Category Archives: Leadership

Innovation is Unknowable Not Uncertain

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Where’s the Marketing Brief? In product development, the Marketing team creates a document that defines who will buy the new product (the customer), what needs are satisfied by the new product and how the customer will use the new product. And Marketing team also uses their crystal ball to estimate the number of units the customers will buy, when they’ll buy it and how much they’ll pay. In theory, the Marketing Brief is finalized before the engineers start their work.

With innovation, there can be no Marketing Brief because there are no customers, no product and no technology to underpin it. And the needs the innovation will satisfy are unknowable because customers have not asked for the them, nor can the customer understand the innovation if you showed it to them. And how the customers will use the? That’s unknowable because, again, there are no customers and no customer needs. And how many will you sell and the sales price? Again, unknowable.

Where’s the Specification? In product development, the Marketing Brief is translated into a Specification that defines what the product must do and how much it will cost. To define what the product must do, the Specification defines a set of test protocols and their measurable results. And the minimum performance is defined as a percentage improvement over the test results of the existing product.

With innovation, there can be no Specification because there are no customers, no product, no technology and no business model. In that way, there can be no known test protocols and the minimum performance criteria are unknowable.

Where’s the Schedule? In product development, the tasks are defined, their sequence is defined and their completion dates are defined. Because the work has been done before, the schedule is a lot like the last one. Everyone knows the drill because they’ve done it before.

With innovation, there can be no schedule. The first task can be defined, but the second cannot because the second depends on the outcome of the first. If the first experiment is successful, the second step builds on the first. But if the first experiment is unsuccessful, the second must start from scratch. And if the customer likes the first prototype, the next step is clear. But if they don’t, it’s back to the drawing board. And the experiments feed the customer learning and the customer learning shapes the experiments.

Innovation is different than product development. And success in product development may work against you in innovation. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to lock things down, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. If you’re doing innovation and you find yourself trying to write a specification, you may be misapplying your product development expertise. And if you are doing innovation and find yourself trying to nail down a completion date, you are definitely misapplying your product development expertise.

With innovation, people say the work is uncertain, but to me that’s not the right word. To me, the work is unknowable. The customer is unknowable because the work hasn’t been done before. The specification is unknowable because there is nothing for comparison. And the schedule in unknowable because, again, the work hasn’t been done before.

To set expectations appropriately, say the innovation work is unknowable. You’ll likely get into a heated discuss with those who want demand a Marketing Brief, Specification and Schedule, but you’ll make the point that with innovation, the rules of product development don’t apply.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

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Create Dilemmas Not Conflicts for Successful Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the summer of 1982, Poland was under strict martial law. The leaders of the revolutionary Solidarity movement were either in jail or in hiding. As the regime tightened its grip, any kind of protest risked arrest. People were demoralized, forced to sit in their homes with nothing to do but watch propaganda-laden “news” and old movies.

Yet the resident’s of Świdnik, a small city in central Poland, refused to take it sitting down. Instead, they walked. Every night at 7:30, when the evening news program began to spew the regime’s lies, they went for a walk and, just to put a fine point on the matter, some took their TV sets with them, in wheelbarrows and baby carriages.

It was fun—and funny. Similar “walking protests” soon spread virally to cities across Poland, which put the regime in a bind, they either had to shut the protests down or let people thumb their nose at the regime. This is what’s known as a dilemma action, a brilliant strategy that allows you to avoid conflict while at the same time putting your opposition into a bad spot.

Starting With A Shared Value Or Widely Held Belief

When we first start working with a team on a change initiative, they want to focus on what they’re passionate about, what differentiates their effort from the status quo. It’s something we all do. When we feel fervently about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance.

Yet to bring others in, we need to switch from differentiating values—what we love about an idea—to more widely shared values. For example, when we work with teams looking to move their organizations toward agile development, they often want to focus on the agile manifesto, because that’s what they’re passionate about. It rarely resonates with people outside the agile community, however.

Once they begin to focus on shared values, like better quality projects done faster and cheaper, it’s much easier to get people to come along. After all, who could argue with better results? That doesn’t mean that agile teams are abandoning the manifesto or hiding it in any way, they’re just not leading with it.

Shared values are also part of what made the Świdnik walking protests so powerful. As one of the protesters put it, “If the resistance is done by underground activists, it’s not you or me. But if you see your neighbors taking their TV for a walk, it makes you feel part of something. An aim of the dictatorship is to make you feel isolated.”

Designing A Constructive Act

Some years ago, I was brought in to rebuild a sales and marketing operation. It immediately became clear that the sales director was a big part of the problem. Not only was she still calling on clients herself and competing with her own salespeople, she was accounting for 90% of the revenues! Clearly, this wasn’t because of superhuman ability, but because she was assigning the best clients to herself.

It was obvious that if I was ever going to get things going in the right direction, I was going to have to get rid of the sales director, but that would be difficult. She was politically savvy, well liked and, because she accounted for so much revenue, was seen as critical to the viability of the company.

She had agreed to distribute her clients among the team and focus on managing instead of selling, but never seemed to get around to it. Put simply, she was sandbagging me. So I set up a sales call for one of the staff and a key client, which put the sales director in a position. She couldn’t object—it was what she agreed to—but if she acceded it would break her hold on the business.

It was similar to the action in Świdnik. Who could object to taking an evening stroll? When an action is seen to be constructive, it takes on the power of legitimacy. One of the mistakes changemakers often make is that in their anger they do something that is seen as destructive and lose credibility. That’s always a mistake.

Forcing A Decision

What makes a dilemma action so powerful is that it forces your opposition to make a choice. In Poland, the walking protests quickly spread beyond Świdnik to cities throughout the country. The communist regime had to decide whether to let them continue or to put a stop to them. If the protests continued, the the apparatchiks would look impotent, but if they took action against people going out for a simple evening stroll, they would look ridiculous.

My situation with the sales director was difficult because the onus was on me. I had to decide whether to continue to let her sandbag or to fire her without a clear cause. Designing a dilemma action got me out of that bind because it shifted the decision to her. She either had to give up the client (and then others) or to take a deliberately insubordinate action.

We often oppose change not because of any rational logic but because, for whatever reason, it offends our dignity, our identity and our sense of self. The response to a dilemma action is far more likely to be governed by emotion than a deliberate thought process. People are prone to lash out and overreach.

That’s what make a dilemma actions so effective. It calls a bluff. The opposition can no longer wait it out, but are forced to act and, because of how the action is designed, any action they take will hurt their cause and push change forward.

How Transformational Change Really Happens

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it comes about when those who oppose it are somehow persuaded. That almost never happens. Look back at any major transformation throughout history and the tide turned when those who opposed it discredited themselves by taking action that was widely judged to be objectionable.

In Gandhi’s Salt March, the British discredited themselves when they violently attacked peaceful protestors. In Birmingham, Bull Connor discredited himself (and Jim Crow laws) when he confronted children with snarling dogs and fire hoses. California’s Proposition 8 was seen as so discriminatory that it aided the cause of same-sex marriage.

We see the same type of thing in our work with organizations. Everybody has been in a meeting in which, after an hour or so of moving slowly to a consensus, someone who hadn’t said a word the whole time suddenly throws a hissy fit in the conference room. This type of behavior doesn’t come from any rational place, but is triggered by an offense to identity.

Dilemma actions give us clear design principles to induce opponents of change to discredit themselves, which they will not only do willingly, but with enthusiasm. The British in India, Bull Connor in Birmingham and anti-gay activists in California wanted to show the world who they were, they merely had to be given the opportunity.

When confronted with fervent, irrational resistance to change the optimal strategy is never to create conflict, but rather a dilemma for your opposition.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Unsplash

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Making People Matter in AI Era

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Making People Matter in AI Era

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

People matter more than ever as we witness one of the most significant technological advancements reshaping humanity. Regardless of size, every industry and organization can adopt AI to enhance operations, innovate, stay competitive, and grow by partnering AI with people. Our research highlights three workplace trends and four global, strategic, and systemic human crises that affect the successful execution of all organizational transformation initiatives, posing potential barriers to implementing AI strategies. This makes the importance of people mattering in the age of AI greater than ever.

Three Key Global Trends

According to Udemy’s 2024 Global Learning and Skills Trends Report, three key trends are core to the future of work, stating that organizations and their leaders must:

Understand how to navigate the skills landscape and why it is essential to assess, identify, develop, and validate the skills their teams possess, lack, and require to remain innovative and competitive.
Adapt to the rise of AI, focusing on how generative AI and automation disrupt our work processes and their role in supporting a shift to a skills-based approach.
Develop strong leaders who can guide their teams through change and foster resilience within them.

Five Key Global Crises

1. Organizational engagement is in crisis.

Recently, Gallup reported that Global employee engagement fell by two percentage points in 2024, only the second time it has fallen in the past 12 years. Managers (particularly young managers and female managers) experienced the sharpest decline. Employee engagement significantly influences economic output; Gallup estimates that a two-point drop in engagement costs the world $438 billion in lost productivity in 2024.

2. People are burning out, causing a crisis in well-being.

In 2019, the World Health Organization included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing “Burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Three dimensions characterize it:

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

Burn-out refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”

They estimate that globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety, costing US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity.

Burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational issue that requires a comprehensive solution. People’s mental and emotional health and well-being are still not prioritized or managed effectively. Well-being in the workplace is a complex systemic issue that must be addressed. Making people matter in the age of AI involves empowering, enabling, and equipping them to focus on developing their self-regulation and self-management skills, shifting them from languishing in a constant state of emotional overwhelm and cognitive overload that leads to burnout.

3. The attention economy is putting people into crisis.

According to Johann Hari, in his best-selling book, “Stolen Focus,” people’s focus and attention have been stolen; our ability to pay attention is collapsing, and we must intentionally reclaim it. His book describes the wide range of consequences that losing focus and attention has on our lives. These issues are further impacted by the pervasive and addictive technology we are compelled to use in our virtual world, exacerbated by the legacy of the global pandemic and the ongoing necessity for many people to work virtually from home. He reveals how our dwindling attention spans predate the internet and how its decline is accelerating at an alarming rate. He suggests that to regain your ability to focus, you should stop multitasking and practice paying attention. Yet, in the Thesaurus, there are 286 synonyms, antonyms, and words related to paying attention, such as listen and give heed.

4. Organizational performance is in crisis.

Research at BetterUp Labs analyzed behavioral data from 410,000 employees (2019-2025), linking real-world performance with organizational outcomes and psychological drivers. It reveals that performance isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about shifting fluidity between three performance modes – basic: the legacy from the industrial age, collaborative: the imperative of knowledge work, and adaptive: the core requirement to perform effectively in the face of technological disruption, by being agile, creative, and connected. The right human fuel powers these: motivation, optimism and agency, which our research has found to be in short supply and BetterUp states is running dry.

Data scientists at BetterUp uncovered that performance has declined by 2-6% across industries since 2019. In business terms, half of today’s workforce would land in a lower performance tier, across all three modes, by 2019 standards.

GenAI relies on activating all three performance gears, and the rise of AI-powered agents is reshaping the way teams work together. Research reveals that companies that invest in adaptive performance see up to 37% higher innovation.

5. Innovation is in crisis.

According to the Boston Consulting Group’s “Most Innovative Companies 2024 Report,” Innovation Systems Need a Reboot:

“Companies have never placed a higher priority on innovation—yet they have never been as unready to deliver on their innovation aspirations”

Their annual survey of global innovators finds that the pandemic, a shifting macroeconomic climate, and rising geopolitical tensions have all taken a toll on the innovation discipline. With high uncertainty, leaders shifted from medium-term advantage and value creation to short-term agility. In that environment, the systems guiding innovation activities and channeling innovation investments suffered, leaving organizations less equipped for the race to come. In particular, as measured by BCG’s proprietary innovation maturity score, innovation readiness is down across the elements of the innovation system that align with the corporate value creation agenda.

You can overcome these crises by transforming them into opportunities through a continuous learning platform that empowers, enables, and equips people to innovate today, making people matter in the age of AI. This will help develop new ways of shaping tomorrow while serving natural, social, and human capital, as well as humanity.

Current constraints of AI mean developing crucial human skills

While AI can perform many tasks, it cannot yet understand and respond to human emotions, build meaningful relationships, exhibit curiosity, or solve problems creatively.

This is why making people matter in the age of AI is crucial, as their human skills are essential.

Some of the most critical human skills are illustrated below.

Some of the Most Critical Human Skills

These essential human skills are challenging to learn and require time, repetition, and practice to develop; however, they are fundamental for creating practical solutions to address the three trends and four crises mentioned above.

Making people matter in the age of AI involves:

Providing individuals with the ‘chance to’ self-regulate their reactive responses by fostering self and systemic awareness and agility to flow with change and disruption in an increasingly uncertain, volatile, ambiguous, and complex world.
Inspiring and motivating people to ‘want to’ self-manage and develop their authentic presence and learning processes to be visionary and purposeful in adapting, innovating, and growing through disruption.
Teaching people ‘how to’ develop the states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills that foster discomfort resilience, adaptive and creative thinking, problem-solving, purpose and vision, conflict negotiation, and innovation.

Human Skills Matter More Than Ever

The human element is critical to shaping the future of work, collaboration, and growth. The most effective AI outcomes will likely come from human-AI partnership, not from automation alone. Making people matter in the age of AI is crucial as part of the adoption journey, and partnering them with AI can turn their fears into curiosity, re-engage them purposefully and meaningfully, and enable them to contribute more to a team or organization. This, in turn, allows them to improve their well-being, maintain attention, innovate, and enhance their performance. Still, it cannot do this for them.

Making people matter in the age of AI by investing in continuous learning tools that develop their human skills will empower them to adapt, learn, grow, and take initiative. External support from a coach or mentor can enhance support, alleviate stress, boost performance, and improve work-life balance and satisfaction.

Human problems require human solutions.

Our human skills are irreplaceable in making real-world decisions and solving complex problems. AI cannot align fragmented and dysfunctional teams, repair broken processes, or address outdated governance. These are human problems requiring human solutions. That’s where human curiosity and inspiration define what AI can never achieve. It is not yet possible to connect people, through AI, to what wants to emerge in the future.

Making people matter in the age of AI can ignite our human inspiration, empowering, engaging, and enabling individuals to unleash their potential at the intersection of human possibility and technological innovation. We can then harness people’s collective intelligence and technological expertise to create, adapt, grow, and innovate in ways that enhance people’s lives, which are deeply appreciated and cherished.

This is an excerpt from our upcoming book, “Anyone Can Learn to Innovate,” scheduled for publication in late 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack . It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over nine weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

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Learn More About the Problem Before Trying to Solve It

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Ideas are cheap, but converting them into a saleable product and building the engine to make it all happen is expensive. Before spending the big money, spend more time than you think reasonable to answer these three questions.

1. Is the problem big enough?

There’s no sense spending the time and money to solve a problem unless you have a good idea the payback is worth the cost. Before spending the money to create the solution, spend the time to assess the benefits that will come from solving the problem.

Before you can decide if the problem is big enough, you have to define the problem and know who has it. One of the best ways to do this is to define how things are done today. Draw a block diagram that defines the steps potential customers follow or draw a picture of how they do things today. Define the products/services they use today and ask them what it would mean if you solved their problem. What’s particularly difficult at this point is they may not know they have a problem.

But before moving on, formalize who has the problem. Define the attributes of the potential customers and figure out how many have the same attributes and, possibly, the same problem. Define the segments narrowly to make sure each segment does, in fact, have the same problem. There will be a tendency to paint with broad strokes to increase the addressable market, but stay narrow and maintain focus on a tight group of potential customers.

Estimate the value of the solution based on how it compares to the existing alternative. And the only ones who can give you this information are the potential customers. And the only way they can give you the information is if you interview them and watch them work. And with this detailed knowledge, figure out the number of potential customers who have the problem. Do all this BEFORE any solving.

2. Will they pay for it?

The only way to know if potential customers will pay for your solution is to show them an offering – a description of your value proposition and how it differs from the existing alternatives, a demo (a mockup of a solution and not a functional prototype) and pricing. (See LEANFOUNDRY for more on an offering.) There will be a tendency to wait until the solution is ready, but don’t wait. And there will be a reluctance attach a price to the solution, but that’s the only way you’ll know how much they value your solution. And there will be difficulty defining a tight value proposition because that requires you to narrowly define what the solution does for the potential customer. And that’s scary because the value proposition will be clear and understandable and the potential customer will understand it well enough to decide they if they like it or not.

If you don’t assign a price and ask them to buy it, you’ll never know if they’ll buy it in real life.

3. Can you deliver it?

List all the elements that must come together. Can you make it? Can you sell it? Can you ship it? Can you service it? Are your partners capable and committed? Do you have the money do put everything in place?

Like with a chain, it takes one bad link to make the whole thing fall apart. Figure out if any of your links are broken or missing. And don’t commit resources until they’re all in place and ready to go.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ free quote slides at misterinnovation.com

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

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Team Motivation Does Not Have to be Hard

GUEST POST from David Burkus

How do you make your team care about the work they are doing?

If you’re a manager, you’ve probably asked that question a few times in your career. And you’ve probably made some attempts at motivating your team already. Did you whip out the company mission statement? How did that go over?

Even if you think your team is doing the most boring work, like turning numbers into different numbers on a computer screen, you can still inspire your team to feel something in their work. This is such a crucial part of great leadership, and it’s not something you can fake or beg people to do.

Employees don’t want mission statements or half-hearted enthusiasm to lift their spirits at work. They want to feel meaning in their work and understand their impact beyond the bottom line or increasing shareholder value.

They want to know “What good is our work doing?”

We want to know our work has a rationale behind it—a purpose, no matter how small. And lack of any rationale or contribution creates a lack of motivation.

The key to motivating your team is to show them the meaning in their work and to help them know their impact. These terms may sound similar, but there are subtle differences that make each important. Meaning is knowing that your contribution counts, that your task isn’t just busy work, and that what you literally do contributes to the larger picture of the business. Impact is knowing who is counting on you.

Most of us think of meaning with a capital M. It’s why we think of doctors, nurses, or firefighters as doing Meaningful work. They’re saving lives. But the research on human motivation and team collaboration suggests something different. It’s okay to offer lowercase m meaning as well. In fact, it’s more than ok. Small m meaning dramatically increases the big M: Motivation.

For impact, well, think about the last time you felt engaged and motivated at work, or the last time you worked on a team that was inspiring and energizing to be a part of. You’re probably not thinking about the last time your boss recited the company mission statement verbatim.

Instead, you’re probably thinking about the last time you got a “thank you” from a client or coworker, or when you found out how your work mattered to someone else.

Taken together – meaning and impact, create what is called a “Pro-social purpose.” And research suggests motivating you team with prosocial purpose leaves them not only more motivated to pursue objectives, but also more likely to work together as a team.

Take KPMG’s approach for instance. Struggling with low morale, they didn’t just throw perks or pay raises at the problem. Instead, they turned to storytelling, launching the “We Shape History” campaign in 2014. The goal of the campaign was to showcase pivotal moments in history that KPMG as a firm was involved in. KPMG managed the logistics of the Lend-Lease Act during World War II, which helped the United States aid the allies. KPMG audited the 1994 South African Presidential Election, which saw Nelson Mandela make history as the first black president. The campaign worked to raise awareness of the impact KPMG’s past work had on history, but what happened next worked even better to raise morale.

After being inspired, employees were then tasked with finding the impact their roles had—at their level. Not a companywide impact, but how their work made an impact from an individual level. They set up an app on the company’s internal website that let any of the 30,000 plus employee submit their own stories. They called it the “10,000 Stories Challenge,” but didn’t take long for them to blow past that target.

Within 6 months, KPMG had collected 42,000 stories, with powerful examples of personal impact like:

“I help farmers grow – because I support the farm credit system that keeps family farms in business.”

“I restore neighborhoods – because I audit community development programs that revitalize low-income communities.”

“I combat terrorism – because I help banks prevent money laundering that can go toward terrorism.”

Leadership at the company got the results they wanted. Employees felt their work made more of a difference. Retention was better. The company became a top place to work.

Purpose became a regular conversation on the individual team level.

Research on Prosocial Purpose

In 2014, researcher Adam Grant and his colleagues were working with their university’s donation call center. These call centers are manned by student workers who are given a list of alumni and a phone and tasked with calling each person and reading from a script that always ends in a request for a donation. The job is boring. It’s draining to be hung up on, yelled at, or worse. It’s relatively thankless. In fact, when Grant and his colleagues showed up, the first thing they noticed when touring the call center was a sign in one student’s cubicle. It read “Doing a good job here is like wetting your pants in a dark suit, you get a warm feeling but no one else notices.”

The researchers wanted them to feel noticed—but obviously not for wetting themselves. They wondered if getting the call center employees to notice the difference they were making would have a motivating effect on them. So, they took the break time student workers received and used it to run an experiment. During a five-minute break, some of the workers were visited by a fellow student who had received scholarship funds raised by the call center and they heard how receiving the funds had positively impacted him.

And when the researchers followed up a month later, they noticed that just that small meeting with a scholarship recipient had a big impact on the callers. The workers who got to meet the people directly served by their work worked twice as hard. They made double the number of calls per hour and spent double the number of minutes on the phone. Their weekly revenue went from an average of around $400 to more than $2,000 in donations.

It’s impossible to overstate how big this effect is.

The workers didn’t get any additional perks or benefits. They didn’t get any training. And they certainly didn’t get asked to memorize and internalize the university’s mission statement. Instead, they got a five-minute chat with someone whose life was made better by the work they were doing.

Putting Prosocial Purpose Into Practice

So, when it comes to motivating your team, the key is to demonstrate to your colleagues the work they’re doing is meaningful and has an impact is a big part of their job. Maybe the most important. Prosocial purpose won’t happen overnight, but here are a few things to bring Meaning to the forefront and have Impact lead the way.

1. Tactic: Make metrics meaningful.

Organizations love metrics. They’re what allow the company to assess the performance of the business and their employees. They can be insightful. They can be cruel. But metrics aren’t meaning. Performance metrics get senior leaders excited when they show business is booming. And managers feel crummy when performance metrics for their team are lagging.

Often the blur of trackable metrics makes it difficult to remember why metrics matter. That’s why you as a leader need to readily remind your team. Use metrics that inspire meaning.

2. Tactic: Share a win every day.

Most organizations celebrate wins, but they’re often limited to the successful end of a project or hitting an important milestone. But on the team level, high-performing teams share wins much more frequently. It may sound like that’s taking too much time for something of too little importance, you’re wrong. People get bogged down on the small tasks that make up the day-to-day experience. You might have established meaning, but it’s like a muscle. It’ll go away if you don’t exercise it. Remind your team. Find wins and express them to the team. And where appropriate, go more public past your team. This sounds simple but imagine yourself in their position. A win is a win, no matter who you are. Wins feel good. Wins create meaning.

3. Tactic: Collect Impact Stories

KPMG was certainly the best example of this. You as a leader need to be on the lookout. Collect threads wherever they come from. Part of being a good leader is keeping tabs on those stories and using them to create that prosocial purpose. And take a note from KPMG to– bring your team into the storytelling process. Have them find impact in their role. But as their manager, keep most of the storytelling work on your plate. Collect them, showcase them, and keep them coming.

4. Tactic: Pause for Purpose

You know – when people talk about jobs with real meaning and impact, we’re quick to say teacher, firefighter, doctors, or nurses. And we’re correct, those are jobs that have and provide a TON of meaning. Do doctors and nurses need reminding of their purpose? Well, consider this: at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the entire team of surgeons, nurses, and support staff pause before every surgery to take a moment to remember the patient they are about to operate on. They break up what would be a routine procedure with a powerful reminder of the humanity behind what they’re doing.

If prominent surgeons are pausing for purpose, you and your team can do this too.

5. Tactic: Outsource Inspiration

Teams, especially at the entry-level, can be put far from the people who they serve. A customer testimonial video or comment only goes so far. Think of this as an extension of the impact story tactic. Bring the story to them. Bring in clients or customers to meet with your team, even just briefly. It only took 5 min for the call center to be inspired. Or if you need to, send them to the story. Take your team out of the office, out of the zoom meeting, and into the world where their impact is. Field trips aren’t just for elementary schools.

Conclusion

On first reading, a lot of this article might sound difficult. It reads like fancy business school jargon on motivating your team. But it’s actually relatively simple. In fact, the entire article can be summarized in just a single sentence.

“People want to do work that matters, and they want to work for leaders who tell them they matter.”

No matter where you get started as long as it’s in the service of one of those things—letting them know their work matters and letting them know they matter to you—you’ll be moving the needle on how much your team feels inspired and how much they feel energized to do work and you didn’t even have to recite the company’s mission statement which is actually a lot harder to remember than anything in this article.

Image credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at http://misterinnovation.com

Originally published at https://davidburkus.com on March 17, 2024.

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Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making

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Putting Human Agency at the Center of Decision-Making

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

We live in an automated age. From the news we read and the items we shop for, to who we date and what companies we choose to work for, algorithms help drive every facet of modern life. Such rapid technological advancement has led some to predict that we’re headed for a jobless future, where there is no more need for humans.

Yet in their recent book Radically Human, Accenture’s Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson argue exactly the opposite. In their work guiding technology strategy for many of the world’s top corporations, they have found that, in many cases, the robots need us more than we need them. Automation is no panacea.

For over a century, pundits have been trying to apply an engineering mindset to human affairs with the hope of taking a more “scientific approach.” So far, those efforts have failed. In reality, these ideas have less to do with science than denying the value of human agency and limiting the impact of human judgment. We need to stop making the same mistake.

The Myth Of Shareholder Value

In 1970, the economist Milton Friedman proposed a radical idea. He argued that corporate CEOs should not take into account the interests of the communities they serve, but that their only social responsibility was to increase shareholder value. While ridiculed by many at the time, by the 1980s Friedman’s idea became accepted doctrine.

In particular, what irked Friedman was that managers would exercise judgment with respect to the objectives of the organization. “the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation … and his primary responsibility is to them,” he wrote.

The problem is that boiling down the success of an enterprise to the single variable of shareholder value avoids important questions. What do we mean by “value?” Is short term value more important than long-term value? Do owners value only share price or do they also value other things, like technological progress and a healthy environment?

Avoiding tough questions leaves significant problems unsolved, which may be one reason that, since Friedman’s essay, our well-being has declined significantly. Our economy has become markedly less productive, less competitive and less dynamic. Purchasing power for most people has stagnated. By just about every metric, we’re worse off.

How The Consumer Welfare Standard Undermines Consumer Welfare

In 1978, the legal scholar Robert Bork published the Antitrust Paradox in which he argued against the rule of reason standard for antitrust cases that required judges to use their discretion when deciding what constitutes a practice that “unreasonably” restricts trade. In its place, he suggested a consumer welfare standard, which would only take into account whether the consumer was harmed by higher prices.

Much like Friedman, Bork didn’t like the idea of depending on subjective human judgment. How could we trust judges to decide what is “reasonable” without a clear and objective standard? If the government is going to block business activity, he argued, it should have to prove, through stringent economic analysis, that harm is being done.

Yet as Lina Kahn pointed out in a now-famous paper titled Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, consumers can be harmed even as prices are lowered. If Amazon is allowed to control the online retail infrastructure, including logistics, hosting, marketing, etc., then trade is restricted, free markets are undermined and the consumer will be harmed.

To understand why, you only need to look at the recent baby formula shortage, in which only three firms dominate the market and, the leader, Abbott, is the exclusive supplier in many markets. Not only is it highly likely that the lack of competition contributed to lax quality standards at Abbott’s plant in Sturgis, Michigan, but once it went offline because of contamination, there weren’t enough suppliers to fill the gap.

These aren’t isolated examples, but indicative of a much larger and growing crisis. An article in Harvard Business Review details how the vast majority of industries are concentrated in just a few dominant players. A more extensive analysis by the Federal Reserve bank shows how the lack of competition leads to lower business dynamism and less productivity.

“Great Power” Politics

In early March, the prominent political scientist John Mearsheimer gave an interview to The New Yorker in which he argued that the United States had erred greatly in its support of Ukraine. According to his theory, we should recognize Russia’s role as a great power and its right to dictate certain things to its smaller and weaker neighbor.

Today, the idea that America should have left Ukraine at the mercy of Russia seems not only morally questionable, but patently absurd. Not only has the brutality of the Russian forces horrified the world, their incompetence has laid bare the fecklessness of the the Putin regime. How could such a respected expert of foreign affairs get things so wrong?

Once again, the failure to recognize human agency is a key culprit. In Mearsheimer’s view, which he calls, “realism,” only “great powers” have a say in world affairs and they will work to further their interests. He believes that by not recognizing Russia’s desire to subjugate other nations in its orbit, America and its allies are being silly and impractical.

Hopefully, we can learn some lessons from the war in Ukraine. Strategy is not a game of chess, in which we move inert pieces around a board. People have the power to make choices. Ukraine chose to undertake tough reforms and arm itself. Russia chose an autocracy which rewarded loyalty over competence. That, more than anything else, has driven events.
The Real World Isn’t An Algorithm

A joke began circulating in the late 1970s, often attributed to management consultant Warren Bennis, that the factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment. Today, even with offshoring, about 10% of Americans work in factories.

When you scratch below the surface, the joke has less to do with technological advancement than it does with derision and control. Bennis wasn’t just any business consultant, but a renowned expert on leadership, who wrote books, published articles in top journals and even advised presidents. That he would promote the view, even as a joke, that leaders should deny agency to employees is as troubling as it is telling.

If you believe that human judgment is a liability rather than an asset, you manage accordingly. You treat employees as cogs in a machine rather than partners in a shared enterprise. You invest in offshoring rather than up-skilling, schedule shifts without regard to people’s lives, deny benefits such as parental leave. We’ve seen where that’s gotten us—lower productivity, worsening mental health and a society that is more unequal and less just.

We need to get back to the business of being human. Our economy should serve our people, not the other way around. The success of a society needs to be measured by the well-being of those who live in it. If we increase GDP, but our air and water are more polluted, our children less educated, we live unhappy lives and die deaths of despair, what have we really gained?

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

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Company Power Strategy is a Team Sport

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Company power is primarily a function of the amount of ecosystem support for your offerings, which in turn is due largely to the market-making opportunities you create for partners to resell or flesh out your whole product. Market share leaders enjoy the most extensive ecosystem support because their installed base creates the majority of partner opportunities.

Let me note, however, that in the context of our Hierarchy of Powers framework, market share is a misnomer. The correct phrase would be category share. That’s because in our taxonomy markets are defined by groups of customers whereas categories are defined by groups of competitors. When financial analysts talk about market share, they are referring to category share, and it is your share of the category that sets the upper bounds of the opportunities you can create for ecosystem partners, the percentage of the total category you can make available to the ecosystem.

After category share, the next most important determinants of company power are barriers to entry and barriers to exit, or what we often just call “stickiness.” Because sticky offerings create ongoing opportunities for up-sell and cross-sell, as well as resist being displaced by lower-cost competitors, they enable vendors to sustain above-commodity pricing margins for the life of the category.

Gorilla Royalty Game

The strongest form of stickiness comes from proprietary technology that is category-enabling, the kind that Oracle has had in databases, Qualcomm in smartphones, Microsoft in operating systems, and Intel in microprocessors. When a category consolidates around such companies, it creates a hierarchy of company power we call a Gorilla Game, entailing three roles — gorilla, chimp, and monkey. In the absence of proprietary technology, categories form an analogous hierarchy with much lower switching costs, something we call a royalty game, organized around a parallel set of roles — king, prince, and serf. Cellular telephony, Wintel PCs, WiFi networking, and DRAM memory chips all exemplify categories with this latter type of structure.

The difference in stickiness between these two hierarchies creates dramatic differences in market capitalization. In the gorilla game, the gorilla dominates the category for the entirety of its life cycle, and thus its market cap gets a very high premium indeed. Chimps also have proprietary technology, hence stickiness, but are not the market standard, hence more limited scope. Their best play is to develop an independent ecosystem organized around high-value use cases specific to particular vertical markets, the way the Unix workstation vendors competed successfully against PCs with CAD-like applications for cinema, semiconductor, oil exploration, fluid dynamics, and high-frequency trading. And finally, there is a very large market open to being served by monkeys who are able to clone the gorilla technology and deliver a plug-compatible alternative at a much lower price.

When it comes to royalty games, the absence of proprietary technology with high switching costs leads to a much more fluid hierarchy of power. The category leader is still the king, but it can be deposed by some up-and-coming prince, the way that Compaq displaced the IBM PC, the way that Micron can challenge Samsung in DRAMs, the way that Aruba can challenge Cisco in Wi-Fi. Here the low-cost providers, whom we termed the serfs, have an easier time gaining entry into a large and growing market, but a harder time sustaining even the most modest of margins, as there is always some hungrier low-cost competitor looking over their shoulder.

Overall, the key takeaway is that, while the gorillas and gorilla games get the bulk of the attention, especially from the investment community, all six of these strategies are perfectly viable provided you play within the parameters of your role. The key is not to hallucinate about what role that is.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels, Geoffrey Moore

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Your Response is What Matters

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Your Response is What Matters

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When was the last time you taught someone a new method or technique? What was their reaction? How did it make you feel? Will you do it again?

When was the last time you learned something new from a colleague? What was your reaction? What did you do so it would happen again?

When was the last time you woke up early because you were excited to go to work? How did you feel about that? What can change so it happens once a week?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and your colleagues helped you make it real? How did you feel about that? How can you do it for them? What can you do to make it happen more frequently?

When was the last time you had a crazy idea and it was squelched because it violated a successful recipe? How did you feel about that? What can you do so it happens differently next time?

When was the last time you used your good judgement without asking for permission? How did you feel about that? What can you do to give others the confidence to use their best judgement?

When was the last time someone gave you credit for doing good work? And when was the last time you did the same for someone else? What can you do so the behavior blossoms into common practice?

When was the last time you openly contradicted a majority opinion with a dissenting minority opinion? Though it was received poorly, you must do it again. The majority needs to hear your dissenting opinion so they can sharpen their thinking.

When was the last time you gave good advice to a younger colleague? How can you systematize that type of behavior?

When was the last time you did work so undeniably good that others twisted it a bit and adopted it as their own? Don’t feel badly. When doing innovative work this is what success looks like. All that really matters is your customers realize the value from the work and not who gets credit. What can you do so this type of thing happens as a matter of course?

Good things happen and bad things happen. That’s how life goes. But the important part is you pay attention to what worked and what didn’t. And the second important part is actively making the good stuff happen more frequently and the bad stuff happen less frequently.

Image credit: Pexels

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Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend

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Yes the Comfort Zone Can Be Your Best Friend

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

We’ve all heard it: “You need to jump out of your comfort zone to grow.” But what if I told you that real, lasting growth doesn’t come from leaping into discomfort, but from steadily expanding your comfort zone?

Expand Your Comfort Zone!

I like to challenge the popular belief that growth necessitates a sudden leap into the unknown. Instead, I suggest a concept that introduces a progressive model where growth is about gradually broadening the comfort zone. By expanding it, we incorporate new skills, experiences, and thought patterns into our safe space, reducing anxiety and fostering sustainable development.

Navigate the Mindset Zones

The model divides our mental landscape into four interconnected zones: Comfort, Fear, Learning, and Growth. These zones form a fluid continuum rather than rigid boundaries. Our development journey is not about jumping from one zone to the next but involves continuous navigation and expansion of these zones.

Comfort Zone: As defined by psychologist Judith Bardwick, the comfort zone is a “behavioral state where a person operates in an anxiety-neutral condition, using a limited set of behaviors to deliver steady performance without a sense of risk.” It’s where we feel safe, in control, and efficient.

Fear Zone: Just outside the comfort zone lies the Fear Zone, characterized by anxiety, self-doubt, and external pressures. This is where our fears, from failure to judgment by others, reside.

Learning Zone: When we face our fears, we enter the Learning Zone, a space for growth. Here, we develop new skills, gain knowledge, and build resilience. Mistakes are part of the learning process.

Growth Zone: The outermost zone is where we actively realize our potential. In this space, newly acquired skills become second nature, confidence surges, and we begin achieving long-term goals and dreams.

The Comfort Zone: Not Just a Place of Stagnation

While often vilified, the comfort zone has significant advantages. It’s not a space of laziness – it’s a foundation for stability, efficiency, and well-being. This is often where we do our best, most consistent work. Consider these pros:

— Predictability: You know what to expect and can respond effectively.

— Confidence: Drawing from experience, you can act with assurance.

— Efficiency: Routine tasks are completed quickly and effectively.

— Dependability: You’re reliable and consistent, both for yourself and others.

— Stability: Your actions don’t threaten the status or ambitions of others.

— Low Stress: You limit the pressure that comes with constant change.

— Risk Management: You minimize exposure to potential failures.

— Recharging: The comfort zone provides mental and emotional rest.

— Safety: It’s your sanctuary, and being there is enjoyable.

While these advantages are crucial for maintaining stability and recharging, the real power of the comfort zone lies in its ability to grow. When we begin to push its boundaries, the zone expands, turning once unfamiliar challenges into sources of confidence and opportunity.

However, all though this is positive, an over-reliance on the comfort zone comes with its own set of challenges:

— Status Quo: You may become stuck in familiar patterns.

— Missed Opportunities: Staying in your comfort zone can cause you to miss out on new experiences.

— Limited Growth: Over time, your personal and professional value can decline.

— Lack of Self-Discovery: Without taking risks, it’s hard to discover your true potential.

— Stalled Learning: Growth slows when challenges are avoided.

— Complacency: Routines can lead to laziness.

— Stagnant Ambition: New goals and dreams are left unexplored.

The Importance of Expanding your Comfort Zone

By expanding the comfort zone, we reduce the size of the Fear Zone.

Taking small, manageable steps is crucial. Whether it’s learning a new skill, facing a difficult conversation, or taking on a new responsibility at work, each step is an opportunity to widen your comfort zone incrementally. As these steps accumulate, they turn once intimidating tasks into routine actions within your expanded comfort zone.

This approach re-frames how we view stress, failure, and discomfort. Rather than seeing these as barriers, they become necessary and productive elements of growth.

Strategies for Expanding Your Comfort Zone

For Individuals:

1. Self-Awareness: Start by recognizing the edges of your comfort zone and acknowledging its benefits and limits.

2. Re-frame Stress: Understand that stress isn’t always a negative force. While chronic stress can be harmful, short bursts of positive stress – known as eustress – can act as a motivator, pushing you forward toward growth and new achievements.

3. Stay Curious: Continually seek new learning experiences and knowledge.

4. Embrace Failure: Redefine failure as part of the growth process, not as a roadblock.

5. Build a Growth Network: Surround yourself with like-minded individuals who encourage growth and share valuable insights.

For Teams:

1. Open Culture: Create an environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity. Encourage team members to take calculated risks and openly share their experiences.

2. Collaboration: Foster a team dynamic where members can learn from each other and support one another in their growth journeys.

3. Leadership Involvement: Leaders should model growth behaviors and actively promote the idea of expanding the comfort zone within their teams.

4. Provide Support: Ensure team members have the resources and support to learn and grow. Offer constructive feedback and provide opportunities for development.

A Dynamic Process, Not a Linear Journey

Growth isn’t a one-time leap; it’s a continuous, dynamic process. There will be times when we retreat to our comfort zones for safety and recharging, and other times when we boldly step into the unknown. The goal isn’t to abandon the comfort zone, but to expand it to include new skills, experiences, and mindsets.

By steadily stretching the boundaries of our comfort zone, we can make continuous learning, resilience, and adaptability part of our daily lives. Growth isn’t about how often you leave your comfort zone – it’s about how far you can expand it.

The Comfort Zone

Pros of the Comfort Zone

Cons of the Comfort Zone

Image Credits: Stefan Lindegaard

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

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Three Ways Strategic Idleness Accelerates Innovation and Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What will you do on vacation?” a colleague asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.

The uncomfortable silence that followed spoke volumes. In boardrooms and during quarterly reviews, we celebrate constant motion and back-to-back calendars. Yet, study after study shows that the most successful leaders embrace a counterintuitive edge: strategic idleness.

While your competitors exhaust themselves in perpetual busyness, research shows that deliberate mental downtime activates the brain networks responsible for strategic foresight, innovative solutions, and clear decision-making.

The Status Trap of Busy-ness

At one company I worked with, there was only one acceptable answer to “How are you doing?” “Busy.” The answer wasn’t a way to avoid an awkward hallway conversation. It was social currency. If you’re busy, you’re valuable. If you’re fine, you’re expendable.

A 2017 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research confirmed what Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard researchers discovered: being busy is now a status symbol, signaling “competence, ambition, and scarcity in the market.”

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your packed schedule is undermining the very outcomes you’re accountable for delivering.

Your Brain’s Innovation Engine

Neuroscience has confirmed what innovators have long practiced: Strategic Idleness. While you consciously “do nothing,” your default mode network (DMN) engages, making unexpected connections across stored information and experiences.

Recent research published in the journal Brain demonstrates that the DMN is activated during creative thinking, with a specific pattern of neural activity occurring during the search for novel ideas. This network is essential for both spontaneous thought and divergent thinking, core elements of innovation.

So if you’ve always wondered why you get your best ideas in the shower, it’s because your DMN is powered all the way up.

Three Ways to Power-Up Your Engine

Here are three executive-grade approaches to strategic idleness without more showers or productivity sacrifices:

Pause for 10 Minutes Before Making a Decision
Before making high-stakes decisions, implement a mandatory 10-minute idleness period. No email, no conversation—just sitting. Research on cognitive recovery suggests that this brief reset activates your DMN, allowing for a more comprehensive consideration of variables and strategic implications.
Take a Walking Meeting with Yourself
Block 20 minutes in your calendar each week for a solo walking meeting (and then take the walk!). No other attendees, no agenda, just walking. Researchers at Stanford University found that walking increases creative output by an average of 60% compared to sitting. The combination of physical movement and mental space creates ideal conditions for your brain to generate solutions to problems you didn’t know you had.
Schedule 3-5 minutes of Strategic Silence before key discussions
Research on group dynamics shows that silent reflection before discussion can reduce groupthink and increase the quality of ideas by helping team members process information more deeply. Before you dive into a critical topic at your next leadership meeting, schedule 3-5 minutes of silence. Explain that this silence is for individual reflection and planning for the upcoming discussion, not for checking email or taking bathroom breaks. Acknowledge that it will feel awkward, but that it’s critical for the upcoming discussion and decision.

Remember, You’re Not Doing Nothing If You’re being Strategically Idle

The most valuable asset in your organization isn’t technology, capital, or even the products you sell. It’s the quality of thinking that goes into critical decisions. Strategic idleness isn’t inaction; it’s the deliberate cultivation of conditions that foster innovation, clear judgment, and strategic foresight.

While your competitors remain trapped in perpetual busyness, by using executive advantage of strategic idleness, your next breakthrough will present itself.

This is an updated version of the June 9, 2019, post, “Do More Nothing.”

Image credit: Unsplash, Laura Weiss

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