Author Archives: Robyn Bolton

About Robyn Bolton

Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.

Why Neglecting New Hire Ideas Hurts Revenue

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The Cost of Silence

Why Neglecting New Hire Ideas Hurts Revenue

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Stop me if this sounds familiar. A new hire bounces into your office and, with all the joy and enthusiasm of a new puppy, rattles off a list of ideas. You smile and, just like with new puppies, explain why their ideas won’t work, and encourage them to be patient and get to know the organization.

Congratulations! You just cost your company money. Not because the new hire’s idea was the silver bullet you’ve been seeking but because you taught them that it’s more critical for them to do their jobs and maintain the status quo than to ask questions and share ideas.

If that seems harsh, read the new research from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

Year 1: Rainbows and Unicorns (mostly)

From 2017 through 2021, Dr. Edmonson and her colleagues collected data from over 10,000 physicians. Using biannual (every two years) surveys, they asked physicians to rate on a 5-point scale how comfortable they felt offering opinions or calling out the mistakes of colleagues or superiors.

It was little surprise that agreement with statements like “I can report patient safety mistakes without fear of punishment” were highest amongst people with less than one year of service at their employer.

These results all come down to one thing: high levels of psychological safety.

Years 2+: Resignation and Unhappiness

However, psychological safety erodes quickly in the first year because:

There’s a gap between words and actions: When new hires join an organization, they believe what they hear about its culture, values, priorities, and openness. Once they’re in the organization and observe their colleagues’ and superiors’ daily behavior, they experience the disconnect, lose trust, and shift into self-protection mode.
Their feedback and ideas are rebuffed: This scenario is described above, but it’s not the only one. Another common situation occurs when a new hire responds to requests for feedback only to be met with silence or exasperation, a lack of follow-through or follow-up, or is openly mocked or met with harsh pushback
Expectations increase with experience: It’s easier to ask questions when you’re new, and no one expects you to know the answers. Over time, however, you are expected to learn the answers and you no longer feel comfortable asking questions, even if there’s no way you could know the answer.

20 years to regain what was lost in 1

According to Edmondson’s research, it takes up to 20 years to rebuild the safety lost in the first year.

As a leader, you can slow that erosion and accelerate the rebuilding when you:

Recognize the Risk: Knowing that new hires will experience a drop in psychological safety, staff them on teams that have higher levels of safety
Walk the Talk: Double down on demonstrating the behaviors you want. Immediately act on feedback that points out a gap between your words and actions.
Ask questions: Demonstrate your openness by being curious, asking questions, and asking follow-up questions. As Edmonson writes, “You are training people to contribute by constantly asking questions.”
Promises Made = Promises Kept: If you ask for feedback, act on it. If you ask for ideas, act on some and explain why you’re not executing others.
Be Vulnerable: Admit your mistakes and uncertainties. It sets a powerful example that it’s okay to be imperfect and to ask for help. It also creates an environment for others to do the same.

The Cost of Silence vs. The Cost of Time

Building and maintaining psychological safety takes time and effort. It takes 5 minutes to listen to and respond to an idea. It takes hours to ensure new hires join safe teams. It takes weeks to plan and secure support for post-hackathon ideas.

But how does that compare to 20 years of lost ideas, improvements, innovations, and revenue? To 20 years of lost collaboration, productivity, and peak effectiveness? To 20 years of slow progress, inefficiency, and cost?

How many of your employees stick around 20 years to give you the chance to rebuild what was lost?

Image credit: Pixabay

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How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

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Reality Strikes Back

How to Build Innovation Resilience in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“This time feels different.” I’ve been hearing this from innovation practitioners and partners for months We’ve seen innovation resilience tested in times of economic uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. We’ve seen it flourish when markets soar and capital is abundant. We’ve seen it all, but this time feels different.

In fact, we feel a great disturbance in the innovation force.

Disturbances aren’t always bad. They’re often the spark that ignites innovation. But understand the disturbance you must, before work with it you can.

So, to help us understand and navigate a time that feels, and likely is, different, I present “The Corporate Innovator’s Saga.”

Episode I: The R&D Men (are) Aces

(Sorry, that’s the most tortured one. The titles get better, I promise)

A long time ago (1876), in a place not so far away (New Jersey), one man established what many consider the first R&D Lab. A year later, Thomas Edison and his Menlo Park colleagues debuted the phonograph.

In the 20^th century, as technology became more complex, invention shifted from individual inventors to corporate R&D labs. By the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed 15,000 people, including 1,200 PhDs. In 1970, Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) opened.

Episode II: Attack of the Disruptors

For most of the twentieth century, R&D labs were the heroes or villains of executives’ innovation stories. Then, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen published, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail.

He revealed that executives’ myopic focus on serving their best (most profitable) customers caused them to miss new waves of innovation. In example after example, he showed that R&D often worked on disruptive (cheaper, good enough) technologies only to have their efforts shut down by executives worried about cannibalizing their existing businesses.

C-suites listened, and innovation went from an R&D problem to a business one.

Episode III: Revenge of the Designers

Design Thinking’s origins date back to the 1940s, its application to business gained prominence with l Tim Brown’s 2009 book, Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation.

This book introduced frameworks still used today’s: desirability, feasibility, and viability; divergent and convergent thinking; and the process of empathy, problem definition, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Innovation now required business people to become designers, question the status quo, and operate untethered from the short-termism of business,

Episode IV: A New Hope (Startups)

The early 2000s were a dizzying time for corporate innovation. Executives feared disruption and poured resources into internal innovation teams and trainings. Meanwhile, a movement was gaining steam in Silicon Valley.

Y Combinator, the first seed accelerator, launched in 2005 and was followed a year later by TechStars. When Eric Ries published The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses in 2011, the US was home to nearly 100 startup accelerators.

Now, businesspeople needed to become entrepreneurs capable of building, and scaling startups in environments purpose-built to kill risk and change.

In response, companies spun up internal accelerators, established corporate venture capital teams, and partnered with startup studios.

Episode V: Reality Strikes Back

Today, the combination of a global pandemic, regional wars, and a single year in which elections will affect 49% of the world’s population has everyone reeling.

Naturally, this uncertainty triggered out need for a sense of control. The first cut were “hobbies” like innovation and DEI. Then, “non-essentials” like “extra” people and perks. For losses continued into the “need to haves,” like operational investments and business expansion.

Recently, the idea of “growth at all costs” has come under scrutiny with advocates for more thoughtful growth strategies emerging There is still room for innovation IF it produces meaningful, measurable value.

Episode VI: Return of the Innovator (?)

I don’t know what’s next, but I hope this is the title. And, if not, I hope whatever is next has Ewoks.

What do you hope for in the next episode?

Image credit: Pexels

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Five Keys to Company Longevity

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Five Keys to Company Longevity

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

The quest for immortality is as old as humankind. From King Gilgamesh in 2100 BCE to Jeff Bezos and Larry Page, the only thing that stops our pursuit of longevity is death. So why don’t we apply this same verve and vigor to building things that last forever? Why don’t we invest in corporate longevity?

Consider this—in the last 80 years, human life expectancy increased by almost 30% while corporate life expectancy declined by almost 500%. Other research indicates that the average company’s lifespan on the S&P 500 Index dropped from 60 years in 1960 to just under 15 years in 2024.

We spend billions on products to slow, stop, and even reverse aging. Yet, according to the New York Times, there are just seven keys to living longer.

Could achieving corporate longevity possibly be just as simple?

Yes.

Here are five keys to corporate longevity.

1. Take care of yourself today AND invest for tomorrow

We all know what we should do to stay healthy. But one night, you don’t sleep well, and hearing your 5:00 am alarm is physically painful. What harm is there in skipping just one workout? At work, you had a bad quarter, so cutting the research project or laying off the innovation team seems necessary. After all, if you don’t save today, there won’t be a tomorrow, right?

Right. But skipping workouts becomes a habit that can bring your retirement plans crashing down. Just like cutting investments in R&D, innovation, and next-gen talent makes keeping up with, adapting, and growing in a rapidly changing world impossible.

2. Build and nurture relationships. Inside AND outside your company

According to the Harvard Study of Adult Development, strong relationships lead to happier and healthier lives and are the biggest predictor of well-being. Turns out relationships are also good for business.

Strategic alliances and partnerships directly grow revenue. For example, 95% of Microsoft’s commercial revenue comes from its partner ecosystem. Starbucks’ collaboration with Nestle allowed the coffee chain to expand its presence in people’s lives while Nestle gained access to a growing category without the cost of building its own brand. There’s a reason that Andreessen Horowitz declared partnerships a “need to have” in today’s world.

3. Everything in moderation

Toddlers are the only people more distracted by shiny objects than executives. Total Quality Management. Yes, please. Disruptive Innovation. Absolutely. Agile. Thank you, I’ll take two.

Chasing new ideas isn’t wrong. It’s how you chase them that’s dangerous. Uprooting your existing processes and forcing everyone to immediately adopt Agile is the corporate equivalent of a starvation diet. You’ll see immediate improvements, but long-term, you’ll end up worse off.

4. Eliminate bad habits (and bad people)

“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worse behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”

Read that again. Slowly.

To live longer, stop engaging in, tolerating, and justifying bad habits. To make your company live longer, stop tolerating and justifying people and behaviors that contradict your company’s culture. Eliminating bad behavior is tough, but it’s the only way to get to your goal. In life and in business.

5. Rest

Getting 7-8 hours of sleep a night adds years to your life. Less than five hours doubles your dementia risk. More sleep also boosts your productivity and creativity at work.

The latest example of rest’s power is the four-day workweek. In 2022, 61 UK companies adopted it without any changes in pay. Two years later, 54 still have the policy, and over 30 made it permanent. Other companies, like Microsoft in Japan, reported productivity increases of more than 40%.

What will you unlock with these keys?

As a leader, you have the power to build a legacy and a company that thrives for generations. But that only happens if you channel the same energy into achieving corporate longevity that you put into pursuing a longer, healthier life.

By embracing the keys of corporate longevity—caring for today while investing in tomorrow, nurturing relationships, practicing moderation, eliminating bad habits, and prioritizing rest—you’ll build businesses that endure.

The journey to corporate immortality starts with a single step. What’s yours?

Image credit: Pixabay

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The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis

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Executive Trust in Their Teams is Plummeting – Here is How to Rebuild It

The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Trust no one. Suspect everyone.” Great advice if you’re an MI6 agent trying to uncover a spy at the height of the Cold War. Not great advice if you’re a senior executive responsible for leading a team to deliver record results. So, when a report titled “Leadership Confidence Falls to Three-Year Low” was published, I hoped it was clickbait. So I clicked.

Things only got worse.

While two-thirds of CEOs believe that their teams role model the right culture and behaviors, work together effectively as a team, and effectively embrace change, everyone else disagrees. Only about half the C-suite believes their teams work together well, are role models, and embrace change. The lower in the organization you go, the lower those percentages get.

Why confidence is at an all-time low

In a word – change. Neither humans nor financial markets like change, and that’s all we’ve experienced for the past four years. “From the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and their destabilizing effects on the world, to inflation, rising interest rates, and the launch of ChatGPT igniting massive interest in generative AI, the leadership landscape has been far from quiet. What’s more, nearly half of the world’s population is set to head to the polls for what many are calling a ‘super election year.’”

None of this is the executive team’s fault, but the relentless nature of depressing and destabilizing news wears everyone down. As a result, people have less patience and empathy and are quicker to anger, judge, and blame others. Senior execs are people, too. And they’re taking their exhaustion out on the people they spend the most time with – their teams.

What you can do about it

If you have the power to stop the wars, improve the financial markets, quell GenAI fears, and ensure that democracy reigns, please use that power now. (Also, what have you been waiting for?)

If you do not have such powers, there is still something you can do: Build trust.

Researchers found that leaders of high-performing organizations are 8x more likely to feel that their teams practice and role model high levels of trust in all their interactions across the organization. But the teams won’t practice and role model trust if you don’t set the example through:

Inclusive, transparent, and vulnerable communication – Most of us grew up in cultures where information is power, so it is hard to build a habit of sharing information with everyone on the team, especially if it isn’t good news. But if you want your people to work together as a team, you can’t create cliques or pick and choose the information you share. There is no trust where there are Haves and Have Nots.
Lead by listening and collaborating – In case you haven’t noticed, command and control styles of management don’t work anymore. The people on your teams are experienced adults with good ideas. Treat them like adults, value their experience, and listen to their ideas. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you hear and earn.
Be consistent – If one of the causes of the problem is change and you want to be part of the solution, do the opposite – be consistent. Yes, things can change, but who you are, the values you role model, and how you treat people shouldn’t. When things change (and they will), remember that decisions made with data should only be unmade with data. Then, communicate those changes broadly, transparently, and honestly (see #1)

What will you do about it?

Rebuilding trust within your team isn’t a quick fix; it’s an ongoing process that requires commitment and consistency. By being transparent, authentic, and reliable, fostering open communication, and empowering your team, you can create a high-trust environment that drives success.

What steps are you taking to (re)build trust within your teams? Share your thoughts and let’s navigate this journey together. Remember, trust is the glue that holds your team together and propels your organization forward.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Adjacent Innovation is the Key to Growth and Risk

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Adjacent Innovation is the Key to Growth and Risk

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s not easy leading innovation. Especially these days. You need to do more with less. Take risks while guaranteeing results. Keep up with competition through incremental innovation and redefine the industry with radical and disruptive innovation. It’s maddening. Until you find the Goldilocks Zone of adjacent innovation.

Adjacent Innovation: From Middle Child to Just Right

As HBS Professor Regina E. Herzlinger and her co-authors point out in a recent HBR article, the US is in the midst of an innovation crisis. The cost of lost productivity, estimated at over $10 trillion between 2006 and 2018, is a stark reminder of the economic consequences of a lack of innovation. This figure, equivalent to $95,000 per US worker, should serve as a wake-up call to the importance of innovation in driving economic growth.

The authors identify the root cause of this loss as the ‘polarized approach companies take to innovation.’ While companies focus on incremental innovation, the safe and reliable oldest child of the innovation family, the Venture Captialists chase after radical, transformative innovations, the wild, charismatic, free-spirited youngest child. Meanwhile, adjacent innovation – new offerings and business models for existing customers or new customers for existing offerings and business models – is, like the middle child, too often overlooked.

It’s time to rediscover it. In fact, it’s also time to embrace and pursue it as the most promising path back to growth. While incremental innovation is safe and reliable, it’s also the equivalent of cold porridge. Radical or transformative innovation is sexy, but, like hot porridge, it’s more likely to scorch than sustain you. Adjacent innovation, however, is just right – daring enough to change the game and leapfrog the competition and safe enough to merit investment and generate short-term growth.

Proof in the Porridge: 4x the returns in HALF the time

Last year, I worked with an industrial goods company. Their products aren’t sexy, and their brands are far from household names, but they make the things that make America run and keep workers (and the public) safe. The pandemic’s supply chain disruptions battered their business, and their backlog ballooned from weeks to months and even years. Yet amidst these challenges, they continued to look ahead, and what they saw was a $6M revenue cliff that had to be filled in three years and a product and innovation pipeline covered in dust and cobwebs.

From Day 1, we agreed to focus on adjacent innovation. For four weeks, we brainstormed, interviewed customers, and analyzed their existing offerings and capabilities, ultimately developing three concepts – two new products for existing customers and one existing product repositioned to serve a new customer. After eight more weeks of work, we had gathered enough data to reject one of the concepts and double down on the other two. Three months later, the teams had developed business cases to support piloting two of the concepts.

It took six months to go from a blank piece of paper to pilot approval.

It took just another 12 months to record nearly $25M in new revenue.

Those results are more than “just right.”

Be Goldilocks. Pursue Adjacent Innovation

Every organization can pursue adjacent innovation. In fact, most of the companies we consider amongst the world’s “Most Innovative” have that reputation because of adjacent innovation.

How will you become your organization’s Innovation Goldilocks and use adjacent innovation to create “just right” growth?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Breaking Free From Stagnation

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Breaking Free From Stagnation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

As a leader in your organization, you’re under tremendous stress. Not only do you need to deliver against a “growth strategy” that demands constant increases in revenue and profit, but you also need to cut costs and support employees who are more disengaged and burned out than ever before. If it feels like you’re working harder and running faster than ever to maintain the status quo, then I have good and bad news for you.

Bad news: You’re right.

The feeling of working harder or moving faster simply to stay in the same place is called the Red Queen effect or hypothesis. The hypothesis asserts “that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and proliferate in order to survive while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species.” Its name is inspired by the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, who explains to Alice, “here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

You probably feel the same need to adapt to survive “while pitted against ever-evolving opposing species” every time you see new technologies, read about another new management framework, or hear news from your competitors. You also understand that your organization needs to grow and often hear that it needs to do so at all costs, so you buckle down, work hard, and pull off quarterly miracles.

Good for you! You’re reward? You get to do it all over again, and faster, this quarter. And, to add insult to injury, all that growth you’re working harder and harder to achieve is a mirage.

75% of companies do not grow.

HBS professor Gary P. Pisano examined the growth rate of 10,897 publicly held US companies between 1976 and 2019. When adjusted for inflation, the top quartile grew 11.8% yearly, but the other 75% showed little to negative growth.

Being in that top quartile was no guarantee of success, as only 15% (3% of the total sample) were able to sustain a growth rate of 0.3%+ for 30 years. In fact, only SEVEN companies—Walmart, UPS, Southwest, Publix, Johnson & Johnson, Danaher, and Berkshire Hathaway—were top-quartile growth companies throughout the thirty years studied.

If you worked at one of those 7 companies, congrats! Your hard work delivered real and repeatable growth. If you worked at any of the other 10,890, I hope they offer great benefits?

We know why.

Every good academic knows you can’t just throw out some data without trying to find a causal link, and Professor Pisano is a good academic

“I have found that while the usual explanations for slow or minimal growth—market forces and technological changes such as disruptive innovation—play a role, many companies’ growth problems are self-inflicted. Specifically, firms approach growth in a highly reactive, opportunistic manner. When market demand is booming, they go on hiring binges, throw resources at developing new capacity, and build out organizational infrastructure without thinking through the implications… In the process of chasing growth, companies can easily destroy the things that made them successful in the first place, such as their capacity for innovation, their agility, their great customer service, or their unique cultures. When demand slows, pressures to maintain historical growth rates can lead to quick-fix solutions such as costly acquisitions or drastic cuts in R&D, other capabilities, and training. The damage caused by these moves only exacerbates the growth problems.”

(Bold text added by me)

Good news: You Can Do Something About It

In fact, as a leader in your organization, you’re among the few who have any prayer of pulling your organization out of the Red Queen’s race and putting it on track to real and sustainable growth. Achieving this incredible success requires you (and your colleagues) to decide three things:

How fast to grow (target rate of growth)
Where to find sources of new demand (direction of growth)
How to assemble the resources required to grow (method of growth)

Together, these three decisions comprise your growth strategy and enable your organization to achieve the “delicate balance” between demand and supply required to sustain profitable growth.

Getting to these decisions isn’t easy, but neither is slaying the Jabberwocky. So, as this brief rest stop in your race comes to an end, who do you choose to be – Alice, who works hard and deals with a bit of nonsense to progress, or the Red Queen, content to work harder to stay in the same place?

Image credit: Unsplash

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What is Your Purpose?

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What is Your Purpose?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Purpose. Goal. Mission. You hear these words a lot this time of year. Not because it’s the start of the annual business planning cycle but because it’s graduation season.

Across the country, commencement speakers and wise family members espouse the importance of having a purpose to guide and sustain graduates as they set out on their next adventures.

All the talk of purpose can feel overwhelming, especially as you listen to graduates’ wide-eyed optimism about how they will change the world while stewing in an existential crisis that makes you wonder if you even have a purpose.

You do.

And part of that purpose is finding and creating purpose.

What is “Purpose?’

Purpose hasn’t reached buzzword status, but it’s close, so let’s start with a definition, or three, courtesy of The Britannica Dictionary:

the reason why something is done or used: the aim or intention of something – The purpose of innovation is to create value
the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something – The team worked with purpose
the aim or goal of a person: what a person is trying to do, become, etc. – He knew from a young age that her sole purpose in life was to be an orthodontist

Three different definitions of purpose. Three questions that it’s part of your purpose to ask.

“What’s THE purpose?”

Innovation is all about creating value. Sometimes, to create value, you need to do new things. Sometimes, you need to stop doing things. It’s hard to tell the difference if you don’t ask.

That’s why innovative leaders are curious. You aren’t afraid to ask, “What’s the purpose of this product/process/meeting/decision/(fill in the blank).” You want to know “why something is done or used,” and they know that the best way to figure that out is by asking.

You ask this question at least once a day. When you ask it, you’re genuinely curious about the answer. After all, we’ve all experienced people and cultures that weaponize questions – “Johnny, is that where the scissors go?” or “Why did you think that was a good idea?” – and you reassure people that you’re asking a genuine question, even if they should know that by your tone.

“What’s OUR purpose?”

Innovation is hard. You live in ambiguity and uncertainty. You fail (learn) more often than you succeed. You are told “No” and “Stop” more than “Yes,” “Keep going,” and “Thank You.”

Innovators are courageous. You do the hard work of innovation because you are “determined to do or achieve something.”

You also know that sustaining courage and purpose requires a team.

You aren’t fooled by the myth of the lone genius. After all, Thomas Edison worked with as many as 200 people in his West Orange lab. Heck, even Steve Jobs needed Sir Jony Ive (and a few hundred other people) to bring his vision of “1,000 songs in your pocket” to life.

“What’s MY purpose?”

Innovation takes a long time. Change happens gradually, then suddenly. We chose to preserve what we have, rather than take a risk to get more.

Innovators are committed. You are patient for change, steadfast in the face of resistance, and optimistic when others are afraid because of your “aim or goal…what [you are] trying to do, become, etc.”

Even if you can’t articulate it in a grand statement or simple, pithy soundbite, you have a purpose. As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

Three Purposes. Three questions

Even if you lack the wide-eyed optimism of a new graduate and feel like you spend most days just muddling through life, because you are here, you have a purpose. So tell me:

When was the last time you were curious and asked, “What’s the purpose of (artifact of the status quo)?”
When was the last time you were courageous and used your feeling of determination to inspire others to join your purpose, overcome obstacles, and get something done?
When was the last time you had to dig deep, rediscover your purpose, and reinforce your commitment so that you could bear and overcome the “how?”

Image credit: Dall-E via Microsoft Bing

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Creating Value from Nothing

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Creating Value from Nothing

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.

Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?

Don’t blame the status quo.

The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines. The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action.

But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.

We’re stopping ourselves.

Blame one (or more) of these.

Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:

There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:

When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow

Four different states. Only one of them is positive.

I don’t love those odds.

Yet we live them every day.

Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages. Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82^nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.

Round and round we go.

The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.

Anxiety. Boredom. Apathy.

One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild. They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request. In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.

Then overcome them

I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.

I am telling you not to get stuck there.

Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:

When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
When you feel bored, find a new challenge
When you feel apathetic, change everything

Your thoughts and ideas are valuable. Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.

You have the fuel. Now, need to be brave.

We need you to act.

Image credit: Pexels

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Do Nothing More Often

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Do Nothing More Often

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What do you plan to do on vacation?” my friend asked.

“Nothing…”

Long silence

“…And it will be amazing.”

We live in a world that confuses activity with achievement so I should not have been surprised that the idea of deliberately doing nothing stunned my friend into silence.

After all, when people say, “I wish I had nothing to do” they usually mean “I wish I could choose what I do with my time.” And, when they do have the opportunity to choose, very few choose to do nothing.

Why does the idea of doing nothing make us so uncomfortable?

To put it bluntly, busy-ness is a status symbol.

In their paper, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” professors Silvia Bellezza (Columbia Business School), Neeru Paharia (Georgetown University), and Anat Keinan (Harvard University), wrote that people’s desire to be perceived as time-starved is

“driven by the perceptions that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market.”

We didn’t always believe this.

For most of human history, we’ve had a pretty balanced view of the need for both work and leisure. Aristotle argued that virtue was obtainable through contemplation, not through endless activity. Most major religions call for a day of rest and reflection. Even 19th-century moral debates, as recorded by historian EO Thompson, recognized the value of hard work AND the importance of rest.

So what happened?

While it’s easy to say that we have to work more because of the demands of our jobs, the data says otherwise. In fact, according to a working paper by Jonathan Gershuny, a time-expert based on the UK, actual time spent at work has not increased since the 1960s.

The actual reason may be that we want to work more. According to economist Robert Frank, those who identify as workaholics believe that:

“building wealth…is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

We choose to spend time working because Work — “the job itself, the psychic benefits of accumulating money, the pursuit of status, and the ability to afford the many expensive enrichments of an upper-class lifestyle” according to an article in The Atlantic — is what we find most fulfilling.

It’s not that I like working, I just don’t like wasting time.

We tend to equate doing nothing with laziness, apathy, a poor work ethic, and a host of other personality flaws and social ills. But what if that’s not true.

What if, in the process of doing nothing, we are as productive as when we do something?

Science is increasingly showing this to be the case.

Multiple fMRI studies have revealed the existence of the default mode network (DMN), a large-scale brain network that is most active when we’re day-dreaming. Researchers at the University of Southern California argue that

“downtime is, in fact, essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics — processes that depend on the DMN.”

The results of harnessing the power of your DMN are immense:

More creativity. The research discussed in Scientific American suggests that DMN is more active in creative people. For example, according to Psychology Today:

The most recorded song of all time, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, was ‘heard’ by Paul McCartney as he was waking up one morning. The melody was fully formed in his mind, and he went straight to the piano in his bedroom to find the chords to go with it, and later found words to fit the melody.
Mozart described how his musical ideas ‘flow best and most abundantly.’ when he was alone ‘traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep… Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.’
Tchaikovsky described how the idea for a composition usually came ‘suddenly and unexpectedly… It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms.’

More productivity. According to an essay in The New York Times, “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Less burnout. Regardless of how many hours you work, consider this: researchers have found that it takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail. On average, we are interrupted every 11 minutes which means that we can never catch up, we’re always behind.

That feeling of always being behind leads to burn-out which the World Health Organization officially recognized as a medical condition defined as a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and manifests with the following symptoms:

Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
Reduced professional efficacy

Doing nothing, quieting our minds and not focusing on any particular task, can actually help reset our bodies systems, quieting the release of stress chemicals, slowing our heart rates, and improving our mental and physical energy

Better health. Multiple studies indicate that idleness “produces many health benefits including, but not limited to, reduced heart rate, better digestion, improvements in mood, and a boost in overall emotional well-being — which, of course, affects everything on a biochemical and physiological level, thereby serving as a major deciding factor on whether or not we fall ill, and/or remain ill. Mental downtime also replenishes glucose and oxygen levels in the brain, and allows our brains to process and file things, which leaves us feeling more rested and clear-headed, promotes a stronger sense of self-confidence, and…more willing to we trust change.”

Fine, you convinced me. How can I do nothing?

There are the usual suspects — vacations, meditation, and physical exercise — but, if you’re anything like me, the thought of even finding 5 minutes to listen to a meditation app is so overwhelming that I never even start.

An easier place to start, in my experience, is in intentionally working nothing into the moments that are already “free.” Here are three of my favorite ways to work a bit of nothing into my day.

Make the Snooze button work for you. When my alarm goes off, I instinctively hit the Snooze button because, I claim, it is my first and possibly only victory of the day. It’s also a great way to get 9 minutes of thoughtful quiet nothingness in which I can take a few deep breaths, scan my body for any aches and pains, and make sure that I’m calm and my mind is quiet when I get out of bed.

Stare out the window. I always place my computer next to a window so that I can stare out the window for a few minutes throughout the day and people think I’m thinking deep thoughts. Which I am. Subconsciously. Lest anyone accuse me of being lazy or unproductive while I watch the clouds roll by, I simply point them to research that shows “that individuals who took five to ten minute breaks from work to do nothing a few times a day displayed an approximately 50% increase in their ability to think clearly and creatively, thus rendering their work far more productive.

Bring the beach to you. Research from a variety of places, from the UK Census to The Journal of Coastal Zone Management, indicate that our brains and bodies benefit from time at the beach. But, if you can’t go to the beach, there are lots of ways to bring the beach to you. Perhaps the simplest is to bring more blue into your environment. Most people associate blue with feelings of calm and peace and a study published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that the color blue can boost creativity. Even putting a picture of a beach (or your own personal happy place) on your desk or computer screen can trigger your brain to slow down, relax, and possibly trigger your DMN.

With so many benefits, isn’t it time you started doing more nothing?

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These Forgotten Customers Are Key to Your Success

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These Forgotten Customers Are Key to Your Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“There is only one boss. The customer.” – Sam Walton

With all the buzz around human-centered design, customer-centric businesses, and external-facing organizations, corporate America is (finally) waking up to the importance and value of creating things that people actually want and that solve people’s problems.

Teams of innovators, ethnographers, socialists, researchers, and consultants scurry about gathering customer insights, soliciting customer feedback, and generating reports that can be funneled back to R&D, innovation, and product development teams to inform the development of the Next Big Thing.

While this is all important work, amidst all of this activity, one customer is consistently overlooked. And it is this customer that often decides the fate of the Next Big Thing

There is only one first customer. Your boss.

Let’s start with what a customer is:

“The recipient of a good, service, product, or idea obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier via a financial transaction or exchange for money or some other valuable consideration.

Yes, you should spend a lot of time getting to know the people outside your company who will eventually be asked to exchange money for the good, product, or service you are creating.

You also need to spend time getting to know the people inside your organization who you are currently asking to exchange money (give you a budget) or some other valuable consideration (time, people, permission) for your idea and its development.

And you need convince them that “a financial transaction” is worth it because, if you don’t they can and will spend their money elsewhere.

Your boss is a tough customer

No matter what type of company you are in — from a company of 10 to a company of 10,000 — you are faced with limited resources. A dollar spent in one place means a dollar not spent in another place. A person allocated to one team means one less person on another team.

Managers have to make resources allocation trade-offs all the time but are often moving pieces between functions and teams where they know the ROI of additional investments. This situation changes dramatically when a manager must decide whether to invest resources into a new and uncertain venture or to invest in the core, and much more certain, business.

Convincing your boss to buy your idea, especially if that idea is a new venture, is tough because you’re asking your boss to buy (or invest in) something with an uncertain ROI rather than buy (or invest in) something with a more certain ROI. But you can be successful if you understand your boss.

Your boss can be understood (and their decisions anticipated)

First, get comfortable with the fact that your boss is a human being. And, just like other human beings, your boss makes lots of decisions, believes that these decisions are based on logic and reason, and actually bases most decisions more on emotion and instinct.

As frustrating as this may be when you are at the receiving end of these decisions, take comfort in the fact that you can actually use the tools you use to understand external customers to understand, and even anticipate, your boss’ decisions.

Here’s how:

What is the current business situation? While this is usually an easy question to answer, it can be hard to anticipate what impact it will have on your boss’ willingness to invest. Just as most people are hesitant to invest in something new when the current business environment is poor, many people are equally hesitant to invest when business is booming. This is usually because investments in the core business are generating more than usual upside and that’s great for your boss and/or there is no urgency to do anything new because people assume the good times will go on forever (news flash: they wont’). So while you can’t anticipate what impact the answer to this question will have on your odds of securing investment, you do need to know the context within which you are asking.
What is your boss being asked to deliver? How is she measured and rewarded? Is your boss expected to deliver revenue increases? She’ll be drawn to new ideas that increase revenue. Cost savings? Then pitch ways to improve efficiency. How much time does she have to deliver results? If she needs to show results quarterly, you have to generate results quickly. If she has a year to show improvement, you have a longer runway to show results.
What is your boss’ reputation? Does she like it? Humans are hard-wired to be social creatures so, whether we admit it or not, we really care how other people see us. What is your boss’ reputation — is she known for being a steady hand that consistently delivers or a renegade willing to rock the boat and take risks? And how does she feel about her reputation? Does she like it or does she see herself differently? If you have a boss that likes being seen as reliable and a defender of the status quo, you’re going to have a much harder time selling your new idea than if you boss is seen (or wants to be seen) as the next Steve Jobs.

With the answers to these questions, you can figure out the likelihood that your boss will buy your idea. If you boss is managing a business that is struggling, is expected to increase revenue after years of decreases, and is happy to be known as someone who always delivers, it’s unlikely she’ll be willing to invest resources in a new and unproven idea. But if your boss is managing a struggling business, is expected to develop new revenue streams that will replace the old ones, and enjoys a reputation as a someone who challenges the status quo, odds are she’ll support a reasonably well-thought out proposal for initial investment in a new venture.

Bottom Line

Before you get the opportunity to sell a new product or service to external customers, you need to sell your idea to internal customers…your boss. Take the time to understand you boss, the things that motivate her and the issues and challenges that she faces. Then, just as you create a product or service to solve your external customers’ problems, you can create a pitch that shows your boss how your idea solves her challenges.

Approach your boss as you would a customer and you’re likely to get the support you need. Forget that your boss is your first customer and you may never get the chance to pitch to the ones you’ve spent so much time studying.

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