Category Archives: Management

Ideas, Ideas Everywhere

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

There’s an old tale that goes…

Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

Inside of organizations, there’s a corollary…

Ideas, ideas every where, Nor any one can think.

Um, ok, I should stick to my day job. But the point is, organizations are drowning in a sea of ideas, yet they never take the time to think about what matters most.

The other day I was at an event run by a non-profit. They have built up a large network of advocates who support the cause. As I am a good friend with the woman who runs this group, I spent a fair amount of time with her that evening. As the hours passed, many people gave her their thoughts on how to run the organization. ”Do more of this…” ”Do less of that…” “Call your group this….” “Engage these organizations…” “Copy what this non-profit is doing…”

The ideas were all over the map.

I could tell that the organization’s leader was a bit frustrated and confused as there were so many suggestions.

She turned to me and asked what I thought she should do.

Of course, like everyone else, I had my opinion.

I told her, “Stop listening to people’s suggestions.” I then joking said, “And you should ignore my suggestion too.” (Someone once said to me, “Isn’t telling people that they should not use best practices a best practice?” Hmmm….)

Within any organization, there is never a shortage of ideas. There is a shortage of good ideas that actually matter and ultimately create real value.

My recommendation to her was:

  1. Stop listening to suggestions (and don’t solicit them either). Everyone wants to give you their two cents…and that’s all their ideas are worth.

  2. Get clear on your strategy. There has been too much focus on day-to-day activities that the business model has not been clearly articulated. There has been an over-focus on tactics rather than outcomes.

  3. Stop copying the best practices of other, similar non-profits; study for-profit organizations. This will provide new insights. And it will have you less reliant on sponsorship/donations and will force you to develop a real value proposition.

  4. Based on the strategy, identify a series of challenges/opportunities (“How might we…?”). The strategy defines “what” you want to achieve (outcomes) and “why” (purpose). The challenges deconstruct the strategy into questions, that when solved, provide the “how”.

  5. Ask your network (through email or better yet a private discussion board) for “solutions” to these challenge/opportunities. Encourage collaboration.

  6. Find people who are passionate about moving these opportunities forward and put them in charge of implementation.

A critical issue with so many organizations (especially smaller businesses and non-profits) is that there are so many opportunities and so little focus. The ideas/needs of the day tend to overshadow the overall strategy.

Get clear on how you make money, how you differentiate yourself, and then define a series of challenges that will help make that strategy a reality. Focusing on what matters most will accelerate your innovation efforts and reduce your investment.

Happy New Year!

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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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Freedom Can Limit Innovation

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had the identical conversation with several different clients. Apparently, there is an existing belief that if you want to instill a mindset of creativity, you need to have less “structure.” To some degree that is true. But unfortunately, most companies, when undergoing this kind of change, swing too radically to the other side.

One company that has been autocratic for decades now wants to be more innovative. Their belief is that they can accomplish this by letting people do what they want to do, in turn, enhancing their competitive position.

Another organization wants it’s employees to be more creative. They are now encouraging people to “think outside the box” while giving them minimal constraints.

In both of these cases, the company is going from a highly structured and bureaucratic approach to one that is a bit of a free-for-all. Sadly, and often surprisingly, swinging the pendulum that far in the other direction might also kill creativity and innovation.

To illustrate this point, there is an exercise I conduct with my clients that is simple yet powerful. I won’t go into all of the details here as I describe it in my new book, Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition. But here’s a short version…

Exercise #1: People are asked to list a number of ways in which they can use a brick. They are given no restrictions (unbounded). I give them about a minute. Typical answers involve using it as a paperweight, a door stop, or a weapon.

Exercise #2: Then they are asked to identify something random (e.g., on the body, in the kitchen, in a marriage) and are to find all of the uses of a brick for that. For example, if “a kitchen” were the random context, people might find uses like heating it up to make paninis, flattening a lump of dough, or using it as a trivet.

When I ask groups which approach – #1 (unbounded) or #2 (connecting to something random) – yields more creative solutions, nearly 90% of audiences choose the second way. In fact, when we take the time to evaluate the uses, there is indeed much greater divergence when using the second method. The first approach tends to yield a lot of common solutions.

In some respects, this seems counterintuitive. By bounding people we actually increase creativity.

How can this be applied in a business setting?

A client, in an attempt to expand, is always looking at ways to branch into new markets. To accomplish this, they used to ask employees the unbounded question, “How can we adapt our (commodity) product to new markets?” Unfortunately they found that most suggestions were mundane. Therefore, as a way of increasing their level of creativity, they created a list of 200 different industries/roles (one for each business day of the year) and posted it on their wall. Each day management chose a different industry/role from the list (e.g., toll booth collectors, nurses/healthcare, or librarians) and used that to brainstorm new opportunities for their product for that industry/role. They found that they generated greater insights when bounding the conversation around a specific market segment.

In this case, more structure increased creativity.

The same is true when it comes to organization structures. For this, I use jazz and classical music as the metaphors.

Most organizations, in the past, have been designed like classical symphonies. Large compositions (processes, policies and procedures) where employees were expected to perform rote, note by note, exactly as written. There was very little room for creativity or improvisation.

But some organizations, in their attempt to increase their level of innovation, have decided to throw out all structures. Power to the people. However this leads to chaos, not innovation. There is no coordination between individuals or groups. The level of work redundancy is high. And the level of collaboration is low. If you brought together a bunch of musicians and didn’t give them any structure, they would not be able to play anything that resembles music.

Therefore, organizations would better benefit by structuring themselves like jazz music. Jazz is not random. There is a simple structure – like a 12 bar B flat blues – that enables the musicians to collaborate and play together while improvising their own parts. Adding structure, in this case, allows innovation to emerge in the moment when it is needed most.

Although it might be tempting to throw structure out the window in the name of innovation, this may kill the very thing you want. Paradoxically, more structure often leads to greater innovation.

P.S. The brick exercise, as it is described in Best Practices Are Stupid, makes several other important points on innovation and breakthrough thinking.

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Mobilizing Your Innovation Army – Redux

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We had some technical difficulties last week, so IIR will be re-hosting this free webinar this Thursday – September 15, 2011 at Noon EDT.

Too much of the time the innovation conversation focuses on whether someone is innovative or not. We waste far too much time focusing on how people can become more innovative instead of stopping to think about the possibility that everyone is innovative in their own way.

The lone innovator myth needs to die.

Great ‘lone innovators’ like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison had teams of people surrounding them and helping them succeed.

At Noon EDT on Thursday, September 15, 2011 I will present a FREE webinar titled ‘Mobilizing Your Innovation Army‘ as part of the Back End of Innovation conference that will take place October 17-19, 2011 in San Diego where fellow Innovation Excellence co-founder Rowan Gibson will be speaking several times on creating a sustainable corporate innovation system.

Innovation is a team sport, and in this webinar we will take a look at how to engage your entire workforce in the innovation process by leveraging The Nine Innovation Roles to harness the different unique innovation capabilities that we all possess. We are all innovative in our own ways, and The Nine Innovation Roles help you evaluate your current workforce and provide insight into how to mobilize an innovation army.

In this webinar, we’ll focus on:

  • The importance of building a common language of innovation
  • How to destroy the lone innovator myth
  • Ways to use The Nine Innovation Roles
  • Why big innovations often start small
  • How everyone can make a difference for innovation

I hope to see you at the FREE ‘Mobilizing Your Innovation Army’ webinar on September 15, 2011 at Noon EDT.


Build a Common Language of Innovation

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Nine Innovation Roles – A New Tool

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In my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, one of the last tools I ended up adding has turned out to be one of the most intriguing parts of the book for people – especially in helping to build successful innovation teams. That tool is the Nine Innovation Roles, which I have written about before on this blog.

Now, after my latest innovation speech at the Farm Credit Services of America in Omaha, Nebraska and some conversations I had with the leadership there, it has become clear that people would like to have some additional tools to use to help identify which roles people tend towards on their teams so that they can use these tendencies as talking points and possibly to help organize effective innovation teams.

Nine Innovation Roles - A New ToolOne of the things that was discussed as a possibility was having team members fill out a simple worksheet to identify what roles they believe their teammates tend towards, while also self-identifying themselves. If the whole team were to complete this exercise it should yield some interesting and actionable data.

But why stop there with one organization?

I truly believe in the power of the Nine Innovation Roles, and because of this belief I’ve created and uploaded a simple worksheet for people to use. I only ask one thing in return from those who download and use the worksheet.

  1. Please send info at braden kelley dot com the data you collect (without the names)

  2. In exchange I will collect it and share it in aggregate at the end of every quarter

YOU MUST DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET FOR IT TO BE USEFUL

In case you missed it, the Nine Innovation Roles are:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Artist
  3. Troubleshooter
  4. Conscript
  5. Connector
  6. Customer Champion
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

In addition to providing you a pre-built worksheet you can customize and send out to your teams, the worksheet also has embedded in it definitions of the nine roles and the columns on the data entry tab have comments with the definitions as well or people can click the column headers to jump to the tab with a definition (yes, there are tabs that define each of the nine roles).

Please also feel free to share any observations from your use of the Nine Innovation Roles in your organization.

For more information about the Nine Innovation Roles, please get some copies of my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire for your team or check out my previous article highlighting them.

Happy innovating!

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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Will Death of Blockbuster Kill Redbox?

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Will Death of Blockbuster Kill Redbox?Let’s examine something that has been bothering me for a little while. I’ve been renting my movies from Blockbuster and Redbox for years, but now my local Blockbuster store is closing. When I’ve expressed this sadness to friends and colleagues, people just tell me to get Netflix.

Let’s dig quickly into the psychology behind the Netflix/Blockbuster/Redbox choice that each of us has been making. Now, I’m a big fan of technology, but it has its limitations. One of those limitations is that technology can isolate people from the real world. I know all you social media zealots and self-proclaimed experts out there are shouting ‘heresy’ back at me, but hey, that’s why there is a comments box down at the bottom of each article here—for people to engage in a wee bit of dialog.

While social media does serve to connect people, it also serves to disconnect them. To read more on the double-edged impact of social media you might want to check out the book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other by Dr. Sherry Turkle.

Layered on top of the tensions between technology, psychology and social interaction is that people are as different as they are the same. As much as we like to think we’re all individuals, when it comes to market dynamics, we tend to be different. That’s why we segment our customers into groups for marketing purposes, test for personality types in team situations, and create separate brands for different groups of customers.

Given all of this, there is an impact of Blockbuster going out of business that I don’t think many people are anticipating, and that is the likelihood that Blockbuster’s demise will actually accelerate the demise of Redbox. This is because, unlike the assumption most people would make, Blockbuster and Redbox are more complements than substitutes. When Redbox emerged people used it as an arbitrage against Blockbuster to get cheaper rentals from Redbox while still retaining the pleasure of physical browsing and the selection advantage Blockbuster provides over Redbox.

Continue reading this article on the American Express OPEN Forum.

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It is Okay to Marry Your Work (Part 2)

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

Last week I wrote an article for American Express about marrying your work. Unlike the “ball and chain” picture that tends to pop into our heads, I espoused the merits of loving your job, just like you would marry a spouse you love. Be sure to read that article before reading on. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you read the first part, here is, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story…

I’m on vacation this week in Mexico and I just had an epiphany.

Tonight while cooking up some steaks on the barbeque, I looked through the window and saw everyone else on their computers working. In fact, all day long while I relaxed in the pool with my Kindle, everyone else was busy working away.

Admitted, I work a lot, but I love what I do. I truly do. Regardless, I have not taken a “real” vacation in 2.5 years and I work 80+ hours a week. I use this “dedication” as a badge of honor.

But tonight, while watching everyone work while vacationing in paradise, I realized something important.

You can be married to someone, yet not spend 24 hours a day with them. The best relationships are often those where each individual has their own life in addition to their marriage.

Kahlil Gibran’s “The Prophet” is one of my favorite books. In his poem “On Marriage,” he so beautifully says:

“Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone.
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”

For me, this always described the ideal relationship. A deep closeness that is not TOO close. There is space.

Last night I reread the poem through the lens of “marrying your work,” and it took on a whole new meaning.

You can love your work. In fact, you can be married to your work. This is a good thing.

But just as you do not need to be with your spouse 24 hours a day, you don’t need to be with your work around the clock.

Okay, now I need to get back to my vacation…

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How to Motivate Innovators

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

Organizations use a variety of tools to motivate employees to participate in their innovation efforts.

The most common form of motivation involves compensation via a points system. When you contribute an idea, solution, comment or vote, you get points – much like American Express Membership Rewards points – that can be used to buy a variety of items: company T-shirts, mugs, and other “exciting” things. For some reason this reminds me of the arcade games like skeeball where you would win tickets that could be exchanged for wonderful items like fake vampire fangs or rubber spiders.

Some companies have taken the concept a bit further and allowed people to accumulate points that can be used in auctions. Once a month the company holds an auction for a trip to, say, Tahiti. Anyone with points can join the bidding. This encourages people to earn and save as many points as possible so that they can have a chance at some really big prizes. This supposedly stimulates contributions to innovation.

A third model that doesn’t necessarily need a points system involves “priceless” awards. Remember the Mastercard commercials? These are items that you can’t buy with money: dinner with the CEO, a prime parking space or an extra week of vacation. These types of prizes are particularly enticing because no amount of money can buy them

The thing that these three models have in common is that the prize is tangible. Some might call it an extrinsic form of motivation. Chip Conley, author of Peak, might point out that these are the lowest rung of motivations on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food and shelter/safety and security.

There is an opportunity for other, potentially more effective forms of motivation.

At the highest level of Maslow’s hierarchy (going back to Conley’s concept), you will find self-actualization. In the innovation/business world, this is where “the work is its own reward.” The open source software movement was largely built on this model. Millions of people have helped develop software without any formal extrinsic compensation. Many do it just because it feels good to contribute. For some, it is about building software that will bring down the “evil empire” (aka Microsoft).

Although this is an incredibly effective motivator for many, this is difficult to put into practice inside of a “typical” organization. Ok, when I worked for a Formula 1 team, people there truly love their work because they were fans of the sport. But this is usually the exception, not the rule. At least from my experience.

Between food & shelter and self-actualization lies the most under-utilized form of motivation: peer recognition. This can be extremely effective, especially inside of organizations where “intelligence” is highly valued. Pharmaceutical companies, R&D departments, and NASA come to mind off the top of my head.

For some individuals, being recognized by their peers is the highest form of motivation. In come circles, being published in a peer reviewed journal is an incredible honor.

Therefore find ways of recognizing people, especially when it involves peer recognition.

One way to do this if you use a points system like the ones described above, is to create a leader board. This creates a friendly competition and helps individuals stand out from the crowd based on their contributions.

Another approach, of course, is to develop a good recognition program as part of your communication plans. Many companies do this, but they rarely do it well. Here’s the real opportunity…

Stop recognizing people for doing their job. When you hire someone to work for you, it should be expected that they are competent. When you recognize people for doing what they are hired to do, it reinforces a “culture” where the status quo is good enough.

Instead, recognize (and reward) people for going beyond their job; for doing things that are unexpected.

If you want to encourage open innovation or cross-business unit collaboration, then recognize people for that. If you want employees to take risks, make a big deal out of individuals who do that. If you want to let people know that failure is ok – when done the right way – then promote situations where something didn’t work as planned yet powerful lessons were learned and risk was mitigated risk.

Define what your organization values and then reward on that.

Culture is sometimes defined as “a network of conversations.” What they say to each other and what they think to themselves. Shift the conversations and you begin to shift the culture. These types of programs are a great opportunity to create an environment of innovation and promote the values/conversations you want to instill.

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Do You Know Why You Are Successful…or Not?

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I just gave a presentation on “Happiness at Work” in Norway. I started with the following question:

“True or false – People with more money are happier.”

100% of the audience believed that the statement was false.

In reality, the statement is true. Researchers have shown that people with more money are happier.

When people hear this, they immediate assume that money makes people happy. That is NOT true.

The researchers found that money did not make people happy. Instead, happy people attracted wealth into their lives.

I was on a radio show recently and a woman cited a study that said:

“Women who wear lipstick make 80% more money than women who don’t.”

She used this as an example of why women should wear lipstick. She seemed to imply that if you wear lipstick, you will make more money.

But again, I am confident that the causation is backwards. Lipstick does not create wealth. Wealthy women are more naturally inclined to wear lipstick for a variety of reasons.

In business, it is equally important to differentiate correlation from causation.

Understanding what causes success – or failure – will help you in the future. Avoid making assumptions.

Did your marketing efforts truly increase sales? Did your 19th reorganization really improve performance? Did that consultant you hired really help you grow?

The next time an innovation consultant tells you that their clients increased revenues/improved performance after hiring them, be a bit skeptical. Maybe the consultant didn’t improve the business. Maybe businesses that can afford to hire high priced consultants are already better positioned for growth and would have improved anyway.

Hmmm…if my innovation consulting business drops off in the near future, I will simply assume that this article was the cause.

P.S. The happiness study is this: Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at U Cal Riverside, who looked at the correlation between happiness and success. She observed that, “Happy people were not necessarily happier after their success than they were before, but they tended to be happier than others who were less successful.” Her conclusion? “Success is related to happiness – but as a consequence, not a cause, of mood…happy people have other personality traits that facilitate success.”

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Opposites Don't Attract

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GUEST POST from Stephen Shapiro

I remember a project I worked on many years ago. I was leading a large team and had a very large budget. I chose John to co-lead with me because we got along so well. I am a creative, spontaneous, and enthusiastic person and John was pretty much the same. The team loved working with us. We were fun, engaging, and motivating.

And the project was a huge waste of money.

The problem was that John and I got caught up in the novelty of our work. We were too focused on developing new ideas and making sure people were happy. But we never got any work done. We were a total failure.

In hindsight, this failure probably could have been predicted. Our styles were too similar.

In fact, if you look at any group of people who effortlessly work well together, odds are the individuals share a lot in common with each other. They might have similar backgrounds, expertise, interests, or personalities. This is natural.

The reason?

Contrary to conventional wisdom, opposites do not attract.

When it comes to interpersonal relationships, we are attracted to people who are like us. Psychologists have extensively documented the power of similarity when it comes to liking other people. In general, we tend to like those individuals the most who seem the most similar to us.

Therefore we surround ourselves with people who share similar thought processes, similar energy levels, and similar personalities.

But as I learned on that project many years ago, partnering with people who are too much like you can lead to disastrous results.

Contrast that experience with the project that immediately followed. Learning from that failure, I brought in a great planner, Ray, as my wingman on the team. I made sure I treated him as my equal. He was in my face on nearly a daily basis, forcing me to stay on plan and budget. I wanted to avoid the rigors of his planning as I felt that they were limiting and restrictive. But he was unrelenting.

In the end, although we may have annoyed each other, it was one of the most successful projects I’ve ever worked on. In fact, it was one of the most successful initiatives of the firm, one people still talk about nearly fifteen years later.

From this project, I learned something incredibly important:

“The person you like the least may be the person you need the most.”

Although Ray annoyed me on nearly a daily basis, it was because of his persistence that we were so successful. Left to my own devices, I would be chasing “bright shiny objects.” He forced me and the team to stay focused on the plans, deliverables, and timeframes. The combination of my creativity blended with his rigor was the key to success.

Although it is human nature to want to be around people who are like you, in order to be successful you need to partner with people are different. You need to surround yourself with people that complement your abilities and illuminate your blind-spots.

When you have a difficult problem to solve, instead of going to some someone who thinks like you, find someone who is your opposite. Yes, it is quite possible that that individual will annoy you and not give you the answer you secretly want. But that might be the very reason they have something powerful to contribute to you.

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