Category Archives: Strategy

Acting on Strategy and Tactics

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

When it comes to strategy and tactics, there are a lot of definitions, a lot of disagreement, and a whole lot of confusion. When is it strategy? When is it tactics? Which is more important? How do they inform each other?

Instead of definitions and disagreement, I want to start with agreement. Everyone agrees that both strategy AND tactics are required. If you have one without the other, it’s just not the same. It’s like with shoes and socks: Without shoes, your feet get wet; without socks, you get blisters; and when you have both, things go a lot better. Strategy and tactics work best when they’re done together.

The objective of strategy and tactics is to help everyone take the right action. Done well, everyone from the board room to the trenches knows how to take action. In that way, here are some questions to ask to help decide if your strategy and tactics are actionable.

What will we do? This gets to the heart of it. You’ve got to be able to make a list of things that will get done. Real things. Real actions. Don’t be fooled by babble like “We will provide customer value” and “Will grow the company by X%.” Providing customer value may be a good idea, but it’s not actionable. And growing the company by an arbitrary percentage is aspirational, but not actionable.

Why will we do it? This one helps people know what’s powering the work and helps them judge whether their actions are in line with that forcing function. Here’s a powerful answer: Competitors now have products and services that are better than ours, and we can’t have that. This answer conveys the importance of the work and helps everyone put the right amount of energy into their actions. [Note: this question can be asked before the first one.]

Who will do it? Here’s a rule: if no one is freed up to do the new work, the new work won’t get done. Make a list of the teams that will stop their existing projects before they can take action on the new work. Make a list of the new positions that are in the budget to support the strategy and tactics. Make a list of the new companies you’ll partner with. Make a list of all the incremental funding that has been put in the budget to help all the new people complete all these new actions. If your lists are short or you can make any, you don’t have what it takes to get the work done. You don’t have a strategy and you don’t have tactics. You have an unfunded mandate. Run away.

When will it be done? All actions must have completion dates. The dates will be set without consideration of the work content, so they’ll be wrong. Even still, you should have them. And once you have the dates, double all the task durations and push out the dates in your mind. No need to change the schedule now (you can’t change it anyway) because it will get updated when the work doesn’t get done on time. Now, using your lists of incremental headcount and budget, assign the incremental resources to all the actions with completion dates. Look for actions and budgets as those are objective evidence of the unfunded mandate character of your strategy and tactics. And for actions without completion dates, disregard them because they can never be late.

How will we know it’s done? All actions must call out a definition of success (DOS) that defines when the action has been accomplished. Without a measurable DOS, no one is sure when they’re done so they’ll keep working until you stop them. And you don’t want that. You want them to know when they’re done so they can quickly move on to the next action without oversight. If there’s no time to create a DOS, the action isn’t all that important and neither is the completion date.

When the wheels fall off, and they will, how will we update the strategy and tactics? Strategy and tactics are forward-looking and looking forward is rife with uncertainty. You’ll be wrong. What actions will you take to see if everything is going as planned? What actions will you take when progress doesn’t meet the plan? What actions will you take when you learn your tactics aren’t working and your strategy needs a band-aid?

What will you do?
Who will do it?
When will it be done?
And how will you know it’s done?

Image credit: Eric Minbiole

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Are We Doing Social Innovation Wrong?

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GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The Volume Operations business model kicks in when you have hundreds of thousands of users and goes up from there. 100,000, for those of us who are not math majors, is 10 to the power of 5. Uber-successful volume ops businesses operate at 10 to the power of 9 and up—millions of users or customers. But if you are a start-up, you are looking at 10 or maybe 100. How do you get from here to there?

The key thought to keep in mind is the old chestnut “what got you here won’t get you there.” That is, whatever operating model you have, keep in mind it can scale to two exponents but never to three. That means for every two exponents you have to change operating models, which likely means you have to change executive leadership in order to go forward.

To illustrate this idea, I’d like to focus on the non-profit sector and ask the question, what would it take to really solve for any widespread social problem? Homelessness was the first one that came to mind, but hunger is another obvious one, drug addiction a second, street crime a third. They are all seemingly intractable issues that, despite the best intentions of a whole raft of people, and regardless of how much funding is supplied, stubbornly resist any sustainable improvement.

The question I want to address is not what programs would work—because I actually think a whole lot of programs would work—but rather, how could we organize to deploy these programs successfully at scale.

Following our principle of what got you here won’t get you there, we need a ladder of operating models that can take us, exponent by exponent, from 10 to the power of 1 to, say, 10 to the power of 7. What might that look like?

Consider this a straw man, a place to start, something to edit. It conveys a key lesson from the high-tech sector, namely that the fastest way to kill a disruptive innovation is to race to scale by skipping over one or more of these “exponential steps.” It just doesn’t work. There are too many emergent factors at each new level you must learn to cope with in order to succeed. The only reliable way to scale is to ratchet your way up this staircase, adapting your systems and operations as you go.

Unfortunately, that’s not what politicians do. They want to make a big impact right away. That means they start everything on one of the upper stairs. Driven by impatience, they ignore the dynamics of adoption and demand mass deployment from the get-go. They think the problem is simply one of getting enough funding. It’s not. It’s one of operational innovation. Scaling prematurely simply wastes the funding. And then when programs do flounder, as they inevitably will, they blame it on execution when in reality they simply did not do the hard, time-consuming work of building up their foundation step by step from below.

One of the implications of this framework is that social services should be incubated in the private sector where freedom from regulatory constraints supports agile innovation. But as they scale, the importance of regulatory oversight increases and more communal engagement is required. The goal should be to keep this oversight as local as possible as long as possible, doing as much as we can to empower the people delivering the service itself. Once that operating model solidifies, then, and only then, is there a proper foundation for scaling to state and federal programs.

Today, we do not lack the empathy to support social services. Nor do we lack the funding. But we are failing nonetheless. We can do better. We need to do better.

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

Image Credit: Pexels

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, the key difference was that while Route 128 was a collection of value chains, Silicon Valley built an ecosystem.

Clearly, ecosystems are even more important today than they were back then. In fact, a study by Accenture Strategy a few years ago found that ecosystems are a “cornerstone” of future growth and that 60% of executives surveyed viewed ecosystems as a way to disrupt their industry. A similar number saw them as key to increasing revenue.

The problem is that competing in an ecosystem environment is vastly different than a traditional value chain strategy. While a value chain is driven by efficiencies, an ecosystem is driven by connections in a network. So we need to do more than adapt our strategy and tactics, we need to learn how to play a whole new game. The first step is to learn the rules.

First, Start Early

One of the key aspects of ecosystems is that they don’t seem all that important at first. By the time it becomes clear that a change is underway, it is often too late to adapt. The demise of Boston’s technology companies is a great example of how that can happen. Dominant firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories found themselves irrelevant so quickly that they never recovered.

Network scientists call this an ‘instantaneous phase transition’ and it happens because connections tend to form slowly. They start as isolated clusters that, even taken in sum, don’t seem to amount to much. However, when those clusters connect, a cascade ensues and what once seemed inconsequential suddenly becomes predominant.

That’s why it’s so important to become active in an ecosystem before those clusters connect, when things are moving relatively slowly, everybody wants to talk to you and the price of admission is still fairly cheap. Once an ecosystem begins to thrive, things move much faster and costs for entry raise exponentially.

Consider the automobile industry, which is now spending billions to set up research centers in Silicon Valley. Just think of how much cheaper — and more effective — it would have been for those companies to have started 20 or 30 years ago.

Not Just Spinning Out, But Spinning In

A typical strategy for an enterprise looking to leverage an ecosystem is to spin out a division to focus on activities that are relevant to it. These spinoffs tend to have a lot more in common with the ecosystem firms than the parent company and therefore are much more able to connect. However, because links to the parent company become more tenuous over time, benefits are limited.

A potentially more successful strategy is to spin ecosystem firms in. For example, the National Labs have set up programs like Cyclotron Road, Chain Reaction and Innovation Crossroads that invite entrepreneurial firms to come work at the labs, make use of the scientific facilities and be mentored by top scientists.

In the private sector, corporate venture capital operations, as well as incubators and accelerators, can be a great way to connect with small entrepreneurial companies early in the ecosystem lifecycle. Beyond the actual investments made, these programs give you the opportunity to connect with hundreds of small firms, some of which can become important partners, suppliers and customers later on.

What’s crucial is that you are not seen as an interloper, but a true source of value, whether that value is in actual monetary investment, access to facilities and expertise or connection to points of market access. What may be insignificant to your company may be incredibly valuable to a small, entrepreneurial firm.

Maintaining Open Nodes

One of Saxenian’s most interesting findings in Regional Advantage was how differently the Boston technology firms treated outsiders compared to the Silicon Valley companies. The Boston firms were vertically integrated and sought to keep everything in-house. The Silicon Valley companies, on the other hand, thrived on connection.

For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

So while it is necessary to reach out to evolving ecosystems, it is just as important to ensure that there are also paths for small entrepreneurial firms to engage within your enterprise. Ecosystems thrive on personal connections. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

The New Competitive Advantage

Ever since Harvard professor Michael Porter published his seminal book, Competitive Strategy in 1980, strategists have sought advantage through driving efficiencies in order to maximize bargaining power against customers, suppliers, substitute goods and new market entrants. By doing so, they could achieve higher margins and invest in greater efficiencies, creating a virtuous cycle.

Yet today things move much too fast for that kind of chess game. To compete in a networked world, you must constantly widen and deepen connections. Instead of always looking to maximize bargaining power, you need to look for opportunities to co-create with customers and suppliers, to integrate your products and services with potential substitutes and form partnerships with new market entrants.

Power no longer resides at the top of value chains, but rather at the center of networks and collaboration has become the new competitive advantage. Value is no longer merely a target for extraction, but an asset for connection. You need to be seen to be adding value to the ecosystem in order to get value out.

The truth is that we can no longer manage for stability, we must manage for disruption. We can’t predict the future, but we can connect to it, nurture it and profit from it. Yet to do so requires far more than a simple shift in strategy and tactics. It requires a fundamental change in mindset.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Smarter Risk Taking

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Smarter Risk Taking

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

After founding ImagineNation™ in Israel, I invested a year of my time and considerable money in taking what I thought were smart risks to invent an experiential business game. This involved collaborating with one of the top game design companies to co-create a live business simulation incorporating innovative gamification elements intending to teach corporations how to be innovative.

To my shock and surprise at the time, my invention initially failed!

Despite being an adult and experiential learning specialist and having designed and facilitated hundreds of corporate learning games for some of Australia’s top 100 companies over twenty-five years. It felt really horrible, and it was a visceral, heartbreaking, shameful and ego-destroying experience that I would not want anyone, anywhere, ever to experience.

Deep Learning Experience

Yet, it became a profound learning experience, enabling me to understand how:

My imposter syndrome played a significant self-sabotaging role. It did not set me up for success, nor did it set me up for maximising the importance of self-efficacy and self-mastery when on an innovation roller-coaster ride.
I had not undertaken sufficient research studies to determine if users wanted and were ready to accept such a radical innovation. Nor had I noticed how much the corporate learning market was being disrupted by technology, causing significant time and budget constraints, that I had neglected to address.
I had not paused long enough to consider, anticipate, plan and mitigate the risks involved in prototyping a viable minimal product in a new market.
I had not considered the risks involved with collaborating with a new consulting partner and co-facilitator, as well as with a new client. Nor anticipated how to resolve the values conflict that erupted when the project failed.
I had not fully understood the process involved in iterating and pivoting a new invention and the time it would take to produce a commercially viable product that the market would understand, be ready for, and respond to.

Finally, it seems that I had unconsciously fallen victim to the innovative start-up entrepreneur’s curse – falling in love with my product!

This was generated by my excitement, enthusiasm and energy of the possibilities rather than balancing these courageously and compassionately with the:

Harsh realities to be innovative.
Vital role of smart risk-taking and experimentation.
What ‘fails fast, to learn quickly’ really means at the heart (emotional), head (cognitive) and gut (visceral) levels.

Value of Failing Fast

They say that people need to teach what they need to learn themselves.

This valuable failure enabled me to invest the next ten years in learning to make sense of innovation and what it means to be innovative, including:

Helped me develop self-efficacy, trust my inner knowing and judgement, and make a stand for myself in the face of opposition and criticism I often received when presenting at a global conference on the people side of innovation, especially by process engineers.
Investing more attention, time in iterating and pivoting, testing and validating the two-day business simulation MVP to make it more tangible, simpler and teachable.
Acknowledging that technology had accelerated sufficiently to accept that the original creative idea of a simple hybrid board game was the most valuable commercial option that could make the difference I wanted to make in the world.
Becoming more patient, self-compassionate, and courageous in smart risk-taking and leading, coaching, and engaging in team innovation and continuous learning through various innovation, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial learning initiatives.

Iterating and Pivoting

I iterated, pivoted, and refined my intellectual property by presenting and bespoking the Coach for Innovators, Leaders and Teams Certified Program™ for over twelve years to global change-makers.

Most importantly, I reined in my competitive, risky and restless saboteur and focused on doing just one thing, which has finally morphed into a book, supported by a board game to teach people how to be innovative and develop an innovation mindset.

Taking Risks

In the fog of a globalised, disrupted, unpredictable and increasingly uncertain world, no innovation can progress, and no one can be innovative without smart risk-taking.

No innovation can improve without rigorous experimentation, where learning mainly happens by doing things to explore, discover, and know what not to do.

Research has shown that most successful new business ventures abandoned their original business strategies when implementing their initial plans, learned what would and would not work in the market, and conserved sufficient resources to have a second or third stab at getting it right.

Trial and Error and Cause and Effect

Innovation is a never-ending, risky, adaptive process involving trial and error and understanding cause and effect.

Because people are fearful of making mistakes and the negative consequences of failure, innovation requires leadership to develop both foresight and prospection skills to:

Empower and enable them to paradoxically take both a strategic and systemic perspective and a human-centred approach.
Equip them to be innovative when designing business ventures and transformation initiatives that deliver commercially viable outcomes to successfully improve the quality of people’s lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Risk-taking is a Choice

In most businesses and organizations, innovation involves taking considerable risks, especially if seeking to enter a new market with a new product. It is compounded and resisted by many people in organizations because they are too focused on personal survival, personal gain, short-term gain and shareholder return.

Unfortunately, many organizations end up, paradoxically, undermining their organization’s capacity to be innovative, adapt, innovate and grow. Mainly due to their people being disengaged, resistant to change, lacking agency and being held back by bureaucracy and hierarchy that is averse to smart risk-taking and experimentation.

The Future is Permissionless

Because most people generally do not have permission, and are not allowed to make mistakes. They are not encouraged to try new things, so they become risk-averse, avoidant, oppositional and conventional, and don’t feel safe in deviating from the accepted way of doing things.

This is commonly known as the ‘status quo’ and drives people to comply with ‘what is’ (even when it no longer matters) and not apply their human ingenuity, be innovative and create new inventions from ‘what could be’ possible and through smart risk-taking to partner with AI in delivering innovative solutions in a disruptive world of complexity and unknowns.

Image Credit: Unsplash

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An Introduction to Strategic Foresight

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GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Strategic foresight is an essential discipline for organizations aiming to navigate an increasingly complex and uncertain future. It involves a systematic exploration of potential futures to inform strategic decision-making. This approach enables organizations to anticipate changes, identify opportunities, and mitigate risks, thereby ensuring their long-term sustainability and competitiveness.

In my role at Manyone, I am intrigued by how the skills of strategic foresight can be combined with my previous work and research on topics such as innovation, collaboration, mindset dynamics, leadership, team dynamics, strategic HR, and organizational development, including change management and transformation.

Over the next few months, I plan to delve deeper into this integration and share my thoughts, ideas, and perspectives on how we can better utilize these combined insights in our organizations today. I greatly value your input and look forward to an engaging dialogue!

Three Stages of Strategic Foresight

To begin, I would like to present some key elements for implementing strategic foresight in an organization, accompanied by a brief explanation and some key questions for consideration:

1. Leadership Commitment and Involvement: The involvement of top leadership is crucial in strategic foresight. Their commitment legitimizes the process and ensures necessary resources are allocated. Leaders should actively participate and promote foresight, integrating it into the strategic agenda and encouraging organization-wide engagement.

How can we ensure continuous leadership support for foresight initiatives?
What role can leaders play in embedding foresight into the organizational culture?
How can top executives model and advocate for strategic foresight within the organization?
How can our leadership teams as well as the individuals in them best gain value from strategic foresight initiatives?

2. Cultural Alignment and Change Management: An organizational culture supportive of foresight is key. Cultures that value long-term thinking and are open to new ideas facilitate successful foresight activities. It may require managing cultural change to challenge existing assumptions and norms.

What cultural barriers exist to implementing strategic foresight?
How can we foster a culture that values and supports long-term thinking?
What change management strategies are needed to align the culture with foresight practices?
How can we use strategic foresight to enhance internal and external communication in this context?

3. Building Internal Foresight Capabilities: Developing internal foresight expertise ensures the organization can continually engage in foresight activities. Training staff and integrating foresight practices into regular activities are critical for building and sustaining these capabilities.

What training or development is needed to build foresight skills within our team?
How can foresight be integrated into existing roles and responsibilities?
What resources are required to sustain internal foresight capabilities over time?
Who from the outside can help us learn more about and build these internal capabilities?

4. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborating across different departments enhances the foresight process with diverse insights. Effective foresight requires input from various functional areas to ensure a comprehensive understanding of potential futures.

How can we facilitate cross-departmental collaboration in the foresight process?
What structures or processes are needed for effective cross-functional integration?
How do we ensure representation and participation from all relevant departments?

5. Scenario Development and Utilization: Developing diverse, plausible scenarios is central to foresight. These scenarios aid organizations in exploring and preparing for various futures, enhancing decision-making under uncertainty.

How do we develop and select relevant and diverse scenarios?
How will these scenarios be used to inform decision-making and strategy?
What processes should be established for regularly reviewing and updating scenarios?
How do we create “living artifacts” that allow us to test out as well as create action steps based on the scenarios?

6. Feedback Loops and Responsive Adjustments: Strategic foresight is dynamic, requiring ongoing refinement. Establishing feedback mechanisms allows for continual adjustment of foresight activities and strategies based on new information and outcomes.

What feedback mechanisms can be established to assess our foresight activities?
How can we ensure our strategies remain responsive to new foresight insights?
What processes are in place for adjusting our approach based on feedback?

7. Aligning Foresight with Strategic Execution: Integrating foresight into strategic execution ensures that long-term insights shape operational planning. This alignment is essential for a proactive and prepared approach to future challenges and opportunities.

How will foresight insights be translated into actionable strategies?
What steps will ensure foresight is integrated into operational planning?
How can we track and measure the impact of foresight on strategic execution?

8. Communication Strategies: Effective communication of foresight findings ensures understanding and engagement across the organization. A clear communication strategy is essential for fostering a shared vision of the future and coordinated action.

How do we effectively communicate foresight findings throughout the organization?
What communication channels and methods will be most effective?
How can we use foresight to foster organizational alignment and shared understanding and in particular in the context of change management and transformation?

9. Balancing Short-term and Long-term Perspectives: Balancing immediate operational needs with long-term foresight is challenging but essential. Organizations must develop tools and processes to ensure short-term decisions are informed by long-term insights.

How can we balance immediate business needs with long-term strategic foresight?
What tools or methods can help align short-term decisions with long-term insights?
How do we manage tensions between short-term and long-term objectives?

10. Evaluating External Partnerships: External partnerships can enhance an organization’s foresight capabilities, providing additional insights and expertise. Selecting and evaluating these partnerships carefully ensures they complement internal efforts.

How do we identify and select appropriate external partners for foresight activities?
What criteria will we use to evaluate the effectiveness of these partnerships?
How do we ensure external partnerships are aligned with our strategic objectives?

Of course, this overview is just the beginning. There are many more facets to strategic foresight, and each organization will have its unique perspective, shaped by distinct opportunities and challenges.

I encourage you to use this primer as a starting point to spark deeper conversations about strategic foresight within your organization. Let it be a catalyst for exploring how these concepts can be tailored to your specific context and goals.

If you find these insights resonate with you, or if you’re eager to delve further into how strategic foresight can transform your organization, I welcome the opportunity to connect and explore these possibilities together. Feel free to reach out for a more in-depth discussion.

Image Credit: Pixabay, Stefan Lindegaard (Manyone)

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Stop Doing What You Did Last Time

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Stop Doing What You Did Last Time

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If there’s no discomfort, there’s no novelty.
When there’s no novelty, it means you did what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, you don’t grow.
When you do what you did last time, there’s no learning.
When you do what you did last time, opportunity cost eats you.
If there’s no discomfort, you’re not trying hard enough.

If there’s no disagreement, critical thought is in short supply.
When critical thought is in short supply, new ideas never see the light of day.
When new ideas never see the light of day, you end up doing what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, your best people leave.
When you do what you did last time, your commute into work feels longer than it is.
When you do what you did last time, you’re in a race to the bottom.
If there’s no disagreement, you’re playing a dangerous game.

If there’s no discretionary work, crazy ideas never grow into something more.
When crazy ideas remain just crazy ideas, new design space remains too risky.
When new design space remains too risky, all you can do is what you did last time.
When you do what you did last time, managers rule.
When you do what you did last time, there is no progress.
When you do what you did last time, great talent won’t accept your job offers.
If there’s no discretionary work, you’re in trouble.

We do what we did last time because it worked.
We do what we did last time because we made lots of money.
We do what we did last time because it’s efficient.
We do what we did last time because it feels good.
We do what we did last time because we think we know what we’ll get.
We do what we did last time because that’s what we do.

Doing what we did last time works well, right up until it doesn’t.
When you find yourself doing what you did last time, do something else.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Fighting for Innovation in the Trenches

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Fighting for Innovation in the Trenches

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

The first principle of managing innovation is that there are three distinct returns on innovation one can invest to achieve.

They are:

“Unmatchable” differentiation, which confers enormous bargaining power as customers who want what you have “must” select you and “must” pay a premium for your offer. We call this DIFF for short.
“Speedy” neutralization, which catches you up to some new market norm set by a competitor, thereby enabling you to stay in the game rather than be eliminated for lacking this feature. This is NEUT for short.
“Rigorous” optimization, which extracts high-value talent and other scarce resources from non-differentiating work in order to free up investment in highly differentiating work or high-speed neutralization efforts. This is OPT for short.

The second principle is that these three outcomes are mutually exclusive, meaning you do not want to combine any two of them into the same work stream. Most innovation programs bind DIFF objectives with NEUT objectives, tying both to the same release cadence. This either slows down NEUT or dumbs down DIFF, both of which outcomes are painfully counterproductive.

The third principle is that most innovation investment is wasted (which is actually good news, because it means you can get a much bigger bang for your innovation buck once you learn how to avoid the waste). The three great sources of waste are:

DIFF initiatives that do not result in “unmatchable” offers that create unequivocal customer preference. You end up being different but not different enough to gain real bargaining power.
NEUT initiatives that take too long or go too far (or, more typically, both). Here the team has become obsessed with its competitor and is doing extra work that the customer will not value, meanwhile delaying the “good enough” state that the customer would value.
OPT initiatives that do not address “sacred cow” resources. You end up moving around a lot of junior resources, meanwhile leaving the senior ones trapped in context instead of being deployed against core.

A corollary that can help teams avoid waste is to pay attention to their reference points.

If your goal is DIFF, then your reference point should be a prospective customer’s use case, one where purchase preference will be determined by you achieving “unmatchable” performance in your key area of innovation.
If your goal is NEUT, then your reference point is a competitor, then your innovation focus should be to get “good enough” fast enough.
A behavior you must avoid is to use a competitor as a reference point for DIFF. The all too likely outcome here is that you will create a difference that the customer either will not notice, will not acknowledge, or will not value. Meanwhile, the competitor will debate the fact that you even achieved it or that it is relevant if you did.

Finally, in light of these principles, the role of the leader is to deconstruct the overall workload of the team to tease out the DIFF from the NEUT from the OPT, and to charter specific work-streams accordingly. This rarely results in a perfectly pure outcome, but the more pure it is, the more productive your team’s efforts will be.

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

Image Credit: Dall-E via Bing

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Value Doesn’t Disappear

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It Shifts From One Place to Another

Value Doesn't Disappear

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

A few years ago, I published an article about no-code software platforms, which was very well received. Before long, however, I began to get angry — and sometimes downright nasty — comments from software engineers who were horrified by the notion that you can produce software without actually understanding the code behind it.

Of course, no-code platforms don’t obviate the need for software engineers, but rather automate basic tasks so that amateurs can design applications by themselves. These platforms are, necessarily, limited but can increase productivity dramatically and help line managers customize technology to fit the task at hand.

Similarly, when FORTRAN, the first real computer language, was invented, many who wrote machine code objected, much like the software engineers did to my article. Yet Fortran didn’t destroy computer programming, but democratized and expanded it. The truth is that value never disappears. It just shifts to another place and that’s what we need to learn to focus on.

Why Robots Aren’t Taking Our Jobs

Ever since the financial crisis we’ve been hearing about robots taking our jobs. Yet just the opposite seems to be happening. In fact, we increasingly find ourselves in a labor shortage. Most tellingly, the shortage is especially acute in manufacturing, where automation is most pervasive. So what’s going on?

The fact is that automation doesn’t actually replace jobs, it replaces tasks. To understand how this works, think about the last time you walked into a highly automated Apple store, which actually employs more people than a typical retail location of the same size. They aren’t there to ring up your purchase any faster, but to do all the things that a machine can’t do, like answer your questions and solve your problems.

A few years ago I came across an even more stark example when I asked Vijay Mehta, Chief Innovation Officer for Consumer Information Services at Experian about the effect that shifting to the cloud had on his firm’s business. The first order effect was simple, they needed a lot less technicians to manage its infrastructure and those people could easily be laid off.

Yet they weren’t. Instead Experian shifted a lot of that talent and expertise to focus on creating new services for its customers. One of these, a cloud enabled “data on demand” platform called Ascend has since become one of the $4 billion company’s most profitable products.

Now think of what would have happened if Experian had merely seen cloud technology as an opportunity to cut costs. Sure, it would have fattened its profit margins temporarily, but as its competitors moved to the cloud that advantage would have soon been eroded and, without new products its business would soon decline.

The Outsourcing Dilemma

Another source of disruption in the job market has been outsourcing. While no one seemed to notice when large multinational corporations were outsourcing blue-collar jobs to low cost countries, now so-called “gig economy” sites like Upwork and Fiverr are doing the same thing for white collar professionals like graphic designers and web developers.

So you would expect to see a high degree of unemployment for those job categories, right? Actually no. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects demand for graphic designers to increase 4% by 2026 and web developers to increase 15%. The site Mashable recently named web development as one of 8 skills you need to get hired in today’s economy.

It’s not hard to see why. While it is true that a skilled professional in a low-cost country can do small projects of the same caliber as those in high cost countries, those tasks do not constitute a whole job. For large, important projects, professionals must collaborate closely to solve complex problems. It’s hard to do that through text messages on a website.

So while it’s true that many tasks are being outsourced, the number of jobs has actually increased. Just like with automation, outsourcing doesn’t make value disappear, but shifts it somewhere else.

The Social Impact

None of this is to say that the effects of technology and globalization hasn’t been real. While it’s fine to speak analytically about value shifting here and there, if a task that you spent years to learn to do well becomes devalued, you take it hard. Economists have also found evidence that disruptions in the job market have contributed to political polarization.

The most obvious thing to do is retrain workers that have been displaced, but it turns out that’s not so simple. In Janesville, a book which chronicles a small town’s struggle to recover from the closing of a GM plant, author Amy Goldstein found that the workers that sought retraining actually did worse than those that didn’t.

When someone loses their job, they don’t need training. They need another job and removing yourself from the job market to take training courses can have serious costs. Work relationships begin to decay and there is no guarantee that the new skills you learn will be in any more demand than the old ones you already had.

In fact, Peter Capelli at the Wharton School argues that the entire notion of a skills gap in America is largely a myth. One reason that there is such a mismatch between the rhetoric about skills and the data is that the most effective training often comes on the job from an employer. It is augmenting skills, not replacing them that creates value.

At the same time, increased complexity in the economy is making collaboration more important, so often the most important skills workers need to learn are soft skills, like writing, listening and being a better team player.

You Can’t Compete With A Robot By Acting Like One

The future is always hard to predict. While it was easy to see that Amazon posed a real problem for large chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, it was much less obvious that small independent bookstores would thrive. In much the same way, few saw that ten years after the launch of the Kindle that paper books would surge amid a decline in e-books.

The one overriding trend over the past 50 years or so is that the future is always more human. In Dan Schawbel’s recent book, Back to Human, the author finds that the antidote for our overly automated age is deeper personal relationships. Things like trust, empathy and caring can’t be automated or outsourced.

There are some things a machine will never do. It will never strike out in a little league game, have its heart broken or see its child born. That makes it hard — impossible really — for a machine ever to work effectively with humans as a real person would. The work of humans is increasingly to work with other humans to design work for machines.

That why perhaps the biggest shift in value is from cognitive to social skills. The high paying jobs today have less to do with the ability to retain facts or manipulate numbers (we now use a computer for those things), but require more deep collaboration, teamwork and emotional intelligence.

So while even the most technically inept line manager can now easily produce an application that it would have once required a highly skilled software engineer, to design the next generation of technology, we need engineers and line managers to work more closely together.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023

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After a week of torrid voting and much passionate support, along with a lot of gut-wrenching consideration and jostling during the judging round, I am proud to announce your Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023:

Robyn Bolton
Robyn M. Bolton works with leaders of mid and large sized companies to use innovation to repeatably and sustainably grow their businesses.

Janet Sernack
Janet Sernack is the Founder and CEO of ImagineNation™ which provides innovation consulting services to help organizations adapt, innovate and grow through disruption by challenging businesses to be, think and act differently to co-create a world where people matter & innovation is the norm.

Greg Satell
Greg Satell is a popular speaker and consultant. His first book, Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age, was selected as one of the best business books in 2017. Follow his blog at Digital Tonto or on Twitter @Digital Tonto.

Mike Shipulski
Mike Shipulski brings together people, culture, and tools to change engineering behavior. He writes daily on Twitter as @MikeShipulski and weekly on his blog Shipulski On Design.

Braden Kelley
Braden Kelley is a Human-Centered Experience, Innovation and Transformation consultant at HCL Technologies, a popular innovation speaker, workshop leader, and creator of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology. He is the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons and Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan. Follow him on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

John Bessant
John Bessant has been active in research, teaching, and consulting in technology and innovation management for over 25 years. Today, he is Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and Research Director, at Exeter University. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship with the Advanced Institute for Management Research and was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy of Management. He has acted as advisor to various national governments and international bodies including the United Nations, The World Bank, and the OECD. John has authored many books including Managing innovation and High Involvement Innovation (Wiley). Follow @johnbessant

Pete Foley
A twenty-five year Procter & Gamble veteran, Pete has spent the last 8+ years applying insights from psychology and behavioral science to innovation, product design, and brand communication. He spent 17 years as a serial innovator, creating novel products, perfume delivery systems, cleaning technologies, devices and many other consumer-centric innovations, resulting in well over 100 granted or published patents. Find him at pete.mindmatters@gmail.com

Geoffrey A. Moore
Geoffrey A. Moore is an author, speaker and business advisor to many of the leading companies in the high-tech sector, including Cisco, Cognizant, Compuware, HP, Microsoft, SAP, and Yahoo! Best known for Crossing the Chasm and Zone to Win with the latest book being The Infinite Staircase. Partner at Wildcat Venture Partners. Chairman Emeritus Chasm Group & Chasm Institute

David Burkus
Dr. David Burkus is an organizational psychologist and best-selling author. Recognized as one of the world’s leading business thinkers, his forward-thinking ideas and books are helping leaders and teams do their best work ever. David is the author of five books about business and leadership and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, CNN, the BBC, NPR, and more. A former business school professor turned sought-after international speaker, he’s worked with organizations of all sizes and across all industries.

Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is a customer service expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times, bestselling business author. For information on The Customer Focus™ customer service training programs, go to www.thecustomerfocus.com. Follow on Twitter: @Hyken

Howard Tiersky
Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Dennis Stauffer
Dennis Stauffer is an author, independent researcher, and expert on personal innovativeness. He is the founder of Innovator Mindset LLC which helps individuals, teams, and organizations enhance and accelerate innovation success. by shifting mindset. Follow @DennisStauffer

Stefan Lindegaard
Stefan Lindegaard is an author, speaker and strategic advisor. His work focuses on corporate transformation based on disruption, digitalization and innovation in large corporations, government organizations and smaller companies. Stefan believes that business today requires an open and global perspective, and his work takes him to Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.

Douglas Ferguson
Douglas Ferguson is an entrepreneur and human-centered technologist. He is the founder and president of Voltage Control, an Austin-based change agency that helps enterprises spark, accelerate, and sustain innovation. He specializes in helping teams work better together through participatory decision making and design inspired facilitation techniques.

Teresa Spangler
Teresa Spangler is the CEO of PlazaBridge Group has been a driving force behind innovation and growth for more than 30 years. Today, she wears multiple hats as a social entrepreneur, innovation expert, growth strategist, author and speaker (not to mention mother, wife, band-leader and so much more). She is especially passionate about helping CEOs understand and value the role human capital plays in innovation, and the impact that innovation has on humanity; in our ever-increasing artificial/cyber world.

Soren Kaplan
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award-winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an affiliated professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations, a former corporate executive, and a co-founder of UpBOARD. He has been recognized by the Thinkers50 as one of the world’s top keynote speakers and thought leaders in business strategy and innovation.

Steve Blank
Steve Blank is an Adjunct Professor at Stanford and Senior Fellow for Innovation at Columbia University. He has been described as the Father of Modern Entrepreneurship, credited with launching the Lean Startup movement that changed how startups are built; how entrepreneurship is taught; how science is commercialized, and how companies and the government innovate.

Diana Porumboiu
Diana heads marketing at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world, and has a passion for innovation, and for genuine, valuable content that creates long-lasting impact. Her combination of creativity, strategic thinking and curiosity has helped organisations grow their online presence through strategic campaigns, community management and engaging content.

Robert B Tucker
Robert B. Tucker is the President of The Innovation Resource Consulting Group. He is a speaker, seminar leader and an expert in the management of innovation and assisting companies in accelerating ideas to market.

Dainora Jociute
Dainora (a.k.a. Dee) creates customer-centric content at Viima. Viima is the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. Passionate about environmental issues, Dee writes about sustainable innovation hoping to save the world – one article at the time.

Arlen Meyers
Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an instructor at the University of Colorado-Denver Business School and cofounding President and CEO of the Society of Physician Entrepreneurs at www.sopenet.org. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ameyers/

Ayelet Baron
Ayelet Baron is a pioneering futurist reminding us we are powerful creators through award winning books, daily blog and thinking of what is possible. Former global tech executive who sees trust, relationships and community as our building blocks to a healthy world.

Leo Chan
Leo is the founder of Abound Innovation Inc. He’s a people and heart-first entrepreneur who believes everyone can be an innovator. An innovator himself, with 55 US patents and over 20 years of experience, Leo has come alongside organizations like Chick-fil-A and guided them to unleash the innovative potential of their employees by transforming them into confident innovators.

Rachel Audige
Rachel Audige is an Innovation Architect who helps organisations embed inventive thinking as well as a certified Systematic Inventive Thinking Facilitator, based in Melbourne.

Art Inteligencia
Art Inteligencia is the lead futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. He is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Art travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. His favorite numbers are one and zero.

Paul Sloane
Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader and editor of A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing, both published by Kogan-Page.

Phil McKinney
Phil McKinney is the Author of “Beyond The Obvious”, Host of the Killer Innovations Podcast and Syndicated Radio Show, a Keynote Speaker, President & CEO CableLabs and an Innovation Mentor and Coach.

Ralph Christian Ohr
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr has extensive experience in product/innovation management for international technology-based companies. His particular interest is targeted at the intersection of organizational and human innovation capabilities. You can follow him on Twitter @Ralph_Ohr.

Jeffrey Phillips
Jeffrey Phillips has over 15 years of experience leading innovation in Fortune 500 companies, federal government agencies and non-profits. He is experienced in innovation strategy, defining and implementing front end processes, tools and teams and leading innovation projects. He is the author of Relentless Innovation and OutManeuver. Jeffrey writes the popular Innovate on Purpose blog. Follow him @ovoinnovation

Dean and Linda Anderson
Dr. Dean Anderson and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson lead BeingFirst, a consultancy focused on educating the marketplace about what’s possible in personal, organizational and community transformation and how to achieve them. Each has been advising clients and training professionals for more than 40 years.

Shilpi Kumar
Shilpi Kumar an inquisitive researcher, designer, strategist and an educator with over 15 years of experience, who truly believes that we can design a better world by understanding human behavior. I work with organizations to identify strategic opportunities and offer user-centric solutions.

Scott Anthony
Scott Anthony is a strategic advisor, writer and speaker on topics of growth and innovation. He has been based in Singapore since 2010, and currently serves at the Managing Director of Innosight’s Asia-Pacific operations.

Anthony Mills
Anthony Mills is the Founder & CEO of Legacy Innovation Group (www.legacyinnova.com), a world-leading strategic innovation consulting firm working with organizations all over the world. Anthony is also the Executive Director of GInI – Global Innovation Institute (www.gini.org), the world’s foremost certification, accreditation, and membership organization in the field of innovation. Anthony has advised leaders from around the world on how to successfully drive long-term growth and resilience through new innovation. Learn more at www.anthonymills.com. Anthony can be reached directly at anthony@anthonymills.com.

Paul Hobcraft
Paul Hobcraft runs Agility Innovation, an advisory business that stimulates sound innovation practice, researches topics that relate to innovation for the future, as well as aligning innovation to organizations core capabilities. Follow @paul4innovating

Jorge Barba
Jorge Barba is a strategist and entrepreneur, who helps companies build new puzzles using human skills. He is a global Innovation Insurgent and author of the innovation blog www.Game-Changer.net

Chateau G Pato
Chateau G Pato is a senior futurist at Inteligencia Ltd. She is passionate about content creation and thinks about it as more science than art. Chateau travels the world at the speed of light, over mountains and under oceans. Her favorite numbers are one and zero.

Jesse Nieminen
Jesse Nieminen is the Co-founder and Chairman at Viima, the best way to collect and develop ideas. Viima’s innovation management software is already loved by thousands of organizations all the way to the Global Fortune 500. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and frequently writes on the topic, usually in Viima’s blog.

Alain Thys
As an experience architect, Alain helps leaders craft customer, employee and shareholder experiences for profit, reinvention and transformation. He does this through his personal consultancy Alain Thys & Co as well as the transformative venture studio Agents of A.W.E. Together with his teams, Alain has influenced the experience of over 500 million customers and 350,000 employees. Follow his blog or connect on Linkedin.

Bruce Fairley
Bruce Fairley is the CEO and Founder of The Narrative Group, a firm dedicated to helping C-Suite executives build enterprise value. Through smart, human-powered digital transformation, Bruce optimizes the business-technology relationship. His innovative profit over pitfalls approach and customized programs are part of Bruce’s mission to build sustainable ‘best-future’ outcomes for visionary leaders. Having spearheaded large scale change initiatives across four continents, he and his skilled, diverse team elevate process, culture, and the bottom line for medium to large firms worldwide.

Tom Stafford
Tom Stafford studies learning and decision making. His main focus is the movement system – the idea being that if we can understand the intelligence of simple actions we will have an excellent handle on intelligence more generally. His research looks at simple decision making, and simple skill learning, using measures of behaviour informed by the computational, robotics and neuroscience work done in the wider group.

If your favorite didn’t make the list, then next year try to rally more votes for them or convince them to increase the quality and quantity of their contributions.

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2015
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2016
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2017
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2018
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2019
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2021
Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2022

Download PDF versions of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2020, 2021 and 2022 lists here:

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. . .

Happy New Year everyone!

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Voting Closed – Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023

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Happy Holidays!

For more than a decade I’ve devoted myself to making innovation insights accessible for the greater good, because I truly believe that the better our organizations get at delivering value to their stakeholders the less waste of natural resources and human resources there will be.

As a result, we are eternally grateful to all of you out there who take the time to create and share great innovation articles, presentations, white papers, and videos with Braden Kelley and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation team. As a small thank you to those of you who follow along, we like to make a list of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers available each year!

Our lists from the ten previous years have been tremendously popular, including:

Do you just have someone that you like to read that writes about innovation, or some of the important adjacencies – trends, consumer psychology, change, leadership, strategy, behavioral economics, collaboration, or design thinking?

Human-Centered Change and Innovation is now looking to recognize the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023.

It is time to vote and help us narrow things down.

The deadline for submitting votes is December 31, 2023 at midnight GMT.

The ranking will be done by me with influence from votes and nominations. The quality and quantity of contributions to this web site by an author will be a BIG contributing factor (through the end of the voting period).

You can vote in any of these three ways (and each earns points for them, so please feel free to vote all three ways):

Sending us the name of the blogger by @reply on twitter to @innovate
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on Facebook
Adding the name of the blogger as a comment to this article’s posting on our Linkedin Page (Be sure and follow us)

The official Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2023 will then be announced here in early January 2024.

Here are the people who received nominations this year along with some carryover recommendations (in alphabetical order):

Adi Gaskell – @adigaskell
Alain Thys
Alex Goryachev
Andy Heikkila – @AndyO_TheHammer
Annette Franz
Arlen Meyers – @sopeofficial
Art Inteligencia
Ayelet Baron
Braden Kelley – @innovate
Brian Miller
Bruce Fairley
Chad McAllister – @ChadMcAllister
Chateau G Pato
Chris Beswick
Chris Rollins
Dr. Detlef Reis
Dainora Jociute
Dan Blacharski – @Dan_Blacharski
Daniel Burrus – @DanielBurrus
Daniel Lock
David Burkus
Dean and Linda Anderson
Dennis Stauffer
Diana Porumboiu
Douglas Ferguson
Drew Boyd – @DrewBoyd
Frank Mattes – @FrankMattes
Geoffrey A Moore
Gregg Fraley – @greggfraley
Greg Satell – @Digitaltonto
Helen Yu
Howard Tiersky
Janet Sernack – @JanetSernack
Jeffrey Baumgartner – @creativejeffrey
Jeff Freedman – @SmallArmyAgency
Jeffrey Phillips – @ovoinnovation
Jesse Nieminen – @nieminenjesse
John Bessant
Jorge Barba – @JorgeBarba
Julian Birkinshaw – @JBirkinshaw
Julie Anixter – @julieanixter
Kate Hammer – @Kate_Hammer
Kevin McFarthing – @InnovationFixer
Leo Chan
Lou Killeffer – @LKilleffer
Manuel Berdoy

Mari Anixter- @MariAnixter
Maria Paula Oliveira – @mpaulaoliveira
Matthew E May – @MatthewEMay
Michael Graber – @SouthernGrowth
Mike Brown – @Brainzooming
Mike Shipulski – @MikeShipulski
Mukesh Gupta
Nick Jain
Nick Partridge – @KnewNewNeu
Nicolas Bry – @NicoBry
Nicholas Longrich
Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz
Pamela Soin
Patricia Salamone
Paul Hobcraft – @Paul4innovating
Paul Sloane – @paulsloane
Pete Foley – @foley_pete
Rachel Audige
Ralph Christian Ohr – @ralph_ohr
Randy Pennington
Richard Haasnoot – @Innovate2Grow
Robert B Tucker – @RobertBTucker
Robyn Bolton – @rm_bolton
Saul Kaplan – @skap5
Shep Hyken – @hyken
Shilpi Kumar
Scott Anthony – @ScottDAnthony
Scott Bowden – @scottbowden51
Shelly Greenway – @ChiefDistiller
Soren Kaplan – @SorenKaplan
Stefan Lindegaard – @Lindegaard
Stephen Shapiro – @stephenshapiro
Steve Blank
Steven Forth – @StevenForth
Tamara Kleinberg – @LaunchStreet
Teresa Spangler – @composerspang
Tom Koulopoulos – @TKspeaks
Tullio Siragusa
Yoram Solomon – @yoram

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We’re curious to see who you think is worth reading!