields better buy-in for decisions as people more fully support ideas they help create”.

Idea Selection Process

Begin with an ideation session to get ideas flowing into the hopper. Organizations need to conduct at least two ideation sessions each year in order to foster continued growth. A good innovation leader has the foresight to have an on-line idea submission exchange and schedule regular ideation sessions year after year, and not just when sales are dwindling.

Once you have collected your initial ideas and comments, it’s time to prioritize/select an idea using an idea ranking system, sometimes called an idea attractiveness ranking.

The first time you create your idea priority ranking, or idea attractiveness matrix, begin by surveying all associates. This will allow you to build a profile of innovation with criteria that matter to your organization as a whole, and helps to rank your organizations list of potential innovation ideas. Using pre-set and shared parameters chosen by your team ensures total buy in, and accountability.

Wallace Ryland is a current partner at Arden Operating Co., and former head of business development at Kiplinger. Ryland shares, “At Kiplinger, we created a very simple form: what it is, what’s the goal, what’s the forecast for audience development, and revenue. After 90 days, if we didn’t like it, it’s off the site.”  Tina Imm, General Manager at Time Inc., has a similar practice. “Someone submits a form that lists the idea and the potential audience. It’s the first line of defense, as it makes you think it through a little more.”

Some ideas for ranking criteria include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Market attractiveness
2. Strategic fit
3. Sales growth
4. Product advantage
5. Reward vs risk
6. Cost and time to implement

Once you have set your criteria, an innovation committee can set values for each parameter.  Often these are values on a scale of 0-5 or 0-10. See the example below:

In the above example, Idea A would be given the green light to continue through the next gate of the new product development process.

You will see that the best ideas, based on the resources & needs of your company, and chosen by your team, will naturally flow through the top. The selection of the top opportunities in this fashion will assure buy-in and support across the organization, from top to bottom.

Innovate and Thrive!

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GUEST POST by Robert F. Brands

After getting your house in order it is time to move from ideation to the NPD processes. This process is defined as the complete cycle of creating and bringing a new product to fruition – from idea creation to product sale; from concept to launch. New Product Development is addressed in the third step in Robert’s Rules of Innovation, and global appliance leader, Electrolux, teaches by example:

Electrolux, a Swedish Appliance Company is the second largest global appliance supplier behind Whirlpool. The company sells products branded as Frigidaire, Molteni, and AEG and their Grand Cuisine Line offers high-end kitchen appliances. Carol Matlack from BusinessWeek.com provides some insight into Electrolux’s transition from “being a capital-intensive organization to trying to be a talent-intensive organization”.

Step 1: Generating New Ideas

“What is the most unpleasant thing about vacuuming? Swedish appliance maker Electrolux (ELUXA:SS) has a lot riding on the answer. So two years ago the company’s market researchers spent hours in homes in Australia, France, and Russia, watching and asking questions as people vacuumed, then cataloging the ‘pain points.’”

Ask yourself when is the last time you used your product or service? Many Innovations, product and service improvements can originate from this effort. Look for product improvements, easier assembly, better packing, a better service experience…

The answer to both fuels new ideas.

Step 2: Screening the Idea

“Bagels vacuum cleaners are rapidly gaining market share globally, and Electrolux wanted to introduce a model that would stand out from competitors such as Dyson and Hoover.”

Electrolux asked several customers what they felt were the most annoying things about vacuuming.  Their researchers then spent hours observing homeowners vacuuming their carpets and recording their findings.  These briefs were then turned over to designers for modification ideas.

Step 3: Testing the Concept

“The company tests potential [UltraCaptic] designs with focus groups. Anything with a less than 70 percent approval rating is deemed not ready for prime time.”

The UltraCaptic design was originally a modification to an existing vacuum created by research and development after studying some of the unsavory characteristics of existing vacuums.

Step 4: Business Analytics

“The R&D side of the triangle weighed in next, assessing the pros and cons of different approaches. For example, a motorized compactor would be more powerful than a manual piston, but would be more expensive and require batteries. In the end, the manual compressor won.”

R&D became involved in the new product development process only after two rounds of focus groups were conducted with potential consumers.  The first priority of the company was to find out what customers wanted in a vacuum.

Innovation should not be just R&D’s responsibility; all should be involved from customer, to sales, finance, customer service and operations.

Step 5: Beta / Marketability Tests

“The company tests potential designs with focus groups. Anything with a less than 70 percent approval rating is deemed not ready for prime time.”

Electrolux went through three separate rounds of focus groups: one before design and two after initial designs to ensure the UltraCaptic was a vacuum cleaner that consumers wanted. 

Step 6: Technicalities + Product Development

“Before settling on a final design, Electrolux convened additional focus groups to review the alternatives, pitting them against models offered by rival companies, with brand names concealed. The 70 percent rule was applied at each stage.”

Design variations were made and compared to existing products from competitors.

image credit: electrolux.com