Closing The Innovation Gap
October 12, 2008
I spent Saturday lunch at Via Vite on Fountain Square with a group of regional entrepreneurs in a forum where Judy Estrin discussed with us her book, Closing The Innovation Gap. Her’s is a seminal work discussing how our economic engine developed from innovation to the point where we measure progress with quarterly reporting and even more frequent guidance on the numbers. The unfortunate result is that room for true innovation in the corporate world no longer exists.
Judy’s premise of taking the long view is good. Still, I had difficulty digesting whether or not we, in an American business culture, could actually change our ways and allow an ecosystem of innovation to develop again. It took us 40 years to dismantle it. I can’t see us rebuilding it overnight. If we hope to continue to compete in the global economy, we’ll have to start.
Innovation matters. We can’t compete without it. Our corporate drive forward needs to find ways to incorporate ongoing change and innovation into our lives. Many times the foundations of these two ideas clash, and innovation is set aside due to the pressure for corporate profits now. Then it becomes clear that innovation doesn’t just happen. It can’t be mandated. It can’t be scheduled. Innovation requires the right environment.
After WWI, America’s business environment thrived on a foundation of research and innovation. In the ’70s companies stopped investing in research and focused on efficiency and production. There could be no room for surprises. Every input and output had to be measured. In the’80s and ’90s greed took over. And with the bursting of the internet bubble and 9/11 in 2001, business’ appetite for risk was undermined. So we find ourselves today in a business environment not conducive to innovation.
But it’s more than just the business “environment”. Estrin suggests that progress requires creating an ecosystem where innovation can thrive, an ecosystem where research communities, development communities, and application communities can find the right balance to sustain life. Balancing calls for leadership, funding, education, policy, and culture. Of these, leadership and culture are most important. The right leadership develops funding, education, and policy. The right culture allows for both top-down and bottom-up growth.
This ecosystem balances itself and thrives on the basis of 5 core values.
- Questioning – the ability to question from a perspective of curiosity, but moreso from a perspective of self-assessment. Be the critical optimist performing constant self-assessment in order to feed more data back into the process.
- Risk – the willingness to fail. Attitudes towards failure must change to support a culture of failing often and failing early. Embrace failure and allow the experiences to continue to funnel more data back into the process.
- Openness – Imagine together. Collaborate. Share the failures and their lessons. Continue to take in new data.
- Patience – For the researcher, patience is tenacity. For the business, patience is letting something develop rather than asking, “Is it done now? How about now? Okay, well when do you think?”
- And finally, Trust
Most companies construct disincentives to innovate all over the place. There is no room or time for questioning. You need to know up front whether or not an initiative will succeed. Failure is not a badge you wear on your chest, and the larger the failure the more quickly you’re shown the door. So why share the lessons? That only shines a brighter light on the problems and exposes your weaknesses. And because you have not only NOT added to the bottom line for this quarter, but you’ve taken from it, you can no longer be trusted.
Can we really deconstruct our disincentives? Can we develop an environment that allows profit and innovation to thrive together? Or are we past the point that we can fix it?
- Andy
Selecting A Skills Evaluation Tool
August 8, 2008
We have a lot of hiring planned between now and the end of the year. In order to add some consistency and a bit more predictability to the process we’ve decided to use a skills assessment tool. Brainbench is the obvious and probably most well known solution. So we’re evaluating that. Wanting to spice up the mix a bit we’ve also decided to evaluate the IKM TeckChek product. I expect to select a product by the end of the month.
So why am I telling you this? Because one of these two companies blew my expectations out of the water.
I talked to a Brainbench rep and setup our account to do some evaluations. We were given one exam at no-charge to evaluate the product. I fully expected, and did, pay for the other seven or so tests that we evaluated. Reporting for the Brainbench product is really very nice. You get comparisons against others in your company as well as the entire set of Brainbench test takers that have taken the same test. The product has a very nice administrative interface. All signs pointed to this being our selected product.
I left a few messages for IKM. We tried contacting them through the “contact us” link on their site. Silence. For about 4 days we heard nothing. Now, to their credit, IKM did follow up with me in June when I started this process, and I never got back to them. So I searched my email, found some contact information, and left another message. A day passed with no return call. I’m ready to give up at this point. I give it one more try and leave one final message.
Later that morning I get a return call with apologies because the rep had been travelling and could only now return my call. Expected, and nothing special. So I talk to him about our strategy and let him know we’re evaluating the TeckChek product against Brainbench. He took all this in stride. I told him I needed an account next week so we could evaluate some tests and that I expected to pay for them. Then the good part.
Right then, TeckChek sent me an agreement giving me site-wide access for two weeks allowing us to complete any exam we wished at no cost to us. Our agreement was in place within minutes. Then he had a training person reach out to us to train us on how to use their product. And none of this took any special efforts on their part. This is the way they do business. I did not have to bend around their processes.
They are holding our hands and making sure our business processes move forward as expected. Their processes are setup to provide this level of customer service, even to smaller accounts. The attention and the speed at which they responded once I contacted the right person made me think twice about our final selection.
I don’t know where things will fall out. We haven’t taken any of the TeckChek assessments yet. But if their tests are anything like their customer service, Brainbench has some pretty hefty competition. I’ll let you know how this all plays out.
- Andy
Describing InOneWeekend In 500 Words
July 24, 2008
Given a half-page, Laura Baverman covered the launch of LifeSpoke and InOneWeekend thoroughly. Laura touched on all the highlights and included snippets of the human interest side of the event. I appreciate her coverage, and I’m sure she experiences the frustration of having to condense nearly 72 hours of content into, say, 500 words. That’s a challenge.
Fortunately there is no word limit in the blogosphere, save for the attention span of you, the valued reader. Surely holding your attention span is no small feat. So here are some of the details of my InOneWeekend experience to add to Laura’s.
Laura captured the core of Roy Gilbert’s talk. “Have a large and compelling vision…understand risk and embrace failure…and think beyond the launch to build a team,” she wrote. For me, Roy responded to a question I asked about how research work done by Google engineers actually become products released to the market. Surprisingly, although it probably should not be, Google will release without a business plan at times in order to know exactly how the market will respond. I don’t know if it’s a chicken-egg thing, but that seems irrelevant now that Google can afford to back potentially bad ideas as they work to launch the next great one.
We did spend Friday evening narrowing down ideas. I laughed when I saw the watchmesleep idea that allowed others to peer in on the guy who overslept. Nice. And as Laura reported, Vanessa Indriolo’s idea of online scrapbooking received the majority of votes. Supplementing this idea were four other similar ideas that coalesced into the concept of LifeSpoke.
The dynamics on site could have split the group and made the rest of the weekend unproductive, as nearly, if not more than, 50 percent of the participants did not vote for the scrapbooking idea. Those who did not throw their hat into the scrapbooking ring split their votes between an application that keeps track of receipts and an application that ranks great deals that people find on the internet.
I know I felt quite a bit of frustration as I had a hard time getting behind the group’s idea. I told myself that the process mattered much more than the concept, and in the end that proved true. By Sunday I was convinced that any of the ideas could fly given the horsepower of our team, and we just needed to pick one. My guess, though, is that we lost a few people on Saturday because of the polarity in the vote, and that some folks simply could not buy into the fact that their participation continued to prove valuable. I have to hand it to those who stayed involved. We made the weekend great with our commitment to each other first.
The InOneWeekend group split into technical, management and operations, finance, sales and marketing, business strategy, and branding teams to work on their respective responsibilities Saturday and Sunday. Laura describes the LifeSpoke financial model as “hazy, predicting a $16 million company in three years,” but if you were in the rooms, on the teams, doing the research, and watching the give and take of heated deliberation, I don’t think you would have selected the word “hazy.” With a competitive strategy based on real-life market comparisons of our actual competition, LifeSpoke’s birth is grounded in what I would think most participants would describe as conservative reality.
Still, the odds of success are long, and no one is cashing in their options quite yet. Laura got it right that “the Flash Activescript technology didn’t yet work,” but in business terms that’s a hurdle that can be overcome. A tangible outcome of the weekend is, as Laura describes, that a number of entrepreneurs came together to experience what they could accomplish as a team. We now have the connections we need to begin to succeed where we may have floundered on our own, without the proper support, in past ventures. And now that we’ve been through the process, we’ll be able to save ourselves a whole lot of time when we face our own challenges in the future.
- Andy
What Happens When You Miss A Deadline?
July 21, 2008
At most companies you just move the deadline. At some, you might get some sort of reprimand. And at a select few, you may even get written up. Well, at LUCRUM we push you out of a plane! Josh, what the *(@#* did you do now?!
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=qpx3Tyrn3cw[/youtube]
- Andy
InOneWeekend – Some Perspective On Enterpreneurship
July 15, 2008
Geez, at one time I thought I might be an entrepreneur. I’m not. Well, at least not yet. And any thought of, “well, maybe I am,” had the door slammed on it as Saturday progressed. Three times before Saturday was over I said to myself, “I’m done. I’ll just sleep in tomorrow and enjoy my weekend.” Really. Three times. And I talked myself through it. “Self. The idea doesn’t matter. Engage in the process. Learn. Grow.” I stayed actively engaged. I’m glad I did.
Jeff Stamp guided our expectations on Friday evening with the admonishment, “Be comfortable being uncomfortable!” I thought that would be easy. My personal philosophy keeps me at the edge of uncomfortable. But I had never been in the same room, required to actively participate in such a focused task, with 99 other strong personalities with strong ideas. I found out how tempting it is to shut down when *I* wasn’t the central theme. THAT is humbling. In a good way. I found tons of room for personal growth.
Then there was dinner with the 20-something who’s goal it was to build a $1M real estate fortune, free and clear, before he turned 30. Sure, a lofty goal, if not for the fact that he was well on his way. The kid talked circles around the financials involved. And he NEVER exhibited any thought or consideration to the idea that he might not reach his goal.
I met another woman who ran a cookware business around an idea that she developed. Being fought by Intel over trademark infringement, she circled the right people around her and kept moving forward. She still has 8,000 sets of a 60,000 piece run of cookware stored in her home. No sign of stopping.
A natural healing business. A PR business. A dotcom. A VC. The list went on and on.
Then JB spoke on Saturday at lunch. 6 startups, I believe. The latest recently secured $15M in funding. No obstacle too much. In fact, the mindset seemed to be, “what obstacle?” When the rest of us could clearly see the obstacles.
It’s not that serial entrepreneurs don’t understand risk. They do. JB alluded to sleepless nights and working 12+ hour days. Why? “Because your competition is.” You could tell the weathering of time and pressure on the experienced business owners as they’ve pushed themselves to their limits over and over again. It’s almost as if that little “moderation” switch in their brains has been turned off. They still see the signs of risk, the signs just don’t affect them and don’t keep them from moving forward. With autistic-like tendency, they simply don’t know how to process risk, so instead they move in for the win. Where many of us might say to ourselves, “why not?”, the successful entrepreneur doesn’t even consider the question. A question of weather or not really never crosses their mind.
The idea, too. That doesn’t really matter, or so it seems. I struggled through Friday not wanting to pursue the idea InOneWeekend came up with. By Sunday I realized we would have been successful with ANY of the 3 ideas we narrowed down to. I don’t doubt that one bit. Heck, we could have sold ice to Eskimos. So it dawned on me that it’s the process that hooks the serial entrepreneur. The process repeats. The idea might be different, but the process is predictable.
Now all of this may be way off-base. I dunno. From the outside looking in, those are some of the observations I’ve made. And although I’m not an entrepreneur now, it doesn’t mean I won’t be at some point. I listened to countless stories of people hitting their strides and making these huge life changes in their 40s. Pheeewww. I still got time.
Now educate me. Take my liberal arts education and put me in my place. Tell me what’s going on inside your head and help me understand what this is going to take. And make all of us a little stronger.
- Andy
InOneWeekend – Raising Up A Leader…In 24 Hours
July 14, 2008
Ever read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team? What a great, quick read on understanding the problems that surface in a team. And what a great study of a leader who can bring order and alignment to a dysfunctional situation. The team’s work with InOneWeekend, our effort to bring together 100 imaginative and driven individuals to create an idea and standup a full-fledged company in three days (July 11th – July 13th, 2008), could easily have suffered any of these dysfunctions. Somehow we didn’t. The group policed itself, shutting down any threat knowing we only had three days to get this done.
Sure, the folks at Neyer Holdings organized the event with Elizabeth Edwards as the primary cheerleader. Steve Boord provided some semblance of order with a booming voice from time to time, but he didn’t bark orders at us. They brought in Jeff Stamp to unlock our creative juices and Roy Gilbert to motivate our sense of destiny. JB Kropp spoke to us on the life of an entrepreneur. Still, none of them explicitly told us what to do. My guess is that they came in with a plan, which is the right approach, and then quickly threw away the plan as they handed over direction to the rest of us.
We split ourselves into a number of groups: Management and Ops, Tech, Sales and Marketing, Finance, Branding, and Business Strategy. In each group a leader bubbled to the top. We spent Saturday and Sunday working together in our teams, coming together from time to time in town hall meetings to update the group on our progress.
I worked on the Business Strategy team where Craig Froehle slowly (relatively) became the obvious choice as our leader. Not that we weren’t looking for a leader quickly, but no one took the proverbial bull by the horns. And not that credentials don’t help, but Craig’s background as a project manager, business owner, and associate professor of business ops lent credibility to his contributions to the team. Craig directed our efforts, helped us all develop an action plan, and then begin plugging the holes in our research. By Saturday’s end the team had established Craig as our leader.
Having others grant a leader authority makes a team much more effective than a leader taking and establishing authority. In fact, Kouzes and Posner in The Leadership Challenge describe the most effective leader as having characteristics of establishing a clear vision, trustworthiness, and competence. It is fairly easy to cede leadership to someone exhibiting these characteristics. Craig quietly established himself this way on the Business Strategy team. His influence was clear to anyone walking into our room. Unlike many of the other rooms, when you walked into our room you could hear a pin drop. We each had a small job to do, and we each worked diligently to get it done. Then piece by piece the picture became clearer. We knew what our product had to do to stack up against the economic and technological trends, and more importantly, against our competition.
The influence of the Business Strategy team permeated much of the work on the other teams as we became the research group finding answers that would allow other teams to complete their pieces. Craig didn’t come to the table with all the answers, rather, he brought the ability for our team to get almost anything done for any other team to the table. And our team eagerly followed Craig. By mid-day Sunday, the entire group backed Craig as he was not so much appointed as he quietly assumed a spokesman role for the entire weekend. Craig helped compile the final presentation to launch our product, *************, and when he presented we all cheered with delight.
Watching this process unfold amazed me. All together – all 100 of us – we all made this possible. I think our chances at the beginning were 1 in 1000. We hit the 1. Amazing. I’m honored to have had this opportunity to work with such a fantastic group of people. Here’s to our public launch in a few days.
- Andy
The Power of The Wiki
June 24, 2008
Have you ever been in a meeting where you’re working with your customer, you’ve brought additional technical support, and your own people simply were not aligned when it boiled down to your customer’s needs? Perhaps the support folks couldn’t find the location and called you 5 minutes before the meeting for you to realize they were still 10 minutes away. Maybe folks showed up with khakis and a polo when formal attire is required. Or were they flying blind hoping to pick up context during the converstion. No, you’ve never been there before.
Enter the Wiki. The Wiki is an easy to setup and easy to use resource for small departments to large global enterprises that allows information sharing on a real-time basis. What kind of information? Well, any, really. The web-based interface allows point and click reading and editing of information in the wiki. No special formal training is necessary to get started.
Some great ways to leverage a Wiki is to help your folks gain a comfort level about a client before a customer visit. Your wiki may contain local hotel information, good places to eat with your folks reviewing local restaurants, and probably directions including nuances and local landmarks from an airport or hotel. You may choose to enter interesting details of the people your folks might talk to on a client site. For instance, “Joan is responsible for the eCommerce systems and has some strong relationship with marketing, including Manuel and Bruce.” Organizational information will help your folks navigate the communication channels on site. Then simple information about dress code and company culture will help your folks feel comfortable the minute they walk in the door.
Most importantly, the Wiki gives your folks a chance to gain alignment on your clients’ business needs. If sales and delivery update a wiki with relevant information, you now have a platform where all the participants should be up to date about the particular project or initiative. You and your company will gain credibility as you capture your tribal knowledge in a formal way that allows new participants to join the conversation mid-stream in a knowledgeable fashion.
As the Wiki becomes more mainstream you can find its use even in the most protected areas of our government workings. InformationWeek ran a short piece about the CIA leveraging Wiki technology to augment learning and information sharing across their own organization as well as with other government agencies. The CIA’s advice? Organize your wiki by topic and not corporate structure. Start small. And make barriers to use low.
- Andy
CRM 2.0?
June 20, 2008
Conversations continue to take place bi-directionally between customers and businesses as they move away from the traditional uni-directional, tailored messages pushed to a customer base. And the tools available to support these bi-directional conversations continue to proliferate.
Newly minted Web 2.0 enterprise thought leaders experience “ah-ha” moments after truly interacting with a customer for the first time – as if they were blinded by a shining sun as they emerge from a winter’s hibernation. Before now, customer interaction in the back office may be limited to an executive’s annual ride in the delivery truck, or manning the cash register for an hour to “get in touch” with the front line. But even in these cases the conversations taking place took place between the executive and the employee – not necessarily the customer.
Drucker explains that Quality is giving the customer what they asked for. Peters described the Hedgehog concept as the one thing that an organization excells at better than any other organization in the world. Now that organizations have the tools to find out what all the customers are saying, the challenge becomes aligning customer feedback with the corporate mission. The risk of listening to all the customers is the distraction of delivering outside an organization’s Hedgehog concept.
What I find interesting about how far business has come with respect to listening to and interacting with customers is that these “new” concepts have been around since the beginning of civilization. Why does it take so long for a business to change it’s model to align itself with the normal human communication behaviors? Developing a Hedgehog concept is nothing different than, say, an ancient hunting tribe deciding to hunt black bear and not any other kind of bear, or moose, or bird because the tribe understood everything about the black bear and how it, more than any other bounty would best support the needs of the tribe. “Listening to the customer,” and concepts like crowd-sourcing, are these so much different than sitting around a campfire at night and discussing with the neighbors what works best and why?
Fast forward a few thousand years and we find these new communication strategies are generally bottom-up strategies. Technological limits tended to necessitate top-down strategies as delivery of radio, television, and newspaper messaging happened in one-way fashion. As technology changes, opportunities to generate two-way communication exist somewhat ubiquitously. And younger consumers will expect open lines of communication. They are getting back to their roots. We better be ready to deliver.
So when eWeek runs a piece on CRM 2.0 this week (June 16th, p32 – I can’t find a link) I have to bite my lip. Yes, there are some great platforms out there like Salesforce Ideas and Dell IdeaStorm that allow customers to suggest ideas and allow the crowd to vote on them. Yes, the conversation between businesses and customers has been enhanced in some amazing ways. I just need to swallow my pride when I think that many open source projects pioneered these strategies 10 years ago, forget who gets the credit, and just be glad that we’re arriving.
- Andy
How Have Leadership Principles Changed?
June 19, 2008
At times I feel old-school when it comes to leadership. My perspective of a good leader is a servant leader who can listen well and concretely respond to followers while providing a compelling vision for what an organization can accomplish. Followers, in turn, actually want to follow as they vest themselves in both the vision and the leader because the leader, along with all other responsibilities, has their interest in mind, and has proven this through speech and action. In business, where next quarter’s numbers matter more than pretty much anything else, and six-week cycles rule as companies release earnings guidance mid-quarter, implementing a vision is difficult at best. And servant leadership exists in two places:
- In theory as investors pound at the door demanding attention and earnings.
- In practice after a company has filed for bankruptcy or has missed earnings enough times to force out the current “leader.” In this case, the new leader is given the ability to implement a vision with a leash. Earnings better turn around in 18 to 24 months. Think Bob Nardelli at Chrysler.
George Andrews wrote a piece in the June 18th Journal about the influence of Peter Drucker on Asian business management principles (subscription required for full access). In China last year, 6,000 managers gathered to discuss Drucker’s principles, and next year’s conference expects a 20% rise in attendance. 14 acadamies exist to expressly spread the Drucker word. Why the enthusiasm?
“With China building up its manufacturing capacity…it’s probably more useful for Chinese management students to examine U.S. industrial triumphs of past decades, rather than get distracted by the fanfare associated with the various postindustrial ventures of today’s America.”
You see, when Drucker describes leadership, says Henry To, CEO of the Drucker acadamies, “he says that integrity must come first. He says leaders need to listen to their employees and be followers, too.” Andrews concludes that Drucker’s philosophy is “out of step with the tastes at many leading business schools, where the preference is for conclusions based on large statistical studies.
And what philosophy has Drucker forwarded that is out of step?
- The essential activities of business are innovation and marketing; it’s a mistake to fixate on profits.
- Good management should make work productive and the worker effective.
- Set objectives. Set separate ones for each crucial area of the business.
- Take social responsibility seriously. An enterprise exists only as long as society believes it does a necessary and useful job.
- Quality is what the customer wants, not what’s expensive and hard to do.
- Knowledge workers in modern organizations may manage no one, yet their decisions’ impact can be comparable to what executives do.
Mr. To explains that “Drucker’s fondness for business history is considered a virtue, not a fault. ‘I tell students: “The truth will not be outdated.” ‘ ”
I’d agree. Am I out of my mind?
- Andy
Ehem…Standardizing Every Aspect of Delivery
April 9, 2008
LUCRUM works hard to standardize every aspect of our delivery processes. Mary wrote earlier about LUCRUM’s efforts in Quality Management. In order to focus on business problems, LUCRUM has implemented a standard dress code so that consultants don’t need to think about what they need to wear on a given day. Here Josh and Jeff show off for Tan and Teal Thursday.
- Andy
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