GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In a recent interview in Adam Bryant’s Corner Office column in the New York Times, Ken Rees, the CEO of Think Finance, identifies several nuggets of insight for the innovation practitioner. In distilling his wisdom about the challenges of leadership, Rees cites three approaches he leverages to drive improved performance at his company: Cookies with Ken, the Bulldozer Award, and the Bus Driver Award. Each of these ideas has relevance for the innovation team leader.

Cookies with Ken is a recurring meeting in which Rees invites a dozen employees from various parts of his organization to engage in a dialogue with the CEO about their work. The innovative aspect of these sessions is not the mere fact that a CEO is meeting regularly with employees. Rather, what is unique is the way that Rees ends each meeting by asking the participants to tell him “one thing you really like about the company and one thing that frustrates you about the company.” This could be an interesting question to pose at the outset of an innovation workshop because we typically focus solely on the latter – pain points – rather than the former – what is working well.

In addition, the juxtaposition of what works well and what is not working well at a company, from the employee’s perspective, could also yield insights into new areas of opportunity for innovation. For example, if an employee mentions a product that is getting great responses from customers as something that is working well, but then also cites an internal sales process that is frustrating his or her efforts to sell that product, the innovation leader could identify a target for improvements.

The Bulldozer Award, according to Rees, stemmed from a lesson learned from an executive coach who told Rees that he was behaving like a bulldozer with his subordinates. That behavior might have worked well at a small company but was ill-suited for a large company. Seeking to make a positive out of a negative, Rees created the Bulldozer Award to “recognize people who are pushing things forward, which allow[s] me to really step back” and offered a plastic toy bulldozer to the winner each quarter. For the innovation practitioner, the Bulldozer Award could acknowledge the fact that in some innovation projects, there is a need for a person to push an idea forward despite significant obstacles, though that person needs to be cognizant of the fact that there is a difference between needlessly antagonizing a team (acting like a bulldozer) and pushing forward in a way that leads to a desirable outcome. In a similar vein, an innovation leader may also want to find a participant in an innovation workshop who could “win” the Bulldozer Award and perform that role while the innovation leader steps back, just as Rees does in his work.

The final idea cited by Rees is perhaps the most intriguing for the innovation practitioner. The Bus Driver Award evolved from the Bulldozer Award and more accurately reflects the challenges of driving innovation in a large organization. For Rees, the Bus Driver Award “recognize[s] people who do a really good job of putting together effective teams.” Although Rees uses the Bus Driver Award as a basic recognition of the work required to lead “cross-functional teams and initiatives,” the metaphor of the bus driver is particularly instructive for innovation leaders.

The bus driver operates the physical infrastructure required to move to a team from point A to point B. The driver knows the destination and knows the different ways to reach the destination (including detours, if needed) but is not as deeply involved in the discussions underway by the passengers riding on the bus (the innovation workshop participants). The bus driver is instrumental to the success of the overall effort, but not engaged like a bulldozer plowing through obstacles and forcing the innovation workshop participants down a particular path. For the innovation leader, the key attributes of bus driver innovation are recognizing the importance of knowing the destination before starting the process and acknowledging the abilities of the riders on the bus to engage in their work without too much interference from the driver. However, the driver needs to stay aware of their work and, as needed, take or provide input as it relates to the overall objective of the innovation effort.

Source: Adam Bryant, “How to Become a Bus Driver, Not a Bulldozer,” New York Times (October 6, 2012). image credit: bus driver image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In the field of innovation, as in many endeavors in life, there is a constant tension between simplicity and complexity. When we see a new idea applied in the form of an innovative solution to a problem, we are sometimes astounded by the simplicity of the idea, thus generating the oft-heard quip “why didn’t I think of that?”

This is the case for many consumer electronic devices with simple yet highly functional forms, such as the Nest thermostat with a single dial. Conversely, we may look at an innovation and reflect on the complexity of the technology that underlies the solution, such as the complex algorithms driving a successful search engine or the technology that sits behind the simple dial of the Nest thermostat.

This same tension is evident in the physical and social sciences and is perhaps best summarized by Occam’s Razor, which focuses on the power of the simplest explanation for a phenomenon as a starting point for investigation. Stated quite succinctly, the physicists Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw write that Occam’s Razor “really says that the simplest hypothesis should be tried first, and only if this fails should we add complication bit by bit until the hypothesis fits the experimental evidence.”

My past work in the social sciences focused on international relations theory in which the leading scholars in the field struggled to explain the complex interactions between nation-states via the simplest, or most parsimonious, theories. The scholar who best articulates a parsimonious, or reductionist, theory of international politics is Kenneth Waltz, who examines whether international relations can be explained by the sometimes bellicose nature of man, the aggressive nature of certain nation-states, or the anarchic nature of the international system itself.

Rather than bore the reader with a detailed review of these three levels of international politics (one hint – Waltz selects the third level, or the anarchy of the international system, as the simplest yet most powerful predictive theory of international politics), I would like to apply the concept of parsimony to the field of innovation. To accomplish this, we need to consider Samuel Huntington’s guidance to Fareed Zakaria in the field of international relations:

If you tell people the world is complicated, you’re not doing your job as a social scientist. They already know it’s complicated. Your job is to distill it, simplify it, and give them a sense of what is the single [cause], or what are the couple of powerful causes that explain this powerful phenomenon.

The words above could serve as the mission statement for an innovation program, as the job of the innovation leader is to distill and simplify the complex when working on a truly innovative idea.

In the realm of corporate innovation, our work typically focuses on two areas: 1-identifying new products or services, or 2-identifying operational efficiencies and cost savings. When working on a new product or service, the innovator may be overwhelmed at the thought of how to develop an idea that could lead to a new product or service to compete in a crowded marketplace of strong players. Innovation lore is replete with examples of statements suggesting that everything of import has already been invented decades ago, but the apprehension on the part of an innovator facing the challenge of the marketplace is real. Clearly there can be successful innovation in new products and services, as we see the results of these efforts in front of our very eyes on a daily basis.

The application of simplification may in fact be a better fit in the second area of innovation focused on identifying operational efficiencies to yield cost savings. I have spent many years in the field of Business Transformation and am always pleasantly surprised at the benefits that can be derived from focusing on the simplification of a process that has become unnecessarily complex over years and years of operation.

Huntington’s manifesto can provide inspiration to the innovator by encouraging him or her to focus not on the complexity of the environment but, rather, on the process of distillation and simplification that can lead to true innovation. Cox and Forshaw provide an even better description of the power of parsimony:

‘From the simplest of ideas’ . . . if there were ever to be an epitaph written for humanity’s greatest scientific achievements, it might begin with these five words. Taking delight in observing and considering the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details of nature has led time and again to the most majestic of conclusions. We walk in the midst of wonders, and if we open our eyes and minds to them, the possibilities are boundless.

Sources: Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Why Does E=MC2? (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2010). Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York: Waveland Press, 2010). Robert D. Kaplan, “Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things),” The Atlantic (January/February 2012). image credit: therapeutic

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Could an algorithm generate innovation? Christopher Steiner poses a similar question in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Automatons Get Creative.” Steiner posits that automation is slowly making its way into creative fields that previously were viewed as immune to machine-generated content. After all, the very essence of a creative individual is the fact that such a person can identify new pathways, whereas a machine must be programmed in advance to follow a specific set of guidelines. Imagination is typically the opposite of automation, but as Steiner points out, perhaps “[c]omputers can be creative after all.”

Steiner focuses on the power of the algorithm, which takes a series of inputs and follows a decision tree to generate certain outputs. With the increased use of Big Data analytics and incredibly fast computers, algorithms can process more and more data and, presumably generate more interesting output. Steiner cites several examples in his analysis of the state of the art in computer algorithms performing creative-like tasks, ranging from tools that predict the popularity of a certain piece of music, to quantitative tools that anticipate which movie scripts will deliver the greatest box office success, to programs that grade student essays, to programs that automatically generate news reports about football games using quantitative data captured during the game.

For the student of innovation, the increasing prevalence of powerful algorithms operating in the creative fields raises the question of whether such tools could be used in the innovation process. At first glance, algorithms could be of value to the innovation process in the ideation process and in innovation scoring or assessment. The ideation phase, when innovators work to define a new set of approaches to solve a particular problem, could benefit from the assistance of a more powerful tool to gather and assess the different aspects of an innovation theme. For instance, the innovator could create an algorithm that scanned certain websites to perform basic word association activities to look for connections that the innovator or workshop participants might have missed. Similar to the visual word clouds or tag clouds, an innovation ideation algorithm could identify patterns and connections between concepts that a human might not see. Moreover, the algorithm could scan through infinitely larger data sets than could a human, casting a broader net.

Although there is debate in the innovation arena concerning the value of a shotgun approach versus a more focused and precise ideation strategy, there is definitely value in being able to process a large quantity of data in the case where an innovator has done work to define a specific innovation theme or area of investigation. The innovation scoring or assessment process could also benefit from the incorporation of more rigorous, and less subjective, methods. Just like the movie script algorithm, an innovation scoring algorithm could assess an innovation concept against a large data set of known innovation successes and post a likelihood of success, providing an additional data point for the practitioner in determining whether to proceed with a given approach.

Steiner concludes with an interesting anecdote about the power of algorithms, citing the example of the political science professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and his work with the CIA in political and military predictions. Dr. Bueno de Mesquita’s game-theory inspired algorithms have been used to assess over 1,700 different political and military scenarios and his approach has predicted the outcomes successfully at double the rate of the CIA’s internal analysts. The advantage of the computer model, the professor notes, is that the CIA analysts are focused more on “personal back stories and gossip that will have no effect on the future,” whereas the machine just focuses on the data. This is an occurrence that many of us have witnessed in innovation workshops, where either the facilitator (I am guilty of this) or participants will focus on one idea or an aspect of an idea to the detriment of the overall process. Perhaps when we facilitate innovation sessions we should step back and think more like an algorithm in terms of processing the inputs we are generating and receiving from the room.

Source:
Christopher Steiner, “Automatons Get Creative,” Wall Street Journal (August 18, 2012).

image credit: gorkieryluk.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Do procrastinators make good innovators? At first glance, the procrastinator may not be well-suited to a structured innovation effort which requires consistent, dedicated efforts to develop a new process or technology to meet a market need. The procrastinator may engage in bursts of activity from time to time but then may also disengage to focus on other endeavors, while a competitor with a more structured approach to work would continue to follow a repeatable process, working through each failure to refine his or her innovation.

Conversely, the procrastinator may, in the course or delaying work to concentrate on another topic of interest, stumble across an insight that propels the innovation forward, leapfrogging ahead of the more step-by-step approach of another practitioner. In the article “How to Be a Better Procrastinator,” Stanford Professor John Perry offers support for the latter scenario, noting that procrastinators “are people who not only get a lot done but have a reputation for getting a lot done.” Perry presents several observations about procrastinators that resonate with those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about different approaches to innovation.

Perry’s first piece of advice to the procrastinator is to ignore the typical mantra of keeping one’s commitments to a minimum. The non-procrastinator sees the procrastinator as someone who has trouble saying no to a new commitment and, as a result, ends up overwhelmed with assignments and responsibilities. Perry notes that the procrastinator is better off having a large set of things to work on so that when the inevitable urge to procrastinate strikes, he or she can quickly jump into another area of interest. Otherwise, a procrastinator with only a few commitments would end up doing nothing, which is even less productive. For the innovator, this advice resonates to the extent that one should always be open to considering new innovation themes or ideas to explore, even if one is fully occupied with an existing set of initiatives. This openness to new ideas can serve two purposes. First, it ensures that the innovator always has a full pipeline of areas to investigate for future innovation in the event that he or she encounters obstacles in working on an existing project. Second, the introduction of new ideas could inspire the innovator to look at an existing challenge in a new way, resulting in the improvement of both the old and new ideas.

Perry’s next recommendation is for the procrastinator to stay away from the scenario where he or she laments an inability to avoid diving into a particular work area. Focusing energy on one’s lack of willpower, Perry writes, “will make you a depressed procrastinator but won’t help you get anything done.” Perry sees procrastination as a tool possessed by some individuals that enables them to “manipulate [themselves] to achieve results [they] can’t get with willpower alone.” In this example, Perry counsels the innovator to focus on the output of the process more so than the flaws of the mechanism that he or she uses to achieve that output. An innovator who procrastinates should not lament the procrastination itself. Rather, he or she should leverage the procrastination process to explore new ideas or think about a current problem in a new way. A long walk in a park can lead to breakthrough thinking in solving a problem, such as James Watt’s famous lunchtime stroll across Glasgow Green. Jason Fried, CEO of the software company 37signals, has taken this concept to the extreme and devoted a month of company time each June to allow employees to investigate new ideas or processes. According to Fried, the “June-on-your-own experiment led to the greatest burst of creativity [he had] ever seen from [his] 34-member staff.” He even characterized the output as “ultra-productive.”

Another admonition from Perry concerns the need for the procrastinator to “avoid perfectionism.” Specifically, Perry highlights the downside of “fantasizing about doing things perfectly,” because procrastination can sometimes be a method in which the procrastinator delays working on a task so that he or she can do a less than optimal job on work that does not require perfection in the first place. Voltaire perhaps best expressed this in his poem La Begueule, writing “the best is the enemy of the good.” For the innovator, this aphorism holds equally true. Paul Hobcraft’s recent article in these pages, “Jumping Hurdles and Closing Gates on Innovation,” provides an excellent assessment of the disconnect that can occur between innovation and typical corporate strictures, such as an integrated product development process, particularly in the area of disruptive innovation. A stage-gate process inevitably forces rigor on an innovation effort but can also impede the open-thinking that successful innovation requires. Just as some work efforts do not require perfection and thus are susceptible to procrastination, so, too, some innovation projects can benefit from a lack of rigor and more free-thinking.

Finally, Perry recommends that procrastinators freely admit to their colleagues that they are afflicted with this mindset to reduce the level of annoyance that this attribute often inflicts on the non-procrastinators. For the innovation practitioner, this is not quite as challenging, as we are often seen by our colleagues as more prone to free thinking (or even daydreaming) than our more structured colleagues. Acknowledging this attribute to colleagues is easy, but as Perry points out throughout his article, leveraging this attribute to improve performance is the real challenge.

Perhaps the best way for the procrastinators and innovators to signal to colleagues that they are engaged in another stream of thought is through the use of headphones. Writing in the New York Times “Workstation” feature, Amisha Padnani cites research from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Miami that highlights how listening to music can improve workplace performance. One study of information technology specialists, authored by Dr. Teresa Lesiuk, suggests that “those who listened to music completed their tasks more quickly and came up with better ideas than those who didn’t, because the music improved their mood.” Decisions made under stress, Dr. Lesiuk notes, tend to be made among a more narrow set of options whereas a positive mood allows an individual to take into consideration a greater range of options. For the procrastinator, the recognition that procrastination is an integral and productivity-enhancing part of the work process could serve the same function that music does for a cubicle dweller sporting headphones. Likewise, the innovator should accept this realization and use open-thinking to drive innovation.

Sources:

John Perry, “How to Be a Better Procrastinator,” Wall Street Journal (August 11, 2012).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good

https://www.communitywalk.com/location/james_watt_memorial_stone/info/1348232

Jason Fried, “Be More Productive. Take Time Off,” New York Times (August 19, 2012).

https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2012/08/21/jumping-hurdles-and-closing-gates-on-innovation/

Amidha Padnani, “The Power of Music, Tapped in a Cubicle,” New York Times (August 12, 2012).

image credit: cmcforum.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

A common theme in innovation is the importance of identifying the most promising innovation projects as opposed to those that are less likely to succeed (see Paul Sloane’s excellent posting on killing weak innovation projects to protect the strong projects). Other innovation practitioners may refer to this as separating the wheat from the chaff, managing the signal to noise ratio, or following an Integrated Product Development process with a managed pipeline and phase gates. While I agree that there is value in applying strict and objective scrutiny to the assessment of ongoing innovation projects, I noticed a concept recently that suggests an alternative approach to the process of investigating ideas as part of an innovation pipeline. In an article titled “Why We Should Scam the Scammers” in the Wall Street Journal, Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simon highlight an interesting, counter-intuitive approach to scam emails originally suggested by Microsoft Researcher Cormac Herley. This approach, in which there are benefits derived from engaging in a process that at first glance should be avoided, provides interesting implications for approaches to assessing the value of innovation ideas.

It would be difficult to find a regular user of email who has not at some point received an email from an exiled member of the royal family from an African country claiming to need a bank account to temporarily house some of his great wealth, for which the cooperative person will receive a generous commission payment. Herley, in a paper delivered at a security conference in Berlin, applies signal detection theory to the scam to develop an alternative approach to how to handle these scammers. Signal detection theory focuses on the importance of discerning the signal from the noise in any analysis.

In the case of the email scammers, Herley turned the analysis around and looked at the situation from their perspective. The scammers send thousands and thousands of emails hoping to find the small handful of individuals who could actually be duped into providing bank account information (or sending a payment, in the myriad variations of the scam). The scammer must weed out any false positives from the very small subset of individuals who respond because the scammer has a finite amount of time to parse through any responses to determine which ones are worth investigating. Sending out thousands of emails takes little time, but deciphering the responses, and deciding which ones are worthy of a follow-up email, is much more challenging.

This is where Herley provides a fascinating alternative approach. Today, when we receivethese emails, our immediate response is to delete them and/or mark them as spam, hoping that we can block them in the future. The scammer is not impacted by this action as we are doing part of his job for him by not sending back a false positive. In essence, we become part of his work force. Blocking his email address is only a temporary setback, as he can easily change domains for future email blasts. Herley’s recommendation is counter-intuitive in that he instructs us to engage the scammer and overwhelm the person back with a deluge of false positives that would require a great deal of labor on his part to investigate. This bombardment of replies could be done manually with quick notes from individuals or, more promisingly, through a computer-generated reply that mimics the varied nature of human responses, including typographical errors, the use of colloquialisms, and even the use of realistic-looking bank account or credit card numbers. Just as the scammer seeks to draw us into his web ever more deeply with each exchange of information, we, too, could ensnare the scammers by dragging them down a path that inevitably leads to a dead end, but not before the scammer has invested large amounts of time and energy, thus limiting the damage that person could do against a real potential mark.

Reading about this approach to counteracting scammers made me think of the process we typically follow in innovation of following up on an initial idea proposed by a participant in an innovation workshop or jam session. The normal approach is to acknowledge an idea proposed by a participant by repeating it verbally and then writing it on a flipchart or whiteboard to record it. In some cases, the innovation session facilitator will identify an idea that has potential merit and engage in a more thorough discussion about that concept with the initiator of the idea and the workshop team as a whole, driving out multiple threads and new concepts to explore along the way. While this approach has been proven useful time and again in innovation, reading about Herley’s counter-intuitive approach to scam emails led me to wonder if there is value in looking at less-promising innovation workshop or jam ideas differently. Just as the normal response to a scam email is to mark it as spam and ignore it, so, too, is our normal response to a less-promising idea proposed in an innovation session to log the idea and essentially ignore it.

I am particularly guilty of leaping to conclusions about some ideas without exploring them more deeply, as would be the case for an idea that does not match the theme of the innovation session. For instance, we might be in the midst of an innovation jam dedicated to exploring the theme of social media and a participant introduces an idea on the topic of mobile device management. The challenge for the innovation facilitator is how to explore that thread to derive value from the new idea without derailing the overall momentum of the session. My tendency in these scenarios is to acknowledge, record, and move on to another participant, but we may want to consider the benefits from driving into every idea, at least a few layers deep, to explore the concept. This approach is based on the assumption that every individual has unique value to contribute to a session, and somehow that individual made the connection between the topic under discussion and the concept that he or she introduced. Although it could be that the person was not paying attention to the session and introduced the idea without a valid reason, there may be subconscious factors at play in that individual’s mind that are worth examining to see if it can lead to a better overall outcome. I do not advocate getting bogged down exploring every thread that comes up in a workshop, but I believe there is value to exploring counter-intuitive concepts as a way of avoiding self-imposed constraints. Such an approach could increase the creative aspects of the workshop and open up the discussion to new ways of thinking. The innovation facilitator will need to work harder to keep the overall session on track, but the improved output could be worth the effort.

Source: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, “Why We Should Scam the Scammers,” Wall Street Journal (August 4, 2012). image credit: bluedish & wikicommons

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In Love Works: Seven Timeless Principles for Effective Leaders, Joel Manby provides a roadmap for any business leader seeking to transform the way he or she interacts with coworkers, employees, and customers.

Manby, formerly the CEO of Saab Motors at GM, is the CEO of Herschend Family Entertainment, the largest family-owned operator of theme parks in the US. Manby’s work provides valuable insights for practitioners of innovation. When driving an innovation program or even pursuing a single idea, we often forget that we are engaged in an activity that is little different from the thousands of other work-related tasks that those of us in the business world face on a daily basis. We sometimes become so focused on the power of innovation, or the excitement of pursuing something incredibly novel, that we lose sight of the importance of exhibiting the qualities of leadership in our day-to-day interactions with members of the team working on pursuing innovation. Manby’s “Seven Principles for Effective Leaders,” explained in the context of work in the innovation process, can serve as sound reminders of the types of behaviors we need to demonstrate.

1. Patient – Have Self Control in Difficult Situations

We all inherently know that patience is a virtue and that innovation requires immense quantities of patience due to the well-documented prevalence of failure in the innovation process. For every successful idea, there are hundreds of failed ideas, and only a patient innovator will have the stamina to continue working through the process to make the refinements needed for an idea to succeed. Manby’s first principle, however, points to a larger considerations for an innovation team leader – that of how to deal with difficult situations. For an innovator, a difficult situation could be a failed idea or a cut in funding for a project which, depending on how much an individual had invested emotionally in an idea, could become quite challenging. In this scenario, the innovator must exercise patience and self control, knowing that a sound idea in the long run will prevail.

2. Kind – Show Encouragement and Enthusiasm

Kindness is a word not often associated with innovation, as we sometimes view the innovator as an inspired genius who casts aside social mores and ignores the wants and needs of colleagues to focus on developing a new product or concept. Enthusiasm is often overflowing for an innovator, but engendering enthusiasm in others requires the other “e” mentioned by Manby, encouragement. By encouraging others in their work to support the development of a new idea, the innovator can create a more enthusiastic team.

3. Trusting – Place Confidence in Someone

For the innovator, trust is perhaps the most challenging of Manby’s principles. Afterall, an innovator may have created an idea and nurtured it with blood, sweat, and tears. It is difficult for the innovator to place confidence in a colleague to assist with driving that idea through to completion, though in almost every case this assistance is critical to the success of the overall innovation effort. Few innovations emerge from the work of a single person with no outside interactions, and innovators can almost always benefit from the input of a skilled colleague or industry observer who can offer up modifications of or new applications for an idea. Another interesting twist on this principle is the fact that in innovation work focused on generating a patent and/or a market-changing idea, we often are wary of sharing that information with anyone at all, lest that person “steal” the idea and claim ownership, particularly with the US Patent Office’s implementation of the “first to file” rule. Thus for an innovator to place confidence in someone, there has to be an extremely high amount of shared trust, even more so than in a typical business environment.

4. Unselfish – Think of Yourself Less

Obsession with an idea can sometimes lead to an overbearing focus on oneself, particularly for the person who first thought of the idea and has an inherent interest in seeing that idea work through the innovation process. However, just as a leader who is too inwardly-focused can fail the test of leadership, so, too, can a selfish innovator fail to provide the type of critical thinking that is needed in the innovation space. An innovator who is thinking too much about himself or herself loses the ability to view an innovation from an outside perspective, such as that of a customer. As an idea evolves, the innovator may drive it in a direction that does not necessarily align with the marketplace. In some cases this works (see Steve Jobs), but the inward focus of the innovator can also lead to the development of ideas that are less attractive to a larger audience. Selfishness can be dangerous in innovation.

5. Truthful – Define Reality Corporately and Individually

This is perhaps the most important of the seven principles in terms of its applicability to the innovator. The basic act of exploring a new idea often forces an innovator to stray from the realm of what is real to the realm of what “could be,” and this initial suspension of disbelief, while required at the beginning of the innovation process, can become a hindrance later on in the process. An innovator looks beyond reality to identify a new idea or concept, but must come back to reality at some point to assess the applicability of the idea to the marketplace. Creative thinking starts the process, but reality has to be injected at some point. Manby’s particular insight here is that reality has to be defined at the corporate level, in terms of what are the capabilities of the company or organization, and individually, in terms of what the innovator is able to achieve. There are limits to any corporation or individual, such as would be the case with a company in one market trying to develop a market-shattering innovation for a completely unrelated product or service. For an individual, there are always limits to what an innovator can accomplish and truthfulness to oneself, according to Manby, is the key to leveraging this knowledge as a leader.

6. Forgiving – Release the Grip of the Grudge

In the course of working on an innovation, a practitioner will experience peaks and valleys in terms of interacting with colleagues on the project. As a visionary, the innovator may be particularly impacted by negative comments from a colleague about the innovator’s cherished idea. Such comments, if repeated, can eventually reach the point of engendering a grudge between the innovator and the person making the statements. The danger of the grudge is twofold. First, the holder of the grudge may focus time and energy on the grudge. This is time and energy that is not spent working on the idea itself, and the overall process suffers as a result. Second, the holder of the grudge may allow anger to overshadow the absorption of the feedback being provided by a colleague. This feedback may end up being critically important to the success of the innovation, particularly in that it might reflect true external insight into the viability of the idea, and may trigger the innovator to think of an alternative approach to developing his or her idea. Once the innovator releases the grip of the grudge, he or she is open to new thinking.

7. Dedicated – Stick to Your Values in All Circumstances

This principle of leadership may be the easiest of all for the innovator if we look at it solely in terms of dedication. After all, innovators tend to be the type of individual whose focus is intense and who are the very definition of dedication in their tireless pursuit of a new idea or concept. While Manby acknowledges the importance of dedication as a principle of leadership, the idea of sticking to one’s values also receives top billing from Manby. This raises the question of what are the values of the innovator. An innovator’s values can vary as widely as the subject matter of the innovation itself. For instance, an innovator working on a better method of purifying water for rural villages may be demonstrating the value of improving living conditions for humanity. Conversely, an innovator working on an improved manufacturing technique to reduce costs for a major corporation has another set of values in mind. In both cases, though, the innovator must be dedicated to his or her purpose and should stick to the values that inspired the innovation in the first place.

A final thought for innovators comes from a quote that Manby notes appears on the desks of many of his employees:

“The enthusiasm of your customer’s experience can never rise any higher than the enthusiasm of your own employees.”

Just as an employee dedicated to pursuit of a given value will provide great customer service, so, too, will an innovator dedicated to the pursuit of a given value drive powerful innovations. An innovator carrying forward these seven principles can improve his or her performance as well as the performance of the team accompanying him or her on the innovation journey.

Source: Joel Manby, Love Works: Seven Timeless Principles for Effective Leaders (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Books, May 2012) image credit: visualize & smallbus.

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

There are many competing approaches concerning the most effective structure for an innovation team. Recently I stumbled across a concept for team structure that I believe could yield positive results for practitioners of innovation, and its chief value may derive from its very simplicity. With a tip of the cap to Scott Anthony’s “Innovation Bipolarity” (innovationexcellence.com, 17 November 2011), I term this concept “polar innovation.” I use the term not because it involves cold temperatures and brave explorers (such as Jim Collins’ story of Antarctic explorers in Great by Choice), but, rather, because it embodies the intentional establishing of a team structure that forces opposing ideas into a unified approach to drive innovation. Polar innovation is about understanding the power of opposites and contradictory thinking within a team to generate new ideas and avoid stagnation.

A great example of polar innovation comes from an explorer who marched his way through a dramatically different climate than Antarctica. The Lost City of Z recounts the story of the famous American explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who focused his peregrinations on the Amazon region in search of a mythical lost city in the early 1900s. According to David Grann, Fawcett was “the last of the great Victorian explorers who ventured into uncharted realms with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose.” Although Fawcett’s story contains numerous fascinating elements, one portion relevant to the modern innovator concerns the team makeup of one of his expeditions in the Amazon. For one of his South American trips, Fawcett assembled a team consisting of two very different key individuals. The first key member of the team was James Murray, who had braved sub-freezing temperatures and desolate landscapes in the Arctic. As Grann recounts, the combination of Fawcett and Murray “seemed like the perfect match, [combining] the great polar scientist [with] the great Amazon explorer.” The second key member of the expedition was Henry Costin, a British Army Corporal who responded in 1910 to one of Fawcett’s newspaper advertisements seeking members to join his team. Costin was a gymnastics instructor in the Army and was in great physical shape and an excellent shot with a rifle.

As the group drove deeper and deeper into the jungle, the Arctic explorer proved ill-suited for the ravages of the Amazon while the Army Corporal excelled at handling the demands of the environment, ranging from intense heat to constant danger from poisonous plants and animals. Murray became increasingly contentious as they drove deeper into the jungle, and constantly questioned Fawcett’s leadership skills and strategic direction. Over time, Murray proved incapable of keeping pace with the expedition and could not tolerate the deprivations and hunger of the trek into the jungle. This lack of performance grated on Fawcett and reached a boiling point where Fawcett hired a local with a mule to take Murray, who was suffering from numerous maladies from the jungle and near death, back to civilization. Fawcett was bitter at having to divert his expedition for a brief period of time to handle the situation with Murray, though in the end Murray survived. This interaction set the tone for future team structures for Fawcett, as noted by Grann:

Fawcett was an electric and polarizing figure, and his men fell into two camps: the Costins and the Murrays. The Costins gravitated toward him, relishing his daring and élan, while the Murrays despised his ferocity and unforgivingness. An officer among the Murrays said that Fawcett ‘was probably the nastiest man I have ever met in this world and his dislike of me was only exceeded by my dislike of him.’ [Another officer was] a Costin [and said] ‘Fawcett and I, despite the disparity of our ages, became great friends.’
Grann points out that the members of Fawcett’s subsequent expeditions usually fell into the camp of the Costins and Murrays, and this framework helped to balance against Fawcett’s passionate leadership while still inspiring him to continue to press forward in his explorations. This dichotomy between the Costins and the Murrays led me to think about innovation teams. At first glance, Fawcett is emblematic of the innovative entrepreneur who is seized by an idea and pursues it, without rest, to the end. That entrepreneur typically surrounds himself or herself with a team of individuals dedicated to the same pursuit (Costins). However, if everyone shares the same zeal for the objective, then it is possible that the team could suffer from a lack of grounding and could also isolate themselves from broader thinking about how to make progress on their innovation.

The very idea of including team members with negative thoughts (Murrays) on an innovation team runs counter to what we sense intuitively about the best formula for success in generating new ideas. As Terry Tietzen, founder and CEO of Edatanetworks, relates in a recent New York Times interview, one must “guard against negativity in a creative company. Negativity will wipe out innovation. You get one guy saying, “I don’t think we can,” and then everybody starts thinking that.” In other words, Tietzen sees danger in a team that includes Murrays because of their potential to drag down the visionary Fawcetts. Another perspective on this dilemma is provided by Eli Pariser, creator of the concept of “filter bubbles.” According to Pariser, filter bubbles are “confined spaces of web interaction where a person only sees certain information because of personalization and filtering of content on the internet. Such filtering can diminish innovation by decreasing the breadth of ideas to which an individual is exposed.” Interestingly, Tiezen also alludes to the importance of a divergence of opinions in another observation on innovation, where he states “In real innovation, being comfortable isn’t good. I don’t want to be comfortable. I always want to be on edge, because that edge gives you energy and excitement. What’s new? What’s next? That’s how you stay ahead.”

The concept of avoiding the negative strikes me as a potential downfall of a team of Fawcetts and Costins to the extent that no one will offer alternative opinions to those presented by the visionary leader. Indeed, the durable and seemingly indefatigable Fawcett finally met his fate during his last quest to find the lost city of Z in the Amazon. On this endeavor he was not accompanied by any Murrays. Rather, he was accompanied by his son, whose allegiance to him proved even stronger than that of Costin. On this journey, Fawcett marched into the jungle one day in 1925 in the Mato Rosso region of Brazil with his son and was never seen again. It could have been due to his lack of having a Murray around to keep him grounded. As Grann recounts in one incident relayed by Fawcett’s son, “Daddy had gone on ahead at such a speed that we lost sight of him altogether.” Grann states that this incident was “just as Costin had feared: there was no one to stop Fawcett.”

Likewise, Murray left the Amazon with a desire to return to Arctic exploration, but became stranded on a shop locked in the ice. Murray led a mutiny against the captain of the ship and set out across the ice with his fellow mutineers and several sleds. He was never seen again. Perhaps Murray, too, needed a Costin and a Fawcett.

As we assemble our teams to pursue innovation, we should size up our colleagues to determine if there are Costins and Murrays in our midst. Although Costins will keep our spirits high and overcome any obstacle we throw in their path, we should also consider the value of the Murrays who could direct us to go around, rather than over, the obstacle, or to give up a pursuit altogether and try another approach.

Sources:
David Grann, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (New York: Vintage Books, 2010)
Erik Sherman, “Personalization: a Blow Against Innovation,” cbsnews.com (December 22, 2011)
Adam Bryant, “Want to Innovate? Feed a Cookie to the Monster,” New York Times (March 24, 2012)

image credit: deenarose.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In today’s world of complex systems, Big Data, and massive analytical capabilities, sometimes we need to step back and remember that transformative innovation can, and often does, arise from simple human ingenuity.  Two historical examples from the food industry, one relatively recent and one from the 18^th century, demonstrate how science and analytics are not necessarily the only path to innovation.

The first example is food preservation.  As recounted in Tom Standage’s An Edible History of Humanity, in 1795 the French government initiated a contest calling for a new method of preserving food to support prolonged military campaigns.  Previously, soldiers and sailors had suffered from poor nutrition on long voyages, were required to manage huge supply chains (e.g., thousands of carts and mules), or had to forage for food across the territory in which they were traveling, which could be challenging depending on the geography (e.g., desert) or the season (e.g., winter).  The French food preservation prize called for innovation in terms of creating a product that was good-tasting, nutritious, cheap to create, and easy to transport.  Militaries had relied on salted, dehydrated, and smoked foodstuffs in the past, though these altered the taste and nutritional qualities of the food involved.  Scientists such as Robert Boyle (the Irish “Father of Chemistry) and Denis Papin (a French physicist), had been working on the challenge of food preservation for decades with limited success, though none of their creations met the criteria for the French prize.

The person who solved the puzzle of food preservation and won the 12,000 franc prize in 1809 was not a scientist.  Rather, it was a chef named Nicolas Appert, who was experienced in the use of sugar to preserve fruit as part of his work in Paris.  Appert experimented with preserving food in champagne bottles and, through an extensive process of trial and error, determined how applying heat in various amounts to foodstuffs resulted in properly preserved foods that maintained their taste and nutritive content.  Appert had no idea why applying heat to his concoctions improved their preservation, and indeed this would not be fully understood for another 60 years until Louis Pasteur identified the microbes killed by the heating process.  Although Appert focused on the use of bottles to preserve his food, a British engineer named Bryan Donkin followed Appert’s process but put the finished products in tin-coated iron cans, leading to the ubiquitous product that we see today.

The second example is Murray Lender of Lender’s Bagels, as told in a recent Wall Street Journal obituary.  Lender died on March 21, 2012 after fundamentally transforming the way Americans, and many others around the world, consume breakfast.  The Lender family began making and selling bagels in the 1920s in New Haven, CT.  Customers typically purchased and consumed bagels on weekends, resulting in intense workloads for the Lender family on Saturday and Sunday mornings.  Lender’s first innovation was a simple attempt to better manage this work by freezing bagels on the weekend then defrosting and delivering them to customers in subsequent days.  This was a gamble, and for a time Lender was worried about customer reaction, but the overall response was positive and resulted in a whole new bagel product offering.  Lender’s simple work-saving innovation spawned a whole new industry that continues to function today.  Additional innovations from Lender came from similarly simple notions, such as the pre-sliced bagel (customers were complaining about cutting their fingers while slicing their partially-defrosted bagels) and new flavors that were more traditionally tied to breakfast tastes, such as cinnamon and raisin.

As modern practitioners of innovation, particularly in highly-complex world of Information Technology, we sometimes forget that even the simplest solutions can be the most innovative.  In the case of Nicolas Appert, we see that it was a chef, not a scientist, who solved a problem that had perplexed people for generations.  Appert applied scientific-like methods of trial and error to solve the problem of food preservation, but he was not a member of the scientific community, though his innovation was by no means less transformative than those ideas that emanated from the great scientific minds of his era.  Similarly, Murray Lender’s development of an entirely new product line (frozen bagels) evolved from a simple desire on the part of his family to reduce their weekend workload.  When we think about innovation, we should remember to focus not only on complexity but also think about simple solutions to complex problems.

Sources:

Stephen Miller, “He Turned Bagels into National Nosh,” Wall Street Journal (March 23, 2012), page A5.

Maria Balinska, The Bagel: The Surprising History of a Modest Bread (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity (NY: Walker and Company, 2010).

image credit: wikipedia.org

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

A Profile of Colonel John Boyd, U.S. Air Force Innovator

Although the United States Air Force has only existed for a little over 60 years (it was created as a separate entity in 1947), its sheer size and typical military bureaucratic tendencies made it an organization relatively immune to change. This inertia, however, ran in direct contrast to the mission of the Air Force to be both innovative in development and application of new technology (faster, more advanced aerospace systems).

John Boyd would not adhere to protocol throughout his career and was referred to as the “Mad Major” or the “Ghetto Colonel” for some of his erratic behavior. Boyd usually arrived late for meetings (usually more than 15 minutes), was unkempt in his appearance, brash, used profanity, and unruly in behavior. He was an interesting combination of the arrogant fighter pilot and academic eccentric. He did not follow rules and “borrowed” time on an Air Force IBM computer to complete the calculations supporting one of his theories. Few people left an initial encounter with a positive impression of Boyd. He also participated in a coterie of advocates known as the “Lightweight Fighter Mafia,” which alluded to the size/performance of the aircraft, not the intellectual capabilities of the group’s membership.

Despite all this, from within the middle-ranks of the Air Force came an innovator whose contributions are relatively unheralded but absolutely critical to the success of the entire U.S. military. Yet as is so often the case with innovators, though, their ideas are not quickly embraced by the bureaucratic establishment that the innovator seeks to reform.

After serving in World War II in a support role, John Boyd first excelled in his military career as a pilot in the Korean War and immediately encountered one of the infamous “puzzles” that so often confound innovators and ultimately drive them to a discovery. American jet fighters in the war were, on paper, inferior to the aircraft of their opponents (based on weaponry and speed) yet the U.S. pilots outperformed their adversaries by a ratio of nearly 10 to 1. Boyd concluded that the U.S. pilots succeeded due to the superior visibility afforded by their bubble canopies and the greater maneuverability of their aircraft. This theme continued throughout his career and applied equally to other dimensions (land, sea) as to the air. When faced with a problem, Boyd exhibited an incredible power of concentration and would search through a variety of alternative solutions until he found the one that made the most sense. Almost no outside distractions could pull him away from solving one of his puzzles.

These puzzles led to a series of innovations by Boyd:
• Wrote the first manual on air-to-air combat for the U.S. Air Force (Aerial Attack Study)
• Heavily influenced the designs of the F-15 and F-16 fighters which are still among the best in the world even though the designs are several decades old
• Created the OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action) loop concepts used in military strategy and business (the source for several articles in Forbes and the Harvard Business Review)
• Invented the Energy-Maneuverability Theory to use for aircraft design and analysis of tactics
• Defined the strategy that ensured rapid success in the First Gulf War
• Helped to initiate reform movements that spread across all branches of the U.S. Military and dramatically changed thinking about strategy.

Though Boyd was extremely well-read (Sun Tzu, von Clausewitz, Heisenberg), he never published any of his findings in leading military journals or books.  He preferred to inject his ideas into operations manuals for fighter pilots and the much-maligned conference room briefing format. Indeed, his epic work was a nearly 200-slide, two-day briefing entitled “A Discourse on Winning and Losing” (later renamed “Patterns of Conflict”) which he refused to deliver to anyone, no matter how senior the rank, unless delivered in its entirety. This limited the audience that received the briefing until the word of its innovative qualities has spread sufficiently to motivate even the most time-constrained executive to make the investment to hear the presentation.

Some of Boyd’s ideas about military conflict from his famous “Patterns of Conflict” briefing are relevant to disruptive innovation in business (though in a less-confrontational sense):
• It is advantageous to possess a variety of responses that can be rapidly applied to gain sustenance, avoid danger, and diminish adversary’s capacity for independent action
• Variety/rapidity/harmony/initiative (and their interaction) seem to be key qualities that permit one to shape and adapt to an ever-changing environment
• Diminish adversary’s capacity while improving our capacity to adapt as an organic whole, so that our adversary cannot cope while we can cope with events/efforts as they unfold
• The person who is willing and able to take the initiative to exploit variety, rapidity, and harmony—as basis to create as well as adapt to the more indistinct-more irregular-quicker changes of rhythm and pattern, yet shape focus and direction of effort—survives and dominates
• Shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

Despite the innovative nature of his work, Boyd was rarely accepted in the Air Force due to his constant challenging of the status quo and refusal to adhere blindly to contemporary strategies that he thought were flawed. This led to a substantial rift between Boyd and the Air Force leadership over the course of his career. At Boyd’s funeral in 1997, for instance, the Air Force only sent a single, low-ranking representative (the Marine Corps, which fervently accepted many of his ideas, sent a whole group of representatives). Yet this lack of acceptance did not force Boyd abandon his love for innovation for the institution. After retirement he refused the potentially lucrative offers from the defense industry that many of his colleagues accepted and continued to work on his theories and strategies even though it caused severe financial strain to his family (his archivist found thousands of dollars in uncashed checks for travel expenses and speaking fees after he had retired). As Marine Corps General Krulak wrote in 1997, “Colonel Boyd never sought the acclaim won him by his thinking he only wanted to make a difference in the next war.”

There is a lesson for the corporate innovator in this astute assessment. The innovator in a large organization should not focus on the praise or credit that he or she might receive from the acceptance of his or her idea. Rather, the chief measure of success is in the implementation of the innovative idea.

Sources: John Boyd, “Patterns of Conflict,” https://www.d-n-i.net/boyd/pdf/poc.pdf

Grant T. Hammond, The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001)

Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (New York: Little, Brown, 2002)

imagecredit:arlingtoncem & military

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Charles Darwin, the English naturalist who is most often synonymous with the theory of evolution,  eclipses another leading thinker of the 19th century who independently developed evolutionary theory and co-discovererd natural selection.

I recently wrote about the experiences of Alfred Russel Wallace and how modern innovators can benefit from understanding his life story.  There is another side to the Wallace story which I alluded to in my previous posting that warrants additional discussion, and is cogently presented in a recent article by James Tabery, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah.  Wallace is the less well-known expositor of the theory of evolution.  He worked in parallel to Darwin, making observations in Brazil and the Malay Archipelago. In 1858, Wallace sent Darwin a manuscript that outlined the same concepts that Darwin had been working on for nearly 20 years, though Darwin, for various reasons, had chosen not to publish his findings yet.  Tabery notes that the history of science is replete with examples of scientists bending the rules of ethical behavior to advance their careers and make great breakthroughs.  However, in the case of Darwin, we see precisely the opposite behavior (though Darwin still is synonymous with the ultimate discovery).

When Darwin received Wallace’s manuscript in 1858, he had a number of options to consider, ranging from destroying the document, to stealing ideas from it for his own theory, to threatening Wallace not to proceed with his research.  Instead, Darwin sent the manuscript to two fellow scientists, Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, and sought their guidance for how to proceed.  Lyell and Hooker recommended that Darwin and Wallace conduct a joint presentation of their discoveries to the Linnean Society to make it clear that both authors had arrived at their conclusions independently. By approaching the dilemma in this manner, not only did Darwin rise above the ethical entanglements posed by this situation, but he also chose a path that further enhanced scientific knowledge by sharing with his colleagues the different pathways that he and Wallace took to arrive at the same conclusion. The ethical path expanded scientific knowledge in a way that could not have been accomplished through the alternative approach.

From the standpoint of the modern innovator, there are two key lessons from Darwin’s treatment of Wallace’s manuscript.  First, a recurring experience for anyone working in the innovation field is to sense that one has achieved a breakthrough only to find out, after further investigation, that someone else has already tread across that path and articulated the same insight, often in a more succinct manner.  In some ways, working on an idea for an extended period of time then finding out that someone else has already mastered that concept can be more devastating than working on an idea that ultimately fails in its core conception.  For instance, designing and building a prototype of a tool to solve a problem and ultimately seeing that tool fail and not work as planned could be seen as less painful for an innovator than spending the same amount of time on the tool and realizing late in the process that someone else has already built it and succeeded.

Darwin’s lesson for the innovator is to acknowledge that in the course of scientific discovery even the sharpest minds investing tremendous amounts of time can stumble across the possibility that another sharp mind will match or surpass their output.  If twenty years of scientific investigation can be superseded by opening a single letter in the mailbox for one of the brightest minds in the history of science, then we as innovators should be prepared for similar experiences in our careers. A second innovation lesson from the Darwin/Wallace interactions in 1858 lies in the way that Darwin handled the dilemma of what to do with Wallace’s manuscript.  Darwin chose the path that leveraged the expertise of fellow scientists and focused on expanding the boundaries of knowledge without (much) thought as to who would receive credit for the final discovery.  In the end this approach proved beneficial not only to Darwin and Wallace but also to the development of knowledge as a whole.

Source: James Tabery, “Science and Ethics: What Would Darwin Do?” Salt Lake Herald Tribune, February 10, 2012, page A13.

image credit: visualizingevolution.com

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