Category Archives: Management

External Talent Strategies for a Global Talent Pool

Why Having an External Talent Strategy is Becoming Increasingly Important

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

The question becomes: what is happening at the micro level with this global talent pool? Well, the world continues to move away from being a place where employees expect to have jobs for life, and fight against any change to this paradigm, to a world where portfolios, personal branding, and project-based work will become more common in an increasing number of industries. The evolving world of work is becoming a world in which individuals will need to be really good at collaborating and playing well with others, while also honing their skills at standing out from the crowd. At the same time, the external perception of your network value will expand from a focus on internal connections to also include the talented minds you might know outside the organization that can be brought in on different projects or challenges.

At the macro level, we are also confronted by an economy right now that is characterized by high unemployment – especially for the young. And for those that have jobs, many are underemployed. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, many baby boomers will continue to look to make money and stay involved in the workplace in significant numbers. And for those not retiring who still have jobs, many employees now are doing more work but feeling less engaged. When you combine the macro and micro pictures, you can see that there is an army of talent out there looking to build their resumes or their balance sheets by working on interesting challenges and projects.

As your organization opens up and crafts a formal external talent strategy, there are several ways external talent can help benefit your organization.

Increased Speed:

External talent networks can form an expanded rolodex of experts that you can consult with to expand your knowledge on a particular search area or market and give you a running start instead of a standing one.

You can use your external talent strategy to find existing solutions from outside your industry. One example of this is a tire company adapting existing technology for cutting cheese to cutting rubber. Another is InnoCentive client OSRI, who used concrete construction principles for the purpose of oil spill cleanup (see sidebar).

To accelerate innovation and product development timelines, many companies strategically partner with external talent to advance their projects and help fight through roadblocks or work on other components when the lead team is off the clock. Dissecting work and distributing it to the individuals, groups, or partners that can best complete the work is an essential component of open innovation strategy.

Increased Success:

You can form a relationship with a particular expert and work together to solve a problem, to evaluate a range of potential solutions from internal folks, to tap expertise you lack currently in your organization, or to add diversity of thought.

You can use your external talent strategy to engage a large number of potential solvers on a tough problem. Through open innovation and crowdsourcing, Roche found a solution to a problem it had been struggling with for fifteen years by engaging the InnoCentive global solver community. At the same time, the company validated that the approaches it had already tried were the logical and correct ones.

When you engage external talent, you can collect lots of little ideas from outside, and connect them internally, uncovering some really big ideas that properly applied and executed can lead to some great new breakthrough innovations.

Increased Learning:

An under-appreciated and under-utilized benefit of working with external talent is to use it to learn new problem solving techniques by analyzing how the external talent solved the problem, to learn new technical skills not held internally by having external talent train internal talent, and by encouraging information sharing from the outside-in from external talent working in different disciplines.

Teamwork and Collaboration:

An increasing number of problem solvers are working together to solve challenges posed by organizations and this collaboration and teamwork is yielding higher quality solutions. Research by EMC into their own internal innovation challenges has shown that teams were more likely to successfully create winning challenge entries. InnoCentive, for instance, has responded to this behavior by creating more collaborative features for its global solver community to use in responding to challenges.

Consider scale for a moment. A person delivering a ton of value does not need a ton of headcount anymore if they are employing an effective external talent strategy. In an era where organizations are focused on increasing productivity and output without changing the number of headcount (focusing on revenue or profit-per-head), smart employees and business units will increasingly focus on being a force multiplier – getting more work done with the same number or even less headcount.

Two of the most important job skills in this new world of work will be the ability of the individual and the organization to deconstruct the work into portable units that can be executed by a mix of internal and external talent, and construct a project plan for distributing, aggregating, integrating, and executing the component parts to achieve the overall project goal.

But to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your work with outsiders – as well the output – you need to be strategic in your approach because the speed of adaptation (your ability to adapt and integrate work from outside into the inside) will become more important. And the flexibility you show as an organization and the ability of your employees to execute under immense market and customer pressures will become increasingly important as well. You must be strategic because ultimately you want to design scalable external talent strategies, policies, and processes.

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Following the Line to Innovation

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Following the Line to Innovation OK, it may not really be an innovation, but I appreciated the following operational efficiency anyway:

Going to check out of the Hilton New York City, there was a queue in spite of the several available kiosks and multiple employees staffing the counter to help customers with various requests. Hilton had obviously invested in some business process consulting (or possibly listened to an employee suggestion) because in addition to the kiosks and the employees staffing the counter, they had an employee staffing the line to identify the needs of guests while they waited in line.

In my case, she asked how my stay was and I told her the story about how I had difficulty with the WiFi not allowing me back into my work e-mail after the connection went down and came back up again. I told her that the first night it worked fine and that I expected not to pay for the second night because it didn’t work properly (leaving important time-critical messages stuck in my outbox). She was sympathetic, but I halfway expected to have to tell the story all over again when I got up to the counter (as this is the typical bad customer experience on the phone or in person). I was surprised and impressed when she told the counter person to take off the second night’s WiFi and that I was ready to check out. Thankfully, I didn’t have to tell the story again.

This is good operational practice for a couple of reasons:

It gave them a way of increasing throughput during busy times when they would otherwise be limited by the number of computer workstations.
It provided a good customer experience. I only had to tell the story once.
I was on my way much more quickly as a result, and the counter person was on to their next customer more quickly as well
The poor person behind me didn’t have to wait while I told my story again, and potentially argued with the counter person because this had already been taken care of while we were both waiting in line (except no arguing was necessary).
If the customer has no special needs, the employee can direct the customer to an available kiosk.

This example, while more about good operational practice and customer service than innovation, does provide the opportunity to identify process innovation opportunities if we look at our own business through a lens of separating the customer experience into the following parts:

Information Gathering
Information Evaluation
Information Processing

Are there times in your business when your customers are waiting? Why are they waiting?

Do you have certain resources that reach capacity quickly or for sustained periods during busy times that you can’t expand easily?

Is there a way to utilize that waiting time to separate out the information gathering or information evaluation components of a customer interaction, to allow for a division of labor that can be more easily flexed to accommodate demand spikes?

In a phone scenario, could you not implement an interactive voice response phone system that notifies the customer how long they can expect to wait and then transitions to a “While you are waiting…” message and then asks the customer for their name, account number, and phone number to either be played for the agent before transferring the call, or maybe even trying to do some kind of speech to text and facilitate a record-lookup using that information?

Maybe you need to allow your skilled people to focus on information evaluation and processing, while lower skilled people focus on information gathering. Or, maybe in your industry the skilled people are at the front end, focusing on information gathering and evaluation and need to be separated from the information processing tasks.

In a manufacturing environment, while we don’t talk about information gathering, evaluation, or processing, we still use the same logic to evaluate the overall system throughput. Then, break it down into components so that we can identify and manage critical constraints and manage them in a way that maximizes throughput.

So whether you are in a manufacturing or a service environment, are you constantly looking for ways to optimize throughput and maximize profits or customer service (or maybe even both)?

What are your favorite stories of process innovations that have led to improved customer service or manufacturing efficiencies?

P.S. Continue reading on this topic by reading – Followup – Following the Line to Innovation at Costco

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Retained Innovation

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Retained Innovation As a provider of innovation coaching services along with training and innovation speaking, I try to talk to as many other fellow practitioners as my schedule allows to keep abreast of what others are experiencing and doing. What I have found in the area of billing clients is that there are a myriad of ways of receiving compensation for the work that we do. Everything from traditional hourly/daily/weekly to at-risk payment types like graduated rates, milestone payments, equity stakes, contingencies based on achieved savings, royalties, and even retainers.

Of all the different methods that I’ve seen, I think that royalties and savings contingencies make the most sense in revenue augmentation and cost reduction scenarios. Companies should be willing to reward those practitioners that deliver real revenue increases and cost savings, and practitioners should be willing to accept lower compensation if they don’t.

But when it comes to looking at innovation projects and innovation process then I think that the retainer model is the best way to go. Innovation is about competitive advantage and in today’s competitive environment, companies can’t afford to wait around until their favorite practitioner is available to fully engage, and at the same time they can’t afford to go with whoever is available regardless of quality and fit.

I believe the retainer model works best for innovation projects and innovation process because the guidance is there when you need it. It can be as proactive or reactive as the needs of the client dictate, and it provides the continuity necessary to keep program improvements on track. The retainer model also allows the company to access their practitioner a few hours at a time, something that would be unworkable for both sides if a new contract was needed each time.

The retainer model also can be quite useful to companies who would like to have a Chief Innovation Officer (a steward of the innovation process and culture for a company), but can’t justify the overhead of a full-time resource.

But regardless of how a company chooses to resource their innovation capability, every company should have an innovation strategy, and that should include continuous re-evaluation and improvement using both inside and outside resources to preserve freshness and to introduce new thinking.

So what is your innovation strategy?

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Interview with Retired President X

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Interview with Retired President X I had lunch in 2009 with the recently-retired president of a multi-billion dollar company and had a great conversation about innovation, leadership, and culture. The insights are still relevant and he enjoys his private life so I won’t be naming any names, but I will share some of the key insights and advice for innovators that came out of the conversation.

Don’t be afraid to pay people well. When people aren’t busy worrying about money, they can focus on how to get more money into the business instead of trying to figure out how to get more money out of the business for themselves. Removing money from the equation also increases the chances that employees will bring their best ideas to the business instead of leaving to create a startup based on them.

If you are an innovator and want to develop your idea within the company you are working for (whether it is an incremental innovation or a radical innovation), try to take it to someone who can say yes. There are far too many people in organizations that are trained to say no, and far too few who are equipped to say yes. Unfortunately, most organizations reinforce the importance of saying no, without empowering enough managers to say yes.

Run as flat an organization as possible is crucial to innovation. Flatter organizations have fewer people in the middle to say no, and flatter organizations require managers to push more decisions to the edges of the organization. Pushing decisions to the edge of an organization tends to result in better decisions. The farther removed you are from all of the factors in decisions, the less successful you will be in making them correctly.

Echoing former Halliburton CEO John Gibson’s thoughts – people brought in to help re-make the organization will ultimately be defeated by the processes and culture of the organization. Organizational change must occur from within and will generally occur quite slowly.

Big ideas should be separated from the main organization into a new organization funded by the board of directors and reporting directly to them. They should also be staffed with employees from outside the main organization as well (except maybe Finance to enable consistent reporting). When you try and keep these potential radical innovations within the main organization, inevitably conflicts of interest will emerge between funding the idea and funding other transitory short-term leadership priorities.

Upper management doesn’t generally know the best ways to effectively improve individual components of the organization. One approach to maximizing incremental innovation and improvement possibilities is to give the employees (not management) of a factory, a business unit, etc. a pile of money to use to improve the organization. You will be surprised how quickly employees can self-organize to determine the best uses for the money, how good they will be in selecting the best improvements to fund, and how fast stories about such an effort will spread to other parts of the organization.

When people have an idea, they often just jump in and start developing the idea (even those ideas that others have had before), often reinventing the wheel and repeating many of the mistakes of those who have gone before them. To reduce waste and to accelerate success, consider having people submit a short research paper on the area of innovation they plan to pursue (to show that they have researched those that have gone before them). At the same time, somehow we have to find a better way of capturing the learnings from failed efforts for those undertaking new projects to learn from.

Finally, President X expressed that he would encourage anyone about to rise to the top job to take a break before assuming the top job to refresh, reflect, and to bring renewed energy and insights into the job. Whether or not you are in the top job or several levels down, I think there are some interesting insights to ponder here.

What do you think?

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The Nine Innovation Roles

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I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about innovation personalities and the like, and I’m a firm believer that it’s not personalities that matter so much when it comes to innovation, it’s the roles that we play in making innovation happen (or not). So, I would like to add my Nine Innovation Roles to the conversation.

The following is an excerpt from my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire:

Too often we treat people as commodities that are interchangeable and maintain the same characteristics and aptitudes. Of course, we know that people are not interchangeable, yet we continually pretend that they are anyway — to make life simpler for our reptile brain to comprehend. Deep down we know that people have different passions, skills, and potential, but even when it comes to innovation, we expect everybody to have good ideas.

I’m of the opinion that all people are creative, in their own way. That is not to say that all people are creative in the sense that every single person is good at creating lots of really great ideas, nor do they have to be. I believe instead that everyone has a dominant innovation role at which they excel, and that when properly identified and channeled, the organization stands to maximize its innovation capacity. I believe that all people excel at one of nine innovation roles, and that when organizations put the right people in the right innovation roles, that your innovation speed and capacity will increase.

Here are The Nine Innovation Roles:

1. Revolutionary

The Revolutionary is the person who is always eager to change things, to shake them up, and to share his or her opinion. These people tend to have a lot of great ideas and are not shy about sharing them. They are likely to contribute 80 to 90 percent of your ideas in open scenarios.

2. Conscript

The Conscript has a lot of great ideas but doesn’t willingly share them, either because such people don’t know anyone is looking for ideas, don’t know how to express their ideas, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.

3. Connector

The Connector does just that. These people hear a Conscript say something interesting and put him together with a Revolutionary; The Connector listens to the Artist and knows exactly where to find the Troubleshooter that his idea needs.

4. Artist

The Artist doesn’t always come up with great ideas, but artists are really good at making them better.

5. Customer Champion

The Customer Champion may live on the edge of the organization. Not only does he have constant contact with the customer, but he also understands their needs, is familiar with their actions and behaviors, and is as close as you can get to interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.

6. Troubleshooter

Every great idea has at least one or two major roadblocks to overcome before the idea is ready to be judged or before its magic can be made. This is where the Troubleshooter comes in. Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge or expertise to help solve them.

7. Judge

The Judge is really good at determining what can be made profitably and what will be successful in the marketplace.

8. Magic Maker

The Magic Maker takes an idea and makes it real. These are the people who can picture how something is going to be made and line up the right resources to make it happen.

9. Evangelist

The Evangelist knows how to educate people on what the idea is and help them understand it. Evangelists are great people to help build support for an idea internally, and also to help educate customers on its value.

As you can see, creating and maintaining a healthy innovation portfolio requires that you develop the organizational capability of identifying what role each individual is best at playing in your organization. It should be obvious that a failure to involve and leverage all nine roles along the idea generation, idea evaluation, and idea commercialization path will lead to suboptimal results. To be truly successful, you must be able to bring in the right roles at the right times to make your promising ideas stronger on your way to making them successful. Most organizations focus too much energy on generating the ideas and not enough on developing their ideas or their people.

If you would prefer, here is a slide deck that I posted to slideshare.net:

The Nine Innovation Roles

View more presentations from Innovation Excellence

Action Items

Download the simple Nine Innovation Roles Worksheet from my FREE STUFF page and use it in your groups to help understand what innovation roles people tend towards and which ones are underrepresented.

Do you believe these are the roles that drive successful innovation? If not, why not.

Book a Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop

This is just an excerpt. Please check out the whole book.

Sound off in the comments below.

Download the PDF version of the Nine Innovation Roles:

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Personal Innovation – Shine Your Star

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

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

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

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

Definitely not!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improved reputation
Free advertising
Free public relations

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

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

So, the following questions remain:

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

Well, are you?

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Are you the 10th person who innovates?

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

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

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

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

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Rise and Fall of Innovation at Yahoo!

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

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

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

So, what’s the answer?

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

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

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

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

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

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Innovate Thyself (aka Personal Innovation)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you ready to create your own Personal Innovation?

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Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

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

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

Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)

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

Strategy

We want to be the leading Internet retailer

Policy

Free shipping on orders over $25

Processes

Create marketing program to promote this benefit

Systems

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

Reporting

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

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

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Human-Centered Change and Innovation

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

Category Archives: Management

External Talent Strategies for a Global Talent Pool

Increased Speed:

Increased Success:

Increased Learning:

Teamwork and Collaboration:

Following the Line to Innovation

Retained Innovation

Interview with Retired President X

The Nine Innovation Roles

Download the PDF version of the Nine Innovation Roles:

Personal Innovation – Shine Your Star

Are you the 10th person who innovates?

Rise and Fall of Innovation at Yahoo!

Innovate Thyself (aka Personal Innovation)

Business Strategy Innovation Diamond (BSID)