Dispatches from the front lines of executive education

Just Say No to PowerPoint

2012-02-15T10:49:00.000-08:00

Last week, I directed what we call a "booster program" in which six very different business teams, each composed of a CEO and 5-6 of his or her direct reports, used the workshop format of the program to prepare a strategy presentation to the Board of Directors at the end of the week. As part of the program, we work with the teams not only on what they are going to say, but how they are doing to deliver that message. This takes the form of sessions on both powerpoint delivery [one hour in the evening by a real .ppt master] & a shorter session on "presence and command of attention" based on theatrical arguments and delivered by a courtroom-experienced attorney.
This year, much to my surprise and pleasure, four of the six presenting teams made their presentations completely without powerpoint, relying instead upon visuals provided by the two full-time visual facilitators [artists] that we had as part of our team.
While the content in nearly every case was convincing, the visual approach, sans powerpoint, made it compelling! The lesson: when you have an important argument to make, just say "no" to powerpoint!

A Life in Executive Education: Lessons Learned

2011-12-08T08:04:00.001-08:00

I am no longer recommending aging as a life-strategy to my children or young friends; I've yet to find that many advantages to it!

One of the few advantages that I have found to be associated with aging, however, is that sometimes people ask for your opinions, and then actually listen. This happened to me recently, when a friend and colleague -- Ellie Weldon -- from both IMD and CEIBS days, who is presently at CEIBS as both Professor and Academic Director of Custom Executive Education Programs, asked me to reflect on several topics regarding ExecEd. I thought that the questions, and the opportunity to reflect on accumulated experience, were interesting enough to publish here in a slightly extended format, so here goes -- the questions are Ellie's, and the responses, for better or worse, are my own:

a. Lookingback over your career, can you identify events that had a significant impact onthe way you design and deliver Executive Education? What were those events, andwhat did you learn?

Yes,for sure! In the beginning of my career, the events that (now, in hindsight)really impacted me had to do with getting opportunities to try things -- to begiven a cameo spots in a program to see what I could do, and, of course, beingmentored by some real veterans of Exec Ed classrooms. What's interesting aboutyour question is that I have really never reflected upon this before, but nowthat I do what I see is that the invitations to participate at a relatively early age in my careerwere extremely important for building confidence and encouraging greater synergybetween ExecEd needs and my own research efforts. I was extremely fortunate to beat The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [now Kenan-Flagler] at atime when people such as Dick Levin, John Pringle, CL Kendall and Nanti Meyer, and the like were really quiteinnovative in their ExecEd designs. This extended to the younger programdirectors, as well, such as Jay Klompmacher, Bill Bigoness and Les Garner [Young ExecutivesInstitute & Government Executives Institute, respectively].

AsI matured and developed broad functional themes (Operations Strategy,Innovation Management, & China), I received invitations to do theme-basedblocks or even programs at schools such as Carnegie-Mellon (PFE for Bob Dalton), USC(IBEAR for Jack Lewis), UCLA's Anderson School (George Yip), and Duke (WarrenBaunach & Jean Hauser). These opportunities really introduced me to programdesign, which I had not previously been responsible for, and since some ofthese engagements lasted for 10-12 years, there was a reallearning opportunity to develop course architecture and to bring-in partners.

Finally,I think that at IMD when I really took on significant Program Directorship roles, that that reallyhas been the most significant learning experience. To work with Mike Stanford and his colleagues in Partnership Programs, and to be involved with a clientearly in the relationship and to then develop an effective learning response issomething that provides a sort of end-to-end perspective on each individualpart of the executive development experience. Andy Boynton [now Dean of BostonCollege’s Carroll School of Management] was a huge influence at this point inmy life. Andy is a genius at the “choreography of the classroom” and theopportunity to watch him, and work closely with him, has been a constant sourceof insight and learning. For many years, Andy and I did a stream of “two-menshows” where we were both always in the classroom, playing off of each other.That, for me, was an amazing opportunity to try things with the assurance thatsomeone else was along-side in case the experiment went wrong.

b. Inyour own view, what makes you successful as an Executive Education professor?

Hopefully,I am successful. But there are three things that I think any success that Ihave had can be attributed to:

1. A real sense of whatmy own professional mission is. In our recent book TheIdea Hunter, Andy and I talk about “knowing your gig”:knowing what you are really trying to accomplish. Late in life, I figured thisout and it has changed my world. In the process of writing VirtuosoTeams (again, with Andy), I discovered that my gig wasreally all about fighting against talent-diminishment. At the same time, mywork with Charlie Fine [MIT-Sloan] in co-directing our joint IMD/MIT DrivingStrategic Innovation program opened my eyesto some real principles of innovation. Inow have put my gig together with these innovation principles and I try topractice them in each and every opportunity that I have. Interestingly, theseprinciples are mostly about “process” rather than “content”. What distinguishes myapproach to executive education today is no longer solely about my opinions about what the participantsshould learn, but more about how they should master it: co-creation, moreconversations rather than less, more participants talking rather than me,prototyping, experimenting well before the program rather than only during ourtime together, pull rather than push, etc.all make for a more effective learning experience for all involved --me included!

2. A belief that my roleis no longer to be the “purveyor of truth” but rather, instead, to serve as a “smart person facilitatingsmarter people.” This is not easy. It defies decades of professorialprerogatives and requires a willingness to cede control over the classroomexperience to the participants, but it is a sober and realistic admission thatthe people in our executive education classrooms know a lot, are smart people,and should own the experience. My role, then, is to put them into a positionwhere it is their program and not my own.That is not to say that I abdicate my responsibilities as an "instructor" or as someone whose job it is to observe many different managers and businesses, and to draw opinions from these experiences, but the emphasis should be on applying this knowledge to move the participants' conversations forward, rather than "dazzling" them with what I think that I know.

3. A facility withambiguity. I thrive in ambiguity and if you are experimenting whilesimultaneously ceding control, there is often a lot of ambiguity to deal with.For me, that’s a challenge, but you also need to be mindful that your client[or faculty colleagues] don’t perceive this as “disorganization.”

4. Allow me a fourth:I’ve been consistently fortunate throughout my career to be at institutions,and working for Deans and with senior faculty, where Executive Education isseen as a legitimate and important part of the school’s mission. That has madeeverything else so much easier.

c. Inyour own view, what can be done to help other professors develop the skillsthey need to be successful in Executive Education? What advice would you givethem?

1. We all need to figureour who we are and what we wish to accomplish with respect to the audiencesthat we deal with. Knowing “your gig” is an amazingly powerful advantage foraddressing executive education.

2. More institutions needto emphasize Executive Education not only in their revenue portfolios but alsoin their criteria for faculty attraction, retention and development. Toseparate “knowledge creation” from “knowledge delivery”, especially to a clientgroup that is in such great need for better managerial insights, makes nosense.

3. Those of us who are nolonger novices need to invite younger faculty into the mix, in order to givethem a start on their own development.

4. And, I think that weneed to celebrate and reward Executive Education successes in much the same waythat we would celebrate a new book or scholarly achievement.

When I now read this over, what strikes me is how important the generosity and mentorship of others has been as an element of my own good fortune. I always knew that this was true in my research and writing efforts, as I had great mentors all along the way, but I guess I never realized before how important all those offerings of opportunities were on the "teaching" side of my career as well. My hope is now that I've realized this, that I can be more proactive myself in creating opportunities for the next generation, as a way of repaying those who made the effort to help me.

Tapas for Tweeters: From Moroccan Cuisine to Fading Finnish Stars

2011-10-10T05:45:00.000-07:00

The "real thing": a Barcelona tapas bar

Think metaphorically! That's one of the enduring lessons from The Idea Hunter, and in the spirit of that thought I have appropriated the metaphor of tapas from my visit to Barcelona last week, and am going to try to use it to serve-up, from time to time, small morsels of thought that have seen their first light in the form of tweets, but which need more explanation than Twitter's 140 characters allows.

From Moroccan cooking to fading Finnish stars: Here's the logic of what is clearly a prototype -- first the original tweet in bold, and then my extended thoughts on it:

If you read one bookreview this weekend, make it this one! Moroccan cuisine: tradition vs. #innovation (& Kerouac too) http://nyti.ms/plTe4p My wife Marie is the most amazing, and instinctively natural, cook that I have ever met, and a professional one at that. Over the years, certain names in her life have become instantly recognizable in my own, and one of these is Paula Wolfert, originally from Brooklyn [as are Marie & I] and well-known for her Mediterranean cookbooks (especially France & Morocco). Ms. Wolfert now has a new Moroccan cookbook out and the The New York Times book review cited above is both delightful but also professionally provocative, at least if you're interested in the contradictions between innovation and tradition. What they did was to review Ms. Wolfert's book in parallel with a new book by Moroccan-born, San Francisco chef, Mourad Lahlou. The argument is that Ms. Wolfert, who lived in Morocco many years ago, but who is still an "outsider", is nonetheless "the stickler for authenticity and tradition," whereas Mr. Lahlou, the "insider" yet living abroad, is struggling to break-out of the "few narrow ruts" that has confined the development of Moroccan cuisine. To be fair, Ms. Wolfert observes of Mr. Lahlou: "He has made this incredible jump, but his food is not the Moroccan cooking I know. He took steps that only he could take." I find this fascinating. Wolfert was a catalyst in the evolution of Moroccan cuisine when she started collecting recipies from families who had no tradition or sharing such treasures. Her recipes are "the real thing" -- authentic Moroccan cuisine. Without such codification of knowledge, it might never have been possible to move on to the next step of evolution of the cuisine? Lahlou, on the other hand, is sort of a "lead-user", struggling to find that next step that he feels the authentic receipes are not providing. He needs the foundation of knowledge that Wolfert codified for such exploration, but it is his "unique" experiences, as an insider living outside, that prepare him to "take steps that only he could take." In a very real sense, both Lahlou and Wolfert are coexisting in similar but different universes -- or S curves-- but they are, nonetheless, still indespensible to each other, and we are all better off for their efforts!
Iberia's new low-cost airline: what chance do I give this? Zero without a completely new star! on.ft.com/nd9YWX I was delighted when my assistant @KatrinAtWork saw fit to retweet this the other day! Why? Because this is very much a part of the leitmotif that runs through so much of what we have been working together on: Strategy is all about choice & execution! This is the familiar IMD mantra, but yet we see it violated over and over again. Here's an example: Iberia, the Spanish airline part of International Airlines Group [which resulted from the merger with British Airways] has announced the launch of "Iberia Express", a new low-cost airline. It has kept the "Iberia" name as part of the new one, and the new airline's routes are explicitly tied to the hub & spoke needs of the parent airline. The question arises immediately: How different is this really going to be? And, why do we think that with simply a new name [I realize I'm exaggerating here, but not by much] that anything is really going to change? Not surprisingly, the Spanish pilot's union has already claimed violations of contractual agreements as a result of this new offer, and cabin-crew grievances are also expected. What a mess, and they're not even operating! Real change needs new choices, and frequently new organizational cultures as well, and there's no immeditate reassurances here that that is really going to happen. Instead, it appears to be a "half-way" effort to reduce costs and "half-way" nearly never work. My reference in the tweet to the "star" is to Jay Galbraith's framework for considering managerial choices that are necesary to achieve the "cultural outcomes" one hopes for. This is one of the most useful frameworks that we rely upon, and I've blogged about it earlier on these pages.
Look at the smile on Carlos Ghosn's face in Brazil. You can tell that he's in a BRIC & not back in Japan or Europe! on.ft.com/pvvW7a The smile says it all! You can tell that Ghosn is in a market where growth is possible, where the future appears limitless, where people are dreaming bigger! Not so long ago, I had the pleasure of having dinner in an emerging market and was seated next to a young European who was an IMD-alum. I asked him "why he was living out-here" and his response was perfect. He said "At home [in Europe], people have stopped dreaming. Here they dream big!" Is there any wonder why Mr. Ghosn's smile is so big? Can you imagine what his face looks like when he gets back home --either Europe or Japan -- and once again has to listen to the litany of why nothing is possible?
"If U're in a commodity business, it's because U deserve it!" Words by Tom Vollmann; proof by Steve Jobs! C: nyti.ms/oajaQs Tom Vollmann was someone who changed my life. A close friend for many years, an IMD colleague, and someone who was instrumental in the launch of at least three revolutions within the Operations Management field. Tom had a gift for insight and the ability to articulate in memorable ways. He always said of struggling competitors: "If you're in a commodity business, it's because you deserve it!" This all came back to me while reading James B. Stewart's Common Sense column in the International Herald Tribune, New York Times. The pc business has been a commodity business for a long while, and, to be fair, Apple's fate was to languish near the bottom of the pile, condemned to single-digit market shares. Dell, on the other hand, currently unfashionable today but a real high-performer in this industry for over two decades, loved being in a commodity business because it knew what it was doing and made great choices. Apple often appeared to be confused -- price and elegance were not what the consumer was looking for. What Apple did that so many other players didn't do, however, was to hold true to its beliefs. It would rather remain desirable and unaffordable in the pc industry than to compromise who it was and how it went to market. What really saved Apple, however, was not that steadfast allegiance to its values in the unappreciative pc business, but, rather, the ability to open-up entirely new markets in music [iPod], smart phones [iPhone] and connectivity [iPad], where the very essence of each of these industries today is a reflection of Apple's inner beliefs. So, when Steve Jobs is quoted in this article in The New York Times, as saying: "Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends-up expressing itself in successive out layers of the product or service" this speaks to everything that we are trying to do in advancing a product or service through multiple generations of S-curves. If we can ever figure out what that "fundamental soul" is we will know what the ordinate of the "progress" curve's graph really is as well.
Elcoteq from #innovation star 2 bankruptcy. @Reuters suggests value-chain failure, I hear #leadership? reut.rs/njT8GJ Tom Vollmann, who was mentioned in the comment just above this one, and another IMD colleague Carlos Cordon published a small book a few years ago on supply-chain management that I absolutely love. The Power of Two recognizes that once you strip-down the strategically abstract concept of a supply-chain to its' essentials, it's all about people dealing with other people. Did Elcoteq plunge from the heights because it chose the wrong value-chain partners? Or, did it not work well with the ones it had? I guess that either way you answer, it's all about leadership!

Score it as an Error at Fenway

2011-09-14T15:16:00.000-07:00

One night this week, thanks to ourDriving Strategic Innovation partners at MIT's Sloan School, and as a result of the generosity of the folks at Entercom Broadcasting [sports radio: WEEI], I had the opportunity to stand on the playing field at Boston's Fenway Park and watch batting practice up-close. For a baseball fan, this may be as close to heaven as you can get, even if it was Red Sox' park and not Yankee Stadium :-)

Among the other few visitors on the field at the same time was a fellow who self-described himself to me as a "golf pro at a local club." Coincidentally, it turned out that among our DSI group was the director of R&D for a major golf equipment company. I pointed this out to my new golf pro acquaintance and then stood back to watch him take advantage of this amazing opportunity. To my chagrin, and then frustration, he chose not to pursue what just might have been an Idea Hunter's dream. What an error!

Idea Hunters believe that ideas are everywhere, but you have to hunt them. I literally lost sleep that night regretting the missed opportunity. The Red Sox turned out to be winners, but my fear is that in some small way, Golf lost.

Reading Recommendations for Idea-Hunters

2011-08-02T08:17:00.001-07:00

The onset of August always brings with it a bittersweet reminder that summer's end is not that far away, but it also means that there is still one month of summer remaining, and that that time can be well-spent reading. What better to read about, this year, than lessons from accomplished idea-hunters? There are a number of suggestions in this vein that I'd like to offer (in no apparent order):

The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence, by Martin Gayford. It's 1888, and not yet the superstars that they would eventually become, and the young Van Gogh and Gauguin were each in search of new ideas to reboot their flagging careers. Nine weeks spent together in the South of France, explicitly to learn from each other, is a wonderful insight into the lengths that some will go to seed their idea-capital. I am particularly fascinated by the thought that since they had never previously met, they sent each other self-portraits so that they could be recognized when Gauguin made it to Arles. The lessons they shared there ranged from perspectives and styles to the media with which to paint, and the book is a wonderful reminder of much of what we know about the need for agility to be able to move, both physically and mentally, to places where the probabilities of catching new new ideas will be higher.

The Man Who Loved China by Simon Winchester. This biography of Joseph Needham, one of the 20th century's great China scholars, is a virtual "master-class" on one very successful idea-hunter's practices. Needham, who essentially established our knowledge of China's historical science and technology, went about his craft in a highly disciplined fashion and it is no coincidence that his work has had such a profound and lasting impact on those of us who study China's scientific and technical trajectories.

A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age, by Joao Magueljo. For me, reading this book reminded me of reading Kerouac's On the Road. As thrilling for its story as its cadence, the book spills across the tumultuous history of mid-century European physics with all of its complications and romance. Throw-in Enrico Fermi's Via Panisperna boys, and you even have a "Virtuoso Teams" story as well!

Charles Darwin "Voyaging" by Janet Browne (volume 1 of two volumes on Darwin). Darwin changed our world, but not by himself. This book is a treatise on the powers of networking and the power of including more and more different minds in idea-hunting. It is also a primer on how personal modesty and professional success do not have to be mutually exclusive, if the capacity to learn is nurtured.

Faust in Copenhagen, by Gino Segre. Also a great book on networking, this wonderful story of the "family" of scientists who in the 1930s stood at the inflection point between classical physics and quantum mechanics is a very useful exploration about how new ideas move from idea-hunter to idea-hunter and how distortions such as geographic space, political ideology and institutional pride can affect the flow of a new idea.

The Murrow Boys: Pioneers on the Front Lines of Broadcast Journalism, by Lynne Olson and Stanley W. Cloud. Perhaps, best known today for his courage in standing up against Senator Joe McCarthy, and the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, Edward R. Murrow also deserves our respect for his work in "inventing" the modern field of broadcast journalism. This book describes Murrow's role in creating the way that today's news reaches us, and thevirtuoso team he assembled to cover the second World War.

China By the Beach

2011-07-21T06:00:00.000-07:00

For me, one of the best parts of summer is the ability to sit on the beach -- in Liguria, or North Carolina -- and catch-up on my reading. Without exception, I always start with Homer and the Greeks [except this year the cycle is Virgil and the Greeks], but (to paraphrase NC's own James Taylor) I always have "China on my mind" as well! Recently, I was asked by some colleagues in the IMD Dutch alumni community to suggest some summer China reading. In response, I've tried to come up with a brief but interesting list that would be good for the beach:

To Change China by Jonathan D. Spence. Originally published in 1980, this is the book that I always use to start any reading list on China. Spence, a distinguished China scholar, offers us a sobering view of the futility that has marked the efforts of past generations of Western missionaries, aid-providers, and business people engaged in attempting to change the mind of China in a variety of what appeared to them as logical and attractive ways. This was the book that left the biggest impression on me prior to our moving to China in 1980, and the one that I think of instinctively whenever I hear the dreams of a new-to-China enthusiast.

On China by Henry Kissinger. Published only a few months ago, Kissinger's book (reviewed by Jonathan D. Spence in The New York Review of Books) is the only book on this list that I have not yet read, but it is in my pile for this summer. Although the book hardly mentions China of the 21st century, I am including it because Kissinger is in a unique position to offer us a historical and politically-interperative overview of Chinese history, and I think that such a historical treatment is a well-worthwhile foundation upon which to build an awareness of contemporary and future China.

When China Rules the World by Martin Jacques. We have used this book as a primary reading for IMD's EMBA discovery expedition to China for the past two years, and it has served us well as a platform for bridging China's omnipresent past with it's accelerating drive into the future. Jacques, who writes for The Guardian, offers an informed and wide-ranging view of China's political and social infrastructure and how they interact with the rampaging economic machine that it transforming the global economy.

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard Mcgregor. In the midst of our adulation of the Chinese growth experience, it is always a danger to discount the role of the Communist Party in all of this. As the old song title indicates, it's very likely true that: Without the Communist Party, there Would be No New China. The Financial Time's Richard Mcgregor has produced a very accessible and informative introduction to this most mysterious of growth catalysts.

The Beijing Consensus: How China's Authoritarian Model will Dominate the Twenty-First Century by Stefan Halper. Could China's success persuade other emerging markets to give-up on democracy and market mechanisms and adopt a more "directed" approach to economic growth and social organization? Halper provides a good overview of this recent political movement.

Ultimatum by Matthew Glass. Just as I was about to post this, my good friend Katrina Garner pointed out that no beach reading list would be complete without a good novel. I think that she's right and Matthew Glass's first novel is an amazing one for the beach. Climate change and US-China rivalry combine in an incredibly realistic and gripping yarn. Even if you are not interested in China, this is a good one for the beach!

Catch & Release Those Great Ideas

2011-06-28T11:35:00.000-07:00

I believe as an "article of faith" that: Ideas in motion add value, ideas at rest do not. As a result, idea flows are always more desirable than idea stocks.

If I continue the fishing metaphor from my last blog, to help me think differently about how to work with ideas, then the next most obvious lesson that I learned last week while fishing in the Adirondacks was the attractiveness of "catch & release" as a philosophy of fishing. Simply put, the Adirondack trout fisherman is obligated in most places to quickly release any fish that they may catch so as to spare the fish and give it the chance to grow into something bigger. Why not do the same thing with ideas? We all have ideas that we've stored away until that special day when we can put them to work. In most cases, if we're sober and honest, that "special" day will never come. Why not release that idea back into the flow -- smartly in order to send it off with the best chance for success, and perhaps with some type of linkage back to you -- but send it off nonetheless?

There are some additional metaphorical illustrations to make this proposal more vivid. I've long admired, for example, and belong to, a web-community called www.bookcrossing.com which is dedicated to releasing books "into the wild" after you have read them. I really love the idea of sharing a great read with someone I've never met before. Similarly, Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher, who formerly wrote the wine column for The Wall Street Journal, created the occasion that they called "Open That Bottle Night" to encourage readers to share that "special" bottle that they've been saving for a celebration with friends before it lost its luster. OTBN can be great fun when everyone brings their long-anticipated prize and shares not only the wine but the story that inevitably goes along with it. My hunch is that releasing ideas that you have affection for, but no realistic chance of seeing through to development, will create the same thrill of excitement that is offered by bookcrossing's or OTBN's shared treasures.

Think about how you can give life to an idea by putting it back into the flow. Why not release an idea this week?

Idea Fisching

2011-06-27T01:25:00.000-07:00

Idea Hunters frequently rely on metaphorical thinking to help them gain insights that would otherwise be invisible. The utility of such an approach was brought home to me again last week when I was trout-fishing in the Adirondacks with my son [pictured]. Our guide, Rachel Finn, is a woman who has an MA in Fine Arts from Yale, and an uncanny ability to read a stream in the search for fish.
In helping me better understand where the most promising fishing spots were, Rachel shared three pieces of advice that I believe are perfect for idea-hunting as well:

Fish where the stream's volume of flow is the greatest, as more volume produces more opportunity for more nourishment. Same for ideas! The Idea Hunter wants to position themself in the most likely place to get ideas -- the fast flows where ideas are abundant, rather than the slowest, least likely places where ideas might be found.

Fish the creases -- those subtle changes in speed, or seams- edges - contours- -- between fast water and slow water. Same for ideas! The Idea Hunter is looking for those neighborhoods where different flows of ideas come together. Diversity matters, and hunting for ideas in the same fast moving flows as everyone else is not going to yield different opportunities.

Fish closer before you cast further out. The point here is to ensure exploiting every opportunity close in, before casting further out. Same with ideas! Make sure that you are getting every idea you can from your familiar idea-sources, before you expend resources on more exotic locations.

Metaphors help us see opportunities that are otherwise invisible. Be it fishing or hunting, new ideas are more likely to be found by the thoughtful observer.

Embracing Indifference: I Tweet & Nobody Cares

2011-05-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, is there a sound? If I send a tweet and nobody reads it, does it still count? The answer to the first is an unequivocal "yes." As for the second question, I'm not sure, but I'm working on it!

I tweet, and nobody cares. And, yet, my twitter life is one of the most exciting parts of my persona as an #IdeaHunter. How can that be? I'm an alpha-male, shouldn't I care? Especially, when I am reminded of the thousands of tweeters who follow my colleagues [on those rare occasions when I bring myself to check their numbers]? In fact, I am quite content at being "overlooked" in the Twitter world. Despite my relative inability to attract followers, Twitter has helped me think of idea-hunting, communications, social media and my own role in all of these pursuits, in ways that I had never previously considered. Here is what I've learned:

Tweeting is about learning and not sending

First of all, and most important, Tweeting is about receiving, not emitting, at least in my own Twitter-life. Twitter is fine for voyeurs! Twitter is the most powerful new learning tool that I know of. Everyday -- literally, every day -- I find links of sites, articles and blogs that I would have never have otherwise known about. It's as if I have an army of researchers out beating the bushes, hunting for new ideas for me to consider. Just today, for example, I found estimates of the costs of Chinese IP piracy, that I never knew existed. I've been struggling with how to start-off a Forbes.com "Ideas Business" blog on IP piracy, and this was exactly what I needed to make the topic vivid. Thank you, Twitter! Yesterday, I received two wonderful illustrations of metaphoric thinking -- one on creating a "business class" for newspaper websites; the other for disrupting business school executive education offerings using "playlists." I used both of these examples on the same day that I received them to illustrate Idea Hunter exercises.

None of this required me to do anything more daring than "turning Twitter on." There was no requirement for me to "emit" anything. I was purely and simply a "receiver." In fact, I could be a receiver forever and still learn from Twitter streams about issues that I am interested in.

Links not Lunches

Please forgive me if I tell you that I'm not interested in who you're having lunch with today, nor am I interested in sharing my own luncheon plans with anyone. For me, Twitter is a source of professional information, not social news. I'll follow you despite your need to tell me about your life only if I get value out of the rest of what you tell me. Otherwise, I'm out of our Twitter relationship immediately! No lunches for me; just links!

Twitter is not about wasting time; it's about discipline

Twitter makes me a more disciplined reader & writer. I now read my news sources in an entirely different way than I did just a few months ago. I'm constantly thinking of what I can do with this piece of information? Do I archive as I've always done, in solitary splendor? Or, do I rebound it into the small twitter community that for whatever reason is interested in what I'm interested in [my small band of devoted followers]? Do I add my own opinions to the original tweet (almost always), or merely pass it along? This is now about insight and interpretation, and reuse, rather than merely glimpsing the ephemeral tracks of data packets passing-by.

Twitter also never forgets, and so I keep track of my own tweets as a "diary" of issues that I've been interested in enough to tweet about. For many that require more thought and inquiry, I email them to myself to follow-up on. Tweeting has become a major new part of my ideas-sources portfolio.

Twitter has changed the conversational neighborhoods that I hang-out in.

As an Idea Hunter I have long believed that the world is not flat when it comes to ideas. But, most of the ideas that I'm interested in -- be they about innovation, technology or China -- are occurring somewhere else. With Twitter, I'm now directly in the middle of many of those conversations without leaving Lausanne. For example, I have long admired the insights of Canadian urban-sociologist @Richard_Florida, or Silicon Valley God @jseelybrown; now I talk directly with them, although we've never met. Similarly, I enjoy sharing ideas with my Idea Hunter & Virtuoso Teams co-author @Andy_Boynton, business model entrepreneur Alex Osterwalder [@business_design], MIT supply chain guru Charlie Fine [@clockspd], strategist Estelle Metayer [@Competia], artist Maurizio Marinelli [@MauMarinelli] or China-journalist @fonstuinstra, but even though they are all good friends, and more than a few live close-by, the reality is that such conversations typically took place only when we were face-to-face. Now, however, thanks to Twitter, I can listen-in to what each of these people are thinking about, almost daily, and the contact is often immediate and direct. Twitter has moved our conversations from being episodic to continuous. And, the potential is there to make both pre-and post- program learning experiences more continuous and more immediate then was ever before possible.

So, although few listen when I tweet, my thought world has been richly & spatialy expanded, many-fold thanks to Twitter. I am quite content with where I am in this brave new world of tweeting!

The image above is a wall-hanging at the IBM Corporate Learning Center in Armonk, NY.

Tweetless in Shanghai

2011-05-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

NAME: Bill Fischer
PROFESSION: Idea Hunter
NATIONALITY: CyberSpace
RELIGION: Curiosity

Can you imagine filling-out an "entry form" like this before entering immigration at some airport? No admission would be possible! But, why not? After all, in a very real sense this is as accurate a description of who I am as anything else I might care to put down.

This all came to mind recently, when I was unable to access Twitter (or even this blog, which is truly amazing!) because of internet controls that had been put into place by someone, somewhere, for reasons that simply escape me.

The experience forcefully brought-home to me of the importance of IdeaHunting in how I define who I am, and what I believe in. It also reminded me that in the 1950s, the great broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow ran a radio series, later newspaper series, and book, entitled This I Believe. The idea was to have a cross-section of people offer brief [3 1/2 minutes on the radio] commentaries on truths that they held fundamental. The frustration of knowing that there were ideas "out there" that I could not access gave me the opportunity to consider what I do believe in: I believe in the primacy of ideas. Next to family and friends, ideas are at the very center of the meaning of life. Without access to ideas, we are diminished as human beings; our talent is squandered by those who care more about the continuity of their own power, than allowing us the ability to fulfill our potential.

I also believe that as Idea Hunters we have an inalienable right to be able to search for ideas no matter where they might be found. To quote two very different, but original and influential, thinkers: Deng Xiaoping insightfully admonished us to learn truth from facts, while John XXIII observed that the truth shall set [us] free.

Ideas matter, and in the early years of our emerging knowledge era, those societies which encourage active idea-hunting, far and wide, would appear to me to have the best chances for successfully anticipating and addressing the uncertainties which surely loom ahead of us. Ideas will become the raw materials that economic wealth will be made-of, and social well-being improved. To shut-off as important a source of this raw material as Twitter is a strategic choice of considerable import. One wonders who makes such a choice, and on the basis of what criteria?

The image above is a detail from the original floor of the Cercle Sportif Francais in Shanghai. It reminded me of the knots which tie-up modern Idea-Hunters. The floor is now part of the modern Garden Hotel. The original was designed by architects Leonard, Veysseyre & Kruze, and built between 1924-1926.

The Role of Ideas in the Leadership Role

2011-04-17T23:47:00.000-07:00

Leaders add value through the ideas that they bring to the game. At least, I hope that that's the case!

In fact, like nearly everything else, it's not entirely clear about how ideas work in effective leadership. Think for a moment about leaders you have known. How many of them are associated in your mind with "leading through ideas"? While certainly some jump out immediately, there are an alarming number for whom the notion of ideas would not necessarily be associated with their leadership role. In far too many instances that I can recall, the wordaction is the first characteristic that comes to mind. Mind you, I have no argument with "action" if it is purposeful and thoughtful, but all too often it appears to be spasmodic and reactive. In fact, all too many leaders that I know are neither reflective nor curious.... both devastating liabilities if we are hoping for "smarter" organizations!

The other day in an IMD program designed for CEOs, I asked the participants to describe how their association with "knowledge" and "ideas" changed as they had moved through their careers. Using the "leadership passage" model proposed by Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, & James Noel [The Leadership Pipeline, 2nd edition: Josey-Bass, 2011], we explored what sorts of ideas they had needed at each stage in their careers, and how they learned such things. The image above shows a blackboard shot from the discussion.

At the start of their careers, the CEOs that I was working with felt that their idea-contribution was largely "technical" [by "technical" I am referring to the detailed practice of their profession, and not to "technology" per se.] in nature, often resulting from solitary investigations, and where they had little need to explain their recommendations beyond it's technical effectiveness. Their task was to recommend what to do, and their biggest challenge as an idea-worker[although I don't believe any of them would describe themselves this way] was to "be heard." They also spoke of "generational differences" as both a reason they were asked to submit ideas [presumably, it was recognized that those just out of school might have newer/more ideas], and as a source of impotence in the advancing of their ideas.

The career advance to "managing others" brought along with it a need to delegate idea-work. The new focus became how to do this, and the leadership role was more of an "aligner," with a need to now explain "why" ideas were needed, along with more listening to the proposed ideas of others, which is not necessarily natural nor straight-forward. As they then next moved on to "managing managers", they were required to listen to not only more people, but more different people. There was also a real shift away from working with technical ideas to more working with political ideas: the issues are bigger, and more complex, and the risks are greater.

In the upper reaches of corporate leadership, where they were managing large organizational units, or the corporation itself, my participants saw their idea roles as largely that of inspiring and convincing. They had experienced a real transition from "classical" learning to "learning by experience." They found themselves engaged in long visions and helicopter thinking and were now relying on "processes" for the acquisition of the ideas of others. Their biggest fear at these upper-reaches of corporate life was the loss of entrepreneurial drive and a fear that action at that leadership level was so heavily influenced by incentives. In addition, they admitted that they heard only problems in their jobs, and far less about opportunities. All this cries out for a need for preparation in order to make the transitions in idea-work that accompany the leadership transitions, yet it was also clear that nothing like this had been provided for the people in the class.

Perhaps the most sobering reflections of the day were the lack of responses as tohow they actually acquired the ideas that were necessary to perform successfully at each level of their advance. The first level was the easiest: technical skills obtained in school were the basis for their ideas. Above this, however, one gets the feeling that it is much more happenstance, unless the leader maintains a discipline about "Idea-Hunting" that can serve them well as an alternative to unconscious dependency upon others who have strong personal and political agendas in advancing their own ideas. Acquiring that discipline, however, is a personal initiative, and there was really little or no "education" about how to become a more effective idea-worker at each level of their career advance.

We all agree that we are moving into a knowledge-intensive era, where better ideas will become the ultimate competitive advantage. Presumably, the effective leader of the future will be one who has a facility for working with new ideas -- theirs and the ideas of others, and who is both thoughtful and engaged in the pursuit and support of good ideas. This is a role of strategic importance and considerable responsibility, yet for the most part it would appear that we provide little or no conscious preparation in such facility for the leader-aspirant as they move upwards through their leadership passages. Since our work on The Idea Hunter argues that successful idea-work is more the result of behavior than of brains, it would seem logical to work with future and incumbent leaders to develop their idea-behaviors so that their organizations will, in turn, become effectively smarter.

Choose Failing Over Filtering

2011-04-07T07:09:00.000-07:00

My problem is that we have too many good ideas. We're overloaded with them! I need filters to help me deal with this overload. So went the comment in today's class at IMD. The speaker, a CEO in a good-sized, technically-focused, firm went on to ask what "filters" would I recommend to screen new ideas? To be honest, I think that it's the wrong question.

If we are facing S-curve disruption, it is unlikely that our finally-crafted filters will work as well as we might hope... Afterall, in disruption, we're typically being surprised with something that we hadn't thought about before. If they do work, it might be a sign that we are too late: that the disruption has moved from a potential to the immediate; so much so that our filters now recognize it. Instead, I would suggest an entirely different approach.

When we face surprising, disruptive challenges, that we haven't foreseen, much less prepared for, how can we filter effectively? I say we probably can't. In fact, to be more emphatic, in such situations, I believe that traditional market-based research methodolgies will fail us. What is required is that we take chances:

First, in the face of not knowing things, it's always a good idea to invite others in to help us. More "inclusive"innovation, even to the extent of really being open in our idea-sourcing, will raise the likelihood that others can help us see things that are invisible to us at the moment.

Then, combine more inclusive innovation with testing these new ideas against evolving market possibilities using prototypes -- fully recognizing that this means learning through failure, but failure that is inexpensive in terms of time and/or cost (taking the risk out of failing) -- and we have a fundamentally different approach to learning to the more traditional, but badly suited for disruption, approach of "filtering."

My advice: in the face of uncertainty, invite others to help you find good new ideas, and then fail more rather than "filtering" in an effort to test their merit.

The accompanying image to this post about "filtering" (or building more effective screens) is an image of a man working with a net, in this case to catch deer. It was created in Assyria in about 645-635 BC, Nineveh, North Panel, and is presently in the British Museum.

Mantras for Innovation

2011-04-05T02:40:00.000-07:00

In uncertain times, when we are struggling to find our way, a compass is often considerably more effective than are strict directions. When innovation is the objective (particularly under the threat of disruptive innovation), the need for such a compass can be compelling. Since innovation is all about doing something that we've never done before, "rules & regulations" are not going to get us very far; what we need is a form of compass that provides confidence that no matter what the disruption, we are operating in a way that is likely to raise (not lower) the probability of our success.

With the uncertainty of disruptive innovation threatening nearly every industry, I offer three "compass-like mantras" that have come out of our recent work on Innovation at IMD:

More ideas are always better than fewer;

More minds are always better than fewer; and

More different minds are always better than the same minds.

I have used the term mantra to describe these because I feel as if they are "incantations" to be repeated over again in the face of great uncertainty and risk -- in much the same way that in some Asian religions' mantras are used as an incantation repeated in the hopes of creating transformation. According to Wikipedia, the actual etymology of the Indo-Iranian origins of the word suggests that repeating the words brings out the inherent truth in them. In fact, I find them a reassuring test of the essential question that, in times of stress, we so quickly dispense of, namely: "are we following the right path towards getting the sorts of ideas that we need to avoid falling hostage to our many organizational and professional clichés and assumptions?"

Lest anyone think that I have lost my mind in my advocation of "more rather than less" ideas, I want to argue that over the course of my career in innovation I have met few [none?] organizations that suffer from having too many good ideas. Admittedly, there are times and places where making a choice and moving-on is necessary; but all too often what I see is a discomfort for new ideas in the face of enthusiasm for -- action: "Ready, Fire, Aim" as the metaphor for organizational decision making around innovation; and that's what these mantras may, in fact, be most helpful in resisting.

The image of the dancing Shiva that accompanies this post was taken in my home and is used in recollection of J. Robert Oppenheimer's recital of words from the Bhagavad-Gita on the occasion of the detonation of the first Atomic bomb: July 16. 1945.

Innovation "Culture": Execution is more Important than Aspirations

2011-04-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

Innovation Culture: we all want to be like Apple, or IDEO, Google, or W.L. Gore. As if it were that easy! No one wants to be slow, customer-indifferent, or uncreative, but the sad truth is that too many are! Why? How can it be that we all want something so badly, and yet so few achieve it?

My belief is that the problem starts with the very word "culture." It rolls off the tongue so easily, in nearly any language. When you use the word "culture", especially in relation to innovation, everyone nods in agreement -- it's an "easy sell," the universal panacea. Yet, the real problem is that the word "culture"means everything to everyone. It is so mysterious that none of us have any idea of what the other really means when they use the term, but we don't really care. We are all under the spell of becoming Apple, without questioning what it takes to get there.

For this reason, I truly hate the word "culture", and try to forbid its use in my classes. My former Driving Strategic Innovation program colleague Harvard Professor Rebecca Henderson once called "culture: an excuse for thinking." I agree! Instead, I believe that the word "culture" should describe "how we do things around here," or essentially typical group behavior. If that is true, then I also believe that such behavior is the outcome of managerial choices made within five realms:

the articulation of strategic vision (which should be both precise & liberating)

the talent & skills that are necessary to achieve this vision

the best way to organize our talent & skills to achieve our vision

the processes that we can employ to give our talent a higher probability of success, and

the values, measures & rewards by which we inspire, evaluate and compensate our talent.

Almost all managerial choice involves one of these five realms and together they determine how our people behave --i.e, they determine our "culture." The model was first proposed by my former IMD-colleague, Jay Galbraith, and is best represented by his star model (shown above). I think of the star as a sort of "steering" device. By "tuning" any of the five "levers" I can activate motion in my organization in one direction or another. To really steer the organization in the direction that I wish, I need to consider "tuning" all of them, and in such a way (and at the same time) -- alignment -- that the organization moves in the direction, and at the speed, that we aspire. This is what culture should be about. The conscious and thoughtful result of managerial choices; not mystery!

A War for Ideas?

2011-03-27T02:11:00.001-07:00

Ideas can move the world!

If this is true, how beneficial is it for any one nation to exceed in knowing things? Are we, in fact, moving from a world where making things is no longer as potent in global "realpolitik" as is knowing things? Does this mean that the new competition is about idea generation and realization? Idea policies to replace industrial policies?

This past weekend, in the Financial Times "Life & Arts" section, Ed Crooks reviewed four new books on America's present competitive concerns and possible remedies under the title "The regeneration game." Much of what is said in that review sounds a lot like military preparedness for a war for ideas, albeit ideas made practical, so that they become: rapidly diffused, industrially standardizing, and commercially successful, ideas. Such objectives are not, of course, exclusively American ones. Most of the advanced economies of the world hope to share in the benefits that idea-leadership can promise.

While I must confess that anything that would reduce the creation or dissemination of good ideas strikes me as being abhorrent, there is clearly a national economic competitive aspect to this as well. Ideas will undoubtedly become the currency of the future and those societies who figure out how to have more and better ideas will be better places to live than those who don't. If such competitiveness is in fact a notion that is gaining credibility, then what exactly would a "war for ideas" look like? Ideas, for example, are "sharable," so that if you have an idea and share it with me, neither of us is necessarily worse off. There is not the same zero-sum bargaining that accompanies scarce resources. However, there is a rich economics literature which shows that "value-creation" is not the same, nor necessarily as strategically desirable, as is "value-capture." It is the latter, I suspect, that is the ultimate national political objective, and where large big-branded multinational corporations have the distinct edge. But, nonetheless, "value-creation" is the coal-face where the raw materials of the knowledge age are mined. Where should we be putting our emphasis? And, how to do it?

My sense is that this is something that we should be talking about in the larger political arenas of our lives. At a time when many nations are seeing their education budgets being cut, knowledge-workers [e.g., teachers] diminished, and idea-laden immigrants turned away at national borders, it would appear that there is a major global disconnect between what we all want -- thought leadership -- and how we are going about pursuing it.

The image accompanying this post is from the British Museum. It is Assyrian, from Nimrud's North-West Palace, and is dated at about 865-860 BC.

What's the Big Idea?

2011-03-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Who amongst us works in an innovative position? I would hope all of us! In fact, however, when I ask that question of the executives I work with, normally only about 1/3 think of themselves as "innovators." That's really too bad! Why shouldn't everyone dream of what they could do better, and then have the license to pursue those dreams?

I recently had the chance to work with 30 or so mostly Marketing executives at a European-based, globally-well-known, fast moving consumer goods company, and I asked them "What have been the big ideas over the past decade that have either changed your industry, or the work that you do?" The responses that I received were quite surprising, and I think promising as well.

From the six teams we had assembled for this discussion, we received nine "big idea" nominations. What was so interesting was that they were all different, and represented interesting innovations across the business. Not surprisingly, since this is a product-selling organization, four of the idea nominations were about product changes [each different, in an industry that traditionally stereotypes itself as being "non-innovative"!], but two were about the reinvention of a global supply chain, one was about moving from local to global brands, another was about the rise of Corporate Social Responsiblity as a way of thinking within the industry, and the final one was an apparent industry-wide desire to engender "transformational leadership."

It was, admittedly, a very small and casual sample. Despite this, I was very happy, and quite surprised, to see these results! What they said to me was that: 1. even in a "slow-moving" industry, there are lots of big changes; 2. these big changes -- innovations! -- actually take place in nearly every part of the business: R&D, Supply-Chain, Marketing, HR, and even within the very definition of what it means to be a "leader"; and 3. these innovations, no matter where they occur, are recognized and appreciated by executives across the business. My interpretation is that perhaps sometimes even we, who are steeped in innovation interests, fail to recognize that innovation is alive and well in many parts of a business and that it is often more visible than we suspect.

The accompanying image is of Le Cirque Invisible, and features Victoria Chaplin and Jean-Baptiste Thierrée.

From Raw Recruits to Avid Tweeters, In About an Hour

2011-03-22T22:56:00.000-07:00

What could be more difficult than overcoming the average business person's disdain for social media and converting them from first-time users to avid tweeters in less than an afternoon? Actually, it wasn't difficult at all. We did it with about 24 marketing managers (out of 29) in about an hour!

The secret? Nothing that Ev Rogers hadn't told us about fifty years ago in his seminal work The Diffusion of Innovation. Last week, my IMD colleague Willem Smit, and I, took approximately 30 relatively young, but definitely not social-media-savvy, marketing managers, who work for a large global fast-moving-consumer-goods company, and turned them into ardent tweeters by merely following Rogers' prescriptions step by step. Ev Rogers was a sociologist who studied the diffusion of innovations in a variety of social settings. From this body of work came a recognition that the rate of an innovation's diffusion throughout a society is a function of five variables, each of which we addressed as annotated:

Relative Advantage: For Rogers, this was a comparison of the advantage to be gained from adopting the innovation relative to the advantage of the prior state. In our case, the prior state was an indifference, if not actual unawareness or uncharitable stereotpying, of what Twitter was and how it worked. We sought to increase the relative advantage of using Twitter by establishing a contest that promised a "significant" reward for the "team" that was the most accomplished tweeters over the following few days, as measured by total number of tweet emissions, and the number and "quality" of both followers and followees. We also appealed to their curiosity and Idea-Hunting instincts to argue that Twitter was an extremely powerful professional learning tool.
Complexity: When it comes to speeding-up the rate of an innovation's diffusion, simplicity wins. Twitter is pretty simple to begin with, but we sought to make it even simpler by providing personal coaching as the form of instruction.
Compatibility: According to Rogers, innovations diffuse faster when they fit "naturally" into the cadence of life within a community. In our case, we were running a course on innovation, branding, and social media, in which the participants were responsible, as co-creators, to supply insights as well as impressions. Twitter works well as a entry-way into knowledge-worlds that would otherwise be invisible to them. Once they were aware of this, they realized that Twitter actually allowed them to become measurably better informed than they had been before using it, and. as a result, it fit right into the overall scheme of the program. Finally, we built time to tweet into the first afternoon for experimentation, so that they did not have to do it "later" on their own time (although, once hooked, they no longer begrudged giving up their own time to Twitter).
Trialibility: Rogers argued that if you could try an innovation, without risk, you were much more likely to adopt it, than if there was an all-or-nothing entry fee imposed. We reduced the cost of the first tweet by doing it together with coaching, and then made the continued use of Twitter easy by virtue of employing iPads as the learning platform, so that the "cost" of tweeting was almost nil, and we encouraged everyone to emit their first tweet together.
Observability: If you can get a prospective adopter to try something, but they do it in private, then you have to "sell" each prospective adopter, one by one. If, however, the "trials" are done in such a way that they are visible to all, and if they work, the likelihood is that many or all of the observers will adopt. For our situation, we all tweeted together in one big room, where everyone could see everyone else's enjoyment and success [see photo above]. The effect was contagious! We also requested that all of our tweeters added a uniquely identifiable #hashtag to each tweet that they emitted so that we call monitor our progress. It made assessment easier, but also made eveyone's tweeter activity very observable.

In short, by following Ev Rogers' prescriptions, we literally did turn a group of Twitter Virgins into Avid Tweeters in about an hour, and they continued to tweet throughout our time together, as indicated by their quantitative tweet counts and their qualitative follower/followee relationships.

The Idea Hunter's Dictionary: D is for Diverse -- Insights from FMCG Practice

2011-03-21T00:09:00.000-07:00

More and more different people? How desirable is that? Well, if getting new ideas is your objective, then we believe that it is essential!

There should no longer be any doubt in anyone's mind, as we move into this brave new world of Globalization, that diversity is much, much, more than mere political rhetoric. Make no mistake, "politically-correct" rhetoric was undoubtedly necessary to insure social change, and has been extremely important in forcing us to finally recognize the disservice that we've paid to our species by minimizing the potential contributions of an entire gender, and large groups of our fellow travelers on this planet, for much of recorded history. But, in many instances, we are now at a point where the institutionalization of diversity-preaching has faded into the background noise of running a complex organization. Despite this, we should not lose sight of the importance of diversity practices in building a smarter organization. Diversity -- be it gender, race, religion, geography, profession, you name it -- matters when new ideas are being sought!

From an Idea-Hunter's perspective, there is significant appreciation that diverse sources of ideas are our best chance for getting an "edge" on our competitors. In any industry, when we look around, the rivals have most likely gone to the same schools, studied the same materials, read the same books, hung-out with the same types of people, and probably, as a result of all of this, are likely to have the same ideas, at about the same point in time. Relying on diverse sources of experiences, insights, and ideas, to make an effort to break the "sameness cycle" and really get an unusual idea is the best antidote to being held hostage to the very same "conventional wisdom" as is everyone else. If we can strip-away the rhetorical baggage of preaching diversity, there is real merit in making the effort, as I discovered last week in a program that I ran for a global fast-moving-consumer-goods leader.

When I asked -- as an Idea-Hunter -- 30 or so mid-career participants to identify an actual example of how diversity worked to make their company more effective with respect to the acquisition and usage of new ideas, the results were gratifying and instructive:

* Behavior changes -- diverse teams create a motivation for team members to reappraise their behaviors, which typically results in increased professionalism and more effective interaction.

* More external partnerships -- diverse teams break the mold in what it possible, and what is familiar, and both lead to a greater range of partnership choices and a greater willingness to explore such relationships.

* Best-practice sharing -- diverse teams overcome "not-invented-here" tendencies by sharing experiences in an inclusive fashion: rather than imposing them from above -- change is fostered through peer-to-peer learning instead of being commanded. Also, by filling mid-career appointments from outside, it is possible to learn from other firms both inside and outside the industry.

* Diverse teams create the opportunity to debate such questions as "Why?" instead of starting immediately with "How?"

* Diverse teams lead to different levels of engagement -- the example of more women in the sales force was used by several teams to illustrate how the nature of the selling process was changed just by having different people [females] involved.

Each of these is a valuable outcome in its own right; together they represent a set of advantages that many organizations would love to have. What is so striking here, however, is that they are not so much "big, strategic" initiatives, but more the commonsense employment of diverse, and often temporary, teams which can be developed specifically for raising the probability of getting better ideas.

Marvels of Modern Management: Apple & the Lost Tablet Tribes

2011-03-15T07:50:00.000-07:00

"Apple isn't likely to keep its 90% share of the booming tablet market..." 90%? That's unheard of in nearly any market! Can you imagine such a comment regarding a market as competitive as tablet computers? Yet, that's what Walt Mossberg, the technology columnist for the The Wall Street Journal observed just last week.

In fact, 400,000-600,000 iPad 2s sold in the first three days that they were available, according to The Wall Street Journal's estimates, and that's also amazing when you consider that the iPad 1 took a week to reach that number, and that most of last week's purchasers were first-time buyers of an iPad. By any account, this is an extraordinary accomplishment. In fact, an analyst from Piper Jeffrey & Co., quoted in the same article, admitted as much: "We didn't expect anything close to this." Apparently, neither did the other players in the pc industry!

That is what makes this a marvel of modern management: the absolute lead that Apple has achieved over well-known, highly thought-of, competitors who appear to be paralyzed. As one R&D Director in the industry said to me recently: "We saw tablets coming. We recognized their potential. We saw them as they passed us by, and, now, we are watching them move on; and all the while we find ourselves unable to take action!" Ok, some -- Samsung, in particular -- have moved to challenge Apple, but while most of the big competitors are still to announce their version 1; Apple is well-into version 2. Where are the others? How could this be happening? What are they waiting for?

How do you explain this? It has to be regarded as a Marvel of Modern Management!

My sense is that we live in a time of unprecedented complexity. Technologies,
globalization, emerging markets, etc. have resulted in everything being
"bigger," "faster," more "profound," more "risky." As a direct result, I think
that we can also argue that this is the most demanding leadership era, as well.
As we move forward into this uncharted managerial wilderness, it's not
surprising to catch glimpses, along the way, of extraordinary managerial
accomplishments or shocking confusion/delusion, that merit some attention and
reflection if we are to be more thoughtful about the craft of leadership. This
has prompted me to begin to explore a series of "sketches" regarding what I've
chosen to refer to as "Marvels of Modern Management." The term is a both an
expression of admiration, but it can also be a bit satirical, and comes from a
book that I had as a child which was entitled J.R. Crossland's Modern [1938!]
Marvels Encyclopedia, and which chronicled (according to some scheme I never did
understand) “marvels” of contemporary life. It also, of course, could be taken
to refer to “Captain Marvel,” who assumed “super-hero” form as the result of his
alter-persona Billy Batson's repeating the magic mantra: Shazam, which stood
for: the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the stamina of Atlas, the
power of Zeus, the courage of Achilles, and the speed of Mercury. Not a bad
combination of attributes to be desired in the 21st century CEO!

The image accompanying this post is a terra-cotta figure of an Etruscan actor from the 2nd century BC, said to be from Canino, Italy, and presently in the British museum. The character is holding a bag of money and I chose this image to represent the awarding of a prize for an impressive accomplishment.

The Idea Hunter's Dictionary: I is for Ideas

2011-03-09T06:15:00.000-08:00

Ideas can move the world!

They come in all sorts of packages, from the [slightly dated, but still much loved] iPod nano shown here to the traditional book, which serves as a "container for ideas." And, ideas certainly move markets! Whether it’s the tablet computers that are such a rage, smart phones &/or their “apps”, or social-networking, compression software [mp3] replacing CD players, e-books nudging real books aside, extreme skiing, rap music, the "cloud," boutique hotels, reality television, our interest in nutrition (organic/bio becoming increasingly preferred in food selection): You name it, they’re all about ideas; new ideas displacing old ideas. Someone gets a new idea, it catches-on, and the world is changed. Not as easy, of course, as that makes it sound; but, in truth, that’s the way it works.

For many societies, the search for good ideas has taken on a sense of urgency as standards of living have become so grand that they can no longer compete in making things, because the cost of their labor is too high. As result, once making things is out, “knowing things” becomes the next possible advantage to pursue, and that means finding and harvesting new ideas! Money is spent on R&D; new universities are established; celebrated thinkers get appointed to government panels; but, it’s all very improvised; and there are few lessons to learn, much less anyone trying to learn them.

What do we really know about where good ideas are? How to find them? What to do with them once we get them? Not much, it turns out! In fact, one of the most amazing things that I’ve learned over a career in executive education is that while no one will ever deny the importance of good ideas as a competitive advantage at both the corporate and individual levels, and while we all agree that we are plunging headfirst, and at warp speed, into a “knowledge-intensive” era, what that really means to me, to us, is something that tends to get lost in our excitement for this next new thing.

It’s not that we’re not interested; but I suspect that the questions are too intimate; too revealing; to be pursued with any sort of vigor. In fact, possibly we’ve never even thought about it at all!

Maybe now is the time to begin?

Great Moments in Open Innovation

2011-03-03T00:38:00.001-08:00

Co-creation and Open Innovation are among the hottest ideas in innovation management at the moment. Yet, what is so surprising is that in our enthusiasm for this "next new thing" we have almost completely overlooked the very rich history of Open Innovation, Co-creation, & even Crowd-Sourcing, that spans several hundred years.

This is not an original thought, incidentally, and, if the topic is "co-creation," not being "original" is a good thing! Despite all of my advocacy, as an Idea Hunter, for looking into the history of things, if for no better reason than being able to "borrow" someone else's already-proven good idea, I confess that I had failed to even think about the antecedents of today's Open Innovation/Co-creation boom. Recently, however, I had the good-fortune and privilege of being interviewed by a Chennai-based website www.younomy.com that is dedicated to co-creation, and they asked the question: "what about the history of crowd sourcing" as a form of co-creation and open innovation? What a great prompt! And, fortunately, there is an Australian blogsite Design Crowd [who says globalization isn't really wonderful?] that has a wonderful review of the history of crowd-sourcing, which is where I found the following:

In 1714, the British government offered the equivalent of nearly $25 million for contributions to precise and simple ways of determining longitude (John Harrison won the most celebrated of these).
In 1936, Toyota received 27,000 contributions from which their corporate logo was determined.
And, in 1956, the winning design of Danish architect Jørn Utzon for the magnificent Sydney Opera House was chosen from 233 entries from 32 different countries.

What is so impressive about each of these examples is the “managerial attitude” that had to be common in all three experiences: a recognition that more minds are better than fewer; a willingness to trust others, even outsiders, to help in the making of “big” decisions; and an apparent absence of “unease” in allowing this process to be inclusive. When you think about the magnitude of the choices involved, and the visibility of the outcomes, this is truly impressive!

I would Prefer to Visit Museums, Not to Live in One

2011-03-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

Twenty years ago, maybe even only a decade ago, if you visited Shanghai it would be like visiting -- in places -- a museum. In Puxi, in the old "French concession" for example, the architecture and infrastructure conjured-up memories of what "old China" must have been like. The same was true, of course, for so many cities in Europe where old, well-preserved locales also had a "museum-like" quality to them. Today, in 2011, if you were to visit Shanghai, there would be very little of that same "museum" ambiance; too much has changed. China has plunged head-first into the 21st century. But, the same is not exactly true for so many Western cities, that are at risk of remaining "museum-like." According to a recent Citibank report on the world of 2050, Western Europe, which accounted for 28% of global output as recently as 1970, has seen this output drop to 19% today, on its way to a predicted 7% in 2050; smaller than what is predicted for either Africa or South America. Stephen Fidler has recently asked in The Wall Street Journal: "...what happens to modern economies where growth remains sluggish for long periods? What will life be like in the museum?"

My sense is that it doesn't have to be this way, and it certainly doesn't have to be either/or. What everyone talks about, but what seems to gain little traction, is the centrality of "ideas" as the answer to the question: "how do we add value in a world where low-wage labor is so much lower than our living standards would allow?" Now, especially in Europe and North America, is when we need to really help our talent develop a facility for working with ideas. We're not going to succeed in the global marketplace unless we keep coming up with newer and better ideas; competing on the basis of stronger brawnpower is no longer a viable option. But being an Idea-Hunter is not about brainpower, either. It is about being more conscious, thoughtful and more disciplined, in developing more effective Idea-Hunting skills. There oughta be a book. :-)

Organizational Culture Thrives Only to the Extent that it is Open to being Recreated

2011-02-28T23:10:00.000-08:00

"It is a constant reminder never to define ourselves by the things we make, no matter how successful they are today."

The words are those of Sam Palmisano, CEO of IBM corporation, in a talk he made recently at his alma-mater Johns Hopkins University. What is interesting to me about this is that it speaks to IBM's exceptional ability to successfully jump from one technological generation S-curve to another -- IBM is one of the few "typewriter" companies who made the jump into digital word processing -- or maybe jump-off the curve entirely, as it did when it exited the personal computer business. Palmisano spoke to that as well: ""We are innovators. In 1981 the PC was an innovation. Twenty years later it had lost much of its differentiation. It was time to move on—to the future.....In this light, IBM's history can be seen as a century-long journey to create—and continually recreate—a culture."

This is good stuff! Too many CEOs talk to their people about "this being the last big change; the last major reorganization!" What are they thinking about? Change is all about us; it is endemic to modern management. Palmisano is right when he says organizational cultures exist to be recreated.

The Idea Hunter's Dictionary: D is for Diverse -- Brad Mehldau

2011-02-27T01:36:00.000-08:00

One of the characteristics that mark successful Idea-Hunters is the diversity of their search repertoire: they look in more places; talk to more and more different people; move more easily across idea-domains; than the rest of us. What makes this so easy for them? Some of it is undoubtedly innate; they were born that way, with a wider bandwidth of interests; and some of it has to do with curiosity; but I also suspect that knowing their “gig” is a huge advantage in providing the self-confidence to venture out of their "comfort zones" in the pursuit of a new & better idea (and, of course, it also helps fuel curiosity as well).

Recently, jazz pianist Brad Mehldau shared his listening tastes with reporter Nate Chinen, in the New York Times. What was so amazing about this was the diversity of the influences that Mr. Mehldau allowed into his "idea space:" the Heavy metal band Cancer Bats, Rachmaninoff, "a Joni Mitchell-type" singer, and another pianist with whom he will duet on How Can I Live in Your World of Ideas? What a wide-range of influences to take advantage of! How can he not improve his chances of coming-up with something completely new?

Examples of such wide-ranging portfolios of musical influences among some of our leading musicians are not usual; perhaps that's a key to their accomplishments? The great classical pianist (and son-in-law of conductor Arturo Toscanini) Vladimir Horowitz was known to be an admirer of jazz pianist Art Tatum, even bringing him home one night so that he could observe his playing more closely. And, jazz iconoclast Miles Davis has spoken about the influences of such classical composers as Ravel, Khachaturian, Bartok, and Stravinsky, on his own music [1986 interview with Ben Sidran].

Hunting for ideas outside of familiar idea-neighborhoods gives you a chance of finding a great new idea that no one else in your industry would ever think of. But, to do this also means being diverse in your hunting choices.

When the Smartest Guys in the Room Are Not Necessarily the "Smartest" Guys in the Room

2011-02-24T02:59:00.001-08:00

Being good with ideas -- getting new ones more often, and ahead of others -- has less to do with "brilliance" than it does with behavior. Often, the really smartest people in a room are not as "effectively smart" as others when it comes to accessing and/or implementing good new ideas. Why? Because they haven't ever thought about how to do it better. The "idea" behind The Idea Hunter is that behavior and discipline can be more important than cranial capacity when it comes to being effective with ideas. Yesterday, in an interview with Dave Smith of Inc. magazine, Andy Boynton and I spoke about some of the things that make Idea-Hunters successful. To read more the link is: http://www.inc.com/articles/2011/02/discovering-the-best-business-ideas.html

Pirandello: Where Are You Now That We Really Need You?

2011-02-22T22:23:00.000-08:00

"Don't write the story, set the stage" read a recent tweet by @asliver. What a great metaphor for what we should be doing in executive education, in particular, and "leadership" in general!

In our new book, "The Idea Hunter, we speak about the power of metaphors to serve as a catalyst for the imagination, and @asilver's metaphor has resonated in my mind all morning: "don't write the story, set the stage." Nearly all of the professional situations that I find myself in, either as a professor in an executive education program, or as a consultant, are characterized by my knowing less -- about an industry, about an organization, about a technology, about a customer base, etc. -- than anyone else in the room; and it doesn't matter which room we're in! Furthermore, I need to start with the assumption that everyone in the room is smart; and my role has got to be to help them use that intelligence in a more effective fashion. How presumptuous to believe, then, that I can walk right in and write the story (or even tell the story)! This has got to be a shared affair and, incidentally, everyone else who really knows something has got to be a part of the writing crew.

All of which brings to mind Luigi Pirandello's great Six Characters in Search of an Author, as a "design" for what we're trying to do in executive education. Increasingly, executive education has got to be about setting the stage, and then inviting the "characters" up on the stage to co-create the story; rather than taking on the burden by myself, as the "least knowledgable" person on the room, to try to "write the story" for everyone else.

A Pilotless Landing in Dark & Stormy Weather

2011-02-22T01:22:00.000-08:00

Our airplane was at 10,000 meters altitude, in stormy conditions, about to make an approach for landing at Beijing Capital Airport, and suddenly we realized that the pilot and co-pilot were in the rear of the plane talking with the cabin crew......

Actually, this is not true. We were not in a plane, we were in an executive education classroom at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland. We were not 10,000 meters up, in stormy conditions, but we were with three corporate executive teams who were about to present their strategic plans to the four key decision makers on their corporate board the next morning; and these were going to be very difficult presentations! And, there were no pilot and co-pilot standing at the rear of the plane talking with the cabin-crew. However, there was myself as Program Director (& Professor), and there was the Program Manager (a former McKinsey consultant), and we were both locked-out of each of the three team rooms during the penultimate moment of a week-long preparation for board approval. At that moment, when everything was riding on what was going on in those three rooms that we were forbidden to enter, I knew that we were going to have a big success!

Everything that we had hoped for was happening. The teams and their respective coaches no longer needed our insights and advice. After working all week on their strategic choices and how they intended to execute them, they now had sufficient confidence to dispense with us and do it themselves. Could any other outcome have been as satisfying? We had made ourselves unnecessary. At that very moment of rejection, when I knew that being asked to leave the meeting rooms was unusual, I also knew that we had accomplished all of what executive education promises: we had provided bright, experienced, managers with the tools and frameworks that allowed them to leverage their knowledge effectively to solve their problems. Our job was done! So the Program Manager and I enjoyed a coffee.

In fact, on the very next morning, the three teams – one of the largest energy distributors in the world, a major player in global construction and the largest food retailer in a Latin American country, each succeeded in their presentations well-beyond what we, or they, had hoped for. It was a leaderless victory: the best kind!

My friend Bertrand Piccard, who was the leader of the team that was the first to circle the earth in a balloon, speaks about being “much more confidently aware, and more creative, despite being completely lost for five days over the Atlantic.” How is it possible to gain confidence while losing control? How is it possible to beat the likes of Virgin’s Richard Branson, in highly-pitched competition, if you’re not in control?

After all, Jim Collins, author of the iconic management book Good to Great, tells us that it is “disciplined people -> disciplined thought -> disciplined action” that leads to “great” rather than “good” performance, and yet here were our participants throwing off the formal signs of “discipline” and taking control of their own fortunes. Were we truly losing control? I don’t think so, not if you learn how to lose control in an appropriate and effective fashion.

While Collins is right about discipline mattering, the discipline that he speaks of does not have to be oppressive or imposed from above; and losing control does not have to mean “abdication of responsibility.” We had instilled a set of proven frameworks for considering the choices that each team faced, established processes for their making those choices and effectively presenting them; and associated them with coaches who helped facilitate their conversations and support their activities. At that point, the most liberating thing that we could do was to trust the teams to allow the processes to guide them in applying their own insights and experiences. Far from being out of control, this whole situation was very much “under control.”

Great impromptu performance in the face of the unknown will be an increasingly important attribute of successful managerial practice in the 21^st century; and increasingly this means that it will be impossible to maintain control throughout, if only because we won’t know what to control in advance. However, it is possible to lose control while still keeping it at the same time – if you define what control you are willing to give up, and what control you cannot relinquish. After all, if I am fortunate enough to be working with great talent, I want to give-up some control so that they can fully exercise their talent. At the same time, I am still responsible for achieving the project’s objectives. Think of this as drawing a box around the project: the boundaries of the box determine who owns what. Inside the box are challenges for my talented team to tackle in any way they want. Outside the box is my realm of responsibility. Inside the box is where I choose to lose control; not outside, resulting in my retaining complete control over the objectives, while ceding absolute freedom to my team in how they achieve these objectives. Contradictory? Not any longer, but not easy either.

Effectively losing control requires two elements:
1. clarity of vision, so that everyone understands, explicitly and completely, what the vision of the project is

2. sufficient self-confidence on the part of the leader to let go of control within the box.

That is exactly what we did with these three teams and in the process they became the stars of the show, not us; which is also how it should turn out. After all, when they leave IMD, it is their show not ours, and it is for real!

So next time you see things getting “out of control” with your teams, think twice about whether it is a positive or negative.

No More Training; Please!!

2011-02-20T02:50:00.000-08:00

Have you been "trained" lately? Maybe you are a trainer? Seen a trainer? Sent people off to do training? Visited a "training centre? If any of these things apply: shame on you!! Training is the very last thing you, I, or we, need at this stage of our economic development.

Unless you work with lions in a cage, are a mime at a tourist site, aspire to be a professional dog-handler, or merely going out for a run, training is not for you. Training is for short-cycle, highly-repetitive, learnable skills that tend to be invariant in their application. You "train" someone to answer the phone, for example; or to fold a napkin. This is all about variance reduction; which is not to say that it is not important. We are all the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution; 200+ years of determined variance reduction. Not a bad track-record for "training", since much of what the Industrial Revolution was built upon were short-cycle, highly-repetitive tasks; think: assembly line work.

But, the world has changed. New ideas are the currency of the future, especially if you live in North America or Europe, where commodity manufacturing is dead (and with it the demand for highly repetitive tasks), and where high-wage knowledge industries depend more upon the quality of the ideas that you have, than upon your ability to reproduce the same behavior perfectly, and endlessly. Answering a phone, flawlessly, is no longer as valuable as creating unforeseen "apps" that change the very function of the phone.

New ideas require variance enlargement, and that means "education" rather than rote-training. Searching for conversational-narrowing "preferred solutions" is no longer as valuable as are generating conversational-enlarging "what-ifs?". This small definitional distinction changes everything else. You should be looking for "educators" rather than "trainers." Your development experiences should be at least as much about questions as they are about answers. The role of the people in the room should change from the traditional "training" model of "broadcaster to receiver" to a different model of "smart people facilitating smarter people." The rooms themselves, and everything in them, should change from "front-to-rear" (podium-centric) delivery (so reminiscent of our old school days), to becoming vibrant conversational spaces, where every good idea has a fair chance of being considered. This is no longer about cost-efficient training; it is now all about the choreography of the conversation.

Please, no more training!! I've had three wonderful canine companions in my life, and all of them resisted being trained -- part of the charm which made them so memorable. If we can't train our dogs, what makes you think that we should be able to "train" you?

Curiosity: fuel for idea hunting

2011-02-17T21:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Dean Martin, we all know that amore is "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie." Today, I learned, in keeping with the astronomical theme, that curiosity is when NASA's newest Mars Rover hits the planet Mars. Well, not exactly. "Curiosity" is the name of the newest Mars Rover (above), but to an Idea-Hunter, curiosity is something much more significant. It is the fuel that drives everything about the Hunt.

While there are many opinions about why some people are "more curious" than others, our take is that curiosity is absolutely essential to successful idea-hunting. How to become "curious" is the hard part. Part of it, we think, has to do with identifying "your gig," which was the topic of yesterday's blog-post. Daniel Pink, however, has recently blogged about a new book entitled Curious? by Todd Kashdan, a clinical psychologist at George Mason University, in which Kashdan cites three ways to "refresh our personal and professional outlook":

Thrive on uncertainty
Find the unfamiliar in the familiar; and
Be a safe haven for the risks and joys of others.

I have not yet read this book, but I was struck by how at least the first point resonated with my experience yesterday of having lunch with Alex Osterwalder, the author of the exceptionally popular Business Model Generation; a book that I like very much . As I have revealed before in this blog, I am normally an office-diner, but by breaking my bad habit, and having the opportunity to spend time with a really creative thinker from way outside of my normal life, I was completely re-energized -- it worked, and my curiosity was piqued about a variety of things that Alex told me about; which also supports two of The Idea Hunter's principles:

to be interested in what others are doing; and
to diversity your sources of ideas.

Not a bad set of "lessons" for the price of a lunch!

What Idea Are You Proudest Of?

2011-02-17T09:17:00.001-08:00

A nice question! It assumes, first of all, that I've had ideas -- more than one, at least! The question came last evening at the end of the first talk that I have given on The Idea Hunter. The audience was a group of 90 senior managers from Hilti, who were at IMD for three days. To be honest, however, it's not a question that I've ever considered before.

In thinking about my response, I believe that it illustrates a lot about a key The Idea Hunter concept, and so I thought that I'd mention it here. The idea that I'm proudest of might in truth not even be my own: it's the recognition that so many big companies take great people and turn them into average performers. I find this supremely offensive, and it was the motivating insight that led us to write the Virtuoso Teams book. Mine or not, I came to this idea relatively late in life, but it has taken on a mission-quality and become, what we call in the book, my gig. Everywhere I look, today, I see examples of this phenomenon, or illustrations of how we might reverse its apparent "inevitability." In The Idea Hunter, we think that the notion of a "gig" is a essential insight into why some people are so good with ideas. They know what to look for; they can't help themselves! One way to think about what your gig might be is to consider the Venn diagram above.

When you are really thoughtful, and introspective, what are you absolutely passionate about? What can you do better than anyone else? And, where is the market for all of this? At the intersection of these three questions is probably your "gig." In my case, it is all about the inexcusable diminishing of human talent that we see so frequently in complex modern organizations. The interesting thing about this is that now that I understand this, I have become so much more energized and effective as an Idea-Hunter.

Tips from Idea-Hunters: No Eating in Your Office

2011-02-15T01:13:00.000-08:00

This one is very difficult for me, as I am an inveterate office-diner... eating nearly every lunch in the confines of my own small domain. Yet, as a New York Times interview the other day with F. Mark Gumz, the President & CEO of Olympus North America pointed out, this is a really bad idea. What Mr. Gumz said was: I don’t allow people to eat their lunch at their desk. You have to go to the cafe. I want you to take a break and talk to other people in the company. It’ll be the rule as long as I’m the C.E.O."

For me this is interesting because it's a very simple, but very effective, way to get people out of their offices to talk to one another. Who knows what sorts of ideas they might run into, even if their not experienced hunters? Today I'm going to eat with others!

Using metaphors to shape conversations

2011-02-13T03:38:00.000-08:00

"More a poem than a house;" that's the way that English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti described the home of his colleague William Morris, according the Financial Time's Emma Mahony. Think about how this metaphor can work, not only for "love nests" but also for developing space to shape conversations. Innovation is all about conversations, and the probability of having really great conversations can be increased by the ways in which we design the spaces in which our conversations will occur. We've seen this in the design of Singapore's "Futuropolis" and often in the work of MIT/Sloan's Tom Allen, specially in his book on "The Organization and Architecture of Innovation. The point here is to think about the metaphors that best capture your conversational intentions and then use them as the leitmotif to shape the space in which these conversations might best take place.

Where do ideas happen?

2011-02-04T09:07:00.000-08:00

Not where they're supposed to! At least, that's the impression of Douglas Coupland in his new book "You Know Nothing of My Work!, who points out:

So here is Bill Gates and all these people going off ... trying to figure out what happens next. What happens next is that they didn't think of Google. They didn't think of social networking. And they didn't think of the iPhone. Ideas don't happen where they're supposed to.

Actually, I think that Coupland has this one wrong. All of those ideas pretty much happened in the same Silicon-Valley-influenced neighborhoods that gave birth to the personal computer generation that Bill Gates has been so closely involved with. For a lot of good reasons, ideas do happen in the same places: neighborhoods of diversity, with strong traditions in particular fields, where there are physical and social meeting places that are conducive to great conversations and where there is an institutional infrastructure in place to support the gestation of the ideas that are born out of those great conversations; and where there is sufficient opportunity for the mobility of talent so that different minds can meet and create new futures. Thomas Friedman got it wrong: the world is not flat when it comes to great ideas!

What is different, and why Bill Gates did not invent Google, Social Networking, the iPhone, etc., is that although the places were the same, the conversations were different, and most important they involved different people. If you're talking the same smart Microsoft people every day, on the same swell Microsoft campus, you're not likely to be talking with those other people who are on the margins, often invisible, and yet, as a result, are more apt to be leading the next revolution. We can all learn from Pixar's Brad Bird, who directed The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Ratatouille, who said "Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing it that nobody's listening to." That was a good way, in his opinion, to get ideas that would change his industry -- Mr. Gates' industry as well!

Lincoln's iPad

2011-01-29T23:55:00.000-08:00

After spending a good part of the weekend at home, riveted to the television, as change in Egypt unfolds; and in constant contact with friends spread around the world without leaving the comfort of our couch thanks to the portability of an iPad, I felt as if there were no boundaries on where I could go, and what I could find, if the fancy so took me. What a great gift to be living in the 21st century, where such technological marvels bring the world into your immediate reach, no matter where you are -- or maybe not? What about the large majority of our fellow passengers on this planet who have no access to such devices, or even to internet "connectivity", and the liberalizing worldview that they enable? My colleague, and very good friend, Jean-Pierre Lehman, has just written about the orphans of globalization and the turmoil that seethes within those who feel left out. Where do you get your ideas from, if the boundaries on your imagination are close-up and rigid? How do you broaden your intellectual bandwidth in the face of such obstacles?

Both of my parents grew-up in circumstances which limited their formal educations to primary school. Yet, they were beneficiaries of living in New York City at a time when it was indisputably the cosmopolitan crossroads of the world; it was hard not to have your bandwidth widened, even if you didn't try. But, try they did: they were curious, ambitious, and they read constantly. Even without iPads, they were reasonably "well-informed." Our single-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn was strewn with magazines [Life, Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, The National Geographic, even our next door neighbors' discarded Paris Match], encyclopedia's [The World Book], and compendiums of all sorts: van Loon's The Arts, J.R. Crossland's Modern [1938!] Marvels Encyclopedia, etc. We watched Omnibus and such iconoclastic giants as: Edward R. Murrow, Sid Caesar, and Steve Allen on television; all of which served admirably as "portals" to the outside world. On rainy weekends, my friends and I would play a board-game that took us around the world [similar to Around the World] in search of trade and adventure. In much the same spirit as John Markoff has written in What the Dormouse Said of how the counterculture of the sixties influenced the Silicon Valley generation who created the internet world, these varied sources were the iPads of my youth, that enlarged my sense of the world around us, and prepared us for an increasingly global future.

This morning, in The New York Times, Ted Widmer writes about Abraham Lincoln's stepmother [Sarah Bush Lincoln] and how she changed the future president's life by opening portals to the world outside for him. Joining the family when Lincoln was only nine years old, she brought with her a small collection of books --despite the fact that she, herself, was illiterate -- that would change Lincoln's life: Aesop's Fables, Robinson Crusoe, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Sinbad the Sailor. Modest as this collection was, Widmer refers to it as "the iPads of the day," and that, as a result of being exposed to them, Sarah Bush was able to observe some years later that: "[the young Lincoln] cared little for clothes or food, but a great deal for ideas."

In my preoccupation with Idea Hunting, I could not fail to notice several things from these musings: 1. place matters! The world is not flat! My parents, and I, benefitted from living in New York City; other people are not as fortunate and their "portals" are not as available; 2. "Portals" are extremely important: curiosity drives idea-hunting, and curiosity needs to be stimulated by exposure to the world outside -- no matter what "outside" means; 3. There are many different types of iPads. Not literally, of course, as Apple owns the trademark on the term, but figuratively, there are many different ways of opening-up the world outside. The onus is on us as parents, citizens, colleagues, and "leaders," to make sure that there are always fewer [None is preferable] and more malleable constraints on idea-hunting.

Tips from Idea-Hunters: Travelling While At Home

2011-01-26T11:48:00.000-08:00

"I'm most effective when I'm on the road; I get more done when I travel." This insight was shared with me by a European chemical industry executive who observed that most of his good ideas came when he was traveling and had a different schedule of time than he did at home. This made ample sense to me, as when I'm on the road I wake-up earlier, and start the day by going on-line, in the utter peace that only an early morning can provide --to peruse a number of sites that I'm often too busy to read on a normal day at home. The question then became in his mind: "How do I work more like when I'm travelling, even though I'm at home?"

My chemical industry friend eventually arrived at the following conclusion: "So, now I've adjusted my days at home to be more like the best parts of my days on the road." Me too! I thought that this was such good advice that I now start each day --whether at home or on the road -- in the same way. It might mean that I have to arise earlier than usual when I am at home, but the idea-payoff certainly appears to be richer in return.

The Gig: Knowing What Your Passion is All About

2011-01-26T10:09:00.001-08:00

One of the earliest findings to come out of our new book The Idea Hunter was the recognition that individuals who are most effective in finding new ideas, know what they are looking for! Not surprising, huh? Well, in truth, it is definitely more surprising than it first sounds. Great Idea Hunters really have a mission in life -- a passion -- that turns-on all their hunting senses, so that when a good idea passes by -- and they do all the time, but frequently in disguises that make them invisible unless you know what to look for -- the Idea Hunter, because they consciously understand their passion, is attuned to the moment and recognizes the potential of the idea to what they are passionate about. We call this passion "a gig" and it really acts as an amazingly powerful sensitizing switch that turns the Idea Hunter on all the time.

In December, John Hagel wrote a wonderful blog about his personal "passion trajectory," which I think provides a really good example of what a "gig" might be. In Hagel's words, his passion is: "As I step back and reflect on this evolution of my passion over time, I begin to see a common theme: ... how to participate in ways to scale potential and possibility for others. Each time I have shifted focus, it has been to find a way to scale potential and possibility even more effectively so that I could broaden my impact."

Not only that, he adds insight into how his passion has evolved: "My passion has not shifted – it has evolved, with previous generations of passion still living on – I still engage in my earlier passions. Think of them as geological sediments that still live on and support the passion layers above.

Passions can evolve significantly over a lifetime, yet they often display a common theme that knits together various stages of development."

With such recognition, the hunt for ideas becomes much easier: you know where to look and who to depend upon. Our advice to Idea Hunters is to take the time -- reflective and introspective -- to figure-out what your "gig" really is. For some, it comes early; for others, myself included, later: more than a few decades slipped by before I reached a conscious level of understanding of what my professional passion in life really was. Once that breakthrough happened, I found myself "switched-on" 24/7, and good new ideas suddenly were everywhere.

Competing on Talent

2011-01-25T05:21:00.000-08:00

David Brooks column today, in The New York Times, is entitled "The Talent Magnet"and is a must-read argument in favor of "knowledge-professionalism." Among the points that he makes are the following:

Competitiveness [in the future] will be more about organizing relationships than amassing force, [and] to thrive America will have to be the crossroads nation where global talent congregates and collaborates.
Armies & sports teams are no longer the right metaphors for understanding such competition. Instead, Brooks argues that: ""... competition between elite universities, who vie for prestige in a networked search for knowledge [is a much more appropriate model]. It’s less: “We will crush you with our efficiency and might.” It’s more: “We have the best talent and the best values, so if you want to make the most of your own capacities, you’ll come join us.”"
"The new sort of competition is all about charisma. It’s about gathering talent in one spot".... This concentration of talent then attracts more talent, which creates more collaboration, which multiplies everybody’s skills, which attracts more talent and so on."

Present at the Beginning: a Variation on Lead Users

2011-01-25T03:38:00.000-08:00

Lead-users are best described as: individuals -- "amateurs" (or at least non-participants in an incumbant industry) -- who are often at the forefront of a technology's generational change by refusing to wait for the industry incumbents to get around to their needs and, instead, often force the change to occur by doing it themselves. Typically, such "lead-users" are not only motivated to try-out new solutions for themselves, but to share these in open communities of others struggling with similar needs. They most often have no interest in continuing to produce their solution, once the problem has been solved, and might not even ever become the incumbent industry's customer.

What brings this to mind today is The New York Times obituary of Brian Rust, who is referred to as "the Father of modern discography."Since he was literally "present at the beginning of archival jazz research", Mr. Rust exerted enormous influence over the development of the field, even though he was neither a professional jazz musician, nor a historian. In the words of Bill Kirchner, who is both a professional jazz musican and historian: “Jazz research at its beginnings was the purview of dedicated amateurs. There was no precedent to dictate what the nature of it was going to be, and what the details were going to be. And he [Rust] was really one of those people who decided, ‘This is what it should encompass.’ ” Those of us who are jazz-lovers are indebted to Mr. Rust for his creation of The Columbia Master Book Discography. It exhibits the passion and devotion of an "amateur" love affair [the word amateur is French and denotes a "lover of". Alternatively, Mr. Rust might be considered a "naive expert", or someone from outside of the prevailing instutions within his field. Such "naive expertise" is often extremely effective at getting to the heart of the issues involved (while "institutional experts" revel in detail and trivia, and the improvement of the status quo.). One wonders what the field might be like today if it had been created by such "real experts," instead of by Mr. Rust?

Gatekeepers, Key-Communicators, Bridge Personalities

2011-01-24T06:11:00.000-08:00

In our new book The Idea Hunter, we argue that "conversations" are the basic building blocks of innovation, and that people who can span multiple idea-communities are essential in moving ideas from origin to delivery. There are rich studies about such personalities, that unfortunately span many different literatures; they have been called: Gatekeepers [Tom Allen of MIT originated this term]; Key Communicators [Al Rubenstein of Northwestern used this term]; and Boundary Spanners [perhaps a broader term that comes from Sociology and the Organizational Behavior literatures]; but in every instance their ability to span more than one culture makes them invaluable for recognizing and moving ideas fast. Fast Company magazine recently ran an article from the design studio Frog Design on what they call "Bridge Personalities" that adds yet another piece to the Boundary Spanner literature. What I particularly like about this article is that it recognizes that not everyone can become a boundary spanner, but it suggests that we can all work on becoming xenophiles, or people: "...who believe that we benefit commercially, creatively, charitably, or politically from encountering a wider world," and who then make explicit choices to put this belief into action.

What Kinds of Technologies Can We Not Live Without?

2011-01-21T03:28:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked, for an interview in Correio Brazillense, the provocative question: What kind of technology can we not live without? What follows are my very brief thoughts on this:

A decade ago, we would ask ourselves “how did we ever live without our home fax machines?” Today, we have the answer, and we’re doing just fine. There is no technology that we will ever be unable to do without, as long as we support the continued evolution of new technological innovation. It is important to recognize that our allegiance to any technology is to the function that it performs, not to the form that it takes. I have long been addicted to taking images of memorable moments in our family’s life. At one point, I relied upon a simple Kodak Brownie camera, then I used my father's Stereo Realist 3D camera, then a Kodak disc camera, followed by a Canon 35 mm camera, and now a Casio digital camera. My reliance upon forms of image-gathering technologies has moved from one to another, as has my allegiance to the brands that produced these technologies. In truth, I have been chronically disloyal as an adopter of technologies and as a customer of brands, but what has never flagged has been my allegiance to the function of image-capturing. I can do without many different types of technologies, but I cannot imagine doing without my devotion to certain functions that are enabled by evolving technologies.
There is an additional point to make here. There are still some societies where access to information is imperfect. I cannot, personally, conceive of having my ability to gain information -- to hunt for ideas -- be constrained in any way by someone else. I can’t imagine living without free access to ideas!

The Implications of Steve Jobs' Absence

2011-01-19T11:22:00.000-08:00

Minus 2.25%: that’s what Steve Jobs is worth to Apple; at least if you take yesterday’s shareprice performance in reaction to the events of Steve Jobs' announcement that he was taking a second medical leave and the record corporate performance. Or, maybe it's the minus 6.57% that was the reaction on the Frankfurt exchange?

Obviously, if any of us were asked to estimate his worth, it would be considerably more than either of these numbers, but it’s a good place to begin to think about what Steve Jobs is really worth to Apple. My impression is that his value is incalculably higher than either of these estimates even begins to suggest; that he is truly irreplaceable!

What Steve Jobs has done at Apple is nothing less than extraordinary! He has changed the way we live -- with the iPod; changed the way we work -- with the iPad; and changed the way we regard technology -- with the Macs & the iPhone; and he’s built, and rebuilt, an organization that is capable of doing this, over and over again, on a large and extremely profitable scale. Not bad for a kid from California who dropped out of university!

Steve Jobs is a throwback to the giants of our past who were the architects of so many great industries -- think Thomas Edison, for example. Opinionated, outspoken, passionate about the roots of his business, unswerving in his dedication to excellence not only in performance but in the look and feel; he will be difficult, if not impossible to replace when the time comes for that to happen.

What is also important to recognize about Jobs is that he has built a strong team to replace him in his absence. He has the self-confidence to hire great people and then push them to outperform even their own expectations. He might not trust the judgements of customers in creating the future, but he has been able to trust his colleagues to the extent that they have created dramatic new futures in nearly every industry that they have entered.

This post is an adaption of a version that first appeared as on IMD's website.

Lost in the Jungle: considering the obligations of an Idea Hunter

2011-01-17T10:50:00.001-08:00

The small plane went down in the dense Ecuadorian forest, and all on board were lost shortly thereafter. I vividly remember the obituary of one of those on board -- Ted Parker -- as if it were yesterday. The New York Times, of August 13, 1993, reported that he, and colleague Alwyn Gentry [also killed in the crash], "... reputedly could discover more about the life of an unexplored rain forest in a week than most other scientists could in months or even years." Characterized as "search & rescue" specialists for endangered species, the two worked for the McArthur Foundation-funded Conservation International's Rapid Assessment Team, and at the time of their death it was estimated that: "Two-thirds of the unpublished, critically important information on the Andes went with them in a split second." This was the trigger that etched their story into my mind. This terrible sense of loss, not only of such young and gifted scientists, but the loss of what they knew but had never shared.

I recalled Parker and Gentry in reading Richard Conniff’s “Dying for Discovery” blog, today, in The New York Times. These men were living the hunt for new ideas, and doing it as well as anyone in their field had ever done -- one estimate was that “they were worth twenty!” But, they apparently were not sharing the information in a dependable fashion.... their loss was our loss!

Don’t “professional” idea-hunters have an obligation to do something worthwhile with their ideas? Isn’t the image of the isolated scientist, alone in his/her academic tower, an anathema to all that we look for from those in our society who are fortunate enough to be engaged in the hunt for new ideas? Why was this knowledge not being shared? Was it truly completely lost, or was it, in fact, being shared as tacit knowledge, and thus unorganized and possibly invisible? Either way, the story served as a stark warning that the hunt for new ideas is not simply done for the thrill of the chase, but hopefully for larger purposes.

My late and great friend Tom Vollmann used to ask in appraising somebody’s contribution: “Did they move the ball?” I would argue that the Idea Hunter has an obligation to put, in one form or another, the ideas that they are hunting “into play.” Almost inevitably this means saving/sharing these ideas in a form that allows the rest of us to “move the ball” on the basis of such new insights and knowledge. The “hunt” afterall doesn’t end with the hunting, but with the use that is made of the catch.

Lessons on [not] Running a School

2011-01-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

Recently one of my son's mentors was awarded the opportunity to "run" a [medical] school in a far-away location; what a great opportunity! I once had a similar opportunity and from that I reflected on a number of lessons that I think might be of value to my son's mentor, and maybe others as well. In the spirit of sharing and being candid, here are my personal reflections on my own performance"

1. After 20+ years of working diligently at a classical academic career, and playing by the rules, I gave up an endowed chair, tenure (a life-long appointment), and the familiarity of a [really, two] long-lived-in communities to move to a completely foreign environment on a temporary basis; it was the best thing that I ever did! I wholeheartedly recommend a fling with "big change" in your early 50's. My father had me, and I had this new job, at approximately the same age; both of us were rejuvenated by the disruption to our routine [at least, I like to think that my father was renewed by my arrival; I certainly was by my new responsibilities]. We are all creatures of the familiar, and change restores our need for personal growth.

2. In retrospect, I never "ran" the school, and, in fact, I hope that I never tried to. While many people spoke about "running" their organizations, if I'm honest and candid I tried my best to keep up with the changes created by the smart, energetic, young people who were constantly trying-out new things. Any "running" that I did was more like "running" after them and their boundless energy. Insisting on being an omnipresent strong leader would have only slowed them down and sapped their enthusiasm. My job, in truth, was to be the sponsor, the cheerleader, and the supporter. I'm told that people take on administrative positions in academia because they want a chance to "run" or "build" an organization. I now think that this is the wrong way to look at this. "Enable", "license", or "unleash", are probably much more suitable aspirations for leadership.

3. The value of what we do: frameworks work!

Business schools are “low-theory” neighborhoods. Unlike physics, or even economics, the practice of business administration is still as much “art” as it is “science.” Frequently, the heroes of our case-studies came upon the preferred solution by instinct as much as by hunch. Our professional contribution as educators, however, is to create generalisable lessons from such experiences. In some instances we have theories, but in most it is frameworks that are our best tools for doing this, and one of the first phone calls I made back to IMD from CEIBS was to inform my close colleague Andy Boynton that our frameworks really worked! We had taught them many times, to be sure, but to use them personally to help manage an organization was personally thrilling. We used Porter’s five forces, and Andy’s strategy-transformation framework, as well as a variety of other frameworks to understand the market in which CEIBS was competing and how best to craft a strategy and a vision for our school. That they worked well and provided relief from the overwhelming complexity of the milieu of management responsibility was one of the most reassuring lessons that I learned. Trust the frameworks: they work!

4. The criticality of trust

To be honest, one of the principle attractions of joining CEIBS for me was the opportunity to see a joint-venture from the inside. After teaching about joint-ventures for twenty-some years, I immodestly believed that I knew their ins and outs. I was wrong. What I, and my colleagues, had been stressing in our classes about jvs was typically big-picture, "strategy," sorts of things. What I found as a manager on the ground, was that those issues, while important, were not what you spent your time on from day-to-day. Instead, I believe that my principle responsibility became that of “building trust” between the partners. Without trust, nothing else is possible. At CEIBS, we were fortunate to have great partners. But, even with great partners, trust had to be built and rebuilt on a daily basis. In many ways, trust and values are the major part of what I now believe to be the job of senior management. There are plenty of people in an organization like CEIBS who can do the important daily operations much better than top management can. What they need, however, that only top management can establish, is vision, trust, and values. Conversely, if top management is involved in doing the daily operational work, then who is taking care of vision, trust, and values?

5. The balance between too-much and too-little involvement

When I was at CEIBS, virtually all of our staff were university graduates. These were extremely talented people, and because they were young they had incredible energy. I believe that the most difficult thing for me as a manager to do was to find the balance between too-much and too-little involvement in their daily work. I make no claims about mastering this balance, but I believe that a lot of it is about trust – that the team will deliver – and, also, that some of it is also personal and cultural, as well. A CEIBS alum once lectured me on the need for senior management to follow the teachings of the ancient Chinese legalist philosopher Han Feize. In his mind: "Only by strictly establishing and reinforcing the role of the leader, could discipline be achieved." My time at CEIBS pushed me in an entirely opposite direction, however. I found that my own personal philosophy of management was that the role of the leader is to create situations where the talent of the people in the organization can reach its’ highest individual potential. The leader’s job is to help others achieve all that they are possible of achieving, within the parameters of the organization’s strategic goals. Too often, this can be interpreted as aloofness and disinterest, but I am convinced that as a leader the talent that surrounds you is on loan to you only temporarily, and your responsibility is to enlarge and enrich it so that it can move on to higher aspirations. The challenge for senior management is to get the best people, give them energizing challenges, and then get out of their way; but, stay informed and be engaged, without interfering.

Of course, when prized employees decided to leave, I took it as a personal failure, but my sense now is that this is a natural progression in a talent-rich organization and that I should have been spending much more time on succession preparation and then celebrating the good fortunes of those who had decided to move on.

6. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

Essential to building trust, and destroying any suspicions that you are not engaged, is the very act of communication. I am convinced that it is hard for top management to over-communicate. In other words, no matter how frequently you believe that you are communicating with your organization, the truth is that it’s probably not enough. And, of course, the compliment to communication is listening.

7. Listening, Listening, Listening

If you surround yourself with bright people, who know more than you do about certain important things – and that surely was the case at CEIBS, from the staff, to the faculty, to the students – listen to what they have to say. Create opportunities to listen. Actively listen. Listen all the time, everywhere. This is the only way to learn, and as a knowledge professional leading knowledge professionals, this is essential to both your and your organization’s growth. One of the best things that I learned in this regard was to turn off my email for long-periods during the working day. The real “action” of the school was not on my screen, but out in the halls and classrooms. For too long, I was a hostage to the next email message, and that is probably the last thing an organization is looking for from its leaders.

8. The importance of how you gain and maintain influence

Status is important in all societies, but I was not adequately prepared for what it meant to be President and Dean of China’s leading business school. I was invited everywhere; interviewed by the press continually; flattered that people actually listened to what I had to say; I hobnobbed with the rich and famous on a regular basis, and dined with royalty, ambassadors, luminaries and stars. It was all dazzling! But, there was an associated challenge that haunted me; how, as a knowledge professional, could I continue to grow intellectually in the face of the social and administrative demands of the job? Afterall, I was presumably chosen for the position on the basis of whatever influence I had achieved based on what I knew and wrote about doing business in China. Yet, how to keep that expertise current? How to refresh my personal knowledge pool so that I’d still be attractive for the next opportunity? Actually doing business in China proved not to be enough. The luxury of the “theory class” is that we get to talk to enough people so that the idiosyncrasies of their individual experiences are overwhelmed by the common messages from the multiple experiences. Learning on my own could not be enough. My conclusion, which ultimately led me to return to a faculty position, was that the intoxication of a leadership position, as enjoyable as it was, could be a professionally fatal, or at best limiting situation.

The lesson here was brought home to me it the writings of Warren Bennis: It is too easy as a leader, particularly of a high-visibility organization, to believe that your influence is based on something other than your position. At the end of the day, I wanted my personal professional influence to be based on what was going on in my mind [Bennis calls this voice power], rather than in my office [Bennis calls this position power]. In my case, for me, that ultimately meant giving-up the position in order to keep on learning.

9. The importance of the Board

One of the many things that still wakes me up in the middle of the night, is how I failed to work effectively with our board of directors. What I learned from CEIBS is that the effective leader must know and master the details of the governance structure, from the board down; and to move the interaction with the oversight bodies from episodic ones, where there are periodic reviews and big-issues on the agenda, to more continuous dialog, so that there are no surprises and the board becomes a collaborator rather than solely an evaluator. Also, to the extent possible, it is beneficial to get to know the board members on an individual and personal basis. At the end of the day, “the board” are people too, and the leader’s influence is typically greater on an individual level than on a group level.

10. Speed is essential

Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, had “speed” installed as one of the core values of GE because he believed that “speed wins.” Moving a complex organization, that is a 50/50 joint-venture to boot, in any direction is difficult. Add “fast” as a requirement and it becomes daunting. Nonetheless, I am now convinced, as a result of my tenure at CEIBS, that speed matters, big-time. Fast, in fact, may be the ultimate objective, because if you’re fast and successful, you are way ahead of the rest, and if you are fast and you fail, you might have the chance to recover. Slow, on the other hand, is a bad way to move in any situation. But, “fast,” of course, means “trust” because you as the leader cannot be involved in everything if the organization is to move fast. And, so, establishing, reinforcing, and demonstrating “trust” again and again is a key objective of leadership.

11. The importance of knowing who you are

To be the sole American on the European leadership team of a joint-venture school in China is a sobering experience. One’s nationality is naturally an essential part of who we are and how we respond to the world around us, but I confess that I was startled by the implicit assumptions [stereotypes] that preceded and accompanied my national origins. For better and for worse, there was little doubt that my being an American affected how I and my “messages” were anticipated and received. The fact that I had lived in Europe for several years, or felt Shanghainese, mattered less to some people than where I was born [New York]. In the end, what I learned, is that “I am who I am.” I could not be Chinese in my management style, nor should I have tried. Han Feize simply would not have worked for me. The genius of a joint-venture is not in each side trying to be like the other, but in fact just the opposite: “how do we get the most out of two very different world-views?” The goal is to make more from our differences than to try to reduce them: there are real powerful strengths in these differences; if only we can take advantage of them. I think that we did this at CEIBS, not perfectly perhaps, but that it is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the school, and the educational environment that it offers.

11. What being in the knowledge business means

There has never been any doubt that business schools are in the knowledge business, but too often the character of an educational institution – with its degrees and professors – led everyone to think that it meant that “we had the knowledge.” The truth is, in a fast-moving complex environment such as China, nobody has a monopoly on knowledge. For me, an illuminating moment came in a conversation with one of our corporate sponsors, who told me that the knowledge that they really wanted from us was “the questions that our EMBA students were asking,” not the professors’ answers; because those were probably well-known already. What they didn’t know, and were looking for a measure of, was what was on the mind of the Chinese manager, and what better forum to listen to this mind than CEIBS, where managers from State-owned enterprises mingled with managers from fies, wofes and private firms? Being able to learn as much from questions, as from answers, was to me, a keen insight into what “knowledge” is all about.

So, eleven fairly modest learnings, particularly when I think of all the energy and effort that went into earning them, but for me the opportunity to serve as the president of a leading business school was really more of an education than "another line on the cv;" and it was truly more about "following" than about "running."

Purposeful Innovation

2011-01-10T01:52:00.000-08:00

One of the things that becomes abundantly clear when talking with "innovation enthusiasts" is that for many people innovation for innovation's sake is a perfectly reasonable [perhaps unconscious] concept. Perhaps this is an unwitting outcome of their fascination with change, but my impression is not only is this wrong, it can be terribly misleading! Any discussion of innovation should always start with the context for why that innovation is necessary, or desired. Without such guidance, innovation can waste resources and squander talent. I believe that innovation should always be purposeful! And, I also believe that way-too-many of the innovation professionals that I work with get so caught-up in the excitement of innovation that they pay far too little attention as to why are we doing this anyway?

2011: The Year of the Tablet

2011-01-06T01:55:00.000-08:00

Cave Henricks, our publicist for the new The Idea Hunter book, has published some predictions from their authors regarding the coming year. I thought that this was a good question and it got me thinking about what I thought the biggest change might be (regarding books and executive education). My conclusion was that it could be the mass acceptance of "tablets":

“My prediction is that 2011 will be the year of the tablet: there will be more iPads and other tablets than we would have ever imagined only a few years ago, and the ubiquity of information that they bring with their use will offer us the possibility of profoundly changing the way we work. If, and this is a big “if”, we change our habits to take advantage of information on demand, at our fingertips, 24/7, we can fundamentally redesign our conversational experiences: fact-based conversations could become the norm rather than the exception; simulations, scenario comparisons and prototyping could become common ways of testing new ideas; instantaneous contact with much larger virtual communities via social-networking sites could bring co-creation into our everyday lives. Was all of this possible before the tablet? Of course! But, the tablet, without the vertical notebook screen that implicitly separates us from each other, invites us all into a common fact-seeking conversational experience in a way that no personal computer could ever arrange. We are literally at the dawn of really encouraging “smarter” interactions, but only if we change our habits and our behaviors in consonance with the changing technology that is increasingly available to us.”

One Decade into the 21st Century: An Innovation & Entrepreneurship Retrospective

2011-01-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

When I was a young boy growing-up in New York City, in the middle of the 20th century, we knew, as an article of faith, that all problems would be solved by the 21st century. All of our science fiction stories were about the 21st century; it was very much a utopian future that we had ahead of us. Alas, so far, a decade into the “promised land,” the record is not what we had been led to expect. It is, in fact, as the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry so wisely opined: “The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.”

In fact, the accelerating rise of fundamentalism of all sorts; terrorist acts in many communities; seemingly ubiquitous military engagements around the planet; increasing gaps between rich and poor and little amelioration of poverty and injustice; a reckless disregard for the planet’s well-being (climate); and the continued mass-migration of the desperate; all suggest that we have learned little and have moved backwards as a species, despite the proliferation of new technologies and new knowledge. It is hard to dismiss the notion that we as human beings should be ashamed of how little we have truly accomplished in the past decade.

Nonetheless, there have been significant accomplishments, especially in innovation and entrepreneurship, that we should recognize and be proud of. It is abundantly clear that as we enter the world of the future, we live in a world characterized by continuous change and that technology is not only one of the major forces creating such change, it is also a principle expression of this change. It’s true whether we’re speaking of social networking, or e-readers, or iPods/iPads, or new aircraft, faster trains, 3D television, new pharmaceutical products, digital imaging, and the like -- much of what we see as an increasing pace of change in our lives is directly ascribable to technology. However, I think that if we are thoughtful and sober in our reflection, one of the lessons of the past decade is that it is has been evolution, not revolution, that has truly characterized the changes that we saw in the last 10 years. The technologies that I have mentioned just now are all “extensions” of prior technologies. The past has indeed been a good predictor of the future! Unforeseen, out-of-our-imagination, step-function/discontinuous change is not anywhere near being abundantly evident; black swans are truly rare when it comes to technological innovation!

Just because the past decade has been largely “evolutionary” does not, however, mean that there weren’t some historic movements taking place along the way. There are four major themes that achieved maturity as social factors influencing technology and innovation in the last decade that come to mind immediately:

The ubiquity of information. We now take abundant and instantaneous information for granted in decision-making, innovating and in nearly every aspect of our lives. New devices are not only changing our ability to make better informed choices, but they are also changing the way in which we arrive at those choices, or go beyond traditional choice-making. Today, we have the ability to be smarter/better-informed in every aspect of our lives;
The community-building nature of web 2.0. Facebook, RenRen, Twitter, and entire legions of on-line communities are allowing us to stay connected, express ourselves differently and to larger communities and --again -- to learn more from others. Inclusiveness is a term that can be applied to an entire generation of mostly young people who spend a considerable part of their productive time working with others via on-line communities. The Open Innovation movement is one of the most profound expressions of how on-line communities can harness the collective intellect of many bright people to yield real advances in a variety of innovation opportunities.
Green. The failure of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Summit was a vivid exception to the more globally pervasive recognition of the cataclysmic possibilities associated with climate change and the need to address this issue in many different ways. Ironically, we will most likely have to rely upon entrepreneurs to drive such change in the future, as governments cannot bring themselves to put politics aside in the face of such a broad challenge to our species, but we do see signs of innovation across a wide spectrum of endeavors that offer us some hope of altering the present course towards widespread disasters.
Globalization. Clearly the emerging markets are no longer the “future” but have become “the present.” There has been a pronounced migration of traditional industries [and attendant current account difficulties] from Europe and North America to the emerging markets; there has been the emergence of new emerging market contenders, although not as many yet as might have been expected; there is a widespread reliance upon dispersed work-teams, many of which are located in the emerging markets, and the wealth of ideas that are associated with such diverse teams; and, since the global workday has now become a 24-hour day, there is a definite quickening of the cadence of work-life in general. It is not as clear, however, that the world has flattened to any great extent. Invention, particularly, and innovation, continue to be disproportionately located in the traditional centers for such activity (e.g., Silicon Valley). The multinationals, with their brands, talent, market presence, and distribution channels continue to lead in value-capture, despite some slight erosion in their leadership in value-creation.

So far, the 21st century has not turned out to be the century that we had so long fantasized about, but it contains elements that will shape all of our lives for the foreseeable future. Clearly, we need new organizational types to take advantage of new technologies and the quickening pace of work. Entrepreneurs, with their imagination, boundless energy, and absence of legacy constraints, should prove to be even more important to national economic growth agendas than they were in the 20th century - and there entrepreneurs’ contributions were central to that century’s growth experience! What we need, however, is a different way of thinking about our collective future than that which was so-long driven by the 20th century’s guiding principles of wealth-accumulation. My sense is that all entrepreneurial activity in the future should be inspired by the question: “Are we building the type of world that we wish to leave for our grandchildren?” This is the critical question! What else could be as important? If our commercial activities continue to be undertaken in the pursuit of greed then the legacy it will leave behind will be rightfully trivial and short-lived.

Innovation Lessons from Apple

2010-12-20T00:13:00.000-08:00

InnovationManagement.se an extremely well-produced & informative online magazine for Innovation Management practitioners, recently ran a piece that I have written about Apple and it's lessons on innovation for all of us. The complete article can be read on their site by clicking the link at the start of this note, but I've taken the liberty of articulating a few points below in the hopes that they will get you interested in reading the entire piece:

Take motivation from mistakes: the iPod was more of a great response to a big mistake, than a well-thought-out innovation strategy;
Hire for skills, deal with the attitudes: as opposed to "hiring for attitudes & training for skills", which is by far the more popular approach;
Look outside for great ideas: before Apple extended an 8 week contract to outsider [& lead user] Tony Fadell, they had a great team, but essentially the same ideas as everyone else in the industry. The blockbuster idea that set the iPod apart from everyone else came from outside;
Create innovative work zones: at a time when everyone is talking "space" -- e.g., market space -- "place" still matters in the hunt for new ideas. At Apple, as at IDEO, the design of conversational environments gives then an edge in developing new ideas;
Defining Leadership Boundaries: the boundaries of the iPod project were extremely well-defined and as a result, Jobs was able to get more than 100% of the talent offered to him in his "virtuoso team" by giving them precise, yet inspiring, objectives [1,000 songs in my pocket!] which made it easier for them to believe that they had Absolute Freedom in innovating, while Jobs felt he still had Complete Control;
Be the Police, but dress like a Cheerleader: Aside from being an extremely self-confident leader, Jobs set the project parameters and the team did the work; Jobs stayed closely in touch; but the team did the work..... Jobs took on the job of being the project's sponsor & principal supporter without taking the project out of the hands of those doing it. Our experience is that when senior managers jump into the actual project work they diminish everyone else. Jobs did not do this;
Stand on Firm Ground: The rapid and complimentary evolution of various types of iPods, iPhones; iPads has given Apple an impressive edge in each of the different industries that it competes in. In fact, in nearly every instance, Apple has blown-up existing industry models, that were authored by the incumbents, and established new models [platforms/value-chains/business models] for moving into the future.

Co-Creation: the key to the best innovation

2010-12-18T00:56:00.000-08:00

This post first ran on Forbes.com:

Co-creation is the idea of the moment. Wherever I go lately the desire to get closer to customers, stakeholders and suppliers is at the center of everyone's strategic planning. I saw this emphatically driven home recently in the Driving Strategic Innovation program, a collaborative venture between my school, IMD, and MIT's Sloan School of Management, where nearly 60 chief innovation officers came together for a week to discuss trends in innovation. They came from all types of industries, from manufacturing to services, from government to the sciences and from all across the world.

The surprise was that at virtually every opportunity to describe or construct an effective innovation solution, these veterans immediately turned to some type of collaborative arrangement, whether to enlarge their idea pool, control costs or ensure that projects got done on time. They saw co-creating new offerings in association with value-chain partners, either upstream (suppliers) or downstream (customers, or customers' customers), as the smartest way to ensure a good idea's acceptance and commercial success.

What is remarkable about all this is that not so long ago these same professionals would most likely have been concerned only with innovation that occurred within their organizations, things they could legitimately control. After all, that's how innovation was done for most of recorded history. For decades business school teaching on innovation focused on building more effective filters to avoid the pursuit of ideas that wouldn't lead to commercial success. Today it's almost the reverse. We can manage very nicely within our organizations, but we need to work more effectively outside them, to bring the outside in, so that we can shorten the time and distance between those who have the next good ideas and those who can benefit from them. Rather than being preoccupied with filtering ideas, we are hungry to get more and better ideas. We can always filter later.

In my forthcoming book The Idea Hunter, which will be published in April, my co-authors and I argue that to stay ahead in today's world, astute companies and individuals must make the hunt for new ideas continuous and relentless. They need to understand that almost always the more ideas you can work with, the better. In fact, taking this the next logical step, the more minds you can engage in the hunt for new ideas, the better. That has become part of my professional mantra: More ideas are always better than fewer; more minds are always better than fewer. Always, not sometimes. And, of course, the more different minds you can enlist, the greater your chance of finding a really different idea. You will have to make tough calls on not pursing quite a few good ideas out of the many you get, but getting them is more important than worrying about how to filter them. Collaboration has to become a way of life, not an occasional experiment.

Only a few weeks ago I had a chance to try this first-hand. I was engaged in a session where executives at a fast-moving global consumer goods company were concerned about brand-building. They wanted to generate "wow brands," ones that so excite consumers that they create a viral buzz in the marketplace, and they do so repeatedly. Apple, Red Bull and Football Club Barcelona are three examples. They are exciting and energizing, and each has created a tribal level of allegiance among its customers/supporters/fans.

The challenge for this company was to apply lessons from such brands. The wow factor is more an emotional, visceral reaction rather than an intellectual one. Therefore to try to teach people about "wowness" in a classroom way would be far less effective, maybe futilely so, than to invite a target audience into one's planning from the very start, to help define, from distinctive individual perspectives (the audience came from around the world), what "wowness" meant to them and why.

In a sense we were all teaching one another, simultaneously, and co-creating the course as we did. That changed everything. My principal role as a professor was no longer to broadcast the truth but to provide a framework and a vocabulary with which each participant could make his or her own experience part of what became a shared story about what it took to create a wow brand. The results were extraordinary.

Among the biggest lessons we learned were:

--Wow brands dream bigger than others, but if you rely only on corporate insiders for your dreams, you will have very few dreams.

--Wow brands all rely on regular customers to share their dreams so as to create the future.

--Most companies push to customers, rather than inviting their customers to pull. Wow brands enjoy the power of pull from their fully engaged, co-creating customers.

--Every organization needs to appoint someone to be responsible for making co-creation happen; it doesn't happen on its own.

--Co-creation requires the managerial self-confidence to allow outsiders to help plot an organization's future.

--Finally, successful managers need to understand the value of social networking technologies in making sound strategic decisions.

My biggest personal takeaway from the wow brand experience was that, as always, getting more minds engaged in sharing the burden of creating new ideas both made it easier to find those new ideas and also produced much more interesting ideas than if I had tried to do it myself or with a small team. The big challenge, of course, is trust--giving-up absolute control over end results and trusting others to contribute their best to a group effort. The participants, in fact, spoke of "fear" when it came to sharing idea leadership with their value-chain partners, but, in the end, we all agreed that the power of the final results was worth far more than the security of controlling who participated, and when and how.

Co-creation is the way of the future for all corporate innovative activity, and collaboration--which has become one of my school's central values--will be how we go about all of what we do. Remember: More ideas are always better than fewer, and more minds are always better than fewer. Collaboration makes that possible.

Shanghai Expo: forging or merely viewing the future?

2010-12-18T00:48:00.000-08:00

Shanghai Expo -- the 2010 World's Fair in Shanghai -- was amazing, and amazingly successful as well. Now that the site has been closed, I'll post this column that I originally wrote in May and which ran in China Entrepreneur magazine:

The gala opening of the Shanghai Expo has focused the world’s attention on this vibrant city that is forging the future -- or so we are told. Let no one doubt Shanghai’s vibrancy!! As a native New Yorker, I can truthfully say that Shanghai is the most interesting city that I have ever lived in, and that’s a huge admission for someone born and raised in “the big Apple.” Yet, why wouldn’t a city of 20 million be “vibrant”? Isn’t that an attribute of size? Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Bombay, they can also be described as “vibrant.” What is more telling is the attribution that one commonly sees ascribed to Shanghai as a city “forging the future.” You never hear anyone speak of Rio, Bombay or Mexico City as forging the future, unless it is in a dark science fiction novel with a future gone bad. Yet, Shanghai always has this sense of future promise about it; and this is as it should be for an Expo host, as the future has always been a key characteristic of every great World’s Fair, or Exposition, stretching back as far as London’s 1851 “Crystal Palace” Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations; and certainly this was true of Chicago in both 1893 and 1933; probably St. Louis in 1904; certainly Paris in 1925; and New York in 1939 and 1964. In fact, visitors to the 1939 Worlds’ Fair in New York were given buttons which exclaimed “I have seen the Future.” The question that I have, however, is should such buttons be also given out at the Shanghai expo, and, if so, just how is Shanghai actually going about “forging the future”?

If we look at New York city in the mid-twentieth century, at the time of both of its World Fairs, it was a city of immense possibilities. Not only was the world’s economy centered in its banks, but the emerging electronic entertainment media (radio & television), and advertising industries, that would change everyone’s lives, were housed there as well. In addition, the United Nations was about to settle there as its home, and the local jazz scene was actively spreading its message and influencing the music of the world. People from everywhere were drawn to New York by its magnetism, creating a polyglot street culture that would add color on top of a foundation of earlier successive waves of immigrants, creating a true “world city.” Is it not surprising that so much of America’s creative power in the second-half of the twentieth century would be New York inspired? In fact, one could argue that the 1939 buttons were correct: come to New York and you will see the future!

What about Shanghai? Will we be able to say the same thing fifty years from now about the Shanghai expo? About seeing the future? While I have no doubt at all that Shanghai is China’s “style-setter,” I remain perplexed about the absence of big Shanghai brands in the industries that will shape our future. Baidu, Haier, Huawei, Lenovo, ZTE, even Geely …… These are the brands that are shaping China’s future, and bringing China to the greater world market, yet none of these are Shanghai brands. If we look at the Financial Times’ Global Top 100 brands [April 28, 2010], while there are seven Chinese brands, none are from Shanghai. In fact, if we review CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets’ new “China’s top 20 most valuable brands” [September 2009], we find that the Bank of Communications [#6] is Shanghai’s sole listing -- hardly an electrifying futuristic brand! So, where are the Shanghai brands? As China speeds forward into the global marketplace, Shanghai brands are not even in the race. Instead, it is places like Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shunde, that are producing the standard-bearers for China’s global commercial aspirations. How can that be? How can the nation’s most dynamic city not be at the forefront of China’s branding revolution? What sort of future is Shanghai forging?

Or, take competitiveness: in 2009, the Boston Consulting Group identified 100 “new global challengers,” from the emerging economies of the world that “... either have attained global leadership positions or have demonstrated credible ambitions and abilities to achieve sizable global footprints.” Of these 100 new global challengers, 36 are Chinese; yet, only 4-5 actually come from Shanghai; all of whom are in important, but decidedly old-economy industries [BaoSteel, China Shipping, COSCO, SAIC, and perhaps China Communications Construction]. Is this the future that Shanghai is forging? In fact, BaoSteel and SAIC are the only two Shanghai companies, out of 24 Chinese companies, on the Fortune 500.

This year, BYD Auto became the first Chinese company to make the “top 10” of Business Week’s “Top [50] Innovators,” yet it is from Shenzhen. None of the other Chinese listers [Haier, Lenovo or China Mobile] are from Shanghai either. In April of this year, MIT’s Technology Review launched its first listing of the “50 Most Innovative Companies in the World”. While it included such stalwarts as Apple, IBM, GE, Intel, Amazon.com, and DuPont; it also included Wuxi’s Suntech; but no Shanghai representative.

So, while my love for Shanghai remains undimmed by this reflection, I am troubled by the near-absence of Shanghai companies on any list that would reflect an active role in forging the future. I will visit the Shanghai Expo this year, just as I visited the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and I will look for signs of how Shanghai is forging the future. My hope is that what I will find there is an active authorship of what is to come, rather than a voyeur’s view of what others might be doing. And, while I have no doubt that the Shanghainese are building a “world city,” the mechanism by which this will play its role in creating a future for us all remains a mystery to me.

Steve Jobs: Innovation Leader

2010-12-14T07:25:00.000-08:00

I am an unabashed Steve Jobs enthusiast! I think that what he has done at Apple is nothing short of amazing, and for me the iPod experience has been the most interesting project of all. I've written an IMD case study on "The Making of the iPod" [IMD-3-2142, November 12, 2009], which can be found on the www.ecch.com site. One of the byproducts of my looking at Steve Jobs and Apple's innovation was an invitation to be interviewed by the Brazilian newspaper Correiro Braziliense. What follows are my original english notes for the interview:

Question 1) Steve jobs can be pointed as the main responsible for apple's success? Why?

Response: Steve Jobs was one of the founders of Apple, so for that reason alone he deserves credit for the success of this organization. But, we also know that this has not been a "sure thing" of a "straight path" to success. In fact, Steve Jobs' major claim to being the author of Apple's success lies, I believe, in the "reinvention" of both Apple and himself. In the period between Jobs' departure from Apple, in 1985, and his return 1996, Apple had lost a lot of its "magic" and had become "just another consumer electronics" company; even to the point of being "price-competitive" in the commodity end of the market. To be fair, it had experimented with some interesting projects, the "Newton" being the best known, but it was no longer the elite, exciting, cutting-edge company that it had always been under Jobs in his first "regime." Upon his return to Apple, Jobs combined aggressive cost-cutting, and product-portfolio pruning, with a return to dreaming, and the results are that today it is one of the world's most valuable companies. Jobs personified the brand, in his personal role as leader, as a cheer-leader for change, and as the protector of the brand values. He was both a visionary and disciplinarian, and both at the same time. My sense is that without Steve Jobs, Apple would not be the company that it is today; it might, in fact, not even exist!

Question 2) On your article "Innovation lessons from Apple" you said that iPhones and iPods change the way we live. Why? What they have that causes so much admiration?

Response: Steve Jobs is to the entertainment industry as Thomas Edison was to lighting. The iPod has redefined how we buy, store, and listen to music. It has completely "blown-up" an entire value-chain. Gone, today, for the most part, are record stores, CD production, liner-note writers, album cover designers, and all the other "bit-players" that for decades populated the music industry. Where'd they go? Apple rendered them unnecessary! Not because Apple invented mp3, or computer-based jukeboxes, or on-line purchasing, but because Apple was the only company sufficient visionary, influential and gutsy to pull together an entire new value-chain, including content-providers and distribution methods, to make portable digital media easy, convenient and affordable. What Apple did was to rewire the customer listening experience; all the rest, the hardware [iPod],software, etc. are merely accessories to the big idea of reinventing the music business. Now, they're doing similar things to the mobile phone and book-publishing industry. Furthermore, the real story is not about the music, the books or the phone calls, it's about our lives; it's about how we now get news from podcasts and use apps to book flights, check transportation or pay bills. The one thing that all of these platforms have in common is that they are about our needs more than they are about some producer's hardware. That's so unusal that it's hard not to be admiring!

Question 3) On the same article you said that great leaders didn't sustain inovative themselves. How Jobs can continue be inovative? Do you think this characteristic is going to last long?

Response: In a new book entitled "The Idea Hunter" [Jossey-Bass, April 2011] that Andy Boynton and myself have coming out shortly, we look at what makes for exceptional idea-work, and Steve Jobs meets all of our conclusions. He knows exactly what he's looking for, because he understands himself and his "gig" [the mission in his life that drives all he does]. This actually makes it easier to deal with surprises and search for new ideas because he understands the power of change, as opposed to resisting it. In addition, he is an extremely broad-banded individual: he has electic tastes, but can sample ideas from these many fields of interest and weave them together into a coherent story. This is what gave birth to the iPod, when so many seasoned "experts" in the field failed to see the opportunities. Finally, Jobs trusts others to move his ideas forward. His targets for handpicked talent-laden teams are so precise and so inspirational [take, for example, one of the key targets for the iPod team: "1,000 songs in my pocket", at a time when the leading mp3 player played only 12 songs and could hardly fit into a pocket, and you see both the stretch and the inspiration it contains.] that he can allow others to join-in in co-creating the future, while never feeling that he's loosing control. This ability to invite others in to share their ideas is a hallmark of great innovators.

Question 4) What will be the future of Apple when Jobs dies?

Response: This is an important and valid question. When Steve Jobs was ill last year and required a liver transplant, COO Tim Cook stood in for him and did an admirable job, but, to be honest, we really need a longer period of performance to draw any real conculsions. My sense is that he will, undoubtedly be missed. I mean, he has shaped this organization in a powerful and enormously succesful way that he will leave an influential legacy, for better or for worse. I think, however, that if we consider GE without either Thomas Edison or Jack Welch -- both unthinkable propositions in their time-- or so many other companies with strong formative founders, the real measure of success is not so much the products but the values. At Apple, I believe that Steve Jobs has instilled a pride of purpose and a belief in the way that the organization works, that he has increased the probability that Apple will continue to sustain its success well after Steve's departure.

Question 5) Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, what they have in commom?

Response: They're all brave, iconoclastic, risk-makers; they're dreamers, but with an eye on the details; and, at least Gates and Jobs, are broad bandwidthed individuals who are always in the hunt for new ideas; finally, both Jobs and Gates [it's way to early to tell about Zuckerberg at this point] "act like leaders." They are spokespeople for their organzational and personal values, the inspire those around them, and they make difficult decisions; they personify their brands!

Question 6) What entrepreneurs can learn from Jobs?

Response: When Andy Boynton and I wrote the book "Virtuoso Teams," [Financial Times/Prentice Hall, 2005] one comment was that many of our stories of teams that took great people and achieved exceptional results were "historical" ones [Thomas Edison, Miles Davis, Roald Amundsen, the Manhattan Project, etc.]. In fact, Steve Jobs is the personification of most of the lessons that we learned about successful innovation. Lessons such as: Don't give up! Continue to dream. Set demanding and inspirational goals and then let others get on with it. Think better about your customer than the prevailing industry stereotype does. Build systems, rather than products or platforms. Start with the customer, stretch their lives and then stretch yourself in an effort to deliver great rather than good.

"First Kill All the PhDs"

2010-11-08T00:43:00.000-08:00

This is BusinessWeek.com's choice of a title for the piece, and although I hope that I would never be that aggressive in my choice of remedies, there are times and places where the sentiment comes to mind:

Education is too important to be left to educators. At least that's my feeling, and as a professor, I just might know something about this. According to China's Global Times, in a study last year by the International Assessment of Educational Progress in 21 countries, Chinese students ranked first in the world in mathematics, but they were last in imagination and fifth from the bottom in creativity. Which would you prefer? For me, creative people can hire mathematicians—if they need them. But it's much more difficult for mathematicians even to become aware that they need creative help.

At the same time, the Shanghai Daily reports that the patent activity of China's top 500 enterprises is up 13.3 percent from the prior year, yet no one is asking what impact, if any, these patents are actually having. In a recent column in the Financial Times, Tyler Brûlé observed: "I tried very hard to think of Indian, Russian, and Chinese brands that I owned or used, and I couldn't think of any—no Russian design brands in my house, no reservations at any Indian hotels, and no Lenovo laptop in my bag." Granted, brands and innovation are not necessarily synonymous, but there are associations that cannot be denied or ignored.

So, who's to blame? The Global Times suggests that China's education system, with its emphasis on rote learning, is a part of the problem. In fact, IMD's 2010 World Competitiveness Yearbook reports that China's education system has been in decline since 2007 in terms of how well it meets the needs of a competitive economy, presently ranking 44th out of 58 countries—below countries such as Greece (43), Kazakhstan (35), and Qatar (14). Finland, on the other hand, which ranks 1st in this category, is a notable reference point that people speak about with respect to how its educational offerings in engineering, technology, and innovation are having a direct impact on the economic vitality of the country. Do you ever hear the same about China?

LIFELONG THEORIZING

I also would offer an additional candidate for assigning blame, at least as far as business and entrepreneurship goes: having the right faculty is a "must." During my sojourn in China as an academic and as president and dean of the China Europe International Business School, I was frequently struck by the thought that China's scarcest resource might just be "practically experienced" university faculty. Far too many of the Chinese professors I observed in other schools (CEIBS insisted that any faculty had the ability to interact competently with executives) had never actually worked for a living; they were lifelong academics, and everything was "theoretical" for them. This simply does not work if the goal is to transform new ideas into practical solutions. And it is particularly devastating if we are speaking about business schools and their role in preparing a "managerial class" for competing on the world stage.

Nor is this a uniquely Chinese problem. Business schools around the world are having great difficulty finding faculty who have sufficient work experience to be credible in an executive classroom. Far too many of the available faculty have tasted only academic life, and given that management is an art, not a science, the practicality of execution is often as important, or more so, than the strategic choice being executed. You just don't get this in a classroom, and if your professors have never had to make a suggestion work, and if their professors likewise lack such experience, then we have a three-generation problem not likely to be easily solved, if it is even recognized.

Like most industries, the innovative arts have their own distinctive "value chain," and a nation's university system is upstream in that value chain, producing educated talent that is available for employment in a nation's economy. With business schools, the talent is most likely destined for employment as key decision-makers who are in the process of creating the future through new product and service offerings. If that talent is deprived of "practical" experience, as a result of faculty without such experience, there is no doubt that innovation and entrepreneurship will suffer. Imagination will as well. Former GE Chief Executive Jack Welch was once asked when GE will be unable to continue to drive productivity improvements in such old-economy businesses as light-bulbs and railroads. He exclaimed: "That's an absurd question. Productivity is limited only by your imagination." But "informed" imagination, to be sure. What appears to be lacking today, in China and elsewhere, is academic faculty with sufficient practical experience to nurture such imagination in an effective direction.

"CRITICAL THINKING"

Solving this problem is not particularly straight forward. The merit in insisting on PhD education for business school faculty lies in both their capacity to do and appreciate complex research methodologies that allow us to drill below what often amounts to simplistic management "wisdom." This education also encourages "critical thinking," which is important if such scholars are to be able to separate truth and insight from careless analogies and misplaced associations. Yet the price to be paid for attaining such skills is often the pursuit of a purely academic life, without the opportunity to see the management challenge on a distinctly personal level.

My own school, IMD (IMD Full-Time MBA Profile), on the other hand, prides itself on its practicality and has taken as part of its brand-promise the slogan "Real World, Real Learning." This may be iconoclastic in the academic world, but we find that the more than 200 corporate learning partners who come to IMD each year believe this is an essential ingredient for the development of their executive talent. It is hard to believe that such a promise would not also be attractive to China, as well, unless China is content to produce mathematicians to be hired by our managers.

"Made in China"

2010-08-25T00:38:00.000-07:00

“Made in xxx” appear on some part of every product that we buy, yet what does it really mean? In China’s case, “made in China” has moved from 30+ years ago, where it was representing fairly basic, domestic, and inexpensive essentials, made without much thought given to quality, design, or customer interests; to today, where “made in China” is most frequently associated with good quality, internationally distributed products of varying prices, where the design is often done somewhere else, by a foreign brand-holder, and where distribution and the customer is owned by the foreign firm. What comes next, is still to be determined.

Fifty years ago, “made in Japan” also represented relatively backward products devoid of international design or reliable quality. In a fairly short time period, Japanese firms were able to achieve recognition for design, product desirability, world-class quality, all graced by Japanese brand names. Innovation became unquestionably an element of “made in Japan,” both in terms of product offerings and cost-advantages through process innovation, as well. However, as successful as Japanese firms have been in redefining the value of “made in Japan,” they have not, with a few exceptions, become the global leaders that we anticipated only a few decades ago.

In the United States, on the other hand, “made in USA” has gradually been replaced by “made in China” with one big addition. Turn over any iPod or iPhone, or iPad, and the wording is essentially “Created in the USA. Made in China.” There is a big difference in these two sentences!

So, the good news for us all is that China has come a long way, as validated by its economy growing to number two in the world. This has been an amazing rise – from a non-player on the world stage just a couple of decades ago to its current status as a global leader. Who would have ever imagined this? There is certainly good reason to celebrate the amazing success of China, achieved in such a short period of time.

Yet, the future remains uncertain. Unless China’s begins innovating -- really innovating -- the end of the rise could be in sight, and China could plateau as a great manufacturer of other peoples’ products. The reason for this is also at the very heart of its past success: China’s re-debut onto the world economic stage over the past three decades has been all about cheaper labor and lower costs. No doubt there is an extraordinarily attractive domestic market as well, but China’s real advantage in the global economy has been low-wage manufacturing labor. China’s growth has not been due to innovation! It has not been about the creation of imaginative new services! It has been single-focused on the advantages of making existing products cheaper – and while that ‘s not anything to diminish, it does predict a future of continued manufacturing activity, rather than moving upwards in a value-chain! China’s success, to date, has lacked the entrepreneurial pursuit of opportunities that have characterized Silicon Valley or even the innovation corner between Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland. This should not be!

The conundrum underlying all of this is that you will find a great amount of creativity in China today. From the art scene, fashion, sculpture, music, architecture and cinema, China is awash with creativity. But, if you look closely, you will notice that this is individual innovation, not organizational innovation. What sets the eBays and Amazons and Apples apart from the pack is that they are all examples of “organizational” innovation. The iPod, iPhone and iPad experiences; eBay’s community of users; and Amazon’s amazing service-oriented interface, could not have been designed by one person; each needed a team, and a diverse team of talented individuals at that. In fact, almost all of the big innovations of recent times have been team efforts; more often than not involving diverse teams of extremely young people who are sponsored in deliberate efforts to disrupt existing well-established, national champions. We have not seen the scale, frequency, or abandon of such efforts in China.

There is no denying, however, the potential of what is taking place within the Chinese economy. Each year, China outproduces the rest of the world in the graduation of new engineers and scientists, yet a recent UK study which was titled “China: the next Science Superpower,” observed:

What is often lost in the welter of statistics about [Chinese] R&D investment and engineering graduates is a sense of the raw power of the changes that are under way, and the dizzying potential for Chinese science and innovation to head in new and surprising directions. We cannot say with any certainty where things may lead, but such large and sustained investment in innovation, within a system that for a long time suppressed such impulses, seems likely to produce a growing number of extraordinary achievements at the frontiers of science over the next ten or 15 years.

In order for the unprecedented Chinese ride to continue -- and, believe me, it is in all the world’s interest for this to happen -- China needs to develop a professional management community with an innovative mindset: diverse contributors to push ideas, and organizational willingness to take big risks by unleashing talent – none of which is easy for anyone to encourage. What is needed is a shared perspective on business that is:

1. Global

At first, this might appear to be obvious, even passé. However, this involves building truly global organizations. Japan’s businesses tried this in the 80s and, for the most part, failed – it is not an easy task. It goes beyond merely sourcing out raw materials from and selling products in different countries. Being global also consists of recruiting talent (both high-potentials as well as top management people) from wherever that talent is deployed, sharing responsibilities with “strangers,” and trusting them to contribute to building the next-generation organization. Clearly, this is not for the faint-hearted! Serge Tchuruk, the former CEO of the French telecom giant Alcatel, used to say that “business should be an adventure.” Many of his compatriots realized that when Alcatel-Shanghai Bell was established in the early years of this past decade that it had the power to possibly change the very complexion of the parent organization. The days when an organization’s DNA have unambiguous national origins are gone forever, except in China [and other BRICS] where the national champions remain Chinese; possibly put it at a disadvantage in the pursuit of new ideas.

2. Risk-makers

There is an old Biblical message that “the meek shall inherit the earth.” That may have been the right advice for several thousand years, but my impression is the meek risk getting left behind in today’s fast world. Teams and companies that I find to be impressive tend be ambitious; to raise the stakes, rather than lower them. Instead of avoiding risks, great organizations push the boundaries of their businesses to the extent that they are actually creating risks, rather than merely taking them. Such “risk-making” raises organizational esprit, stretches members and destabilizes less-prepared competitors. Risk-making is at the heart of innovation, and requires a willingness to fail in the expectation that learning will occur and that the next try will be better. When failure is unacceptable, the risk is that no risks are taken.

3. Diverse

Great innovation teams load the odds in their favour by including more, and more different, minds in their hunt for the big idea. This means embracing true diversity – racial, gender, professional, vocational, etc – and trusting different people in the sharing of ideas. I have a worry about China that it is not diverse enough to have a sustainable edge in the global market place. I realize that there is a great deal of difference among Chinese people, but it is Shanghai as diverse as New York? As Milano? As London? As even Hong Kong?

4. Experimental

Getting the one right answer, in an increasingly complex world, is an illusion. There are no longer any “truly” right answers anymore, or at least few that we can identify beforehand. Instead, what we need is a new style of decision-making that begins with leaders experimenting by acting on hypotheses. They then must learn by mistakes and respond quickly and decisively as soon as the need for correction is identified. In the words of the Silicon Valley design firm, IDEO, “failing often to succeed sooner” will become the mantra of 21^st century decision-making.

Think about how “revolutionary” this really is. What it means is that taking risks will have to become a philosophy of life; that learning through failure will be seen as an instinctual way to gain insights; and that failing a lot, in small ways, while still pushing the boundaries, will be seen as a better way of taking bolder chances than the more traditional placing of “one big bet” on a pre-determined, preferred outcome. One wonders yet whether China is there yet in eliminating the fear of failure.

5. Thoughtful

Much of what the foregoing suggests is that the 21^stcentury organization will be one full of ideas in which opinions and opinionated people are the real competitive assets. This means it is desirable, if not imperative, that we have an awareness of how ideas enter the organization and how they move from concept to commercialization. It also means that processes for improving such flows, and recognition for the key roles that allow all this to happen, are recognized, appreciated and reinforced. This is more than just saying “knowledge is important!” Instead, what we need are organizations that place knowledge at the very center of the offerings that they bring to market. That celebrate challenge, confrontation, and stubborness. Frito-Lay is the world’s largest seller of salty snack-foods, but it’s the business knowledge that they share with the store owner that makes them so successful. The Ritz-Carlton still sells hotel rooms, but it’s the knowledge of the individual customer that gains them an edge in a competitive marketplace. Holcim will always sell cement, but it’s what they know about the cement process around the world that differentiates their ability to make margins in a commodity business. Li & Fung will forever be the middleman, but it is being in the very middle of the knowledge chain of the industries they serve that ensures their value. In these firms, there is no doubt about the power of knowing things. As a result, ideas and opinions count more than in traditional firms, simply because they really matter to the success of the organization, and everybody realizes it.

This is an industrial revolution that we have yet to see in China. In fact, few places anywhere have more than an occasional illustration of how “What you know” becomes more important than “what you make”, or “how you make it.” To do this on a global stage also requires sharing considerable responsibilty with local players. But this represents a real shift from labor and capital intensiveness to knowledge intensiveness. The ability to make this shift will characterize the industrial winners of the future.

6. Energizers

As always, competitive success depends on energizing the talent that needs to make this happen and creating a sense of enthusiasm and a feeling of truly making a difference. This is partially true given what we’ve described above. The role of the leader in such organizations becomes essential to energize the people around them with inclusion, respect and empowerment. To my mind, self-confidence is the crowning characteristic of energizing leaders. To have the self-confidence to set a direction and then let others determine how to achieve that vision is one sure way to best unleash talent; but we need to ask ourselves how often do we see such leaders in our midst, whether it is China or elsewhere?

These are the dimensions of a new managerial mindset for our times. Those organizations and cultures whose management teams best adopt these roles will be the ones that can best survive and thrive in volatile times. New markets, new technologies and new business norms mean that change will be a constant factor in our lives. China’s ability to reinterpret “made in China” towards “created in China” will be determined by its ability to create a new generation of innovation leaders with such characteristics.

Moving forward

Successful innovation requires strong leadership and the availability of educated, ambitious, bright people, who are independent and self-confident enough to push their opinions and take responsibility for their projects; as well as being entrepreneurial in the management and delivery of these projects. China is gifted with such people, but at present, too many organizations are holding back such individuals.

In today's fast-moving, complex business environment, innovating quickly, reliably and effectively is an advantage for achieving profitability and growth. Yet, all too often, organizations are unable to generate sufficiently creative ideas and effectively move them to market. We need to endeavor to change the way business leaders think about innovation and technology strategy, and gives them a deeper, richer and more comprehensive roadmap for executing change. “Made in China” has come a long way over the past thirty years; but the future is not guaranteed. The entire world will be watching as Chinese industrial leaders determine what “made in China” truly means in the next decade.

This ran as a column in China Entrepreneur magazine

"The Unforgiving Moment"

2010-08-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

As a former US Army 2nd/1st Lieutenant, who prepared for combat but never had combat experience, I have long wondered how I would have done in the midst of the confusion and fear of a real fire-fight. Now, a book has appeared that addresses this question in a thoughtful yet emotional fashion. Craig M. Mullaney's The Unforgiving Moment, is a well-worthwhile book for those who have grappled with the essence of leadership in the "most unforgiving moments." In particular, there are two observations that Mullaney makes that I feel are worth the entire read:

As a platoon leader he was well-aware that his soldiers' "... parents had entrusted me with [their lives]," which I believe is the precise statement of a platoon leader's first and foremost obligations [p. 292]; and
In Afghanistan, as in so many places, "We should have focused less on finding the enemy, and more on finding our friends." [p. 362]

This is a book that all aspiring leaders would be wise to look at; the issues are important and the writing is moving. It also reminds us of the enormous sacrifices that are often asked of those who are not fortunate/wealthy enough to be able to sit-by and benefit from the sacrifices of others; how truly questionable our wars might be; and the amazing amount of preparation that is required of a thoughtful leader. Several times in the book the comment is made that the Army requires leaders who think; all too often, my experience was that this was the capability that was valued least among a variety of other more "performance-driven" attributes.

Our Summer of Football and it’s Lessons for Entrepreneurs

2010-08-10T06:38:00.000-07:00

The estimates vary widely, but it’s clear that more than a billion people watched a part of the recent World Cup of Football in South Africa. With such an enormous investment of human time, surely there must be abundant lessons to be learned about all sorts of things from this experience. Fortunately for us, there were, in fact, several quite important insights for entrepreneurs that can be gleaned from this most universal of all sporting events.

To begin with, the major conclusion of the World Cup was the enormous victory it was for Europe. A final between Spain and the Netherlands; with Germany the third of the “final four” qualifiers in the Cup [Uruguay being the fourth], was completely unforeseen by those in the business of predicting sporting outcomes. More likely, we were told, would be a Brazilian victory, capping the ascendancy of emerging markets as the new center of world football; but, this didn’t happen. With Europe all too often seen as the very antithesis of entrepreneurship, and frequently characterized as being “old,” “tired,” “lazy” and “complacent,” such domination of the football championship is indeed an intriguing outcome. What accounts for such a result that might help us understand entrepreneurial success?

According to the authors of the statistically-inclined book Soccernomics, world football team proficiency in an international match is best explained by three characteristics: the size of a nation’s population, the size of national income, and a country’s experience in international football [ Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, Soccernomics, New York, Nationbooks, 2009, p. 33.]; yet, clearly, the biggest, richest countries did not dominate the games. China, for example, which has largest population on the planet, as well as the largest number of citizens who actually play football, didn’t even make it into the World Cup 2010; the U.S., which is the richest nation on the planet, and has the second largest population of soccer players, was eliminated in it’s first match of the post-qualifying round by Ghana: a small, poor, and relatively inexperienced team. What gives?

My sense is that there are two big factors that explain Europe’s success (and Spain’s in particular) in the World Cup, and that have immediate import for managers responsible for all sorts of teams. The first has to do with the relative importance of “experience” compared to the other two explanatory variables mentioned above. Experience is clearly the most important of the three explanatory variables, and Spain, the Netherlands, and Germany are all the beneficiaries of lessons forged in the most sophisticated and competitive rivalries in the world. The UEFA Champions League is a collection of the best players in the world, from all over the world. It is a mixing-pot of the best professional talent from every continent that is unparalleled on the planet; how could you not learn from such experiences? So, not only do the Europeans have the experience, they have the most formative experiences possible. The professional football leagues of Europe have been, and remain, the most demanding of tests for professional, and managerial competence, and Europe no doubt used this asset to full-advantage. Just as is true with industrial innovation, so it is for football: countries that remain aloof from the give and take of the best competitiveness, suffer by not learning enough relative to others.

Furthermore, European football learning takes place in a highly geographically-concentrated, international community where lessons of football success regularly move quickly from one rival to another. According to Soccernomics, it is these networks which characterize the European football community that make a big difference in the success of its teams: “the best ideas spread fastest there.” [Kuper & Szymanski, Soccernomics, op.cit. p. 27.] Those that fail to learn, fall behind. Under such conditions, it is difficult, and costly, to maintain an isolationist mindset.

The second factor that I feel is central to understanding Spain’s victory has to do with the way it managed its team’s talent. The World Cup is, without a doubt, a talent-filled extravaganza, but we all know that all-star teams are often not as good as the talent that they contain; they typically disappoint relative to their promise. Spain, however, delighted us, while Brazil was a complete let-down. In fact, Brazilian World Cup teams are typically regarded as the most talented of all teams, but this year Brazil did not even make it into the finals. According to a recent book entitled How Soccer Explains the World

: “Brazil became an international power because it played without the rigid strategic strictures of [European] continental soccer. Positions, formations, and defense weren’t valued nearly so much as spontaneity, cleverness, and the scoring of goals. .... where the European style was prose, the Brazilian was poetry.” [Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World, New York: Harper Perennial, p. 120. Italics added.] Yet, “poetry” alone was not sufficient to make it into the World Cup finals; is there a lesson here?

In our study -- Virtuoso Teams-- of how “all-star” teams live up to their potential [Andy Boynton & Bill Fischer, Virtuoso Teams, London: FT-Prentice Hall, 2005.], we concluded that a secret of innovative performance was achieving a point where everyone on the team felt that they had “absolute freedom” (poetry), while top management still believed that it possessed “complete control” (prose). This is exactly what we saw in the World Cup; neither strategy nor entrepreneurship, alone, is enough; in a fast-changing world, you need both! Brazil was all about poetry (spontaneity and fluidity), while Germany and the Netherlands had a heavy emphasis on prose (strategy and discipline). Spain, however, had a marvelous combination of both; and won the whole thing!

The lessons of the World Cup are important for entrepreneurs. Football, as with business, is all about learning and being more responsive than the other competitors. This typically requires both a thoughtful approach to the challenges at hand, and the ability to adjust as the environment changes. Neither poetry nor prose is sufficient to be the best; you need both. Furthermore, competing in environments where you have sufficient diversity and operational excellence to test the mettle of the competitors is the best place to learn how to navigate between poetry and prose, and for that reason is vastly superior to winning in non-challenging environments.

Bill Fischer is Professor of Technology Management at IMD and Director of it’s Managing Innovation Globally program, to be held in Hong Kong, October 25-27, 2010. He played soccer for Clarkson University.

China’s Global Competitive Advantage: The Beginning of the End, or the End of the Beginning?

2010-08-10T06:18:00.001-07:00

On August 5, 2010, I had a short note published in The Australian, entitled: "Why it's Time for China's Next Evolution: the Low Wage Advantage is Peaking." What follows is the original version that was edited for newspaper publication:

2010 is a milestone year for China. For three decades, China has grown into a world economic presence, if not powerhouse -- slowly, at first, and now full-fledged -- in an unprecedented, consistent, and consistently monotonic, success story. It is, to be sure, an extraordinary achievement; but, it’s also time for a change!

2010 also represents a major transition point in the China growth story. In fact, I am reminded of the metaphor of “shifting gears in a moving vehicle in order to adjust to a change in the road conditions”; will it work or won’t it? 2010 is the year that the traditional engine of China’s growth requires a “shifting of gears.” Let’s be sure that we understand what is happening on the path to continued Chinese growth, and why it matters. If we are sober and honest, China’s last three decades’ wildly successful [re-] debut onto the world economic stage has been all about cheaper labor; and lower costs. No doubt, there is an extraordinarily attractive domestic market, as well, but China’s real advantage in the global economy has been low-wage manufacturing labor. It has not been innovation! It has not been services! It has been single-focused on the advantages of making existing products cheaper; full stop! If we follow Deng Xiaoping’s admonition to “learn truth from facts,” we can answer a series of probing questions with the same response. Has there been a Chinese enterprise who has created a noteworthy new product innovation, such as: Xerox’s [PARC] personal computer? Kodak’s digital camera? Boeing’s 747? Philips’ CD? Sony’s walkman? The answer is “no.” A process innovation as noteworthy as Toyota’s production system, or IKEA’s shopping-maze design? No. An internet offering as noteworthy as Amazon or Facebook? No. A business model innovation as noteworthy as the iPod/iTunes rewiring of the customer listening experience, or Zara’s reinvention of the frequency of fashion offerings, or eBay’s community of members? Again, no! In truth, China’s growth has been powered by not by doing things -- any thing -- differently; but, by doing existing things less expensively; and that takes cheap labor.

Now, here’s why 2010 is so important. This year is the year in which China’s “working age” population reaches its highest level. In 2010, 71.9% of the Chinese population is between the ages of 15 to 64, which has been depicted by statisticians as the ages at which people make a net-positive contribution to economic value-creation. After this year, that proportion of the population will decline, and after 2015 the actual number of Chinese working-age people (15-64) will also begin to decline. As long-time China watcher Philip Bowring recently observed in The International Herald Tribune: “For China as a whole there are currently only 106 million workers in the 15-19 age group compared with 122 million in the 20-24 group. China now has 378 million in their 40s and 50s but only 273 million under 20. The decline, which is continuing, in the number of the young and mobile has been greatest in rural areas. So China will have to find other ways of sustaining economic growth and gains in worker productivity.” The obvious way for that to happen is through innovation, but here we have no reason to argue why the past -- i.e., no innovation -- will no longer be a good predictor for the future.

The conundrum underlying all of this is that there is lots of creativity in China today. The art scene; fashion; sculpture; music; cinema. China is awash with creativity. But, if you look closely, what you see is that this innovation is individual innovation, not organizational innovation. What sets the eBays and Amazons and Apples apart is that they are all “organizational” innovation. The iPod experience could not have been designed by one person; it needed a team, and a diverse team at that. Same is true behind most of the big innovations of recent times. Yet, what is it about Chinese organizations that they turn out to be so much less innovative than the sum of the people who are brought together under that organizational structure? Is it that the command & control approach to management which has characterized thousands of years of Chinese history is still hard to break? Or, is it Confucian respect for hierarchy and relational prerogatives? Is it not enough trust; or too much trust? Is it not enough diversity? Or, is it something else? This is China’s time to address the innovation issue, so that its prior successes represent the “end of the beginning” -- a period of time when China moved from being the factory of the world into a world-class innovator. If this does not happen, then we are likely looking at the “beginning of the end” of China’s distinctive competitive advantage; and a movement into a time when China is just another low-wage producer, bigger than most, but no longer either the biggest or the lowest priced.

Steve Jobs & Apple

2010-07-29T06:47:00.000-07:00

On July 28, 2010, I was invited to participate in a Financial Times "Judgement Call" discussion on whether or not Steve Jobs was sufficiently apologetic over the recent problems of the new iPhone version 4. What follows below is the much-longer original sense of my thoughts on this:

Let’s face it, when you talk about Apple, you can never avoid talking about Steve Jobs. To do so would be to underestimate his importance to the attitude of the company, and ultimately the brand. This is not to say that he is “indispensable,” but, rather that he personifies the company’s tone for ambitiousness and “edginess.” He proved it again in his July 16th response to the iPhone problems.

Far from exhibiting arrogance or “a bunker mentality,” what Jobs’ July 16th response was was a strong statement of reaffirmation about what Apple is -- an engineering company that has repeatedly changed our world for the better -- and all that it has achieved. While he acknowledged the problems at hand, and promised to fix them, he also reminded us that his responsibility as CEO is about moving the company into the future, rather than dwelling on solvable problems of the past. What more do you want than that in a leader? To criticise him for anything else is naive and misplaced.

From the outside, it’s easy to pass judgement and get worked up over a technical glitch; particularly if we’re closely watching the successful guys in the hopes of catching them failing. But, let’s be sober: this is not BP – threatening large numbers of people, damaging ecosystems, and polluting fragile international waters -- this is about a cell phone not being as dependable as was originally promised. There’s a big difference with respect to how corporate leadership should respond.

Jobs knows this. And so do Apple loyalists. His message didn’t let them down. On the contrary, it was a strong statement reassuring us that Apple is committed to continuing to producing great products in the future. Whether it was sufficiently “heartfelt” or not isn’t worth debating. Jobs showed self-assurance and pride and it’s these two qualities that resonate with loyal Apple users and that have catapulted Apple to repeated success. This was as much a message of reassurance to the Apple “tribe” as to anyone else: “we will not be losing our focus in the face of this rather insignificant problem.”

The problem at hand, after all, is temporary. It has been blown into great debate simply because there are a lot of people and organizations that are envious of Apple’s success: “If you can’t out-innovate them; try besmirching them!”

In a nutshell, Jobs’ message was simple: Apple is aware of the problem, we will fix it, and we are moving on. The more significant message to his competitors was left unsaid: catch us if you can!

Management Gurus

2010-02-16T09:56:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked about gurus by the Swiss business publication Bilan. Upon some reflection, it's an interesting topic and I thought that I'd post the first draft of that conversation:

Bilan: Why are the gurus fast all American or at least english speaking people? Are there some cultural explanations?

WAF: It is true that many, although not all -- there are some British gurus such as Charles Handy,and Lynda Gratton, and Japanese gurus such as Professors Ikujiro Nonaka, or Genichi Taguchi -- are American, but rest-assured this is not for genetic reasons. Instead, for the most part, I believe that what we're seeing here is the result of several social forces:

the power of the American media industry: one should never discount the economies of scale that the American media industries enjoy as a result of the sheer size of the population they serve and the ubiquity of English as a second language around the world.

the early and profound embrace by America of "management as a profession." While so many other nations denied "professional status" to managers, America not only accepted the role of the entrepreneur/manager as a professional one, but they made them heroes. This ultimately led to a prospering business press: The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Business Week, Forbes, just to name a few, and out of this came a respect not only for the practice of management, but for the philosophy as well.
Finally, I think that America still remains one of the few places where anybody with a good idea can succeed. And, in such environments, paying attention to the good ideas of others makes abundant sense.

- Have you got a favorite guru? I have several: the late [Austrian-born] Peter F. Drucker, of course: "the guru's guru!" He raised the essential question: What is our business and what should it be? No matter how many times you answer this question, and hopefully it's many times, the next time is always the most important. I also admire Warren Bennis, who approaches leadership issues in culture-light manner that focuses on the universal requisites of leadership; and I confess to being a big fan of both Tom Peters and Gary Hamel; and my good friend Supply-Chain guru Charlie Fine, who I have the privilege of co-directing IMD's Driving Strategic Innovation program with.

- Do you advise to your students to read some of them? Yes, for sure. It’s important to appreciate their role as agents-provacateurs, rather than literally accepting all they write as “gospel.” Their role is to lead with opinions, to serve a catalytic function to get us thinking. Used correctly, the real contribution of the guru’s is more about what I -- the professional manager-- think, than about them -- the professional opinion-leader. There is a lot to discuss, both pro and con, from their writing; and most of the learnings come from our discussion rather than the words of the gurus. In addition, I should point out that there are "gurus" everywhere. As a result of my work on Virtuoso Teams, I now see that such disparate personalities as trumpter Miles Davis, composer Leonard Bernstein, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, even Swiss balloonist Bertrand Piccard, were also profound practicioners of the art of leadership; the reading of whom does not require relying on gurus, and is often much more enjoyable.

- How strong do you believe in the solutions they prescribe? No solution fits all problems. The gurus help us by encouraging us to articulate agreement or disagreement with what they are saying and in exploring our own views as to why we feel this way, so that we can form our own approaches to leadership.

- What can you learn from the experiences they describe? The gurus ask us to be reflective and introspective about what we believe. That is their real contribution; it is not in the rote-application of their lessons, as their lessons are not universal, and can never be. So, I am a great believer in anyone who helps us become more thoughtful about the art of management.

The Wrong Toyota Way

2010-02-10T10:03:00.000-08:00

Toyota has long been an icon in manufacturing circles, and I think that their recent troubles are both unfortunate and that it's unfair to "pile-on" while they are attempting to recover. They remain not only a great company, but also a great benchmark for manufacturing achievement -- you cannot be "best of class" for several decades without doing a lot of things right. I recently wrote about Toyota's problems for Forbes.com and several other publications. Here is the version that ran on Forbes.com on February 10, 2010:

For at least two decades Toyota has been the benchmark of manufacturing quality. Not only for automobiles but throughout the manufacturing world, the "Totota way" has been a model. The company's attention to detail and unrelenting expectation of perfect quality, its promise to the buyer that a car will be trouble-free and its building of an organizational culture that delivered on these promises over and over again--those have all been areas in which Toyota did better than anyone else on the planet.

Now, with the revelation that many Toyota automobiles are not as impeccably well-built or as safe as we had all assumed, the image is tarnished. Toyota has started to look like a lot of organizations that promise things they can't deliver and sell brands with little substance behind them.

In fact, if we reflect soberly, we realize that given the sorry state of the world's automobile industry, Toyota remains the benchmark. Despite its recent recalls of several million vehicles, apparently the largest recalls in history, Toyota still stands out for making cars that work and for innovating in ways that are likely to shape the future. However, while pursuing growth the company has failed by neglecting to pay attention to things it already knew as an organization.

One of the things that Toyota knew and yet forgot was that one must, in the words of Paul Ingrassia, the author of Crash Course, a new book on the auto industry, "never build … a new product in a new factory with a new workforce." Those "three nevers" are opportunity for trouble, because organizations must always combine knowing with growing if they are to succeed in a global marketplace. As we move into a knowledge-intensive era, knowing things will become as important as, if not more important than, making things. Knowing what to make, how to make it and who to make it for will be the key to success. The organizations that come out ahead will be the ones that know more than other organizations and have figured out how to know more. In other words, they will be smarter organizations. Toyota has always been among the world's smartest organizations, yet here, in its pursuit of ever greater global growth, it wasn't so smart after all.

The Toyota situation has been deftly analyzed by two IMD professors, Bala Chakravarthy and Peter Lorange, in their book Profit or Growth; Why You Don't Have to Choose. They argue that companies that are intent on growing, as opposed to protecting and defending their market positions, can expand either by opening new markets or by offering new competencies--but they cannot do both at the same time. Another way to put this is that global growth is based on building on what you know while selectively learning new things. Abandoning everything you know, be it about markets, technology, customers, offerings or anything else, is to proceed knowing very little at all.

One reason for the truth of the "three nevers" is the power of tacit knowledge. According to Ikujiro Nonaka, a scholar at Berkeley and at Hitotsubashi University in Japan and one of the founders of the field of knowledge management, knowledge can exist in a hard or formal form, such as in documents, books or memorandums, or it can be "tacit," such as when it's knowhow in the heads of people familiar with particular work arrangements. Formal knowledge is relatively easy to transfer, through documents; tacit knowledge only moves from one person to another with personal interaction.

We may not even realize we possess tacit knowledge until a conversation with a colleague crystallizes a thought and we recognize how much we know. The problem with violating the three nevers rule is that when we do it we lose all hope of tacit knowledge transfer. When we move into new product areas in new geographic markets and with new factories, we have no hope for a head start, for an advantage based on the strength of our existing knowledge.

Successful globalization is much too difficult to achieve without any knowledge that gives your organization a basis for advantage. You might use your prior knowledge by drawing on existing product offerings in new markets, or by making new products in existing factories with experienced workforces or maybe by using a seasoned team of veteran managers and workers to tackle a new problem in an existing market. But you must always keep some of the familiar while embarking on something new. To do otherwise is to risk following in Toyota's recent path.

Reconsidering Centers of Excellence

2009-11-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, more than I'd like to remember, I published a book with Jack Behrman, entitled Overseas R&D Activities of Transnational Corporations, and in that book we briefly considered "Centers of Excellence." At the time, I was underwhelmed by the concept, but today, in a Leading the Global Enterprise [IMD's new program] discussion of innovation in a global organization, the wisdom of Centers of Excellence became more apparent.

What we know from the Virtuoso Teams project is that: dedicated teams are important; physical intimacy in work-areas desirable; in-touch leadership essential; and we also know from decades of economic examination that there are economies of scale associated with R&D and innovative teams. So, how to achieve these in globally dispersed organization? My sense is that we should be reconsidering Centers of Excellence on a global scale, as they may offer the best organizational platform for achieving many of the elements associated with successful "big" change.

Ambitiousness

2009-09-17T07:38:00.001-07:00

Even if not fashionable, I am in favor of ambition. Being ambitious, allowing justifiable elites to emerge on the basis of superior performance; and letting people become stars is what drives an organization forward. I believe that organizations that win in the talent-wars do it one individual at a time. And, that by enabling talented people to fulfill their potential, we increase the likelihood that we all win.

Back in Business

2009-09-17T06:52:00.001-07:00

It's pretty shocking, and a bit depressing, to discover that it's been nearly a year since my last post; while there are undoubtedly many reasons for this, it's time to get back to blogging. Just as there were many reasons for my withdrawing, there are equally many reasons for coming back online. Maybe the closest thing to a percipitating agent, however, was a recent article in the Harvard University alumni magazine [Elizabeth Gudrais, "The Unlikely Writer," Harvard Magazine, September-October 2009] about the surgeon/writer [of New Yorker magazine fame] Dr. Atul Gawande. In this article, Dr. Gawande is quoted as saying that "he thinks in stories and feels a compulsion to write. In fact, he recommends that everyone do a bit of writing .... 'by putting your writing out to an audience, even a small one, you connect yourself to something larger than yourself... An audience is a community. The published word is a declaration of membership in that community, and also of concern to contribute something meaningful to it.'" I love what he's saying and think that blogging, if only to one or two kindred spirits, is a way of sharing and testing ideas, and maybe, at some point, even contributing to a larger community that are interested in the same ideas. It also, of course, forces me to think about what I'm thinking about, and to crystalize my thoughts so that I can revisit them and develop them in the future.

New AT Kearney Study on Innovation

2008-10-02T03:43:00.000-07:00

A new A.T. Kearney study on innovation was issued this week. Among its findings are:

* Companies that are the most successful innovators have a clear focus on a robust innovation strategy in addition to opening the innovation process to parties outside the company.
* Companies that take a scientific approach to innovation focus their employees and external partners on the right innovation strategy for the company, the right mix of ideas with the right balance of risk and reward, resulting in more commercially viable products and services.
* Leading companies invest more than three times as much effort at the front end of the innovation process (Innovation Strategy, Idea Generation and Concept Development) as other companies.
* Companies that are successful innovators consider a much larger percentage of submitted ideas while bringing fewer of them to the concept testing stage.
* Leading innovators explicitly define innovation within the overall corporate business strategy.
* Leaders also develop more sophisticated open innovation networks with suppliers, customers, academia and other partners.
* Leading companies are excellent in terms of speed -- the time it takes from generating an idea to profiting from it -- and are capable of igniting and sustaining a companywide passion for innovation.
* Idea generation was also identified as an important strategic innovation process step. The study found that innovation leaders involve a broad array of partners to drive the idea generation process.
* These companies embrace open innovation to pull ideas from myriad sources and they employ the Internet to capture combined intelligence on a global scale.

Most of these findings agree that the conversations we've heard in our joint IMD-MIT Driving Strategic Innovation program, and it's interesting to see how much broader the innovation space has become than it was when what happened within the firm was the only thing that mattered!

Dealing with Difficult People

2008-06-15T05:12:00.000-07:00

We all, at some point, have to deal with difficult people. When I was the President/Dean at CEIBS, I used to marvel at how difficult some people could be; frequently, although not exclusively, they were faculty with an inflated sense of self-importance. Frankly, some of these people were difficult and not worth it! Those people received very little, if any, of my attention, and ultimately were separated from the school. Others were difficult and, yet, still worth having on-board, despite how unpleasant it was to be around them. In most cases, I could never succeed in reducing the inherent difficulty in working with them... I used to wonder if they woke up angry?... but we managed to maintain an acceptable working arrangement. It led me to believe that there is a 2x2 matrix around difficulty and value. Those individuals that are both difficult and low in value are unnecessary; those who are valuable and not difficult are great; those who are not valuable but also not difficult should be eased out; and those who are difficult, yet valuable, kept on despite their difficulty. I was reminded of this by reading the comment of baseball manager Joe McCarthy, faced, in 1948 with managing the notoriously difficult, but all-time great Ted Williams: "If I can't get along with a .400 hitter, it will be my fault." Amen!

Bernstein's Leadership Legacy

2008-04-30T14:32:00.000-07:00

What will your leadership legacy be? How will you be remembered by those who were fortunate or unfortunate enough to have passed through your orbit as they followed their own career paths? This is a question worth pondering, as just this week I had a conversation with a colleague who was suggesting that they would "not even be remembered within a year of their leaving their present place of employment." It doesn't have to be that way, of course, and, in fact, there was recentlly an amazingly powerful and moving demonstration of leadership legacy in a most unlikely place. I'm referring to the February concert of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, in Pyongyang, when music director Loren Maazel, himself a long-standing superstar, stepped off of the stage, at a moment of immense personal achievement, when the whole world was watching, and invited Leonard Bernstein, dead for 19 years, to "conduct" the piece. Here is how the Financial Times reported it ["Ovation in Pyongyang is music to US ears"Anna Fifield in Pyongyang, FT.com sitePublished: Feb 26, 2008] :

For the encore, the orchestra played Leonard Bernstein's Candide, after which Mr. Maazel explained the orchestra's special attachment to its former conductor. "Imagine Maestro Bernstein coming back and conducting once more," Mr. Maazel almost whispered. "Maestro, do me a favour," he said in Korean, backing off the stage to leave the orchestra to play Bizet's Farandole without him. The sight of the empty green dais was spine-tingling....

I have thought about this moment for quite a while, now, and I believe it must be one of the most moving and powerful expressions of gratitude, from one leader to his/her mentor, imaginable. As leaders, we can only admire, and envy, Bernstein's legacy, for Maazel to honor him in this way. It proves, that strong and effective leaders can generate admiration and affection that lasts for decades.

The Eyes Have It: Continuous Learning

2008-03-09T04:15:00.000-07:00

I've recently had the privilege of sitting at the "sushi bar" at Nobu's Tokyo restaraunt, and have been able to watch the sushi chefs, up-close. What is so striking is that they are always watching each other work, in a way that suggests appreciation, admiration and a willingness to learn. The chief chef has been a sushi chef for 18 years, 8 of them with Nobu; his associate has worked at Nobu for five years, and next to him is a young man in his first year. Yet, no matter how long they've been in the game, if you watch their eyes, they're always learning.

I believe that it is this willingness -- really hunger or habit -- to learn, that typifies great sustained performance. It is all about pride, professionalism, and a belief that one can always get better at your craft. It was Miles Davis who said: "I'm happy if I can play one new idea each night. .... I try to learn something new every night: the songs I played at the beginning of the year are often unrecognizable by the end of the year.” This is exactly the same sort of learning-ethic that I saw in the eyes of Nobu's sushi chefs.

Leadership as a Contact Sport

2008-02-15T06:40:00.000-08:00

From bankers to resources guys, from IT service-providers to CTOs, over the past several weeks one of the persistent refrains that I've been listening to is the need for leadership to be "in touch," even with the highest levels of executives; and the all-too-familiar failure of senior management to actually fulfill this need. As my good friend and co-author Andy Boynton, Dean of the Carroll School at Boston College, is so fond of saying: "Leadership is a contact sport." Yet, more often than not, leaders are not to be seen; too busy, too distant: conspicuous by their absence.

In many ways, the Virtuoso Teams book was all about "Virtuoso Leaders," who were always, always, in the center of things; fingers on the pulse of the team, well-aware of what and who was going on. This may be considerably more difficult in complex organizations, especially when they are geographically dispersed, but it does not excuse the absence of leadership presence that I am daily hearing about, almost everywhere I go.

The Demise of Polaroid Film

2008-02-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

The recent announcement of Polaroid's decision to cease producing "instant film" is a stark reminder of the power of disruptive innovation. Digital photography is, of course, the ultimate "instant photography," but it is still somewhat sobering to see an icon such as Polaroid depart this market space. No matter that Tom Beaudoin, Polaroid's President, COO and CFO [& obviously a pretty busy guy], has said about the move that: "We're trying to reinvent Polaroid so it lives on for the next 30 to 40 years," it still is the demise of an innovation that we've always taken for granted that is a sobering wakeup call for the need to attend to innovation, and strategic revitalization.

The Growing Dominance of Teams

2008-01-29T05:51:00.000-08:00

There should be no doubt that teams are the dominant form of organizing knowledge work in the 21st century. We all know that the era of the "lone inventor," which may actually never have existed, is certainly no longer in fashion. Now comes a 2007 review of millions of bibliographic records in the Institute for Scientific Information's [ISI] data base which provides strong evidence for both a growing preference for knowlege-professionals to work in teams, and for those teams to outperform individual performers in terms of influence.

Published in the highly-respected journal "Science," the study entitled "The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge," by Wuchty, Jones & Uzzi ["Science," May 18, 2007], the study reviewed five decades of patent data and publications and concluded that "...preeminent work ... never appeared to be the domain of solo authors [or patenters]..., [and] the mantle of extraordinarily cited work has passed to teams by 2000."

The Mindless Pursuit of Customer Indifference

2008-01-26T05:43:00.000-08:00

Everybody loves the customer! At least, that's what I'm consistently told. Why, then, does it not feel that way to me, when I'm a customer? Why are my customer experiences a seemingly endless stream of mediocre performances? My hunch is that it is attributable to the difficulties involved in moving managerial conversations beyond desired outcomes.

How many times have you heard senior-level managers proclaim that their ambition is to be: "number 1;" "the provider of choice;" "the preferred partner;" etc., etc.? It goes on all the time, but what do these slogans really mean? Nothing, in and of themselves. They are dreams, but more important they are the outcomes of more fundamental managerial actions that must be taken and coordinated if these outcomes are to be achieved. Without taking the conversation to the next, deeper, level, and specifying those other actions more precisely, it is left unsaid how, exactly, we are going to reach these dreams. If the hows are not specified, the paths to achieving our dreams remain abstract and implicit; and, all too often, unfulfilled. Achievement of organizational dreams -- the fulfillment of corporate strategy -- requires the leader to go beyond clichés and address the real nuts & bolts details of which managerial choices are going to change, and how we're going to change them, in order to achieve the desired outcomes. Don't settle for mere outcomes in managerial conversations!! Always drill down deeper to find the hows that will make these outcomes achieveable. Good intentions are not enough; as George Bernard Shaw so famously observed, "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions."

What I believe is needed is an understanding of the "deep competencies," or deep masteries, that are necessary if the desired outcomes are ever to be achieved. Takahiro Fujimoto talks about this in his recent book Competing to Be Really, Really Good, which explains Japan's successes in automobile competition, as a function of such deep competencies. One of the most useful ways of addressing this issue, and in my experience the one absolutely vital tool in forcing conversations to go beyond mere outcomes, is Jay Galbraith's "star", which ties managerial choices regarding: strategy, people & skills, organization, processes, and measures and rewards, together. I find this an absolutely essential part of a managerial "toolkit."

Talent Under-Utilization: a damning indictment

2008-01-23T04:34:00.000-08:00

The blogsite "Liquid Generation," yesterday -- January 22, 2008 --, had a damning indictment of talent utilization at a company we all know: Yahoo!:

"Yahoo - You've held back thousands of very talented people for the last 5 years, and prevented them from making the fullest use of their talents and insights. We would all be better off if these guys were freed from your shackles; keeping them inside your doors - working on dead-end projects and hamstrung by political infighting reminiscent of an industrial era monolith like GM - is by far the least productive use of their time.It is, ultimately, because your management is lame."

I don't know if this is really the case at Yahoo!, or not, but what I do know is that this is the sort of indictment that you don't want to have associated with your own leadership legacy!

Optimism Matters! Choose "Nuts" not Bullies

2008-01-20T09:34:00.001-08:00

Optimism as a leadership attribute matters! I completely believe this. There are some organizations that I work with where the degree of pessimism is so omnipresent, that it is painful to even talk about the future. Yet, in our work on Virtuoso Teams, we found, emphatically, that teams, and individuals, who believed in themselves and their ability to change the world were often able to fulfill that dream. Anyone who has ever watched Apollo 13 knows full-well that without Gene Kranz's belief in his team, the three astronauts adrift in space would never have returned. Kranz never gave anyone the chance to be pessimistic, or even skeptical.

Today, in casual reading of two blog sites that I occasionally look at, I was struck by a coincidence of conclusions that speak directly to positivism as a leadership trait. Jeffrey Phillips, on his Thinking Faster blog posting "Management Throttle," January 17, 2008, talks about how important a postive attitude is for a leadership team, and how it sets the stage for others in the organization to buy into. Bob Sutton, who is a Professor of Engineering and Management Science at Stanford, and an IDEO Fellow, has written, on his Work Matters blog site, a posting entitled "John Bolton: Even The Economist Thinks He's an Asshole," January 17, 2008, about how Bolton's "known history of demeaning and disrespecting others" leads to a situation where, in The Economist's words: "this undeniably talented man of principle often comes across as a domineering bully." Domineering bullies fail in almost every way to achieve the positive attitude that great teams feed upon.

Optimism/postivisim, whether about the likelihood of acheiving a goal [the what's], or the capability of a team to achieve it [the how's and the who's], are essential to releasing talent; while negativism about either what's, how's or who's tend to inevitably diminish talent, and achievement. I am reminded in this regard about an unmailed letter to the editor that I had written on the occasion of John Bolton's appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. I tried to draw a comparison between the teams of the Virtuoso Teams project, most of whom could be charitably characterized as led by "nuts" with their obsessions of the dramatic visions that might be achieved, and those led by bullies. You'll recall that at time that Bolton had been characterized in congressional hearings, as a bullie. I don't know Bolton, and have no first0-hand impression of management style, but I've seen plenty of bullies in my time, and I know that bullies are never good for anyone, or any organization, ever. What I wrote at that time was:

In the Virtuoso Teams book, we’ve studied a number of successful leaders: Miles Davis, Jerome Robbins & Leonard Bernstein, Sid Caesar, Thomas Edison, Roald Amundsen, Groves & Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project, and the like. Not all of them were nice people, but they all did amazing things, in unconventional ways, and they each changed our world for the better. In every instance, it was how they built their team, and how they treated the individuals within that team, that made the difference. They were not easy; they pushed and stretched and demanded far more than most people were prepared to give, but they did it a way that enlarged the talent of their people rather than diminished it. They were always positive, never negative; about their goals, and about the capabilities of the people that they surrounded themselves with.
As a result, they wound up not only changing their field, but also preparing the next generation leadership for that field. One benefit was that they each had an edge over their competition in great ideas, and they each took full-advantage of the diversity within their teams to really unleash distinctly new ways of thinking about the world to make a difference. Were they tough? Absolutely! Were they abusive? Never! Nuts, maybe; not bullies! The “nuts” all realized that talented individuals can give more if they are stretched, recognized, given opportunities to shine, and appreciated for their contributions. The bullies, on the other hand, are so intent on reaching their own personal goals that they crush the talent entrusted to them and never reach the limits that are possible.

The acid test is always: how does the assembled talent look back on the experience? Those who worked for “nuts” almost always refer to the experiences with affection. Those who worked for the bullies typically wind-up before Congressional committees.

Implications of China's Demographics

2008-01-20T09:32:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of things about the future of China that need to be forecast, and forecasting is always an "iffy" business -- with China especially, but some phenomena are already known and forecasting is not required. Demographics is one. We know, already, how many people there are on the ground in China today [or, we have a pretty good guess]; and we can calculate, not forecast, how many that will make at each age group ten, and twenty, etc. years from now.This reduces some of the uncertainty involved with such projections, but also make for some sobering conversations.

In a recent post on the blog China Beat, UC Irvine professor Kenneth Pommeranz has a remarkably well-written, concise yet emphatic, discussion of what some of the implications of China's demographics means for urbanization and for the future of China's large US dollar holdings. This is well-worth reading, as it emphasizes the importance of both structural factors in development, and the burden of a large population. The implications for US-China relations, and the dollar are also big!

Building and Maintaining Effective Idea-Flows

2008-01-18T18:20:00.000-08:00

In trying to return to blogging after receiving a new knee and then rehabbing my way through the holidays, I went back to the Financial Times of November 7, 2007, which has an interesting opinion piece by Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, in Sydney, about the lessons from FDR's presidency, in which the late American president is characterized as:

"practis[ing] a highly personal form of government that "must have maddened sober and responsible officials used to a slower tempo and more normal patterns of administration". FDR ignored established lines of authority; he listened to many advisers but relied on none; he worked through friends, personal contacts and battalions of special envoys. He was determined never to become, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr told me, "a prisoner of a single information network".

I was struck by the importance of the final sentence. In an era when knowing things is more important that making things, to assure economic competitiveness learning how to manage knowledge flows is a critical art for knowledge professionals to master. I am reminded, in this regard, of a letter that I wrote in the February 16, 2004 edition of Business Week, which referred to Paul O'Neil's book The Price of Loyalty, which is, in fact, a worthwhile read on building knowledge-intensive organizations, where I suggested that: " In situations where ideas are central to the effectiveness of an organization, the development of processes to ensure that the ideas being worked with are the best possible is absolutely essential. Whatever the political interpretations of Paul O'Neill's memoirs might be, the book certainly emphasizes the importance of the role of processes for superior idea development and execution. Loyalty then becomes best defined by a commitment to the integrity of the idea processes, rather than allegiance to an individual. In fact, the individual is best served as a leader when the idea processes are protected from threats to their integrity."

I would think that no leader would want to be, in FDR's words, "prisoner of a single information network," and, as a result, paying careful attention to the processes by which ideas enter and move through an organization becomes a prerequisite for building both smarter leaders and smarter organizations.

Learning How to Lose Control

2007-10-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

The words are those of Bertrand Piccard, the leader of the team that was the first to circle the earth in balloon, who speaks about being “much more confidently aware, and more creative, despite being completely lost for five days over the Atlantic.” How is it possible to gain confidence while losing control? How is it possible to beat the likes of Virgin’s Richard Branson, in highly-pitched competition, if you’re not in control?

After all, Jim Collins tells us, in Good to Great, that it is “disciplined people -> disciplined thought -> disciplined action” that leads to “great” rather than “good” performance; yet a world moving at warp-speed must, of necessity, require spontaneity in managerial response. Contradictory? You bet! But, is there is fatal disconnect here? Not if you learn how to lose control in an appropriate and effective fashion. .

Collins is right, discipline matters, but discipline does not have to mean “robotic”, and losing control does not have to mean “abdication of responsibility.” “Getting lost” does not have to mean “losing our way.” Jazz pianist great Herbie Hancock, once characterized Miles Davis’ leadership style as “turning his musicians [of which Hancock was one] into magicians,” who “weren’t afraid of the unknown, we relished the unknown; we loved getting lost.” And, it should be noted, in the midst of getting lost, this same team of very talented professionals created some of the most innovative and amazing music of their time.

Great performance in the face of the unknown will be an increasingly important attribute of successful managerial practice in the 21st century; and isn’t the concept of magicians perfect for what stretch and challenge are all about: getting more out of our talented professionals, while helping them fulfill their potential? So what does “loosing control” have to do with this?

Is it possible to lose control while still keeping it at the same time? It is, if you define what control you are willing to give up, and what control you cannot relinquish. If I am fortunate enough to be working with great talent, I want to give-up some control so that they can fully exercise their talent. At the same time, I am responsible for achieving the project’s objectives. Think of this as drawing a box around the project: the boundaries of the box determine who owns what. Inside the box are challenges for my talented team to tackle in any way they want. Outside the box is my realm of responsibility. Inside the box is where I choose to lose control; not outside, resulting in my retaining complete control over the objectives, while ceding absolute freedom to my team in how they achieve these objectives. Contradictory? Not any longer, but not easy either. Effectively losing control requires: 1. clarity of vision, so that everyone understands, explicitly and completely, what the vision of the project is; and 2. sufficient self-confidence on the part of the leader to let go of control within the box.

This comment was published in The Times of India [Mumbai edition] 2007

Disengaged but Happy

2007-10-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

A new study of 90,000 workers in 18 countries, styled as representing the "Global Workforce," was announced yesterday by the consulting firm Towers Perrin. Although I have not yet seen the actual study, what is fascinating about the press release is that the study finds that "only 21 percent of employees are engaged in their work, while 38 percent are disenchanted or disengaged. [The study defined "engagement" as being willing to do more than is required to help their employers succeed and measured it by their responses to questions about their feelings about work, as well as their behavior.]"

Somewhat reassuredly, we're told that the study found that the engagement of an organization's workforce and their financial performance are positively correlated, but on a surprising note, the Associated Press reports: "Despite the high level of disengagement, many workers say they are happy in their employment situations, with 86 percent reporting that they like or love their jobs and 84 percent saying they enjoy challenging work." Senior leaders, rather than direct supervisors, were spotlighted as being particulary important for shaping these feelings of engagement or disengagement.

While this is not particularly surprising, given some findings that I've reported elsewhere on talent utilization, what is disturbing is that workers can be both disengaged and happy, at the same time. We'll have to wait until we can see the actual report before drawing too many conclusions, however.

Irresponsibly Outsourcing Managerial Responsibility

2007-09-27T05:20:00.001-07:00

Call me old fashioned, but in the wake of the Mattel mess, I sort of miss the old Japanese-style "I'm sorry! We let you down! I resign!" type of CEO apology. Not for me, this "he did, we did, a little bit doesn't matter anyway," type of merry-go-round that Mattel treated us to last week. For the rest of this opinion, please go to the Sunday Column section at www.cbiz.cn: http://www.cbiz.cn/news/showarticle.asp?id=2489

China Made Me Do It!

2007-09-18T08:03:00.000-07:00

I was at the beach at North Carolina last month when, on a particularly windy day, our umbrella collapsed. Naturally, we blamed China!

True? Of course not! But, not exactly unrealistic, either. These days, "blaming China" is becoming all too easy; but maybe, on the other hand, not uncalled for?
For the rest of this opinion, please visit my Sunday column page at www.cbiz.cn: http://www.cbiz.cn/news/showarticle.asp?id=2488

Great Leadership Read: Troublesome Young Men

2007-08-31T09:58:00.000-07:00

May 1940; a time when a few young people really did change the world!

In the aftermath of the ill-fated "Munich Accord", and Neville Chamberlain's proclamation of "Peace in our Time;" and in the midst of widespread acclamation in Britain over the Prime Minister's "success" at avoiding war, the then-First Lord of the Admiralty, Duff Cooper, was the lone cabinet minister to resign from the Chamberlain government over his feelings of repugnance with the policy of appeasement. At the time, Cooper remarked: "I should never be able to hold up my head again [had I not resigned]. I have forfeited a great deal. I have given up an office that I loved, work in which I was deeply interested and a staff of which any man might be proud.... I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. But that is little matter. I have retained something which is of great value. I can still walk about the world with my head errect." Listen to these words: they are extraordinary! Where are such leaders today? Who amongst our contemporaries is putting all that matters on the line, when issues such as Iraq, Global Warming, 3rd World Poverty, and the like are crying out for leadership?

The value of Lynne Olson's new book Troublesome Young Men, which is a must-read for anyone interested in leadership, is that it is all about such throughtful and committed leaders. Also relevant for today's world, it is also about the abuse of power, and the ability of a small group of determined actors to change the world, against all odds. Rarely, have I been as enthusiastic over a book at this one!

Among the lessons that come tumbling out of this book that reads like a novel are:

A small group of people really can change the world! We've argued this, of course, in
Virtuoso Teams, but it is impressive to read about U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter telling Tory MP Dick Law: "the trouble with you people is that your acts don't line up with your convictions. You know that this is one of the turning points in history.... Thirty resolute men in your House of Commons could save the world. You won't convince the House by argument nor even by facts -- only by the strength of your own conviction." [p. 177]
The immense importance of Winston Churchill's energy, imagination, and enthusiasm for moblizing and stretching the population. When you think about what it takes to establish the credibilty of real "stretch goals," you have to love Churchill's rebuff to the suggestion that he was exaggerating Britain's military accomplishments: "There are two people who sink U-boats in this war Talbot [director of antisubmarine warfare]. You sink them in the Atlantic, and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am." [pp. 264-5]
The pathos of Sir Anthony Eden's leadership prospects. He was everybody's "natural" alternative to PM Neville Chamberlain; indeed, no one ever looked as much a leader as Eden -- his followers were characterized as "the glamour boys," yet he was unable to fit the bill. His style projected vacillation, hesitation, and caution. As one observer put it: "He gave an impression of superficiality, with no profound interest in the problems of the Commonwealth." While another described him as: "most charming, most intelligent, but as a future leader, quite pathetic. [He] has no independent point of view and clearly no intention of upsetting the existing political status quo.... Really, as I walked down Whitehall after leaving him, I was nearly in tears."
Finding in Chamberlain the fatal flaw of so many leaders, then and today, of reframing issues of national importance into suggestions of personal attacks; distracting intelligent debate on major strategic questions by characterizing them as issues of "loyalty," and politics. Chamberlain comes across as a bully, who exploited others through the power of his position, and who led by fear, divisiveness, manipulation and obfuscation.
Finally, who cannot help but be inspired by the rhetoric which marked the debates of the time; especially Leo Amery's great speech, which he prefaced by admitting "great reluctance, because I am speaking of those who are old friends and associates of mine," but who then went on to quote Oliver Cromwell: "You have sat too long here for any good that you have been doing! Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!" [pp. 294-5]

This is a great book about the many facets of leadership. About the abuse of leadership by insecure incumbents; about the inevitable inertia that resists great change, and the related uncertainty that attends all bold action; and about the power of a few if united in a great cause. It is truly a shining illustration of leadership at many levels.

Executives Sans Frontières

2007-08-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

"More than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day, and most are likely never to have made a phone call or to have travelled beyond their place of birth" not to mention living in slums, the dispair of disease, or the lack of formal education in so many parts of the world. Simply put, there are way too many of our fellow human beings for whom there is little or no opportunity nor hope. It's hard to brag about the virtues of our present global economic economic system in the face of such sad realities, yet most of us go about our daily lives apparently as if we didn't care. Wealth is abundant in many regions in the 21st century. Business school classrooms spend little time on the perils of the really poor, and most businesses regard such unfortunates as "unattractive markets." CP Prahalad has tried to get our attention with his writing aboutThe Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, but we have short attention spans.

Now, Jonathan Ledgard, of The Economist, has written, in the most recent edition of Strategy+Business, a call for a business equivalent to the Nobel-winning Médecins Sans Frontières; literally: an Executives Sans Frontières. While not entirely a novel idea, it's still a great idea, and one that would be quite feasible for companies around the world to participate in.

Increasingly, it is neither defensible, nor desirable, to consign so many of our contemporaries to an existence that we, ourselves, would find intolerable, simply because we're either not sufficiently interested to help them, or else we simply can't think of a way. Legard's ESF is a great solution for addressing one of the most pressing problems of our species, and is not at all impossible. What it needs are champions in businesses to initiate the actions that can really help so many people.

Scoring the Game

2007-08-25T07:53:00.000-07:00

In the sprit of prototyping, and failing often to succeed sooner [thank you IDEO!], indulge me on this one….. I recently bought a book on baseball scoring [The Joy of Keeping Score by Paul Dickson]
for a friend, and was reminiscing on how satisfying it is to score a game, how it keeps me focused in what can otherwise be distracting conditions, and how it’s actually possible to review a scorecard years after the event [I once scored a game that Roger Clemens pitched for the Yanks a few years back, and can recreate some of the drama of the game by re-reading the scorecard even now] and virtually re-experience the action. Wouldn’t it be great if we had something like this in our executive development classrooms?

Like any athletic event, an executive education encounter [a few days, maybe a week, probably more than a single session, should add some value to the client, or else it’s a holiday] should all be about pushing the boundaries of what we’re capable of accomplishing. We do that by putting ideas into play and seeing where we can take them. It can be hard, however, in the midst of the action, for a participant or a facilitator to see where particular conversations are taking us, or how specific sessions add value. “Scoring the game” could change that.

I believe that participants should enter any executive development encounter with specific objectives in mind – issues to think through, problems to solve, skills to apply, etc.; they should show-up prepared, in other words. The encounter, itself, is, on the other hand, playing according to a different agenda…. that of the facilitator [professor]. There’s nothing wrong with either of these starting points, unless that’s where they also end-up. To make an encounter value-adding for both parties, there needs to be a convergence between what the participant is looking for, and what the instructor is “pitching.” Both sides have to change: the participant has to take ownership of the ideas, and put them to work in at least a prototype fashion, and the facilitator/instructor has to vary his/her “delivery” to make their materials more relevant and applicable, and hopefully also learn themselves in the process. All too often, neither party is even aware of this partnership, and the encounter ends with the participant being “entertained” or maybe even “excited”, but without actually engaging a useful idea; and the facilitator leaves with some vague sense of the session having gone well, or not. This would never happen in a baseball game, where the scorers would have a well-informed view of what made scores possible, or where opportunities were missed.

Of course, I’m talking nonsense here, but what if each participant scored ideas as they were “pitched.” In a normal session, there might be one or two “ideas” that are served up to the group. [Here, I'm somewhat mixing metaphors. Unlike a baseball came which is competitive, in Executive Education the ideas are "pitched" in the hopes that they will be "hits."] Most will not be homeruns; homeruns, which bring real immediate value to the individual or firm, are rare; just like in baseball. But what we should expect from a decent session is that we get somewhere with at least one idea… we get on base, at least. Then, over the course of the encounter; in subsequent sessions, and activities, we should be thinking about whether or not that idea is advanced; and why or why not? What are the additional things that help move that idea from “first base” to eventually scoring – being able to actually own and apply the idea when I get back to work, and make a difference as a result? Who is responsible for moving the ball? Who “enters the game” without result? Who makes the “errors”? Also, by comparison of participants or instructors, “who is least prepared”? Who should be sent down to the “minor leagues” for further conditioning?

I see scoring as a metaphor for adding focus, recognition and accountability to both sides of the game of executive development. Scorecards which focus on idea-advancement, rather than merely session entertainment quality, speak to the very mission of Executive Development. In addition, if we could review these scorecards after an encounter, my sense is that both participant and facilitator would be better prepared for the next event, and would be committed to making a difference through their encounters in the future.