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.

Your Carbon Strategy is a Market Opportunity

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We recently had the opportunity to film Andy Hoffman, at the University of Michigan Ross School of Management, regarding market opportunities in a carbon-constrained world.  He frames the discussion in a purely apolitical manner – regulation is emerging at the state, federal and international levels that will dictate corporate carbon emissions; the question for you is: do you want to merely react to this shift in the market environment, or do you want to proactively build the next-generation corporate and product innovations that will put you on the leading edge?  Put another way: do you want to be exploiting the opportunities in this pending market shift, or scrambling to catch up?

Historically many people have had a tree-hugger notion of save-the-planet fringe activists asking us to recycle, reduce, reuse and encouraging costly regulation.  Andy asks us to instead, “Think of climate change as a market shift, one that will create both winners and losers. Changes in regulation coupled with shifts in consumer, investor, and energy will change the competitive landscape. How will you innovate to respond to this shifting landscape? ”  He frames the discussion in strictly business terms.

Consider Tom Friedman’s argument that regulation can be an incredible competitive advantage.  If you are a U.S. based multi-national corporation employing the best and brightest engineers, programmers, architects and technical professionals, you want the bar raised. You want your product innovation to be setting the standard in your market, and you want the barriers to entry to be increasingly higher to provide your company with a competitive advantage.  In fact, that bar is already being raised around the world and US business needs the right incentives to keep up.  Make no mistake, we want market innovation wherever it comes from but if you are a market-leader, you want to be defining the baseline to entry in the market

Your right brain might save your job

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When you were a kid (maybe you still are), you had to memorize multiplication tables, the boiling point of water, and maybe even the periodic table.  This kind of rote learning is giving way to outcomes-based education which favors deeper understandings of relationships and greater emphasis on results, not methodology or routinization.  Dan Pink argues it is routinization in work and labor that can be either outsourced or even automated.  Job-related activities in engineering, finance, accounting, even law can all be routinized and measured and thus easily sourced to countries and markets where these functions can be performed at a fraction of the cost in the U.S.

Last century machines replaced our brawn, now software is replacing our left brain – that side of the brain that is linear, sequential, routinized, pro forma.  Think of drafting a Will for example.  A decade ago or more it involved hours of sitting with a lawyer who builds you an estate will for perhaps thousands of dollars.  Now of course you can go to LegalZoom and get one for 15 minutes and less than $50.

If you want to insulate  your job and your company, consider what can’t be sourced, automated or routinized.  Increasingly inventiveness, design, story, empathy, meaning, and something he calls symphony are becoming far more valuable than task-oriented excellence.  Let’s take “story.”  Story is taking facts and placing them in context and providing meaning through narrative.  Dan Pink buys Big Tattoo Red wine because the marketing pitch doesn’t emphasize hyperboles and superlatives about the quality of the wine, and nor does Big Tattoo prattle on about the unique aging or fermentation process they use.  Instead, Big Tattoo publishes a story on each bottle of wine about how they are trying to sell great wine in an effort to honor their mother who died of cancer and donate proceeds from the sale of the wine to cancer-related causes.  And if you are like most people and can’t tell a great deal of difference in wines, theirs is just fine.  The difference is their story.

Go pick up a copy of A Whole New Mind – it might save your job.

Think inside the box

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chip_heath.jpgEver sit in a “brainstorming session” in which people spin pencils, twirl their hair and talk past each other? Suppose you work for a banking institution and your manager calls a meeting to gather ideas about how to create a more friendly and warm environment where customers like to come? Sue wants a smile campaign complete with happy buttons, Joe thinks we should hand out coffee and donuts and Marcus thinks we should put our energy into a marketing campaign emphasizing the ease of online banking and try to get people to stay home. Independently each idea has its own merit, but together there’s no cohesive direction providing action and unity.

Chip Heath, co-author with his brother Dan Heath of Made to Stick, suggests instead of starting with a blank slate, try starting with the right kind of box to think in. Chip Conley is a successful entrepreneur and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality. After spending three days in non-starter creativity sessions with his staff, he brought a “box” to work one morning for everyone to start thinking inside of – effectively providing a frame of reference from which a clear and compelling stream of ideas could be directed. The result was Joie de Vivre‘s first hotel. Enjoy!

Innovate to death?

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raynor.jpgThere’s a lot of talk in organizations about accelerating the speed of innovation in order to respond quickly to market shifts. This intuitively makes sense – particularly in today’s global economy. If you can’t innovate fast enough, the market changes, the competition eclipses you, etc. . . Or conversely if you innovate too quickly and lead too presciently in the marketplace it’s entirely possible to position yourself ahead of the market in a way where your product initiative can die also. See Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma

Michael Raynor suggests it is also possible to innovate at the speed of change and still perish. Albeit a slow death. Consider the Greenland Norse – initially a robust pilgrim community staking claim to southern Greenland. While they adapted well to the environment conditions, the global climate was steadily cooling making their growing seasons shorter, and harvests smaller. After 450 years as an adaptive Norse outpost in Greenland, the last inhabitants withered in their sod huts having consumed the last of their grain and livestock. Not because they failed to incrementally adapt to changing conditions, but because they failed to make paradigm-changing innovations in their behaviors.

It’s later than you think

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nbarlow1.jpgIf you are just starting to become aware of some cool new productivity gizmo, some slick marketing tool, or perhaps a cutting edge virtual collaboration application to adhere your team projects, then you can bet your partners and competitors are already using it. So then you think you just need to figure a better way to find out what’s coming next so you can be an even earlier adopter. So you dig deeper into the futurists who make prognostications in your market or field of expertise, and you find plenty of intriguing things but not – the next killer app. This is because the experts are looking at the past, and extrapolating in a linear fashion to predict what’s to come. The catch is that the next killer app isn’t a continuation of the past. Innovation and change is, by nature, full of discontinuity.

Alan Kay, an early mentor to Apple, said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Nigel Barlow describes three ways we can start today to invent the future. Create and live your narratives, get paranoid, and listen to our children.

Tom Kelley on Innovation Hurdlers

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tom_kelley_half.jpgDid you know Olympic hurdlers cover the same distance as sprinters in nearly the same time? Hurdlers train and anticipate hurdles (obstacles) with nearly the same speed and ability as those who confront no challenges in their path. An Innovation Hurdler is someone who anticipates there will be myriad challenges yet has the mindset to overcome, ignore, and/or reconcile the obstacle to remain focused on the journey to a achieve a specific goal. And did you know WD-40 stands for Water Displacement #40. Successful innovation takes persistance. Got it on the 40th try. These are but a few of The Ten Faces of Innovation.

We had a ball collaborating with Tom Kelley on these QuickTalks and many others. As the President of Ideo, a premiere innovation and creativity group in San Francisco, Tom Kelley engages in all varieties of challenges and hurdles to aid clients in developing next generation products and services.

And definitely check out his brother David Kelley on Human-Centered Design!

Oren Harari Breaks From the Pack

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oren_harari_half.jpgIt was a marvelous privilege to spend the morning filming Oren Harari, Ph.D. where he teaches at the beautiful campus of The University of San Francisco. He has both rich contemporary business acumen and the ability to speak in the vernacular that resonates from Gen Y to the Boomers sitting in the executive suite of today’s leading business organizations. What do you suppose you can learn from Madonna and Willie Nelson about developing a leading edge product innovation strategy? More than you might expect.

Madonna has managed to be incredibly disciplined in tracking emerging trends and reinventing and branding herself in new iterations regularly including the Virgin, the Material Girl, the Marilyn Monroe glamour girl, the buff ripped 90’s uber-mom, the female-spiritual-power woman, the AIDS-gay-rights activist humanitarian, and even the sensitive children’s book author, just to name a few. In each iteration she spotted a distinct and madanna.jpgpowerful emerging zeitgeist and placed herself at the forefront of it – effectively being “first to market.” Similarly, Ford and GM were first to develop commercially scalable hybrid vehicle technology but were waiting for the market to reach critical mass. Toyota came later to the hybrid technology development but didn’t hesistate to bring it to market. They saw the nacent trend emerging and were first to market and now virtually dominate with the Toyota Prius.