Tag Archive for 'books'

The Power of Ambiguity

Published on 18 October, 2009 in Personal Growth and Science and Technology. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

Have you ever looked at a traffic accident and asked yourself, “How did that happen?”

The other night, I was playing pool and sunk a ball that I didn’t expect to sink – in fact, it was so surprising that I asked myself, “How did I do that?!”

But it’s even more obvious when I look at a website that I like. Sometimes, I’ve been known to look at the source code to try to figure out how they did that.

And the cool thing is that when you ask that question, you get smarter.

Maybe you’ll actually figure out an answer, maybe not. I still have no idea how I sunk that ball in the corner pocket at the other end. But the experience of being exposed to uncertainty – The Power of Ambiguity – helps you get smarter.

A recent study published in Psychological Science had people look at the surreal work of author Kafka and film director David Lynch, and found that afterwards, people were better at seeing subtle patterns. Read more about this in Science Daily or the NYTimes.

This is another great reason to visit the art gallery. Another good reason to watch art house movies. And a great excuse for me to continue staring at the complex building sites around here.

Experience the surreal. Have a look around. And when you see something strange, or someone does something unexpected, be grateful – it’s an opportunity to make you smarter.

And thanks Kellie for tipping me off to this :)

Thoughts on Innovation Articles

Published on 24 November, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , .

As a child, I was very much mathematical, logical and disciplined. My natural tendencies towards impulsiveness and passionate outbursts were channeled into socially acceptable (even desirable) vehicles, methods and mechanisms. As time has passed, I have grown more expressive, more biased (hell, today design is everything ) and more intuitive, and has probably hindered my studies of psychology, law and business, yet impelled me towards the pursuit of personal genius, innovation and entrepreneurship.

They’re fun!!!

I came across a few articles that I decided to take notes from, and wondered if your notes would match up…

  • Connecting the Dots between Innovation and Leadership
    • Leadership + Innovation = Cool stuff… but how do we create it?
      • An insurer said it was about aligning the whole organisation (especially the oft-forgotten support staff like lawyers and financial officers) behind matching customer needs with the organisation’s systems, processes and activities… ie marketing . Being a leader denies you the opportunity to be a “Fast Follower” and try to copy the innovations of others; you have to be leading consumer behaviour.
      • Big is not necessarily better. Throwing more resources at a dead end doesn’t help… small teams will often do the best work.
      • Cultivate an innovative culture by rewarding and expecting innovation. Challenge people to reinvent themselves.
      • Passion is good, and often is the result of feeling a sense of ownership over the work that you do.
      • Capitalise on opportunities by being ready to act – fast .
    • Should you buy or build innovation?
      • If you build it, there’s a better chance of it matching the existing culture, and will help keep the organisation flat… though sometimes a highly targeted ‘rifle shot’ acquisition can work.
      • Select targets that have complimentary skills; where they’re great at something that fit with what you’re generally good at, but haven’t developed as highly in that arena.
    • India and China?
      • According to the panel, they’re great copiers, but haven’t really started innovating yet. Eg Chinese developers use international architectural firms to design the skins of buildings, though aren’t really innovating much beyond this.
      • In biotech, Indian innovation is suffering from poor intellectual property protection leading to decreased rewards for innovation and a consequential lack of investment. That’s changing though…
      • China and India are very different: We can’t just apply what works here! Take the time to get to know them.
      • There are huge opportunities for using India for clinical trials of new drugs. Their massive patient population is yet to be meaningfully tapped…
    • Managers need to remain fixated on customers (and social issues: cultural, generational) to keep in tune with customers and open to gain insights for innovation… (though disruptive innovation relies upon giving people things that they don’t yet realise that they’ll want)
    • Great innovators bring together technical skills with people skills.
    • Turn failures into success…
    • Execution is critical. Great ideas are cheap…
    • Business leaders change the world. Beyond dividends, business provides jobs and advancement to would-be terrorists… to give people a sense of hope makes the world better for everybody. This necessitates companies to act responsibly in building companies of integrity.
    • Part of innovation is being open to doing stuff when you have no idea what you’re doing.
      Peter Linnemann, Wharton finance professor.
    • Everyone wants the golden path. How you get there… is by doing a great job at what you’re doing. Stay in the moment instead of worrying about that next job.
      Seth Waugh, CEO of Deutsche Bank America
    • You cannot really work hard at something that you don’t love, and you’re not going to succeed if you don’t work hard.
      Jeffrey Katz, CEO of Sherwood Equities
  • The Biggest Mind-Flip in Business Today
    • There is nothing more powerful than a truly original idea… something that redefines an industry or transforms a product category. Thought leadership through generating better ideas and making smarter improvements gives sustained advantage.
    • Entrepreneurial folklore gives the credit to the inspired visionary CEO, but the modern world is too complex: We need to develop teams of people who can work in parallel to be more creative than any single individual could be. This is expensive through the transactional costs of dealing with teams, but it’s potentially infinitely more powerful.
    • We need to create an architecture of participation – where contributing your ideas for problem solving and product development is fun (or at least interesting), easy and rewarding.
    • We’re talking about collective intelligence here… that comes from a different leadership style, one where the leader seeks to exude charisma, strength and intellectual humility, to be the sort of person with whom smart people will share their ideas, want to work with and contribute ideas, and to be as open and transparent as the other participants in their work.
  • Learning to Innovate

    • Business schools tend to teach how to teach ‘business-as-usual’. This is important in running successful businesses, though innovation requires people who are Masters of Business-by-Design . Stanford’s d.school has already started it… I wonder how long until the rest of us figure out that we need to design the way forward, rather than just measure what we’re doing.
    • Analysing a business situation is very different from how to create and execute a business innovation. A bunch of Stanford kids were asked to design a way forward for the web browser Mozilla. While the b-school kids would likely have used market size driven financial analyses to generate, develop and complete a new product idea. Instead, the design school was approached: They started with an ethnographic study of consumers and worked towards creating prototypes with potential features, iteratively returning with a succession of potential winners.
    • Without execution, great ideas are worth nothing… yet without ideas, brilliant execution gets outsourced.

While I continue to lament his repetitive writing style, de Bono still ‘owns’ the concept of lateral thinking and even ‘creativity’ for a lot of people. But, in my view, his book on Value Medals is worth checking out if you want to think a little beyond the ‘bottom line’…

Daniel Smith

Ideas that change the world

Published on 5 November, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , , .

Einstein’s famous E = mc2 was expressed in a mere three pages, yet the concept that mass is merely concentrated energy has changed the world. Illnesses being caused by bacteria and viruses is a very recent concept, yet again it is now taken as a given. University, in my experience, is more about learning a relatively small number of key concepts that are able to apply across contexts than it is about learning piles of useless and quickly forgotten formulae and rules.

What are the ideas that have changed your mind?

The Financial Times has identified a number of significant books in their shortlist:

  • The Long Tail , by Chris Anderson
    Mass market economics gives advantage to those products and services that are in high demand, but as borders come down and the global village shrinks, we are seeing parts of the market able to be serviced that were previously too small. Exemplar: Amazon can stock millions of books that an ordinary bookstore – even one the size of Borders – cannot stock because the proportion of the market is too small in a geographically limited market.
  • Small Giants , by Bo Burlingham
    Profitability for a company will be maximised when that firm focuses upon being excellent at what it does best, rather than trying to grow until the diseconomies of scale are unavoidable.
  • The Wal-Mart Effect , by Charles Fishman
    Some companies create market forces as much as being subject to them and other insights available by speaking directly with former executives.
  • China Shakes the World , by James Kynge
    The growth of China is directly impacting the lives of much of the world. As it grows, we are seeing strengths and weaknesses evolve. One thing is certain: There is even more to come!
  • The Box , by Marc Levinson
    Container ships criss-cross the world with the products of globalisation. Entrepreneur Malcom McLean (1914-2001) created the container concept, and made possible the global goods trade system as we know it today. This guy bought a truck for $120 in 1934 but the company ended up with 1770 trucks; he sold his interest for $25,000,000 in 1955. But it was his next venture where he really revolutionised things: Containerisation allowed him to cut the stevedoring charges from $5.83/ton down to just 16c/ton!!! The increasing move towards mechanisation made his innovation even more successful. His containers won patent protection, but then he kept a step ahead of Apple’s mistakes by granting the International Standards Organisation a royalty free lease because he realised that industry grown was more powerful than patent protection. By 1969 – just 14 years after he had exited the trucking business – he sold his interest for $160,000,000. The company is now part of Mærsk.

There are many amazing concepts available today. One of the most important in my mind is that structuring access to information is as important or more important today than the information itself; that the immense quantity of information available to us simultaneously democratises information and increases the value of brands as a way of streamlining our information filtering system. But that’s why I usually read the Tom Peters Wire Service …

Daniel Smith

Powerful concepts

Published on 28 October, 2008 in High Performance. Closed Tags: , , .

Sometimes we come across ideas that change the way we see the world. Reading The Fountainhead as a barely-teenager shifted my model of the world radically by presenting values and attitudes that I didn’t again question for many years.

There were a few key books while I was in business school that had a similar impact – like Strategy Maps and Foundations of Corporate Success. One paradigm that hasn’t made it to much of a book format but that did leave a big impact was the work of Jason Potts and his work in Micro-Meso-Macro economics… so here is a link to the article that he used as a working paper for the subject that I did with him. It is pretty academic in expression, but I really liked the concept.

To me, this structure applies very neatly to business development, personal development and even social development… I would have loved to have used the framework when writing my paper on Objectivism while studying Political Economy.

It also helps make sense of how the rate of technology diffusion has such a seemingly disproportionate impact on development – it is still amazing to me that it takes about 47 years for world-changing inventions to diffuse .

Daniel Smith

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