GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Encountering an Air Sandwich

I was teaching exec ed this week and I saw a textbook example of an air sandwich.

Here’s how Nilofer Merchant describes it:

“An Air Sandwich is a strategy that has clear vision and future direction on the top layer, day-to-day action on the bottom, and virtually nothing in the middle—no meaty key decisions that connect the two layers, no rich chewy filling to align the new direction with new actions within the company.”

I was working with a group of future leaders that had been identified by the management of their company. The firm is in a pretty conservative industry, but they are starting to try to differentiate themselves through innovation. This vision has been articulated from the top. And the young managers in the class had been asked to think about how to embed innovation within the organisation.

They came back with a series of pretty interesting ideas, and they presented them in our workshop, with a number of senior leaders from the firm present. And every new idea that the young guys put forward got shredded by the senior leaders.

Air Sandwich.

How Should You Respond to New Ideas?

There are two ways in which you can respond to new ideas. Your first response can be “no, that won’t work, here are the problems.” Or, you can say “that’s interesting.” And with the second one, you can find ways to build on the idea, or connect it to other ideas to create an even better idea, or at least figure out some way to support the idea.

The firm I’m working with is in a pretty tough industry, and I suspect that the guys giving the rough feedback would say that’s important for the younger managers to harden up – that if they want to make it in this industry they’ll need to be tough. And that may well be true.

But still, if you are trying to build your innovation capability, you can’t take ten of your bright young managers, ask them to come up with creative ideas to help build that capability, and then just absolutely tear those ideas to shreds when they show them to you. This is particularly important for this firm – because they have set themselves a tough challenge. But their overall objectives are admirable, and it’s important that they succeed.

How Should You Respond When Your New Ideas Get Shredded?

So what can you do if you’re the bottom layer of bread in an air sandwich? You can’t control how others respond to your ideas, but you can exert some control over your own actions. Here are some ideas:

• Learn from it. Getting our great ideas to spread is an important part of the innovation process. Overcoming resistance is a big part of that. Every criticism of your ideas contains some element of truth – even if it’s based on a misunderstanding, that shows that you need to get your point across more clearly. We have to learn from this, and improve the deliver of our new ideas.

• Don’t take it out on others. One big danger in a situation like this is that the young managers will learn that this how to respond to ideas in their firm, and react the same way when the people working for them come up with new ideas. This will completely kill off innovation. Instead, we have to use these experiences to build our empathy. This way, when others put new ideas in front of us, it might help us respond by supporting the idea, building on it, and connecting it to other good ideas.

• Change your culture. The culture of a firm is not an unchanging fact of life that simply acts upon us. We re-create it every single day through our interactions. Just because our managers act in a particular way doesn’t mean that we have to. We have the opportunity to start re-shaping a culture by changing the way we respond to things. If we accept new ideas and build on them, others will start to do so as well.

• Band together. It’s hard to change a firm’s culture on your own. So another good idea is to find others that are also committed to driving change, and band together. Cultures rarely change through edicts – it is one thing that is especially open to bottom-up change.

This is Why Innovation is a Challenge

Innovation is hard – if it weren’t, everyone would be doing it. The environment that we create for new ideas is an important part of building an innovation culture. One of the big problems with shooting down ideas immediately is that doing so assumes that we can know in advance which ideas will work and which won’t. But we can’t. This is why experimenting and prototyping are such critical innovation skills.

The best way to figure out which ideas are good is to try them out. If they work, scale them up. Here’s how Saul Kaplan puts it:

“Learn by doing. Constantly test new ideas. Learn, share and repeat. The world is ever changing — stay ahead of the curve. Embrace the art of discovery.”

“We need to try more stuff. Innovation is never about silver bullets. It’s about experimentation and doing whatever it takes, even if it means trying 1,000 things, to deliver value.”

My main piece of feedback to the teams was: “how could we prototype your ideas?” If we test an idea, gather data from the test, and learn, that is the best way to combat a culture that shoots new ideas down on sight. It’s a lot harder to argue with data.

Testing your ideas, and making evidence-based decisions are two more ways to change your culture. That’s my new idea for the day. How will you respond – will you tell me why it won’t work, or will you build on it to make it better?

image credit: growprofit & adam mckibben

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Our cat Wallace has been filled with innovation lessons recently. The first came when we discovered his unusual medical condition, and he taught us how important it is to check your assumptions. After his surgery, we thought that everything was fine.

That lasted for about six days, at which point we came home one evening to discover that he had chewed off his stitches. So I took him in for a quick after-hours consultation with the vet.

She said that overall, the wound was healing well. There was a second set of internal stitches, and while the two sides of the cut had separated a bit, there was no danger of it coming apart. Given the risk of putting him under anesthetic again, we decided that it was best not to try to re-stitch him.

As I was getting ready to take Wallace back home, Elise the vet paused and said “Well, I could put some wound glue on that which would definitely hold it shut until it’s fully healed.” I thought that sounded good, so she went off to find the wound glue.

When she came back in, I was quite surprised to discover that wound glue is Super Glue!

When I brought Wallace home, Nancy was also surprised to hear that our cat had been Super Glued. I mentioned this on Facebook, and a couple of my friends said that Super Glue had been originally developed for medical use. This isn’t quite true, and the actual story is even more interesting.

How you end up with a Super Glued cat

Check out this video – it was shown when Harry Coover, the guy that discovered Super Glue, was given a National Medal for Technology and Innovation to recognise his achievement:

Coover had discovered cyanoacrylates when he was working on a government contract in World War II to develop a clear gunsight. The polymer made a great gunsight, but it was impossible to work with, because it “stuck to everything.” Consequently, Coover and Eastman Kodak shelved the project.

Around 10 years later, here’s what happened:

In the early 1950s at Eastman, Kingsport, TN, Coover was managing a group of chemists who were developing new acrylic polymers for jet aircraft canopies. He suggested trying cyanoacrylates. A young chemist tried to measure the refractive index of the monomer and stuck the prisms of the refractometer together permanently.

Coover had a sudden realization. “Serendipity had given me a second chance,” he says. “What we had was a new superglue. I went and got the material and started sticking everything in the laboratory together.”

Cyanoacrylates were the world’s first single-component, high-strength adhesives. They have developed into a multibillion-dollar global industry that encompasses numerous industrial, consumer, and medical applications.

Super Glue was released as a product a few years after that. During the Vietnam War, it was in fact used for wound repair in the battlefield.

Innovation Lessons from Super Glue

There are several innovation lessons in this story:

There’s always a gap between inventing something, and turning it into something that creates value. In this case, cyanoacrylates were discovered in 1942, and Super Glue showed up as a product sixteen years later. This gap is always there, and managing that time is a critical step in managing innovation.

We often don’t know what our ideas are good for. First, cyanoacrylates were for gunsights, then plane canopies, and only later were they for sticking stuff together. This isn’t unusual. One of the reasons we have that gap between discovery and value creation is that we have to actually figure out what value our discovery creates, and often we have to build a new business model around it as well. Both of these processes take time.

Perseverance and luck both play a role in innovation. Coover was eventually successful because he kept working – perseverance was important. But so was luck – if he hadn’t realised the importance of his colleague gluing their refractometer together, he wound’t have turned cyanoacrylates into Super Glue. Chance favours both the prepared and the connected mind.

The story of Super Glue is actually a pretty normal innovation tale. The path from the Eastman lab to Wallace’s stomach was neither straight nor predictable. It’s why you need to treat innovation as a process, with lots of ideas in the pipeline, instead of making big bets on getting everything right on the first go.

It’s fun to learn about innovation from Wallace, but I hope he can just go back to being a cat now – that would be more fun for both of us probably!

image credit: sticky glue image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Editor’s note: This post is part of a feature series “Does Innovation Need a Purpose?” Click here

Greg Satell and I have been talking about whether or not innovation needs a purpose. While we agree on many points, we can see two differing views on the question. I will argue that within an organisation, innovation does need a purpose.

Let’s start by looking at a case study. When Watson and Crick published their paper revealing the structure of DNA in 1953, they close the paper by saying:

It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.

In their annotated version of the paper, the fantastic Exploratorium in San Francisco says this about Watson and Crick’s statement:

This phrase and the sentence it begins may be one of the biggest understatements in biology. Watson and Crick realized at the time that their work had important scientific implications beyond a “pretty structure.” In this statement, the authors are saying that the base pairing in DNA (adenine links to thymine and guanine to cytosine) provides the mechanism by which genetic information carried in the double helix can be precisely copied. Knowledge of this copying mechanism started a scientific revolution that would lead to, among other advances in molecular biology, the ability to manipulate DNA for genetic engineering and medical research, and to decode the human genome, along with those of the mouse, yeast, fruit fly, and other research organisms.

In many respects, even though these applications were noticeable in 1953, it’s really only been in the past 10-15 years that we’ve started to see a significant economic impact from the discovery of the structure of DNA. So, was the discovery of the structure of DNA an innovation?

There are two ways to look at this. Some say that it’s not an innovation if there isn’t an economic payoff. Or even more strictly, that without a new product, it’s not innovation. Others say that innovation is driven by discoveries like this – that we must engage in search and discovery activities even though we have no idea what practical applications will arise.

Even though these seem like opposites, you must do both – This is another innovation paradox.

On the one hand, if you want to stay in business, the ideas that you execute need to create value. Then you have to convert that value into something that helps you pay the bills. If you’re not innovating around your core, you are vulnerable to competition from people that are.

So while it’s not true that you’re not innovating if it doesn’t create a new product, it is true that you need to create value with your innovations so that you can generate some sort of return.

When we think about corporate groups that have engaged in pure search and discovery, the two big examples are probably Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. It’s no coincidence that both parent firms effectively had monopolies when they made these investments – they didn’t have to care as much about returns.

The answer to the question: was the discovery of the structure of DNA an innovation? depends a lot on timing. And it raises three important points about managing innovation.

1. Innovation is a process. I’ve said before that innovation is actually the process of idea management. Lukas Fittl tackles this issue nicely by talking about the distinction between ideation and execution – what he refers to as the flipping the ideation switch:For our purposes here, ideation is the period when you are doing the searching, which may not have much of a market focus, and execution is when you zero in on building a profitable business model for your idea. Fittl talks about this as a very directed process even in the exploratory state.

1. You face uncertainty throughout this entire process. There are a couple of persistent, damaging ideas that pop up here. One is that when you get to the execution phase of an idea, there isn’t any uncertainty anymore. Unfortunately, this is not true. Any time we are working with new ideas, we can never be certain that they will work.Roger Martin addresses this in a great post about strategy and uncertainty:
   

   Contrary to popular opinion, strategy is not about turning uncertainty into certainty. Lots of bureaucratically inclined board members and corporate executives want and expect this to be the case. When reviewing strategies, you can hear them asking for proof that the strategy will be successful.
   The reality is that strategy is about making choices under competition and uncertainty. No choice made today can make future uncertainty go away. The best that great strategy can do is shorten the odds of success.

   Greg has made the point that strategy and innovation are often conflated. In this case, Martin’s comments on strategy do apply to innovation as well.

2. The business problem with exploration is that the gap between the discovery and the economic payoff is usually very long. This gap is almost always longer than we expect. Look at the DNA example. Watson and Crick published in 1953, and at the time, they noticed that the idea had commercial potential. But the first biotech firm, Genentech, wasn’t founded until 1976, and their first product didn’t come out until 1982 – nearly 30 years after Watson and Crick’s article!

If Watson and Crick had been working for a company in 1953 when they made their discovery, how would it have managed to stay in business until 1982? You’d need a lot of venture capital to support that…

One way to address this is to manage your innovation activities as a portfolio using a 70/20/10 split in your innovation effort. 70% goes to improving your core business with incremental innovations, so that you can continue to stay in business. 20% goes to finding adjacent markets that you can extend into. And 10% goes to blue sky ideas that might change the world, but we just don’t quite know how yet.

Once again, it’s not an either/or question – it’s both/and. We need to be both evolutionary and revolutionary.

However, in practical terms this means that innovation does needs to have a purpose. You can do all the discovery that you want, but if you don’t use it to create value, you won’t be in business for long.

image credit: answers.com; timkastelle.org
(See Greg’s Comment Below)

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Obstacle 1: Competition

Probably the most common question I get about this blog is “how do you find time to write it?”

It’s the same question that I used to get about reading – where do I find time to read books?

The answer to both is the same – I make time. One of the ways that I make time is that I don’t watch much television anymore.

You wouldn’t think that writing a blog has competition, but it does. In order to write a post, I have to not be doing other things with my time. So as I’m writing this, I’m not watching The Wire, even though nearly every single person I know has told me that I must. And I’m not reading either.

If something as simple as writing a blog post has competition, then clearly your competition is never “no one.”

So that’s one big obstacle to getting your great new ideas to spread – even if there is no obvious competition, you’re competing for time, or attention, or money, or…

Jason Fried makes a similar point in his post asking “what is someone going to stop doing when they start using your product?”

“So, when you’re thinking about your product, think about what it replaces, not just what it offers. What are you asking people to leave behind when they move forward with you? How hard will that be for them? How can you help them overcome everything that’s tugging them in the opposite direction?”

Obstacle 2: People that are hurt by your idea

No matter how great our idea is, or how beneficial, some people will be made worse off when it’s executed. This is summed up nicely in yesterday’s cartoon from the brilliant xkcd:

We like to think that our new ideas are benign, or only beneficial. But as the comic shows, even the most harmless looking change will inevitably make someone worse off.

There are always innovation winners and losers. Just as it’s important to think broadly about competition, it also pays to think broadly about who might lose when your innovative idea is executed.

Obstacle 3: Time

The first two obstacles both contribute to the third one: new ideas always spread more slowly than we expect. New ideas always spread though an S-Curve:

The time it takes to work through the period marked X takes time – and that often takes people by surprise. It is a slow process because it takes time for people to hear about new ideas, it takes time to evaluate them, and it takes time to decide to adopt them. Once all that happens, it often appears as though successful ideas are overnight successes, but that’s only because they’ve finally hit a tipping point.

How to work through these obstacles

The first issue is that you need to be aware of them. The idea diffusion s-surve is a research finding that has been consistently supported for 60 years now – it’s is one of the most robust ideas in management research. Yet it is still often misunderstood – just ask Kodak.

Here are four ideas for addressing this issue:

1. Think about timing. You have to think about the timing of your idea. If you are still at an early stage in the diffusion process, all of your attention must go to getting your idea to spread. The right idea at the wrong time is still wrong. This means that you need to think about things like your network of supporters, and how to best take advantage of them to spread your idea.

2. Early ideas need little bets, not big ones. When we face an uncertain future, as we do at the start of the innovation diffusion curve, then we need to try to influence the future through experimenting. The problem with big bets at this point in time is that they assume that we know how everything needs to work. When we’re in time X, we don’t know this – we have to discover it.

3. Think about competition. And think about it broadly. Competition for time, attention and money will all slow the spread of a new idea. If people aren’t using your product or idea, what are they using instead?

4. Think about who loses. This is another source of resistance. The competitors that we just considered are one source. But also, whose routine does the new idea disrupt? People trying to maintain their current routines are a powerful force preventing the diffusion of new ideas. You need to overcome this as well.

People often think that having a great idea is the hard part of innovating. Most of the time, this isn’t the problem. Getting the new idea to spread is.

If you’re serious about innovating, you have to be serious about idea diffusion too.

image credit: tickledlife

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

What are the connections between these three things?

First: Comics – the magic happens in the gaps between panels

In his terrific book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains that comics are special because all of the real action occurs in the gaps between panels – this is the part that readers fill in using their imagination.

A huge amount of effort and creativity goes into making the comic, but then the reader finishes the story in her head.

Second: Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do

Here’s an apocryphal story making the rounds of various photography sites:

A well known New York photographer goes to a socialite party. On his way in the hostess says to him, ‘Oh I love your photos, you must have an amazing camera!’. They have dinner and at the end of the night, on his way out, the photographer comments to the hostess, ‘I really loved the food, you must have an amazing stove.’

Third: Seth Godin on helping people be more perfect

Check this out from Seth Godin:

“Most people in the US can’t cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.”

“In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you’re way better off helping the perfect improve. You’ll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.”

The Story: Creativity Happens in the Gaps

I see the same story in all three pieces: Creativity happens in the gaps.

I’m a lousy cook. So if I go out and buy The Fat Duck Cookbook, and follow each recipe as closely as possible, I still won’t be cooking like Heston Blumenthal.

Why not? Because I don’t know enough to fill in the gaps. As much as I love Scott McCloud’s book, I disagree with him when he says that “what happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create.” I actually think that applying creativity and imagination in the gaps also explains the other two stories.

We can only sell cookbooks to people that are already great cooks because they have the skills needed to be able to fill in the gaps in a recipe creatively and with imagination. And this is why, as in the case of the photographer and the cook, focusing on tools can be incredibly misleading.

Innovation Happens in the Gaps

A couple of years ago, I met with the senior management team from a really large organisation in Brisbane. They wanted to talk to me about being more innovative. We started by talking about what innovation is, and then quickly went through managing innovation as a process, and a few other key ideas.

Then one of them said: “We tried a big innovation initiative a few years ago and it didn’t work.”

There were nods around the table. I said something like:

“Let me guess. You asked everyone for their ideas. Lots of people submitted innovation ideas, but there was no mechanism in place for choosing the best ones. You didn’t have any budget attached for execution either, so nothing much came out of it. And in the end, everyone that put an idea in ended up feeling disillusioned and morale actually went down.”

As I talked, there were sheepish nods around the table.

They didn’t know enough about innovation to fill in the gaps. They wanted to buy the innovation version of the expensive camera, or the great stove.

They had the same problem that Seth Godin outlines: they’re actually not good enough innovators to benefit from the tools that are available to them.

What Should You do If You’re Just Starting Out?

Forget about tools. You have to build your basic innovation skills.

• You need to get everyone on the same page in terms of defining innovation – and your definition might be different from everyone else.
• Connect innovation to your overall strategy. They are two different things, and innovation needs to support your strategy.
• Build your capability to experiment. Here is a seven-step process for starting to innovate quickly.
• Start thinking about innovation as a process, not as an event (just ideas).

Once you’ve done these things, then you can go out and start buying expensive tools to support innovation. But only then.

There are no innovation short cuts. You have to build your skills first.

Once you have, then you’ll have enough knowledge to really use your imagination. Then you’ll know that innovation happens in the gaps.

image credit: jigsaw puzzle image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Here’s a quick quiz – see how you do:

1. Do people love change or hate change?
2. Are big companies more innovative or are small ones?
3. Is innovation good or bad?
4. Is growth good or bad?
5. Is Google making is stupid or smart?

All five questions have the same answer: both.

How did you do?

I was struck by the response to my post Actually, People Love Change. I had a surprisingly large number of people say “No they don’t!” That kind of missed the point of the post.

The point that I was trying to make is this: there are some changes that people actively seek out. They view these changes as good. Yet we know that in many cases, people strongly resist change. They view these changes as bad.

So you can’t categorically say that change is good, or that change is bad – it’s both. The challenge is that you have to figure out type of change you’re dealing with in each particular case. You have to categorize the change.

Classification is an incredibly important tool when you’re dealing with complexity.

It’s complexity that Theodore Sturgeon to develop Sturgeon’s Law:

90% of everything is crap.

Of course, some philosophers have found a more elegant way to show this:

Here is how Sturgeon phrased it:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

His short form of this reflects the thinking behind the Tao as well:

Nothing is always absolutely so.

Everything that’s black contains some white. Everything that’s good contains some bad. Change can be mostly bad, but sometimes good. Or vice versa.

Either/Or thinking is very dangerous in a complex system – precisely because nothing is always absolutely so. And, for better or worse, we live in a whole set of complex systems. We have to figure out how to move beyond Either/Or thinking.

So how should we respond to this?

Here are some ideas that can help:

1. Classification: how do biologists learn about how the world works? The first step is always classification. They can’t say anything if they can’t accurately tell what type of things are interacting with each other. That’s what The Innovation Matrix is – a classification tool.

2. Study the part with the outcomes you want: we know that most large firms struggle with innovation, while some have become very good at it. What makes them different? Figuring that out is a classification challenge. One way to attack this is with The Positive Deviance approach:

Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.

The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.

Or, alternately:

Pay attention to outliers: In complex systems, outliers matter – a lot. That’s why thinking about averages is so dangerous. If we take Sturgeon’s Law seriously, the average science fiction is bad. But as he says, that’s uninformative. The critical question is “how good is the best Sci-Fi?” It turns out that the best is pretty good – the outliers a lot more important than the average.

Absolute statements get more attention. That’s why I named that post “Actually, People Love Change” instead of “Sometimes Change isn’t so Bad” or something equally wishy-washy. But the truth of the matter is that reality isn’t absolute. Neither black nor white. Neither either nor or.

It’s “both.” Developing some skills to deal with “both” is pretty essential these days.

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Why all this talk about innovation? I get that question a lot.

The reason that I think innovation is important is that it is the driver for growth. Here are some of the reasons that I think it’s important to link innovation with growth:

• It answers the “so what?” question. Innovation for the sake of innovation is pointless, and can be destructive. For innovation to work, it has to be tied to purpose. Innovation is about executing new ideas to create value – and if we are creating value, then we will be growing. Not necessarily financially, but at least in terms of impact.

• Innovation must be tied to your purpose and strategy. Again, it’s not enough just to “be innovative.” You need to innovate to support your core purpose.

• Growth happens at multiple levels. When you get good at executing your ideas to create value, it helps you grow. It can lead to increased opportunities, and helps you generate even better ideas that create even more value. This is true for people, and it’s also true for firms. It’s even true for regions – innovation is the one thing that reliably distinguishes regions and countries that grow more quickly than others.

• Innovation requires change – growth reminds us that change can be good. Resistance to change is often cited as a barrier to innovation, but there are some types of change that people welcome, or even seek out. Growth is an example of good change.

• Everything grows.  Skills grow, firms grow, economies grow, impact grows, reach grows, your network grows – and innovation drives all of this growth.

• Not all growth is good.  When cells grow out of control in a person, it’s cancer. Not all growth is good. This is why the link to purpose and strategy is so essential. Growth just for the sake of growth is counterproductive. It’s important to remember this.

As Peter Drucker said:

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation.

Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

Innovation for growth – I think this better reflects what we’re about. What do you think?

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Here’s the story of one the dumbest decisions I ever made as a marketer.

I was managing sales & marketing for a software startup at the time. We were part of a group that included a retail & wholesale computer store as well. The thing that set the retail store apart was that we made good quality custom PCs, which, at the time, was still fairly rare.

One day my manager came to me and told me that we had a chance to start carrying the digital camera line (all 3 of them) from Panasonic. We both thought that was a good idea – it would give people a cheap entry-point into the retail shop. That was our excuse – really, I think we both just thought it was cool.

So I started a long and expensive search for the perfect display stand. After a great deal of research, I commissioned a local metalworker to make us a beautiful wrought iron stand, with spaces to hold 3 cameras. It was gorgeous.

And utterly, completely, idiotic.

I had forgotten one of the key lessons that I had learned earlier in my career – your brand is what you do.

Did any of us know anything about cameras or photography? No.

Was a line of cameras going to help us make better quality or more customised PCs? No.

Does anyone go shopping for a camera and come home with a PC? No.

We forgot to solve a real problem for people and to build our business model around that. The cameras couldn’t help us. My beautiful, elaborate, idiotic display stand couldn’t help us.

I thought of this today when my colleague Marta Indulska posted this on Facebook:

She had searched for “UQ Business School” and the second paid ad is titled “UQ MBA”, and it links to the page for the MBA program at Southern Cross University.

This is as dumb as my wrought iron display stand.

Your brand is what you do. So what does buying deceptive and misleading adword links tell you about a brand?

In the social era, the secrets to success are do awesome work and connect with people.

People that search for something as specific as UQ MBA probably have a few reasons for doing so. It could be because UQ is the university that is closest to them (probable). Or it could be that they have heard that the UQ MBA is ranked as the best program outside of North America & Europe by The Economist (possible). Or maybe they just want to take my innovation course as part of their MBA (highly unlikely).

If you’re searching for UQ for any of those reasons, are you likely to be fooled when a paid link takes you to the SCU site? It might if you were distracted – say, you were doing the search on your smartphone while you were driving. But it’s not going to fool anyone paying much attention.

So let’s say that you’re teaching in the SCU MBA program, or you’re a hard-working student in it, or an alum – what do you think about a marketing strategy that will pull in only those people so stupid that they fall for it? What does that say about the brand that you’re trying so hard to build? Fooling people isn’t doing awesome work.

And if your first contact with someone is based on deception, you’re not connecting with people either.

When you start doing dumb stuff like buying idiotic display stands or trying to steal ad words, you’ve forgotten that your brand is what you do.

You’d be a lot better off if you find a genuine problem, then build a business model around solving it. That’s the way to build a great brand.

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do customer service like Zappos? Or design like Apple? Or innovation like 3M?

Who wouldn’t want to be like those firms?

Well, it’s not so simple.

Barry Dalton wrote an excellent post called You Can’t Be Zappos (and why would you want to be?) addressing exactly this issue. His main point is that the entire Zappos business model is built around delivering awesome customer service – and that unless you build your entire business model around this as well, you won’t have Zappos-level service. And furthermore, Dalton argues that you shouldn’t want to do so – the says:

“So, instead of trying to be like Zappos, how about try this first. Stop. Stop and think about your customers. What problems do they have with your business model? What customer issues are you trying to solve? Then, build a customer experience strategy that addresses that.”

He’s exactly right.

Zappos is Zappos because they’re built to deliver awesome customer service. You can’t just bolt Zappos-style customer service onto an existing business model. To deliver it, your hiring needs to be organised around service, so do your partnerships, your value proposition, your revenue model, and (very importantly!) your cost structure.

Same deal with delivering design like Apple or innovation like 3M.

This is why many innovation initiatives fail – they are just bolted onto an existing business model that isn’t built for and can’t accommodate them.

You can’t just tack on 20% time and get the same results with it that 3M and Google do – you need all the supporting systems in place too. You can’t look at Procter & Gamble’s Connect and Develop and just replicate that – it took P&G about 6 years to get the system in place and operating the way that they wanted it to.

You can’t add “Innovation” to your company values and then tell the middle managers to go figure out how to do it.

It’s relatively easy to add any of the innovation tools that you see elsewhere – but making them work is another matter entirely. Making an innovation initiative work requires a change in behaviour. This is what makes business model innovation such an effective tool – it’s really hard to duplicate!

Most of our innovation initiatives fail because organisations add in the tools, but they don’t change the behaviour. We fail to empower the people that have to make the new ideas work. We don’t build a culture of experimentation. We forget to build learning into our build-launch loops, so it’s not an iterative process.

We fail to really commit to making our organisations more innovative by failing to change the way we manage.

If you want to buck this trend, and make your innovation initiative successful, you could do a lot worse than following Dalton’s advice.

Find a genuine problem, then build a business model around solving it. If you integrate innovation into this, then your odds of success just went up.

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GUEST POST from Tim Kastelle

“People resist change.” I heard this about 10 times at a workshop recently where I gave a keynote. After about the fifth time, it got me thinking. When I went up to give my talk, I asked people to raise their hands in response to these questions:

• Who has moved away from the town or city that you were born in? (almost everyone) Who has moved to a different country? (about half)
• Who has gotten married? (almost everyone)
• Who is a parent? (more than 3/4)
• Who has moved into a job that is different from the first one you took after you finished higher education? (everyone except the handful of PhD students who have just finished their higher education).
• Who didn’t raise their hand at least once? (no one)
• So, why do we say that people hate change?

It turns out that people don’t hate change at all. In many cases we actively seek out change. We move to a new city or country, we get married, we have children, we take a new job. These aren’t just changes – these are massive changes. And we often seek them out.

People don’t resist change. At least, they don’t when they expect the change to make their lives better.

The kind of change that people resist is the kind that makes them worse off. Like letting 10% of your staff go, and expecting the rest to do the same amount of work with far fewer people and resources. That’s not good change, nor is it inspiring.

Sometimes in a crisis you do have to make that kind of change – it’s the only way for your organisation to survive.

But most of the time, people will embrace change – they just need to see what’s in it for them.

If you’re trying to change things, here are some tips:

• Solve a real problem. If you meet a genuine need, you don’t often find resistance to change. Well, you will, from the competitors who lose out, but that’s different. This is another kind of change that people love. When the polio vaccine was developed, people lined up to get it – even though getting a shot is no fun at all. It solved a real need.

• Turn up the purpose. Inside an organisation, change is often resisted because it is not clear how the new way of doing things will make things better. This is especially likely to happen when the organisation does not have a shared purpose

Here is Nilofer Merchant on the importance of vision:

“I see executives regularly saying that they want to “transform the business” or “win the market”, but they can’t point out an end destination. And when I ask, I usually get that, “just leave me alone” look. But here’s the deal. “Transform the business” could mean just about anything, especially to the people who weren’t in the core room where the discussion and debate happened. It leaves too much interpretation up for grabs. It is fuzzy. And fuzzy doesn’t help. Fuzzy means no one can help you do it fully because they need to keep checking in. Fuzzy doesn’t turn on the spark of creativity to generate ideas on how I can help you. Fuzzy creates a dependence, rather than allowing interdependence and action by everyone.”

Her solution? Articulate a clear vision.

• Connect. You can’t meet genuine needs if you don’t understand the people that will be affected by the change. Your best strategy is to connect with them, and build that understanding.

But if you’re finding that people are resisting the change that you’re proposing, that’s a very strong sign that you don’t understand what they need, and you haven’t articulated a clear vision of the future.

I’m not trying to oversimplify this. Innovation is hard – if it weren’t, everyone would do it. Change is hard – if it weren’t everyone would adapt easily.

Deep in their hearts, people love change. That’s why we actively seek it out when we want to make our lives better. If people are resisting your change, you’re not meeting their needs.

You should change that – it will make your life better.

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