AbleBrains

Failure Fridays

Someone very close to me is about to begin a very cool new gig. Its a role that most would love and in fact be envious of (I sure am - and will be blogging about it soon!).  So this is for her and anyone else who wants to optimize their path to success.

Look, I preach failure.  I do.  I believe that one has to fail their way to success, in fact its the only sure fire way to achieve it -- by learning from your failures.   There is no innovation without failure. Failure is not something you avoid!  Its something to embrace. 

I like encouraging my clients to hold Failure Friday get togethers... grab a pizza, some beer and wine - invite the team to join you and invite other teams at your organization to participate.  Go thru the week's successes and failures... spend 10 minutes on the successes, then delve into the failures.  Figure out as a team why it didn't work, and what you can learn from it.  How would you do it differently?  Having outside teams there are critical because they can give you a non-rose colored glasses perspective...they can look at your failures and give you truly objective insight into how to do it differently.

And most importantly, you have to make these celebrations of failure.   If you find you and your team headed to beating yourself up over them, then you're headed in the completely wrong direction.

Mitch Ditkoff who blogs on innovation, has collected some useful quotes on the value of failure.... share them with your teams.

• “The way to succeed is to double your failure rate.” — Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM
• “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” — Miles Davis
• “99 percent of success is built on failure.” — Charles Kettering
• “I have not failed once. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.” — Thomas Edison
• “An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.” — Charles Kettering
• “Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
• “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” — Robert F. Kennedy
• “Adversity reveals genius, prosperity conceals it.” — Horace
• “When we can begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to laugh at ourselves.” — Katherine Mansfield
• “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” — Henry Ford
• “No matter how well you perform, there’s always somebody of intelligent opinion who thinks it’s lousy.” — Sir Laurence Olivier
• “If your life is free of failures, you’re not taking enough risks.” — H. Jackson Brown
• “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.” — Beverly Sills
• “I failed my way to success.” — Thomas Edison
• “Act as if it were impossible to fail.” — Dorothea Brande
• “Failure is success if we learn from it.” — Malcolm Forbes
• “You can only be as good as you dare to be bad.” — John Barrymore
• “The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
• “Failure doesn’t mean that you’re a failure … it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.” — Robert Schuller
• “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities.” — Napoleon Hill
• “You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”– Mary Pickford
• “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” — Winston Churchill
• “We are not retreating — we are advancing in another direction.” — Douglas MacArthur
• “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” — Thomas A. Edison
• “Fall seven times, stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
• “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Confucius
• “Stumbling is not falling.” — Portuguese Proverb

Evolutionary v. Intelligent Design Marketers: Which one are you?

To set the stage... I'm a scientist at heart.  Before I got into tech I was working on my PhD in neuroscience.  So its with healthy skepticism (a valuable trait in a scientist) that I looked at Intelligent Design - a reformulation of Creationism as the explanation for how we got here and where we are going.  Intelligent Design asserts that there is an "intelligent cause" -- some entity -- the Christian notion of G_d,  directing the growth of organisms as opposed to the process of Natural Selection which is the key process in evolution.   In natural selection, random genetic variation represent traits that are either advantageous to species survival or not. If they are advantageous they become more popular over generations.

From a marketeer's perspective, which camp do you consider yourself to be in?

Evolutionary Marketers

Well, do you believe that you should be injecting new talent into your marketing team regularly?  Do you recruit or collaborate with non-marketers AND customers to produce new positioning and ideas on how to take your product to market? How much effort is given over to innovating the marketing function at your firm? Do you give your teams the opportunity to experiment and FAIL then take learnings from that failure and use it to breed success?  Do you leverage scientific approaches to going to market?  If so then count yourself as an Evolutionary Marketeer - you believe in growing your organization in sometimes unexpected directions and you understand that some strategies are marketing dead ends, they won't go any where.. won't "perpetuate the species: -- your firm by driving Demand.  

Intelligent Design Marketers

Is your marketing "pre-ordained?"  Do you have a few folks directing the overall strategy without input from either the feet on the street, your customers or those responsible for execution? Are most of your marketing efforts coming out of some sort of play-book or recipe?  How often do you vary that recipe?  Hardly at all? Do you rely on the same talent -- virtually all of the time?  How much experimentation is there in your marketing activities?  Are you quantity driven as opposed to being quantity and quality driven?  If the majority of these attributes describe your marketing organization then you're an Intelligent Design Marketer.

Its a simple choice really. You can evolve and grow your marketing organization and keep your competitors off-balance.  Or you can execute well for a while until your competitor evolves some survival strategy that  vaults them into a position of market dominance while placing you into an evolutionary dead end. And we all know what that means... we'll be seeing your organization in the "Extinct Species Wing" of the museum.

 

AbleAdvisory: FEED Webzine 2.0

One of the original "webzines" FEED has published its archives. FEED was Launched in May of 1995 and was among the first Webzines out there. FEED was notorious for breaking the traditional publishing paradigms and for exploring what it meant to use the web as a publishing vehicle.  Enjoy this... there's some good S___ out there!!!

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.