What Playing the Flute Taught Me About Business Growth

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What Playing the Flute Taught Me About Business Growth

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Ideas and insights can emerge from the most unexpected places. My mom was a preschool teacher, and I often say that I learned everything I needed to know about managing people by watching her wrangle four-year-olds. But it only recently occurred to me that the most valuable business growth lessons came from my thoroughly unremarkable years playing the flute in middle school.

6th Grade: Following the Manual and Falling Flat

Sixth grade was momentous for many reasons, one being that that was when students could choose an instrument and join the school band. I chose the flute because my friends did, and there was a rumor that clarinets gave you buck teeth—I had enough orthodontic issues already.

Each week, our “jill of all trades” teacher gathered the flutists together and guided us through the instructional book until we could play a passable version of Yankee Doodle. I practiced daily, following the book and playing the notes, but the music was lifeless, and I was bored.

7th Grade: Finding Context and Direction

In seventh grade, we moved to full band rehearsals with a new teacher trained to lead an entire band (he was also deaf in one ear, which was, I think, a better qualification for the job than his degree).  Hearing all the instruments together made the music more interesting and I was more motivated to practice because I understood how my part played in the whole.  But I was still a very average flutist.

To help me improve, my parents got me a private flute teacher. Once a week, Mom drove me to my flute teacher’s house for one-on-one tutoring.  She corrected mistakes when I made them, showed me tips and tricks to play faster and breathe deeper, and selected music I enjoyed playing.  With her help, I became an above-average flutist.

Post-Grad: Five Business Truths from Band Class

I stopped playing in the 12th grade. Despite everyone’s efforts, I was never exceptional—I didn’t care enough to do the work required.

Looking back, I realized that my mediocrity taught me five crucial lessons that had nothing to do with music:

  1. Don’t do something just because everyone else is. I chose the flute because my friends did. I didn’t choose my path but followed others—that’s why the music was lifeless.
  2. Following the instruction manual is worse than doing nothing. You can’t learn an instrument from a book. Are you sharp or flat? Too fast or slow? You don’t know, but others do (but don’t say anything).
  3. Part of a person is better than all of a book. Though spread thin, the time my teachers spent with each instrumental section was the difference between technically correct noise and tolerable music.
  4. A dedicated teacher beats a distracted one. Having someone beside me meant no mistake went uncorrected and no triumph unrecognized. She knew my abilities and found music that stretched me without causing frustration.
  5. If you don’t want to do what’s required, be honest about it. I stopped wanting to play the flute in 10th grade but kept going because it was easier to maintain the status quo. In hindsight, a lot of time, money, and effort would have been saved if I stopped playing when I stopped caring.

The Executive Orchestra: What Grade Are You In?

How many executives remain in sixth grade—following management fads because of FOMO, buying books, handing them out, and expecting magic? And, when that fails, hiring someone to do the work for them and wondering why the music stops when the contract ends?

How many progress to seventh grade, finding someone who can teach, correct, and celebrate their teams as they build new capabilities?

How do what I should have done in 10th grade and be honest about what they are and aren’t willing to do, spending time and resources on priorities rather than maintaining an image?

More importantly, what grade are you in?

Image credit: Unsplash

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Probably the greatest misconception about change is that it fails because people don’t understand it. The truth is that change usually fails because it is actively sabotaged. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. Anytime you ask people to change what they think or how they act, you can expect resistance.

Yet not all resistance is the same. Some people are merely skeptical about change, they are looking for evidence based, rational arguments that the proposed action will achieve positive results. Often, however, resistance is irrational and no amount of evidence will be persuasive. People are actively working to subvert change efforts.

We can’t let our transformation efforts be defined by those who want it to fail. Not everyone will embrace change. Instead of wasting time and effort to convince the opposition, we should focus our efforts on empowering those who want it to succeed. However, we need to learn to recognize different kinds of resistance so that we can address genuine issues.

1. Change Fatigue

In recent years, business pundits have embraced the change gospel. We are told that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Therefore, we must “innovate or die.” This creates an environment in which leaders have strong incentives to be seen as dynamic change agents who drive multiple initiatives.

Yet the truth is that, for most industries, we live in a decidedly un-VUCA world. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

With so much talk about change, but so little of it actually happening, it shouldn’t be surprising that a study by PwC found that 65% of workers experienced “change fatigue” and that only half felt that their organization had the capabilities to deliver change. In other words, the change gospel is undermining our ability to produce real change!

That’s why in our transformation workshops the very first thing we ask participants to define is the need for change. We simply can’t expect people to get on board with a change initiative if they don’t see a genuine, meaningful problem being solved. Change, for change’s sake, is simply a waste of everybody’s time.

So before you embark on any transformation initiative ask yourself: “Why do we need this change? What problem are we solving? What value would we derive from solving it? Is that value worth disrupting people’s lives and work?

2. Perverse Incentives

Earlier in my career my work focused on turning around media companies in Eastern Europe and I noticed an interesting trend. Managers of sales departments in struggling companies often accounted for the majority of sales (and commissions) in their companies. Because these leaders were seen as major drivers of revenue, they had an enormous amount of power.

The secret to their success had less to do with any actual sales ability and vastly more to do with the fact that, for a variety of reasons, they had managed to get the prime accounts for themselves and, even if they were managing those accounts poorly, had no incentive to spread them around. They were, in effect, being incentivized to mismanage.

The truth is that we’ve known for decades that financial incentives usually backfire. Nevertheless, when we sit down with leaders to define a change strategy they invariably want to start by devising a complex system of “carrots and sticks” to engineer the behavior they want to see and are often disappointed when they are told that it’s a bad idea.

You never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people who are enthusiastic about it and want to make it work. Even a small initial cadre should be enough to deliver a successful keystone change and get the ball rolling. After that, the issue has more to do with scaling change than anything else.

3. Switching Costs

Every change encounters switching costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.

There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the mysterious promise of transformation.

Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.

You never want to get bogged down in selling an idea. The switching costs will always be more real to skeptics than any image you can conjure. Rather, you want to identify people who are already enthusiastic about the change and willing to bear any costs associated with switching. If you can empower them to succeed with a keystone change, you can sell that tangible success, which is always a stronger value proposition.

A key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t have to convince early adopters. If you feel the need to persuade, you either have the wrong change or the wrong people. Find people who are as passionate as you are and show change can work. Then you can start thinking about bringing others in.

4. Identity And Dignity

Gary Starkweather had a big idea, but his boss at Xerox’s Research Center in Webster, NY hated it so much that he threatened to fire anyone who worked on it. To him, Xerox was a copier company and the idea didn’t have anything to do with copiers. Luckily, for Gary and for Xerox, the idea meshed perfectly with the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)’s mission and the laser printed he developed there helped save the company.

Xerox PARC has since become almost synonymous with innovation, but even the researchers there could be hostile to ideas that were different. Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, were working on a new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with PARC’s vision of personal computing and the two became outcasts. Smith would later team up with Ed Catmull and the technology would form the core of what became Pixar.

One of the biggest mistakes change leaders make is assuming that resistance to change has a rational basis. Very often people oppose change because it offends their identity and sense of self. We all take pride in the way we go about things, whether that involves our actions or our way of thinking about things.

This is the most visceral kind of resistance. We can motivate people to push through fatigue or bear the burden of inevitable switching costs, but we can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are. When people see themselves in a particular way, they rarely change and, in fact, will pay almost any price to stay true to their inner core.

What can be hardest about change, especially when we feel passionately about it, is that at some point, we need to accept that others will not embrace it and we will have to leave some behind. Not every change is for everybody. Some will have to pursue a different journey, one to which they can devote their passions and seek out their own truths.

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

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Focus your Emotional Energy Purposefully

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Focus your Emotional Energy Purposefully

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

When I exited my corporate career more than thirty-five years ago, I was privileged to be regarded and respected as the Fashion Direction Manager for the Grace Bros Department Store group, one of Australia’s most senior women in retail management. This launched my global reputation as a fashion and lifestyle marketing innovator. In this exciting role, I was responsible for designing and implementing a company-wide fashion information system for apparel, accessories, homeware, merchandising, and advertising.  This required me to focus my emotional energy on researching, analyzing, and conceptualizing global fashion and lifestyle trends and adapting them to suit the Australian consumer lifestyle.

It was a dream role before the invention of the Internet, the implosion of the mass media, and the dominance of fast fashion. It required our team to focus their emotional energy on intensively researching different global and diverse media sources, including yarn, textile, couture, designer, ready-to-wear shows, trade journals, magazines, and seasonal sales data. 

Generating creative thinking

Creativity is about connecting things, and in the fashion world, the best designers make the most unlikely connections to produce novel and wondrous creations. As my professional background included graphic and fashion design and marketing, I could further hone my associative (lateral and connective) thinking skills to think creatively and critically in this role. To focus my emotional energy and attention on guiding my intuition, values, and decisions on the needs and wants of buyers, merchandisers, marketers, and customers. To emerge, diverge and converge the key connections and patterns occurring globally in the fashion world and external complex fashion systems. I also learned the importance of being customer-focused and the value and role of being empathic with customers, manufacturers’ value chains and fashion information system users.

It was an incredibly emotional, physical, and stressful role, which required me to travel overseas four times a year to stay current on the different global fashion streams.

This caused my life to melt into being at work, the gym, or the airport.

Stress-induced exhaustion and burnout

This resulted in my first profound encounter with stress-induced exhaustion and burnout, which hit me right in the face one morning when my body refused to move, and I was unable to get out of bed.

I have also noticed that many of my global coaching clients have faced a similar challenge: stress-induced exhaustion and burnout. Fortunately, they can use the coaching partnership to unearth their particular pattern and unresourceful ways of being and learn how to focus their emotional energy to disrupt, dispute, and deviate from it into a more resourceful way of being and acting. However, it has shifted the coach’s role as a healer, making it even more critical in our current environment.

Focusing emotional energy on pursuing mattering, meaning and purposeful work

This ultimately manifests as a crisis and becomes a defining moment. In my case, I made a fundamental choice to focus emotional energy on pursuing meaning, mattering, and purposeful work, which still focuses my full attention and drives me today.

It created a “crack, “or an opening and threshold for making two fundamental choices: to embark on a healing journey to become the kind of person I wanted to be and to find a way to focus my emotional energy on making the difference I wanted to make in the world. 

This enabled me to use my knowledge, experience, and skills to establish Australia’s first design management consultancy.

What is emotional energy?

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative and critical thinking strategies, now in partnership with AI.

When a person’s emotional energy has contracted, it results in constrained, negative, pessimistic, and even catastrophic thinking habits, which have a toxic impact on the person’s identity and emotional and physical well-being.

This means there is no space, doorway, or threshold to take on anything new, novel, or different. Nor can they imagine what might be possible to evolve, advance, or transform their personal or professional lives in an uncertain future.

Emotional energy catalyses and directs your intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach your world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When you are true to your calling or purpose, you will make extra efforts to be healthier, positively impact your well-being, and improve your resilience.

How does this apply to leadership in uncertain times?

“I think leaders need to remember that they are in the energy management business,” says Halsey. “Their role is to keep people focused, energized, and positive about themselves and their work. They may be unable to change external circumstances, but they can create a safe, nurturing, and empowering work environment. By setting clear goals, diagnosing individual needs, and providing the right leadership style, leaders can help their teams thrive—even in uncertain times.”

People want work to be less of a job and more of a calling.

According to Martin Seligman and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman in their book Tomorrowmind, a US-based research study that included two thousand employees of all ages, industries, tenures, and incomes, revealed that people craved more meaning at work regardless of sector or position. Everyone wanted work to be less of a job and more of a calling and gave their current jobs a rating of 49, which suggests that their “meaning cups” are only half full.

This search for meaning, mattering, and being of service to humanity in a different and value-adding way enables innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs to cultivate the emotional energy and develop the agility required to drive their creativity, invention and innovation endeavors. 

It is the most critical ingredient that motivates, empowers, enables, fuels and sustains innovators, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs to adapt, survive and thrive on the innovation roller coaster.

Channeling emotional energy meaningfully and purposefully

From my leadership training and coaching experience, I have learned that most people desperately want their lives to make sense and be meaningful and to know that who they are and what they do matters. It is possible to link meaning and mattering to being intentionally motivated and directed by your core values to make a difference and a contribution that provides value and significance to someone, a community, or society.  

  • Being purposeful

Being purposeful focuses your emotional energy, guides your life decisions influences your behaviors, shapes your goals, offers a sense of direction, and creates meaning. Rather than engaging in shallow, empty, or pointless activities, it gives you agency.

In our uncertain, volatile and disruptive world, it is crucial to think about your “purpose in life.” Be like an Entrepreneur and link your purpose as a guidepost to help you deal with uncertainty, navigate it better, mitigate the damaging effects of long-term stress, and become psychologically resilient.

People with a strong sense of purpose direct and focus their emotional energy on what really matters to them. They tend to be more agile and adaptive, hardier and resilient, and more able to refocus and recover quickly from adverse and catastrophic events.

According to McKinsey & Co.’s article “Igniting individual purpose in times of crisis,” purposeful people also live longer and healthier lives and are essential to employee experience. This results in higher levels of employee engagement, more substantial organizational commitment, and increased feelings of well-being. Like many entrepreneurs, people who find their purpose congruent with their jobs tend to get more meaning from their roles, making them more productive and more likely to outperform their peers.

How can you add more meaning, mattering and purpose?

Meaning is an outcome of purpose, and many people, due to their experience of the pandemic and hybrid workplace in a chaotic and uncertain world, are seeking to re-engage with their work and workplaces by focusing their emotional energy on improving their well-being and creating more purposeful, balanced, and meaningful lives.

This is a short section from our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Activating the Heart, Mind and Soul of Innovation”, which will be published in 2025.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

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

Image Credit: Unsplash

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Commercializing New Concepts is Hard

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Commercializing New Concepts is Hard

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you have the data that says the market for the new concept is big enough, you waited too long.

If you require the data that verifies the market is big enough before pursuing new concepts, you’ll never pursue them.

If you’re afraid to trust the judgement of your best technologists, you’ll never build the traction needed to launch new concepts.

If you will sell the new concept to the same old customers, don’t bother. You already sold them all the important new concepts. The returns have already diminished.

If you must sell the new concept to new customers, it could create a whole new business for you.

If you ask your successful business units to create and commercialize new concepts, they’ll launch what they did last time and declare it a new concept.

If you leave it to your successful business units to decide if it’s right to commercialize a new concept created by someone else, they won’t.

If a new concept is so significant that it will dwarf the most successful business unit, the most successful business unit will scuttle it.

If the new concept is so significant it warrants a whole new business unit, you won’t make the investment because the sales of the yet-to-be-launched concept are yet to be realized.

If you can’t justify the investment to commercialize a new concept because there are no sales of the yet-to-be-launched concept, you don’t understand that sales come only after you launch. But, you’re not alone.

If a new concept makes perfect sense, you would have commercialized it years ago.

If the new concept isn’t ridiculed by the Status Quo, do something else.

If the new concept hasn’t failed three times, it’s not a worthwhile concept.

If you think the new concept will be used as you intend, think again.

If you’re sure a new concept will be a flop, you shouldn’t be. Same goes for the ones you’re sure will be successful.

If you’re afraid to trust your judgement, you aren’t the right person to commercialize new concepts.

And if you’re not willing to put your reputation on the line, let someone else commercialize the new concept.

Image credits: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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10 Business Mythstakes Some Leaders Believe

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10 Business Mythstakes Some Leaders Believe

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

Some very popular business sayings are potentially detrimental to your organization. Last week I shared one of my weekly Forbes.com columns titled Five Business Myths You Cannot Afford to Believe. It met with plenty of positive feedback, so I’m going to share those five myths with you, plus five more. I’ve written full articles about some of these topics in the past. I now share this compilation of ten popular business myths. Don’t make the mythstake of believing them!

  1. A Repeat Customer Is a Loyal Customer: No, they are just a repeat customer. You must understand why they keep coming back. Maybe your location is more convenient. Maybe you have a lower price. As soon as a competitor has a better location or a lower price, don’t be surprised to see the “loyal” customer disappear.
  2. We Want Satisfied Customers: Our annual customer service research found that one in four (23%) don’t return to a business that just satisfies them. Satisfactory is average. We need to be better than that.
  3. Only the Front Line Needs Customer Service Training: Everybody in an organization is responsible for their role in customer service. If they aren’t dealing directly with customers, they are supporting someone who is, or they are part of the process that impacts the overall service and experience.
  4. Customer Loyalty Programs Create Loyal Customers: Loyalty programs are usually about points, perks and discounts. In reality, they are marketing programs that do a great job of bringing customers back. We love repeat customers, but don’t get caught believing your repeat customers are truly loyal.
  5. All Customers Should Be Treated the Same: All customers must be treated with similar levels of respect. However, today’s customers want a personalized experience. That means an individualized experience.

Shep Hyken Mythstakes Cartoon

  1. Technology Can Replace Human Interaction: Companies have tried, and it doesn’t work. Even Amazon has live customer support. I stand by something I said years ago: “The greatest technology in the world can’t replace the ultimate relationship-building tool between a customer and a business: the human touch.”
  2. A Quality Product Will Ensure Success: It helps, but it’s not a guarantee. Studies have proven that even if you have the best product but treat the customer poorly, they will find another place to buy what you sell, even if the product is not quite as good. And the opposite is true. The best service won’t get your customers to come back if the product doesn’t do what it is supposed to do. It takes the combination of a quality product and quality service.
  3. Customer Training Is a One-Time Event: Many companies include a customer service training module in their on-boarding. That’s a great start, but it needs to be sustainable. I like to say, “Customer service training isn’t something you did. It’s something you do.” Ongoing training and/or reminders are the key to a successful customer-focused culture.
  4. Customer Service Is What Happens When Customer Experience Fails: Customer service is not a department. It’s a philosophy to be embraced by everyone in the company. However, customer support is a department. Don’t confuse the two. One is about your culture. The other is about handling complaints and helping customers with their problems or questions.
  5. The Customer Is Always Right: We’ll end with my favorite. No, the customer is NOT always right, but they are always the customer. So, if they are wrong, let them be wrong with dignity and respect!

Image Credit: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides at misterinnovation.com

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Why Talent Drives Innovation

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Why Talent Drives Innovation

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

In any organization, having the right people in the right places at the right time is critical for success.

This is especially true for innovation, which doesn’t just depend on good ideas, projects, or technologies – it depends on the people who can bring these to life.

When resources are limited, every individual must perform well, as even one weak link can jeopardize a project. That’s why people – and the teams they form – are more important than ideas when it comes to driving innovation.

So, who are these key individuals?

They are those with the mindset, skills, and attributes needed to turn ideas into successful realities. These individuals may come in many forms, but they tend to share common traits such as:

  • Creativity: They think outside the box, solving problems in novel ways.
  • Problem-solving: They identify challenges and find practical solutions.
  • Growth mindset: They experiment and learn from both success and failures and they are life-long learners in many aspects of life.
  • Adaptability: They thrive in dynamic, ever-changing environments.
  • Collaboration: They work effectively with others, both inside and outside the organization.
  • Passion: They are deeply committed to their work and driven to succeed.
  • Persistence: They push through obstacles and stay focused on achieving their goals.
  • Communication: They clearly convey their ideas and inspire others.
  • Leadership: They motivate and guide their teams toward success.
  • Initiative: They take action without waiting for direction.
  • Strategic thinking: They see the bigger picture and consider the long-term impact of their decisions.

The reality is that having people – talent – like this in your organization is more valuable than having endless top-notch ideas or projects to choose from.

Stefan Lindegaard People Process Ideas

Why? Because talented people can take even a mediocre idea and turn it into something extraordinary, while average performers will struggle to execute even the best ideas.

This is true for organizations of all sizes. Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, success depends on your ability to attract, develop, and retain people who can turn ideas – whether they originate from themselves or others – into reality.

Large organizations might have the flexibility to move their top talent around, but for smaller companies, it’s even more crucial to identify and nurture individuals with these key traits.

Either way, before focusing on generating more ideas, make sure you have the people who can bring those ideas to life. Talent, not just ideas, is the driving force behind innovation.

Image Credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available at misterinnovation.com

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Job Design as Innovation Strategy

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How Complex Problem-Solving Creates Automation Champions

Job Design as Innovation Strategy

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Imagine a manufacturing company.  On the factory floor, machines whirl and grind, torches flare up as welding helmets click closed, and parts and products fall off the line and into waiting hands or boxes, ready to be shipped to customers.  Elsewhere, through several doors and a long hallway, you leave the cacophony of the shop floor for the quiet hum of the office.  Computers ping with new emails while fingers clickety-clack across the keyboard.  Occasionally, a printer whirs to life while forcing someone to raise their voice as they talk to a customer on the other end of the phone.

Now, imagine that you ask each person whether AI and automation will positively or negatively affect their jobs.  Who will champion new technology and who will resist it?

Most people expect automation acceptance to be separated by the long hallway, with the office workers welcoming while the factory workers resist.

Most people are wrong.

The Business Case for Problem-Solving Job Design

Last week, I wrote about findings from an MIT study that indicated that trust, not technology, is the leading indicator of whether workers will adopt new AI and automation tools.

But there’s more to the story than that.  Researchers found that the type of work people do has a bigger influence on automation perception than where they do it. Specifically, people who engage in work requiring high levels of complex problem-solving alongside routine work are more likely to see the benefit of automation than any other group.

Or, to put it more simply

Net Impact of Automation & New Technology on Your Work

While it’s not surprising that people who perform mostly routine tasks are more resistant than those who engage in complex tasks, it is surprising that this holds true for both office-based and production-floor employees.

Even more notable, this positive perception is significantly higher for complex problem solvers vs. the average across all workers::

  • Safety: 43% and 41% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 32% avg)
  • Pay: 27% and 25% net positive for physical and office workers, respectively (vs. 3.9% avg)
  • Autonomy: 33% net positive for office workers (vs. 18% average)
  • Job security: 25% and 22% net positive for office and physical workers, respectively (vs. 3.5%)

Or, to put it more simply, blend problem-solving into routine-heavy roles, and you’ll transform potential technology resistors into champions.

3 Ways to Build Problem-Solving Into Any Role

The importance of incorporating problem-solving into every job isn’t just a theory – it’s one of the core principles of the Toyota Production System (TPS).  Jidoka, or the union of automation with human intelligence, is best exemplified by the andon cord system, where employees can stop manufacturing if they perceive a quality issue.

But you don’t need to be a Six-Sigma black belt to build human intelligence into each role:

  1. Create troubleshooting teams with decision authority
    Workers who actively diagnose and fix process issues develop a nuanced understanding of where technology helps versus hinders. Cross-functional troubleshooting creates the perfect conditions for technology champions to emerge.
  2. Design financial incentives around problem resolution
    The MIT study’s embedded experiment showed that financial incentives significantly improved workers’ perception of new technologies while opportunities for input alone did not. When workers see personal benefit in solving problems with technology, adoption accelerates.
  3. Establish learning pathways connected to problem complexity
    Workers motivated by career growth (+33.9% positive view on automation’s impact on upward mobility) actively seek out technologies that help them tackle increasingly complex problems. Create visible advancement paths tied to problem-solving mastery.

Innovation’s Human Catalyst

The most powerful lever for technology adoption isn’t better technology—it’s better job design. By restructuring roles to include meaningful problem-solving, you transform the innovation equation.

So here’s the million-dollar question every executive should be asking: Are you designing jobs that create automation champions, or are you merely automating jobs as they currently exist?

Image credits: Robyn Bolton and misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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Shifting Mindsets to Compete in an Ecosystem-Driven World

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Shifting Mindsets to Compete in an Ecosystem-Driven World

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In 1980 Harvard professor Michael Porter published Competitive Strategy, which recommended that firms create advantage by driving efficiencies throughout the value chain and mastering competitive forces by maximizing bargaining power. These concepts drove corporate thinking for decades.

Yet as AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, around the same time that Porter’s ideas were ascending among CEOs in the establishment industries on the east coast, a very different way of doing business was gaining steam in Silicon Valley. The firms there saw themselves not as isolated fiefdoms, but as part of a larger ecosystem.

Competitive advantage can no longer be reduced to the sum of efficiencies in a value chain, but is embedded in webs of connections. To compete in an ecosystem-driven world, Leaders need to do more than adapt how we deploy assets, we need to look at things differently. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, we need to inspire and empower belief.

Shifting From “Compel And Control” To “Access And Empower”

In the 1920s Henry Ford built the almost completely vertically integrated River Rouge plant. Because the company had the ability to produce just about every facet of its product itself (the plant even had its own steel mill), it had tremendous control over the value chain, making it virtually immune to the bargaining power of suppliers.

However, as the industry matured, other companies began to specialize in particular components. Ford, unable to compete in so many directions, became integrated into the larger ecosystem. In fact, during the financial crisis in 2008, the company’s CEO, Alan Mulally, said this in testimony to Congress:

“In particular, the collapse of one or both of our domestic competitors would threaten Ford because we have 80 percent overlap in supplier networks and nearly 25 percent of Ford’s top dealers also own GM and Chrysler franchises”

In a value-chain-driven world, Ford would have welcomed its competitors’ demise. In an ecosystem-driven-world, however, their collapse would damage nodes that the company itself depended on. Clearly, the principles of competitive advantage have changed. Today your fate depends less on the assets and capabilities you control, than what you can access.

That, in essence, is why we need an ecosystem strategy. Control has become a dangerous illusion. It’s what led to the demise of the East Coast technology companies such as DEC and Data General that AnnaLee Saxenian wrote in her book. By seeking full control of their value chain, they cut off connection to important parts of the ecosystem. When the market and technology shifted, they were left on their own island.

Building Silos Of Excellence

It’s become so common for pundits to complain about organizational silos that few even think about what it means anymore. Why do silos form in the first place? Why do they persist? If silos are so egregious, why are they so common? And once we get rid of them, what takes their place? To “break down silos” and not ask these questions is just lazy thinking.

Silos aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Essentially, they are centers of excellence. It’s true that people who work closely together naturally form a working culture and tacit domain knowledge that can be hard for others to penetrate, but breaking those units apart can undermine the important work they do.

Another problem is that when you reorganize to break down one kind of silo, you inevitably create others. If, for example, your company is organized around functional groups, then you will get poor collaboration around products. But when you reorganize to focus on product groups, you get the same problem within functions.

The truth is that you don’t want to break down silos, you want to connect them. What we need to learn is how to network our organizations to help silos become interoperable with other silos that have complementary resources and areas of areas of expertise. That, essentially, is what an ecosystem is, a network of interoperable networks.

Paradoxically, we need silos of excellence to provide value to the ecosystem in order to get value out. The best way to form a connection is to have something attractive that others want to connect to.

Connecting Silos To Leverage Platforms

It’s become clear that no organization can survive focusing exclusively on capabilities it owns and controls. Today, we need to leverage platforms to access ecosystems of technology, talent and information from a variety of stakeholders, including customers, partners, vendors and open platforms. Yet, that is often easier said than done.

The truth is that while platforms offer enormous possibilities to scale, they also have deep vulnerabilities. Yes, platforms can help connect to capabilities and assets, but they are no substitute for a sound business model that creates, delivers and captures value. That was one problem with Uber, it created connection, but little else.

Organizations that successfully leverage platforms do so with silos of capability at the core. Amazon has leveraged decades of investment in building an unparalleled logistic capability to create a dominant commerce platform. In a similar way, IBM has leveraged its expertise in quantum computing to create a network of like-minded organizations. Corporate Venture Capital (VC) funds leverage industry expertise to access entrepreneurial innovation.

There are a number of ways even small firms can leverage platforms to access ecosystems. The Manufacturing USA Institutes cater to small and medium sized firms. Local universities are often overlooked resources to access deep expertise. Harley Owners Groups are a great example of how firms can leverage their own customer networks.

Strategy Is No Longer A Game Of Chess

Traditionally, strategy has been seen as a game of chess. Wise leaders survey the board of play, plan their moves carefully and execute flawlessly. That’s always been a fantasy, but it was close enough to reality to be helpful. Organizations could build up sustainable competitive advantage by painstakingly building up bargaining power within the value chain.

Yet as Rita McGrath has pointed out, it’s no longer as important to “learn to plan” as it is to “plan to learn.” Today, a better metaphor for strategy is an online role-playing game, where you bring you certain capabilities and assets and connect with others to go on quests and discover new things along the way.

Unlike chess, where everyone knows that their objective is to capture the opponent’s king, in today’s ecosystem-driven world the basis of competition is in continuous flux, so we cannot be absolutely sure of the objective when we start out, or even if our opponent is really an opponent and not a potential ally.

That’s why strategy today requires a more Bayesian approach in which we don’t expect to get things right as much as we hope to become less wrong over time. As I wrote in Harvard Business Review some years ago, “competitive advantage” is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections. Strategy, therefore, must be focused on deepening and widening networks of information, talent, partners, and consumers.”

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

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Three Ways Teamwork Can Fail

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Three Ways Teamwork Can Fail

GUEST POST from David Burkus

Teamwork is a constant in organizational life. You will work on teams for the majority of your career. Some of those teams will be an uplifting, engaging experience—but most will be an average or even a draining experience. Because most teams aren’t high-performing ones. Most teams fail to achieve a level of performance above the average of each individual’s capabilities. Most teams lack what Stephen Covey would call “synergy” but what organizational psychologists call “collective intelligence.”

Collective intelligence happens when a team’s performance on tasks exceeds what would be predicted by averaging the capabilities of each member. Collectively intelligence teams find a way to bring out more from each other than they even expected of themselves. And the inverse is true as well. When teams fail, it’s often because they fail to achieve collective intelligence.

In this article, we’ll outline three different reasons teamwork fails—or at least fails to achieve collective intelligence.

1. Social Loafing

The first reason teamwork fails is social loafing. Social loafing is a phenomenon that can seriously undermine the effectiveness of a team. It refers to individuals who do not fully commit to tasks or deadlines, taking advantage of the interdependence of work in teams. This lack of commitment can lead to missed deadlines, incomplete tasks, and a general decrease in team productivity.

The key to addressing social loafing is accountability. By holding each team member accountable for their assigned tasks, it is possible to remove the opportunity for social loafing. Regular check-ins can also be beneficial, as they allow team leaders to monitor progress and ensure that everyone is pulling their weight. By fostering a culture of accountability, teams can minimize the impact of social loafing and ensure that all members are contributing effectively.

2. Unequal Sharing

The second reason teamwork fails is unequal sharing. This occurs when certain individuals dominate conversations, preventing the full range of ideas from being expressed. When this happens, the benefits of all the team’s diversity are not fully utilized, leading to sub-optimal decision making.

To address unequal sharing, it can be helpful to introduce structure into team meetings. This could involve using timers to ensure that everyone gets a chance to speak or breaking larger teams into smaller groups to facilitate more balanced conversation. Encouraging conversational turn-taking can also be beneficial, as it ensures that all voices are heard.

3. Lack of Social Sensitivity

The third reason teamwork fails is a lack of social sensitivity. This is a less obvious, but equally damaging, issue that can affect team performance. It refers to the inability to perceive and empathize with the emotions and beliefs of others. This lack of empathy can lead to misunderstandings, conflict, and a lack of cohesion within the team.

Increasing social sensitivity within a team can be achieved in several ways. One effective strategy is to add more women to the team, as research has shown that teams with a higher proportion of women tend to have higher levels of social sensitivity. Additionally, taking steps to better understand and empathize with team members can also be beneficial. This could involve team-building exercises, training in emotional intelligence, or simply taking the time to listen and understand each other’s perspectives. By modeling behavior and teaching empathy, teams can become more socially sensitive and therefore more effective.

Building collective intelligence within a team is not always straightforward. It requires careful management and a commitment to fostering a positive team culture. By addressing issues such as social loafing, unequal sharing, and lack of social sensitivity, teams can become smarter and less likely to fail. The strategies outlined in this article provide a starting point for teams looking to improve their effectiveness and achieve their goals.

Image credit: Pixabay

Originally published on DavidBurkus.com on December 10, 2023

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What Great Ideas Feel Like

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What Great Ideas Feel Like

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

If you have a reasonably good idea, someone will steal it, make it their own and take credit. No worries, this is what happens with reasonably good ideas.

If you have a really good idea, you’ll have to explain it several times before anyone understands it. Then, once they understand, you’ll have to help them figure out how to realize value from the idea. And after several failed attempts at implementation, you’ll have to help them adjust their approach so they can implement successfully. Then, after the success, someone will make it their own and take credit. No worries, this is what happens with really good ideas.

When you have an idea so good that it threatens the Status Quo, you’ll get ridiculed. You’ll have to present the idea once every three months for two years. The negativity will decrease slowly, and at the end of two years the threatening idea will get downgraded to a really good idea. Then it will follow the wandering path to success described above. Don’t feel special. This is how it goes with ideas good enough to threaten.

And then there’s the rarified category that few know about. This is the idea that’s so orthogonal it scares even you. This idea takes a year or two of festering before you can scratch the outer shell of it. Then it takes another year before you can describe it to yourself. And then it takes another year before you can bring yourself to speak of it. And then it takes another six months before you share it outside your trust network. And where the very best ideas get ridiculed, with this type of idea people don’t talk about the idea at all, they just think you’ve gone off the deep end and become unhinged. This class of idea is so heretical it makes people uncomfortable just to be near you. Needless to say, this class of idea makes for a wild ride.

Good ideas make people uncomfortable. That’s just the way it is. But don’t let this get in the way. More than that, I urge you to see the push-back and discomfort as measures of the idea’s goodness.

If there’s no discomfort, ridicule or fear, the idea simply isn’t good enough.

Image credits: misterinnovation.com (1 of 850+ free quote slides for download)

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