Following are a few noteworthy blog entries from members of our BIF community reflecting processes of innovation which I don't think get enough attention these days: talent and trust.
BIF-4 co-host Bill Taylor writes about Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. The online retailer founded in 1999 is unbelievably successful and if projections hold true, will reach the $1 billion in merchandise sales mark by the end of the year. (Up from $70 million five years ago). In Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too Bill profiles Hsieh's obsession with customer service. From simple things like a 365-day return policy and free shipping both ways for customers to paying potential employees in their four-week training program a whopping $1,000 to leave the company, Hsieh emphasis on delivering value to the customer through a talented and well-trained staff has turned Zappos into an online retailing phenom.
(Side note: Tony Hsieh will be a storyteller at our upcoming summit in the fall. His personal story is not to be missed.)
Some of the most successful innovations come from creating environments where your talent (both internal and external) can work together collaboratively. All too often though, companies just don't make the time. Former BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes about a couple of such platforms in Innovation 2.0. "I have become convinced that most highly talented people, - especially those destined for high management and technical positions, - are essentially ambidextrous when it comes to their work. They are able to do their day jobs with flying colors, while simultaneously participating in innovation activities," writes Irving.
And finally, John Wolpert, newest member of our research advisory council and BIF-4 storyteller wrote a great post called “Us” is all of us. “Them” is none of us. Trust-building is overlooked in most innovation conversations these days. Similar to the points made in the blogs above, collaboration isn't simply a matter of providing the right tools and technologies. In this entry, John shares a great example from a Japanese silicon chip consortium in the 1980’s and its four-year effort to break down silos for major breakthrough.
An interview with BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan is posted on Steve Hardy’s Creative Generalist blog where the two talk about everything from Rhode Island’s position as a national innovation hot spot to the real world innovation lab BIF is developing to what it takes to really drive systems change.
If you’re looking to break down silos and cross boundaries, this sample from the interview extols the necessity for thick skin:
Steve: What skills/training/experience do you personally rely on most to span such silos and to foster collaboration?
Saul: Very thick skin, a strong belief that there is always a better way, the ability to thrive with ambiguity, actually enjoying steep learning curves, and did I say very thick skin. Everyone loves innovation until it impacts them. I used to think that we could enable large-scale change and create more innovators by proselytizing. Innovation rhetoric is everywhere and yet we still don’t seem to be progressing beyond the buzzwords. I now believe in sorting the world to identify the innovators across every imaginable discipline and silo and then finding ways to connect them in purposeful ways. I think we will make more progress that way. That is what BIF is all about.
Memorial Day is an important day of reflection for me. Baseball and barbecues aren’t bad either. I am grateful that so many American men and women choose to serve our country by serving in the military. We owe each of them our gratitude, respect, and support. I recently had the opportunity to see the amazing dedication and heart of our U.S military up close and personal. I was asked to participate in the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference (JCOC 75). It was an experience I will never forget.
JCOC is a U.S. Department of Defense civilian outreach program that that has been run 75 times since 1948. I was invited to participate in JCOC 75 which brought together 48 civilian leaders from across the country for a week of total immersion in U.S. military operations. And total immersion it was.
When we arrived at the Pentagon, prior to the start of JCOC 75, the only information we were given was that our host would be the US Southern Command led by Admiral James G. Stavridis. All we knew is that we would be visiting military installations throughout Central and South America. For security reasons we were not given specific details on where we were headed and what we would be doing. Try packing for that! It promised to be interesting given the recent news coming from the region including: Hugo Chavez, Guantanamo, the Columbian Free Trade Act and, a huge possible oil discovery off the coast of Brazil.
The mood was set immediately upon arrival to the Pentagon with a visit to the reconstruction site where 284 individuals lost their lives on September 11, 2001. While our group had yet to create the personal bonds that would strengthen over the course of the upcoming week, we all shared a common sense of excitement and anticipation as our itinerary for the week was revealed.
JCOC 75 * April 18-26, 2008 * ITINERARY
Pentagon, Washington DC
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
U.S.S. George Washington (off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Bogata, Tolemaida, and Cartegena. Columbia
Sota Cano Air Base, Honduras
Key West and Miami, Florida
Andrews Air Force Base
It was immediately obvious that this was no boondoggle when the wake up call arrived at 3:00 AM and we boarded a C-17 military cargo plane that would be our home base throughout the week’s journey for a direct flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Talk about diving right in to the pool. I am a news junkie and have followed a lot of the policy and political rumble over Guantanamo. Our early wake up call was soon forgotten with the riveting experience of touring two of Guantanomo’s prison facilities and visiting with American men and women who serve our country in Cuba. Regardless of your political views and the policy debate going on far from this U.S. military base, what I observed were dedicated and hard-working U.S. soldiers serving all of us in a difficult and stressful prison environment. These soldiers who are away from their homes and families for extended periods are subjected to abuse from prisoners every day and carry out their jobs with integrity and pride. I now view Guantanomo news coverage with a new appreciation for what I observed going on there.
With Guantanamo still on our minds we boarded our C-17 for an all night flight to Rio de Janeiro where we planned to meet up with the USS George Washington in transit nearby. It isn’t every day that you get the opportunity to visit an active aircraft carrier out at sea. Luckily I was in a small group of a dozen JCOC participants that were delayed in visiting the ship and by the time we were able to board the C-2A Carrier Onboard Delivery (nicknamed COD) to take us out to the ship deck we were told that we would be spending the night on board the carrier and coming back to shore the next morning. We would get to see night flight operations from the deck of the GW - an experience we were told that is rarely available to civilians. Wow! I will never forget that night and the opportunity to spend time with many of the enlisted men and women assigned to the GW.
The visit began with the COD flight and arrested landing on the GW deck. We have all seen film clips of fighter jets being caught by a wire on the short runway of an aircraft carrier. The film clips do not do justice to the actual experience. I am glad to have done it once! Imagine sitting backwards while strapped into the COD and then with little warning and no visual cues to orient yourself you experience a bone-jarring stop when the plane catches the wire on the ship’s deck. After I caught my breath I was thankful for the wire and a talented pilot. Later that evening I stood on that same deck and watched an exercise where F 18 fighter pilots practiced catapult take-offs and arrested landings. It was incredible to see the after burners of the F 18s light up the horizon off the deck of the GW and the choreography of the entire flight operations team made me think of a high tech and high stress ballet. I am glad that our country continues to invest in this important strategic military capability.
The GW is a city with 5000 on board and everyone that I spent time with was dedicated to his or her mission and had a great personal story to share about how they joined the military and how much they missed their homes, friends, and families. The other day I read about a fire on board the GW and I immediately worried about the soldiers that I had met on our visit. I hope that they are alright.
From there we left for Columbia and I was reunited with my luggage in Bogata for the first time since leaving the Pentagon. In Columbia our military plays an important advisory role to help the Columbian military strengthen its capacity to defeat the FARQ and other insurgent groups that finance their military efforts primarily through cocaine trafficking. Most of the world’s cocaine originates in Columbia and ends up on our streets in the United States. I was impressed by the progress made by President Uribe and the Columbian military to both combat drug trafficking and to support the development of an economic future that isn’t dependent on the drug trade. We visited Columbian military installations at Tolemaida and on the coast in Cartagena.
Next stop, Sota Cano, Honduras. Here we visited a humanitarian project where our military was beginning a project to build a new school in an impoverished Honduran village. I had the opportunity to help distribute school supplies to many of the students in the village. Being there and looking directly into the big brown eyes of these children really hit home and I was proud that our military plays a supporting humanitarian role in Honduras.
After an exhausting and eventful week it was back to U.S. terra firma. We visited a Coast Guard installation and the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West, Florida. JIATF is a good example of collaborative innovation where seemingly, every silo spanning military and law enforcement services comes together for the common purpose of slowing the flow of illegal drugs coming across our borders. I was impressed by their use of technology to enable collaborative intelligence sharing and interdiction operations.
We celebrated the conclusion of our journey at dinner with Admiral James Stavridis in Miami who shared a compelling vision of a strong Southern Command with deep collaborative relationships across the entire region. I am grateful to the DOD for making the JCOC experience possible, to the Southern Command for hosting our visit and making me more aware of this important region, to my fellow JCOC participants who were all interesting and made the journey special, and most of all to the men and women who serve our country in the U.S. military.
Changing Business Models: Clay Shirky on why media is a triathlon
Last weekend I was watching Costas NOW on HBO and heard a tirade against blogging like no other. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lightsunleashed a fury against Will Leitch, editor of the popular sports news site DeadSpin.com. From bloggers' writing skills, to their ethics deficiencies to their lack of credentials, Bissinger believes our moral fiber is in jeopardy because of the dearth of consumer-produced sports media. “I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed,” Bissinger said.
To his credit, Leitch managed the attack with grace and dignity but he didn't hit a homerun with his response. He had a chance to address mainstream media's genuine fear and suspicion of the blogosphere's influence. What he needed was a dose of cognitive surplus.
I just watched BIF research advisor Clay Shirky's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. In his speech, titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus, Shirky nails it when he says “media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.” And like it or not, Shirky's conclusion includes sites like DeadSpin.com.
From Shirky's speech: This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer.
There's a lot of complexity right now in the media world but Clay is clearly on to something when he says that business models which don't include consuming, producing and sharing will not make it in the future. As he says in his speech, "this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into." That's a motto for systems changes anywhere.
Follow-up to a blog entry a couple of weeks ago about the innovation and design exhibit at MoMA. Paola Antonelli, the exhibits curator, appeared on the Charlie Rose show last week. Antonelli is an Italian-born, self-described "generalist." Watch the interview and you'll realize quickly how insightful she is too. During the hour-long talk, she descibes the bridging of science and design (developing comfort and trust between both parties is key) as well as the changing face of scale in 2008, the relationship of architecture and nanotechnology and the need to push designers toward "pragmatic intellectualism."
Couple of notable quotes:
“Some people say that designers can revolutionize and change the world. Yes and no. That’s not their job – their job is to help us change the world. They’re the interface.”
“What is scale today? Philosophically, it's changed considerably. From realizations about the universe to realizations of the genome, it isn’t about dimension anymore. It’s about complexity.”
Antonelli is a great communicator. Her philosophy on design in the 21st century is fascinating. Watch the video
(The website designed for the exhibit is crazy cool too.)
John Wolpert Joins BIF's Research Advisory Council
I'm thrilled to announce that John Wolpert has joined our research advisory council. He will also be a storyteller at the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit in October. John is an experienced practitioner of innovation having led IBM’s “Extreme Blue” business & technology incubator in Austin, Texas. Most recently, he was engaged by the Australian Industry Group to build an organization that helps innovators in different companies work together. Through John's stewardship, the InnovationXchange (IXC) evolved into a global organization with operations in the UK, the US and Australia.
I first heard about John back in 2005 through an article called The rise of the corporate clergy. An early pioneer of open innovation, he was spearheading a growing network of independent go-betweens or ’intermediaries’ in Australia whose mission was to enable groundbreaking ideas that transcend corporate boundaries without compromising intellectual property. This concept should sound familiar to members of our BIF community. In like-minded fashion, the IXC was structured as a non-profit, non-commercial entity which gave it a neutral advantage for achieving networked innovation.
John is back in the states now, consulting on a variety of new projects. He's also blogging regularly at TheThreePercent. He calls the blog a "support network for innovators." His point-of-view on innovation is refreshing ~ it's based on the idea that only three percent of any population is actually innovating (as opposed to inventing or improving).
Inventors have their own societies. Improvers - people who make the existing game work better - are well accepted. But innovators, the three percent, are often alone, isolated, misunderstood. We don’t solve problems so much as we pioneer new ones. Innovators don’t just invent new tools - we use them to change how people organize themselves, do business, and live their lives. That might be great in the long run, but it’s usually trouble for somebody in the short run.
Management gurus might tell you that anyone can be an innovator, and we wouldn’t argue with that…but if innovating involves changing the rules of the game, then perhaps it’s a good thing that only a few souls happen to be doing it at any given time. ~John Wolpert
I'd like to extend a big welcome to John as he joins our amazing advisory council. It's one thing to start something and another to make it work ~ his experience in successfully bridging barriers will undoubtedly add tremendous value to our BIF mission of enabling collaborative innovation. Glad to have you part of our BIF community John.
And of course - learn more about the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit and how you can register. In addition to John Wolpert, we've got one heck of a lineup. Don't miss this exciting 2-day event.
More on hiring for collaborative innovation: Pixar's Brad Bird and his flock of black sheep
Following up on my blog post last week - Spanning Silos...Fostering Collaboration...How do you hire for that? - a friend passed along a great interview with Oscar-winning director Brad Bird from last month's McKinsey Quarterly. In the article, the director talks about how he pushes teams of animators beyond their comfort zones, encourages dissent, and builds morale. He also explains the value of "black sheep" - restless contributors with unconventional ideas.
What's interesting about Bird's hiring at Pixar is that he joined the company in 2000, just at the height of Pixar's success with Toy Story,A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2. Rather than wide the wave and continue on the tried and true path (as so many established companies are prone to do) senior executives at Pixar worried about complacency and that feeling that they "had it all figured out." So Steve Jobs, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter hired Bird to "shake things up." (Ironically, Bird himself was coming off a huge financial failure with a film called The Iron Giant.)
Bird: "For a company that has had nothing but success to invite a guy who had just come off a failure and say, 'Go ahead, mess with our heads, shake it up' - when do you run into that?"
Bird's first project at Pixar was The Incredibles. According to Bird, it completely broke with tradition because it represented everything that computer-generated animation had trouble doing; from human characters to multiple sets. Although the creative team loved the idea, the technical team "turned white." No way was their response, telling Bird it would take 10 years and $500 million to get the job done.
Bird's response: "So I said, 'Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody's listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.' A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well."
In the end, Bird's approach worked really well. For less money per minute than was spent on Pixar's previous film, Finding Nemo, Bird and his black sheep team delivered a movie that had three times the number of sets and everything that was considered too hard to do by the previous technical team.
The article continues with several examples of Bird's ability to change mindset. It's clear that he's a phenomenal team leader. My belief has always been that innovation without leadership is a lost cause. Harmonious orchestration requires a conductor. Otherwise, as Bird says in the interview, "each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they're crazy." Undoubtedly, Bird is a creative genius but what sets him apart is his ability to build morale, take risks, engage across silos and wrap it in unwavering ambition to do what others haven't done before. Those are lessons we can all learn from.
The full article is behind the pay wall at McKinsey and I recommend its purchase. Or, GigaOm has a decent write-up of the article here.
Spanning Silos...Fostering Collaboration...How do you hire for that?
Spanning silos and fostering collaboration in complex systems requires an open mind, steadfast persistence and unyielding resolve. So how exactly do you hire for that? I asked Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School that question last week and his answer: look for attitude. Find someone with opinion yet isn't opinionated; someone who questions assumptions but also has a clear point-of-view; someone who leverages conflict instead of fears it.
And where do you find someone like that?
BIF research advisor John Seely Brown (JSB) has been doing a bit of research into this area too and he suggests the multiplayer online gaming environment as an attractive source of new hires. His recent blog post "The Gamer Disposition" highlights five attributes of these players. JSB even goes so far as to say that gamers who embody these attributes are "better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace."
His five gamer attributes: (1) they are bottom-line oriented; (2) they understand the power of diversity; (3) they thrive on change; (4) they see learning as fun; and (5) they 'marinate on the edge'. These are polar opposite attributes from typical management processes which are built to ensure discipline, alignment and conformance.
Of course it's a big leap from the virtual gamer world to the real-world but you can see the potential convergence - as companies find increasing competitive advantage with a strong knowledge-based workforce, employees are looking for companies that also reflect these gamer attributes.
Several interesting posts from members of our BIF community I want to share:
BIF Research Advisor Alph Bingham has a meaty entry on R&D Productivity Metrics and Ohm’s Law. Layman that I am, I still managed to follow his substantial argument that most R&D productivity metrics fail because they're just too fuzzy. It's pretty easy to screw up metrics says Alph - but there are also plenty of ways to get them right and his post will definitely get you thinking.
BIF-4 co-host Bill Taylor writes about Roger Bannister's famous and record-breaking four-minute mile with a post called What is Your Company's "Four-Minute Mile"? In it, he wonders why records, once broken, are so easily matched and suggests mindset may be the motivating factor. It's an interesting game-changing philosophy for overcoming challenge.
BIF-4 storyteller and research advisor Clay Shirky shares an edited transcript from his speech at the recent Web 2.0 Conference. Gin, Television, and Social Surplus is worth reading from beginning to end. Although I had an initial problem making the connection between alcohol consumption and the industrial revolution, Clay makes some interesting points about the effect surplus plays in societal change.
And finally, former BIF-3 storyteller Steven Johnson has written a post called The Silent Room Tone which gets into both the problems and opportunities storytellers face on stage at the hands of audience Twitterers. Recent news stories have highlighted the effect twittering can have on storytelling. Like it or not, it's here to stay - but how much of an effect will it have on the art of communication?
Dancing with Complexity: Roger Martin on The Opposable Mind
Yesterday I spent some time at the offices of Continuum. The Boston-based design firm was hosting a book signing soiree for Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School in Toronto and author of the new book The Opposable Mind.
Martin has spent the past few years searching for patterns in thinking among great leaders. His conclusion: success comes from an ability to utilize tensions between different business models in order to build a better one. He calls it 'integrative thinking' and it's a direct assault on the reductionist, either/or approach to decision-making, which is typically taught in business schools. This holistic - and yes, more complex and often times ambiguous - approach to thinking, Martin says, is at the heart of many great, new business models.
Martin has a strong, optimistic point-of-view. One of my favorite lines of the night was "just because something hasn't been taught doesn't make it unteachable." While there are those who believe that great leaders are born and not made, Martin says no. To prove it, he established Designworks, a centre for a new way of learning and thinking on the campus of Rotman.
Managed by Heather Fraser, Designworks Director and Adjunct Professor at Rotman, the program provides a learning experience that encourages and nurtures new ways of thinking and leading. Bypassing the often linear “management only” or “design only” curricula, Designworks makes use of its resources in the academic and design community by teaming Rotman MBA students with those at the Ontario College of Art and Design. (Stateside, I think Stanford's d.School probably comes close to this type of curricula.)
After his talk, I was fortunate to spend some time with Martin, one-on-one, for a video podcast. I'll have that posted later next week. In the meantime, I recommend reading his book. I particularly liked chapter 4, "Dancing Through Complexity," because it hammers home how integrative thinking is a masterful blend of both art and process. When you have a predisposition to look at opposing models and turn tension into harmony, some very useful answers will arise. Leaders profiled in Martin's book include P&G's A.G. Lafley, Bob Young of Red Hat Software, Four Season's Isadore Sharpe, and Institute for OneWorld Health founder Victoria Hale.
BIF-4 co-host Bill Taylor writes about Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. The online retailer founded in 1999 is unbelievably successful and if projections hold true, will reach the $1 billion in merchandise sales mark by the end of the year. (Up from $70 million five years ago). In Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too Bill profiles Hsieh's obsession with customer service. From simple things like a 365-day return policy and free shipping both ways for customers to paying potential employees in their four-week training program a whopping $1,000 to leave the company, Hsieh emphasis on delivering value to the customer through a talented and well-trained staff has turned Zappos into an online retailing phenom. 
Some of the most successful innovations come from creating environments where your talent (both internal and external) can work together collaboratively. All too often though, companies just don't make the time. Former BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes about a couple of such platforms in Innovation 2.0. "I have become convinced that most highly talented people, - especially those destined for high management and technical positions, - are essentially ambidextrous when it comes to their work. They are able to do their day jobs with flying colors, while simultaneously participating in innovation activities," writes Irving.
And finally, John Wolpert, newest member of our research advisory council and BIF-4 storyteller wrote a great post called “Us” is all of us. “Them” is none of us. Trust-building is overlooked in most innovation conversations these days. Similar to the points made in the blogs above, collaboration isn't simply a matter of providing the right tools and technologies. In this entry, John shares a great example from a Japanese silicon chip consortium in the 1980’s and its four-year effort to break down silos for major breakthrough.
