Innovation - Have the Last Laugh

Book Review and Innovation Summary - "The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

Innovation is hard, dirty, contentious work full of creative tension and disagreements and barriers to be overcome. All the more reason why it is important for innovation managers to not take themselves too seriously, and to know how to loosen up and allow as much fun into the process as possible. As I've said before, innovation and business success are the result of the quality of your insights and the quality of your execution.

You have to have find a way to have some fun on the bumpy road to innovation, or you will definitely fall into a pothole and stay there.

"The Levity Effect" by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher is all about why it pays to lighten up in business. It is no accident that many of the best places to work are also some of the best performing businesses. Here are a couple of quotes from the book that capture its essence:


"An increasing body of research demonstrates that when leaders lighten up and create a un workplace, there is a significant increase in the level of employee trust, creativity, and communication..."

"...fun in great companies is natural, organic... The relationship comes before the fun, which makes the fun real and acceptable."


I'd like to focus one particular quote from the book from Amy Lyman, co-founder of the Great Place to Work Institute - "Fun benefits from high trust and vice versa. Since people are trusting, they aren't afraid to make fools of themselves and take more risks. And in turn trust is reinforced and benefits from the fun experiences people have." - The reason you should think slowly and deeply about this quote is that, when it comes to innovation, risk-averse cultures find it the most difficult to innovate. So, if people in your organization don't find it safe to take risks in small ways, what makes you think they will feel safe taking the big risks that innovation often requires?

When it comes to Continuous Innovation, if it wasn't clear before, let me say that I believe that building a culture conducive and supportive of innovation is the real key to success (and the hardest thing to do). If you've already created a culture of respect and trust in your organization, then fun is the next step, and you should consider this book for your reading list.

You'll have to read the book to really understand the full importance of levity, but just to be clear, that when it comes to levity, they're not saying that as a manager that you have to be a comedian, but you do need allow yourself to be human, to connect with people, and to have a sense of humor. Ultimately, people are less creative and innovative when they are stressed, so if you as a manager can help people feel more relaxed and make the atmosphere a little less tense, and show people a little respect, then who knows what creativity might spring forth.


"Levity is the link between trust, respect, and the engagement of a workforce. It is human alchemy."


Want to hear something truly disturbing from the book that will really make you re-evaluate your life? A study referenced in the book found that preschool children laugh up to 400 times a day, while adults only manage 15. Fifteen! "No wonder kids think adults are about as fun as a box of hair."

• So, how much fun are you?
  
• How much fun is your workplace?
  
• Is your workplace conducive to innovation?

Please leave a comment and let us know. :-)


As a special bonus, here are Scott Christopher and Adrian Gostick talking on The Today Show about the book:





My interview with "The Levity Effect" author Scott Christopher can be found here.


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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.

Is Innovation a Fad?

by Jeffrey Phillips

I had a rather disconcerting part in a recent discussion with some senior leaders and executives who were discussing innovation. It was interesting to hear from some of them that they believe "innovation" is a fad, and will run its course shortly. They believe that innovation is simply another "quick fix" elixir cooked up by management consultants to find new things to sell to senior executives. Some others in the discussion believed that innovation is more systemic, and will have a longer shelf life, and add value for many years to come. I found myself disagreeing with both schools of thought.

The cynics suggest that innovation is simply a buzz word for creating new products or services, something that many firms already do. In that regard they view innovation as the current flash in the pan, meant to distract everyone from the real problems and place a nice bow on a box that already exists. To these cynics I say - you couldn't be more wrong. In a market that is moving and changing as quickly as the one we are experiencing now, and an environment where consumers are demanding more, and better, products and services, and in a production environment where any new idea can be copied fairly quickly, the only real winners are those who create substantially new concepts on a consistent basis. The old, static product lives and days of lower competition are over. Innovation isn't a "nice to have" or a "flash in the pan", it is rapidly becoming the most important skill set your organization can acquire.

For those who believe innovation does add value and can be more systemic, I say they are right, but only partly so. They see innovation as a tool that can be used, until the next tool comes along. This follows the theory of "waves". There was the "wave" of quality improvement, followed by the "wave" of rightsizing and outsourcing. Now, these folks believe, is the time for the "wave" of innovation, which will run its course and introduce a new wave of something else yet unseen. The problem with considering innovation as a wave with a specific time horizon is that new products and services will continue to be important long after the expected time frame of the "wave" is complete. If your investment is to simply adopt innovation as the next tool down the pike, and expect to jettison it once the wave is over, your team won't commit the necessary resources to innovate effectively. It will be a sideline to the "real work" of the organization, eagerly awaiting the next wave or fad.

No, here's where I diverge from the discussion. We are in a fundamental environmental shift. The pace of change and the increase in global competition means that the way we work has to change. Innovation isn't an interesting sideshow or fad, unless your management team allows it to be. Innovation isn't a wave or trend for the next "x" years to be replaced by something else. Innovation is THE differentiator between firms that are thriving and healthy today, and those that will be thriving and healthy a decade from now, because innovation isn't a fad, and isn't a wave, but is going to become a permanent way of life, a sustaining capability for the firms that understand the shift underway and adopt innovation as a cultural imperative.

If you think this doesn't matter then simply consider the culture and environment of the organization where you'd most like to work. Do you want to work in a firm that places emphasis on the future and staying abreast of trends and new ideas, or do you want to work in a firm where the constant activity is reacting to what other firms do in the market? The most innovative firms will attract the best people and accelerate their capabilities, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The firms with less innovation skill will atrophy because they can't compete on new ideas, and they can't generate new products and services fast enough to retain customers.

What's it going to take for us to wake up and realize that innovation is the most important skill we can gain within most organizations? I recognize that this kind of change threatens the status quo, but if we ignore the shifts underway in the market and economy we risk a future with far fewer jobs and far fewer opportunities.


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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.

Building Up Innovation Capital

by Rowan Gibson

As usual it was Peter Drucker, the godfather of modern management, who said it first. Right back there in 1966 (!), in his landmark book "The Effective Executive", Drucker argued that companies would need to build a new kind of organizational capital as the industrial economy gave way to the knowledge economy. His famous proclamation was that, in future, brainpower would be a more valuable asset for wealth creation than factories and financial clout. All of which came true, of course. But that was not the end of it. Now, over four decades later, we are once again challenged to rethink organizational capital as we make the transition from a knowledge economy to an innovation economy. And that creates a new agenda for every single company.

For most of the last century, as well as the previous one, we looked at companies as if they were comprised of only two kinds of capital: financial and structural. Financial capital obviously refers to a company's balance sheet. Structural capital is the value of its physical assets - its networks, facilities, warehouses, plants, inventory, and so on. Thus, if we had gone back and spoken to the super-rich industrialists and financiers of the late 19th and early 20th century - such as Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan - they would have told us that this was the only way to measure the worth of an enterprise. Move forward a few decades and the same would have been true if you had talked to great business builders like Henry Ford, Alfred P. Sloan, Thomas Watson Sr., or any of their corporate accountants. What counted back then was the tangible stuff that is easy to quantify and monetize on a financial statement.

In the 1980s and 1990s, that began to change. In large part because the stock market value of companies was beginning to get out of all proportion to the "book value" of their physical assets. Microsoft, for example, had an almost 8-to-1 ratio of market value to physical assets value. And when Philip Morris bought Kraft in 1988 for $12.9 billion, the "hard assets" of the firm were calculated to be worth only $1.3 billion. That means Philip Morris was paying a full $11.6 billion - or 89.9% of the transaction price - for "other stuff" that wasn't even on the balance sheet: intangible stuff like brand equity, marketing capability, and so on.

British futurologist Hugh Macdonald coined the phrase "intellectual capital" to describe these intangible assets. He defined it as "knowledge that exists in an organization that can be used to create differential advantage." And in a seminal article in Fortune magazine in 1991, Thomas Stewart wrote that "every company depends increasingly on knowledge - patents, processes, management skills, technologies, information about customers and suppliers, and old-fashioned experience. Added together this knowledge is intellectual capital."

From then on, we had three forms of capital - three basic kinds of assets - with which to measure a company's worth. But in a new, innovation-based economy, where value-creation is the new Holy Grail, the way we define, measure and manage organizational capital is again woefully incomplete. In 2001, strategy guru Gary Hamel argued that financial, structural and intellectual capital, by themselves, do not create new wealth. And I agree with his astute observation. Think about GM. If any company on earth ever had huge amounts of money, massive dealer and supplier networks, giant manufacturing plants, countless technological patents, well-oiled management processes, tons of customer information and decades of industry experience, it would have to be General Motors. Yet where is GM today? In effect, all of those assets have proven to be almost worthless in terms of creating new wealth.

Hamel's view is that the three traditional forms of capital are largely inanimate. In today's competitive era, they need to be animated or catalyzed by three new kinds of organizational capital if we want to translate them into wealth. He calls these "imagination capital", "entrepreneurial capital", and "relationship capital", all of which are different forms of human capital.

Consider the first one. Most companies would tell you that knowledge is a critical resource. Many large organizations have internal KM efforts aimed at sharing information and experience across the firm with a view to continuous improvement. But in a world where the pace of change has gone hypercritical, we're finding out that success has less and less to do with learning from the past, and more and more to do with imagining future opportunities. Knowledge has become a commodity. Let's face it, you can go online and find out almost anything with just one or two clicks. So the issue is not how much you know but how creatively you can leverage what you know. Today, the advantage increasingly goes to those firms that develop "imagination capital" - which is the capacity to dramatically reconceive what the firm is and imagine entirely new uses for its financial, structural and intellectual capital. Einstein's oft-quoted reflection that "imagination is more important than knowledge" becomes the mantra of the innovation economy.

Second, companies need to develop their "entrepreneurial capital", which means building the entrepreneurial spirit into many, many employees across the whole organization, not just in an incubator or some new venture division that exists out on the periphery of an otherwise orthodox company. It's about creating a cultural environment where the entrepreneurial spirit is everywhere; where ordinary employees can have the courage to experiment and try something new, where they can get unfettered access to the financial and human capital they need to push their ideas forward.

The third of these new kinds of capital is "relationship capital" (or what I would call "network capital"), which refers to the connections a company can make between previously isolated people, ideas, resources and domains - both across and beyond the organization. Innovation is so often about spotting the opportunities that come from recombining and blending all of these ingredients. The quality of a company's network of relationships - its ability to connect with individuals and organizations that have very different skill sets and capabilities - is becoming more and more critical to its own capacity to innovate.

Here's the sad reality: most companies don't have a clue about how to support
the development of these new forms of capital. So the challenging agenda for
organizations around the world will be to think about exactly what it takes to
build, measure, manage and exploit what amounts to their "innovation capital" - which is so essential to creating wealth in our times.

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Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on enterprise innovation. He is co-author of the bestseller "Innovation to the Core" and a much in-demand public speaker around the globe. On Twitter he is @RowanGibson.

Battlefield Innovation Lessons for Business Leaders

by Paul Sloane

Let's be clear, business is not war. But if you are operating in a fierce marketplace then it can feel like it. Many of the methods we use in our sales campaigns, marketing strategies and competitive tactics are based on military analogies. So what lessons can business leaders today learn from the history of warfare? Here are some that seem particularly relevant.

David vs. Goliath - 1000 BC?

Goliath was a giant and the Philistine's champion at man-to-man combat. David was a young shepherd boy. Goliath expected to overwhelm his opponent in a sword fight but David chose to fight on different terms. He defeated Goliath by using an unusual weapon, the sling, with pinpoint accuracy.

Lessons: It is no use going up against someone who has an 8-ft spear with a 4-ft spear. You need a different weapon. If you are smaller you have to be agile and different. If your competitor is the giant in the market, you need a radical approach so that you can strike rapidly and accurately. This is what Direct Line did when they used telephone technology to sell car insurance directly while the major players were using brokers.

Battle of Crecy - 1346

The English army of about 14,000 men under Edward III had ravaged northern France. They were finally confronted on August 26, 1346 by an army of some 40,000 Frenchmen under Philip VI. Battles were normally fought by knights on horseback and the French, with such a numerical advantage, felt confident. But the English had a new and superior technology, the longbow. Their archers were trained in rapid fire and could sustain a rate of over 10 arrows per minute. Each arrow could penetrate armor. It was the first time that such a mass volley of arrows had been used in warfare. The French attacked in waves and they were cut down relentlessly by the power, speed and range of their opponents' archers.

Lessons: One of the best ways to beat an established competitor is with a new technology. Innovation can overcome a strong opponent. Focus your firepower on the target. Amazon used internet technology to directly address the needs of book buyers and to run rings around the established high street vendors.

Battle of Trafalgar - 1805

Traditionally, naval battles were fought by lining up two fleets in parallel line so that they could deploy the maximum firepower from their canons. At the battle of Trafalgar, Villeneuve, the French admiral, formed his fleet of 33 ships into a line. But Nelson did not line up in parallel. He split his 27 ships into two squadrons and attacked at right angles to the French line. In the hectic battle that ensued Nelson died but the British were victorious and established a naval supremacy that lasted over 100 years.

Lessons: If you do not have a superior force or superior technology then try a different tactic. Surprise your opponent with a fresh approach. Virgin, Benetton and Body Shop are examples of businesses that used surprise tactics to disrupt incumbent market leaders.

First World War - 1914 to 1918

The scale of the slaughter of soldiers in World War I was appalling. Over 8 million military personnel died. The main tactic on the western front was to repeatedly attack strong defensive positions with waves of men. They were massacred. It was believed that with sufficient artillery bombardment and pure weight of numbers a breakthrough could be achieved. But the way to overcome barbed wire defenses and machine gun posts is not with lines of infantrymen. What was needed was the rapid development and effective deployment of the tank.

Lessons: Effort, courage and hard work are not enough. If you are competing with a well-entrenched opponent who has a strong defensive position then you need a new technology or approach to achieve a breakthrough. A long war of attrition debilitates both sides. Retail banking was a stodgy business until Egg, First Direct and Cahoot came along to shake it up and take millions of accounts away from the big players.

Maginot line - 1940

The British and French high commands assumed that the new war with Germany would be similar to the First World War, with huge static armies facing each other. The French built a massive defensive line along the entire border between France the Germany, the Maginot line, consisting of enormous fortifications. But when the Germans attacked in May 1940 they did some lateral thinking. They used fast-moving armored divisions and paratroops. They swept through Holland and Belgium and around the Maginot line. The British and French were outmaneuvered and France fell in five weeks.

Lessons: Assuming that new contests will be similar to previous ones is dangerous. The best way to combat an opponent who has a strong defensive position and barriers to entry in a market is to go around those barriers and find a new way to the market. This is what Direct line, Amazon, Netscape and Easyjet did.

Battle of Britain - 1940

After the fall of France, the British retreated across the Channel, leaving most of their equipment behind. The German army, having raced across Europe was rampant while the British army was demoralized and under-equipped. The Germans planned an aerial assault followed by an invasion, and many thought that Britain would fall as quickly as France, Holland or Poland. But the British had some things that the others had not - the channel, the Spitfire, radar and Winston Churchill. Churchill gave the people a vision, purpose and belief that enabled them to sustain the blitz, oppose the might of Germany and eventually triumph.

Lessons: In tough environments, winning CEOs are those who have a clear vision, can communicate it to their people and motivate them to achieve the goal. Sir Arnold Weinstock, Bill Gates and Jack Welch are recognized as this type of visionary leader.

Defeat of Hitler - 1945

After his great successes in the early part of the war, Hitler was convinced that he was a military genius and the German Wehrmacht could overcome any obstacle. When he attacked Russia in the summer of 1941, he was so confident of victory that there were no plans for a winter campaign; no winter coats for the soldiers and no winter oil for the tanks. He ignored the advice of his generals and pushed his forces down towards Stalingrad and then refused to allow them to withdraw or regroup when the communication lines became overextended. His arrogance and overconfidence built a barrier to criticism and meant that he never used the full talents of his team. Eventually Germany was overwhelmed by the weight of Russian, American and British forces.

Lessons: A narcissist CEO will lead the business to disaster. Plan a fallback scenario. Strong vision and belief are essential but a leader who blocks constructive criticism, ignores the input of his team and fails to build consensus is doomed. To mention them by name would be libelous but take your pick from the CEOs who have led mighty companies to disaster in recent times.

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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.

Optimizing Innovation - Dr. Daniel Sturman of Google

by Braden Kelley

We are happy to bring you some of the key points and insights from Dr. Daniel Sturman's talk at the Optimizing Innovation Conference, which was held October 21-22, 2009 in New York City.

Dr. Daniel Sturman, Engineering Director at Google, spoke from an engineer's perspective, not from an innovation director's perspective, about the culture at Google. The main key in his mind?

Make sure you have good people, that they know what direction you're going in, and then as a manager, try to get out of the way:

• Rich and broad mission scope


• Tolerance of failure and encouragement of risk-taking


• Decentralized action towards a commin mission and platform


• Technical leverage (cloud computing)

The Google approach to managing people and launching and iterating, may very well not be applicable to other areas, but it's what they do. Dr. Sturman talked about how he wouldn't necessarily want his surgeon launching and iterating.

From his experience, there was no master plan to Google from 2001 to 2009:

• Many ideas large and small were tried and abandoned


• What worked was defined by user excitement


• We focus on launch and iterate, and fail early and often, because often our first conception of what the user wants were wrong

"Usage is the currency that speaks - not what customers say they will use"


To help them figure out which ideas will succeed and which will not, Google does a lot of live experiments on the Google site - re-routing a small portion of their traffic to experimental parts of the site (as little as .1% of the traffic).

Dr. Sturman feels that having a strong and flexible technical foundation is key to Google's success. This means easy access to hardware resources - rather than machines belonging to a certain group or having to requisition things through a restrictive process.

Google has the advantage of low experimentation costs - because they're in the online services business and have lots of servers. Dr. Sturman referred to the Google portfolio as "shared warehouse computing".

Also key is that all the pieces of code (with very few exceptions), are available to everyone in the organization.


"When in doubt, always move towards empowerment"


Management sets the tone:

• How important is control?


• I have 25 direct reports, some with the same spans of control


• This makes it almost impossible for me to be a control freak


• I can't possibly know exactly what everyone is doing


• A rational organization can often rationize away innovation
  
  • Accountability must be balanced
  
  
  • Some chaos can be a good thing!
  
  
  • Technnology in lieu of hierarchy
  
  
  • Communication can enable flatness
  
  
• Small teams (say 8 people) and a flat heirarchy are good


• Peer driven evaluation and promotion


• If peers don't think your work is important, but boss does, you're not going to be promoted


• peer opinions are almost more important

"Always look for reasons as a manager at Google to say yes."


Google Labs is their outlet for 'radical ideas' to allow for ideas to be tested out:

• Google Squared and its table format for search results is one example of solutions being tested


• Okay that user interface is not consistent


• Primarily advanced users will find these ideas

One of the great things Dr. Sturman has found at Google is that it is much easier to build solutions for very complex problems.


Question from Jack Anderson of Chevron:

"How does Google attract the right people to work in such an environment?":

• We look for people who are comfortable with ambiguity and who have the ability to accept failure


• We hire smart generalists and hope they can acquire the necessary specialized knowledge to solve the problems at hand


• There is no formal process for hiring or training innovators

But, one of my favorite quotes from the event came from Dr. David Matheson in the audience:


"The accumulation of policy and procedure is the greatest burden that a company faces."

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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.

A Day with Gary Hamel

by Braden Kelley

The day after the lights went down on the World Business Forum, the lights went up on an all day seminar with Gary Hamel across the street at the Time Life Building. It was great to be able to get down to the next level of detail below the talk that Gary gave at the World Business Forum.

My day with Gary Hamel began with a discussion of the accelerating pace of change and how:


"While we are in here bullsh**ting about strategy, something is happening out there."


Corporate Evolution

Gary spoke about how the biggest thing that may limit organizational success most going forward is our organization's ability to evolve their management models. But an even biggr handicap to future success may be the fact that our management models were not built to manage innovation but precision, stability, discipline, and reliability. So how do we create organizations that are great at efficiency but also incredibly adaptible?

Capable of transcending the inherent tradeoffs?

• Coordination without centralization


• Scale without inflexibility


• Leadership without formal heirarchy

Our organizations need to move from building competitive advantage to building evolutionary advantage over time, because no matter how good your strategy is, strategies die.

For the first time in the history of the world, each new generation is born into a new world with new technologies, new preferences, and new ways of communicating.

• Difficult for organizations to stay relevant


• Coke was late to sports drinks, late to new age drinks, late to water products


• Microsoft has been late to several markets as well

Gary spoke about the evolution of companies and how they start as attackers, then they grow, and if successful they become defenders. Usually when companies start playing defense, they're in trouble. There is no alarm bell to let you know you've crossed over. By this point the organization has become highly optimized for exploitation and doesn't spend enough time on exploration. And if the company enters a decline, remember, usually the first rats off the ship are the best swimmers. And, when a company has a crisis and loses its momentum, it takes about a decade to recover it - if you can recover it at all.


"Innovation is born out of a gap between ambition and resources."


Innovation Preparation

Organizations get into trouble when they don't change their offering as fast as the needs of their customers have changed. This is true for churches just as much as it is for companies. Often it is too painful to make management change so companies don't (i.e. GM's 20 years of benchmarking Toyota or Nokia's resistance to moving from candy bar phones). But, the longer you delay change, the more painful and expensive the change will be. Some key points:

• You have to seek out the dissidents and test and explore their hypotheses - Are you really open to change?


• Strategies die because they get imitated, they reach a natural limit, or cutomers destroy them


• Once you recognize potential problems you have to create options for strategic renewal (see Michael Raynor's great book "The Strategy Paradox" for more on this topic

When it comes to innovation, companies aren't comfortable with the venture capital model of it taking 1,000 ideas to identify 100 experiments that might yield 10 workable projects and only one big winner. But this is often what the pursuit of innovation requires. For example, Google runs 50,000 search experiments a year and about 500 of the ideas get implemented.


"Getting pregnant is considered a big success despite the millions of wasted sperm - so what's your corporate sperm count?"


Once you know which innovation ideas you are going to pursue, the biggest challenge is to realign talent and provide capital. Most organizations are so lean that there are no slack resources and among managers, to lose resources is to lose status. Another big limiting factor to innovation is that inside organizations ideas can only be sold up the chain of command - intrapreneurs only get one shot to sell their idea, unlike the outside world where an entrepreneur might get turned down 8-9 times before getting funded. For innovation to really work in organizations we need to create a network of internal angel investors to provide intrapreneurs more than one funding source.


"You have to combine scale with the spirit of small" - Audience member


Preparing to Change

Ultimately inflexible mental models are more of a problem than inflexible assets. People have the opportunity to choose either positive change or negative change, and often resist change out of fear. So, to make change happen, we should seek to create an opportunity for positive change so people will be excited about the possibilities and make the changes in spite of their fears.

Speed is important, but it is not everything. Keep in mind that if the first mover does it right, you're screwed as a fast follower. Better to be a smart mover. Move as fast as your knowledge allows and faster than competitors. Microsoft went from fast follower (aggressive) to slow follower (weak).


"People who have a stake in the old, will rarely embrace the new."


Seeking Innovation

Three questions to determine whether something is an innovation:

1. Does it have the power to change customer expectations?


2. Does it have the power to change industry economics?


3. Does it have the power to change the basis for competition?

Keep in mind that innovation is not always risky and it is not always fast. It took JVC 20 years to build a VCR that they could sell for $500 instead of $50,000. It took 20 years for the world to accept Australians' theory that bacteria could cause ulcers. Five years passed between the opening of Pret a Manger's first store and the opening of its second store (it was a new concept, lots of learning needed). Nespresso started getting patents back in 1970 (it was a 40 year overnight success). We must distinguish between how innovative an idea is and how risky an idea is.


"While imagination is not evenly distributed, it is widely distributed."


So, how can you increase the chances for innovation?

1. Challenge unexamined orthodoxies (Umpqua Bank, Pret a Manger, SAAS)


2. Challenge business model components


3. Exploit unnoticed trends (Nokia phones, Disaggregation of TV - Hulu, Blinx, Youtube)


4. Leverage unseen capabilities (Amazon's WebStore and other cloud apps)


5. Serving unarticulated needs (What does customer experience or life feel like?)

Innovation is just another skill. Companies train thousands of people in Six Sigma, why aren't we training people to be business innovators? We have prizes, solicit ideas from people, and don't train them?

When it comes to innovation, organizations have to be more open. Your job is to build a magnet that pulls in the best ideas, the companies that win will figure out how to build the biggest magnet and perservere (building innovation strategies, processes, incentives, management, etc.).

1. View everyone as a potential partner


• What external capabilities can you leverage


• Example: Ice cream bar partnering with Colgate to have a toothbrush-shaped stick inside with the Colgate brand on it


2. Get customer to innovate (Cisco)


3. Build platforms to innovate (Threadless)


4. Bid out problems (Innocentive, DARPA)


5. Open up your stategy process (IBM innovation jams)

"If people will laugh abut the current reality, there is an opportunity for innovation."


Keep in mind with your innovation ideas that it is never clear whether it is a marathon or a sprint. Keep in mind the question - Will increased investment make it happen faster? If you miss the window, increased investment won't let you catch up.

Jeff Bezos is committed to the Amazon Kindle and with each failure, the team asks themselves if they still believe, and if they do, then they have the energy to keep going.

Gary Hamel made it very clear several times during the day that he doesn't feel like he has the answers, but he wants to stimulate people to start thinking about how they could try and realize some management innovation in their organizations and to start experimenting.


"More and more of the work of managing will move to the periphery and we will have fewer and fewer managers."


Leading the Way

A leader doesn't tell people what to do. A leader helps people understand what needs to be done and brings the people and resources together to make it happen. To truly unleash human capabilities, we must focus on injecting a sense of:

• Freedom - Loosening the reins of control


• Community - Increasing the sense of belonging


• Purpose - Investing work with meaning

"We need to try and put Dilbert out of business."


So how does one go about trying to become a management innovator?

• First - Be Bold


• Raise trust and reduce fear?


• Second - Challenge Dogma


• What crazy assumptions do we see as sane?


• Challenge the orthodoxy of executives being the only ones to think strategically


• Challenge the orthodoxy of a crisis being needed to provoke change


• Concentrting strategy at the top helps to cause this


• Challenge habits, artifacts, and conceits


• We've separated people from customers, colleagues, the broader overall view, and leadership


• We've turned employees into children


• Heirarchical organiztions move slower


• It takes time to aggregate, sanitize, and communicate up


• We need to give people the information they need to make the necessary tradeoffs

"If life developed on earth according to six sigma principles, we would all still be slime, but damn good slime"


In pursuing innovation, we need to pursue it under the theories of biology and variety, while also employing the power of markets to allocate resources more efficiently than heirarchies. At the same time, we should consider having co-sponsors on idea submissions as a way of weeding out the stupid-stupid ideas. We need to be more democratic, even though democracies may not always be the most efficient systems. They do however allow for change to start from the bottom up. Thriving democracies tend to have a large number of activists. Why don't companies teach people to be activists (or entrepreneurs for that matter)?

Diversity and connectivity help to create innovation. So why do most companies have beige walls and create teams of people with similar backgrounds and ways of thinking? Why do organizations engineer out diversity? We need to learn from the positive deviants in organizations and create organizations that have:

• Variety (look to biology or life)


• Flexibility (look to markets)


• Activism (look to democracies)


• Significance (look to faith)


• Connectedness (look to cities)

Amongst other things we need to also find a way for people to choose what to work on, in order to avoid the frequent mismatch between passions and responsibilities. And from a workers perspective, as the labor market becomes more open, what happens when your vocation is competing against someone's avocation?


Conclusion

As you can see the day ended with more questions than answers, but often it is having the right questions in your head that allows to ultimately find the solutions that are appropriate for your situation. So, are you ready to try and create the positive change you would like to see in your organization? Are you ready to advocate for better innovation conditions in your organization? Are you ready to conduct management experiments in your organization to find the management innovations that will work for your organization and create evolutionary advantage?

Well, are you?

---

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.

Why can't your firm innovate?

by Jeffrey Phillips

Recently there's been a debate about why larger firms can't innovate. Perhaps they are too comfortable. Perhaps they are too afraid to cannibalize their markets. Perhaps they are afraid of risk and uncertainty. Perhaps, Perhaps.

Or maybe they operate under a management model that rewards compliance and punishes creativity. Now I think we are getting to the crux of the problem.

I've had the opportunity recently to hear Gary Hamel speak and see Dan Pink's new Ted Talk. Both are compelling, and somewhere between Hamel's discussion about management innovation and Pink's thoughts about compensation and incentives lies the real issue that challenges many larger, and especially entrenched, firms. We structure our organizations (Hamel) and reward structures (Pink) to reward consistency and compliance, when what we really need is experimentalism and creativity.

Think about it. Most of the management practices we follow are based on management models put in place by Taylor or others modelled after GM in the 30s and 40s. Many of the employees at that time were uneducated or undereducated and their value proposition was in labor. The goal of the organization was to send down management's goals and break them down into work units for simple tasks. The goal of the organization was top down, consistency and compliance to orders and tasks. As Pink points out, the compensation models that accompanied that structure made sense as long as the tasks were simple and clear and can be executed following a very specific process.

Now, most of the work we do is knowledge work. It is difficult to place specific outlines or processes around the work, and can be difficult even to define the end products. If I can outsource a steel factory and make semiconductors overseas, the premium on labor and compliance is gone. What differentiates a firm in this environment is not compliance and control, but creativity and engagement. I need an organizational structure that attracts people to work on products or services they believe in, and are engaged in, and I need different compensation models. Pink talks about Autonomy (choice), Mastery and Purpose (engagement), the words in parenthesis being my interpretation.

So, many firms, especially older firms are built on hierarchical models that are top down and organized for compliance, not creativity. As I blogged earlier, they are well designed to meet the operating needs and realities of the mid 20th century, just as labor and compliance were becoming less of an issue as a management consideration. We have entered a completely different environment, which calls on organizations to be nimble, able to adjust rapidly, call on the best insights of all employees and create a meaningful relationship and experience with customers. Virtually none of those attributes are prevalent in older organizational models.

Many firms can't innovate because their structures, processes and compensation models are rigidly organized for the work world of the 1950s and 1960s and haven't shifted the organizational structures, processes and compensation models to reflect what's necessary today. When a firm like P&G is heralded for taking ideas from its customers as if that is a novel concept or something no one else could foresee, or when WL Gore is held up constantly as a management icon because of its "Lord of the Flies" organizational and management approach, you can see that many theorists in academia and many executives in larger organizations can't quite grasp the changes that are necessary for many businesses to innovate successfully.

It's not the people, it's not the "culture", it's not the compensation, it's not the management hierarchy, it's not the fear of risk or uncertainty that holds back most larger firms. It's all of the above, and being willing to make a clean break with the past.

---

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.

Gary Hamel on Management Innovation and Enterprise 2.0

by Hutch Carpenter

Last week at the first-ever Spigit Customer Summit, I had a chance to listen to Gary Hamel live. He delivered the keynote for the event, "Inventing Management 2.0." If you're a reader of Gary's blog or his books, you know he's a big proponent of empowering employees and changing management paradigms. See his 25 Stretch Goals for Management in the Harvard Business Review from last February for a great overview of his thinking.

In his speech last week, he did not disappoint. In fact, he provided a distinct rationale and call to action for companies to embrace the Enterprise 2.0 movement.


Driving the Autobahn in a Model T

In his presentation, there were two distinct graphs that really drove home the point that it's time for new ways of managing companies. I've put them together below:



On the left, a conceptual chart outlines something many of us instinctively feel. The pace of change in our world is increasing. As Gary Hamel noted, year-to-year volatility in company earnings have been increasing exponentially the last 40 years. Those changes are manifestations of what we all experience. I thought he put it well when he said:

"What a company did in the past is now less predictive of its future."

Business Week in 2004 ran an article that nicely demonstrated the acceleration of change. It included these points:

• The number of Fortune 300 CEOs with six years' tenure in that role has decreased from 57 percent in 1980 to 38 percent in 2001.


• In 1991, the number of new household, health, beauty, food, and beverage products totaled 15,400. In 2001, that number had more than doubled to a record 32,025.


• From 1972 to 1987, the U.S. government deleted 50 industries from its standard industrial classification. From 1987 to 1997, it deleted 500. At the same time, the government added or redefined 200 industries from 1972 to 1987, and almost 1,000 from 1987 to 1997.


• In 1978, about 10,000 firms were failing annually, and this number had been stable since 1950. By 1986, 60,000 firms were failing annually, and by 1998 that number had risen to roughly 73,000.


• From 1950 to 2000, variability in S&P 500 stock prices increased more than tenfold. Through the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, days on which the market fluctuated by three percent or more were rare - it happened less than twice a year. For the past two years it happened almost twice a month.

On the right, the chart provides the major innovations in company management over the past 150 years. Current management systems reflect philosophies that were developed in an earlier era of greater stability. A quick primer on the different management ideas (note - cannot find information on McCollum):

Taylor: Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated: "It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone."

Sloan: Former GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan revolutionized the management of corporations through numbers: "Sloan oversaw the use of rigorous financial and statistical tools to profitably manage GM's far-flung empire."

McGregor: MIT professor Douglas McGregor developed Theory X and Theory Y: "In Theory X, management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can. In Theory Y, management assumes employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control."

Deming: W. Edwards Deming was a professor and statistician credited with revolutionizing post-war Japan's manufacturing: "Dr. W. Edwards Deming taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations can increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs (by reducing waste, rework, staff attrition and litigation while increasing customer loyalty). The key is to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces."

The point Gary Hamel drives home is that our business and economic environment has irrevocably shifted toward higher volatility and accelerated change. The sundering of companies from healthy industry positions to crisis mode in relatively short order demonstrates the need for updating management philosophies.


Need for Better Adaptability in the Post-Establishment Age

My own term for this is the "post-establishment age". In prior decades, change was slower, and companies could count on inherent advantages that helped them maintain their established positions. As Gary Hamel noted, protections came in the form of regulatory frameworks, monopolies (e.g distribution), capital access and other ways.

These protections continue to erode in our modern, WTO-governed society. The web and digitalization of content and processes are making it easier than ever for new ideas to be tested. Consumers have access to more information than ever. Social media ensures more people know about new companies and products more rapidly then ever.

Old protections are falling, while change and industry disruption is accelerating. What can modern companies do to manage in this new environment?

Gary Hamel prescribes two strategies for companies in the post-establishment age:

• Increased organizational adaptability


• Pushing innovation and decision-making out to employees

Adaptability is a critical strategy. It means that companies pivot as they learn new information about their markets, competitors and changes in customer behaviors. As noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article noted, companies can try more ideas faster and less expensively than ever:

"Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds - and prices - that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly."

Gary Hamel then notes that senior executives continue to have a monopoly on strategy. This essentially makes companies dependent on a handful of executives' ability to adapt to change.

Yet employees are probably the earliest to know when something is changing. They also are faced with situations where they must come up with solutions. It is in this environment where companies will find their sources of adaptation. In an article for the Harvard Business Review, 25 Stretch Goals for Management, Gary Hamel included these two goals:

12. Share the work of setting direction. To engender commitment, the responsibility for goal setting must be distributed through a process where share of voice is a function of insight, not power.

17. Expand the scope of employee autonomy. Management systems must be redesigned to facilitate grassroots initiatives and local experimentation.

In the post-establishment age, these strategies are what distinguish leaders from those that will go through another disruption.


This Is Enterprise 2.0 Evolved

The cornerstones of Enterprise 2.0 include greater information visibility, tapping the emergent knowledge of employees and increased collaboration. Those are the foundational elements. Use them to create a company of higher adaptability and distributed innovation and decision-making.

As Gary Hamel concluded in his keynote:

"You can't build a company that's fit for the future unless it's one that's fit for human beings."

---

Hutch Carpenter is the Director of Marketing at Spigit. Spigit integrates social collaboration tools into a SaaS enterprise idea management platform used by global Fortune 2000 firms to drive innovation.

Top 10 Gary Hamel Insights (Spigit Innovation Summit)

by Braden Kelley

I had the good fortune to hear Gary Hamel of London Business School's Management Innovation Lab speak on the first day of the Spigit Innovation Summit on August 13, 2009.

Here are the top ten insights that I captured from Gary Hamel's speech:

1. We need to openly challenge our corporate management policies and processes, and experiment like we do in other scientific disciplines


2. The more consolidated the control of change is, the less resilient an organization will be


3. To come up with any really good idea, you have to challenge your deep orthodoxies - we need to do the same thing with our management principles


4. Two hard problems - (1) How do you do things at scale without being inflexible? (2) How do you have strong coordination without centralization?


5. "If call wait time is 30 minutes, how come I can't pay $2 and jump to the front of the queue?"


6. The future is not necessarily unpredictable, but it is often uncomfortable - As a result, management often fails to react


7. As knowledge becomes distributed across organizations and countries, it becomes harder to create sustainable differentiation


8. Not only is the pace of change going exponential, but business is getting a lot tougher because barriers to entry are falling, and things are changing so fast that by the time regulators understand something new, it's out of control


9. The time from leader to laggard in an industry is now sometimes measured in months


10. "We can create organizations that can manage incredible complexity, but with great inflexibility" - even though we complain about how organizations are managed, startups do it the same way only smaller

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.

Innovation Conversations with Scott Anthony

I had the opportunity recently to interview Scott Anthony, President of Innosight and the author of "The Silver Lining" about a variety of innovation topics including: 'The Great Disruption', barriers to innovation, education, leadership, and commodity businesses.

Here is the text from the interview:

1. What is the biggest challenge that companies face in the Great Disruption?

I think the biggest challenge facing companies is an unwillingness to let go of the past. Companies have to come to grips with the fact that what made them great in the past will not make them great in the future. That doesn't mean they have to completely walk away from their heritage. But they to constantly question the status quo, think about the businesses they are not in that they should be, and be willing to walk away from businesses before they need to. It's a tough challenge.

2. What stands in the way of many companies being able to deliver new innovations to market?

Well, I think it is important to note that companies don't struggle with all types of innovations. Most companies excel at managing innovations that extend their core business. They struggle with innovations that run counter to their existing way of operating. Then, the greatest enemy lies within. We call it "the sucking sound of the core." A company's core systems and structures "want" an innovation to conform to what a company has done before, not what is necessary for success. The sucking sound makes innovation slow and complicated. To break the sucking sound of the core, companies need to make sure they have a "safe space" for innovation, and that senior leaders actively step in to break standard operating procedures when required.

3. If you were to change one thing about our educational system to better prepare students to contribute in the workforce of the Great Disruption, what would it be?

The one thing I would want to see students trained in is non-linear thinking. The era of optimization is over. We are in an era of constant creative destruction. Students need to learn how to find the non-obvious insight and to imagine possibilities that don't yet exist. I worry that an increased focus on standardized tests runs counter to the needs increasingly facing companies.

4. What skills do you believe that managers need to acquire to succeed in the Great Disruption?

The basic problem facing many managers is they are being asked to solve problems they have never faced before. You see, it used to be possible to have a productive 40-year career being an operator that did a great job executing a solidly formulated strategy. Today's leaders have to be great operators and great innovators. They have to pass that old F. Scott Fitzgerald test of holding two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, while still retaining the ability to function. In simple terms, managers have to learn how to find the "and." Disciplined and creative. Love big businesses and small businesses. And so on.

5. What advice do you have for companies that are already loving the low end in a commodity business?

Companies that are already loving the low-end should think about innovative ways to extend and grow their business. One way to do so is to add on additional offerings that help customers solve additional problems they are facing in their lives. This could be a new feature, it could be a service. Another approach is to see if there are other markets where they can bring their low-cost acumen. A low-cost business model is a powerful weapon that companies can deploy in multiple markets.


As a special bonus, here is a video of Scott Anthony being interviewed about "The Silver Lining" by Business Innovation Factory's Chris Flanagan:





My book review of "The Silver Lining" can be found here.

---

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.

UTEK Webinar Synopsis: Q&A Session

I had the good fortune to attend a three-part UTEK webinar yesterday featuring Gary Hamel "Innovation in Rough Times", Tim Jones "Future Catalysts of Innovation", and Regina Lewis "Adopting an Innovation Strategy", and will now share some of the notes, quotes, and key insights I was able to capture.

Gary Hamel has been called the world's most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal, and his latest book, The Future of Management, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in October 2007 and was selected by Amazon.com as the best business book of the year. Gary Hamel was a founder of Strategos, which was acquired by UTEK in 2008.

Tim Jones, Ph.D., author of Innovating at the Edge, (published by Butterworth Heinemann) and Managing Director of Innovaro, a division of UTEK, will discuss the future catalysts of innovation.

Regina Lewis, Ph.D., Vice President of Consumer Insights for InterContinental Hotels Group, will wrap up this informative webinar with her discussion on the impact of adopting an innovation strategy and its benefits to InterContinental Hotels.

Please NOTE: Because these are notes, they may be a little rough, but I've done my best to clean them up.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the Q&A session:

(Gary Hamel)
Advice for small companies - Innovation is going to need to be radical in a startup in order to force your way into the marketplace

(Gary Hamel)
There is an optimal time to put resources beyond an idea (Hotmail-few months versus HDTV-20yrs) - Key questions to ask yourself

• Does infrastructure need to be built?


• Is there built-in consumer resistance?


• You can't push an idea faster with more money and you will have a hard time catching up if you get there too late by spending a lot of money

(Gary Hamel)
It's no longer first movers versus fast followers, it's smart movers versus dumb movers:

• Dumb movers don't learn from early experimentation


• You must learn faster per unit of input than your competition

(Tim Jones)
Every industry has its own natural clock speed

• Different industries move at different speeds (FMCG 18-24 mos, Energy 3+ yrs, etc.)


• OTC pharmaceuticals were one of the drug companies' strengths and now you will find more FMCG getting into the OTC pharmaceuticals space and these companies have faster clock speeds than drug companies


• Nokia is shifting from product company to a service company and if they use their 6-month cycle in the service sector this will give them a 3,4,5 times the speed advantage over their competition

(Regina Lewis)
It is important for us to innovate in more than a me-too fashion

• We have to look to leapfrog our competition


• How can we lead again?


• There are always going to be un-met consumer needs


• Anxiety and loss of control in traveling is one key focus area

(Tim Jones)
A lot of airports are trying to expand their capacity (Heathrow, Frankfurt, Schiphol)

• One limiting factor is the ability of the airport to process people through security


• One way to overcome this limitation has come from looking not at other airports, but from looking at Disney


• Queues for experienced people versus families versus novice people


• Disney focuses very heavily on queue management and getting people spending more money, etc.

(Gary Hamel)
The tendency over time is for a company to become more incremental because they start talking to the same consultants and measuring themselves against each other

• Ask your employees to tell you about their fundamental customer experiences in different parts of your production chain


• What are the companies that are making the most dramatic changes in customer expectations?


• The key is to look outside your own industry - What has changed your employees lives as consumers and investigate that

I hope these notes have given you a good idea of some of what was discussed in the Q&A session at the UTEK webinar and what the key takeaways were. Please also see my blog articles on Gary Hamel's and Tim Jones' and Regina Lewis' portions of the webinar.

Happy innovating!

@innovate

UTEK Webinar Synopsis: Gary Hamel - "Innovation in Rough Times"

I had the good fortune to attend Gary Hamel's webinar today on "Innovation in Rough Times", and will now share some of the notes, quotes, and key insights I was able to capture.

Please NOTE: Because these are notes, they may be a little rough, but I've done my best to clean them up.

Gary Hamel has been called the world's most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal, and his latest book, The Future of Management, was published by the Harvard Business School Press in October 2007 and was selected by Amazon.com as the best business book of the year. Gary Hamel was a founder of Strategos, which was acquired by UTEK in 2008.

Here are some of Gary Hamel's thoughts:

The tide is running out and the only way for companies to outperform their competition and market expectations is to continue to innovate.

The companies that win will have to create highly differentiated products and services, or build a radically-different cost structure compared to their competition.

In this market, innovation on the cost side is also important.

In the present market, companies face:

• Falling entry barriers (deregulation, digitization, new channels)


• Growing buyer power (more choices, better information, falling transaction costs)


• Hyper-efficient competitors (labor arbitrage, zero legacy costs, new business models)

There is no other area in business where the correlation is weaker between inputs and outputs than in innovation.

So how can you maximize your investment?


Five drivers of innovation efficiency (ratios):

1. No. of Radical Ideas/No. of Ideas (or incremental ideas)


2. No. of Innovators/No. of Employees


3. Ideas from Outside/Ideas from Inside


4. Learning/Investment


5. Commitment/Time

Additional Commentary on Driver #1 (No. of Radical Ideas/No. of Ideas):

• Most new ideas are incremental, but outlier ideas are the only ideas with the capaibility of delivering extraordinary profits


• The need to increase the proportion of radical ideas, doesn't imply taking radically more risk - there is not a direct correlation


• Does it have the power to change customer expectations? (Paypal, online news, etc.)


• Does it have the power to change industry economics? (eBay, IKEA, etc.)


• Does it have the power to change the basis for competition? (does it wrongfoot the competition)

Additional Commentary on Driver #2 (No. of Innovators/No. of Employees):

• Where does innovation come from?


1. Challenging unexamined orthodoxies


2. Exploiting unnoticed trends


3. Leveraging unseen capabilities


4. Meeting unarticulated needs


• Only a certain number of employees are truly innovators


• Key question - How many people have been trained to be business innovators?


• The answer most managers give mystifies me


• Every employee should be trained in the same way that Toyota trained every employee in quality control methodologies


• Toyota received 540,000 suggestions last year for improvement


• What is your company's average number of ideas/employee?


• 5-6 per employee per year should be the minimum but most companies are not anywhere close


• Companies are generally disappointed with their new electronic suggestion boxes (very incremental or flights of fancy)

Advice from Braden Kelley: Companies should not set idea submission goals, but they should train all employees how to be business innovators and have the strategies, policies, process, and systems in place to encourage idea submission and more importantly, the infrastructure to support idea implementation and communication of results

Additional Commentary on Driver #3 (Ideas from Outside/Ideas from Inside):

• View everyone as a potential partner


• Leverage the competencies/assets of other organizations where possible


• Recombination - Nike/Apple example


• Create platforms for 3rd party innovators (Microsoft, Google Maps, Apple AppStore - 50,000 apps)


• Get your customers to innovate (Dell IdeaStorm - 11,000 suggestions)


• Troll the world for good ideas (entrepreneurs in residence around the world, trolling patents, IBM's open-sourcing of its strategy)


• Bid out problems - Innocentive - was mostly technology - but now Chicago Transit Authority and others are putting up business problems

Additional Commentary on Driver #4 (Learning/Investment):

• How many things do you try?


• How quickly do you learn?

Additional Commentary on Driver #5 (Commitment/Time):

• Consistency over time is important, try not to have huge shifts in innovation effort


• Commitment is about persistence and perseverence not how much you spend


• Companies too often lose patience with an idea


• Nespresso took about 20 years for that product to become a significant business for Nestle (lots of evolution in the business model, the product, etc.)


• How engaged are people?


• This varies by country (Companies in Asian countries tend to have highly disengaged employees in comparison with western countries)


• People don't tend to feel engaged - Less than 1 in 5 people feel highly engaged in their work


• Obedience -> Diligence -> Intellect -> Initiative -> Creativity -> Passion


• Those things at the top (initiative, creativity, passion) are gifts from employees


• We are now in the creative economy


• How do I build an organization that elicits these extraordinary gifts that these employees can give?

I hope these notes have given you a good idea of some of what was discussed in Gary Hamel's presentation of "Innovation in Rough Times" and what the key takeaways were. Please also see my blog articles on Tim Jones' and Regina Lewis' portions of the webinar.

Happy innovating!

@innovate