Tag Archive for 'Innovation'

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Dilemmas of innovation culture and capabilities

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

Innovation is cool. Everything that we see around us were once a figment of some freak’s imagination… a figment that, over time, became a spark, which lit a fire which drove an engine that made things change. To me, that process of innovation is fascinating!

One of the most challenging parts of innovation – and one of the things that makes it so fascinating – is the complexity. It’s not like we can wake up some morning and decide to have a Nobel Prize winning breakthrough innovation – the disruptive innovations that really make a difference usually come from unexpected places and not as a result of ‘hard work’.

It was interesting to see that 3M – the guys that came up with the Post-It note amongst a heap of other stuff – are running through that dilemma. A few years ago, they brought in a CEO who made them really efficient – using GE’s famous Six Sigma program – but who arguably drained out the culture and capabilities that yielded the innovation that made 3M the poster-child creative companies.

Read more about it here.

Daniel Smith

The messiness of innovation

Published on 3 December, 2008 in Innovation. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Changing things is great, though it’s important to keep making progress. And when you’re trying to do something amazing all the time, you have to make sure that you have spare time… otherwise, you’ll end up being late for everything a lot of the time. Back in the 1930s, Felix Pollaczek said this: “high capacity utilization and high variability in task-completion times can combine to create severe delays.”

So if you are committed to getting things done, keep focused on tasks whose duration you can maintain good control; if you are looking to do something amazing, don’t work too hard.

Then again, you could take a leaf out of Tim Ferris‘ book and just work for four hours a week… if you can eliminate time wasting habits, put your cashflow onto autopilot by outsourcing everything that you can, and keeping mobile by moving from place to place in a series of mini-retirements (ie work hard, play hard). I like his style…

I do love how there are so many ways to express the same thing. “Behonce’s Action Method” strikes me as being just a fragment of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) approach, though it’s still a nice way of expressing the sentiment. I like to think that I come up with the odd novel thought from time to time… though maybe I ought be satisfied with just coming up with my way of expressing something. Yet I really do love their Action Pads and how they’ve created a product from their service experience!

Daniel Smith

Visionaries shut up and listen… and not to focus groups

Published on 1 November, 2008 in Change, Innovation and Personal Growth. Closed Tags: , , .

Really cool stuff doesn’t follow trends.

Kinda cool stuff does – but not really cool stuff.

Google didn’t follow the trends set by the (then!) giants like Microsoft and Yahoo!… and the Pure Digital’s Flip didn’t either – even though they sold 1,000,000 basic camcorders last year, they radically diverge from the path charted by Sony and the rest of the industry. It wasn’t that their CEO had focus groups and steadily developed a novel product – “He paid attention, and created a product for them without hiring focus groups. ”

Isn’t that where the really great ideas come from?

Business schools have been popularising the “Blue Ocean” – but great minds have been thinking this way for thousands of years. In order to get ahead of the pack, you have to either be a born freak or you have to chart a different route. And born freaks chart a different route intuitively.

We make it hard for those that want to march to their own tune. Radicals are punished – and that it is a good thing in a sense… it is in the nature of the ’system’ to challenge those who work to undermine the Nash Equilibrium presently being enjoyed so as to ensure that the proposed change overcomes the switching cost. It’s not personal – it’s just evolutionary.

To stand out can be frightening and lonely. Yet if you don’t be true to yourself – or a company is not true to itself – what do you really have left?

Great minds listen to their inner voice. In the modern world, it is often drowned out by the clattering of empty vessels, but if you can stop and listen to the voice within, you can start to explore what makes you great. What makes you unique? What are you better at – or could you be better at – than anybody else? What are you passionate about? If you could stop and listen to that voice from within, what would you do? It’s like we have an internal radio tuner that we seldom tune – and we get confused that all the white noise means that there’s nothing really there.

It is still your song to sing… if you dare.

Daniel Smith

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