Complete This Drawing!

This is too wonderful NOT to share. That would be "cheating," as I noted in my previous post.

Creativity takes time! Seriously...I am NOT kidding!!!

(Source: Ads of the World.)

A Silo Busting Technique: The "No Cheating" Rule!

In an earlier post, I invoked the specter of Tony Soprano while discussing the bane of every Membership Director's existence: How to engage the entire staff in the cause of membership? At issue is how break down the silo mentality that inhibits different departments from collaborating to create member value.

In fact, this silo mentality is hardly unique to the association world, it plagues companies and organizations from profits and nonprofits, large and small...well, you get the picture.That's why organizations with a true commitment to collaboration will have some version of the "No Cheating" Rule:

Cheating is defined as:

The refusal to help your co-worker

by withholding assistance or information.

 

A few years ago I facilitated a staff retreat where the topic of silo busting was front and center. As a result, they invoked the following, creating-value-for-the-member version of the "No Cheating Rule."

Cheating is the failure to share information
and collaborate with fellow staff
to create value for the member.
Cheating is also the failure to
initiate value-creating activities
when, in your judgement,
they are not occurring.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get back to work and quit your cheating ways!

Making Sense of Innovation: Three Questions to Ask Yourself

A lot has been written about innovation - perhaps too much. As a topic and as a practical matter, it can be hard to your head around it. To that end, here are three questions to ask yourself as you try to figure out how make innovation happen in your organization. 

1. Which "pathway" to innovation is best for your organization? 

It turns out there are a number of pathways to innovation (as illustrated below). The trick is understanding which will make the most sense for your kind of organization. 

• The "Expertise" Pathway:  Developing superior knowledge and expertise to gain leverage. Consulting firms, when they are able to establish a clear intellectual leadership in a particular field, are a good example.
• The "Re-mixing Common Elements Uniquely" Pathway: Innovation is realized by how an a company packages or presents its products or services. In its heyday, for example, The Gap's clothing was not impressively unique, but its method of merchandising and presenting were.
• The "Unmet Customer Needs" Pathway: This reflects the ability to match products with unfilled consumer needs. Church & Dwight, maker of Arm & Hammer baking soda, has expanded it sales by finding new, unfilled needs for its sodium bicarbonate: toothpaste, carpet freshener, and mouthwash.
• The "Leveraging Functional Excellence" Pathway: The ability to execute, consistently, a certain function better than one's competitors. The Ritz-Carlton defines functional excellence for customer service in the hotel industry while Procter & Gamble has mastered the skills to excel in consumer packaged-goods marketing.
• The "Pure Imagination" Pathway: Using imagination to see possibilities that are not always logically evident. Walt Disney Company has given the lexicon of marketing a whole new term - "imagineering."

2. Do you have a well-defined approach to Creative Problem Solving?

It is not sufficient to simply say, "let's get together and brainstorm a solution" and expect consistently good results from your innovation efforts. Staff needs to be in-sync about how to proceed with Creative Problem Solving. .For that reason, a number of organizations train their staff in the Osborne-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Model, which consists of six well-defined steps:

1. Determine the objectives or desired outcome.
2. Assemble the facts. 
3. Define the problem that needs solving.
4. Generate ideas for possible solutions.
5. Determine the best ideas leading to a solution.
6. Determine strategies to make sure the solution will be accepted and implemented within the organization. .

3. How will you manage the team?

Execution is the name of the game, here. This requires a framework for managing a team working on an innovation project. One approach is to use the the C.A.R.E. Profile® -- an instrument that identifies five key roles in innovative team performance:

1. Creator: Generates original concepts, goes beyond the obvious, and sees the big picture. Hands off tasks to an Advancer.
2. Advancer: Recognizes new opportunities, develops ways to promote ideas, and moves toward implementation. Hands off tasks to a Refiner.
3. Refiner: Challenges and analyzes ideas to detect potential problems and may hand plans back to an Advancer or Creator before handing off tasks to an Executor.
4. Executor: Lays the groundwork for implementation, manages the details, and moves the process to completion.
5. Facilitator: Works throughout the process to ensure tasks are handed off to the right people at the right time.

The C.A.R.E. Profile enables a manager to choose the right people to fill each of these roles so a team has a balanced mix of skills needed for success.

Related articles:

• Solve the Right Problem! 
• An Innovation Challenge: Would You Implement the "30-Day Rule?" 
• A Lesson in Creative Problem Solving

Lexus Innovates by Borrowing a Lesson from Henry Ford

An earlier post, Learning to Create the Future, discussed what Henry Ford called the forced method of investigation. This philosophy is what led Ford to imagine the Model T (a car that would sell for the previously unheard of price of $500) and then figure out a way to manufacture it. In other words, Ford and his colleagues defined the challenge (a low-cost, affordable car) in a way that forced them to develop assembly line automobile production.

As the video shows, Lexus has just used a similar approach. They began by imagining a new kind of chassis that would be lighter and stronger than conventional chasses, one that would require the use of Carbon Fiber Reinforced Plastic (CFRP). That in turn, forced them to invent a new kind of loom that could weave the carbon fiber directly into the chassis.

Pretty neat, eh?

An Innovation Challenge: Would You Implement the "30-Day Rule?"

It's one thing to say, "I'm all for innovation." It's quite another thing to demonstrate true commitment. Let's take a look at how one CEO approached this.

As she speaks, employees are muttering to themselves, "Okay, we've heard this before!"

More muttering, "Yeah, yeah, committed and serious..."

"Holy brainstorm, Batman! Did our CEO just say that?"

What do you think of the "30-Day Rule?"

  Would you implement it? Why or why not?

Kill New Ideas with the Idea Shredder!

In an earlier post (A Few Good Ideas) about innovation, I concluded by stating: if you don’t how to respond when someone brings you a new idea, you aren’t ready to launch an innovation initiative in your organization.

 

Why? If you announce, "We want innovation!" but are unable to act when new ideas are brought forth, you are wasting your people's time, energy, brainpower and enthusiasm. People will feel as if their good suggestions are being dumped into the waste bin. The impact on moral is likely to be about the same as having the fictitious Idea Shredder illustrated below.

The Idea Shredder

Let's imagine this device really exists!

For Managers Who Haven't the Time for Input
THE SUGGESTION SHREDDER

It looks just a like an ordinary suggestion box...



 

But inside there's a miniature
but very powerful paper

shredder! Every suggestion is

obliterated in the time

it takes to cry, "EUREKA!"

Twenty Things You Can Say to Kill a New Idea

It's vitally important to avoid the perception that ideas and suggestions are being ignored (i.e., the metaphorical idea shredder). That's why a number of innovative organizations go so far as to train their managers what not to say when someone brings them a new idea. They are taught twenty idea killing, enthusiasm deadening phrases that must be avoided.

1. Every one knows this!
2. We have never done this before, no point trying it.
3. I know it won’t work
4. This isn’t up-to-date.
5. Is this within budget.
6. Too many things to do – will see this when I have time.
7. Some other time.
8. Let’s wait & watch for a while.
9. Why do you want to change things?
10. Against the rules.
11. Not technically feasible.
12. Management will never agree.
13. Not done in our company.
14. Makes more work for another department.
15. Real world is more complicated.
16. Do you really understand the situation?
17. Can’t afford it.
18. This will create too many problems.
19. Even my advice won’t help.
20. Can’t you make it better?
    

The Bottom Line: Saying any of the above in response to a suggestion can be just as discouraging as the Idea Shredder.

Technology May Not be the Cleverest Thing About the New iPad!

After watching this video, I'd buy the new iPad just for the cover. It is soooo friggin' clever and soooo bewitchingly simple.

Innovation: Got Focus?

In two earlier posts (here and here) I proposed two of three questions executives should ask themselves before embarking on a crusade for innovation.  The third question, which concerns focus, is the topic of this article.

Got Focus?

Let’s start with a simple proposition: ninety percent of all managers lack the requisite focus to successfully implement an innovation initiative.

An article entitled, Beware the Busy Manager, offers important insights into what is going on. For ten years, the authors studied the behavior of busy managers, and their findings are instructive: fully 90% of managers squander their time in all sorts of ineffective activities. A mere 10% of managers spend their time in a committed, purposeful, and reflective manner (i.e., the purposefulness quadrant).

 

Managers that fall into the other quadrants, by contrast, are usually just spinning their wheels; some procrastinate, others feel no emotional connection to their work (disengaged), and still others are easily distracted from the task at hand. Although they look busy, they lack either the focus or the energy required for making any sort of meaningful change.

 The Bull in the China Shop

By far the largest group of managers found in the study—more than 40%—fell into the distracted quadrant: those well-intentioned, highly energetic but unfocused people who confuse frenetic motion with constructive action. When they’re under pressure, distracted managers feel a desperate need to do something—anything. That makes them as dangerous as the proverbial bull in a china shop.

 Got Credibility?

Which brings us to the bull in the cartoon, he lacks credibility. The poor store clerk is just wasting for the inevitable rampage.

Likewise, it is no wonder that most employees react with groans when management announces, “We’re doing innovation!”  That’s because most managers, and management teams. lack the focus to deliver. “Innovation” becomes just another flavor-of-the-month initiative, another euphemism – from the employees’ point-of-view –for spinning their wheels.

Now ask yourself, am I a focused manager? How about the rest of the management team in my organization? If we announced an innovation initiative, would we have any credibility?

Learning to Create the Future

"Asking members what they want is stifling my ability to make a breakthrough!

 

"Does asking our members what they want stifle breakthroughs?"

That question was posted recently on the ASAE Executive Listserv. In response, I offer the following excerpt from an Association Management article printed way back in August, 1997!

Learning How to Create the Future

  “Companies that create the future do more than satisfy customers, they constantly amaze them.”
                                                Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad,  Competing for the Future

What will it take to constantly amaze your members into the future? That's a question every association executive needs to ask in this era of rising member expectations and increasing competition.

With that in mind, let us explore four lessons, learned from some of the most highly successful and imaginative corporations, that you can apply to your association's strategy-creation process.

Why is it that some organizations are capable of imagining and creating the future while others are forever playing catch up? The future-focused organizations have learned the following lessons.

 

Lesson 1: Imagination is the master of great strategy, implementation its servant.

If an organization wishes to create the future, it must begin by imagining compelling ways to amaze its customers. Then, and only then, should it ask, How will we do this? What are the details of implementation?

At first glance, this may seem a risky or unscientific approach. After all, doesn't an organization need to assess its current resources and capabilities before determining what it can do in the future? The history of strategy and marketing offers many excellent illustrations of why this isn't the case. Consider Henry, Ford. Ask yourself, Which did Ford imagine first - the assembly line or the Model T, the means or the end?

Most people mistakenly believe that Ford first invented the former, which enabled him to create the latter. Actually, it was the other way around. Ford's invention of the assembly line was the direct result of his imaginative desire to produce an affordable automobile. In short, Ford knew what needed to be done before he knew how the deed would be accomplished.

In his 1923 book entitled My Life and Work, Ford discussed a "broad scientific approach" that forces people to dig for unimagined solutions. He said, "Our policy is to reduce the price, extend the operations, and improve the article. You will notice that the reduction of price comes first. . . . Therefore we first reduce the price to a point where we believe more sales will result. Then we go ahead and try to make the prices. . . . The more usual way is to take the costs and then determine the price, and although that method may be scientific in the narrow sense, it is not scientific in the broad sense, because what earthly use is it to know the cost if it tells you yon cannot manufacture at a price at which the article can be sold? . . . One of the ways of discovering [emphasis added] . . . is to name a price so low as to force everybody in the place to the highest point of efficiency. . . . We make more discoveries concerning manufacturing and selling under this forced method than by any method of leisurely investigation."

Great strategy, therefore, is about discovering that which is possible but previously unseen, and then searching for the means to turn it into a real-life, value-producing product or service.

Lesson 2: When it comes to creating value, imagination wins out over forecasting and prediction.

The art of creating the future is more about uncovering evolving customer needs than about forecasting trends or building scenarios. This is not a particularly mysterious process, but it does require the right kind of information and the proper use of that information.

The right information is derived from a relentless search for cues about how the future will unfold. This search involves analyzing trends and competition, tracking emerging technologies and management techniques, and gathering insights from market research and customer contacts.

While gathering this information, it is important to remember that forecasting and scenario building are tools and not the end points of activities. For example, 15 years ago all the major automobile companies had access to data about the trends facing families and could have crafted reasonably accurate future scenarios or predictions about the hectic pace of life that was emerging. But it was Chrysler that went beyond mere forecasting to asking, If that's what life will be like for many families, what future options do we have for creating value? Their imaginative answer: the minivan.

Lesson 3: Ambitious goals act as catalysts.

Creating the future is an enormous task and is only worth doing if you have a goal that makes a meaningful difference in the lives members, staff, and volunteers. In this way, strategy becomes more than a blueprint, it becomes a source of ambition and a catalyst for action. Henry Ford's ambition to make a meaningful difference was captured in the phrase, "Put a car in every garage." Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, motivated his employees to provide "rock-bottom prices to rural Americans."

Lesson 4: Don't listen to the naysayers.

  

Inventing the future can be scary work. No matter how brilliant and sound your ideas, there will always be naysayers. The following quotes remind us that many of the great ideas of the past were initially discounted or scorned: 

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." – Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." - A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service; Smith went on to found Federal Express

"If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." - Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" notepads.

Innovation and the Need to Instill Courage

"Any feedback yet about the Innovation Initiative?"

In an earlier post, I proposed the first of three questions executives should ask themselves before embarking on a crusade for innovation.  The second question, which concerns courage, is the topic of this article.

Right off the bat, let’s acknowledge the reaction portrayed in the cartoon is a bit extreme, but it illustrates an important point: “innovation wannabes” need to realize there will be resistance and sometimes sabotage in response to their efforts. As a result, uncertainty and even self-doubt inevitably sets in.

A Lesson from W. Edwards Deming

"Massive training is required to instill the courage to break with tradition.”

This quote is from W. Edwards Deming, one of the fathers of Total Quality Management (TQM). For all his attention to the statistical aspects of quality management, Deming was equally forthright in calling out the need for instilling courage.

The above quote nicely frames the two-fold challenge facing “innovation wannabes.” First, it is intensely personal. If you want to be an innovation champion, be prepared to face the inevitable nay saying that calls into question your judgment and your choice of priorities. Second, you must fully prepare and support the “troops” as they use innovation to break with tradition.  

The question for Innovation Wannabes

 

“Do we have a process for innovation?” or “Does my leadership style foster creativity?” are often the types of questions heard when discussing this topic. These inquiries, however, seem inadequate to the challenge at hand; they do not directly address what is required of individuals who are trying to “break with tradition.” And this is the point Deming was constantly trying to communicate.

Without a doubt, innovation requires courage. Heck, there’s no way around it! So, if you’re serious about innovation, you need to ask yourself, “Do I have the courage to lead this initiative and, in so doing, do I have what it takes to instill courage in others?”

‘nuff said!

A Few Good Ideas

There is an interesting discussion about innovation taking place over at The Hourglass Blog, hosted by Eric Lanke and Jamie Notter. In addition, a useful dialogue has broken out between them and Jeff DeCagna of Principled Innovation.

Eric and Jamie have offered three questions that association executives can use to determine the innovation readiness of their associations associations:

1. Does your leadership embrace innovation as one of the strategies necessary to achieve your goals?

2. Do you have a defined process for how innovation will function in your association?

3. Is that process working?

  

Starting with this post, I will propose the first of three alternative questions executives should ask themselves before embarking on that "innovation thing."

Lessons from the Innovation University program

A few years ago, I had the privilege of participating in the Innovation University Program. It brought together a select group of change agents from non-competing companies who gathered each quarter to visit innovative companies and explore ways to apply these lessons in their own organizations. Visits included companies such as Coca-Cola, Interface Carpet as well as several companies in Lima, Peru.

Those visits brought me face-to-face with a number of remarkable people; leaders who had the passion and tenacity to make innovation a living, breathing, results-producing force in their organizations.

The lesson I learned: innovation isn’t about processes or concepts or theories, it is about the people who champions it. How they behave, how they treat other people and how they respond to challenges, obstacles, failures and opportunities is the engine that drives the Innovation Train.

But first, a story about a “problem plagued” CEO

Let’s consider the story of a ‘problem plagued” Fortune 500 CEO.  One day he complained to friend, “I spend all my time dealing with people’s problems and complaints. No one ever brings my new and exciting ideas.”

The friend asked, “Let’s say I work at your company and I come to you with a problem or a complaint, what happens?”

CEO:  “Well, we sit down and talk. I gather the facts; we discuss options and try to figure out a way to deal with the problem.”

Friend: “That’s very good. Now what happens if I come to you with a great new idea?”

The CEO paused, looking a bit flummoxed. “Gee, um…I’m not sure.”

The friend observed, “So let me get this straight: if I bring a problem to you, I will get a lot of your time and attention. If I come to you with a new idea, you don’t know how to respond?”

The CEO nodded his sadly, “Yes.”

A Few Good Ideas

Now comes the fun part! We’re going to imagine the above dialogue as part of an exciting new movie. It’s called A Few Good Ideas and it’s loosely based on that classic, A Few Good Men with Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise. Here’s how the exciting confrontation plays out:

The first question you need ask yourself, "Can I handle a new idea?"

I hope I have made my point: if you don’t how to respond when someone brings you a new idea (i.e., “you can’t handle a new idea!”), you aren’t ready to launch an innovation initiative in your organization. The leaders I witness during my Innovation University visits thrived whenever people brought them ideas. They knew how to have a productive and encouraging conversation and how to act as a guide and even the muse.

Are you ready to do that?