Are You a Great Leader?

Or are you just running with the rest of them?

by Holly G. Green

If you were to compile a checklist of attributes for great leaders, it would certainly include the following:

Visionary? Check. JFK's powerful vision of "We will put a man on the moon by the end of a decade" is a classic example of great leadership through a compelling vision.

Great communication skills? Check. Ronald Reagan's ability to inspire others through passionate oratory earned him the moniker "The Great Communicator."

Focus? Check. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln saved a nation (and changed the world) with his relentless focus on keeping the United States whole.

Courage under fire? Check. When things looked their bleakest for England in the early days of WWII, Winston Churchill rallied the country with his personal courage and bulldog tenacity.

Personable? Check. Despite his other character flaws, Bill Clinton had a charm and charisma that attracted people to him in droves.

Strategic thinker? Check. The business landscape is full of great strategists who have guided their organizations to positions of market leadership. Steve Jobs of Apple. Gordon Moore of Intel, to name a few.

If you asked people which of these is most important for a leader to have, many - at least those in the business world - would probably say strategic thinker. With so many competitors in every market and with change happening in the blink of an eye, it takes a great strategy to come out ahead. It takes someone who can look around, make new connections, and connect the dots faster.

But creating a winning strategy is only half the battle. In fact, it may be the easier part. Leading effectively in today's business environment requires the ability to think strategically and to implement according to that strategy. And that's where many leaders and entire organizations are falling short.

I firmly believe that the #1 job of today's leaders and managers is constant focus on both strategy and implementation. This represents a huge difference from a generation ago, when it often took several years for a good strategy to unfold. These days, speed, the rate of change, and universal access to information have created a whole new set of demands that require your daily attention.

The key is to balance your energy and attention across strategy and execution. Find a tool (or tools) that will enable you to develop the same sense of urgency around strategy and focused implementation that you normally devote to putting out all the "emergencies" that occur throughout the day.

These tools can be as low-tech as a sticky note reminder or as sophisticated as an automated "task ping" from your PC or laptop - anything that keeps you focused on the activities necessary to turn your plan into reality.

To stay focused on implementation, pause for a few minutes and plan out your time for the week ahead. Segment it into separate activity blocks, such as collecting data on strategy X, hands-on work on initiative Y, feedback sessions, customer meetings, communication events, etc. Really think about where you are spending your time and how much of it correlates to actually achieving your strategy.

Review the percentage of time you allocate to each activity block and ask: Does this align with getting us to our destination? Am I ignoring or missing critical areas? Are there areas taking up too much of my time for the anticipated return? Of what I am doing right now, what will have an impact a year from now?

Spending all your time contemplating the future might work for think tanks and ivory towers. But in the business world, it's the day-to-day actions (communicating, providing feedback, realigning behaviors, recognizing others, etc.) coupled with the strategic thinking and doing that equates to success.

Many leaders can come up with a winning strategy. It's the follow-through and focus on getting the right things done that separates the great leaders from the good ones. Don't just run, run in the right direction!


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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Why 'Top Down' Innovation is Difficult

by Jeffrey Phillips

As a person who works with a number of firms attempting to improve innovation capabilities, I am constantly astonished by the disconnect between what senior executives say they want and what actually gets done in most businesses, at least within the context of innovation. As they say in government, the President proposes and Congress disposes. Most executives I interact with say they want innovation, but the force of their desire and the clarity of their vision doesn't translate down to the people who will actually do the work. I think there are at least three reasons for this.

First, most senior executives aren't innovators themselves. Most senior executives grew through the organization and moved up by being effective stewards of the company's funds, resource and culture. Most of them were respectful of the history of the company and the brands. They progressed by doing things well, and doing things efficiently. Few senior executives in most organizations got to their posts by being demonstrably different. In fact we create celebrities of the CEOs like Jobs from Apple or Branson from Virgin who are really different CEOs, who shook up an industry or market. Since most senior executives weren't innovators and didn't obtain their jobs because of innovation, they don't really understand what's required when they say they want innovation. If your CEO or senior executive team is asking for innovation from the organization and you believe they haven't defined what they really want, stop waiting for the definition. Like pornography they'll know it when they see it and not before, and will probably struggle giving you a definition. If you decide to respond, simply write down your objectives and how you think that aligns to corporate strategy and start innovating. Most likely your model will be adopted.

Second, since most executives are keepers of the culture, and in many cases creatures of the culture, they don't understand the amount of change necessary to move a company that's been focused on effectiveness, efficiency, cost cutting and minimizing errors or mistakes to a company that embraces innovation. The biggest barrier to innovation isn't creativity or generating ideas or the ability to spot new opportunities. The biggest barrier to innovation is cultural inertia and fear. After years of very clear communication about effectiveness, lean, cost cutting and so forth, it requires a lot of trust and change to shift to an innovation posture, and cultures like battleships turn slowly. Since most executives don't have long tenures, cultural change sounds like a Bataan death march, and those requirements are ignored, misunderstood or swept under the rug. Even executives who understand the need for cultural change in support of innovation blanch at the work involved. If you decide to start innovating in your product group or business unit, don't wait for the organizational cultural change. You know what needs to happen, so create your own local culture in your product line or business unit that embraces innovation. You'll give yourself enough rope to succeed, or to hang yourself. Either way it's a decision.

Third, most executives are driven by the quarterly drumbeat of the market, and therefore many don't have patience to examine and understand longer term goals and strategy. Innovation, especially the disruptive innovation that everyone wants, is by its very nature a longer term effort. So, while organizations talk about "white space" and executives demand 'disruptive breakthroughs' many of them don't have the stomach for the longer term effort and don't understand the investment involved. Trend spotting and scenario planning isn't hard, it just requires a commitment to doing the work and understanding what the future may hold. Most firms don't do this well, if at all. Strange to think that the one place we are all heading is the one place most firms don't do a good job of understanding. For most executives the future, especially anything more than 5 years out, is simply unknowable and perhaps beyond their expected tenure, so why try? If you want to innovate, you've got to piece together views of the future beyond the annual plan. Most organizations have a product development cycle greater than 18 months, so a three to four year look into the future on a regular basis should be automatic, but it's not.

Fourth, some innovation programs assume that executives should be the ones to generate the ideas, and the middle managers, product managers and so forth are the ones who should figure out how the ideas get implemented as new products. With a few exceptions, I can't think of a worse way to run an innovation program. Most senior executives are rarely in touch with the lives of their actual customers, and have little understanding about the challenges the customers are trying to solve or the new opportunities they have in their lives. Most executives sit in meeting after meeting with other executives and never actually meet their customers or understand their lives. Like the GM executives who only drove GM cars and never purchased their own gas, many executives are isolated from their customers and their customers' needs. If you want to innovate, listen to the strategies being defined by the executive team and then go out and find out what customers really want and need, and align your ideas if possible to both requirements, giving more weight to the customers' needs. The ultimate fulfillment of the Peter Principle is that the higher you climb in executive management, the further removed you are from what an average customer really wants. This makes dictating the kinds of innovation necessary very difficult and results in vague requests for innovation.

Finally, many organizations are so large that it is difficult to have a crisp statement of strategy or strategic intent. Without clearly defined corporate goals and strategies, it becomes hard for innovators to decide which problems are more important and which ideas are valid. In the absence of clear strategic and strategic direction, all ideas seem relevant. In a large firm, innovation is all about resource allocation - picking the best ideas among a number of competing ideas. Your executive team needs help here as well. They want organic growth, differentiation or disruption, or some combination of those three things. They need to know that innovation is a tool in service of these corporate goals, not a strategy in and of itself. If you can help them identify and clarify the goals for the firm, then you can apply innovation as a tool to rapidly improve any of those three factors. Strategic clarity is usually lacking, but executives don't understand why that is so important to innovators.

If you are still reading at this point, you may think that 'bottom up' innovation is the only way to succeed, and for many firms I think that's probably right. Having people who understand the need of the customer means being close to the customer or prospect, which is less likely to happen at senior levels. It means more flexibility and risk taking, and having a longer term point of view, both less likely to happen at senior levels. If these things are true, what can executives do to spawn innovation?

They can impact the culture through rewards and recognition. They can understand their value in creating clear strategic goals and communicating those effectively. They can introduce tools, techniques and methodologies to help the innovators accomplish their goals. They can introduce a common language and approach for innovation as tools for innovators to use. They can encourage networking and interaction with other firms which will spawn many more new ideas. They can introduce new tools to gain customer insight. They can create new funding mechanisms beyond an annual plan. In essence, they can become the cheerleaders, funders and tool-bringers, which is really all they can do effectively.


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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Video Interview - Mary McDowell - Nokia's Chief Development Officer

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Mary McDowell, Chief Development Officer at Nokia at The Economist's conference "Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy". I'd like to share a video interview I did with Mary during the event:




In this video Mary talks about the future of mobile devices, use of the built-in sensors, information access in the developing world, Nokia Life Tools.



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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Video Interview with Mickey McManus - MAYA Design CEO and Principal

by Braden Kelley

I had the opportunity to interview Mickey McManus, Chief Executive Officer and Principal at MAYA Design at The Economist's conference "Innovation: Fresh Thinking for the Ideas Economy". I'd like to share a video interview I did with Mickey during the event:




In this video Mickey talks about the role of design and a bit about the future of pervasive computing.



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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

The Age of Innovation

by Alan M Webber

When this period we're in right now passes and whatever comes next arrives, we'll look back fondly on this current time and call it, quite rightly The Age of Innovation. Beset as we are by serious and pressing problems, we run the risk of failing to appreciate one of the most incredible periods of creative output in world history. Take a look around you and make your own list of the remarkable stream of innovation that is going on all around us.

It's been almost a decade since "innovation" became a business buzz word. Frankly I thought it was just the flavor of the month; I suspected we'd see companies trumpet their "innovative spirit" and then move on to something else when the marketing message got old.

Instead, innovation has become a sustained business element. It's not a fad, it's a requirement, a new component in every company's way of doing business. It's become an accepted part of "what we do here," in company's around the world in every industry.

Why?

Here's a partial list - feel free to add to it or make your own!

1. Global competition. The heat is on. If you want to compete, you've simply got to innovate. There are too many new entrants, too many rivals popping up all over the world. Years ago Ted Levitt wrote that "you can de-commoditize anything." Global competition has become the powerful prod to drive constant de-commoditization - which is all about innovation.


2. The web. The web does, in fact, change everything. It's part of the global economy, but it's also part of economic transparency. No more secrets - everyone can know what everyone else is doing. When that happens, when we shift to a knowledge economy, then innovation is the only way to stay ahead of the game. Innovate or die. Even for slow companies, that's an easy choice.


3. Technology. Computing power makes it faster, cheaper, and easier to test out new ideas. The mantra of "fail faster to succeed sooner" is all about the speed with which new ideas can be tried and tried again, before being brought to market. Modeling, sampling, revising--all are staples of the innovation economy.


4. Science. Think of all the innovations that are a direct product of science - from new construction techniques to food, health care, clothing, medicine, furniture, you name it. Materials science, chemistry, biology, earth sciences are only some of the categories where new discoveries are driving new innovations. Science is undergoing its own innovative revolution; new fields are being created at the intersections of what used to be compartmentalized categories. Out of those new fields we're seeing brilliant new insights leading to amazing new innovations.


5. Business model innovation. The mandate to compete is driving companies to go beyond product and service innovation to meta-innovation - competing on new business models. If you want to challenge your rivals, you don't simply out-produce them, you out-think them with a business model that undercuts their whole way of doing business. Innovation has gone meta.


6. Education. The spread of learning makes innovation a global phenomenon; at the same time, young, bright, technologically-savvy students are able to test their ideas and creativity without waiting for traditional jobs in traditional companies to give them permission to innovate. Education not only makes people smarter; it makes them eager to use what they've learned to do new things.


7. Design thinking. We've got new tools and new disciplines that are teaching us how to apply all those right-brain notions. Design gives shape to instinct; technology makes it possible to model design; the need for differentiation in the market provides big rewards for outstanding design. It's a system that works, producing design-driven innovation, differentiated products and services, and competitive rewards.


8. Natural imperatives. We're waking up to the idea that if we don't make major changes in how we produce, what we produce, and how we consume what we produce, we may not have the luxury to keep doing all this stuff. Sustainability is a powerful driver for innovation; the need for companies to do a better job of greening their operations is more than a temporary marketing ploy. Economics are changing, requirements are changing, and process and product innovations are resulting.


9. Social innovation. A lot of our social habits, structures, and behaviors are reaching the end of their shelf lives; people all over the world who've been overlooked are demanding new practices that take their needs into account. As we try to balance the needs and rights of a global population, social innovation is becoming the most rapidly evolving field for new ideas, business models, practices, and developments.

Take a look around you.

What are the shapes, forms, and practices that tell you we're living through the Age of Innovation?

What are you doing to be part of it?

One thing's sure: You don't want to miss it - you don't want to fail to appreciate it or fail to participate. Years from now we'll look back and think, for innovators and for innovation, this was the golden age.


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Alan M. Webber is author of "Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self"; he co-founded Fast Company magazine and previously was the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.

LG Contest - Imagine the Future of Mobile Phones

LG Mobile Phones is partnering with crowdSPRING to announce a new competition to define the next generation of mobile communication. If you are a U.S. resident (citizen or green card holder) age 18 (or age of majority in state of residence) and older, you can have a chance to design your vision of the next revolutionary LG mobile phone and compete for more than $80,000 in awards. Exercise your creative imagination and let your ideas be heard. You don't have to work for LG to make an impact on the future of mobile communication!


Your assignment: Imagine the future of mobile communication

Deadline: April 26, 2010


What they're looking for:

Predict what's next. What do you think the next generation of mobile phones should work or look like for the U.S. market in the next 2 to 3 years? We are asking for your help. We're NOT looking for a long list of specs or phone ideas that already exist. We're looking for a cool new concept or 'big idea' supported by usage scenario and user experience illustrations.

Go to crowdSPRING for more information.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Thinking the Unthinkable

The New Leadership Imperative

by Holly G. Green

People ask me all the time what I consider to be the biggest challenge facing today's business leaders.

I don't even hesitate on this one. It's the automatic assumption by most business leaders that we still live in a fairly predictable world.

Think about it. Six months ago, who would have thought that Toyota would be in the position it is today?

Here we have one of the largest, most successful, most respected companies in the world. And now it faces a crisis that is not just destroying its hard-earned reputation, but could well put it out of business.

That's unthinkable! And yet it's happening right before our eyes.

Sales of Toyotas are plummeting. The U.S. government is launching a full-scale investigation into the company's business practices. And a tidal wave of lawsuits around the faulty floor mat/throttle issue is about to be unleashed.

If Toyota is found to be at fault, and if it turns out they had knowledge of the defective design and did nothing about it, punitive damages could run into billions of dollars. Not even Toyota could withstand that kind of a financial hit and still survive.

I'm not saying the unthinkable will happen. But the possibility that Toyota could go out of business in the near term is very real. And that's the kind of world we now live in.

Leading a business in this kind of environment requires a new way of thinking. Considering that most business leaders still view the world as fairly predictable, the question becomes:


How do we train ourselves to think differently?


The answer is simple - pause, think, focus, run.

• Pause. Make it a habit to back away from the day-to-day and evaluate what is happening outside your industry as well as inside.


• Think. Constantly challenge your beliefs and assumptions about what you know to be true about your customers, your markets, your industry and the way you do things inside your organization. Take nothing for granted.


• Focus. Identify opportunities to add value to your customers in ways that nobody else is doing. Identify significant initiatives that support leveraging those opportunities, and get and keep everyone in your organization clear on achieving them.


• Run. Implement quickly, with focus and flexibility, knowing in advance that your new initiatives will not unfold exactly as planned.
  Then repeat this process.

During the think phase, develop the habit of engaging in scenario planning. Ask questions like:


"What would happen if our biggest competitor suddenly went out of business? What is taking place in other industries or other parts of the world that we could use to transform our industry?"


Many companies do this once a year during the strategic planning process. In today's world, that will no longer suffice. When a company as large and seemingly invincible as Toyota can have the rug pulled out from under them so quickly, it's clear the old rules no longer apply.

Pondering the imponderable should become an everyday occurrence in organizations. To be a successful leader today, thinking the unthinkable must become a way of life.


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Holly is the CEO of THE HUMAN FACTOR, Inc. (www.TheHumanFactor.biz) and is a highly sought after and acclaimed speaker, business consultant, and author. Her unique approach to creating strategic agility, helping others go slow to go fast, will change your thinking.

Innovation Perspectives February Wrapup

Innovation Perspectives is our monthly feature to present our loyal readers with different perspectives on a single topic all in one place along with the ability to compare, contrast and discuss them in the comments here on Blogging Innovation and in the Continuous Innovation group on LinkedIn. This month's topic was:


"Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?"

• Thank you to Jeffrey Phillips for submitting this month's topic

Here is a list of all of the authors that participated this month and links to their articles on this topic.

1. Jim Estill - Leader's Role in Trend Spotting


2. Mike Brown - Trendspotters' Fab Five


3. Braden Kelley - Trendspotting Trifecta


4. Rocco Tarasi - All of the Above


5. Jeffrey Phillips - Purpose, Frequency and Responsibility


6. Robert Brands - Shepherding a Team of Opportunists


7. Vyoma Kapur - Trend Spotting Collaboration


8. Adam Schorr - Your Trend Spotting Team

If you would like to suggest a topic for next month's Innovation Perspectives, or would like to contribute, please leave a comment or contact us.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovation Perspectives - Purpose, Frequency and Responsibility

This is the fifth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Jeffrey Phillips

I've written before about the reactive nature of many businesses. It often seems there are more incentives to ignore signals in the marketplace and then conduct heroic efforts at recovery than to simply plan effectively and study trends and act accordingly. The purpose of today's topic is to examine whether or not trend spotting and scenario planning is important and valuable (hopefully already answered) and if trend spotting and scenario planning are important, what individual or team within your firm should be focused on this work, and how frequently it should be done.

First, let's put to bed the debate (admittedly a thin one) about whether or not your organization should track trends and try to understand likely future scenarios. The answer for most firms is a resounding "yes", especially given the increasing pace of change. In the past you might have been able to argue that change was slow and steady, and an occasional peak in the periscope was all that was necessary. As globalization increases and the pace of change increases, you need to be identifying trends and making sense of those trends consistently, or the disrupters will eat your market share for lunch. Your planning efforts can't assume the future looks a lot like the present, and also must look further out in time. You need to look further out in time because even though the demand cycle has sped up, many firms haven't improved their product or service development cycle, so if you only look a year or two into the future, but it takes 18 months to two years to get an idea through the pipeline, you are shooting behind the curve.

OK, let's assume for the sake of argument that you agree that trend spotting and scenario planning are valuable. Then the question becomes - who should spot and capture trends, who should develop scenarios and who should interpret the results? These questions need to be answered on two levels: at the corporate or business unit level, and at the product or service level.

Trend spotting should be underway, all the time, as a consistent activity by a wide range of people within your organization. Those trends should be reported to a central analyst (individual or team) who is capturing, recording and tracking trends. This model works at both the product/business unit level and at the corporate level. We at OVO emphasize this work at the corporate level, because work at a product or business unit level can too easily be focused too narrowly on a specific product or market or geography, and miss trends or disruptions from other sources. We'd rather see a number of people recognizing and reporting trends throughout the organization, centralized in some team at the corporate level, who capture, report and synthesize the trends, typically in four or five categories (demographic, technological, economic, governmental). One central repository of these trends reduces the "my trends are more accurate than yours" debates and should ensure a more all encompassing view of trends. Of course everything I've described can be replicated in a business unit or product line, with the awareness that these are often more narrowly tailored.

If we centralize this skill, what kinds of people are necessary to capture, analyze, report and synthesize trends? Anyone in the organization who reads, or interacts with customers or business partners, or who has an interest in what's happening or unfolding can capture and register trends. We've set up several systems like this where anyone can report trends. Additionally, the central team can also track and register trends. As trends are recorded and categorized, we can also begin to identify which are important and relevant for the business, and request more insight or investigation into some trends over others. As this is an ongoing activity, over time it becomes evident that some "trends" fade away while some are enforced. Periodically (we recommend twice a year) a team comes together to select trends and build scenarios about a 5 to 7 year distant future.

We tend to pick 5 to 7 year futures because in many firms the selection and implementation of a new idea and the rollout of a new product can take several years, so we want to get the product to market slight early rather than slightly late. With the pace of change as is currently experienced, trying to understand more than seven years into the future is really a crap shoot. Using a horizon less than three years is really not effective, as most concepts will be incremental.

Who should develop the scenarios? We believe these should be guided or facilitated by people who don't necessarily have a vested interest in the outcome. A scenario guided by a product manager is likely to reinforce his or her biases, since they have a stake in the outcome. Again a central innovation team acting as facilitators with a representatives from a product unit or business unit can mix the best of both worlds and ensure a relatively unbiased examination of several potential future outcomes.

Note that through all of this discussion we assume that this function exists as a continuous offering over time, not a discrete, start-stop program but a team that builds insights and skills and offers them to executives within the business. If you want the inexpensive, low hanging fruit of innovation, here it is. No where else can you get a great understanding of the near future and your opportunities and challenges for less cost. The only requirement after the scenario plan will be your ability to take action.


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Jeffrey Phillips is a senior leader at OVO Innovation. OVO works with large distributed organizations to build innovation teams, processes and capabilities. Jeffrey is the author of "Make us more Innovative", and innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com.

Innovation Perspectives - Trendspotting Trifecta

This is the third of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Braden Kelley

I believe this question should really be broken up because there are three VERY different (and incredibly important) pursuits intermingled here:

1. Trend spotting
   
2. Putting emerging behaviors into context for a business
   
3. Putting emerging needs into context for a business

Only at the very beginning of a business, when it is all or nothing for a small team of founders, should responsibility for these three tasks be combined. The reason responsibility for these three different pursuits should be split up is because each requires a different way of thinking, that often requires different types of people to generate the most relevant and actionable insights.

As I've written before, insights and execution are the real keys to business success, and in building any successful innovation - the insights come first. So, combining these three pursuits properly and getting the insights correct is incredibly important - otherwise you'll design, build, and distribute a solution that misses the mark with customers.

Trend spotting requires big picture thinking, a talent for separating the notable from the unimportant, the ability to see how potential trends connect together, and the vision to see the impact of this trend intersection (what megatrends might they point to, etc.).

Putting emerging behaviors into context for a business requires an incredible capacity for insightful observation, the ability to spot influential thinkers who are good at identifying and describing changing behaviors, and the skills to synthesize a collection of perspectives into a cohesive view of the future. This view of the future must of course have a strong chance of being correct.

Putting emerging needs into context for a business is incredibly difficult and requires understanding how emerging trends and behaviors will intersect with new technologies and other business capabilities to expose new customer needs. Those new needs then represent potential growth areas for businesses to enter with new solutions. The goal of course is to identify and act upon these emerging needs before the competition has the opportunity to observe these needs as expressed behaviors and actions and react.

The one skill that all three share in common however, is the ability to disconnect one's own perspective from the changing perspectives of others. Whether you as an organization choose to hire people into these roles, hire in consultants to provide this insight, or to spread the responsibilities around the organization, you must have a strategy.

Personally, I believe organizations may soon begin creating insight networks within their organizations in the same way that they currently do with innovation. This means having a central insights team at Corporate HQ with strong executive support that is responsible for managing the process, the distributed global network, its training/certification, and its outputs. This does not have to mean starting a new team - companies could incorporate these responsibilities within an existing dedicated-innovation infrastructure. So, can an insight management software industry be far behind?

And last but not least you will need to assign people to monitor trends and emerging behaviors and needs from Six Ways to Sunday:

1. Demographic and Psychographic Changes
   
2. Legal and Political Changes
   
3. Different Geographies
   
4. Different Industries
   
5. New Supplier and Technology Capabilities
   
6. New Business Capabilities and Business Models

Do you have a strategy and responsibilities in place for spotting trends and emerging needs/behaviors in your organization?

What are you waiting for?


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Innovation Perspectives - Trendspotters' Fab Five

This is the second of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?'. Here is the next perspective in the series:

by Mike Brown

Who should be deciphering the future and helping shape how a business understands and prepares for it?

The first inclination might be to think about a specific part of an organization for the function. It's important though to identify the individuals well-suited to this challenging role. From that perspective, five capabilities are vital to successfully champion this effort:

1. Having a Natural External Perspective


• Creating solid insights about the future depends on starting with a view outside, not inside the business. It's a natural orientation that not all people share. Someone in a trend-interpreting role has to be a sponge for gathering, processing, and extrapolating information on markets, customers, competitors, and a broad set of inputs on the economy, demographics, and other environmental factors.


2. Being an Integrator


• Being able to do something with a broad set of future-looking inputs requires someone with a solid perspective on the business and what drives its success. This has to be coupled with the ability to understand how other industries and markets affect the business today and imagine how they might in the future. Finally, it demands a strong command of frameworks to integrate meaningful interpretation of broad, and typically incomplete, forward-oriented data sets.


3. Possessing Both Left and Right-brained Orientations


• Ideally solid quantitative metrics (i.e., demographics, demand forecasting, industry sizing trends) are available to help form relevant predictions. Often though, numeric information isn't available. In any case, analysis has to be coupled with creating compelling stories to drive strategic actions anticipating and preparing for the future. "Whole brain thinkers" are essential, since they provide left-brain quantitative and analytical skills coupled with creative, communications-oriented right-brain perspectives to help make on-target, forward-looking action happen.


4. Displaying Strong Intuition


• There's no single clear picture of what the future holds. Creating credible future scenarios requires tremendous amounts of interpretation and extrapolation. Some of this can be learned; much of it can't. Trend watchers and prognosticators need to be able to instinctively "know" what all the information they're seeing means. If it's a broad intuitive sense, that's fantastic. Even if it's industry-specific, that can be fine too. I used to work with an economist who had been in transportation for many years and had tremendous instincts for our market. I'm not sure he could have been dropped into another industry and had the same feel, but for our market, he could look at a competitor's quarterly numbers and tell you exactly what was and would be happening in its logistics operation with high certainty.


5. Building Powerful Relationships and Networks


• It's quite a list to this point, isn't it? It's challenging for one person to excel at all of these skills. As a result, the fifth essential capability is to be an outstanding relationship builder. This includes the ability to recognize the talents necessary in others who can help shape a view of the future along with the interpersonal skills to cultivate and share value throughout the network of experts that's needed.

There are certainly other skills and capabilities which make for a strong trend watcher and interpreter. But if you can find someone in your business solidly embodying these skills, don't wait for a clearer view of the future. Get them into the job right now!


You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'Who should be responsible (if anyone) for trend-spotting and putting emerging behaviors and needs into context for a business?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Mike Brown is an award-winning innovator in strategy, communications, and experience marketing. He authors the Brainzooming TM blog, and serves as the company's chief Catalyst. He wrote the ebook "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" and is a frequent keynote presenter.

Cisco Announces $250,000 iPrize Competition v2.0

by Braden Kelley

Cisco has announced its second Cisco iPrize Competition. At stake is a $250,000 Grand Prize that will be awarded after eight selected finalists have the opportunity to present their innovation idea to Cisco's selection commitee using Cisco Telepresence.

The first Cisco iPrize was awarded to an idea focused on reducing the energy consumption in the electrical grid. This idea is currently undergoing development in Cisco. But the winners are back at it again and have entered an idea in Cisco iPrize v2.0.

I had the opportunity to do a video interview with Sharon Wong, Director of Business Development in Cisco's Emerging Technology Group about the competition:

Interview with Sharon Wong about Cisco iPrize from Braden Kelley on Vimeo.

In this open, global competition entrepreneurs submit proposals and collaborate to create the seed idea for Cisco's next billion-dollar business.

You have until April 30, 2010 to submit your idea. Idea submissions should fall in one of four categories:

1. The Future of Work: New solutions that accelerate and change the way we do business


2. The Connected Life: Technological inspirations that dramatically improve living conditions and disseminate culture


3. New Ways to Learn: Next-generation solutions that transform when, where, and how people learn.


4. The Future of Entertainment: New solutions that change how people play together

Below on the left you'll find a video of Marthin De Beer announcing the Cisco iPrize Competition and on the right you can watch Guido Jouret speak about some of Cisco's views on what makes a big idea:



You can submit an idea by yourself or you can work together as a team. Once ideas are submitted, iPrize community members can vote for the best ideas, and otherwise engage with the community of people who have submitted ideas. For complete rules and other information, please check out the Cisco iPrize Questions and Answers.


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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Who Killed Our Business?

by Paul Sloane

Most business managers go through the annual ritual of budgeting. We plan the next one or two years based on the actual results of the most recent year. We draw up a spreadsheet and plan line by line - sales revenues up 10% and costs held to a 5% increase means a modest improvement in profits.

We should have learned by now that this is a sterile process. The past is a poor guide to the future and its innovations. In 1972 the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth." It was a model that predicted what would happen to energy, food, population, environment, etc. It concluded that essential resources like oil would run out in the 1990s and that economic growth was unsustainable. It extrapolated the future based on the past. And it got it wrong precisely because the future is not like the past.


Blocking out innovative ideas

The planning straitjacket means that we are restricted to small incremental increases in revenues and we are squeezed on expenses. There is no scope for the radical improvements that the business so desperately needs. By thinking in terms of last year plus 10% we are blocking out big ideas. The motor car was not the horse-drawn carriage plus 10%, Amazon was not Barnes and Noble plus 10%, and the Smart Car is not your average sedan with an extra 10%. Each was a leap, an innovation, a different approach.

Nokia started as a wood pulp mill in Finland in 1865. It made paper products, rubber products and became an energy company before moving into consumer electronics and becoming the world leader in mobile phones. Virgin was founded by Richard Branson as a record label. It now offers a range of products in travel, entertainment, finance and communications. These successful companies did not get where they are today by modest incremental steps, but by combining efficiency with bold ventures into new arenas.


Who killed our business?

I use an exercise in my creative leadership workshops to shake people out of incremental thinking and planning. The team imagines that they are sitting in the room six years from now asking the question, "Who killed our business?" The premise is that some powerful force has put their company out of business. Individually and in teams they have to conceive of changes in technology, processes, fashion, competition or demographics that might completely replace their current business model.

There are many examples of how the unexpected has devastated businesses. Typewriter manufacturer Smith Corona was wiped out by word processing software on PCs. Polaroid was sideswiped by digital camera technology. MacDonalds has fallen victim to the rise of anti-corporatism and the power of the book, "No Logo." Downloading music on the Internet is hurting music companies. A loss of reputation demolished Arthur Anderson. Accounting scandals killed Enron and Parmalat. Laser eye surgery is a threat to makers of spectacles and contact lenses.

Starting with a blank piece of paper, people have to imagine a major new trend or approach which would eliminate them and at the same time meet the needs of their customers better. Once they have agreed on some possible scenarios they need to design ideal companies to exploit the new approaches. Instead of starting from today and planning forward, they start from the future and plan for the future.

You can aid the process by first discussing fashion trends, technology developments and demographic movements. The purpose is to startle people out of a complacent and comfortable view of the future and to consider instead a vortex of dangers and opportunities.

Spreadsheets are great tools for recording figures and for trying different assumptions in an existing model. But among all the many menu bars and commands in Excel there is no instruction for "use your imagination" or "conceive entirely new possibility." Try getting your team together and brainstorm some radical ideas. Develop scenarios that are imaginative but possible. Build some prototypes to test new products or business methods. Test them in the marketplace. An experiment will teach you far more than any spreadsheet. It is by systematically testing boundaries and pushing into new areas that companies like Nokia and Virgin succeed.


Conclusion

Of course every business needs a budget as a yardstick to measure against. But the budget is not a strategy for success or even for survival. Leadership means taking the business from where it is today to somewhere new and different. It means using imagination and innovation to design a better tomorrow.


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Paul Sloane writes, speaks and leads workshops on creativity, innovation and leadership. He is the author of The Innovative Leader published by Kogan-Page.

Realistic Impossibilities

by Kathy Robison

Being on the wrong end of the continuum between realistic and impossible is what plagues many of today's large multi-national corporations. The fear of failure by employees who are only partially engaged and don't entirely feel like valued members of the team, will always translate into goals and ideas that are mediocre and achievable and never ones that are innovative or impossible. In the 21st century, which is fraught with global economic adjustments, global-interdependence, developed world saturation, and a consumer base that is rapidly changing, creating the impossible is the only way to break away from the competition, ensure success and create a meaningful impact on the world.

Unfortunately most large companies live in the land of the realistic. It has permeated their business model, their culture, and the expectations of their customers. Many of these companies are starting to realize that creativity, thinking differently, and innovation are the keys to success in the future, but they feel stuck in how to achieve such goals. Hopefully some will view them as impossible and find the courage to achieve them anyway. You see, if you want to create a culture that reaches for the impossible, despite the odds, it must begin at the top and it often begins with an updated and innovative business model.

Designing an innovative and exciting business model with impossible goals is often a much easier and less expensive way to creating a culture of creativity and innovation that trying to dictate it. Processes, procedures, and changes in organizational structure can be dictated; innovation and creative thinking must be experienced and nurtured. The act of dictating, making rules, and imposing your will on others are the very things that have turned off our creativity, thinking, and innovative traits in the past. It was OK in the last century where the goals were to build, duplicate, and be efficient. The difference now is that we are moving from a world of industrialization and knowledge to one of conceptualization and connection.

Yes, there will be impediments and unforeseen circumstances that get in the way of creating the impossible, but they must be viewed as learning and growth opportunities. And, yes, there is always the possibility of failure, but failure is not altogether a bad thing. We must learn to accept failure as a part of the process of success. Unfortunately, many corporate cultures are so anti-failure that they no longer reach for anything exciting, tantalizing, or remotely interesting, which are the very things that improve productivity, reduce turnover, attract talent and create cultures that regularly innovate.

The disillusionment with big business and the realization that job security was really an illusion anyway is the fuel for new competition that will come charging out of the gates with all of these new attributes in tact. During the next 50 years, we will see some of the biggest companies in the world come crumbling down as well as the birth of some of the greatest companies in the world. It will be an interesting game to watch and fascinating to see the rules of play take a completely new direction. Here are a few of my favorite new perspective one-liners to start 2010:

• Do as Wayne Gretzky and "Skate to where the puck will be"


• Have the capacity to collaborate with the most unlikely of players


• Create something larger than the products you sell


• Lead with the tenacity of an underdog

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Kathy Robison is the CEO of YURU, (The Guru Is You), dedicated to assisting businesses to realize the full potential of their success through innovative business strategies, executive coaching and leadership development.

Do you have an innovation blind-spot?

by Mike Myatt

My experience with most executives and entrepreneurs is that they are totally committed to and focused on success. As a result, many of them tend to have a major blind-spot (translation: weakness) when it comes to the anticipation of set-backs. While this is understandable, it is nonetheless naive, and it constitutes a major flaw in the business logic of most strategic plans. This is so much the case that the most often overlooked aspect of strategic planning is adequately addressing contingencies as part of the planning process. As you get ready to usher in 2010, my suggestion is to take one final look back at your planning and assure that you've anticipated all the ways in which things can go wrong, and what you'll do when the inevitable happens...

The reality surrounding the success of any implementation is found by understanding that no matter how smart you are, things rarely go as planned. Those that plan in advance for changes in circumstances can adroitly address issues when they occur, while those who must deal with "unforeseen" circumstances don't tend to fare as well. Smart leaders view obstacles as a constant rather than a variable, and incorporate that thinking into their planning. Any well crafted strategy anticipates obstacles and factors in multiple "what if" scenarios. Leaders that wait until a problem occurs to deal with it place themselves and their organization at a huge strategic disadvantage.

The two most common outcomes created by a lack of contingency planning are: 1.) watching things grind to a halt as you scramble to evaluate options, and; 2.) having fewer options to assess based upon the new found time constraint. Speed is your friend and should be leveraged to your advantage. Speed is aided by anticipation and slowed by a lack thereof. Smart leaders will do everything in their power to keep a decreae in velocity from becoming a self imposed adversary due to a lack of contingency planning.

It is important to remember that contingency planning is a key to avoiding costly mistakes. In most cases your wins won't put you out of business, but your losses most certainly can. The three most critical items to focus on when conducting your planning are:

1. Insure that personal accountability is present on any major benchmark, milestone or deliverable.


2. Make sure that someone has identified the 5 worst things that could happen with any initiative, what steps can be taken to prevent their occurrence, and what measures will be taken to overcome them if they happen?


3. Make sure that advance warning signs for potential failures are identified and understood so that you have plenty of runway in front of you to implement your contingency plans.

Good luck and good planning.

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Mike Myatt, is a Top CEO Coach, author of "Leadership Matters...The CEO Survival Manual", and Managing Director of N2Growth.

2010 - Year of the Man Purse

by Braden Kelley

I've been trying to decide whether to make any 2010 predictions, and I never thought that this would end up being the one that I chose, but here goes:

2010 will be the year of the man purse - thanks to the proliferation of netbooks, e-readers, and a new generation of tablets launching this year from Apple, Plastic Logic, Google, and others.

It probably won't happen in the first half of the year, but by the time back-to-school and christmas roll around, man purses will finally start to catch on.

Some people will call it a satchel to make themselves feel more manly, and others will see no shame in calling it a man purse, but the fact remains that people will want a way to keep close at hand the gadgets that they are beginning to see as an extension of themselves.

Way back in 2006 celebrities including Robert Downey Jr., David Beckham, and Cuba Gooding Jr. were using man purses, but they didn't cross the chasm because there wasn't enough value created for the average joe. But now, don't be surprised if by the end of 2010 you see more celebrities like possibly Shaquille O'Neil, LeBron James, or Chad OchoCinco sporting a man purse to help carry the gadgets they choose to use to connect with their fans.

For my money, the biggest unknown is not whether man purses catch on, but which devices will be their main residents. Which devices will earn the right to be worn?

Apple is not going to have this market to themselves, no matter how cool their tablet might be.

So, what kind of device will Google come up with?

Can Amazon counter with something to keep the Kindle relevant?

What do you think?

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Electronic Readers Hit the Big Time

Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook

by Kevin Roberts

Fear of new technology is not new. In 1982, the king of all Hollywood lobbyists, Jack Valenti, told the US Congress:


"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."


Hysteria aside, the movie industry was utterly convinced that the advent of video cassettes would destroy the film industry. 30 years on, video and DVD have had the opposite effect - far from undermining the industry, they are integral to its ongoing profitability. How could Hollywood keep producing so many films, at such great cost and such variable quality without the "straight to DVD" option? Even the notorious box-office bomb, Waterworld, almost broke even in the end, thanks to DVD sales.

There has been similar angst about the fate of books and the publishing industry since the arrival of the Internet and new technology like e-readers. In 2007, the US National Endowment for the Arts reported a "remarkable decline" of American reading habits, its chairman saying that it would damage the civic, political and economic fabric of the country. The New Yorker chimed in, quoting sociologists who claimed that "reading for pleasure will one day be the province of a special 'reading class', much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy." The Boston strangler strikes again!

E-readers are all the rage this holiday season. Industry experts forecast that Amazon will sell 900,000 Kindles in the last two months of 2009. The Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, which sold-out before it even hit the shelves, are also on a tear. There was a lot of skepticism about e-readers in the first couple of years, and a lot of doomsayers who thought they spelled the end of the written word.

The truth is that technology has ended the monopoly of bound, mass-produced manuscripts we call books, and expanded choice for readers. We can read on the computer screen, on dedicated e-readers like Kindle and Nook or on our cell-phones.

We love books for the stories and the emotional power, the insights and inspirations. Who ever puts down a great book and says, "Wow, I loved the paper-stock, and the font was awesome!"

People who love reading will read more than ever before - I know I do.

Circumstances, mood and moment will determine how and what we read - the Kindle is great for plane trips or train-rides; the cell-phone works well for a quick catch-up with emails or news, and nothing (for me, at least) will beat the pleasures of a book on a beach, or a bookshop on a rainy afternoon.


Editor's note: Will Apple go after the e-reading market with the rumored Apple tablet?

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Kevin Roberts is the CEO worldwide of The Lovemarks Company, Saatchi & Saatchi. For more information on Kevin, please go to www.saatchikevin.com. To see this blog at its original source, please go to www.krconnect.blogspot.com.