You Are Responsible for Getting Your Ideas to Spread
Posted by Tim in book riffs, connect on 22 February 2012
So you’ve had a great new idea for making something better, and you’ve figured out how to make it real. It could be a new thing, a new method, anything. But no one is picking up on your idea.
What’s wrong?
Often, people in this situation think that the problem is that others just don’t understand their great idea. After all, it’s a great idea – it’s value should be obvious, right?
But often, in this situation, the problem is really either that maybe the idea isn’t so great, or, maybe you’re not communicating that value very clearly.
Let me illustrate these with examples from literature.
First off is a quote from a character in Headhunters
An artist who maintains that he has been misunderstood is almost always a bad artist who, I’m afraid to say, has been understood.
In other words, the idea isn’t so good.
Now consider this from an interview with David Foster Wallace on Salon from just after Infinite Jest came out. It includes this quote about the state of Literature:
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
What’s weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature’s current marginalization is the reader’s fault. The project that’s worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it’s also pleasurable to read. The reader feels like someone is talking to him rather than striking a number of poses.
This addresses the second issue -thinking that the problem is a lack of understanding. It drives me crazy every time I hear someone say that their new product or service isn’t doing well because they have to ‘educate the customer’. To me, this idea reflects the same problem that DFW is talking about – blaming your customer. I’m not saying that everything you do has to be dumbed down. But if people don’t understand the benefits of your new idea, then you haven’t presented it well. Even if the idea is just a concept, you have to be able to explain it in clear English. And if the idea is a product or service, you have to make it reasonably easy for people to see how it’s good for them.
When I was doing industrial water treatment, a lot of people in the industry spoke about water treatment like it was a black box that the clients could never understand. I always took that to mean that they didn’t understand it themselves well enough to explain it. So I practiced talking about it until I could explain water treatment to people with pretty low education levels who often had English as a second language. That’s how I got the idea ‘working with Tim is a good thing’ to spread.
Bottom line – to get your ideas to spread you have to connect with people in a way that is meaningful and useful to them. If you can’t do this, it’s your fault, not theirs.
How to Take Advantage of Surprises
Posted by Tim in book riffs, experiments on 21 February 2012
If the budget that you’re managing blows out one month and you’ve spent 200% of your allocated funds, what happens?
In most organisations, a negative surprise like this leads to painful forensic investigations. To improve efficiency, it is important to stamp out negative surprises like this.
Conversely, what happens if one of your revenue areas brings in 200% of what’s expected. In most organisations, this would be greeted happily, but these positive surprises are not usually investigated as closely as negative ones.
This is a mistake.
Peter Drucker discusses these positive surprises as unexpected occurrences, one of the seven triggers of innovation opportunities. He has several interesting examples of positive surprises and the opportunities that they present in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
In the first example, Macy’s actually tries to stamp out the positive surprise. Here is the story:
More than thirty years ago, I was told by the chairman of New York’s largest department store, R.H. Macy, “We don’t know how to stop the growth of appliance sales.”
“Why do you want to stop them?” I asked, quite mystified. “Are you losing money on them?”
“On the contrary,” the chairman said, “profit margins are better than on fashion goods; there are no returns, and practically no pilferage.”
“Do the appliance customers keep away the fashion customers?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” was the answer. “Where we used to sell appliances primarily to people who came in to buy fashions, we now sell fashions very often to people who come in to buy appliances. But,” the chairman continued, “in this kind of store, it is normal and healthy for fashion to produce seventy percent of sales. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account fo three-fifths. And that’s abnormal. We’ve tried everything we know to make fashion grow to restore the normal ratio, but nothing works. The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.”
“The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be.”
Eliminating negative deviance is usually good, but eliminating positive deviance is not so good.
The outcome was that Macy’s languished. In contrast, Bloomingdale’s noticed the same trend, and put extra effort into promoting appliances. Consequently, they jumped from fifth in sales among NYC department stores to a strong second.
Drucker has two more interesting examples:
A German chemist developed Novocain as the first local anesthetic in 1905. But he could not get the doctors to use it; they preferred total anesthesia (they only accepted Novocain during World War I). But totally unexpectedly, dentists began to use the stuff. Whereupon – or so the story goes – the chemist began to travel up and down Germany making speeches against Novocain’s use in dentistry. He had not designed it for that purpose!
…entrepreneurs know that their innovation is meant to do. And if some other use for it appears, they tend to resent it. They may not actually refuse to serve customers they have not “planned” for, but they are likely to make it clear that these customers are not welcome.
This is what happened with the computer. The company that had the first computer, Univac, knew that its magnificent machine was designed for scientific work. And so it not even send a salesman out when a business showed interest in it; surely, it argued, these people could not possibly know what a computer was all about. IBM was equally convinced that the computer was an instrument for scientific work: their own computer had been designed specifically for astronomical calculations. But IBM was willing to take orders from businesses and to serve them. Ten years later, around 1960, Univac still had by far the most advanced and best machine. IBM had the computer market.
Positive surprises create opportunity. Here are some dos and don’ts for dealing with these surprises:
- DON’T just analyse negative deviance, DO analyse positive deviance as well. Drucker suggests that for every regular meeting you have to address problems, you should also have one focussed on opportunities. Particularly those provided by these positive surprises.
- DON’T try to fit these anomalies into business as usual. Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s both analysed the unexpected change in appliance sales. But their responses were quite different. Macy’s treated positive deviance just like negative – and they tried to stamp it out. Bloomingdale’s changed the way they did business.
- DO get market feedback as soon as you can, and DO pay attention to it! You may think you know how to deal with the opportunity, but data changes everything. The Novocain and computer examples both show the value of data. Dentists buying Novocain and businesses buying computers were both unexpected – they were surprises. IBM was ready to respond to the data that showed that businesses were interested in computers, even though they didn’t understand this demand. Univac was not.
There is often an automatic negative reaction to any surprise, positive or negative. It’s important to understand that both types of surprise provide innovation opportunities.
To take advantage of these opportunities, you must be prepared to analyse the surprise, gather data to test the opportunity, listen and respond.
That’s how to take advantage of surprises.
Why Innovation is Less Risky Than You Think
Posted by Tim in book riffs, design, experiments, innovation strategy on 19 February 2012
One of the most common excuses I run across for not innovating is risk aversion. Organisations don’t innovate because they’re risk averse, or so they say.
But is innovation really so risky? Yes, a new idea might not work. But in many cases, not innovating is even riskier. Here is how Peter Drucker puts it in his classic book Innovation and Entrepreneurship:
Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enormously risky. And indeed, in such highly visible areas of innovation as high tech – microcomputers, for instance, or biogenetics – the casualty rate is high and the chances of success or even of survival seem to be quite low.
But why should this be so? Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of course, there is a risk they may not succeed. But if they are even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be. One should thus expect entrepreneurship to be considerably less risky than optimization. Indeed, nothing could be as risky as optimizing resources in areas where the proper and profitable course is innovation, that is, where the opportunities for innovation already exist. Theoretically, entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course. (emphasis added)
This is the point that Clayton Christensen, Stephen Kaufman and Willy Shih make in their article Innovation Killers (link to pdf). They illustrate it with this great diagram:
When we assess the potential risk of innovating, it is normal to assume that things will continue as they currently are. In a stable environment, it might be safe to assume that taking the ‘do nothing’ option will result in stable returns.
Drucker’s point is that if you are in an industry that is primed for innovation, then even if things seem stable, assuming continued safe returns is extremely dangerous.
Then how can we tell if our industry is primed for innovation?
Drucker addresses this in the book (and there is a short summary in this HBR article as well) – he identifies seven drivers of innovation opportunity. These are things that change the environment. Drucker contends that these can be identified through analysis, and that regularly conducting such analyses is a central part of the discipline of innovation.
The seven drivers are:
- Unexpected Occurrences: Drucker stresses that we should look for outcomes in our business that surprise us. These can be positive surprises. He talks about Macy’s department store in the 1950s identifying an unexpected surge in appliance sales relative to clothes. This actually reflected the start of a major shift in consumer behaviour. Or the surprise can be negative, like the failure of the Edsel. In both cases, you have to identify the surprise and learn from it. Macy’s identified the surprise, but didn’t act. It was Bloomingdale’s that took advantage of the change in behaviour. On the other hand, Ford did learn from the Edsel, which led to the extremely successful introduction of first the Thunderbird, and then the Mustang.
- Incongruities: these are differences between expectations and results, or between beliefs and reality. A great example of this is in the shipping industry. For a long time, it was assumed that the best way to drive down costs was to reduce the time it took to get between ports. However, this is an incongruous belief. The real problem in shipping is when the ship is idle. So the best way to increase returns is to get in and out of port as quickly as possible. Recognising this incongruity is what led to the invention of containerization – which almost immediately led to a 60% reduction in shipping costs.
- Process Needs: these arise from problems within a production process. Photography provides a good example. When it was invented, it quickly became very popular. However, a big impediment to amateur photography was the need for the use of heavy glass plates. George Eastman saw this process problem, and worked to replace the glass plates with cellulose film. Doing so is what led to a market-dominant position for his company, Kodak, within 10 years of the introduction of his lightweight camera.
- Industry and Market Changes: here are some of the examples Drucker used in 1985:
In a similar fashion, changes in industry structure have created massive innovation opportunities for American health care providers. During the past ten or 15 years, independent surgical and psychiatric clinics, emergency centers, and HMOs have opened throughout the country. Comparable opportunities in telecommunications followed industry upheavals—in transmission (with the emergence of MCI and Sprint in long-distance service) and in equipment (with the emergence of such companies as Rolm in the manufacturing of private branch exchanges).
You can see similarly structural changes now driven by the internet in a wide range of industries.
- Demographic Changes: these are usually fairly predictable, but often ignored. For example, how many of you are still not considering the enormous opportunities provided by the increase in ageing consumers that we are currently going through? This is the best innovation opportunity ever.
- Changes in Perception: here is Drucker again:
All factual evidence indicates, for instance, that in the last 20 years, Americans’ health has improved with unprecedented speed—whether measured by mortality rates for the newborn, survival rates for the very old, the incidence of cancers (other than lung cancer), cancer cure rates, or other factors. Even so, collective hypochondria grips the nation. Never before has there been so much concern with or fear about health. Suddenly, everything seems to cause cancer or degenerative heart disease or premature loss of memory. The glass is clearly half empty.
Rather than rejoicing in great improvements in health, Americans seem to be emphasizing how far away they still are from immortality. This view of things has created many opportunities for innovations: markets for new health care magazines, for exercise classes and jogging equipment, and for all kinds of health foods. The fastest growing new U.S. business in 1983 was a company that makes indoor exercise equipment.
- New Knowledge: these are opportunities that arise through invention – and often this is the only one of these drivers that we consider.
Obviously, these drivers often overlap. The main point is to use them as tools to identify the areas that we should be thinking about.
If you do this, you are on your way to practicing innovation as a discipline, rather than as a lottery. And if you do that, innovation can be much less risky than doing nothing.
Do You Need a Team of Innovators or an Innovative Team?
Posted by John in innovation on 17 February 2012
I’ve been working on a research project looking at innovativeness in project teams and it’s given me the opportunity to go back through the evidence of what makes innovative teams. Without giving you the long literature review I can tell you that this is a really well worked area over more than two decades. However, the good news is that there is a body of accumulated evidence on the factors that promote innovative behaviour in teams. In short, we have an evidence-base of what works and what doesn’t.
One business-school academic who has produced a significant amount of research on the subject is Professor Michael West of the Aston Business School in the UK. I first met Michael at an applied psychology conference in 1997 when he was a keynote speaker and I was impressed by the practical focus of his research. Recently I’ve gone back to his work because he is one of the rare business school academics who recognise the importance of both creativity and execution in the innovation process. Tim and I have also written about the two sides of innovation and it has become the basis for much of our own research and consulting work.
If you break innovation into a mix of idea generation and execution then it becomes pretty obvious that innovation teams need to be good at different things to successfully innovate. Focussing on idea generation and creativity rarely results in more innovations. On the other hand, a process for implementing new ideas, without support for creativity and bold experiments usually results in a lot of small improvements, but little game-changing innovation.
A very important study of Michael West’s that I keep going back to was published as long ago as 1996 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, but it’s been very heavily cited since then. Using a sample of 27 senior management teams from 35 UK hospitals, West and Anderson looked at the relationship between team composition, team processes and innovation. I think the results have a very important message for innovation managers.
The best predictors of radicalness and novelty was the presence of individual innovators. However, the overall level of innovation was closely linked to group processes that are related to execution such as commitment to objectives, participation and task orientation to ‘get the job done’. Putting together a team of innovators is important but unless this is backed up with an execution discipline, the results are less likely to appear.
An individual innovator may have many good ideas but a task-oriented team of innovators will realise the value of the idea.
Don’t Be Surprised, Prepare the Surprise Yourself
Posted by Tim in complex systems on 15 February 2012
Here is a great quote from Ioan Tenner in a post on the strategy of surprise:
Significant surprise is a life event. Neglect this subject and your fate may be of the led and of the losers.
The surprised lose initiative, stumble and take hasty decisions they will regret. They submit to choices crafted by other people while surprisers gain advantage.
…
What else to do with the unexpected than to suffer it?I claim that we can do better: we can prepare against surprise, for surprise and we can even prepare the surprise ourselves.
Thanks to Geoffrey Morton-Haworth for tipping me off to Tenner’s post. He did so in a comment on my post How to Think About the Future.
The point that I was trying to make there is that in a complex world, it is close to impossible to predict or control the future. But we can try to influence by experimenting. Complex systems co-evolve with those within the system – so while we might not have control, we can have influence.
In a longer post on the topic, which is well worth reading in full, Tenner discusses strategies for preparing the surprise yourself. He includes some excellent advice for getting people to buy-in to the surprise that you come up with:
If you want to avoid the “built-in” negative reaction of people being surprised with something new, make a rule of being slow, easily foreseeable, with many warnings.
Do not start where you are, do not start where the newness is – far ahead, but where people are. Start always from the people towards the newness and not from the unknown towards the people. Start with the understood, the usual and the accepted.
To cushion surprise follow well-known and familiar patterns, plan steps and rituals of passage to reassure. The newer the content, the older the form!
That’s pretty good innovation advice. Because as we know, having the great idea (preparing the surprise) is only part of the process. We also have to get the idea to spread.
And that’s the hard part.
Still, it’s better than being surprised.
(Picture from flickr/DailyPic under a Creative Commons License)
Evidence-Based Innovation Management
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation strategy on 14 February 2012
Yesterday I made the case for evidence-based management in general. Today I’d like to talk about what this means for managing innovation.
The case in favour of evidence-based management is made in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
There’s not space to summarise all of the research evidence here, but these are some of the things that know:
- Innovation is risky, but it drives growth: this is what Pfeffer and Sutton say:
We’ve also seen that there is no innovation without failure. Most organizational change efforts have a high failure rate—from mergers, to new product introductions, to technological change efforts. But the rub is that the only thing more dangerous than changing an organization is never changing it at all.
- Innovation works best if you manage it as a process: I think about innovation as the process of idea management:
The biggest mistake I see firms make is to think that innovation is only about having great ideas. That’s part of it, but you also have to select the best ideas to pursue, make those ideas work, and then get the executed ideas to spread.
- Great new ideas are most often combinations of old ideas: here are Pfeffer and Sutton again:
It sounds ironic, but even creativity is mostly sparked by old ideas. Both major creative leaps and incremental improvements come from fiddling with ideas from other places and blending them in new ways. Better ideas result when people act like “nothing is invented here” and seek new uses for others’ ideas. This holds for even the most creative companies like Apple, 3M, IDEO, Genentech, Google, Capital One, and Cirque du Soleil. Unfortunately, too many companies are plagued by the not invented here syndrome, where people insist on using homegrown ideas, especially ideas that can be ballyhooed as new and different. There are, after all, substantial rewards for pretending that the same old ideas are brand-new. Managers can impress bosses with cutting edge ideas. Consultants can sell clients unique services. Gurus can land lucrative book contracts and speaking fees by peddling the next big thing. And journalists can sell newspapers and magazines by giving readers the latest scoop.
It’s usually smart to be cautious if someone is pushing an idea that they claim is completely novel.
There is a great example of evidence-based innovation management in Game-Changing Strategies
It’s a very good book. Markides looks at business model innovation, particularly how to manage it in larger firms. One of the crucial issues in that case is this: how can you effectively manage multiple business models within one firm? This is something that larger firms usually have to come to grips with when trying business model innovation.
You have a couple of choices to make here. The first is: should the new business model be run in a separate business unit, or should it be integrated into the main business? The second is whether or not you should enter one of these configurations in a phased manner.
The strong recommendation is that you should always set up a separate unit – think about Michael Porter talking about being stuck in the middle if you try to achieve multiple objectives.
However, Markides has found that the answer isn’t so straightforward. He studied 68 firms that tried to manage dual business models. Of these, 42 created a separate business unit, while 26 did not.
And of the forty-two that created a separate unit, only ten were successful. This implied that separation on its own is not enough to ensure success – thirty-two firms (out of forty-two) created a separate unit but still failed!
The findings were similarly mixed for those following an integrated strategy. Even though conventional wisdom says this shouldn’t work, in a number of cases it was a successful approach.
What should we make of this?
In comparing the successful firms to the unsuccessful ones, this is what Markides found:
- Separate units were more successful if they had a high degree of autonomy to make financial and operational decisions, but not when they had autonomy on strategic decisions.
- Firms were less successful in managing separate business models if the units used different evaluation and incentive systems.
- Running separate business units works better if the CEO of the new unit is an insider rather than an outsider.
- Firms that allowed the new unit to develop its own culture were more successful than those that expected them to adopt the dominant culture of the parent.
This is a tricky mix. It shows that running separate business units requires a combination of autonomy and control, and the choices of what you keep control over are crucial to success. These results are not immediately obvious, which is a great benefit to this research – it provides useful insight.
This is typical of evidence-based management. It is harder to do, because there are no clear-cut answers that are always right. While it’s convenient to think that there are, one-size-fits-all solutions usually come from charlatans.
Knowing the boundaries of a great idea is very important – when will the idea work, and when won’t it? Good research can show you the circumstances in which a particular idea is more likely to be successful. We don’t know everything about managing innovation, but we do know a fair bit now.
Practicing evidence-based innovation management doesn’t guarantee success. But it improves your chances. And in a complex environment, that’s a great outcome.
The Case for Evidence-Based Management
Posted by Tim in book riffs on 13 February 2012
How can we be better managers?
I just finished reading Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management
They start by saying that most people probably think that managers already do this.
But if you thought any of that, you would be wrong. Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own experience can attest, are frequently based on hope or fear, what others seem to be doing, what senior leaders have done and believe has worked in the past, and their dearly held ideologies—in short, on lots of things other than the facts. Although evidence-based practice may be coming to the field of medicine and, with more difficulty and delay, the world of education, it has had little impact on management or on how most companies operate. If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there would be far more sick and dead patients, and many more doctors would be in jail.
…
When the late Peter Drucker was asked why managers fall for bad advice and fail to use sound evidence, he didn’t mince words. “Thinking is very hard work. And management fashions are a wonderful substitute for thinking.” If you are willing to do the hard thinking required to practice evidence-based management, if you want to reap its benefits, you need to recognize your blind spots, biases, and your company’s problems and take responsibility for finding and following the best data and logic.
One of the reasons that we make poor use of evidence is that often we make mistakes interpreting the numbers. There are two common errors here.
The first is looking at the numbers for a particular action, and thinking that they don’t apply to you. I call this the lottery mistake. As the web-cartoon Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal points out, you won’t win the lottery:
And yet, people still buy lottery tickets. There is evidence to suggest that there are possible psychological benefits from buying a lottery ticket, regardless of how bad the odds are. But a lot of people buy lottery tickets “because someone has to win, right?”
We see similar wishful thinking in innovation management. Executives announce a new commitment to innovation. And the hope for a big win (like hitting the lottery). But they fail to put into place any system that would actually make their firm better at innovating.
That’s the lottery mistake – someone has to win, right?
The second error is misunderstanding averages. Pfeffer and Sutton discuss studies that looked at mergers and acquisitions through the 1980s and 90s. Over 70% of those that took place in that time period either failed to create value, or actually destroyed value in the firms involved.
People make two mistakes with numbers like this. First, they will sometimes cite a counterexample, and then act as though that disproves the study. It doesn’t. The counterexample simply falls into the 30%. Statistics that show that something is true the majority of times don’t mean that they are true for everyone.
The second mistake is to believe that this means that all mergers and acquisitions are doomed. Again, these results don’t apply to every one.
In fact, we know a fair bit about what makes mergers and acquisitions successful. This excellent post from Accenture summarises the evidence well. They are more likely to succeed when:
- One firm is bigger than the other: this reduces power struggles.
- The two firms are geographically close to each other: M&A success decreases with distance.
- There is a good cultural fit between the two firms: this is the key one. Mergers based on strategic or operational synergies tend to be less successful than those based on cultural fit.
If you use this evidence, you can beat the odds. Throughout the period most of that research covered, Cisco acquired 57 firms, and nearly all of these acquisitions were successful in terms of building value.
They didn’t do this by hoping that they would beat the odds. They did it by understanding them.
That’s evidence-based management. Pfeffer and Sutton do a great job of explaining why you should try it yourself (check out Greg Satell on how to do this).
The research shows that if you do, you’re more likely to succeed.
Montessori Lessons for Innovators
Posted by John in design, innovation on 10 February 2012
Since the revelations that many stars of silicon valley are alumni of Montessori schools there has been a lot of interest in what managers can learn from the Montessori approach to education. I hadn’t realized this until Tim told me but the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are all members of the US creative elite called the “Montessori Mafia“.
This seems to be more than a circumstantial relationship with a survey of 3000 executives of innovative companies showing that many were influenced by a Montessori education, as one of the authors of “The Innovator’s DNA” tells in an Harvard Business Review interview.
A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).
My own children have been fortunate enough to attend a Montessori preschool and as someone who works as a teacher I have been fascinated by the philosophy and techniques of Montessori education. When I tell my friends that my kids attend a Montessori school they immediately jump to the aspects of Montessori that make it seem so different from standard education practice. They ask about the way kids are free to choose what they want to do and are not pushed into any particular program of learning.
This is also the aspect of Montessori that business has tapped into. Employees should be allowed to follow their own ideas and giving them challenges allows them to develop. Employees need to be nurtured rather than measured and labeled.
The encoragement of curiosity and self directed development is an important part of Montessori teaching philosophy but it is only one dimension. As one friend said to me before Christmas, ‘this do-what-you-like stuff sounds really nice but aren’t you worried that your kids won’t learn anything? The classroom must be anarchy!’.
But that’s the whole point. A good Montessori classroom is highly ordered and there is a big focus on what Maria Montessori called ‘the prepared environment’. My son is in primary school this year but late last year I took the morning off work to spend time in his classroom. I suppose that I was expecting a chaotic environment too but spending an hour and a half seeing four-year old children moving calmly from activity to activity is really quite something with my first thought being ‘why can’t I do this at home?’.
The answer is that there is a lot of structure to the Montessori classroom that enables creativity and self-directed learning. The environment is prepared to support children to explore and learn under careful guidance. Activities or ‘jobs’ are designed to be used by children with shelves and desks placed at the right height and the room is set up so that there is space to work quietly or in groups, depending on the job. New activities are demonstrated and the rules for using the job are explained to the children.
The other part to this is that there has been a year or two of training for children to work in this way. Right from the beginning they are taught how to begin and finish a job in an orderly way. In a Montessori classroom there is no sense of ‘anyone can do whatever they like’ in a way that creates chaos and dysfunction.
Tim’s recent posts on the innovation matrix talk about building innovation competence. A big mistake for organizations trying to be innovative is that they tell employees to innovate without creating a prepared environment for innovation. The prepared environment that creates innovation competence has many facets including the right people, tools, resources and rewards. It is structured but the structure supports experimentation and learning rather than dictating what will be learnt and what the experiment will be.
An important Montessori lesson for innovators is that if you want people to be innovative and creative then you need to create the structures and processes that will support them.
Don’t Follow Your Dreams, Follow Your Effort
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, The Innovation Matrix on 9 February 2012
We repeatedly see survey results that say that CEOs think that innovation is a top priority for their firm. And yet, these same surveys also say that most CEOs are unhappy with their innovation efforts.
Why is this so?
Here’s an example – a report from a couple years ago in McKinsey Quarterly. They surveyed over 1500 C-level executives. 15% of them said that innovation was the top priority for driving growth in their firm, and over 70% listed innovation as one of the top three priorities.
But what are firms doing about it? The report says:
But the way companies manage and govern innovation doesn’t reflect that importance. For instance, although executives say corporate performance is most likely to be affected by breakthrough innovations, they also say their companies generally focus on innovation in areas such as product or service development. Only 36 percent of top managers—and just over a quarter of other executives—say innovation is part of everything the organization does. Further, although more than a third of top managers (those at the senior vice president level and above) say innovation is part of the leadership team’s agenda, an equal number say their companies govern innovation in an ad hoc way.
There are a couple of key points there. First, note that there is a disconnect between the number of CEOs that say that innovation is part of everything their firm does, and the number of lower ranking executives that say this. Second, it appears as though for many firms innovation is on the agenda, but there is no process in place to support getting better at innovation.
Mark Cuban recently answered reader questions on the Freakanomics blog, and he had this to say to someone who asked if he should follow his dream and try to get involved in major league sports:
Never follow your dreams. Follow your effort. It’s not about what you can dream of. That’s easy. It’s about whether or not it’s important enough to you to do the work to be ready to be successful in that business.
I would say that a lot of these executives are dreaming about being more innovative. And why not? Innovation does drive growth. But they’re not putting in the effort.
This is a big part of why I worked out The Innovation Matrix:
Executives talking about the importance of innovation is one of the first steps towards increasing your innovation commitment. It’s great that CEOs want their firms to innovate more. But that’s just a dream.
To improve your innovation, don’t dream about it. Increase your innovation efforts. Get better at actually executing ideas.
Why Do Razors Have Five Blades Now?
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy on 8 February 2012
I remember that when Gillette came out with their double-bladed razor, I started joking about how it wouldn’t stop until razors had five blades. At the time, that seemed absurd, but sure enough, now we can buy razors with five blades.
Now, while this may seem ridiculous, it’s actually a pretty smart response to a potentially disruptive innovation.
The introduction of the double-bladed razor was actually how Gillette responded to the introduction of disposable razors. The value proposition of disposables was: the quality of the shave is almost as good as you get with real razors, but we’re a lot cheaper.
For Gillette, this is similar to the situation that Swiss watchmakers faced with the introduction of quartz watches. The main difference is that quartz watches were both cheaper and more accurate than mechanical watches. In the case of razors, disposables were cheaper, but not better.
Gillette faced a choice. They could embrace the new technology and start making disposables themselves. Or they could double down on their existing business model.
They chose the latter. They had a quality advantage, and they have continued to invest in stretching that advantage. Instead of trying to shore up their weakness (price), Gillette put all of their energy into building their advantage.
This is what Youngme Moon recommends doing in her excellent book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd.
Doubling down on the current strategy doesn’t always work. There are at least two conditions that need to be met:
- You must have a clear advantage in at least one feature that customers care about.
- You must be have a value proposition that is built around this advantage.
The Swiss watchmakers had built their value propositions around accuracy. When quartz watches were introduced, this disappeared. A huge number of watchmakers that had been around for centuries went out of business. The ones that made it through built on the advantages that they still had: prestige and craftsmanship.
Gillette had a clear advantage in performance. And they’ve been able to build on that. The result has been that even in the face of a potentially disruptive innovation, they’ve managed to keep a better than 70% market share in razors.
That’s why we’re probably not too far away from razors with 8 blades. This time, I guess I’m not joking…
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Tim was named #5 in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2011 at Innovation Excellence.
Tim and John were both named in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2010 at Innovation Excellence.
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