It’s not about who, but how you do it

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passing-the-baton

I don’t believe in failure. It is not failure if you enjoyed the process.”
– Oprah Winfrey

Drummer Hoff was one of my favorite childhood books. It’s a story about people who, in turn, provide pieces of a cannon (“Sergeant Chowder brought the powder, Corporal Farrell brought the barrel…”), and then finally it’s Drummer Hoff who fires it off – KAH-BAH-BLOOM! It’s a lesson in teamwork, a lesson in process.

In 1985 Michael Jordan was Rookie of the Year. Yet after just a couple of seasons, critics were whispering if he really had what it takes to bring the Chicago Bulls to championship level. Then Jordan learned to play defense as well as he could score. Then he honed his team instincts, and then came the 1990-1991 season which started an eight year run in which Jordan would lead the Bulls to six Championships. Even the great Jordan couldn’t do it alone.

I recently participated in a 4-hour client presentation with five of my colleagues, all from different parts of the company. It worked beautifully, and we all agreed that each person had played a unique and crucial role. We started by envisioning the outcome. Then, we created a process for composing and delivering the presentation to fulfill that ambition. Finally, we chose the right people to play each position. We didn’t start with the people.

The how is the process. The who are the people who perform the tasks. Yes, the impact, the why, matters. But after settling on the why, think about the how.

Here’s a few reasons why how beats who:

  • Process is replicable and scalable. When the process isn’t clearly identified, evaluated, and constantly improved, the results aren’t easily repeatable. When we place results alone as the overarching goal, we de-emphasize the process that got us there.When we de-emphasize the process, we can’t easily retrace our steps and examine, dissect, and replicate how we got there.
  • Process emphasizes networks, not heroes. A results-only culture can provide too much focus and reward on sole contributors, creating superstars deemed irreplaceable. Results then can take on a heroic quality. This has a doubly negative effect because it not only relies on the elusive and unqualified “talent” of an individual, but also handicaps that individual with a superstar label.
  • Process builds integrity. If it’s the results that count, not how we got there, then we risk inviting unethical behavior to gain the result. The global financial crisis taught us that predatory lending bankers with little oversight and with quick money as their sole motivation were gleefully willing to game the system to their benefit.
  • Process cultures remove blame and heighten intelligent risk. Results are the culmination of a series of decisions that are sometimes intricate and often involve many stakeholders. Individuals at all levels of the process chain contribute decisions that eventually lead to an outcome. It’s possible that a strong, high-quality decision can lead to a poor outcome for reasons entirely beyond the control of the person who made the decision.

Endings are just new beginnings

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BRASIL X HOLANDA - COPA DO MUNDO 2010 ÁFRICA DO SUL - ESPORTES - 02/07/2010

“The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back. That’s real glory. Thats the essence of it.”
― Vince Lombardi Jr.

“You guys were just great! Well done. You all played really well.”

No one said anything. Our ten-year old soccer team had just lost. We got crushed. Badly. I was the coach and trying to cheer up the boys.

Later while walking to car, my son Will said, “Dad, why did you say all that stuff about us after the game? We sucked!”

Praise and recognition is a tricky motivator. And when we have setbacks, praise rings hollow. It doesn’t sound believable and we often don’t feel like we deserve it. Specific feedback is better. Praising specific plays, moves, passes, shots, and attitudes is both more believable and memorable. And it’s even better when the praise is specific to the individual.

There are varieties of incentives we can use to motivate and encourage others, but as we know from research, it’s a sense of progress in meaningful work that is the strongest motivating factor around. And when things go well, things tend to go well. That is, wins beget wins. Naturally, when the team has a winning game in which they play well together against a fairly matched opponent, the team feels positive, acts more cooperatively, enjoys the game more, and plays with more assertive confidence and control.

But something interesting happens during setback events. Not only does the team act less supportive with one another, but they respond less to praise and recognition. They will also feel more restricted in their actions. Team members begin to develop a perception that they can’t (or aren’t permitted) to take risks, be assertive. Sure, sometimes we throw a hail mary pass or take desperate chances, but they aren’t often elegant and inspired chances. More often we retreat.

You’ve seen this before in sports. When one team starts losing, they play more defensively, more conservatively, and take fewer chances. And because of it, often start losing even more. The same is true in our work. In fact, we’ve learned that negative events and setbacks have a far bigger impact on our emotions, our perceptions, and then our actions in our work. As researcher Teresa Amabile found:

The effect of a setback event on happiness was over three times as strong as the effect of a progress event on happiness, and the effect of a setback event on frustration was almost twice as strong as that of a progress event on frustration.

Understand a setback for what it is. It’s just an event, a moment, an opportunity to learn. It doesn’t define you. What defines you is what you do next. Remember to celebrate endings, because they represent new beginnings.

There it is again. Weird works.

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fosburyIn 1968 Dick Fosbury astonished the world at the Mexico City Olympic Games by clearing 7′ 4″ 1/4 inches in the high jump. His efforts before 80,000 people were an aberration – an anomaly in track and field events. Dick was a gangly 6’3″ athlete who hadn’t excelled at any event in track and field at his Medford, OR high school and he unveiled a maneuver to set a world record. More remarkably, his competitors failed to recognize and adopt his innovative style and lost – not only on that occasion, but for years to come because they couldn’t acknowledge the power of his innovation.

Fosbury’s own coach, who didn’t care for the move at all, called it “a shortcut to mediocrity.”

But it wasn’t, in fact, “unseen before.” Fosbury had been working on perfecting the technique for a couple years. Not only that, another athlete, the Canadian Debbie Brill, had developed an identical style she called the “Brill Bend.”

So how in the world did the lesser athlete Dick Fosbury not only develop a technique to best his rivals, but do so quite publicly while his competitors failed to recognize and adopt the innovation to excel?

The day Fosbury actually unveiled this new technique was five years earlier at a track meet in which he beat his own personal best by a foot and a half. Eighteen inches. High jump improvements are typically measured in inches – or fractions of inches. People should have been paying closer attention instead of ridiculing him. But why? Because it was new, because it was different, because it looked weird, and because no one else had the discipline to bother.

There it is again…curiosity, experimentation and persistence as keys to excellence.

Go. Conceive and Deliver Art

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Beautiful non-commissioned work at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

More beautiful art conceived and delivered at http://www.heatherperryphoto.com/

In 1943, Richard James was a naval engineer trying to develop a meter designed to monitor horsepower on naval battleships. Richard was working with different types of tension springs when one of the springs fell to the ground. And after it fell to the ground, it kept moving as if stepping away. Astonished and delighted by the odd movement, he immediately thought this would make a fun toy for a child. He had just discovered the slinky.

Swiss chemist Jacques E. Brandenberger was sitting at a restaurant one day in 1900 when he watched a glass of wine spill and seep slowly into the tablecloth. His thought in the moment was: wouldn’t it be better to have a kind of coating to the cloth that would prevent absorption, so it would be easy to clean up. He spent the next ten years of his life working on this side project to invent what is now called cellophane.

Some cool innovations are recognized immediately, while others are conceptualized and take years of persistence of realize. Yet there are two primary ingredients that pervade accidental innovation: Curiosity and Play.

Or to put it another way, these were non-commissioned works by an artist.

Almost twenty years ago, Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues conducted an interesting study. They asked 23 artists to randomly select 10 of their commissioned works and 10 of their non-commissioned works. They then took the 460 works of art to a space where they could be evaluated by a team of art curators, historians, and experts – all of whom had not been told which was commissioned (paid) art, and which art was created at the self-direction and initiation of the artist

Amabile and her colleagues reported:

“Our results were quite startling…the commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality.”

In other words, it was the non-commissioned, self-directed art that was found to be more creative, interesting, and valuable. Go, conceive and create, undirected, non-commissioned work.

Where’s Your Woodshed?

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CharlieParkerWoodshedding is an old jazz expression – it means to go deep in isolation to build your chops, get your groove on, master your instrument. As the legend goes, in 1937, when he was only 17 years old, young Charlie Parker – before he became the great “Bird” Parker – would go down to the High Hat Club, also known as “the cutting room” to play with the great session musicians of the day.

One night, after young Parker ran out of breath and ran dry of new ideas in the middle of his solo, the great session drummer Jo Jones unscrewed his cymbal and threw it with a crash at Charlie Parker’s feet. The gesture was clear. Take a hike kid. You’re cut.

The same thing happened to Parker just a couple years earlier, when he was only 14 years old. And when he was that young, he didn’t know what he didn’t know. He was so humiliated then that he quit the instrument for three months and refused to play. But this time he had a different reaction. He was indeed humiliated being cut from the stage, but this time around Parker worked even harder at the instrument. That summer he secluded himself at a resort in the Ozark Mountains to work on his playing. He joined a house band to pay for his roof and bread. But what he was really doing was wood-shedding and playing alone hour after hour each day to develop his virtuosity.

He emerged from that self-imposed seclusion and presented the world with an astonishing contribution to a new developing form of jazz known as bebop.

Here’s what I believe: The key to developing innovation and excellence starts by having the courage to develop our own niche mastery, and to understand and know that our actions make a difference.

First Reach In: Find your most compelling signal in the noise that surrounds us. Find the intersection of your passion and talent, and with perseverance, tenacity, grit, hard work and pluck, take it to the woodshed. In the constant din of noise that surrounds us, we need to understand the power of a mute button to silence the static while we focus.

Next Reach out: to a teammate, friend, colleague, or loved one, with encouragement and accountability enrich them to do the same. Multiply that excellence in others. For remember, a rising tide lifts all boats

Day-glo 80’s ski tricks, Border Smashers, and Dinner Rolls

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Before Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile, a group of runners had been working on it for a decade and many, including scientists, considered the four minute barrier physically impossible. But once the world saw Roger do it in May of 1954, within weeks his record 3:59 was beaten by John Landy of Australia. And then the floodgates opened and a quick string of runners beat the four-minute barrier after that. Today a talented collegiate runner can break a 4-minute mile. When we see the possible, it can become inevitable

My son’s ski coach is a former U.S. Ski Team moguls champ. When I mention his name to people on the mountain, they say to me incredulously, “Have you seen him ski!!?” Yes, he rocks. And few sports have had the amazing amount of fast ingenuity and innovation that moguls and freestyle skiing has.

Here’s that I mean. Jonny Moseley won Olympic Gold in 1998 in Nagano Japan in moguls skiing. Fast and fluid and best in the world, but basically incrementally improving on what everyone already knew. He didn’t do anything remarkably different. He just executed the best on known skills and tricks – what my son calls “day-glo 80’s tricks”. For example, here is Travis Cabral a year afterward, winning a U.S. Championship in 1999 doing much the same tricks that had been repeated over the past few decades.

 

Then Jonny Moseley invents the “Dinner Roll” – an off-axis double rotation trick, the likes the world had never seen. He created the trick for the 1999 X-Games, perfected it, and then performed it in Olympic competition in 2002 in Salt Lake City. The judges didn’t like it, and scored it the same as more simple tricks, because they didn’t know what else to do with it. And because he spent more time in the air executing this trick, he was slower on the course. He got fourth in the 2002 Olympics, but the crowd went completely nuts. In the eyes of the world, he crushed. Here it is in slow motion (with a hilarious commentator):

 

 

Jonny Moseley’s “Dinner Roll” is now known, among those who speak the language, as a “Cork 7” – short for “corkscrew 720” and it’s a fairly basic trick these days for anyone in competition. Here’s a 12 year old doing one (fast-forward to 1:35).

Over the past ten years since Moseley smashed that border, there has been a whole new dimension of tricks and an explosion of ingenuity. Here’s Mikael Kingsbury winning the World Championship last month, March 2013.

 

Here’s the thing about Moseley’s irreverent ingenuity. He knew, going into the 2002 Olympics, that he wasn’t going to win with the Dinner Roll. The judges, his coaches, his teammates all reminded him he would gain nothing in points for his somewhat smart-ass trick. And he did it anyway. And because he did it anyway, he cleared the way for invention in the sport. Within six months of presenting the Dinner Roll in 2002 Olympic competition, the rules were changed to allow, and reward, inverted and off-axis rotation in the air.

Sure he would have liked to win. But pushing the boundaries of the sport was more important. Jonny Moseley said of the 2002 Olympics:

“There’s no question I was making a point; I was making a statement. I had hoped to be able to both make a statement and win, but in the end I probably sacrificed a gold for a statement. I hate to sound like I did everything for the good of the sport. I just personally couldn’t swallow the idea of going up there and doing what every single other person was doing. It wasn’t worth abandoning innovation and abandoning what is possible.”

Turkeys, Flash Freezing and Cafeteria Trays

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swanson_dinner2In late 1953 the Swanson brothers had a glut of turkey.  Swanson were turkey wholesalers and had overestimated the market.  They thought they would make a killing that year on Christmas turkeys sales. Not so much. So now they had 235 metric tons of turkey riding around the U.S. in refrigerated rail cars and the executive team was wondering what to do.  Meanwhile the CFO is showing charts of what it cost to have all those turkeys rolling around on refrigerated rail cars per day.

Gerry Thomas, a sales executive at Swanson, had been flying around the country and had just seen what Pan American airlines was doing with compartmentalized in-flight food offerings.  He and the executive team at Swanson coupled this notion with Clarence Birdseye’s new flash freezing technique, and then added the catchy product label “TV Dinner” that fit beautifully with the cultural explosion of television.  Their great market opportunity was the eight million moms who were joining the workforce after WWII, who were also enjoying an abundance of electrical home appliances like ovens, refrigerators, freezers, and of course televisions.

Turkey Glut Crisis + New Technology + Market Inflection = Bonanza of Realized Value

Swanson thought they might sell five thousand units the first year.  They sold ten million at .98 cents each.  Big hit, and now you understand how the intersection of technology, inspiration, marketing and resources made it happen.  But does that formula work again today?  Here’s the difference now:

Resources are scare, not abundant: From water to textiles to lumber, the availability and premium placed on the natural resources we use to create the consumer products and comestibles are in high demand and, in the case of fossil fuels and water particularly, are increasingly precious.

Talent is global, not local: Historically if you had a local workforce that was obedient, diligent, and brought expertise and skill to bear executing on top-driven strategies, you had competitive advantage.  The future is most certainly now in terms of the ability to connect need with a globally-dispersed labor force –  highly talented, motivated, and comparatively cheap by U.S. standards.  And all connected by the cost of the internet, $0.

Innovation is democratized, not top-driven: No longer can firms rely on the the wisdom of a handful of insightful strategists at the top of a pyramid, when meanwhile companies like Rabobank or Best Buy are doing a better job of catering to customer need by creating mechanisms to actively listen to, and incorporate the interests of customers, and know-how of line personnel.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

Turn the small screws

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think-small-imageThink big! Blue sky! Anything is possible! Let’s build the next iPhone. Or better, let’s disrupt our own business model with a seismic market change, like iTunes. No…wait, like Spotify!

This kind of collaborative bluster is akin to throwing a Hail Mary in the waning seconds. Possible, yes. Probable, no.

I was reminded of a valuable trick from Seth Kahan the other day on how to build predictable innovation. More often, it’s in the small tweaks of what you already know, not the big grandiose changes – that generates consistent wins by building incremental value.

Indeed, Seth does have lessons on how to identify big-picture shifting market inflection points and how to capitalize on them. But the kind of value building that leads to reliable market leadership is about parsing out the pieces of our value chain, examining each, and tweaking steadily toward constant excellence.

I once had a conversation with Patagonia founder and CEO Yvon Chouinard who told me he has yet to find a business or product problem that cannot be solved by increasing quality. Patagonia is a company that has built a legacy of consistent product integrity and innovation. From rock climbing pitons to the source of their cotton to the dying processes they use, Patagonia has been chasing excellence and success for over forty years.

“We have 1,500 styles of clothing and shoes, and we follow every one of those products all the way from the farmer to the very end to make sure there’s no unintended consequences of our actions and it’s as clean as we can possibly make it.”
– Yvon Chouinard

In that same spirit, Kahan’s advice is to look at all the parts that contribute to the whole – the supplier, the transport, the assembly, the quality assurance, the delivery, point of sale, customer service, etc… and peel away the layers of each part of the process. In doing so, you’ll find something to improve. Always. Don’t think big. Think small. Innovation will follow.

The risk is in your head

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freestyle-ski-tricksOur twelve year old son walked into the lunchroom at Sugarloaf ski resort a couple weeks ago and said quietly, “I learned how to do a 360.”

I said, “Awesome! That’s pretty cool. How did you learn that?” He said he just decided to do it. Within 24 hours our ten year old and his buddies were all spinning off jumps. Will admitted that the first time was scary but he knew he could do it. He just knew. What yesterday he thought was really risky, suddenly today wasn’t.

I learned something similar about mentally removing entrepreneurial risk from Harris Rosen, founder of Rosen Resorts. Anyone seeing him in the hallway of the Rosen Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando, Florida, picking up bits of trash and straightening plants might mistake him for a custodian or perhaps a fastidious guest. Harris Rosen, founder and owner of Rosen Hotels and Resorts might just be the hardest working man in the business. In person he is quiet, thoughtful, and generous with his time. Well dressed, but never ostentatious, and in excellent health, Rosen swims most every day of the week to remain fit and alert.

Rosen says he purchased his first hotel in 1974, after being fired from a number of companies because he was told that he did not fit comfortably in their corporate structure. He decided it was best that he strike out on his own and has never looked back. With diligence, care, and an indefatigable work ethic, he has built remarkable hotel and resort properties in the Orlando area. Starting with a premonition in the 1970s that the Orlando area would become a much sought-after leisure and conference destination, he worked hard to develop and grow his hotel and resort company to cater to both the meeting and the leisure markets.

From his very first property—a Quality Inn—to his most recent luxury hotel, Rosen has sustained a remarkable curiosity, which enables him to remain vigilant about changes in the marketplace and to adjust his strategy accordingly. In an interview, Rosen talked to me about the importance of marrying hard work with risk-taking:

How do you teach someone to take a risk? For those of us who do on occasion take risks, you must first convince yourself that everything will turn out OK because you will do whatever it takes to ensure its success. For instance, if you don’t have the money to fly to New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts to meet with potential clients, you hitchhike.I think the message is…first have a dream, don’t give up, and always be honest and respectful—and work harder than anyone else, to ensure success.

Of course I stopped launching off jumps a couple years ago. Way too risky.

Changing behavior is the new killer app

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fingerInnovation is implementing something new, which is realized by another as having value. This isn’t creativity. People can be wonderfully creative over and over until they finally produce an innovation recognized by another person, or a whole community of people, as indeed valuable.

Lytro has introduced a real game-changer in the camera market by creating a consumer-priced camera that captures the entire depth of field, allowing you, the viewer, to choose the point of focus. Try it – it’s pretty neat. Cars become faster, more efficient, or more intuitive. Smartphones, smarter. But the real innovative in innovation these days may be going on in the consumer-collaborations between online community curators and architects, and their users.

Change is hard. Facebook knows you are not going to like their latest attempt to inspire and streamline your experience. But they are provoking you intentionally to change your behavior, improve their ability to harvest data from you, or make you a more accessible target to potential online vendors. Consider, each time Facebook adds a graph search feature or changes your user profile display you freak out. Then you post about how annoying the new interface is. Then you get familiar with it. And then you use it. You change your behavior to adapt to this new innovative environment or feature set introduced and you change your behavior.

Who decided your were going to adopt the new profile banner, or categorize your friends as “Close” or “Acquaintances” – you or Facebook?