Finding Global Talent

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During the .com boom 52% of technology and IT start-ups – silicon valley style – were created by foreign-born nationals. 26% of ALL start-ups in the U.S. are created by foreign-born nationals. People from China, India, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and well…everywhere, have been coming to the U.S. for the promise of an excellent education and the freedom of entrepreneurship.

Yet the U.S. has adopted a policy of sharply curtailing the issuance of H1-b Visas to stay and work in the U.S. Over the past decade the U.S. has reduced the H1-b quota from 195,000 to 65,000, a quota that was exhausted in 2010 before the year even began. By the end of 2009 more people had applied for Visa applications than were available for the entirety of 2010.

President Sebastián Piñera of Chile is offering $40,000 to people who are willing to come to Chile and start a business. Singapore is offering up to 4:1 in matching funds for entrepreneurs who come and create businesses. Meanwhile the U.S. is making it increasingly difficult and onerous to come to the U.S., stay in the U.S., and create new businesses. And so brilliant people are flocking to these inviting countries, as well as simply taking their excellent U.S. educations back to their home countries instead of staying in the U.S. to build jobs, innovation, and economic wealth.

Start Up Visa is trying to help change that.

Finding the Adjacent Possible

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paintingdrippingWhatever field you work in, your expertise is expected, it’s a given. So too your diligence. It is your initiative and creative ability to bring unique and signature solutions to solve unexpected problems that is your brand, and increasingly your company’s brand and identity. The question is how to find it? Or a better question – how can we create collaborative learning environments where we can have new ideas on a regular basis? Not in a mechanized on-demand sort of way, but rather create an ecosystem which encourages exploration of the adjacent possible.  More on that cool concept here from Steven Johnson.

Bill Taylor’s new book, Practically Radical, talks about three key elements to drive successful innovation:

  • To become the ‘most of something’. Check out the most successful organizations and people. They are all the most of something. There is no place in today’s high-pressured, rapidly-changing, killer-competitive world for anything less
  • To embrace a sense of vuja dé. Vuja dé is looking at a familiar situation as if you are seeing it for the very first time. This instantly opens up limitless imagination, and fresh insights and ideas
  • To look for fresh, new ideas in new places. Never compare yourself with what or who is considered best in your field. Learn from people and organizations that are way outside your field

If Bill is right (and I think he is) this has implications for how we develop learning environments for people in our organizations. The future of learning is must be to provide conceptual and powerful learning opportunities; opportunities which offer insight, ideas, and parables intended for inference and application by the learner. The outcomes of this kind of learning are quite unexpected, and by its very nature, bring in fresh insights and solutions. This is what makes the whole learning experience unique and beautiful.
To create the shift to conceptual learning, is to essentially balance the spoon-fed, outcome-anticipated, specific-competence results-oriented learning environments with more conceptual learning environments. This will treat learners as ready and able to distill ideas into their own signature integrated solutions, which are applicable for their line of work both internal and external. Success ensures that the experience is meaningful. This will then bring about the total shift to conceptual learning.

Tom Kelley, CEO of IDEO, a premier product and services innovation company, has been a long advocate of this approach. In his book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, he describes a particular persona called the “Cross-Pollinator”. Cross-Pollinators are those people who are inquisitive beyond their particular domain expertise and explore ideas from industries outside their immediate purview. They understand and learn the technology, device or methods employed elsewhere and figure out how to incorporate these ideas into their own work.

Go. Find the adjacent possible.

Using Humor for Discovery

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I’m in Virginia this weekend visiting my mom, Bev Hunter, with my eldest son Charlie, and was reminded of the relationship between the Ha-ha of humor and the Ah-ha of discovery. Bev has been using humor as a therapeutic device for combating an illness (you can read in her blog), and I’ve been reminded of the power of using humor in finding new insights and ideas. As a gift she gave me a deck of creative thinking cards developed by Roger von Oech – each with their own little bit of creative provocation. I keep this deck in my bag everywhere I go and pull it out and try the next card in spare moments when reaching for new ideas.

Roger von Oech is a firm believer in using fun ideas to stimulate creativity. His company Creative Think was started in 1977. He is the author of A Whack on the Side of the Head, and this Creative Whack Pack I keep handy. Oech believes in the power of ‘creative stimulants’ and ‘mental fresheners’. They stimulate the thinking process, and open the mind to creative ideas.

I’m in Roger’s camp, who says that humor can drive creativity and the process by which new and different ideas are produced. And, there is a practical angle to it. It has to work in the given situation, or adapted in a manner that can work in the particular situation. Oech recommends that organizations have an ‘innovation requirement’ in the performance plan of employees. This way, employees would also focus on looking for innovative solutions. Asking questions that stimulate their thinking, or putting them in situations which require them to think laterally, or giving them open-ended problems to solve would get their creative juices flowing. It is important for people to approach a problem from many and different points of view.

Having a sense of humor helps. It has been found that there is a close relationship between the ‘Ha-ha of humor and the A-Ha! of discovery,’ to quote Oech.

Employees with wide-ranging interests in fields other than their field of work, or area of specialization, or have absorbing hobbies are always more creative than those who only specialize in their field of work. How does one use peripheral vision? Here again, Oech has a suggestion: ‘Look for the second right answer.’ Most problems have many solutions. The deal is that you have to look for them – have to free the mind enough to see them. It is only then that all possibilities can be found.

Building Urgency for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption

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We had a fantastic interaction and presentation with Andy McAfee, author of Enterprise 2.0, this past week. He delivered a live, interactive webcast to our global audience of over 500 organizations. He opened by debunking a fairly straightforward idea that we hear constantly, “It’s not about the technology.” This is a common idea paraded about in organizations to demonstrate that while, yes, technology is of course changing, it is more about the business models, ideas, and market landscape that surrounds the changing technology.

Myself, I’ve been sucker to that same argument when talking about the importance of recognizing technology as a tacit enabler, but not the point itself. McAfee wants to point out that…now…more than ever before, the technology itself is changing at such a logarithmic rate, that indeed it has powerful impacts on the services and product innovation we provide.

Take at look at the graph – when we weigh infrastructure asset prices of industrial, transportation and infrastructure costs against the cost of available technology, clearly online technological costs are plummeting, and that has profound implications about how we can, and should, do business. And importantly, how we interact as communities in the emerging Enterprise 2.0 environment. The price crash of collaborative technologies based on peripheral equipment like computers (iPads!, NetBooks!) has opened up immense opportunities for people to congregate virtually, share expertise, practices, and insights – and if they choose, to also collaborate in competitive ways in the market.

With the advent of online collaborative environments we are seeing heightened competition from everyone, everywhere, for everything. If you thought your market niche was product based, or particularly regional in scope, think again. With cool collaborative innovation sinks like InnoCentive, people can build iterative new products and services leveraging expertise around the world in a flash. So as you and your business consider integrating Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, consider that the alternative could be obsolescence.

What Every CEO Wants: Creativity, Integrity and Perspective

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It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.
– Roger von Oech

IBM conducted a study this year in which they asked 1500 CEOs, in face to face interviews, what skills were of paramount importance for the leaders in their organizations, to their business and global competitiveness. You can read the entire study here, but in a nutshell, this is what CEOs care about.

The premise of the study is that change is accelerating and complexity is deepening in all markets around the world. As the world has become increasingly volatile and the future ambiguous, there remain a powerful minority of companies globally that have been able to capitalize on these seismic changes and turn this turbulence into innovation and advantage. These are the keys:

1. Creativity. Yes – your creativity, initiative, inventiveness and passion. More than ever, people have wholly transparant real-time access to relative value and price to the market goods, services that companies are providing, and our ability and willingness to bring our creativity to work can become the discerning factor. Remember 3M famously created post-it notes by allowing people in the organization to express their own creativity. From 3M to Google to Atlassian, some of the most powerful innovations have come from the bottom up within business cultures where, autonomy is offered, creativity encouraged, and ideas flourish.

2. Integrity. I recently had an interaction, and conducted a workshop with a group of women executives at an insurance and financial services group. A running theme throughout the attendees was the challenge of ‘being everything to everyone.’ That is, being the great mom, partner, executive, community service contributor, etc… Here’s a piece of advice I believe from Rick Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life. When we think of our life, it’s common to think of ourselves as having different lives – the workout life, the professional life, the partner and spouse life, the parent life, etc. – when in fact we have but one life to live. My encouragement is to give permission to ourselves, and everyone around us to bring our whole selves to every endeavor. The etymology of Integrity is from the Latin integer, meaning whole, oneness. Recognize that each of us is but one person with a rich history and present, and future, and to bring our whole selves to everything we do represents our greatest contribution, and our greatest opportunity to draw from our own rich experience and apply to everything we do.

3. Globalization #3 in importance, in terms of creative leadership was the ability to think globally. One key aspect of thinking globally is to borrow brilliance from all sectors. One finding of the study was that CEOs wanted creative leaders to borrow disruption models from other industries and market sectors. If you are in the IT business, don’t benchmark what other IT business are doing. Go out and borrow ideas from the toy industry or maybe the microlending community – just something outside your usual purview.

Finally “act despite uncertainly.” Yes there is much ambiguity, and yes it can often feel better to wait until things shake out before committing a particular direction. But increasingly CEOs want creative leaders to be taking risks. Acting while others hesitate can pay off. The key to a successful jump is to follow your true convictions and beliefs.

Beware the Innovation Killers

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“All too often the act of the innovator, that stroke of genius, is in spite of the company system, not because of the company system.”

– Craig Wynett, Chief Innovation Officer, Procter & Gamble

Alan Murray blogged today in the Wall Street Journal that management is dead. Within hours Tom Peters tweeted: “Guarantee: Hierarchy will NEVER disappear. Period. Take it to the bank.”

I think they’re both right.   Of course, people have been talking about the power of creative destruction and blowing up hierarchies to foster engagement, collaboration, and innovation for years. Whether unintentional or flat-out malicious, the enemies of innovation include:

  • The Bureaucrat: builds consistency, and sets limits to ensure rule adherence. Favorite quotes: “Fill out this form.” and “That’s not in this budget cycle.”
  • The Totem-poler: resource-blocker and creativity killer. Favorite quotes: “Has this been approved?” or “We tried that before without success.”
  • Deadbeat sponsor: project champion lacking attention, interest, or clout. Favorite quotes: “Can you rework the business plan on this?” “Let’s study this some more”
  • Power-monger: power and resources are more important than results. Favorite quotes: “I’ve already thought of that” “We’re already building that in our group”
  • Chicken-little: paranoid scarcity-mindset. Favorite quotes: “We can’t afford that.” “Hope you can do that with your own people”

True innovation supporters and collaborators are generous, encouraging, and inspiring. Stay close to the real McCoy.

Bring back quiet time and your ideas will benefit

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It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. – Einstein

Theresa Amabile, of Harvard, and her colleagues conducted a study in which they tried to capture creativity in the wilds of teams and companies by asking participants to reveal their activities in Daily Questionnaires. These surveys were aimed at monitoring what participants were doing on a daily basis in their teams and projects to distill how creativity really happens – thus trapping the elusive critter Creativity in action.

Entering the study, the conventional thinking was that imminent deadlines and crisis thinking would lead to more innovative and novel solutions. The power of urgency right? As Theresa’s colleague Leslie Perlow demonstrated in a 1999 study, the vicious time-work cycle of crisis mentality, rewarding individual heroics, and constant interruption, is considerably less conducive to fostering real creativity and innovation, than good old-fashioned focus and uninterrupted attention.

In Amabile’s study she introduced a mandatory quiet time, followed by collaborative interaction, then another quiet period of work and implementation. Overwhelmingly, the engineers reported a higher level of both productivity and creativity when the strict quiet time was imposed. Sadly, six months after the study concluded quiet time had vanished, and within a year the old habits of constant interruption were back in force. I might get an email from the Getting Things Done guru David Allen on this next point, but Therese Hoff Macan showed in a 1994 study that although time management training and tools could bring greater satisfaction, contrary to popular claims, time management training was not found to be effective in job performance.

Bring back quiet time, and uninterrupted work. How we spend our day is how we spend our life. We are the sum of what we pay attention to. What we focus our attention on determines our skill, experience, knowledge, amusement, fulfillment, joy.

The Next Level – Become a Change Artist

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My last post argued for recognizing and adopting the innovative practices of positive deviance. Now I’m suggesting you can become one. Identifying and adopting the strategies of positive deviants can be a powerful accelerant in your work, your play. I’m talking about being a Change Artist – creating new, unique change in positive and pro-social ways.

First, what’s positive deviance:

Positive deviance focuses on those extreme cases of excellence when organizations and their members break free from the constraints of norms to conduct honorable behaviors. – Gretchen Spreitzer, University of Michigan

Change artists do at least these four key things constantly, always:

  1. Replace fear with curiosity: First get out of your comfort zone. Often fear motivates stagnation, and the fear of failing can drive people to not try new or challenging things outside their competence, and thus finally fulfill The Peter Principle and arrive at their own level of incompetence.
  2. Experiment: Familiar with the story of WD-40? Some engineers were trying to make a rust-preventative by displacing water on metal surfaces, thus “water displacement #40” because it took them 40 recipes to get it right. Try things and don’t give up.
  3. Reach out for ideas: Even poets, writers and sculptors in their private studios are collaborators – always building on open-sourced collaborations. Whether you reach out personally to colleagues, or scour the web for ideas, when you reach beyond your own expertise with an open mind, the resulting collaborative effort will yield more powerful results
  4. Count things: Become a scientist about it. Anything directly or indirectly related to your goals are worth keeping track of, because the numbers will lead to questions, and the questions will lead to change. If you run a restaurant, count the number of kids who order Shirley Temples, or how long your typical wait list is on a Friday night. What you count becomes what you think about, and what you ultimately choose to change.

Positive deviance can also happen on an organizational level.  Previously I posted about Merck during the dark Vioxx days, but Merck has deviated from the norm in positive pro-social ways too.  In 1978 Merck inadvertently created a potential cure for river blindness – a painful and debilitating disease that affects millions in developing nations around the world.

They had a choice to think like a capitalist and mine the bottom of the pyramid market with this new drug, drop the project due to daunting manufacturing and distribution costs, or… be true to their founder’s words:  “We try never to forget that medicine is for the people.  It is not for profits.  The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they never fail to appear.” – George Merck II

In spite of the fact that the manufacturing and distribution was greater than what the 3rd world market could bear, in spite of the fact that Merck lacked the infrastructure to effectively distribute the medication, in spite of the fact that the drug wasn’t mass market-tested and they were unsure what the medication’s effect would be at scale, and in spite of the fact that they risked Wall-street confidence by investing against earnings because there was no foreseeable profit and a 250 million dollar price tag – despite all this, since 1987 Merck has donated more than 2.5 billion tablets of MECTIZAN in more than 30 countries worldwide and protected over 100 million people from this debilitating disease.

Learn from Positive Deviants

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On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, at age 42, refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. In her own words, she was “tired of giving in.”

As a popular Zen Buddhist story goes:
Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening. It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides. At one place a beautiful young woman was standing unable to walk accross because of a puddle of water. The elder of the two monks went up to a her lifted her in his alms and left her on the other side of the road, and continued his way to the monastery.

In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said, “Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman.”
The elder monk answered “yes, brother”.
Then the younger monk asks again, “But then Sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?”
The elder monk smiled at him and told him ” I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her.”

What common dogmas are you abiding by? In our world, our work, our life, we commonly see others, and ourselves, abiding by principles and ideas we take for granted, for truth. Yet some of these ideas we intuit naturally that they don’t seem quite right. Some of these ideas may be unchallenged, but our conscious knows. Choose carefully, but if you have a better idea contrary to collective beliefs and ideals, act on them and see who follows. If you persevere with resolve and conviction, the truth with out.

Positive deviance is a bottom-up, not top-down, approach to innovation that systemically recognizes people doing innovative behaviors and adopting them for universal use. Consider the story of Jasper Palmer, a transport medical worker at Albert Einstein Medical Center, who noticed that the gowns and gloves he and other staff wore while moving patients infected with a virulent Staphylococcus virus were overwhelming the hospital’s trash cans. The piles of discarded attire spilled out of disposal bins onto the floor, contaminating surrounding surfaces. So Mr. Palmer devised his own method: He took off his gown, rolled it up into the size of a baseball, and pulled his gloves over it to contain it in a tight package. This simple innovative behavior then became taught and part of the common behavior of all medical technicians.

“Positive deviance uses a process of interviews to highlight these people’s solutions and spread them throughout the community. Rather than imposing externally defined best practices, as is common in many quality-improvement initiatives, it generates solutions from within.” – Curt Lindberg, Chief Learning and Science Officer at the Plexus Institute

Let New Ideas Past the Watchman

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Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Issac Newton, Albert Einstein all included long walks as part of their daily routine.  Charles Darwin had a favorite “Sand Walk” that has since become famous and popular for tourists to walk.  Teddy Roosevelt, who greatly expanded our National Parks, was such an avid outdoor enthusiast that after his Presidency, he spent almost a year on safari in Africa.  Isaac Newton was known for his odd tendency of drifting off into silent trance of thought for several minutes even during his lectures.

Freud used the analogy of a large banquet hall to represent our unconscious, and an adjoining small drawing room to represent our conscious mind.  At the door of the drawing room is a Watchman.  Within the subconscious mind of the banquet hall, there are all varieties of guest ideas, while within the smaller drawing room are ideas the conscious mind is actively working with.  The Watchman’s job is to allow entry to the drawing room for only those ideas which comply with our belief and logic system.  So while we consciously work with only a small subset of ideas, skills, behaviors and attitudes in our active, conscious mind, William James, the father of modern psychology, believed we have a wealth of thoughts and ideas at our disposal now – we just don’t allow them into our conscious thought patterns.  The Watchman evaluates bizarre, foreign, strange ideas in our subconscious and decides whether or not they can be permitted into the active thinking process.  William James believed the healthiest mental relationship with our thoughts is to treat them as simply thoughts, without any bearing on reality.  At the other end of the spectrum is psychosis, in which thoughts are treated as reality.  In this mental state, if you have the thought that there are ants on your arms, you believe this is reality.  That’s psychosis.

But if you can treat your thoughts as simply thoughts, without danger to reality, the Watchman will permit more into your active, conscious mind.  The results is that you will have a much greater arsenal of ideas to work with.  More tools for your creative problem solving.

After you start feeding your mind positive, constructive ideas, you need a pause in your efforts.  These pauses open up the drawing room of your conscious mind allow new ideas from the subconscious to enter.  And a physical or emotional provocation is a great way to start.  By removing yourself from your desk, engaging in physical activity, attending an art exhibit, having lunch with someone who works in a different field, etc…, you allow the puzzles that are active in your work to incubate.

This incubation period is crucial to getting to synthesis – pulling together mentally the ideas into an innovation.  Because new ideas and creativity aren’t enough.  You must put them into action.  Innovation = creativity X execution.

You must find the time to partition your active thinking and turn off the white noise in our lives.  Yet our conscious thought is incredibly difficult to turn off.  Just try it while lying awake at 2:00 am while your mind churns.  Consciously persisting in repetitious mind games on ideas isn’t usually the best way to solve a problem because you aren’t allowing new ideas to enter your mind to contribute.  You need to allow new ideas past the Watchman.  Start by getting outside of your usual domain and getting comfortable with new ideas and experiences.  You can teach the Watchman to allow more ideas into your active thinking process.