AbleBrains

Hire Me Every Day!

Ok, now that I've got your attention, no, I have no plans to leave SAP.  But I thought it was an attention grabbing opener.  So why open with such a flagrant gambit for attention?  Because I think its important during periods of economic uncertainty, heck economic crisis, to continue to invest in innovation.

"Yeah, Steve we get that, you've talked about investing in innovation before, what does that have to do with hiring practices?"

Let me ask you a question.  How long do you think your organization can remain competitive, remain innovative without investing in your Human Capital?  Investing in the folks who you are depending on to deliver that innovation?  Innovation doesn't grow on trees (damm I wish it did but it doesn't).  It grows out of the minds of those working to make your company successful, whether it be on the product side, marketing, customer experience, social media, you name it... it all grows out of the fertile and creative minds of your employees.

So why the battle cry "Hire Me Every Day!"?

Each employee has to deliver in uncertain times. And companies in return have to invest in those employees, to make them feel they way they did on that first day of work at a new job -- excited, nervous, invigorated, motivated, ready to take on the world and do wonderful things.  That's the way I felt my first day of work and I strive to make my teams feel that way every day. 

I know, its a lofty goal. One that isn't reached every day for sure. But I think its a goal worth pursuing on a daily basis.

Orion: Intersection of Design, Innovation and Manned Spaceflight

Love this Fast Company article on the evolution in manned spaceflight by NASA and Lockheed Martin. Thanx to Vinnie for referencing it.  Click the link below for the entire article. 

clipped from www.fastcompany.com Designing any new spacecraft requires relentless innovation. But sometimes the better part of innovation is not invention, but effectiveness. And therein lies the challenge for Orion, and for the engineers designing it. NASA and Lockheed Martin must find the discipline to produce a straightforward spaceship, with a clear mission and mature technology. And they must do it by 2015, with a total budget of only $8 billion--the equivalent of six weeks' expenses in Iraq.

The Petri Dish of Innovation

I've had the fortunate opportunity to lead innovation efforts in a wide variety of circumstances. Some spectacularly successful. Others no so much. Where there has been success, the common theme has been the opportunity to extensively train creative people in how to think, experiment, collaborate and then harness innovations.  In Gary Hamel's words:

"Today, innovation is the buzzword du jour in virtually every company, but how many [leadership teams] have put every employee through an intensive training program aimed at boosting the innovation skills of the rank and file? Sure companies have electronic suggestion boxes. slush funds for new ideas, elaborate pipeline management tools, and innovation awards -- but in the absence of a cadre of extensively trained and highly skilled innovators, much of the investment in these innovation enablers will simply be wasted."

Gary is right.  Training is one of those fundamental needs to driving innovation. In fact, its the Petri Dish of Innovation - the place where you will first "see it grow." But to my way of thinking it won't take root unless you you build the correct foundation. Think of the following initiatives as a way to begin to re-engineer your culture for Innovation.

Ya. Training is important but not in a vacuum.  Leadership needs to lead... that is, it needs to put some skin in the game and help to lead the innovation initiative.  Management systems need to be put in place to manage innovators differently, including the rationalization of performance-based (standard) and learning-based (innovation) cultures thru proper Innovation Incentives.  Management systems must also include co-creation initiatives with customers and partners.  IBM does a great job creating Innovation incentives and I've talked about that here.  Design Thinking needs to be deployed strategically across the organization to solve business problems.  My favorite example of this is how Stanford D-School helped Firefox take on IE.   Finally, a critical yet often forgotten element in this re-engineering process is change management, early and often.   The process of driving change requires innovative communications that are conversational, bi-directional and enable the leadership and employees to communicate freely and openly on what's working and what's not!  Social Networking provides a great opportunity to lay this communications platform.  Taken together you'll be able to eventually transform a culture so it can stimulate new competencies, challenge orthodoxies, discover and leverage new trends as well as unarticulated needs.

Evolutionary Design or How I Learned to Automate Innovation

As human-computer interaction becomes richer, we're asking computers to take on tasks normally reserved to those with biochemical substrates for thought.  There has been a movement under foot to see whether or  not computers can innovate... can be creative in ways similar to humans.  Its called evolutionary design.

In evolutionary design computers create thousands of variants representing design solutions until a best-fit solution to a design problem is found.  Its a brute force trial and error approach but done at speeds that human teams can't replicate. In essence, evolutionary design takes humans out of the design equation.  It starts with humans but with enough iterations on design problems eventually one could conceiveably factor humans out of the equation completely.  Two initial "parent" designs are provided as starting points to a design modelling program.  The program then takes design elements from each parent design and recombines them in unique ways.  Take a pair of sneakers for instance -- the modelling program could take the ventilation pattern from one sneaker design and the sole waffle pattern of the other parent and blend them into a unique offspring design. In fact, thousands of offspring designs can be produced that combines features of each parent to come up with new more evolved designs.  The program then selects the offspring it thinks are worth a detailed look at and the process is repeated countless times to see if breeding with other promising offspring comes up with even better results.

Question... is design recombination though a form of creative thought?  Would I ever come up with something original that in some way or another is not related to the parent design but is disruptive (in a good way) in its own right? Perhaps.  Perhaps offspring can evolve to the point where the designs are dramatically different from the original parent designs but I think evolutionary design can be leveraged to drive incremental improvements.  But if you  are looking for the next best thing since sliced bread, is this gonna get you there???

The hope here of course is that after thousands of "generations," the modeler will create some design combinations that might never have occurred to a human.

Traditionally  evolutionary design was found primarily in the aviation and auto industries but now is moving into a wide range of other industries  and device designs--  USB memory sticks, yacht keels, high bandwidth optical fiber, Wi-Fi antennae, cochlear implants... and the list goes on. What's making evolutionary design available to a wide range of industries? Why Moore's law of course.  Although evolutionary design has been around for years, cheap processing power hasn't. Its needed since it can take up to 20 million generations before a usable design is created. And what used to take months of design simulations now happens in a matter of days.

Its even being used to design around patents. Stanford design students were hired to design a Wi-Fi antenna for a company that wanted to avoid paying Cisco fees for their antenna  design. They used evolutionary design to come up with a wi-fi antenna that didn't use any features covered in the Cisco patent and purportedely is more efficient as well.

All of this begs the question, just where is the line between humans and machine intelligence when it comes to design?  Are humans needed to produce designs?

Innovation Mistakes

Bruce Nussbaum writes on the top innovation mistakes companies make in trying drive innovation in their enterprise. From his Business Week article:

"In no particular order—except No. 1 which is by far the worst mistake made most often with the most impact.

1-CEO sloth. There’s no pretty word for failure to focus on innovation by top management. Every major innovation index, including the new one coming out by Business Week in 08, shows significantly higher rates of return for companies that innovate. Yet CEO’s consistently mouth the word without providing the leadership and resources to make it happen. CEOs need to make the time to lead the  innovation movement in their companies.

2- Adding, not transforming. Most corporations today will allow innovation to be added to their structure. They will add a new innovation pipeline, a new social networking process, a new customer focus group, a new product or service. But companies usually don't scale or leverage the innovation to transform the entire corporate culture--so the innovation remains isolated. In the end, the old pushes back and erodes the new, the best talent leaves, and managers wonder why innovation doesn't work.

3- Choosing Metrics over talent. You must run a global corporation with a system of metrics in place. But measuring efficiency doesn't make a company creative. You need talented people for that. Creative talent is rare in business culture. B-Schools are only beginning to produce them. Getting your efficiency metrics grid down is critical to success but doesn't guarantee it anymore. Swimming in the global talent pool to get creative people for your company is just as critical to success today.

4- Failing to use design thinking strategically. Most companies employ innovation and design consultancies at the midlevel to foster culture change. That underestimates the power of design thinking to guide companies through this unusual period of constant and unexpected change. Innovation consultants and coaches should be used at the top of the executive pyramid.

5- Underestimating Crisis. We don't live in a world of change, we live in a world of crisis. It's "change" on steroids" and its impact on us is greater than at any other time in a century. We are living through an energy crisis, a technology crisis, a political crisis, an economic crisis, a food crisis, a demographic crisis, a terrorist crisis--all overlapping and happening at the same time. How to manage in constant crisis mode is the critical management problem of our era."

I think these are all important points.  Of particular interest to me is the notion of adding NOT transforming.   Time and time again, I've seen companies thinking if they just add this team,  this function this organization, without the commitment to support then integrate these functions into the core organization, they are blowing it!  Also, don't incorporate a function too early in the change management lifecycle... all the hard work you've put into driving change will get lost in the contextual work that that particular team is undertaking.

Bruce's comments on creative people very much resonate with mine.

Also the failure to use design thinking is a critical flaw of many organizations.  In some ways SAP does this correctly.  SAP's Design Services Team (DST), a group dedicated to design thinking reports into the Office of the CEO.   The DST is involved in driving design thinking at many levels of the organization, including the top!

Minor Innovation Gap @ BW?

So I was doing some reading  this morning on Business Week and decided to subscribe to their Innovation RSS Feed.  I was surprised by this:

No link to subscribe to Google Reader.  Why is that?

Do You Need To Manage Innovators Differently?

I think so.  Folks who wake up every morning with the drive to create, to induce change -  can be difficult to manage however because the work they do opens up functional groups to change and increased risk.   So here are some tactics that I think  can help you manage innovators:

1. Learn to bear some risk and some change.  Yes, its not always about the innovator, its about you who has to manage the innovator. Where you come in is in the defintion and refinement phase.
From Innovate on Purpose:

It is important to carefully define what you want an innovator to do - incremental or disruptive? Cannibalize existing products and services or create entirely new ones? Product, service or business model innovation? Defining the breadth and scope of the innovation initiative gives the innovator some room but also sets clear boundaries and guidelines - it lets the innovator work but bounds the risks and change to some degree.

2. I've written about this before but you'll also have to consider modifying your compensation structure.  Especially for those individuals with Research intensive positions where failure in the early stages of a project is important!

3. Leverage social networking to link your innovator with others in your organization. Don't let your individual innovators or teams be islands unto themselves.  Make sure they can collaborate and network easily with other innovators in your organization - no matter how small or large your enterprise may be.

4. Create a change management plan to manage both education related to innovation rollout and the actual rollout itself.  Bring your communications/marketing professionals into the mix and do it early.  That way you can pace your communications and get the company or the market ready for the changes you will be inducing.  Obviously, if you are in stealth mode then you probably don't want to have this cadence of communication until closer to announcement time. 

Managing innovators is fun.  And challenging.  Remember, they are not always able to see the last mile of a project and bring their innovations into execution.  But then again, they're not typically wired to do that so don't necessarily expect it.   Make sure you link the innovation team with a strong execution arm.  I learnt this the hard way at SAP.

BSG Alliance Acquires Don Tapscott's New Paradigm

Don and I go back a few years.  So I am so happy to see this happen for him and the rest of the New Paradigm team.  BSG alliance  a company trying to deliver "Enterprise 2.0 technology, operating models and applications to the market" has acquired New Paradigm for an undisclosed sum.   

I think this is a good deal for both parties. 

For New Paradigm, Don's company receives

1. Needed infrastructure -- the company needed to establish an infrastructure to support its growth plans among its predominantly American client base.  BSG provides this and needed cash flow as well.
2. Linking Research to Execution -- as a New Paradigm client, one of my criticism's of Don's team were that they were great on strategy but light on execution.  With this marriage, the BSG arm of the company will be able to deliver on the Innovation strategies that Don's team focuses on.
3. Freedom to Focus on Research -- Additionally, this deal provides more freedom for the New Paradigm team to focus on expanding existing research lines and broadening into others such as its Government 2.0 research initiative.

For Steve Papermaster and BSG:

1. Enhanced Web/Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Platform - from my discussions with Steve Papermaster, CEO of BSG and Stephen Douty, President of BSG Applications, the long term vision (and this is still fuzzy in my head) is to build an application platform for  old world vertically integrated companies to leverage Enterprise 2.0 capabilities and move into a more collaborative, Net-generation friendly work mode.  Whether or not BSG is going to attempt to productize  Enterprise 2.0 capabilities or not, I couldn't glean from our conversations but it is clear that they intend to deliver Don's content and strategic consulting as part of their business transformation portfolio of services.  I do have concerns about trying to productize innovation...  I don't think that's possible. 
2. Gives BSG an entre into a Government client base with the the NP Govt. 2.0 project
3. Net Generation adaptation - Don's thinking will also inform BSG's Talent 2.0 and Talent sourcing programs which are aimed at helping enterprises integrate and adapt Millennials into their workforces as well as adapt their talent strategies as the 80 million some odd digital natives enter the work force.

Both New Paradigm and BSG see an opportunity to teach enterprises how to use Web 2.0  and social media to drive the change so many enterprises desperately need to adapt to new ways of doing business and doing business with a generation that fundamentally thinks and acts in different ways.

At the end of the day, New Paradigm was not in any way geared for execution.. which is as it should be. But to take his vision of business innovation and generational transformation to the next level Don needed a strategic partner.  BSG is that partner.

Failure Is An Option, Part II

Last week I wrote on failure as a critical component of Innovation and the fact that there are many organization's both large and small which fear failure so much that they automatically relegate their market position to the 2nd or 3rd tier because of their inability to experiment - fail - experiment again - succeed! So the question begs itself, how can firms begin to create a culture that embrace failure as an integral component of success?

A caveat first. It ain't going to be easy. Companies have been cutting costs and employees for years, resulting in growing job insecurity.  So many EE's don't feel like putting themselves in a position to fail and subsequently lose their jobs.   Couple that with increased expectations as to employee job performance and you have a perfect storm keeping employees tied up in the play it safe harbor.

So here are a few tactics that can be leveraged to build a "good failure" culture:

1. Leadership - place leaders in the trenches who not only foster an environment where it is safe to fail but who have failed themselves - and can turn failure into eventual success by enabling the team to learn from it and try again.  This may mean bringing in new blood from outside the team or outside the organization to deliver that new perspective and new methods of doing things.
2. Recognize and Rationalize Performance and Learning based cultures.  Lets face it, if you are bonused on discrete MBO's, there is no way in hell you want to fail, your livliehood is resting on it. But then how do you ever get a chance to learn from your mistakes?  Systems need to be put in place that don't put these two cultural imperatives on a collision course.  At IBM Research for instance, there are two performance and review cycles. A standard one year cycle which accounts for an employee's bonus in that year and a 3 year cycle for performance on salary and rank.  In this way, if a researcher has a year of failures, his rank and salary in the corporation is not affected.  This is especially important as any of us researchers can tell you,  as more often than not the beginning of a project has many more failure points or get results you didn't expect than later in a project. These failures though can take you in completely different yet very serendipitous directions... can you say rubber?
3. Celebrate your failures.  Most companies bury their failures under the rug, move the manager of the team to some insignificant role as a hand slap or pretend the whole thing never happened.  You want to ingrain in your teams that its ok to fail? Celebrate them!  Recount your failures as a team and even party around them, but don't sweep them under the rug. 
4. Examine your past. Where else can you find a wealth of information on your organization's successes and failures. Set up learning sessions for managers and employees to look at projects and initiatives that did not meet internal and or external expectations.  Its the the only way to learn!
5. Co-create with Customers and Partners Early.  Co-creation is one of the key ways in which you can afford to fail early and often because when the rubber meets the road, its your customers and partners who use the solutions you create.  If you bring them into the innovation cycle from the beginning you are more likely to develop services and solutions that meet their needs... from the beginning
6. Hire employees who have failed and learned from their past.  Managers who have failed and failed hard AND have learned from them should be hugely prized. These are individuals who are able to learn from their mistakes and put practices in to place that exploit them for good.

There's a lot of good reading on Innovation that you should digest.   Initial recommendations  include:

• Dealing with Darwin, Geoffrey Moore
• The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christenson
• The Innovator's Solution, Clayton, Christenson
• 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, Vijay Govindarajan & Chris Trimble
• What Customer's Want, Anthony Ulwick

Failure Is An Option (Or Should Be!)

I've been reflecting back over my last few posts regarding innovation and the thought occurs to me, why don't more companies - large and small -  encourage failure?  My mother used to tell me that I will learn more from failing than by succeeding and I've repeated that mantra to my kids.  I've always felt, hey, lets go for it and if we fail we'll try again.   So what is it with failure and why are companies so anathema to it?

At the end of the day, I think many companies face tremendous internal inertia.  As Geoffrey Moore says:

... as more and more processes in an establishment become context [versus core - that which creates sustainable competitive advantages for a company, contextual items are everything else a company does] the total population of risk averse mangers beings to exceed that of risk-taking management. Now the ability of the organization to change strategy [innovate!] by embracing the next set of changes becomes seriously impaired.

Large enterprises may feel they don't have the luxury to fail because their categories have become so competitive and shareholders so demanding, that failure can result in lost market share or Wall Street confidence.  Let's be clear here, its not that these companies can't innovate, can't afford to fail...they can, but there is so much inertia built up in the organization that there is no way for the company to experiment, fail, innovate (shampoo, rinse repeat!). Why?  Because the company has the majority of its resources tied up in just keeping the lights on... couple this with risk aversion in the culture and you have a powerful anti-innovation anti-failure culture.

Small companies on the other hand may feel they don't have the luxury of failure because they are constrained from a human and financial capital perspective. Failure is deemed a waste.  Folks who have spent any time with startups though, know that they fail every day and that as my friend Charlie Federman likes to say, those startups that face their crises and failures and successfully navigate them tend to succeed, while those that ignore them will later fail because that crisis or failure magnifies over time if not dealt with quickly.

So does failure play a role in Market success? You betcha! Lets look at the market leaders.  From the Washington Post:

While Google places a premium on success, it appears to shrug off failure. The resulting culture of fearlessness permeates the 24-hour Googleplex...  Google employees are encouraged to propose wild, ambitious ideas often. Supervisors assign small teams to see if the ideas work. Nearly everyone at Google carries a generic job title, such as "product manager." All engineers are allotted 20 percent of their time to work on their own ideas. Many of the personal projects yield public offerings, such as the social networking Web site Orkut and Google News, a collection of headlines and news links.

Philip Remek, an analyst who follows Google for Guzman and Co., sees the many initiatives as a series of lottery cards. "A lot of them aren't going to work," Remek said. "Maybe there will be a few that take off spectacularly. And maybe they're smart enough to realize no one is smart enough to tell which lottery card is the winner five years out."

Google's success is clearly a result of failure being an option at Google. In fact, its expected.  Many of the ideas that employees work on never make it to market but with such a broad innovation base to draw from, its clear that they will continue to drive many innovative products to market in the years to come.  But many folks point to Google so lets look a formerly small company acquired by a large organization.

Linksys' (a leader in home networking, acquired by Cisco) product development model was to take a volume operations approach to product innovation.  Product development was completely out-sourced, thereby lowering the cost of product innovation but allowing the company to test many new ideas in multiple categories simultaneously.  When they failed, and they did many times, the strategy was to simply discard the idea and start again.  When they hit it, as they did with home networking, they quickly ramped up their sales channels to get product to market as quickly as possible.

Ok, one more.. this time from the medical device space.  Medtronic - the folks who gave me my insulin pump!  Medtronic is the world leader in the medical device market. And the company goes a long way to foster innovation and encourages failure as part of the outcome. The company even offers grants to employees who want to chase ideas. Winners get up to $50,000 for whatever they decide they need, including hiring outside experts or contracting with research universities, and they can devote part of their regular workdays to their project - very similar to Google's approach.

Those are three quick but powerful examples of embracing failure to drive innovation and ultimately category leadership. What we'll discuss in a follow on post are the practical steps that organizations large and small can take to move in the Failure Breeds Success direction.