Category Archives: Leadership

Are you the 10th person who innovates?

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

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

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

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

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Innovate Thyself (aka Personal Innovation)

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

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

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

  1. Limited Resources (money and time)
  2. Existing Jobs/Interests
  3. Resistance to Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready to create your own Personal Innovation?

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Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

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

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

Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

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

  1. Strategy
    • We want to be the leading Internet retailer
  2. Policy
    • Free shipping on orders over $25
  3. Processes
    • Create marketing program to promote this benefit
  4. Systems
    • Modify shopping cart application
    • Build on-page messaging to alert customers of additional purchase $$$ required to reach the $25 threshold for free shipping
  5. Reporting
    • Establish any infrastructure required to measure orders above/below $25
    • Measure benchmark period
    • Create report measuring % of orders greater than $25 in current period versus benchmark period to measure effect

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

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Checkbox Hiring Doesn’t Lead to Innovation

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Checkbox Hiring Doesn't Lead to InnovationWhen looking for a new job, it seems like 95% of the time people will only hire you to do the job you just did, and the other 5% of the time will provide an equal mix of once in a lifetime opportunities and jobs you shouldn’t take.

So why aren’t organizations more innovative in their hiring processes?

First, recruiters are tasked with providing candidates for interviews who meet certain education and experience requirements set out by the hiring manager. It quickly becomes a case of “you get what you ask for, not what you need.”

Recruiters provide a set of potential recruits that tick the boxes and look very similar on paper. Time constrained hiring managers then interview the people they are provided with and figure they are a “smart” hire because they have the education and experience. This generally means hiring the guy or gal that has done the same job before, preferably at a larger or more respected company.

Need a JobFor example, a restaurant will hire a waiter who has been a waiter before, even if the only reason he is available is that he was a crap waiter every other place he worked. In our hiring system, someone who has experience almost always gets the job, regardless of ability and capacity for growth. Meanwhile the gal who dreams of being a waitress, whose passion for the profession would make her an amazing waitress as she strives to create the perfect customer experience, never gets hired. Where does this leave the person with amazing potential but no direct experience in the position they seek?

They are confined to finding that desperate manager with an entry level opening who just had three people turn down their offer and has nobody left in their pipeline.

We hire people the same way we hire an office chair:

  • Four wheels? – check
  • Tilt? – check
  • Height adjustment? – no
  • …and on to the candidate who might have a height adjustment built-in

Consequently we end up with amazing consumer marketers working as engineering firm accountants because they started out in accounting for an engineering firm straight out of university and now can only get accounting jobs. How much stronger would our economy be if we could find an innovative way to allocate our human resources to those places where their star potential would be unleashed?

Now granted, some companies will allow someone from accounting to move to marketing within the company, but even in those companies that do facilitate this type of movement, the great majority really occurs at the managerial level with individuals the organization views as skilled managers with the potential to move up in the organization. So where does this leave the staff accountant whose real talent is not management but something else like consumer marketing?

Frustrated Hiring ManagerUsually this person is doomed to remain an unhappy accountant, potentially seeking an MBA that may or may not successfully allow them to transition over to the world of marketing.

So why don’t we change the hiring process?

Well, change is hard, and checklists are easy. “I don’t have time to interview as it is, I’ve got work to do! I certainly don’t have time to think about creating a better way to hire. My list of questions works pretty well.”

The problem is that people can only look at how candidates perform that have actually been hired in terms of how long they stay, and similar metrics. We cannot measure how much more we would have benefited if we had hired someone else that we didn’t even consider.

But, if we continue to hire the same type of people that we’ve always hired in the same way that our competitors continue to hire, then we will never achieve a business strategy innovation.

So what’s the answer?

There is no magic answer, but here are some guidelines to consider:

  1. Have recruiters identify and provide at least one or two candidates who show passion but don’t have the experience or education tick boxes checked
  2. Don’t focus on what someone has done, have them show you what they can do
  3. Think about the key tasks and challenges of the position
    • Have the candidate tell you, or even better, show you how they would approach them (remember lingo and document formatting can be learned – do they understand what’s involved?)
  4. Ask them what job they would really like to do in the organization
    • Regardless of what job they’ve applied for
    • Maybe even go so far as telling them that the job they applied for has been filled and see how they react (What job would they choose to interview for?)
  5. Ask them if they think they are qualified to do that other job and if not why not
  6. Movie producers don’t interview actors, they have them audition
    • Use appropriate role plays
    • Have candidates present if doing presentations are part of their role
    • Give them a small piece of real world work to do to see both how they approach it and how well they execute it
    • Have candidates pitch you your product as if you were a potential customer (even if it is not a sales role)

Click here to download my new white paper on ‘Harnessing the Global Talent Pool to Accelerate Innovation’

Final Thought: There is one other side benefit to hiring people with the passion and capability for the job, but not the experience, they’ll usually take less money upfront and won’t be turned off by probationary periods.

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Twelve Days of Innovation

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Twelve Days of InnovationAs we are now in the middle of the Twelve Days of Christmas, I thought it might be fun to do a post from the innovator’s perspective of the kinds of gifts that might mean the most to an innovator during the holidays when it comes to their quest for innovation excellence. The song however does get quite repetitive so instead of running through it in song format, let’s look at the Twelve Days of Innovation as a list:

1. On the first day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – Top Level Support for Innovation

There is no doubt that whatever the Chief Executive takes the time to talk about (repeatedly) and measure, is what people focus on and support in the organization. Having the CEO or even the whole top level of management talking about the importance of innovation by itself isn’t of course enough to make innovation happen. When we talk about Top Level Support, it may include the top level talking about their support for innovation, but it is more important that they show their support for innovation by giving the innovation efforts of the company a voice and making resources available to support them and in some cases even measuring and rewarding the level of innovation contribution of the staff in order to make it go.

2. On the second day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Common Language of Innovation

What is your definition of innovation? We all have one, and they are all different. If your company hasn’t taken the time to define what innovation means in your organization or to lay out how you are going to talk about innovation internally and externally, and captured somewhere what kinds of innovation you’re after, then exactly what kind of innovation do you expect to get?

3. On the third day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Chief Innovation Officer

While top-level support is crucial, it definitely helps to have someone in charge of organizing the innovation efforts of the organization. A Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) or VP of Innovation or Innovation Director or whatever you choose to call them is not responsible for coming up with all of the innovations for a company, but instead helps to organize and own things like the common language acquired on the second day, and the gift coming next on the fourth day. In short the CIO manages the process and acts as a facilitator to help put the right innovation resources against the right innovation projects.

4. On the fourth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – Separate Funding for Innovation Projects

If you try and fund innovation projects from within existing budget categories, usually you will end up only with incremental, product-group specific innovations. Having separate funding for innovation means that you can fund the promising innovation projects that your organization identifies and that you can be more strategic about the kinds of innovation projects that you fund. It also allows you fund the gift coming next on the fifth day.

5. On the fifth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Balanced Innovation Portfolio

The innovation needs of any organization are diverse, and that is what makes a balanced innovation portfolio so important. If you received enough dedicated innovation funding on the fourth day, you’ll have no trouble putting together a balanced innovation portfolio of innovation projects focused on a variety of innovation types, projects with different risk profiles and time horizons. A balanced innovation portfolio will allow you to manage risk and ensure that you always have innovations ready to launch.

6. On the sixth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – Access to Customer Insights

In the innovation diatribes of many authors they talk about the importance of engaging your employees in your innovation efforts while also talking about the importance of understanding the customer and trying to discover unmet customer needs when trying to come up with new innovations. The problem is that most organizations don’t share their customer insight or voice of the customer information beyond their market researchers, product managers, and possibly a handful of executives. The problem? Successful innovations are often deeply linked to a novel or reinterpreted customer insight. How can employees maximize their innovation contributions if they don’t have access to customer insight information? Organizations that help their employees better understand the organization’s customers stand to accelerate their innovation efforts. Just do it.

7. On the seventh day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Global Sensing Network

Innovation insights and ideas can come from anywhere. So, if you’re only looking in a few different places and asking a handful of people, how can you possibly maximize your innovation efforts? The solution is to build a Global Sensing Network. The purpose of a Global Sensing Network is to allow an organization to collect and connect the partial insights and ideas that will form the basis of the organization’s next generation of customer solutions. This involves collecting and connecting customer insights, core tech trends, adjacent tech trends, distant tech trends, local social mutations, expert communities, and more. To actually build a Global Sensing Network you need to start from the inside out. You have to take a look around inside your organization and see what employees you have, what natural connections they have, and where they are currently located on the globe. This will get you off to a good start – I can help you if you would like – but this article can help too.

8. On the eighth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – An External Talent Strategy

Does your organization want to increase its speed to market? Is innovation on the minds of your leadership? Does management insist that the smartest people in the world work for your organization? Or, do they acknowledge that there are more smart people outside your four walls than inside? The truth is that the nature of the organization is changing from a talent ownership mindset to a talent attraction mindset. We now do business in an integrated, global economy with an interconnected web of suppliers and distribution channels where having a partner of choice mentality will be increasingly important. We also live in a world where in the near future the most valuable employees will be those that not only good work, but also who serve as a force multiplier for their organizations by being good at organizing the efforts of others who don’t even work for the company. As an organization you’ll want to evolve to a place where ideally, even those who don’t work FOR you, want to work WITH you. This will require that organizations craft an external talent strategy to maximize not only the productivity of their employees on their payroll, but also to accelerate their innovation efforts. A link to the free webinar I did with Innocentive on this topic is coming soon, along with a white paper on the subject in early January.

9. On the ninth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – More Tolerance for Risk and Failure

When I speak at corporate events and conferences around the world with innovation practitioners trying to champion innovation in their organization and do the hard work in the trenches, I often hear the comment that their organization struggles to innovate because the culture of the organization is risk averse, or even worse, failures are punished so severely nobody wants to do anything risky or innovative. This is a leadership and a management problem that requires the gifts from the first, fourth and fifth days because the fact is that some of your innovation projects will fail and ideally you want to have a balanced portfolio of innovation projects that sit outside the business units and product groups so that the eventuality of this is acceptable and manageable. AND, at the same time it is also equally important that you work to establish a culture where people do not obsess on their fear of failure or the risk they are taking but instead on how fast they are learning – from both successes and failure. When learning balances failure and when portfolios manage risk, you’ll create more room for innovation.

10. On the tenth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Flexible, Adaptable Organization

If there are two characteristics that should be at the top of any wish list of organization capabilities besides innovation – flexibility and adaptability should be in the running for the top two spots. Flexibility and adaptability are not the same thing. A flexible organization is able to move resources from where they normally sit in the organization to where they are needed most in the organization at any one time. An adaptable organization is capable of quickly adapting to changes in the marketplace based on changes in the competitive structure of the industry, changing customer preferences, or a myriad of other changes that require the organization’s strategy, policies, processes, and even structure to change to better serve their profitable customers. Think Nokia moving from making tires to making mobile phones, think about Amazon switching from being a traditional e-tailer to welcoming third-party sellers onto the site and starting a cloud services business. Flexible, adaptable organizations are capable of surviving massive marketplace shifts caused by innovation. Flexible and adaptable employees capable of coping with all of the change required by flexible, adaptable, innovative organizations will be in high demand in the 21st century.

11. On the eleventh day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – A Long-Term Commitment to Innovation

It’s great that the CEO threw you a bone on day one and gave you some top-level support for innovation, but unless your organization is willing to make a long-term commitment to innovation at all levels, and continually work to put the common language, training, policies, processes, and funding in place to sustain your innovation efforts, you won’t be successful. A long-term commitment to innovation is required. One that will survive a few failed innovation efforts (that of course yield a lot of learning), and a few defections of top talent to other organizations as you build out your innovation programs (innovation talent will be highly desired by other organizations after all). Over the long haul, you must as an organization work to embed innovation capability across the organization and not only use your efforts to produce new innovations but to also innovate your innovation efforts themselves if you want to pursue innovation excellence and make innovation a deep capability of the organization. Innovation is a marathon, not a sprint.

12. On the twelfth day of Innovation, my CEO gave to me – Idea and Insight Management Software

And finally, if you want to engage your employees, or eventually your partners, suppliers, customers, or even the general public in your future innovation efforts, you are going to need to have a system for gathering ideas and tracking their progress through the evaluation and execution phases of innovation. But at the same time you should also look at how you gather and share your customer insights and evaluate whether you need a system to manage that important resource as well. Don’t let great insights or ideas fall through the cracks because someone misplaced them.

Conclusion

Of course there are more ingredients necessary for making innovation a deep sustainable, renewable capability of the organization, but for the innovator in our song, these would be a great start. Innovation is hard work, and the organizations that invest in deepening their innovation abilities AND capabilities will over time be more successful than those that don’t. Building a strong innovation effort takes time and dedication, so if you’ve already started – keep pushing! And if you haven’t started yet, what are you waiting for?

I hope you all have a great finish to the holiday season and a prosperous start to the new year!

Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy – First Followers

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If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

1. A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore – it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

The 2nd follower is a turning point: it’s proof the first has done well. Now it’s not a lone nut, and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news.

2. A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers – not the leader.

Now here come 2 more, then 3 more. Now we’ve got momentum. This is the tipping point! Now we’ve got a movement!

As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join now. They won’t be ridiculed, they won’t stand out, and they will be part of the in-crowd, if they hurry. Over the next minute you’ll see the rest who prefer to be part of the crowd, because eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining.

And ladies and gentlemen that is how a movement is made! Let’s recap what we learned:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here – did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Special Bonus

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Global Innovation Index 2011 – Innovation Efficiency

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Global Innovation Index 2011 - Innovation EfficiencyThis article is the third in a series of four articles digging into the recently released Global Innovation Index 2011 put together by Insead along with knowledge partners Alcatel-Lucent, Booz & Co., the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

There is a lot of data in the Global Innovation Index 2011 and so I thought it would share it with you bit by bit to make it digestible and then share my overall thoughts. In previous articles we shared the country rankings and the input/output rankings.

Below you’ll find the country rankings based on innovation efficiency (an index comparing the innovation outputs to inputs):

Global Innovation Index 2011 - Innovation Efficiency

In the final article – coming soon – I will give my analysis of the outcomes and implications of the Global Innovation Index 2011. Until then, feel free to sound off in the comments about whether you believe your country’s position in the innovation inputs or outputs rankings are justified or off base.

Additional Global Innovation Index 2011 Articles:

#1 – Global Innovation Index 2011 – Country Rankings
#2 – Global Innovation Index 2011 – Inputs and Outputs
#3 – THE ARTICLE ABOVE
#4 – Coming Soon – Global Innovation Index 2011 – Final Analysis

In the meantime, consider following the Human-Centered Change & Innovation page on LinkedIn.

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