For all my life I have been taught that time is the fourth dimension in a space-time continuum. I mean, for goodness sake, Einstein said this was so, and all of physics has followed his lead. Nonetheless, I want to argue that, while the universe may indeed have four dimensions, time is not one of them, nor is it a fundamental element of reality.
Before you think I have really jumped off the deep end, let me just say that my claim is that motion is a fundamental element of reality, and it is the one that time is substituting for. This is based simply on observation. That is, we can observe and measure mass. We can observe and measure space. We can observe and measure energy. We can observe and measure motion. Time, on the other hand, is simply a tool we have developed to measure motion. That is, motion is fundamental, and time is derived.
Consider where our concept of time came from. It started with three distinct units—the day, the month, and the year. Each is based on a cyclical motion—the earth turning around its axis, the moon encircling the earth, the earth and moon encircling the sun. All three of these cyclical motions have the property of returning to their starting point. They repeat, over and over and over. That’s how they came to our attention in the first place.
If we call this phenomenon cyclical time, we can contrast it with linear time. The latter is time we experience as passing, the one to which we apply the terms past, present, and future. But in fact, what is passing is not time but motion, motion we are calibrating by time. That is, we use the cyclical units of time to measure the linear distance between any given motion and a reference location.
As I discuss in The Infinite Staircase, by virtue of the Big Bang, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the ongoing rush to greater and greater entropy, the universe is inherently in motion. Some of that motion gets redirected to do work, and some of that work has resulted life emerging on our planet. Motion is intrinsic to our experience of life, much more so than time. As babies we have no sense of time, but we immediately experience mass, space, energy, and motion.
Because mass, space, energy, and motion are core to our experience, we have developed tools to help us engage with them strategically. We can weigh mass and reshape it in myriad ways to serve our ends. We can measure space using anything as a standard length and create structures of whatever size and shape we need. We can measure energy in terms of temperature and pressure and manipulate it to move all kinds of masses through all kinds of spaces. And we can measure motion through space by using standard units of time.
The equation for so doing is typically written as v = d/t. This equation makes us believe that velocity is a concept derived from the primitives of distance and time. But a more accurate way of looking at reality is to say t = d/v. That is, we can observe distance and motion, from which we derive time. If you have a wristwatch with a second hand, this is easily confirmed. A minute consists of a wand traveling through a fixed angular distance, 360°, at a constant velocity set by convention, in this case the International System of Units, these days atomically calibrated by specified number of oscillations of cesium. Time is derived by dividing a given distance by a given velocity.
OK, so what? Here the paths of philosophy and physics diverge, with me being able to pursue the former but not the latter. Before parting, however, I would like to ask the physicists in the room, should there be any, a question: If one accepted the premise that motion was the fourth dimension, not time, such that we described the universe as a continuum of spacemotion instead of spacetime, would that make any difference? Specifically, with respect to Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity, are we just substituting terms here, or are there material consequences? I would love to learn what you think.
At my end, I am interested in the philosophical implications of this question, specifically in relation to phenomenology, the way we experience time. To begin, I want to take issue with the following definition of time served up by Google:
a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future.
From my perspective, this is just wrong. It calls for using events to measure time. The correct approach would focus on using time to measure motion, describing the situation as follows:
an intra-spatial continuum that can be measured in terms of time as one event succeeds another from a position of higher energy to one of lower energy.
The motive for this redefinition is to underscore that the universe is inherently in motion, following the Second Law of thermodynamics, perpetually seeking to cool itself down by spreading itself out. We here on Earth are born into the midst of that action, boats set afloat upon a river, moving with the current on the way to a sea of ultimate cool. We can go with the flow, we can paddle upstream, we can even divert the river of entropy to siphon off energy to do work. The key point to register is that motion abides, inexorably following the arrow of entropy, moving from hot to cold until heat death is achieved.
If motion is a primary dimension of the universe, there can be no standing still. Phenomenologically, this is quite different from the traditional time-based perspective. In a universe of space and time, events have to be initiated, and one can readily imagine a time with no events, a time when nothing happens, maybe something along the lines of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In a universe of space and motion, however, that is impossible. There are always events, and we are always in the midst of doing. A couch potato is as immersed in events as a race car driver. Or, to paraphrase Milton, they also move who only stand and wait.
A second consequence of the spacemotion continuum is that there is no such thing as eternity and no such thing as infinity. Nothing can exist outside the realm of change, and the universe is limited to whatever amount of energy was released at the Big Bang. Now, to be fair, from a phenomenological perspective, the dimensions of the universe are so gigantic that, experientially, they might as well be infinite and eternal. But from a philosophical perspective, the categories of eternity and infinity are not ontologically valid. They are asymptotes not entities.
Needless to say, all this flies in the face of virtually every religion that has ever taken root in human history. As someone deeply committed to traditional ethics, I am grateful to all religions for supporting ethical action and an ethical mindset. If there were no other way to secure ethics, then I would opt for religion for sure. But we know a lot more about the universe today than we did several thousand years ago, and so there is at least an opportunity to forge a modern narrative, one that can find in secular metaphysics a foundation for traditional values. That’s what The Infinite Staircase is seeking to do.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Pixabay
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How to Embrace Agile Leadership to Innovate at Speed
GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu
In a world dominated by uncertainty, how can we prepare for the unpredictable and keep innovating in what seems like a highly chaotic environment?
We simply need to be faster in adapting to change and navigating uncertainty. Studies show that organizations that move faster achieve significantly better results across various metrics, including profitability, operational resilience, organizational health, and growth.
How to make sure your organization is fast enough? Innovation at speed is more relevant than ever, but someone must put the pedal to the metal. Typically, that someone has to be a leader, because in the face of unprecedented change, leaders are needed to get us through the transformation.
However, unless organizations rethink leadership, they won’t be able to innovate systematically. In this day and age, great leadership requires a different mindset and a new approach to drive innovation and keep pace with change. We call this agile leadership.
This article, the second in the series dedicated to Agile Innovation Management, explores the critical role of agile leadership in innovating at speed.
Discover the key challenges and misconceptions surrounding the topic and understand why many leaders struggle with it. We’ll also provide practical steps and examples that will hopefully inspire you to increase the agility of your organization.
From Old Leadership Models to Agile Leadership
Let’s begin by clarifying what we mean by agile leadership and its position in relation to established leadership models.
The history of leadership traces back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, American engineer renown for his methods aimed at enhancing efficiency and productivity. Innovative at his time for shaping industrial management, his legacy still lives on today.
Unfortunately, his methods are not adapted for this century. Despite this, many leaders and managers still adhere to “Taylorism”, a top-down approach where leaders make the decisions and plans, and employees are tasked with executing them.
This model conflicts with the flexible and adaptable mindset required for agility. The gap between employees and Taylorist leaders trying to implement agile practices often leads to frustration and inefficiency.
Even if they introduce squads and sprints, Taylorists maintain a top-down approach, telling people what to do and how.
For successful agile transformations, you need to move away from rigid, outdated models. As we saw in the ING examplepresented in the “Guide to Business Agility” article, simply copying other companies without suitable leadership will not produce the desired outcomes. Therefore, fundamental change is needed.
True agile leadership allows for rapid decision making, resilience, adaptability and innovation. It requires leaders to embrace new ideas, offer clear direction without micromanaging, and create a culture that supports speed and innovation.
Agile leadership is about rapid decision making, resilience, adaptability and innovation.
It’s also important to remember that managers and leaders are not the same. Leadership goes beyond overseeing a group and delivering desired outcomes.
As Seth Godin stated in his “Leadership vs Management” speech, “managers do things right, leaders do the right things”.
While it would be ideal for all managers to cultivate leadership skills, the reality is that their primary focus is on increasing efficiency and productivity within their domains, often overlooking the broader picture. Such skills are essential in leading people, lifting them up and empowering them to become agile, innovative problem solvers.
Despite the progress of AI and technology automating mundane tasks, we still need leaders capable of making decisions that address both present and future challenges. Effective agile leaders should be able to navigate failure and complexities, and map a way to move forward.
To succeed, we need to hone in on critical thinking and those often overlooked “soft skills” like navigating tough conversations, giving and receiving feedback, and showing empathy. No matter where you fall on the org chart, mastering these skills can be the game-changer between just getting by and achieving excellence.
While agile leadership might not be about the “Agile” way, being familiar with the agile values and principles can be useful on a practical level.
For example, the authors of Doing Agile Right help leadership teams shift to agile methods by tailoring the Agile Manifesto’s core values to fit their unique situations. It’s about adapting and making it work for you.
Viima design created from Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos
To give another example, think of the principle of self-organizing teams. It’s important to know how to build self-organizing teams that thrive, collaborate and continuously learn from each other through continuous feedback and transparent communication.
We’ve seen this time and again in how teams use Viima to collaborate on their ideas, assess, prioritize and develop those that have been discussed openly. We noticed that most successful projects created using Viima have strong leadership too.
But moving away from the practical details to the bigger picture, how much can leaders influence the speed of innovation at an organizational level?
Can Agile Leadership Drive Innovation?
We established in The Guide to Agile Innovation Management that agility enables innovation by embracing experimentation and learning, implementing adaptive planning processes, emphasizing cross-functional collaboration and bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise.
All these elements would not be possible without the guidance of a great leader. So how can a good agile leader unlock innovation in an organization?
Adapting fast by building trust
Agility in leadership is about adapting to changing environments quickly, often under the pressure of performance.
However, this can have negative consequences. The Work Trend Index from Microsoft surveyed over 20,000 people across 11 countries and found that half of them reported experiencing burnout. Although 83% of employees claimed to be productive, only 12% of leaders felt confident their teams were genuinely productive.
To build trust and participation in feedback systems, leaders should regularly share what they’re hearing, how they’re responding, and why. — Work Trend Index 2022
As a leader, offering support and trust can help balance the pressure of performance. Including people in the organization’s narrative and showing them where they fit in helps build trust and provides a sense of purpose.
This sense of purpose encourages people to commit, learn, grow, improve, and innovate. Which brings us to the next point: agile leadership nurtures not only the ability but also the willingness of people to innovate.
Speed requires commitment
Many large firms still rely on outdated “industrial-era management” models. These models focus on hierarchical organizational charts, emphasizing static reporting relationships.
In such environments, it can be extremely difficult for ideas and initiatives to navigate through the many layers of hierarchy and reach the right decision-makers. If they do make it through, the process takes so long that the opportunity may be lost by the time an idea reaches approval.
This approach can lead to a culture with limited transparency and collaboration across teams and departments, along with an attitude of “every man for himself.”
It’s no surprise that over 70% of workforce is disengaged or quietly quitting, which significantly stifles an organization’s ability to innovate. When employees lack motivation, everything slows down. But when there is a sense of ownership and pride, there is higher commitment.
An agile leader fosters a sense of community and nurtures people’s commitment and dedication. This leads to speed and adaptability.
While the right mindset is crucial, using the right tools can also help build trust and promote collaboration. Many leaders use Viima to create processes that enhance idea sharing at all levels, collaboration and trust. They can provide feedback and follow up on people’s ideas in a timely manner, while employees can see the progress of their ideas.
But to reach this level, it’s important to understand the behavioral changes needed. In the next section, we’ll dive into practical tips on how to adapt your mindset by examining leaders who have successfully guided their organizations to thrive and innovate.
How to Be an Agile Leader
How can you become a great leader who adapts to change and guides others into the future? To provide some practical examples, I turned to Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation by Linda Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove, and Kent Lineback.
The authors conducted a decade-long research study of 24 leaders across different organizations and industries. They offer valuable insights into how exceptional leaders cultivate environments that foster collective creativity, collaboration, and experimentation.
In a nutshell, the authors describe the ABC of leadership which drives innovation and makes the shift from “vertical ideology of control” to “horizontal ideology of enablement”.
Their research has identified that to lead an organization that innovates at scale with speed, you need leaders that fill in three different functions:
the Architect — to build the culture and capabilities necessary to collaborate, experiment and work.
the Bridger — to create the bridge between the outside and the inside of the organization by bringing together skills and tools to innovate at speed.
the Catalyst — to accelerate co-creation through the entire ecosystem.
The Architect: Create the right environment
The paradox of business agility is that it takes time to build the capabilities needed for fast response and adaptability. Even if you want to move quickly and encourage others to do the same, you can’t force change.
Achieving agility requires a different mindset — letting go of some control that conventional leadership often demands. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect for many leaders who believe their power lies in maintaining control.
However, as an agile leader, you must recognize existing interdependencies. You rely on employees’ willingness, commitment, and ability to drive progress. Your success depends heavily on others, which is why it’s crucial to create an environment where people can ideate, create, and execute. As we will see in the next chapter, agile leadership involves balancing relinquishing control with providing enough direction and guidance to prevent chaos.
Many elements are at play here, but one of the most innovative animation studios, Pixar, offers a clear example. They created the first feature-length computer-animated film, Toy Story. What’s remarkable about Pixar is that every film they released after Toy Story became an instant commercial success.
Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar, is a mastermind of innovation and a pioneer in technology and storytelling. His legacy offers numerous inspiring lessons for leaders, but here are some key points on how he and other company leaders fostered an environment where innovation thrives.
Pixar’s culture is built on two essential elements: diversity and conflict.
Diversity
In this context, diversity means intellectual diversity — bringing together people with different perspectives, skills, working styles, and problem-solving approaches.
At Pixar, three different worlds converged: creative, technical, and business. People from all areas were treated as peers, and all perspectives were valued equally. Among visual artists and tech people, you could also find cultural anthropologists, music producers, and even a professional cheerleader.
When different views come together, great ideas, solutions, and innovations can emerge. But inevitably, disagreements and conflict can also arise.
Conflict
Conflict is something many leaders fear and seek to minimize. When conflict becomes destructive, personal, or a battle for who is right and who is wrong, nobody wins. However, at Pixar, feedback is honest and direct. Sometimes even brutal. But the aim is to improve things and find the best solution.
A confrontation becomes a debate in search of a better solution that serves everyone’s goals. Those who receive and provide feedback should always keep this in mind.
Naturally, this is not always achievable, and tempers can flare quickly under pressure, frustration or when passionate people clash. When conflict turns into a fight to win an argument, you should intervene, remind people of the greater purpose, and bring them back on track.
As a leader, community building should also be on your radar. Foster a strong sense of “we” and psychological safety. This encourages people to stand up for their ideas and pursue the solutions they believe are best for the greater good.
This is what contributed to Pixar’s continued innovation. As a leader, Ed Catmull realized early on the critical role of leadership in creating the context for innovation.
I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film (Toy Story) to be made. My new goal became … to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic.
The Bridger: Decentralize decision making
Decentralized decision-making is key to breaking down silos and eliminating bottlenecks, enabling faster experimentation, learning, and improvement. Although this approach is increasingly popular and recommended for driving innovation, many struggle with its implementation.
Decentralization demands strong leadership that empowers teams to drive progress, avoids micromanagement, and provides the right support while removing barriers and building innovation capabilities.
For teams to collaborate effectively, they need a leader who plays a central role — not to manage decisions, but to facilitate innovation.
Take the example of Volkswagen. In 2010, Luca De Meo was the CMO for VW, a group of nine brands, helping the organization achieve its goal of becoming a leading car manufacturer.
VW’s marketing decisions were decentralized, with local marketing teams independently creating and implementing their own strategies based on general guidelines from headquarters.
However, this approach led to a lack of communication and collaboration among marketing teams worldwide. Marketing spoke with different voices in each market, lacked alignment, and had no clear strategic role within the organization.
To build mutual trust and respect De Meo organized a two-day design lab where he brought together over seventy people to collaborate, ideate and work together to build a global brand. Of course, a one-time brainstorming workshop is not enough, so this became a recurrent event. Each gathering had different goals or action points on which diverse teams had to work together, bring their own experience and expertise to the table.
He also took a new approach in handling launches by creating a cross-functional team that brought together fresh perspective from young employees in marketing or other fields. He created a small team and gave them a free hand to come up with an integrated marketing strategy for the launch of a new city car model.
De Meo did not interfere and did not tell them how to go about it. Instead, he encouraged them to work as intrapreneurs within the larger organization. He set high expectations and tried to nudge them in the right direction when needed. Most importantly, he encouraged them to take risks and allowed them to make mistakes. The agile way.
A very important thing to highlight from this story is that De Meo made sure that minority voices were heard. In setups with a conventional approach to leadership, the loudest (or more experienced) voices usually get their ideas across. This means that many opportunities can be missed.
Long story short, leadership created the environment for people to innovate and removed barriers and enabled people to move faster. The efforts paid off and VW grew both as a recognized brand and in financial results.
The Catalyst: Grow capabilities of everyone around you
Visionary leaders made history, but if we take a closer look, it was not all about vision. It’s not enough to have a vision and expect others to follow you. You also need to set direction on how to get there, not just by dictating but by unleashing and amplifying people’s own capabilities, talents, passion and strengths that are useful for the bigger goal.
In our latest conversation in The Innovation Room podcast, we had the great pleasure of talking to John Bessant, an innovation veteran. From his vast experience he shared a few examples of how innovation leaders focused on facilitating conversations and debates to lead people to the future.
Such leaders can cultivate agility, and what is called dynamic capability: the ability to integrate, build and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments.
To illustrate dynamic capability, Bessant gives the example of Procter and Gamble. P&G made a major change after 150 years of excelling in R&D and market research. They switched to a model they called “Connect and Develop” — their open innovation approach — well ahead of the open innovation trend. This shift involved a significant change in mindset and took them 20 years to get through it. They stepped back, reassessed, and adapted to the changing world.
This is a summary of their achievements, but reaching such results required an internal shift in culture. P&G needed to get everyone on board with open innovation, not just to embrace external ideas, but internal ones too. Early on, they recognized this model as essential for adapting to future challenges.
P&G leadership understood the critical role of employees in driving these changes. The new approach required employees to be more agile and flexible, to develop skills like curiosity, collaboration, and connectedness.
They worked to support employees who were inclined to control more, were insecure, or were resistant to sharing and opening up. P&G set new challenges and increased the complexity of some tasks to push employees’ capabilities. They ensured that employees worked across the business in different markets. As employees gained experience in different areas and improved at identifying and solving problems, their mindsets began to evolve.
Cultivating an innovative mindset is a process that takes time and a structured, intentional approach.
These are just a few examples, and although summarizing them may make it sound simple, each of these leaders struggled in their journey to achieve the desired outcomes.
Excellent agile leadership is challenging, but it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. Let’s explore these challenges in more detail to help you assess what you can realistically implement in your own leadership role.
Challenges and Limitations of Agile Leadership
Being a great leader is never easy and being an agile one — navigating through uncertainty — is even tougher. Whether you call it agile leadership or not, your role as a leader is to create spaces for your teams to adapt quickly and steer the organization toward future success.
Let’s see what are some of these challenges and how you can address them by leading with agility.
1. Providing a sense of certainty in an uncertain environment
Certainty is an emotional state that can influence how we perceive our work environment. While you can’t control uncertainty, you can manage the fear of the unknown by being transparent. The least transparent environments often breed anxiety, rumors and speculations.
Remember: Share the big picture with your team, and don’t shy away from the truth. Provide updates on ongoing projects, successes, and setbacks. This way you build trust and foster a sense of purpose. Balance transparency with discretion — too much detail can overwhelm people, but too little breeds suspicion.
2. Managing the chaos
You want your team to take initiative and explore new ideas, but a lack of guidance can cause confusion and inefficiency. I’ve seen leaders struggle with this balance, either micromanaging their teams or stepping back too far.
Remember: Define clear ground rules and processes to guide your team. Support people to innovate within a framework that provides structure. Encourage ideas to surface and provide top-down guidance to turn them into actionable innovations.
3. Adapting to a new leadership model
Embracing agile leadership requires stepping out of your comfort zone and taking others with you. It demands discipline and a low tolerance for incompetence, with a focus on striving for excellence.
Remember: Encourage a disciplined approach to experimentation and ensure that failures lead to valuable lessons rather than wasted efforts. Candid feedback should flow both ways. Both leaders and employees should be open to having their ideas challenged. Embracing this kind of culture fosters growth and adaptability, but it also demands discipline and high standards to strive for excellence, as mediocrity thrives in comfort zones.
Conclusion
Whether you’re a leader or aspiring to be one, it’s important to recognize that perfection in leadership doesn’t exist — everyone has their own shortcomings and challenges. While we should empathize with these struggles, we must also hold leaders accountable.
Today, speed is a crucial competitive advantage, often going hand in hand with scale. Agility at the team level alone may not be enough; you need speed and scale in innovation to drive meaningful change.
Achieving this requires responsible and committed leadership that understands the need for both rapid and large-scale innovation. As you navigate your leadership journey, strive to lead with accountability, adaptability, and a focus on accelerating innovation.
Not long ago, pitchers and catchers reported to MLB Spring Training facilities in Florida and Arizona. For baseball fans, this is the first sign of Spring, an occasion that heralds months of warmth and sunshine, ballparks filled (hopefully) with cheering fans, dinners of beers and brats, and the undying belief that this year will be the year.
Moneyball is based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis and chronicles the 2002 Oakland Athletics season. The ’02 Oakland A’s, led by General Manager Billy Beane (played by Brad Pitt), forever changed baseball by adopting an approach that valued rigorous statistical analysis over the collective wisdom of baseball insiders (coaches, scouts, front office personnel) when building a team. This approach, termed “Moneyball,” enabled the A’s to reach the postseason with a team that cost only $44M in salary, compared to the NY Yankees that spent $125M to achieve the same outcome.
While the whole movie (and book) is a testament to the courage and perseverance required to challenge and change the status quo, time and again I come back to three lines that perfectly sum up the journey of every successful intrapreneur I’ve ever met.
The Beginning
“I know you’ve taken it in the teeth out there, but the first guy through the wall…he always gets bloody…always always gets bloody. This is threatening not just a way of doing business… but in their minds, it’s threatening the game. Really what it’s threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It’s threatening the way they do things… and every time that happens, whether it’s the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins – they have their hands on the switch – they go batshit crazy.”John Henry, Owner of the Boston Red Sox
Context
The 2002 season is over, and the A’s were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. John Henry, an owner of the Boston Red Sox, has invited Bill Beane to Boston to offer him the Red Sox GM job.
Lesson
This is what you sign up for when you decide to be an Intrapreneur. The more you challenge the status quo, the more you question how business is done, the more you ask Why and demand an answer, the closer you get to “tak(ing) it in the teeth.”
This is why courage, perseverance, and an unshakeable belief that things can and should be better are absolutely essential for intrapreneurs. Your job is to run at the wall over and over until you get through it.
People will follow. The Red Sox did. They won the World Series in 2004, breaking an 84-year-old curse.
The Middle
“It’s a process, it’s a process, it’s a process” — Bill Beane
Context
Billy has to convince the ballplayers to forget all the habits that made them great and embrace the philosophy of Moneyball. To stop stealing bases, turning double plays on bunts, and swinging for the fences and to start taking walks, throwing to first for the easy out, and prioritize getting on base over hitting a home run.
The players are confused and frustrated. Suddenly, everything that they once did right is wrong and what was not valued is deeply prized.
Lesson
Innovation is something new that creates value. Something new doesn’t just require change, it requires people to stop doing things that work and start doing things that seem strange or even wrong.
Change doesn’t happen overnight. It’s not a switch to be flipped. It’s a process to be learned. It takes time, practice, reminders, and patience.
The End
“When you get an answer you’re looking for, hang up.” — Billy Beane
Context
In this scene, Billy has offered one of his players to multiple teams, searching for the best deal. When the phone rings with a deal he likes, he and the other General Manager (GM) agree to it, Billy hangs up. Even though the other GM was in the middle of a sentence. When Peter Brand, the Assistant GM played by Jonah Hill, points out that Billy had just hung up on the other GM, Billy responds with this nugget of wisdom.
Lesson
It’s advice intrapreneurs should take very much to heart. I often see Innovation teams walk into management presentations with long presentations, full of data and projections, anxious to share their progress, and hoping for continued funding and support. When the meeting starts, a senior exec will say something like, “We’re excited by the progress we’re hearing about and what it will take to continue.”
That’s the cue to “hang up.”
Instead of starting the presentation from the beginning, start with “what it will take to continue.” You got the answer you’re looking for – they’re excited about the progress you’ve made – don’t spend time giving them the info they already have or, worse, could raise questions and dim their enthusiasm. Hang up on the conversation you want to have and have the conversation they want to have.
In closing
Moneyball was an innovation that fundamentally changed one of the most tradition-bound businesses in sports. To be successful, it required someone willing to take it in the teeth, to coach people through a process, and to hang up when they got the answer they wanted. It wasn’t easy but real change rarely is.
The same is true in corporations. They need their own Bill Beanes.
Are you willing to step up to the plate?
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
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While history tends to single out individuals, the truth is that when you look behind the story of any heroic leader, what you find is a network of loyal supporters, active collaborators and outside facilitators that are behind any great achievement. Nobody accomplishes anything significant alone.
That’s probably why it’s become fashionable for pundits to encourage us to “find our tribe,” a network of like-minded people who share your ambitions. Don’t listen to them. The truth is that great things are achieved not by taking comfort from your tribe, but from going beyond it and reaching out to those who aren’t of like mind.
The problem with focusing too much on your tribe is that those people tend to think the same way you do. They frequent the same places, watch the same TED talks and read the same blogs. That may be great for giving you some comfort and confidence, but it also acts as an echo chamber that will reinforce flawed assumptions and lead you down a false path.
The Problem With Closed Networks
In 2005, a team of researchers decided to study why some Broadway plays become hits and others flop. They looked at all the usual factors, such as production budget, marketing budget and the track record of the director, but what they found was that what was most important factor was the informal networks of relationships among the cast and crew.
If no one had ever worked together before, both financial and creative results tended to be poor. However, if the networks among the cast and crew became too dense—for all intents and purposes, becoming a tribe—performance also suffered. It was the teams that had elements of both, strong ties and new blood, that had the greatest success.
The same effect has been found elsewhere. In studies of star engineers at Bell Labs, the German automotive industry and currency traders it has been shown that tightly clustered groups, combined with long range “weak ties” that allow information to flow freely among disparate clusters of activity, consistently outperform close networks of likeminded people.
Just as we need to invest in building strong, trustful relationships, we also need to go beyond our comfort zone and seek out new connections. It’s far too easy to hide in a tribe.
The Discomfort of Diversity
While studies show that closed networks lead to worse performance, it has long been established that diversity improves performance. Researchers at the University of Michigan found that diverse groups can solve problems better than a more homogeneous team of greater objective ability. Another study that simulated markets showed that ethnic diversity deflated asset bubbles.
While the studies noted above merely simulate diversity in a controlled setting, there is also evidence from the real world that diversity produces better outcomes. A McKinsey report that covered 366 public companies in a variety of countries and industries found that those which were more ethnically and gender diverse performed significantly better than others.
Yet diversity also has a downside. In Political Tribes, Yale Professor Amy Chua notes that we are hardwired to be suspicious of others. For example, in a study where young children were randomly assigned to red or blue groups, they liked pictures of other kids who wore t-shirts that reflected their own group better. A study of adults had similar findings.
So you can see the attraction of tribes. We feel uncomfortable with people who we perceive as different. Surrounding ourselves with people who see things the way we do, on the other hand, makes us feel confident and powerful.
Mixing With The Heathens
Growing up in Iowa in the 1930s, Everett Rogers, noticed something strange in his father’s behavior. Although his father loved electrical gadgets, he was hesitant to adopt hybrid seed corn, even though it had higher yields. In fact, his father only made the switch after he saw his neighbor’s hybrid crop thrive during a drought in 1936.
This became the inspiration for Rogers’ now-familiar diffusion of innovations theory, in which an idea first gets popular with a group of early adopters and then only later spreads to other people. Geoffrey Moore later pointed out that most innovations fail because they never cross the chasm from the early adopters to the mainstream.
A study done by researchers at Kellogg and Stanford explains why. They put together groups of college students to solve a murder mystery. The groups made up of students from the same sorority or fraternity felt more confident and successful, even though they performed worse on the task than integrated groups that experienced more conflict, uncertainty and doubt.
That’s the problem with staying in your tribe. Sure, it feels great to have your ideas supported and reinforced by people you like and respect, but they are doing so because they already believe the same things that you do. To actually achieve something worthwhile, however, you have to go beyond preaching to the choir and start mixing with the heathens.
Do You Want To Make A Point Or Do You Want To Make A Difference?
In my book, Cascades, I cover a wide range of movements. Some, like the civil rights movement and the campaign to save 100,000 lives, succeeded brilliantly. Others, like Occupy and the technology companies along Boston’s Route 128, failed miserably. Another thing I found is that many movements that ultimately succeeded, failed initially because they failed to go beyond their tribe.
Here’s what Srdja Popović, who helped lead the Otpor movement that overthrew the brutal regime of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, told me about the initial student protests in 1992.
These were very ‘Occupy’ type of protests where we occupied the five biggest universities and lived there in our little islands of common sense with intellectuals and rock bands while the rest of the country was more or less supportive of Milošević’s idea. And this is where we began to understand that staying in your little blurb of common sense was not going to save the country.
In a similar vein, Nelson Mandela started out as an angry nationalist, but eventually learned that to get results, he would have to actively collaborate with others that didn’t quite see things the same way he did. In Poland, Solidarity’s first actions were disastrous, because they only involved workers. It was only through a later alliance between workers, intellectuals and the church that the movement ultimately succeeded.
Today, both America and the world have become increasingly tribal and it’s easy to retreat into what Srdja calls “your little blurb of common sense.” You can state your beliefs, make your point and see the heads nod around you. You can live in comfort, knowing that any voices of dissent will be quickly shouted down, as you self righteously feel they should be.
However, at some point, you will have to decide if you want to make a point or whether you want to make a difference. To achieve anything worthwhile, you have to go beyond your tribe.
— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Unsplash
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If there’s no discomfort, there’s no novelty.
When there’s no novelty, it means you did what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, you don’t grow.
When you do what you did last time, there’s no learning.
When you do what you did last time, opportunity cost eats you.
If there’s no discomfort, you’re not trying hard enough.
If there’s no disagreement, critical thought is in short supply.
When critical thought is in short supply, new ideas never see the light of day.
When new ideas never see the light of day, you end up doing what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, your best people leave.
When you do what you did last time, your commute into work feels longer than it is.
When you do what you did last time, you’re in a race to the bottom.
If there’s no disagreement, you’re playing a dangerous game.
If there’s no discretionary work, crazy ideas never grow into something more.
When crazy ideas remain just crazy ideas, new design space remains too risky.
When new design space remains too risky, all you can do is what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, managers rule.
When you do what you did last time, there is no progress.
When you do what you did last time, great talent won’t accept your job offers.
If there’s no discretionary work, you’re in trouble.
We do what we did last time because it worked.
We do what we did last time because we made lots of money.
We do what we did last time because it’s efficient.
We do what we did last time because it feels good.
We do what we did last time because we think we know what we’ll get.
We do what we did last time because that’s what we do.
Doing what we did last time works well, right up until it doesn’t.
When you find yourself doing what you did last time, do something else.
Image credit: Unsplash
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Growth is the lifeblood of any organization, and the quest for growth opportunities is not just a strategic imperative. It is a fundamental necessity because the ability to identify and capitalize on opportunities is a game-changer for companies wanting to achieve sustainable success and stay ahead of the competition.
The challenge, however, is that not all opportunities are the same – some are head-smackingly obvious, while others are like trying to nail down JELL-O. Yet companies take a “one size fits all” approach to finding, developing, and capitalizing on them.
SEARCH when need to transform
What do you do when you need information but don’t know precisely what you need and certainly don’t know where to find it? You Google it or, in less-branded terms, you search for it.
When searching for growth opportunities, you’re looking for something but don’t know exactly what you need or where you’ll find it. Finding opportunities requires you to go beyond traditional market analysis and adopt a learner’s mindset to see ways to disrupt the status quo, challenge existing paradigms, and create new value propositions for your customers.
Searching is a creative process that entails investing in R&D, fostering a culture of intrapreneurship, and experimenting with new technologies. It requires a culture of creativity, experimentation, and agility to adapt to changing market dynamics. You have to be willing to be wrong on your way to being right, to move slowly so you can act quickly, and to throw out the timeline to harness the game-changing opportunity.
SEEK when you need to innovate
What do you do when you know what you need and generally where to find it? You seek it out – you go to where you think it will be, and, on the off-chance it’s not there, you pivot to Option B.
When you’re seeking growth opportunities, you have a target in mind but are not 100% sure how to hit it. Maybe you know you want to enter a new geography, but you need to figure out how to do it successfully and avoid the mistakes of previous entrants. Maybe it’s a new industry or category, but you must understand if and how to do it without disrupting your existing business model.
Seeking is both creative and analytical. You look for data and market intelligence, interview experts and individuals, analyze industry trends and explore untapped segments. It also requires you to stay open to surprises and new possibilities and take calculated risks to capitalize on emerging trends or consumer preferences. Like searching, it requires patience. Unlike searching, it respects a deadline.
STALK when you need to improve
Just like a lioness stalking a wildebeest, you do this when you see an opportunity and know exactly how to capture it. Yes, there will be zigs and zags along the way, and an unexpected competitor may pop up. But this is who you are and what you do.
When stalking opportunities, you bring the full value and power of your experience, expertise, resources, and capabilities to bear on an opportunity. This may happen when you’re operating and improving your core business. It may also occur after you’ve searched (and found) an opportunity, sought (and decided on) a strategy, and now you have the confidence to launch and scale.
Do Your Approaches Align with Your Goals?
Most companies say that they want to transform. Still, very few have the patience or intestinal fortitude to search because there is no Google for Transformation that produces the exact plan you need to transform successfully.
Companies also tend to stalk when they want to innovate, leaving opportunities to change the game and build sustainable competitive advantage on the sideline because they’re too uncertain or take too long.
Growth requires all three approaches – search, seek, and stalk – but only happens when your chosen approach aligns with your goals.
Image credit: Pexels
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The first principle of managing innovation is that there are three distinct returns on innovation one can invest to achieve.
They are:
“Unmatchable” differentiation, which confers enormous bargaining power as customers who want what you have “must” select you and “must” pay a premium for your offer. We call this DIFF for short.
“Speedy” neutralization, which catches you up to some new market norm set by a competitor, thereby enabling you to stay in the game rather than be eliminated for lacking this feature. This is NEUT for short.
“Rigorous” optimization, which extracts high-value talent and other scarce resources from non-differentiating work in order to free up investment in highly differentiating work or high-speed neutralization efforts. This is OPT for short.
The second principle is that these three outcomes are mutually exclusive, meaning you do not want to combine any two of them into the same work stream. Most innovation programs bind DIFF objectives with NEUT objectives, tying both to the same release cadence. This either slows down NEUT or dumbs down DIFF, both of which outcomes are painfully counterproductive.
The third principle is that most innovation investment is wasted (which is actually good news, because it means you can get a much bigger bang for your innovation buck once you learn how to avoid the waste). The three great sources of waste are:
DIFF initiatives that do not result in “unmatchable” offers that create unequivocal customer preference. You end up being different but not different enough to gain real bargaining power.
NEUT initiatives that take too long or go too far (or, more typically, both). Here the team has become obsessed with its competitor and is doing extra work that the customer will not value, meanwhile delaying the “good enough” state that the customer would value.
OPT initiatives that do not address “sacred cow” resources. You end up moving around a lot of junior resources, meanwhile leaving the senior ones trapped in context instead of being deployed against core.
A corollary that can help teams avoid waste is to pay attention to their reference points.
If your goal is DIFF, then your reference point should be a prospective customer’s use case, one where purchase preference will be determined by you achieving “unmatchable” performance in your key area of innovation.
If your goal is NEUT, then your reference point is a competitor, then your innovation focus should be to get “good enough” fast enough.
A behavior you must avoid is to use a competitor as a reference point for DIFF. The all too likely outcome here is that you will create a difference that the customer either will not notice, will not acknowledge, or will not value. Meanwhile, the competitor will debate the fact that you even achieved it or that it is relevant if you did.
Finally, in light of these principles, the role of the leader is to deconstruct the overall workload of the team to tease out the DIFF from the NEUT from the OPT, and to charter specific work-streams accordingly. This rarely results in a perfectly pure outcome, but the more pure it is, the more productive your team’s efforts will be.
That’s what I think. What do you think?
Image Credit: Dall-E via Bing
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If you have more features, I will beat you with fewer.
If you have a broad product line, I will beat you with my singular product.
If your solution is big, mine will beat you with small.
If you sell across the globe, I will sell only in the most important market and beat you.
If you sell to many customers, I will provide a better service to your best customer and beat you.
If your new projects must generate $10 million per year, I will beat you with $1 million projects.
If you are slow, I will beat you with fast.
If you use short term thinking, I will beat you with long term thinking.
If you think in the long term, I will think in the short term and beat you.
If you sell a standardized product, I will beat you with customization.
If you are successful, I will beat you with my hunger.
If you try to do less, I will beat you with far less.
If you do what you did last time, I will beat you with novelty.
If you want to be big, I will be a small company and beat you.
I will beat you with what you don’t have.
Then, I will obsolete my best work with what I don’t have.
Your success creates inertia. Your competitors know what you’re good at and know you’ll do everything you can to maintain your trajectory. No changes, just more of what worked. And they will use your inertia. They will start small and sell to the lowest end of the market. Then they’ll grow that segment and go up-scale. You will think they are silly and dismiss them. And then they will take your best customers and beat you.
If you want to know how your competitors will beat you, think of your strength as a weakness. Here’s a thought experiment to explain. If your success is based on fast, turn speed into weakness and constrain out the speed. Declare that your new product must be slow. Then, create a growth plan based on slow. That growth plan is how your competitors will beat you.
Your growth won’t come from what you have, it will come from what you don’t have.
It’s time to create your anti-product.
Image credit: Pixabay
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There’s a lot to be learned about innovation by looking at good ideas that just didn’t make it. We’d all like to believe that if we have an idea that genuinely improves upon something, and if we execute that idea correctly, the idea will be successful. But there is another factor to consider:
Here’s today’s example:
Back in the early 2000’s, I was running part of the eCommerce practice for Ernst & Young. Around 2003 we moved into a shiny new building at 5 Times Square in New York City, right next to where the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. The building was the first place I had ever seen with a keypad-controlled elevator. Instead of pushing an up or down button, the elevator is called by a numerical pad. You type in the number of the floor you are going to and receive a response from the keypad with a letter (such as D.) That letter corresponds to the elevator that you have been assigned to. You go to “your” elevator and, when it arrives, it automatically takes you to your floor.
This innovation delivers several benefits that improve the elevator experience:
1. It makes the elevators more efficient.
People going to lower floors are clustered together, as are people going to higher floors, and people going to the same floors are put on the same elevator. This allows more elevators to run express. Fewer stops. Less waiting for an elevator and a faster trip in the elevator.
2. It reduces “clicks.”
In a traditional system, an elevator user has to “call” the elevator and indicate their desire to go up or down. Once in the elevator, the user has to pick a floor. The old system was not a massive amount of effort, but the new system reduces two interactions to one. Presumably an improvement.
(Plus there’s no worrying about the kid in the elevator who decides to push all the buttons — there aren’t any!)
Is there a downside to this innovation?
Well, if you’re already in the elevator, there’s no opportunity to change your mind without getting off on the wrong floor and repeating the whole process. The biggest downside of this innovation is simply that it requires users to learn something new. In fact, when I moved into 5 Times Square, I found that when people came to meet with me for the first time, the first 10 minutes of our meeting was inevitably focused on their need to vent their reactions to our crazy elevators and how they couldn’t figure out how to use them!
Truthfully, the elevators were easy to use. Clear instructions were printed above the keypad, and the system worked very well. The problem was that it required users to relearn a skill they had fully and completely mastered (i.e., using an elevator) and start over at a beginner level — even if it only took 30 seconds to learn how to use the new elevator system.
I’ve watched with interest over the years to see if these types of elevators would take off. It turns out they didn’t. Very recently, I was visiting a client in Houston. The building had actually spent money to remove the keypad system and replace it with the traditional 2-step process. Wow. You know your innovation is not doing well when your customers are willing to invest tens of thousands of dollars to get rid of it and go back to the old way.
After much thought, I believe it’s all because of the friction of asking people to re-learn how to push an elevator button. Some innovations don’t require this. The new Boeing 787s have substantial innovation, but from a passenger standpoint, they work in basically the same way as the last round of airplanes. The innovations improve comfort, fuel efficiency, and other factors, but you recline the seat and return your tray table to an upright position in pretty much the same old way. Other innovations require learning: ATMs, DVRs, electric cars. All of these innovations have been successful, despite their learning requirements. However, the need for users to learn new behavior did slow their adoption. Innovation friction slows down adoption of innovations that require substantial behavior change, and even more so if it requires learning. This is especially true if the innovation requires un-learning an old way of doing something. If the friction is greater than the momentum of the benefit of overcoming it, the innovation stops dead in its tracks.
An example of this friction is the metric system, which has made only a very small amount of progress in adoption over the last 50 years, despite being clearly superior to the “English system.” It’s just too darn much trouble to change.
One last story about innovation friction from early in my career.
At that time, I was working with a lot of insurance companies creating web-based interfaces to replace traditional “green screen” systems used by insurance agents to quote and initiate new policies for auto and home insurance. It typically took a new hire 4-5 months to learn the system well enough to complete a policy quote — and well over a year to become truly proficient with it! We proudly designed replacement systems that anyone with basic computer skills could learn in a day or two at most, but found that some users were quite hostile to our efforts. They already knew how to use the green screen systems, and they were pretty darn fast with them. One Customer Support Agent even quoted Charlton Heston to me, saying I would only be able to take away her green screen if I pried it from her “cold dead hands.” Creepy? Yes. But also telling. Those old systems are gone now, because of the huge benefit of being able to train people on the new system so quickly. This benefit put the companies that used the new system in a position to more or less force that innovation onto other users.
Many successful innovations have required change and learning — automobiles, indoor toilets, smartphones. With all of these examples, we’ve seen many people willing to learn, for whom the “pain” of change was outweighed by the perceived benefit. But we also see a substantial number of users who resisted for years, saying, “No thanks, I like my outhouse (or horse and buggy or bank teller) just fine.” When conceiving or launching an innovation that requires learning, it’s important to consider the role innovation friction will play in adoption, where you can reduce it, and where you can increase the user’s willingness to accept it as the cost of the greater benefit.
This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Unsplash, Howard Tiersky
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In 2014, rumors started to circulate that Apple was developing a self-driving autonomous car to compete with Tesla. At the end of February 2024, rumors circulated that Apple was shutting down “Project Titan,” its car program. According to multiple media outlets, the only logical conclusion from the project’s death is that this decision signals the beginning of the end of Apple.
As much as I enjoy hyperbole and unnecessary drama, the truth is far more mundane.
The decision was just another day in the life of an innovation.
As always, there is a silver lining to this car-shaped cloud: the lessons we can learn from Apple’s efforts.
Lesson 1: Innovation isn’t all rainbows and unicorns
People think innovation is fun. It is. It is also gut-wrenching, frustrating, and infuriating. Doing something new requires taking risks, which is uncomfortable for most people. Even more challenging is that, more often than not, when you take a risk, you “fail.” (if you learned something, you didn’t fail, but that’s another article).
What you can do: Focus on the good stuff – moments of discovery, adventures when experimenting, signs that you’re making life better for others – but don’t forget that you’re defying the odds.
Lesson 2: More does not mean success
It’s been reported that Apple spent over ten billion dollars on Project Titan and that over 2000 people were working on it before it was canceled. With a market cap of over two trillion dollars, a billion dollars a year isn’t even a rounding error. But it’s still an eye-popping number, which makes Apple’s decision to cut its losses downright courageous.
What you can do: Be on guard for the sunk-cost fallacy. It’s easy to believe that you’ll eventually succeed if you keep working and pouring resources into a project. That’s not true, as Apple experienced. And in the rare cases when it is, executives are often left wondering if the success was worth the cost.
Lesson 3: Pivot based on data, not opinions
At least four different executives led Project Titan during its decade in development, and each leader brought their own vision for what the Apple Car should be. First, it was an electric vehicle with driver assistance that would compete with Tesla. Next, it was a self-driving car to compete with Google’s WayMo. Then, plans for fully autonomous driving were canceled. Finally, the team returned to its original target of matching Tesla’s Level 2 automation.
Changes in project objectives, strategies, and execution plans are necessary for innovation, so there’s nothing obviously wrong with these pivots. But the fact that they tended to happen when a new leader was appointed (and that Jony Ive caused an 18-month hiring freeze simply by expressing “displeasure”) makes me question how data-based these pivots actually were
What you can do: Be willing to change but have a high standard for what is required to cause a change. Data, even qualitative and anecdotal data, should be seriously considered. The opinion of a single executive, not so much.
Lesson 4: Dream big, build small
Apple certainly dreamed big with its aspirations to build a fully semi-autonomous vehicle and it poured billions into developing and testing the sensors, batteries, and partnership required to make it a reality. But it was never all-or-nothing in its pursuit of the automotive industry. Apple introduced CarPlay the same year it kicked off Project Titan, and it continues to offer regular updates to the system. Car Key was announced in 2020 and is now offered by BMW, Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.
What you can do: Take a portfolio approach towards your overall innovation portfolio (Apple kept working on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro) and within each project. It’s not unusual that a part of the project turns out to be more valuable than the whole project.
Lesson 5: ___________________________
Yes, that is a fill-in-the-blank because I want to hear from you. What lesson are you taking away from Project Titan’s demise, and how will it make you a better innovator?
Image credit: Dall-E via Bing
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