To celebrate s+b’s 10th anniversary, they looked back at the conceptual breakthroughs that appeared in the magazine — and invited readers to vote on which were most likely to last.
If the huge oil profits caused PR and political problems for energy companies recently, it’s only logical that taking the reverse action could have the reverse effect, which is what Citgo (U.S. arm of Venezuelan oil) did, and is getting big media attention here this morning…
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez added New York City to his program of selling discounted heating oil to low-income Americans, begun in Boston last month… “We want to help the poorest communities in the U.S.,” Chavez said in August. “There are people who die from the cold in winter in the U.S.”
Skeptics interpret this as a way of embarrasing President Bush, but ultimately it’s a great humanitarian gesture that should shame other companies into doing the same.
There’s a flurry of innovation talk from the old school business guard lately. Reading through it, it seems like those concerned with innovation are repeating ourselves, possibly because we’re not aware of what other work has been done and because we’re using discovery tools that aren’t revealing anything new.
Jaruzelski, Dehoff, and Bordia from Booz did some financial analysis and found
BCG’s annual survey (PDF) found
In both cases I’m struck by the research tool used: both firms use familiar tools that are useful but (IMHO) result in limited answers. Financial analysis tells us what happened quantitatively but not why. Surveys show us perception of the situation, but not necessarily the real situation. Neither used qualitative research that, incidentally, can help address the problems they uncovered.
In Not All Innovations Are Equal, Govindarajan and Trimble talk about the wider application of innovation beyond continuous improvement and products to strategic innovations. That classification has existed in the form of Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation. Their conclusion, that “Limits to innovation have less to do with technology or creativity than with management skill” has been discussed by Gary Hamel and is now championed by MIG.
That these ideas are becoming more widespread is great. But unless this is all just marketing bravura, we need more cross-pollination of ideas and experience to make progress rather than repetition. I’ve got a little project started to make that happen, more details in the New Year.
James Surowiecki’s Sarboxed In?…
Improvements in products, process, and culture can reinforce each other over time.
Great products can have a revitilizing effect on a company’s culture. But companies with poor cultures have trouble making great products.
Developing great products relies on an effective process. Cultures that acknowledge the need for process will make better products. But we’re not taught process, so usually we focus on the more tangible products.
Culture can make certain kinds of products and processes possible, but culture is hard to change directly; often it changes through the context of adopting new processes and products.
One approach is to focus on product but introduce process in order for both to change the culture over time.
Since I’ve been working on how to structure teams to do innovation work, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the basics in the form of The Wisdom of Teams by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith. One point they make is to differentiate between “performing teams” structured in a mindful way and other groups of people merely working together. A performing team has certain characteristics…
In the book and article The Discipline of Teams, they identify three kinds of teams:
For managers, the key is knowing where in the organization these teams should be encouraged.
I just discovered Howard Rheingold’s Tools for Thought is online. It’s usefulness should be obvious from his introduction…
Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of Steve Jobs. Indeed, the idea that people could use computers to amplify thought and communication, as tools for intellectual work and social activity, was not an invention of the mainstream computer industry nor orthodox computer science, nor even homebrew computerists. If it wasn’t for people like J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, Alan Kay, it wouldn’t have happened. But their work was rooted in older, equally eccentric, equally visionary, work, so I went back to piece together how Boole and Babbage and Turing and von Neumann — especially von Neumann – created the foundations that the later toolbuilders stood upon to create the future we live in today. You can’t understand where mind-amplifying technology is going unless you understand where it came from.
Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software created a documentary DVD of the summer interns’ experience creating an actual software product. Notice how they cook and share a meal together. I’m a big fan of establishing a relationship over home-cooked meals. Last winter I met the guys from Zago Design for the first time in one of their homes over a meal. We ate delicious food and talked for hours, and by the end I wanted to partner with them more than other firms I’d known for years on a more superficial basis.
I watched State and Main recently. It’s a movie about making a movie, and hints at how that industry must blend the pure creativity of writing stories, the pure business of running a studio, and the combined creative/business endeavor of bringing together stories and studio to create a movie. I started to wonder if the collaboration and work styles found there was what business designers were trying to create.
I think business design can be much more, yet I think there’s a lot to learn from how people in film and theater run things.
I just discovered a book on this topic, called Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work…
This book is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard Business School professor Robert Austin and leading theatre director and playwright Lee Devin. Together, they demonstrate striking structural similarities between theatre artistry and production and today’s business projects — and show how collaborative artists have mastered the art of delivering innovation “on cue,” on immovable deadlines and budgets.
One Amazon reviewer compared it to agile programming. Another reviewer noted, “Concepts of rapid iteration, small groups and ‘playing’ …are not new.” Right, and that’s reassuring to me that we keep seeing these concepts applied in productive ways across several disciplines.
“There’s a simple doctrine. Outside of a person’s love the most sacred thing they can give is their labor. Labor is a very precious thing you have and any time you can combine labor and love you’ve really made a match.” — James Carville
…No one can really beat us on the low end. It’s just what you need, and nothing you don’t. You’re always going to have more people on the low end who just need a few things.”
I love that Jason Fried quote, he’s proving out the worse if better argument.
One benefit he didn’t cite was disintermediating IT departments. I’ve seen this happen: IT departments spend months deciding whether to offer a service, evaluating packages, and designing a scalable offering. Meanwhile, individuals and teams simply sign up for a web-based service and get their jobs done.
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bakeoff is now online, in which the food R&D firm Mattson tries to create the perfect cookie. Project Delta created three teams: one traditional in-house team, an “XP” (extreme programming) team of two people, and an “open source” dream team of the industry’s best working remotely. For anyone thinking about how to arrange people to create innovative products I’d say it’s a must read primer. With a couple caveats:
The explanation of getting team size right alone is worth reading the article for. Some expertise on the team is good, but too many people create friction in the process and impedes progress. Also see What Makes Teams Work?
Kim Severson’s article on organic milk production and sales answered a few questions I had, namely
It’s the low supply, not the production costs, that are keeping the price high. I bet some qualitative research could influence this growth curve. For example, suppose it’s more educated parents who buy organic milk for their kids. Increase organic milk supplies to their geographic areas first and use the profits to increase production elsewhere.
There’s still so much confusion over the “organic” labeling, due to industry/government disagreements. Designers could do an end run and solve this through, for example, smart package design to educate the consumer, e.g.
Milk leads organic food sales because emotion plays a large role in this purchase, particularly for parents of babies. Again, this is another area that qualitative research can get the preferred organic products in people’s hands.
For Sarah McLachlan’s World On Fire video, they spent almost the whole production budget solving the problems she’s writing about rather than producing the video.
When Boots pharmacy customers weren’t taking advantage of a service that transfers prescriptions directly from the doctor, Marketing firm Naked Communications stepped in: “Boots discontinued its TV spots and had employees suggest the service to customers waiting in line for prescriptions. According to Chris Laud, Boots’ media manager, the number of participants in the program has skyrocketed several hundred percent at a fraction of the cost of the TV campaign.”
In Douglass Rushkoff’s new book he writes, “When things are down, CEO’s look to consultants and marketers to rethink, re-brand or repackage whatever it is they are selling, when they should be getting back on the factory floor, into the stores, or out to the research labs where their product is actually made, sold, or conceived.â€
If this is a larger trend, I think it’s because marketing has made consumers either cynical or confused, or both. There’s still a role for marketing to play in a customer-centric marketplace, but it requires collaborating with engineering and design rather than putting lipstick on pigs.