Thinking Faster

What's on your office Wall?

I was listening recently to the radio and overheard a discussion about what good leaders use to motivate themselves.  The conversation turned to whether or not you could learn things about people by what they place in the cubes or offices - especially graphics, paintings, pictures and motivational sayings.

That got me thinking that it would be interesting to see what people place on their walls, to inspire them, to remind them of why they do the jobs they do, to encourage them and so forth.  So, with that in mind I'd like to start a small project, and hopefully many of you will participate and encourage people you know to participate as well.

What's on your office wall that inspires you?  What pictures, photos, drawings or sayings are there that you keep there on purpose?  I'm not talking about the snapshots of your family or the office picnic, but images, cartoons, etc that you placed there to help you think differently or that inspire you.  Since this is the first edition of the What's on your office Wall (possibly called WOYOW later), I'll go first.

On my wall I have three quotes.  The first is from Gandhi and it reads:

Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence:  wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.

I have this one on my wall to remind me that all of the good things in life come with responsibilities.

The second quote on my wall is from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.

I have this quote to remind me that it's important to do a number of things reasonably well.

The third quote on my wall is attributed to both Machiavelli and Daniel Burnham:

Make no small plans for they have no power to stir the soul

I have this quote to remind me that real change and innovation require big plans.  Small, safe plans don't stir people to action.

I also have a cartoon on my wall about innovation, entitled the Lifecycle of Innovation:

I have this image on the wall to help me remember how hard it is to create really interesting new products and services.

So, that's what's on my wall that inspires me, encourages me and makes me think.

Care to share what's on your office wall?  If so, please email me at whatsonyourofficewall at gmail dot com.  I'll post your pictures and sayings in upcoming posts.  If you send me an email, please send the picture, graphic or saying, and tell me why the particular item encourages you or inspires you.  Let me know if you want to be identified or prefer to remain anonymous.

I look forward to hearing from you and finding some insightful thinking.

Why is fighting fires more valuable than avoiding fires?

I was working with a client recently in a team meeting when one of the participants got a phone call, bolted up, apologized for the sudden departure and left the room.  His reason - a big "fire" was underway and he was needed to help put it out.  For the life of me I'll never understand this.  In most businesses we place so much value on people who can conduct a "turn around" or who are "fire fighters" but we constantly don't invest in people or value people who predict or avoid fires.

It seems to me our priorities are all wrong.  We've built several generations of managers who are almost completely reactive, and who are rewarded for reacting quickly.  I suspect that given the chance, many managers would be happy to do little proactive work and would only respond to problems once they become big and hairy.  Perhaps all of us should be issued a set of boots, fire proof clothing and one of those cool fire fighter hats when we join our organizations.

What's wrong with investing in the skills and foresight necessary to avoid fire fighting and avoid the problems or perhaps even predict them and put programs in place to not merely avoid the future fires but be prepared to take advantage when our competitors get caught short, but we don't.  I can't wrap my head around this - a small investment in a few people constantly scanning the near term future and identifying potential problems, challenges or roadblocks would dramatically reduce the number of fires.  Fire fighting is difficult, costly and means the firm is simply trying to react to catch up to some shift in the market or some problem.  This means it's an investment on top of a previous investment, so fighting fires is expensive and doesn't necessarily place the firm in a better position going forward.

Look at the problems at Toyota right now with the sticky accelerator.  Even though the designs may have been bad, if Toyota had done a better job recognizing the problems at the outset and planning and reacting at that point, rather than stalling and waiting until the problem became a "fire fighting" exercise, they'd have a much better outcome.  Clearly in this case it may have been difficult to predict the problem and avoid it, but scanning the feedback and watching the trend lines would have had them reacting much faster.

I think much of this is cultural.  For some reason we believe that sweeping in and fixing a problem has more drama, and gains more attention, than doing the work to predict and avoid problems.  Perhaps we've trained people to believe that reacting to problems after they've occurred is more valuable than avoiding or predicting problems in advance.  In our culture we dislike people who predict negative consequences in the future, even if they are right, yet celebrate people who fight fires that could have been easily prevented.  Perhaps we need to place more emphasis on who missed the signals that led to the problem, and place less emphasis on fire fighting and more on strategic vision.

Book Review: Shop Class as Soul Craft

Every once in a while you'll stumble across a book that is just so spot on that it almost resists interpretation.  It's as if someone wrote all the cogent and coherent thoughts that rattle around in your head, and did so in an intelligible way.  Shop Class is one such book.

For a long time I've pondered the classic "work" environment.  Increasingly the US workforce is made up of people who don't actually produce anything - they work on the margins of a product or solution, or analyze information or create new knowledge.  Few people see any new product or service from conceptualization to delivery into a customer's hands.  The increasing atomization of work and work processes means that most people add great depth of value over a very small portion of the value chain, and for every person on the "front lines" there are four or five support people managing IT and procurement and accounting and so forth.

What this means is that we have a workforce that rarely sees any effort to completion, and is so far removed from the actual delivery that placing quantitative measures of performance on their effort is difficult and arbitrary at best, and they know it.  I suspect these jobs offer less satisfaction and demand less passion and commitment than jobs in previous years.  I also suspect that many people are more interested and more dedicated to their hobbies and interests outside of work, where they find more fulfillment, than in anything they do "at work", which is a shame given the amount of time we spend at work.

The book, Shop Class as Soul Craft, provides a context for all of these thoughts and more.  In the book, Matthew Crawford, who has run both a Washington DC think tank and a motorcycle repair shop, considers "work" and what work means in context.  These contexts include both the "knowledge worker" and the "blue collar" worker, and the belief that blue collar work is not "thinking work".  He points out that this is a relatively new concept, and that many "blue collar" roles do require thinking work - the thinking and doing are intertwined.  In our educational systems we've de-emphasized "vocational" skills and yet have crying needs for people to repair our machines and build our buildings.  Too many people are being directed to college because "thinking" skills are more heralded, while many people could do just as well, or perhaps even better, in a vocation or trade. 

Additionally, he points out there's more connection and passion in many vocations than in many knowledge work environments.  Since a craftsman or tradesman is presented with a problem, has to diagnose the problem and fix the problem, he or she sees the problem from end to end, responsible for all facets of the solution.  Most knowledge workers see only a tiny portion of a problem and rarely deal with the end result.  They are passionate, if at all, about the process rather than the outcome.

Crawford points out some of the problems in Florida's "Creative Class":  after all, even if everyone is creative and innovative, we'll still need to build things and more importantly, repair things.  He also points out that creativity is based on deep knowledge and competency, which is more common in tradesmen and craftsmen than in our traditional work world and educational world, where a premium is placed on being able to learn rather than to do.  Crawford also identifies the challenges in a modern economy that Pink did:  any job that can be reduced to a given set of rules, or doesn't require a local presence, is heading out of town.  You can't outsource the building of a new structure or the splinting of a bone or the repair of an auto engine, because they are place specific.

I've also written before that many organizations never engage the passions and true capabilities of their employees.  Most people punch an 8 to 5 clock, pushing paperwork and analyzing information, then go home to do tremendous things with their "free time" - as if they trade 8 hours of drudgery to earn a couple of hours of time exercising their interests and hobbies.  Why can't we capture more of that passion and interest and find ways to harness it as part of a "job"?

Crawford gets some flack for so many philosophical references, but with a PhD in philosophy, he'd be remiss not to link back to the Greeks and other philosophers.  His writing can at times seem a bit dense and overly repetitive, but finding the nuggets of great insight and the recommendations isn't hard.

We need to find the right jobs to suit the best passions and interests of everyone.  Denigrating vocational education just means we have people who are better suited in other jobs spending needless time and money in college for no good reason.  We also need to do a much better job helping people find their true interests and capabilities, and matching education and apprenticeship to those capabilities.

I'd like to highly recommend this book to everyone who is interested in work, and its benefits.

Stop thinking and start listening

Last week I led a workshop on generating ideas for a new product for a financial services firm.  I described research that indicated that customers of the firm had certain needs.  Rather than delving deeper into the needs and understanding the root causes that kept the customers from complete satisfaction with the current offerings, several of the people in attendance asked why the customers didn't simply use the products and services on offer already, and went on to list all of the features and benefits of the existing products and services.  It's as if I don't need to listen to your needs and requirements as long as I can produce a long list of features that you might find interesting.  Rather than understanding what you need, let me tell you what we've got and let you, the customer, figure out if that's valuable.

There's a huge deficiency in our ability to listen to our customers, and I blame that on a couple of management and leadership mantras.  The first is "active listening", which was supposed to be a panacea for not listening.  Now we are supposed to listen and repeat back what we've heard from the customer, but mostly we are just queuing up what we want to say in response.  The second reason we don't listen well is overconfidence based on misguided market research.  Many firms have tremendous reams of data about customer satisfaction with existing products, but don't survey prospects about why they don't uptake existing products, and have no insight into new products or services.  We are overly confident based on a reasonable grasp of about one third of the problem.  Third, we often simply assume our customers are misguided or don't understand.  It can't be our fault, so clearly the customer doesn't understand our offerings or products.  The problem here is that it is likely that they don't understand since we didn't communicate it well, or simply didn't communicate the offering at all.

Businesses and individuals who comprise those businesses need to shut up, sit down and start interacting with customers and prospects on a much more basic level.  As competition heats up and the pace of change increases, small mistakes are compounded and make it much more difficult to catch up.  Put aside the "active" listening and the certainty that you are right and listen to the needs, wants and aspirations of your customers and prospects.  Ask them questions rather than providing solutions.  Get down to the root causes of their needs.  Then, ascertain whether or not the products and services you offer meet their needs and the challenge is a lack of understanding or communication, or if your products and services are missing key features that will make the offering more compelling.

The problem isn't with the customer, it's with the business.  Stop talking, stop thinking and start listening.  Then, once you've listened, start thinking, start changing, and then start talking to your customer.

Humor Me

Here's an interesting question:  can making something that most people refuse to do, that might be "good" for them, interesting or fun encourage behavioral change?  Rather than lecturing you to eat your vegetables, could turning the situation around and making it fun or rewarding encourage you to do things that are good for yourself, or your community, or the planet?

Of course this is the carrot and sticks argument.  I can sternly warn you to do what's good, or right, in my opinion and threaten you with punishment.  In this regard I am using coercion to force you to adapt your behavior to what I wish, or what I believe is correct.  Your reactions are self-evident.  You unwillingly adopt the behavior when observed, but probably revert to old behaviors when not observed, and attempt to subvert the system whenever possible.

However, if I can change your thoughts or behaviors by engaging you in something rewarding or fun, you have made a conscious choice without threats.  You are more likely to repeat that behavior and retain that behavior over time, and model that behavior for others.  So, if this model is so much better, why isn't a carrots model used more frequently?  I don't yet know, but I'm forming some opinions.

A new Volkswagen initiative sparked my interest in this topic.  You can see it at The Fun Theory, a new website that supports a program to encourage people to modify their behavior through fun and rewards, rather than sticks and threats.  My favorite is a set of steps that mimic piano keys and allow people who use the steps rather than an escalator to play a tune.

What if your health insurer placed stickers on apples and other fresh fruits and vegetables.  If you purchased one of these at the supermarket you could enter a contest to win an award for healty eating.  It would seem any behavioral change we might desire could be influenced through fun, amusement and games or rewards.  Imagine a trash can that returns a ticket to a lottery each time you place trash in the can.  There'd be little to no litter if people had an incentive to clean up their own litter, much less an incentive to pick up the litter of others.

This kind of thinking is important because we face an array of demographic and societal challenges, in addition to all the challenges in the business world.  New thinking and new methods to encourage the best behavior and modify behaviors over time is welcome, and I think can be rapidly implemented.

"normal times"

I read a recent survey of leading executives in "innovative" firms that was conducted by Booz Allen.  The results weren't surprising to me.  Many of the leading innovators are actually accelerating their innovation efforts in the recession, betting that customers will demand new products and services as we come out of the downturn.

But that wasn't the only thing that interested me about the survey.  What was really interesting was the professed mindset by one of the executives they interviewed.  A gentleman from IBM suggested that in a recession or downturn "...that really drives a need for innovation and a level of creativity that you might no otherwise have in normal times."  My question is:  what is "normal times"?

Executives in business seem to be no less likely to have the "up and to the right" concept of market advancement that the rest of us have.  That is, we expect each year that the markets will rise and the economy will grow.  We never anticipate or plan for a slowdown, a downturn or a recession.  These periods are considered "not normal".  Yet if we look back over any reasonable period of history we can find plenty of slowdowns, downturns and recessions.

Less than ten years ago we were coming out of the "dot com" bubble, where the economy slowed and jobs were scarce.  In the early 1990s the economy was very slow, which led to the ouster of the first Bush and the presidency of the first Clinton.  There was a dramatic slowdown in the economy in the late 70s and early eighties that coined the phrase "Stagflation" and led to the presidency of Reagan.  The oil embargo of the early 70s also sent price shocks through the market.  This list is just off the top of my head - evidence that the market doesn't constantly rise (remember the 500+ point market drop in 1987?) and the economy doesn't promise an endless stream of new jobs.

So, what is this IBM executive expecting when he pines away for "normal times"?  He's probably recalling a short period of time (2003-2007 for example) when the market grew rapidly.  That time period has been bracketed by the dot com bust and the financial meltdown, both of which impacted the economy and job growth.  Why aren't these considered "normal" times as well?

And, rather than expect the market to consistently rise and the economy to grow, why aren't executives better at predicting where the economy is heading and the implications for their business.  As Wall Street watchers like to say, the most common word in any analyst call is the word "surprise", as in "we, the management team, were surprised by the (Fill in the blank) that happened to the market".  Why do the executives get the big bucks if they are constantly surprised that the environment does not provide continuous "normal times"?

The economy has the ability to lull you to sleep, secure in a comfortable cocoon, safe in your assumptions that the economy will continue to perform the way you are comfortable with, and then rapidly shift and force your firm to think differently.  Perhaps we should be a little less intellectually lazy and constantly test our assumptions about the economy.

Cheap, Fast and good enough

As you know, in today's society, one data point is cause for discussion and two data points are a full on trend.  I mention that because I have a sense that many consumers and the cognoscenti as well are beginning to get fed up with intricate, highly finished products that have too many features and bells and whistles that don't seem to add much value to a consumer.  Yes, I'm looking at you Windows Vista.

What got me thinking about this was an article in September 2009 Wired magazine entitled the Good Enough Revolution, which is an article describing how the Flip Video camera zigged while the rest of the digital video providers zagged, and why Flip won.  Basically, it recognized that people wanted video that they could quickly share and was simply "good enough" for replay or perhaps Youtube.  They didn't need 999 megapixels with sophisticated lighting options and radical zoom, since they weren't going to Hollywood with the footage.  The Flip was a stripped down, simple, small, pocket video camera that was limited to about an hour of video recoding, had no interchangable battery but was so simple my 9 year old can use it (and does on a regular basis). 

The second data point was also provided by Wired magazine, which wrote in the November 2009 edition about Demand Media.  Demand Media uses algorithms to assess what people want to learn about and then seeks independent writers and film producers to develop the content.  Demand Media is the leading content provider to YouTube.  The videos and writeups about how to change a lightbulb or how to eliminate unwanted facial hair are developed by amateurs who write, script and film videos or simple writeups for less than $20.  Again, the concept is all about speed, low cost and "good enough" advice.  We all know that if you are really going to remove difficult facial hair, you can either get cheap and "good enough" advice, or you can go see your dematologist for $400.  So why not start on the cheap side?

Both of these articles point out that too often product and service firms fail to understand that for the most part we are "satisficing" agents.  Other than hobbyists or perfectionists, most of us want to gain just enough insight or knowledge to get the job done.  We don't want to be experts and don't have the mental capacity or time to become experts.  Microsoft Word has thousands of features that may be important to some small minority of the population, but I'll never use them, and really can't be bothered to learn them.  It might be interesting to see if Demand Media creates How To guides for software applications since the help functions are so ridiculously poor to begin with.

Further, most product developers overemphasize features.  The Flip example goes on to note the "pixel" wars in digital cameras.  At some point it didn't make sense to compete on the number of pixels anymore, but that's all the camera guys had in their arsenal.  Flip countered with what appeared to be a weakness - limited pixels, but triumphed because of simplicity and low cost.

As Christensen and others have pointed out, many disruptions occur when the incumbent becomes too complacent and adds features (and costs) that its customers don't value and don't need.  Disrupters spot the opportunities and provide products and services with less functionality and less cost, which the incumbent laughs off or ignores.  Yes, I'm looking at you, 1970s GM.  You and the other "Big Three" laughed off the imports until they ate your lunch.  Why are we always surprised when history repeats itself?

Book Review: The Design of Business

It's unfair that some individuals can write so well about topics that can be a bit esoteric.  Roger Martin, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has produced yet another good book about thinking differently.  His first book, The Opposable Mind, captured how good business leaders can see past the traditional "either-or" alternatives to create "both-and" options.

In The Design of Business, Martin offers a view that suggests that design should be the centerpiece or the starting point for much of the work we do in business, and why design is so important.  He's not the first to suggest the importance of design, and a number of firms, such as IDEO, have been in the vanguard of the design-led forces.  What Martin does well is to describe why design led thinking is important, and give examples of how to do it well.

Martin argues that all knowledge moves through three stages - a mystery, a heuristic and an algorithm.  Mysteries are about discovery of new opportunities or research into solving intractable problems.  Heuristics are rules of thumb that narrow the size and scope of mysteries and make them more manageable.  Algorithms reduce the heuristics into repeatable processes.

This leads to two schools of thought in most businesses:  exploration and exploitation, according to Martin.  Most businesses are structured to exploit the algorithms, refining the way they do business and becoming highly effective and efficient, while neglecting the exploration of mysteries.  Martin calls this the reliability-validity tradeoff.  The vast majority of businesses want "reliability" - clearly defined processes that are easily repeatable and produce the same results.  What he argues they need is more "validity" - creating the right and best outcomes through more exploration and less reliance on reliability.  Three powerful forces emphasize reliability over validity:  the demand for proof of the correctness of a new idea, an aversion to bias and time/resource constraints.  These factors reinforce the bias toward reliability and repeatability over exploration and validity.

Once Martin has described his ideas, he then proceeds to use a few good examples to demonstrate the transition from a reliability driven organization to a validity and design driven organization.  One chapter is devoted to the transition Lafley and Kotchka made at P&G, well documented in other places.  Another chapter is devoted to Herman-Miller and the development of the Aeron chair.  One of my favorite quotes from that chapter came from the Chairman of Herman Miller.  He quizzed the design team about who they interviewed and received feedback from about the Aeron chair.  When told they had not asked the sales force for feedback, the chairman said "That is right.  You never ask the sales force what they think of a design.  Their job is to sell it."  Note that the designers spent hundreds of hours with actual customers, watching them work at their desks and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of existing seating options.

The book offers up a few more examples, ones that unfortunately have been used by others to demonstrate innovation and design, including Apple, RIM, Target and Cirque de Soleil.  The weakness of many books about innovation and design is that they either have too few examples and must return to the same well, or that design thinking simply isn't widespread, so the same examples are used over and over.  What's not clear is whether or not these firms are bellwethers or just happy accidents.

On the whole, this is a well-conceived and well-written book.  In what could be a very esoteric topic, Martin keeps the concepts moving and introduces a lot of examples.  He puts his finger on many of the challenges that those of us in the innovation and design space constantly face:  too much short term thinking, too much demand for proof of an idea based on historical norms, too little time and too few resources for innovation and design.

This is a great book, and an easy read. It belongs on the desk of any executive or manager who is tasked with introducing more design thinking into an organization.

Social Media - Blessing or Curse?

To be a bit contrarian is just in my genes, so I thought I'd take a minute to consider the value proposition and the challenges of social media.  Right now it appears that most people who are active on Twitter or Facebook or other social networking and social media sites think that for the most part these are good and valuable services.  I am beginning to wonder if that is true.

For those of us who are relatively active on blogs, and who use social networks like Linkedin, and who ocassionally tweet when the spirit moves us, there is a lot going on in social media that ought to be paid attention to.  Many points of view, many perspectives and many voices.  I can use Twitter as a trend spotting mechanism on just about any topic.  I can seamlessly connect with colleagues and friends across so many different interaction media that sometimes just choosing the right way to connect can be a challenge.

Yet in a time when we need the methodologies created by David Allen to "Get Things Done" and a new book called the Tyranny of Email has just been published, doesn't it strike you that we are almost under assault by all the means of connection and networking?  I regularly have people connect with me on Twitter I don't know and am relatively sure don't understand my point of view.  I am regularly asked to "link" with people on LinkedIn or other social networks, and I don't know these folks.  It could be they are the best in their fields, but I don't want to create links with people I don't know and don't share significant interests with.

Are we really better off with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instant Messaging, email and a host of other interaction tools and technologies?  Certainly there's no lack of content.  In a given day thousands of tweets are tagged with innovation as an example, so clearly a lot of people believe they have a lot to say or contribute.  But how do we discern value in all of this firehose of communication?  Is being more connected but less engaged really valuable?  If many people struggle to respond appropriately to email, what are all the other communication vehicles doing to an attention starved populace?  Is it really all that important to know what Ashton Kutcher thinks about Demi Moore or what he is doing right now?

We've become a population that is afraid to be "left out" - we need to know stuff that really has no value and to a certain extent we are at risk of filling our lives and brains with meaningless information at the expense of meaningful dialog and interactions.  It's probably time for a careful analysis of all of the social networking tools and their places in our work lives and private lives, to ensure a balance between communication, understanding and engagement.  If people are too busy and feel too interrupted by email to think effectively, what will layering on all the other demands for your time from products like Twitter, Facebook, IM and other tools do?  Can you live and work successfully in constant interrupt mode?

Knowledge, ability, nimbleness

It struck me recently that the "too big to fail" crowd has it all wrong.  In most cases, the companies that are too big to fail are simply too awkward to change.

Think about an entrepreneur or a small firm.  The firm may have a some knowledge or insight that is valuable, and is very nimble, but lacks the scale and ability to reach a wide audience.  Ony the advent of the internet has changed this dynamic, meaning we can now have very small companies provide services and information to a wide audience.

Over time, small companies grow larger and gain more insight and knowledge, yet they increasingly become less nimble, to the point where changing the focus or intent of the firm, or how value is delivered is difficult if not impossible.  Bureaucracy, organization and process add value as you grow the firm until those things become barriers to change and agility.  Many of our largest firms really struggle to get anything new or interesting accomplished, since change requires a different set of skills.

Perhaps the best operating model is to achieve the best of all three components - knowledge, ability and nimbleness.  That would mean gaining enough skill and insight to be really differentiated, the ability and scale to deliver that value effectively and the nimbleness to adapt to change and market conditions.  Most likely this organization would be a holding company, made up of a lot of small to mid-sized companies or lines of business that are large enough to create learning curve scale but small enough to remain nimble and agile.

Historically only two of these criteria appeared important - knowledge and ability to scale.  Once a firm demonstrated insights or knowledge that was valuable, and the ability to scale, the sky was the limit.  That thinking was predicated on a relatively stable environment where change happened slowly or not at all.  This was true from the end of World War 2 to about 1990, when globalization and increased competition changed things.  These changes were exacerbated by the rise of the internet, which allowed many small but smart companies to "scale" rapidly.

Right now the banking firms are excellent examples of knowledgable, scaled organizations that are locked into traditional models and slow to change.  Many banks are still only open 8-4 and only Monday through Friday.  They seem to think the financial world came to a screeching halt in 1950.  Meanwhile a significant number of smaller disrupters and competitors, much more agile and facing far smaller scaling costs (see Mint) are chipping away at the customer base of the larger financial institutions.  And like good bureaucracies with something to protect, the larger banks are fighting change and resisting new legislation, rather than accept the fact that the world has changed.  Large and smart but rigid isn't an operating model anymore.