Do It Your Way: Find Your Signature

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Much of the conversations we get engaged in with customers often involve discussion of “How did other companies do it?” – discussions around benchmarking processes.  Yet most of the emerging ideas in leadership and talent development we hear from eminent thinkers, researchers and writers warn of benchmarking to mediocrity.  Stuart Hart, author of Capitalism at the Crossroads, has a dynamite quote buried in the middle of his book:

“A smart strategist gravitates toward ill-defined and ambiguous opportunities.  That is because once everything has been defined and reduced to standard operating procedure, there is no money left to be made.” – Stuart Hart

The point he is making, and the same point Jeffrey Pfeffer, Jonas Ridderstrale, Lynda Gratton and others have made in our interviews, is the same – to be the market surprise, instead of be surprised, you need to create unique and original ways of conducting your business.  Lynda Gratton calls this “signature processes.”  Red Hat is a great example.  We were chatting with a senior executive at Red Hat and I explained part of a presentation we could provide which would showcase companies with leading implementation practices and he stopped me and said, “Look I don’t mean to interrupt but I can’t bring that story in here.  At Red Hat we do it the Red Hat Way.”  He went on to say of course they don’t ignore the market landscape or operate in some creative oasis, but that once they make a bet on a product or service, they execute their way.  By doing it the Red Hat Way, they also build great culture and engagement because everyone feels they are part of true creation.

A lifetime ago around 2001, while leading a small start-up we got together our customer research and stories and dreamed up an online system which could aid the learner and leader to use, apply, track, and campaign on our video learning assets.  Then we built the system and when we took it on the road test, people said, “Oh you’ve built an LMS.”  A what?  “You’ve created a a Learning Management System, although it’s got some stuff we haven’t seen before.”  We had indeed built an LMS before we had ever heard of one.  Instead of benchmarking LMS vendors (whom we didn’t know existed), and listening to our customers instead, we created something unique and did it with passion and energy because we believed in our originality and our ability to create a killer app.  The tip coming from emerging leadership is this: pay attention to the market yes, but be bold and original in what – and importantly how – you execute.

Make Innovation Accessible

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Gary Hamel and Tim Sanders

Now that's a lotta guru! Here is Tim Sanders chatting with Gary Hamel after a recent event in Mountain View, CA. Tim came down to the studio to record a fresh series of videos on the Keys to Talent Management, and I can tell you they are pitch-perfect.

Gary Hamel believes there’s a very good chance that over the next few years we are going to see a revolution in management.  A revolution just as profound as the revolution in management that gave birth to the industrial age.  One of the primary influencing factors is the compounding rapidity of change we’re facing.  Product innovation and speed-to-market lifecycles are compressing, and in order to stay competitive, even relevant, organizations need to start constructing environments which allow product and service innovation to emerge organically.

It’s simply not possible to perform competitively in a tiered command-and-control manner any longer.  To be sure, seismic change efforts marshaled by Ed Zander of Motorola or Anne Mulcahy at Xerox, are indeed awe-inspiring.  Remarkable corporate turn-arounds have historically been about executing on steely-eyed vision.  But that’s not the kind of change that will bring lasting and sustainable competitive advantage.  The kind of culture needed to foster sustainable creativity and engagement starts with something Hamel calls “management innovation.”  Then the process, product, and business architectures that create lasting competitive advantage start to emerge naturally.

Our next live event on Oct 20 features Matt May who talks about making innovation accessible at all levels of the organization, and the importance of creating environments where people come not just to do their own work, but rather improve the work of the organization.  Matt demystifies common descriptors about innovation being incremental or evolutionary or breakthrough, and instead prefers defining innovation as simply doing something better than it’s been done before.  Define innovation in this manner, and Matt says you can create an environment where innovation is suddenly accessible and achievable at all levels of the organization.

Law #6 of the Saver Soldier: The Law of the Last Mile

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Ever moved? Wrapped the flatware and taped and labeled the boxes? It wasn’t moving the sofa and the bookcase and dining room table that almost broke you – you had friends, pizza and beer when that went down. It was disassembling, organizing and cleaning the fridge that killed. Or it was the ancient college papers, photo albums and misc camping gear strewn in the attic that had you cursing. Or maybe the loose hardware in the garage that you finally just swept up and threw away because you couldn’t think straight enough to organize it. After the pizza and the friends are long gone and the house appears virtually empty, it was that last 2% that sucked your energy and time. It was the lonely, dirty work that had to be done to get to closing.

When you moved you didn’t have a choice, closing day and walk-through with your buyers was looming. At work, think of it the same way: closing day is coming. The law of the last mile is finish what you started, take ownership, execute, get ‘er done. In Tim Sanders’ new book, Saving the World at Work, failing to finish affects more than you might think. Lack of execution on stated goals can infect a culture with an implicit suggestion that abandoning projects is OK, and can become anticipated. Tim cites Tom Peters’ suggestion that every project be outfitted with a 2% person – someone who owns that closing 2%. A cleaner.

And if you want to work and play and collaborate in a culture that covers the last mile, show the way. Or as Jim Kouzes puts it, “Model the Way.” Because leadership is the relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow. And believe, if you choose to lead the last mile, they will indeed follow because nothing inspires like finishing.

To cross the last mile, build both transparency and accountability into your projects. Keep progress highly visible to avoid starving the project of energy and to maintain momentum. And build accountabilities into the system so everyone understands the clear contributions and role they play.

Learn the Laws of the Saver Soldier

The culture defines the outcome

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Autonomy, mastery and purpose are the new building blocks for the emerging workspace – or what Pamela Meyer calls our Play-space.  Because as Don Tapscott reminds us the emerging Net Gen has it right: work = collaboration = creativity = fun = work

The Results Only Work Environment is coming of age and the hypertension-inducing nation of clock-punching is eroding.  WL Gore, HCL Technologies, Google and Whole Foods are currently out front in management innovation and the race is on to build the 21st century play-space environments that foster the kinds of killer app product creation that happened organically in the 90s.  The thing is – we’re now understanding that these creative hotbeds don’t have to happen by happy accident.  We can create environments that are not command-and-control, that allow the best ideas to emerge and where resources gravitate to the best ideas, instead of being hierarchically allocated.

Google wants to be a highly inventive company with little tier-based control, and so attracts highly inventive people and then assigns managers about 60 direct reports, which is intentionally unmanageable.  Who can possibly exert granular management over 60 people?  That’s the point.  Google also is a world of radical transparency, or as Schmidt puts it, “highly porous.”  Because remember, if you want real sustainable competitive advantage it has to be in the DNA.  A product sleight of hand, or lucky market timing break won’t persevere.  As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, says it so nicely here, “The culture defines the outcome.”

Forget Everything You Know

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“Innovation doesn’t happen by spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”

A big thanks to my colleague Taavo who pressed me to read Gary Hamel’s The Future Of Management. Previously I’ve posted here about the importance of product innovation, as defined by Michael Treacy, or business model innovation, as described by Clayton Christensen, or operational innovation a la Michael Hammer. I’m here to testify in the wake of reading Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management, I’m converted. I’m a true believer in the importance, value and urgency of what he calls management innovation. As Hamel writes it, management innovation is the killer app, the ultimate competitive advantage and I’m inclined to believe he could be right.

Early in the book he outlines the “innovation stack” as consisting of – from the ground up in ascending order of competitive value

  • Operational innovation – mostly the leveraging of short-lived replicable IT capabilities to optimize processes. IT advantages are time-sensitive and can be quickly and ubiquitously deployed and replicated and offer no proprietary long-term advantage.
  • Product or service innovation – while a true product innovation can no doubt propel a company from obscurity to market competitor (he cites Dyson’s bagless vacuum cleaners), again even with patent protection, product and service innovation isn’t a barrier to market entry. Witness Whirlpool who, within eighteen months, had a competitive product to Dyson, which they were able to distribute on a scale Dyson can’t compete.
  • Strategic innovation – a.k.a. business model innovation, which can produce true game-changing disruptors. For example, while the music industry first ignored online piracy, then enacted draconian scare-tactics (e.g. lawsuits against undergrads), and finally DRM-laden music products, Apple walked right through an open opportunity door with iTunes. Remember Apple went from never being in the music retail business to being the most powerful player around. It’s all catch-up now for Microsoft, RealPlayer and others.

Toyota has enjoyed a decade-spanning market-dominating run owing to management innovation. That’s right – I said the key is/was management innovation beyond all other identifiers. In a telling anecdote Gary Hamel describes a dinner with a group of U.S. automaker executives in which they had just completed their twentieth annual Toyota benchmarking study and Hamel inquired what, pray tell, did they learn this year that they couldn’t figure out over the past twenty years. Only now have other automakers acknowledged the innovative management practices at Toyota which empower each front-line employee to be “problem-solvers, innovators, and change agents.” In stark contrast Henry Ford once quipped, “Why is it, whenever I ask for a pair of hands, a brain comes attached.” Such is the management legacy and culture asked to compete against a market foe that believes innovation and solutions are welcome and expected at all levels of the org chart.

Hamel argues that only management innovation can produce the lasting and ultimate competitive advantage to protect your business from certain paradigm-shifting challenge. As Gary puts it, without question, “…sometime over the next decade your company will be challenged to change in a way for which there is no precedent.” And the way to be ready is to institute management innovation which is endemic, not crisis-based. While Gary would certainly laud Gerstner’s efforts at IBM, or Anne Mulcahy’s stern hand at Xerox, he argues these seismic change efforts are short, crisis-based, and built on out-moded command-and-control tactics in which senior tiers set agendas and execute effectively in a cascading manner.

Straight from the pages of The Future of Management, Gary offers a few questions to help start your journey:

  • What’s the tomorrow problem that you need to start working on now?
  • What are the tough balancing acts that your company never seems to get right?  What values does your company espouse yet have the hardest time living up to?
  • What are you indignant about in your company? What are the frustrating incompetencies that plague your company and other organizations like it?

If you read this and feel like you’re lost in the beaucracy and lack the power to initiate change, pick up Hamel’s book – he has immediate recipes to help you be a change agent.  Beware – he will ask you to be bold!  Enjoy the journey!

The Great Convergence! Cornell Global Forum June 1-3 NYC

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Last week we had the opportunity to spend three intense days filming and working with delegates at the Cornell Global Forum on Sustainability.  Representatives from Google, Intel, GE Healthcare, Cascade Engineering and many more, converged on NYC for three days dedicated to understanding the immense opportunities at the Base of the Pyramid, and to participate in closed working sessions to build disruptive innovations aimed at creating products and services to serve the BoP and build sustainable business models for global multinationals.

The concept is this: While there are nearly 7 billion people on the planet, historically business has created products and services catering to the very top of that pyramid – the wealthy communities and populations.  And the “Base of the Pyramid” has been largely relegated to unsustainable philanthropic activities.  While charitable donations and efforts from first world nations to aid emerging nations certainly has a welcome and important role to play, the challenge and fantastic opportunity available to both corporations and entrepreneurs, is to build effective, inexpensive services and products which both serve the BoP and unapologetically make profits for leading innovative groups.  For example, hand held cheap and readily scalable water purification systems selling for as little as $50 can purify local water sources and remedy dysentery and water-borne illnesses that incapacitate millions around the world.  Such a simple purification device can be built and deployed in markets of need numbering in the millions, even billions.  This simple device can then be improved and innovated up the pyramid long before (for example) a full-scale cost-intensive desalination plant is required.  Of course a full blown desalination plant and requisite distribution system is both expensive and requiring immense infrastructure to deliver the needed clean water.  Think of it!  Instead of competing for the narrowing markets at the top of the global population pyramid, companies and entrepreneurs can address the needs of immense markets.

While at the conference, we had the privilege to conduct video interviews with the leading environmental engagement and sustainability practitioners from Google, SC Johnson, Whirlpool and others.  Our interviews were conducted by David Bennell, Executive Director of the Organic Exchange.  And the entire event culminated at the 92nd Street Y in a panel discussion with Fisk Johnson, CEO of SC Johnson, Stuart Hart, Vice President Al Gore, Ratan Tata, and hosted by Charlie Rose.

During the course of the conference we filmed the proceedings and built a real-time video narrative to capture the intent and ideas generated.  Enjoy!

Customers buy holes, not drill bits

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Familiar story: One day Joe comes up with what he thinks is a killer new product app for his company that he is certain will rock the market.  So he takes the half-baked idea and spends a few days drawing up a provisional plan to present to his product team.  He works on the product development team so of course his colleagues like the idea with a few changes – mostly enhancements and expansions as they get excited and brainstorm over the concept.

Next Joe takes the idea to the sales manager, because of course you can’t take anything to market without the support of the sales group.  The sales manager takes a look and says, “There’s no way I can get my salespeople to focus on this.  The price points are too low and our commission structure, based on your proposed pricing, won’t motivate them.  And besides, your product requires a different buying point with our customers.  My people don’t have relationships with who you need to sell to.  My guys won’t even glance at this.  It looks cool on paper, but let me know when you have something we can actually sell.”  So Joe makes some price modifications and product changes so it is more appealing to both the sales group and their existing relationships.

Next Joe has a meeting with the CFO who says, “I’m not sure you recognize this, but we have a financial plan and margin goals here and your product doesn’t come close to meeting these targets.  You’re going to need to optimize the cost structure around your product before we can introduce it.  Come back to me when you can make it fit our financial model.”  So Joe and his team figure out how to optimize the cost and materials structure, and margin values of the product and finally the CFO approves.

Meanwhile Joe and his team have been having discussions with the engineering group to develop specifications to build the product application.  And the lead engineer says, “Your requirements exceed the talent and capacity of our team.  You’re gonna need to find some money and identify an external resource to build this thing.  Not only that, it will take us 18 months to integrate any external efforts to make your product market ready.”  So Joe and his team make more modifications to reduce the enhancements, scale back the performance, etc.. so it can be built for less, using internal resources, and on time.

Eventually what comes out in product release is laden with the constraints of the company’s business model and is no longer recognizable as what Joe and his team dreamed up.  And of course the product no longer looks like something that will satisfy consumer demand, but more like something that satisfies internal mechanisms.  Well, the customer doesn’t buy what is best suited to the business model conveniences of the manufacturer.  They buy to get a job done.

Clay Christensen makes the case that it’s the business model that needs to innovate to allow innovative products to emerge.  Business units do not evolve, but companies can.

When product development people dream up new products and services they typically think in terms of product market segments and/or customer market segments.  For example, car companies think in terms of compact, mid-size, luxury, SUV, mini-van, light truck, etc… Pharmaceuticals might think in terms of customer market segments – low-income/high-income, 18-24 year olds, married/unmarried, internet access or not, etc…  Christensen suggests that the most successful products answer a need for what the customer is trying to do.  In other words, think in terms of what job needs to be accomplished.  Scott Cook, founder and Chairman of Intuit said, “Looking back on it, whenever we failed with a new product, we followed a conventional marketing paradigm, of segmenting by a product attribute, or customer demographic.”  In other words, when Intuit created products that failed, they didn’t necessarily evaluate what job the customer was trying to accomplish – they thought instead of who they might be able to sell to, or how the new product might fill a narrowing niche in an already compressed market.

The original marketing guru Ted Levitt famously said, “People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.  You’ve got to study the hole, not the drill.  The drill is just the solution for it.”

Dr. Christensen illustrates the point in this amusing story about milkshakes.  Enjoy!

The Volunteer Generation

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“[GenY] has been called ‘fatally-flawed,’ accused of lacking values, social awareness or caring about anyone, or anything. In fact, Professor Mark Bauerlein says we’re ‘The Dumbest Generation.’  In a book of the same title, arguing that the internet ‘stupefies youth,’ author and professor Jean Twenge dubs the Net Generation as Generation Me, saying that self-esteem programs in school, combined with the internet, may be unleashing ‘a little army of narcissists’ on society.  Others argue that youth, consumed with their own celebrity and web obsessions, are superficial and lacking social skills.”

So says www.dumbestgeneration.com

I had the privilege to spend Tuesday with Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, and a number of other books. His latest is the culmination of a study about GenY/Millenials and how they think, interact, learn – and how their behavior will affect the way we interact and collaborate in our communities of work and play. Don has come to the conclusion that the emerging generation may be, in fact, the smartest generation – a generation able to synthesize information through all varieties of media and iterate new ideas, products, services, who-knows-what, much faster than any other generation.  Basically Tapscott describes younger media-saturated kids as developing greater carrying and switching capacities in their brains.

Contrary to Bauerlein’s view, I’m heartened by Tapscott’s optimism. In his research he discovered that more than any previous generation in the last 100 years, GenY is less motivated by money, status and power and more by interest and curiosity to explore, travel, collaborate and volunteer. This generation has the highest percentage of those entering public and non-profit vocations, and the highest percentage of those going into social, environmental and public works jobs. From 1988 to 2008 the percentage of college freshman who say they have volunteered in the last year went from 65% to 90%.

Last year my boys – then 5 and 7 – and I cycled in the Trek Across Maine on behalf of lung cancer. I used their cute faces on our website to help raise the minimum required to ride. This year I’ll make sure they understand what we’re riding for and ask them to help raise the contribution.

Green IT and the 2% Solution

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About a year ago we embarked on a project to interview senior leaders working in the area of sustainability, environmental engagement, value chain management, green product development and more. The goal is to capture the leading practices and ideas of groups and organizations who have made cutting edge contributions to optimize resources, reduce emissions and build innovative processes and products to introduce in the marketplace. I posted about this previously when we did the Thomas Friedman event.

We have interviewed sustainability practitioners from Microsoft, Green Mountain Coffee, Cornell University, Aveda, and more but most recently we had the opportunity to sit with John Glowacki, Chief Technology Officer for CSC and David Moschella, Global Research Director for CSC’s Leading Edge Forum.I asked John what role senior leaders need to play in organizations to help Green initiatives work.  I thought he would talk about the importance of leaders modeling the way, but instead he talked about how organically change within CSC has been growing from the bottom up.  Groups within CSC across the globe have been creating and sharing their own innovative green initiatives.  This kind of bottom up change behavior has also fostered a kind of creative competitiveness – divisions are competing in a friendly manner how to best optimize and reduce the impact of their operations.  And in an effort to make gains, people are building creative and innovative solutions.  This is the kind of co-opetition has the effect of accelerating change.

The Teacup Generation

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Chronocentrism refers to the belief that the current state of humanity is superior to past and future times. In this video interview Buckingham is suggesting that Gen Y – the Millennials – are less entrepreneurial-inclined, less pragmatic and more romantic about themselves. By inference, he is suggesting Gen X, Boomers and other generations have a greater entrepreneurial capacity and drive and this should concern us because “82% of all economic growth and GDP in this country is driven by entrepreneurial activity.” I don’t mean to diss Gen Y on the entrepreneurial front, but I worry this could be true.

In Obama’s address Tuesday evening he mentioned the word entrepreneur three times, all in the context of driving economic growth: “The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation. The answers to our problems don’t lie beyond our reach. They exist in our laboratories and our universities; in our fields and our factories; in the imaginations of our entrepreneurs and the pride of the hardest-working people on Earth.”  Our schools, our parenting, our communities need to be fostering the creative entrepreneurial sparks of emerging generations.

As anecdotal evidence that Marcus might be on to something, my wife teaches high school biology and environmental science and often bemoans not only the entitled, pampered attitude her students sometimes have, but more frightening that sometimes their parents defend and encourage these attitudes and behaviors and frame the discussion on how the school, the teacher, the curriculum, the textbook, is hampering their child’s development. What are we teaching our children if we bolster these notions of entitlement?  But then again maybe I’m just chronocentric about Gen X.