Category Archives: Innovation

Personal Innovation – Shine Your Star

Personal Innovation - Shine Your Star I had a nice conversation with a friend from London today that I haven’t spoken with in a while and we got onto the topic of careers. We started talking about my article on Personal Innovation and how in most professional occupations there are the stars and then there is everyone else.

We talked about how stars in certain professions might only be 5% better at something than their peers but get paid 5x to 50x more than the rest. There are certain professions like professional athletics where this is particularly true. But at the same time in many professions including lawyers, consultants, managers, speakers, even cooks and hair stylists, the stars are those who are best at marketing themselves. So if you really want to become a star, you have to hone the skills necessary to market yourself and/or your ideas.

If you read my article about The Commodity Marketplace for Employees you’ll get a lot more background on this topic. Today I want to focus on a good point that my friend brought up. He had consciously tried to build up an ‘aura’ (or a “reputation for greatness”) in his organization and had been somewhat successful in doing so. But after succeeding at building his ‘aura’, some coworkers who had previously been helpful in building it, suddenly stopped supporting him. Why did they do this? Well, they began to feel that his ‘aura’ had become stronger than their own, and a potential threat to their own career ambitions.

So, if you are really good at what you do, is building yourself into a star doomed to failure?

Definitely not!

This is one of the hazards of focusing your personal innovation efforts within your organization. While it is important to have a reputation for greatness within your organization of a certain level, it is more important to focus on expanding your reputation for greatness outside the organization and here is why:

To build a reputation for greatness within your organization you are dependent on your peers and managers saying flattering things about you and throwing their support behind your efforts, but at some point this support will likely decrease or cease

The only exception is a company growing so fast that there is endless opportunity for all
This is because people eventually become threatened and will not want to be seen as inferior

Building up a reputation for greatness within your organization really only helps you

It might help your manager if he/she can show their bosses that they are a great developer of talent and deserve to move up to the next level
It does not add value to the organization

Making yourself a star outside your organization increases the awareness of other companies to your promise and potential

It also increases the profile of your organization as being a thought leader
Upper management will eventually recognize this thought leadership benefit

Improved reputation
Free advertising
Free public relations

Let’s face it, becoming an internal star will probably only get you a 3% annual raise instead of a 2% annual raise, and possibly on the fast track for promotions (but only until you become a little too threatening to the wrong person). If you truly are a star, begin preparing yourself mentally for the possibility that you may have to leave your current employer to be compensated appropriately, continue to execute brilliantly and start polishing your star.

If you do a good job building up your self-marketing skills and show that you do have something unique and valuable to say, then you will become of greater value to another organization than to your current one, and to a sufficient level where the other organization is willing to campaign to acquire you.

So, the following questions remain:

Are you really a star?
Are you committed to the hard work and learning necessary to shine your star?
Are you ready to leave your current employer when the time is right for a new opportunity or to create your own?

Well, are you?

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Are you the 10th person who innovates?

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Are you the 10th person who innovates? “For every nine people who denounce innovation, only one will encourage it… For every nine people who do things the way they have always been done, only one will ever wonder if there is a better way. For every nine people who stand in line in front of a locked building, only one will ever come around and check the back door.”

“Our progress as a species rests squarely on the shoulders of that tenth person. The nine are satisfied with things they are told are valuable. Person 10 determines for himself what has value.”

– Za Rinpoche and Ashley Nebelsieck, in The Backdoor to Enlightenment

As I’ve said before, innovation is achieved when something becomes valuable to the customer, instead of merely useful. Are you standing in line with your competitors, or are you creating the real value that will help you achieve competitive separation?

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Rise and Fall of Innovation at Yahoo!

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Rise and Fall of Innovation at Yahoo! Can people really innovate when they have to tend to all of their day-to-day responsibilities?

Unfortunately, people don’t get promoted for being innovative, they get promoted for getting stuff done, developing people, and meeting or exceeding goals or stretch targets. If people are busy making sure they do all that, when are they supposed to innovate? And if they do come up with a good idea while they are in the shower (after all they don’t have time to do it at work), how many hours of sleep are they willing to give up to help move it forward?

This is one of the key problems established organizations have in making innovation happen in their organizations. First, people get rewarded for executing not creating. Second, everyone is so overworked that getting funding and staffing up a project team to make the business more profitable or to ensure its longevity, is incredibly difficult.

So, what’s the answer?

I came across an article in 2007 that showed that Yahoo! believed the key was a set of dedicated off-site resources charged with taking employee ideas and suggestions and developing them. In the article they cite a product development example in which the product was developed in a third of the time it would have taken within the normal Yahoo! reality. 65% faster than an internal project. What does that say?

What this article reinforces is that people must have time to execute new ideas. Top levels of management have to commit to ring-fence a portion of people’s time to develop new product or process ideas that will improve the efficiency and profitability of the enterprise OR they have to commit the resources to a group external to the normal operations of the company. 3M has its 15% time and Google has its 20% time (if your 20% time project is approved), but Intuit’s group-focused, aggregated percent time seems the most sustainable because it allows managers to schedule and plan for innovation time away like they do vacation.

Bringing in outsiders is a third alternative, but not that different from number two with the exception of a little more of an outside perspective that comes from working with multiple clients and living outside the political culture.

So, which approach are you prepared to commit to? Or, are you committed to driving the best ideas and people out of your company and seeing your competitors blow by you?

P.S. Yahoo! Brickhouse opened in 2006 and closed in 2008.

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Innovation Comes in Many Forms

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Innovation Comes in Many Forms Innovation comes in all different forms, and there is more than one way to boost profits in organizations.

Layoffs are not the only way to improve the bottom line when times get tough. Often asking the right questions can uncover new revenue sources in areas that previously had only been seen as a source of costs.

There is an article in Fast Company from 2007 when I wrote this article that talks about ways that companies are greening themselves. I highly recommend that every entrepreneur and manager read it. It’s not a hippie and granola, look at us aren’t we great type of article but instead highlights loads of different ways that organizations are becoming green. This article highlights lots of different ways that organizations are improving their bottom lines, while greening themselves at the same time.

There are many reasons why trying to make your organization more environmentally responsible has the potential to improve the bottom line:

It focuses the organization on identifying and eliminating waste
Creating new directions for the waste your organization produces:

Are our waste products of value to someone?
Can we recycle or otherwise use our waste products for something useful?

Could we produce our products closer to our customers?
Could we source our inputs closer to our factories?
Could we change how we package our product to reduce the amount of raw materials needed?
Could we somehow distribute our products in reusable containers?

Finally, there is no escaping the fact that becoming more environmentally responsible as an organization will either gain you additional sales now or prevent you from losing sales in the future. as the standards of government and corporate procurement departments begin to shift towards purchasing from more environmentally responsible vendors.

So, what does your organization have to gain from trying to identify areas of environmental opportunity?

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Innovate Thyself (aka Personal Innovation)

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Many people have written previously about how difficult it is to innovate within an established organization. Trying to transform oneself can be just as incredibly difficult. I wouldn’t call it a re-invention, per se, because of the distinction I draw between invention and innovation.

The distinction is that invention is all about coming up with useful products and services, while innovation truly occurs when a person or group of people take that useful invention the last mile to make it truly valuable. As a result, I like to call this incredibly difficult transformation “Personal Innovation” instead, because transforming oneself is also about more than coming up with a useful idea. Personal Innovation is more about creating a new existence that is even more valuable to you and those around you. So, why is Personal Innovation so incredibly difficult?

Well, it is difficult for the exact same reasons that innovation in established organizations is difficult:

Limited Resources (money and time)
Existing Jobs/Interests
Resistance to Change

To achieve a Personal Innovation in the realm of employment, you first have to overcome the time and financial limitations caused by your current employment. We’ll talk about employment in the broad sense, so it incorporates starting a business. This is because in both cases someone owns the job and pays you to do it. In the case of starting a business, you own the job and pay yourself to do the job of running the business.

The challenge begins with finding the time to move yourself towards your dream job or business. Obviously you have to spend a lot of your time on the existing job or business just to keep the lights on. If you have a have a family finding the time to pursue your Personal Innovation is even more difficult (because, after all, you do want to spend time with them). If your new direction requires acquiring new knowledge (formally or informally), then that has to squeeze into the limited time available and may take a long time to complete as a result.

Quitting your existing job or selling your existing business will condense the time needed to acquire the new knowledge, but of course this comes at a financial cost. If your transformation involves starting a business then you also have to wait to begin until you can save or raise the funds necessary to get your venture off the ground.

If all of this isn’t difficult enough, then there is also the challenge you will face of truly moving away from the current job or interests that are the subject of your transformation. The job or interests you are pursuing now always have some kind of payoff, otherwise you would have transformed yourself before now. Maybe your current job pays better than the job you think you might want to do or the business you might want to run. Maybe your current job doesn’t pay enough and so you have to work two jobs to make ends meet (further reducing your time available to make a transition). You may also have to face the enticement of a future payoff in terms of a promotion (in the case of a job), or the temptation of delaying the transformation to some future date when it might be more “convenient” for you or your family.

Finally, change is scary. The thought of making a big change and moving away from the familiar might be too much stress for some people’s systems to keep pursuing the transformation. Those who stay the course will have to overcome criticism and even ridicule from those who they share their current job or interests with. There is also self-doubt to contend with. Sometimes, you will feel that you are not talented enough or smart enough or deserving enough to make the switch. You might find yourself unconsciously sabotaging yourself to avoid making the change. We all sometimes find excuses for why we are not doing the things we should be doing to realize a change. Sometimes we blow an interview because inside we ourselves don’t believe we are truly ready for the change.

All of these things that happen in a personal context are very similar to the reasons that innovation is difficult in established organizations. This is why startups sometimes catch established competitors off-guard, allowing them to disrupt entire industries (aka disruptive innovation). But, some established organizations still manage to innovate and stay ahead of the competition however, which begs the question:

What can we do as individuals to achieve the disruptive innovation in our personal lives that we seek?

Well, it all comes down to recognizing our limitations, both personal and circumstantial, and then being determined to succeed in spite of them. By acknowledging the challenges, we simultaneously provide ourselves with excuses, but if committed, also with exciting challenges to find solutions for. It has been proven time and again that difficult situations and daunting constraints often result in the brightest solutions.

Put yourself in the role of the underdog even if you’re not, and challenge yourself to find solutions to the things you see as limitations. Share these challenges with those you trust and enlist their help in finding solutions. By putting the message into your universe about the change you are trying to make, the efforts that you are putting forth, and the approaches you are taking to overcome the requisite challenges, you will be surprised by the unexpected answers that you receive from unlikely sources.

Be ready to listen when the answers come, and don’t be afraid to go over, under, through, or around any obstacles that get between you and achieving your Personal Innovation. Celebrate the little victories and don’t get discouraged if it takes time. In fact, expect it to take longer than you initially imagine. This may sound daunting, but we really are capable of transforming ourselves.

Are you ready to create your own Personal Innovation?

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Leveraging External Talent for Innovation

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How Leading Organizations Manage Their Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing Efforts

Although there are simple and cost effective ways to jumpstart your efforts – for example, leveraging a company like InnoCentive to host prize-based challenges in order to rapidly find solutions to your most pressing problems – leading organizations that wish to truly embrace open innovation and crowdsourcing do so through careful planning. When seeking to engage external talent, one of the first of many questions you must first ask yourself is: Why are we doing this? What do we hope that external talent can achieve for us that our internal talent cannot (or should not) achieve, and how do we integrate the two together?

The second question leading organizations in open innovation ask themselves is: Why will they care? And one good place to start in answering this difficult question is to ask: What kind of organization do you have? Do you have a product-driven organization like Microsoft that is very much organized around products? Do you have a customer-driven organization like Hallmark that is organized around customer moments instead of around products? Or do you have a purpose-driven organization? While it does not technically matter what kind of organization you have, the key is to find something that not just your employees will engage with, but that your customers and partners will engage with as well. This could be purpose, but it could also be love for a brand or a well-designed, emotionally-connected product.

The Commodity Marketplace for Employees

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The Commodity Marketplace for Employees There is a plethora of articles and books out there about how difficult it is to be in a commodity business. Books like “Blue Ocean Strategy” talk about it in terms of swimming away from the red ocean to the blue ocean, or that the blood of fierce competition in a commodity marketplace has turned the ocean red.

Innovation is such a hot topic right now because an increasing number of industries that used to be places where differentiation existed, have suddenly turned into commodity industries. When differences between the offerings of different companies become small, competition increasingly turns to price, and the product is commoditized. The customer becomes ambivalent about which offering they choose – there are a number of choices good enough for their purposes.

Why don’t we see the same plethora of articles and books out there about Personal Innovation?

Ah, but you might say the marketplace is full of self-help and personal growth books. Yes, but Personal Innovation is about more than personal growth. Personal Innovation is about self-transformation and in the employee context, about creating a strategy for swimming away from the red ocean.

Yes, if you choose to be an employee you are choosing to swim in the red ocean. The employee marketplace is an incredibly commoditized industry. A System Administrator job pays x, a Bookkeeper job pays y. Have you ever heard this before – “I’d love to give you a raise, but you’re already at the top of the salary range (aka salary band)”?Or maybe you’ve heard this one – “We think you’re the best person for the job, but the money you’re asking for…nobody in that role makes that much.”

Despite what some people may tell you, the employee marketplace has little room for value-based selling (especially after you are in the door). The Human Resources department in the same way as the Purchasing department, has made sure that every “product” purchased has an approved price. Want to buy a photocopier? It can’t cost more than x. Want to hire a finance manager? You can’t pay them more than y.

Continuing with our photocopier example, employees who don’t know their own value ruin the marketplace for employees who do in the same manner that companies willing to sell their photocopiers for thin or negative margins to build market share ruin the marketplace for other copier companies. So what is an employee to do?

Unionization is one way that employees can improve their lot, but it has its own set of problems in that “stars” or extraordinarily high performers have no way to make above average income on their above exceptional contribution.

Professional athletes are probably the only set of employees that have managed to guarantee themselves a high level of minimum compensation and benefits without eliminating the possibility of stars to earn much more. Professional services (lawyers, consultants, CPA’s, etc.), venture capital, and private equity firms with a partner structure offer the potential for “star” compensation, but “stars” are defined not by ability to do the job but their ability to bring in business.

Professional Services independents have the opportunity to generate “star” earnings as well, but again this has more to do with the professional’s ability to create business, although it is more closely linked to at least their perceived ability.

So where does this leave the average employee?

In today’s reality, if you are a “star” your best investment will be to build yourself into an industry expert within the confines of your existing employment. This is where Personal Innovation comes in. You have to determine how you can achieve differentiation and competitive separation from your peers. First you have to determine why you are a “star” and they are not, and how you can prove to the world that you are a “star” and deserve to be compensated outside the traditional salary range. Creating a “star” quality is all about proving in a tangible way that you deliver extraordinary value beyond that of other employees, and showing that you deserve to be treated differently. It’s not good enough to be a strong performer, or the best performer. You must achieve competitive separation and differentiation from your peers.

This can be achieved through the continuous pursuit of industry education, improvement of your public speaking and writing skills, creation of an industy blog, and volunteering to represent your company as a speaker at industry conferences and trade shows. The industry blog and public speaking engagements will expand the perception as a “star” beyond the bounds of your organization. If you combine these efforts with other publishing efforts like magazine or journal articles and possibly even a book, and you will expand your reach even farther and faster. You do need to have something unique and useful to say however, which is why the continuing education is so important. Doing all of these things will not only potentially improve your ability to do your existing job, but will also increase the possibility that another company will become interested in you.

Let’s face it, the best hope you have of getting better compensation is to move on to a different company (otherwise you are limited by your salary range) or start your own. If you do manage to get another company interested in you enough to try and entice you away, make sure first that it is not just to be their employee, but that they are recognizing that you are a “star” coming in and need to be compensated in an appropriate manner. CXO’s typically manage to negotiate in this way, as do some VP’s (particularly Sales VP’s). For a “star”, being compensated in an appropriate manner means of course a high base salary, but more importantly it means a package that includes things like signing bonuses and a large opportunity to earn via incentive-based compensation and stock options or awards. Negotiating this kind of package is difficult to achieve unless you have risen to the top of the organizational hierarchy and is the reason that most true “stars” end up starting their own company, even if initially it only provides an auxiliary source of income.

So if you believe you have that “star” quality, hopefully your mind is churning out ways that you are going to achieve that competitive separation and differentiation from your peers. If you pursue Personal Innovation with the same or greater gusto than you pursue product or service innovations for your current employer, I’m sure you will find a way to swim away from the bloody waters of the commodity mentality that is the traditional employee marketplace.

It will require unwavering commitment and determination, but those are qualities that all “stars” have. Personally, I am swimming as fast as I can, but I recognize that it is a difficult journey with an uncertain length. I hope you will join me on this journey. Do you have what it takes to be a “star”?

What do you think?

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Innovate Yourself – Becoming Overpaid

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Innovate Yourself - Becoming Overpaid A fun one from the archive (2007)

I came across this article from MarketWatch on the Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S. and thought it was worthy of discussing. I don’t want to focus on whether these occupations are overpaid or not (I’m sure the people working in these roles would disagree with the author), but instead on what we can all learn from this article. First here is a list of the ten occupations:

Wedding photographers
Major airline pilots
West Coast longshoremen
Skycaps at major airports
Real estate agents selling high end homes
Motivational speakers and ex-politicians on the lecture circuit
Orthodontists
CEOs of poorly performing companies
Washed-up pro athletes in long-term contracts
Mutual-fund managers

Next, here is my list of some of the common threads amongst the ten occupations chosen by Chris Pummer of CBS MarketWatch with the input from anonymous compensation experts, and an academic examination of how someone might approach the “problem” of increasing their income by looking at these common threads:

Power

Create a situation where meeting your demands becomes an extremely attractive alternative to not meeting them. Some people would refer to this as identifying points of leverage.
Banding together with other highly skilled co-workers into a union is one approach that people take.
Another is to take create sufficient revenue for an organization so that the company doesn’t want to risk interruption of that cashflow.

Fear

People are afraid of someone messing up their wedding photos, their investments, or their safe journey.
Put yourself in a position to directly protect a customer’s memories, finances, or their life itself.

Establish a “tradition”

Pro-actively create the perception that it is the usual way of doing things for a customer to tip you or pay you a percentage of their bill (regardless how big).
The people at the airport taking your bags at the check-in counter do the same job as curbside check-in (they give you a ticket and check your bag), but we all believe it is accepted practice to tip the curbside check-in person and not the person at the check-in counter inside. We tip a “waiter” for taking our order and giving us food and drink, but we don’t do the same for the “cashier” at McDonald’s do we?

Create a shortage

Organize the people in your “profession” and work to create barriers to entry that can be used to control supply.
Trade unions do this to some extent with apprenticeship programs and the like.
In addition to Orthodonists, Pharmacists and Veterinarians have been accused of this.

Turning garbage into gold

Identifying a job that most people wouldn’t want to take, but where a highly qualified person is desired, can result in a job that might pay quite well.
If you are a supervisor, try to position yourself to supervise the group of people in your organization that makes more money than the group you supervise now (usually a supervisor will make more than the people he/she supervises).
Most talented managers won’t take on a position at a struggling company, and as a result the company will either have to over-pay to get good talent to join or be satisfied with hiring people who want to stay in the local area or couldn’t get hired by a better performing company in the industry. If you have a tolerance for risk, seek out opportunities at underperforming companies in your industry and play up the career risk about moving from your successful company to their unsuccessful one in the compensation discussions.

Would it be wrong for an individual or a group of employees to look to game these common threads consciously?

Organizations are constantly looking for ways to put downward pressure on wages, so would it be wrong for individuals to look after their own self-interests and attempt to maximize their ability to take care of their family?

I would argue that it is the responsibility of the individual to protect their own self-interests and look to maximize their wages in the same way it is the responsibility of the organization to look to minimize wages for the self-interest of the shareholders.

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Moving from Talent Ownership to Talent Attraction

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Moving from Talent Ownership to Talent Attraction

In our hyper-competitive, always-connected world, organizations are increasingly becoming focused on improving both their speed to market and their revenue per headcount. In this environment, more senior leaders every day are seeing innovation as the primary way to gain competitive advantage and to simultaneously increase revenue and cut costs. At the same time, organizations are struggling to find ways to accelerate their pace of innovation without escalating their costs faster than their budgets will allow.

The increasing demands for speed and efficiency are causing organizations to become ever more virtual and flexible, to utilize more variable resources, and to add and shed employees with greater regularity (often with both happening in the same organization at the same time). The progressively dynamic nature of the workforce inside organizations is making it more difficult for organizations to attract, develop, and retain the best talent while simultaneously meeting the fiscal realities of the business. This is causing many organizations to move from a talent ownership mindset to a talent attraction mindset. In a talent ownership world, recruitment and the hiring transaction are king. But in a talent attraction world, successful organizations are those that master the art of building and maintaining talent communities that keep talent connected to the organization even when they are not employed by it. Consciously creating an external talent strategy is therefore essential to success.

The talent market relationship changes are not just happening at the individual level. Change is also happening at the organizational level, as organizations themselves are moving from a fortress mentality, where all work is secret and kept inside the organization’s four walls, to an integrated, global economy with an interconnected web of suppliers and distribution channels – where being the partner of choice in your industry will be increasingly important.

Silicon Valley icon Bill Joy once famously said, “There are always more smart people outside your company than within it.” In this new world of work, organizations must begin accepting that the most valuable employees will now be those that not only do good work, but who also serve as a force multiplier for their organizations by being good at organizing and orchestrating the innovation efforts of others who do not even work for the company. And ideally, you will want to evolve to a place where even those who do not work for you actually want to work with you. In this brave new world, you must have strategies in place for attracting both internal and external talent to your innovation efforts.

Section 1. Why Having an External Talent Strategy is Becoming Increasingly Important

The old way of winning the talent wars was to search for and hire the very best talent and keep them inside your own four walls by offering them competitive compensation, benefits, and perks. Your hope was that your talent is better than your competitors’ talent. But over the last couple of decades, companies have increasingly found that employees who pursue what they do with passion will outperform an employee with a gun to their head every time. Circuit City learned very publicly that people are not commodities and went out of business from treating them as if they were. At the same time, we know that diversity is very important and hard to foster internally. And so it is to get to this diversity of thought in order to accelerate product launch and innovation timelines that companies must open up – it is a global economy with a global talent pool.

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Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

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Continuing my quest to surface some classics that the Innovation Excellence audience will have never seen, here is another from 2007:

I would like to introduce a visual metaphor that the consultants use at Business Strategy Innovation. It’s called, predictably enough, the Business Strategy Innovation Diamond, or the BSID. There is another reason we use it, to “ID” the “BS” in an organization. Now a lot of people would represent strategy as the top of a pyramid, processes in the middle, and systems as the base of a pyramid, but that ignores two of the most important tools in any organization – policies and reporting. Business Strategy Innovation instead starts with a diamond that looks like this:

Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

Here is an example of how the Business Strategy Innovation Diamond can help you structure an organizational analysis project:

Strategy

We want to be the leading Internet retailer

Policy

Free shipping on orders over $25

Processes

Create marketing program to promote this benefit

Systems

Modify shopping cart application
Build on-page messaging to alert customers of additional purchase $$$ required to reach the $25 threshold for free shipping

Reporting

Establish any infrastructure required to measure orders above/below $25
Measure benchmark period
Create report measuring % of orders greater than $25 in current period versus benchmark period to measure effect

The BSID focuses your organization on making sure that the policies support the strategy, that the processes facilitate the policies, that the systems enable the processes, and the reporting measures the execution of the strategy. Not focusing on the BSID, may result in just BS instead of strategic innovation.

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

Innovation, change and transformation thought leadership, lovingly curated by Braden Kelley

Category Archives: Innovation

Personal Innovation – Shine Your Star

Are you the 10th person who innovates?

Rise and Fall of Innovation at Yahoo!

Innovation Comes in Many Forms

Innovate Thyself (aka Personal Innovation)

Leveraging External Talent for Innovation

The Commodity Marketplace for Employees

Innovate Yourself – Becoming Overpaid

Moving from Talent Ownership to Talent Attraction

Section 1. Why Having an External Talent Strategy is Becoming Increasingly Important

Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)