Archive for September, 2010

Want Innovation? Don’t Read this!

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Innovation
No. This is not a joke. This is not your usual “The Top 5 Steps For Innovation” blog post either. This is not a romantic story about innovation. What this article IS, is an urgent call for your attention to one of the fundamental keys you need to unleash innovation.

For too long you’ve been reading endless articles that promised to give you the recipe to build the next killer innovation. For too long you’ve listened to stories about how great innovators only needed a eureka moment to create their world changing innovation. For too long you’ve waited for your eureka moment to come. And for too long nothing happened. At least it’s not your fault. Besides how could you make an “A-HA” moment to happen? You’re just not inspired today. Maybe tomorrow will be THE day. Or the next day.

Well… now is the time for you to make a very important decision; Do you want to keep wanting or do you want to start doing something about it?

Take your time.

If you decided for the former then save your time and stop reading this! Seriously.

So, you decided to start doing something about it. Congratulations. You’re one step closer to becoming an innovator! As a gift, you’ll receive one of the fundamental keys you need to unleash innovation. It’s of utmost urgency that you receive it and understand it.

Key: There’s no recipe for innovation. There’s no magic behind it. There’s no romantic mythological muses that deliver inspiration.

Now that you have the key, here’s what you must understand to use it effectively.

#1: Inspiration & ideas are over-rated!

Good ideas are common – what’s uncommon are people who’ll work hard enough to bring them about ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Ask any successful business people. Do you think Donald Trump was sitting in his living room waiting to be inspired before becoming a multi-billion dollar success? Do you think that Steve Jobs was sitting beneath a tree when an apple hit him and led him to create the company responsible for innovations like the Mac, the iPod and the iPhone?

Inspiration is the Hollywoodesque answer to the question: how do you create a world changing innovation? Any blockbuster movie that portraits fantastic stories of success only show you glimpses of the HARD work that was done in order to succeed. This is the simple answer that you want to hear, because it validates your present attitude: “Let’s wait for inspiration to come. Then I’ll show the World what innovation is all about! Reward me now and then I’ll deliver it later.” It’s like the employee that says to his boss: “Chief, if you give me a 50% raise, I’ll work harder than anyone else. Reward me now and then I’ll deliver it later.”

It doesn’t work like that. Forget inspiration. If I waited for inspiration to write this article, it simply wouldn’t exist. You have to do what you do even when you don’t feel inspired. Even when you don’t want to.

Inspiration needs to find you working! That’s why it is so important to work on something that you’re passionate about. When you’re passionate about something is easier to build up energy and start working.

Transpiration is under-rated though it’s constantly present in the innovation process. From the market research stage, through the creative stage where ideas are born, exploration & experimentation, product development and all the way to shipping and marketing the product. This whole process involves a LOT of hard work to complete, let alone a success.

Inspiration and ideas aren’t the core of the innovation process. They’re only the initial spark.

You do NOT need an original idea to innovate! Google is famous for changing the World with it’s innovations. However Google started with a search engine. Was it a original idea? No, but it was an innovation in itself. Another example is Apple’s iPhone. In spite of not being an original idea (we had many smart phones available at the time), the iPhone changed the way we communicate and the way we interact with a smart phone.

Great innovations don’t create customer’s needs/desires. Great innovations start by listening and understanding customer’s needs/desires and then satisfying them in ways that they couldn’t imagine possible.

If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. – Henry Ford

#2: You don’t need to born with “a special gift”

It is your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude.  ~Zig Ziglar

Many people think that successful innovators are born with a special gift. Darren Hardy, publisher of SUCCESS magazine has interviewed many successful business people and innovators.

Here’s what he has to say about them: “every time I interview an extraordinary superachiever I walk away with the same realization. There really isn’t anything that extraordinary about them. What I mean is their answers to all the probing success questions are usually the same, simple and not extraordinary. What is extraordinary is that they actually DO the simple principles of success—relentlessly, passionately and consistently. And unfortunately that IS extraordinary.”

Notice the focus on the doing part. What differentiates a failure from a success is the willingness to keep going, keep doing the work that needs to be done to launch the next innovation and never EVER quit!

Having a special gift is something you can’t control. It’s another excuse to explain the fact that you haven’t launched any innovation. However, your attitude is something you CAN control. It’s a choice! You can choose to work hard to materialize your ideas or you can choose not to. That’s why the initial Zig Ziglar quote is so important and that’s also why you should never forget it.

Now, although you don’t need to born with “a special gift”, you must understand this: YOU were born with a special gift!

You’re the only person in the world that can use your ability. ~ Zig Ziglar

Think about that statement for a minute.

Do you realize the importance of your gift?

There is no single person in this world that can use your skills. That’s called competitive advantage. Only you can use your ability. The choice of using it is up to you. It will define both your attitude and the innovations that you’ll make.

#3: Escape The Ugly Duckling paradox

Now that you received your gift, you must escape, what I call The Ugly Duckling paradox.

Do you know The Ugly Duckling story? It’s a simple but powerful story of a homely little bird born in a barnyard who suffers abuse from his neighbors until, much to his delight (and to the surprise of others), he matures into a graceful swan, the most beautiful bird of all.

The Ugly Duckling story perfectly portraits what happens to us since the moment that we’re born. First it’s our parents that teach us “Don’t do this or else… Say that or else…”. Then it’s the media turn “If you don’t wear this brand no one will talk to you. If don’t buy that car brand no girls will like you. If you don’t do that, you won’t succeed.” Time to school: “If you don’t like the same games that all the other kids like, no one will be your friend. If you don’t have good grades, you’ll die miserable and poor.” Then the job market: “If you don’t do what your boss says, you’ll fired. If you try to do a task in an improved way, your team will think that you’re trying to make them look bad.”

Then after years of brainwashing you start reading everywhere that you need to innovate to succeed. You need to think outside the box. You need to differentiate yourself from the competition. You need to think different. But how are you supposed to do all this when all that you’re trained to do is to comply and fit in?

The status quo has raised you to believe that you’re a duck because if you discovered that you’re a swan, the status quo would be in big trouble. Have you noticed that every time a new innovation changes the game the status quo starts screaming? Great innovations tend to polarize people but there’s no extraordinary innovation that doesn’t make the status quo quiet. In fact, a great way to discover if you’re launching a world changing innovation is to ask: “who am I upsetting?” If the answer is “no one”, then you’re not innovating. The status quo hates change and innovation loves change!

If you try to be all sorts of things to all people you will undermine what makes you different. When designing you’re next innovation don’t try to please everyone. Especially, don’t try to please the status quo. There’s more that enough people doing that and you’re not one of them.

#4: Balance yourself

You don’t need to do all this alone! Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack. Bill Gates and Paull Allen. Bill Hewlett and David Packard. This is a small sample of famous successful business partnerships that resulted in great innovations. One of the reasons that they were a success is because both business partners balanced one another. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas with people you trust and that complement you. In fact, try to choose a business partner that can balance you off.

If you’re a great Engineer, you need a great Marketeer. If you have both, you need an Operations person. If you’re the youthful visionary, you’ll need adult supervision.

~Guy Kawasaki

One of the top fears that people have about sharing ideas is the fear of someone stealing their great idea. However, if your idea is truly extraordinary, few people will like it, let alone want to steal it AND implement it.

Still worried about sharing your precious ideas? Here’s a small sample of comments made by famous people about truly great ideas:

I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.

~Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.


The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.

~ Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.


So we went to Atari and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we’ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we’ll come work for you.’ And they said, ‘No.’ So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, ‘Hey, we don’t need you. You haven’t got through college yet.’

~Apple’s founder Steve Jobs tries to get Atari and HP interested in the Machintosh.

We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

~Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

Can you hear the status quo screaming? Just don’t expect it to love your idea when you’re about to change the World as we know it.

So, there’s no reason for you to not share your idea. In fact, it’s a great way to realize if you’re upsetting anybody. If everyone loves your idea, if it will be great for the employees, the employers, the customers, the investors and the whales… there’s probably something wrong about it or worse: you just created mediocrity. Of all things, be afraid to create mediocrity!

#5: Think beyond product innovation

Who said that for you to innovate you had to apply it to a product? Innovation is NOT all about the product! You can create great innovations that aren’t product based.

Every business related area can be a potential target for innovation. Some of this areas include:

  • Process innovation: changing the processes that are used to run your business to make it more competitive.
  • Market innovation: creating new markets to do business in. What better way to drive your competition crazy than to make them irrelevant? Warning: make sure that there’s someone interested in the new market that you’re creating.
  • Business model innovation: this one is related with the previous item. One of the most famous business models innovation is the Freemium model: offer a base package for free and charge for additional features. Warning: don’t underestimate the power of cashflow. Companies don’t go bankrupt because of having no profit. They go bankrupt because they’ve run out of cash.
  • Logistics innovation: logistic networks play a key role in today’s modern competitive business World. The way you manage the connections inside the logictics network can have a dramatic impact in your product competitiveness. Amazon and Dell are two great examples of logistics innovation.

Conclusion

The common theme in this article and one of the fundamental keys for innovation is hard work. It’s about having the courage to start doing something. It’s about focusing on action.

Want Innovation? Stop reading this, start exploring new ideas using your creativity while doing the hard work that needs to be done to unleash innovation and change the World!

-Bruno Coelho

Bruno Coelho is a Portuguese entrepreneur who loves Marketing, Innovation, Leadership, Customer Service and Entrepreneurship. Read more from him at http://bcoelho2000.blogspot.com” and find him on Twitter at @bcoelho2000

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Have Your Ideas Passed Their Expiration Date?

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

Imagine that you are a pilot and you have to fly through a 5-mile canyon upside down. It’s actually kind of hard to imagine because it’s not something you’re trained to do but it’s something that could happen in a real life situation. It’s a scenario that’s outside your direct experience, you find it hard to accept it as possible and even worse adapting to it.

Now think about it this way:
What if businesses were judged on their ability to create ‘happiness for customers’? What if all those “like” buttons had less to do with becoming a fan and more to do with specific actions an organization took to actually make a customer happy? What if you hired people based on how happy they’ll make your customers? What if there were a ‘customer happiness index’ dashboard (Tweetdeck) and we’d all have access to it just like the stock market? Imagine how every business would behave.

Same thing, right? How can this be possible?

These may seem like outrageous scenarios but it’s definitely something we should be thinking about. As I argued before, delivering happiness is not business as usual, all it takes for things to change is for someone somewhere to start acting differently. This someone is Zappos, and pretty soon others will join their crusade.

This is not a new idea, but it’s been so long since it was replaced by impersonal mass marketing that it seems like new and it has taken everyone by surprise.

Zappos ‘delivering happiness‘ strategy didn’t come out of a week long brainstorming session, it came about by the desire to build a company that’s designed for both life and work happiness.

This is a dramatic change from the familiar and it does provide a useful lesson for both identifying and exploiting change:
The importance of recognizing when the system is stuck. In this case the idea that businesses exist purely to make a profit. If you flip that script upside down, other options reveal themselves. Options nobody else can anticipate, strategies nobody can think of, ideas waiting for an owner to call their own.

Just like scripts become obsolete, so too do ideas have an expiration date. Think about what would be the opposite of doing what you currently do, how would that look and what options reveal themselves.

Prepare for the unexpected and learn to recognize when an idea has reached it’s expiration date because if you don’t, you’ll be caught in an unfamiliar situation.

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Cultural Leverage: Finding an Easier Path to Improved Innovation Performance

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
- Jimmy Dean

One of the greater challenges facing organizations that willingly seek to improve their innovation performance is “where to start?” Product development managers, research directors, marketing and brand specialists all face the similar, daunting prospect of wrestling their organizations into adopting new patterns and behaviors. For anyone who has been involved in change management, undertaking this kind of program is considered long and hard, because the duration of these efforts is counted not in days, weeks, or months, but in years.

In the present economic circumstances, we can’t wait that long to get our innovation engines firing. At a time like this, innovation cannot be relegated to an isolated part of the enterprise. How might we ready our organizations to embrace innovation as a practice in all areas?

Recognizing the Signs

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.
- John Dewey

At its essence, an organization’s culture is composed of many different elements, all of which point towards accepted behaviors and commonly held expectations. Organization symbols such as organizational layout, organizational landscape, or organizational dress are a direct manifestation of an organization’s culture, and they are experienced as real; their impact has significant organizational consequences. Each symbol is a sign of what is and isn’t acceptable to the organization, and the symbols are powerful indicators of organizational dynamics that are not necessarily easily changed, contrary to what you might think.

Consider your organization’s headquarters, a symbolic place on multiple levels. It represents the “heart” of the organization, a symbolic stage on which the day unfolds. It is also a container of symbols—the art on the wall or the layout of different functional departments—each having a series of layered meanings about what your organization deems important or even relevant. In this view, the notion of a symbol is not merely a backdrop against which organizational action happens. Rather, “place” is a system of environmental experiences that incorporates the personal, social, and cultural aspects of activity within an environment.

What do people see when they arrive at your building for the first time? Is there a friendly receptionist? Is there a phone on the wall and a series of codes to be dialed? When you arrive, do you enter the same way as customers or visitors, or do you enter by a separate employee-only entrance? Each of these elements says much about your organization, what it values, how it operates. But I would bet that you pay it little attention. Correct?

Objects and organizational landscapes are powerful indicators of social and cultural meaning, rather than simply arbitrary signs. Basic psychological research supports the idea of symbols as an unconscious form of communication: in the 1990s, work in this area suggested that a person’s motivations and goals may be triggered directly by their environment. The experience of symbols is a form of communication with verbal or conscious intervention.

What is your organization unwittingly saying about itself? Examine important organization symbols as sources of power and influence that may be co-opted in order to prime the innovation pump. What should you look for?

Finding the Pivot Points

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
- Woodrow Wilson

Before you change any symbols, be sure you understand as much of their complete meaning as possible. For example, a new and eager employee in an architecture firm noticed during her first week that every now and then, a ship’s bell was rung in the middle of the open plan floor. She asked what it was all about, and was told that the bell was rung when the firm won a new account or a new piece of business was signed. She heard it a lot during her first weeks at the firm, but about a month into her tenure, the bell stopped ringing. She worried. It was only when she asked why the bell hadn’t rung for the last couple of months that she was told the firm had so much new business, the leadership had decided to not pitch for any more in the current year. Suddenly the bell’s silence was no longer ominous, it was a symbol of the organization’s outstanding success.

Much relieved, the employee quietly let slip that she no longer feared for her job. The long-term employees around her were horrified: they understood how the bell was used, but hadn’t realized the lack of it ringing could have such a profoundly negative effect. Symbols matter, but their meaning may not be universal.

Marketing collateral, annual reports, and other formal organizational communication rely on symbols to communicate to both insiders and outsiders. But for all of the structure applied to them, they may not carry the same meaning for their different audiences. Think of BP’s logo. What it stands for inside the company and what it stands for in the community at large may vary quite a bit, especially after the recent gulf oil catastrophe. The impact of that one symbol, the logo, is so profound that independently owned BP-branded gas stations have seen 15 to 40 percent drop-offs in customer traffic. Their owners are now looking to resurrect a past symbol—the Amoco brand torch logo—in an attempt to help customers rethink their gas (petrol) purchase choices.

If we attempt to accelerate the growth of a culture of innovation in an organization, we have to be clear about the symbols at play, and which ones we might choose to modify in order to influence the behaviors we desire. Answers to the following questions may be helpful in assessing what matters most: How is meaning generated? What do people find meaningful about the work they are doing? How are they connected to the whole enterprise? How do they sense it, feel it, know it?

Only with answers to questions like these should we seek to leverage change across the organization.

Using Leverage

When you combine ignorance and leverage, you get some pretty interesting results.
- Warren Buffett

Organizational symbols provide a way for members to understand the identities and values that come along with a major organizational change. More broadly, symbols—as the physical manifestations of organizational life—help organizational members and observers integrate their experiences into coherent systems of meaning. The physical environment helps people encountering the organization make sense of it as a coherent whole. They key is not to contradict those symbols, but to adapt and shift them so that they influence the new behaviors you seek. Whether it is customers’ needs identification, idea generation, or effective commercialization, the symbols you employ will speak volumes about what you intend for them to understand and do.

To use symbols to leverage the practice of innovation in organizations, we must carefully modify them to enhance and promote the necessary behaviors. Because they reflect implicit and tacit aspects of culture by generating emotional responses from organizational members and representing organizational values and assumptions, symbols can rapidly galvanize an organization’s members. In an organization that seeks to promote cross-functional collaboration, what happens when the physical layout of the organization is changed so that cross-functional teams and groups are seated together? What happens if they are co-located around open areas for collaboration? Changing where people sit may have a profound effect on their behavior.

Where in the organization are there already existing symbols of innovation? How might you take what is already working well to influence the behavior of the wider organization membership?

Symbols elicit internalized norms of behavior, linking members’ emotional responses and interpretations to organizational action. They frame experience, allowing organizational members to communicate about vague, controversial, or uncomfortable organizational issues. And they integrate the entire organization in one system of signification. If you make innovation significant, then you have to make its significance apparent, otherwise the path to success will be unclear and little traveled.

- Andrew C. Marshall

Photo credit: Gary Minniss

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Change Your Internal Chip

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” – Einstein

How many times have you been with a client and proposed a new idea only to have the bottleneck of someone’s ego get in the way? Too many to remember I assume. When someone’s ego prevents someone from seeing other alternatives to how things can be done I always remember when it happened to me while with a client. As I was thinking about this fact with the people there, I said: “Like computer chips that evolve and get better all the time, so must we.”

Voila!

That simple statement broke the pattern.

Do you remember how in the movie Terminator 2, Sarah and John Connor take out and modify the Terminator’s internal cpu so it can learn and stop following its preset rules? Well that’s exactly what we have to do with ourselves and people who are impervious to ‘there’s always a better way’ speak.

If changing your ‘internal chip’, that is to say your mental model, sounds like black magic, it’s not. The magic is not the chip, it’s in letting go of your ego. To do this, first you have to understand that we’ve all been programmed to think how we think: our past experiences determine our beliefs and therefore how we see and think about everything around us. We bring with us assumptions that limit us from seeing other alternatives that might lead to a better opportunity. But then again you already knew this.

The truth is everything we believe to be real is in our heads, it’s in that thing we call brain. That ‘organic chip’ that helps us make ‘safe’ decisions is sometimes best to throw away and use another one. This sounds crazy and I promise you it doesn’t require surgery, it requires a willingness to adopt other people’s mental models.

In English, it means to be empathetic!

So how do you ‘change your chip’? Here are few things I think you can do:

  • Borrow someone else’s chip. Hang around people with a different set of chips than yours and see how you can use some of their abilities for your own advantage.
  • Make your own chip. If you could put together abilities you’d like to have from other people what would they be? For example, combine the abilities of Steve Jobs + Picasso + Leonardo Da Vinci and what would you have? How do you integrate them into your thinking?
  • Improve your chip. Hack yourself and see where there are holes that you can improve on. Like computer chips that evolve and get better all the time, so must we. There’s no governing rule like Moore’s Law that limits our own thinking!

Changing minds, hearts, and behaviors is key to innovating and a mind full of differing perspectives is better than one with just one perspective. A little bit of empathy goes a long way toward achieving that.

The important takeaway is we don’t have to wait another 50 years to have implanted chips in our heads that help us think better, we can start right now. In fact, why would we even want to be plugged into a computer telling us what to do? It’s better to think for ourselves, and a way to better do that is to create a portfolio of differing mental models that we can use to see the world through.

What do you think, how do you improve your own thinking?

Photo credit: Jurvetson

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