The Daily Innovator

Another blog...

No, don't worry.  I'm not launching YET ANOTHER blog!  I simply want to make TDI readers aware of another blog to which I contribute called The Association Renewal Blog.   It is the blog of my joint venture consulting practice, Association Renewal LLC, and it was just included in a list of Ten Cool blogs for the association community.

The focus of The Association Renewal Blog is on associations, of course, but I think that Jamie Notter (my Association Renewal business partner and blog co-author) and I write about issues that have relevance beyond associations.  I want to bring this blog to your attention and encourage you to check it out.  To help make it more accessible for you, I have added a feed for the blog to the TDI sidebar (scroll down) so you can see the five most recent posts.  Thanks in advance for giving it a chance.  Let me know what you think!

Expectations

Everybody has expectations.  We expect that our spouses will love us (most of the time), the kids in our lives will behave (sometimes) and our disobedient but lovable dogs will bark no matter what we say!  :>)

So here's a question for you to consider:  what expectations do you have for yourself as an innovator?  What are your expectations of others?  If you don't have any expectations, take a moment to reflect on the reasons why.  Is innovation so low on the daily priority list that it never occurred to you to have expectations?  How can you create or raise such expectations and include innovation of some kind in your top ten to do items for each day?  What will it take to make that happen?  Think about it and share your insights right here!

Innovation disconnect

Last Friday, the NussbaumOnDesign blog at Business Week Online shared some headline results from a recent BCG survey that reveal what I regard as a troubling disconnect between how corporate CEOs and their managers and employees view innovation. Here are the key points:

• Some 81% of CEOs believe innovation is a top priority for their companies while only 63% of lower-level execs share this view.
• Some 76% of CEOs believe their companies foster a culture of innovation, but 51% of lower level execs and employees disagree.
• Some 66% of CEOs say their senior management teams share a common view on managing innovation but only 53% of non-CEOs agree.
• Some 56% of CEOs believe their companies have the right organization structure already in place to generate innovation. But 56% of lower-level people do not agree.

Troubling, but not terribly surprising.  I think it is fair to say that most CEOs are out of touch with what is actually happening inside their companies, so some difference of views on innovation is to be expected. Nevertheless, I still find these results quite concerning because they reflect some real gaps between leadership intentions and organizational reality that ultimately hurt our customers and damages our companies' prospects in the marketplace.

The challenge for the daily innovator is clear:  we must  take steps on our own initiative to begin closing the gaps reflected in these survey results.  The more we can do to fill the void by helping to create an innovation-friendly culture or an actual process for supporting innovation, the better off our organizations will be in the long run.  We already know that this isn't easy work, but we now have some additional evidence that confirms why it is so important.

Innovation book I just found

This weekend, I received a book I ordered through the self-publishing website, Lulu. (I am working with some colleagues on a book and we are thinking about using Lulu for it.)  I discovered We love innovation! so long as it's nothing new while exploring the Lulu site, and it was very exciting to find a brand new innovation resource!

The book is by Jeffrey A. Carlisle, and anybody named Jeff is okay by definition in my "book" (no pun intended), so there was no question I had to buy it.  I've only started looking through it, but I can already see that I'll be blogging often on We love innovation!  It includes interesting innovation stories from the author's personal experience, as well as great quotations. I'll put up my first post on Carlisle's ideas in the next few days.

The double challenge of innovation

Thanks to Chuck Frey of Innovation Tools for pointing us to an article by Dr. Joel Orr, VP of Business Development for KollabNet, Inc. The article, "The Double Challenge of Innovation" explains that in addition to the typical resistance to innovation embedded in the DNA of most organizations, innovators must also overcome an inherent cynicism with respect to innovation that emerges when managers feel threatened by the possibility of innovation success.  Despite preaching the virtues of innovation publicly, these managers may actively try to thwart it at every turn if they feel their status is on the line, simply because they couldn't produce the same success prior to the introduction of the new idea.  As Orr writes:

Innovation is an unnatural act. It induces fear, unmitigated by the promise of great gains in productivity. The fear is fear of personal loss - prestige; power; respect. The promises are of gains for the organization, not for the individual. 

It would be like screaming at the night to suggest that those who fear innovation should get over it.  But that is truly how I feel right at this moment.  It's pretty frustrating to have to constantly confront the naysayers on what feels like their terms, i.e., from the premise that we must prove to them something that may be unprovable just to get the chance to try something new or different.  Of course, if it doesn't work out, the naysayers will be more than happy to point out that they "told us so."  Orr now gives us something to have to worry about, namely the real concern that even if an idea succeeds, a so-called leader might still pull the plug on it simply because he/she feels personally threatened by that success.  It is amazing how tied up in knots we allow ourselves to become!

My advice: illegitimi non carborundum. Be proud to be a daily innovator and don't let anyone else's insecurities deter you from your mission.  Despite the obvious frustrations, I urge you to remain confident in your commitment to innovation, as well as the certainty that you will prevail in the long run!

The stupidity of dumb ideas

You want to read something really, really dumb?

Imitation Across Industries Is More Efficient and Effective Than Blue-Sky Creativity and Innovation.

This is one of the arguments advanced in a study of 1,300 publicly traded U.S. companies in fifty-five industries conducted by Chuck Lucier of Booz Allen Hamilton.  Apparently, Lucier found "that only four broad ideas, copied over and over again in one sector after another, accounted for 80 percent of the breakout businesses created between 1965 and 1995: power retailing, megabranding, focus/simplify/standardize, and the value chain bypass."

Here's my emphatic response:  %@$#*&$%#!

Best practices: Enemies of Innovation

Okay everybody, we need to get something straight:  your organization will never achieve genuine innovation by focusing on best practices.  Yet leaders today just love best practices, probably because they seem easier, safer and less time consuming than original thinking.  In truth, however, best practices are nothing but fading copies of once great ideas, pale imitations of past originality.

My advice to you:  look around your organization and try to identify the so-called best practices in use.  Once you've done that, make every effort to erradicate those eroding approaches by developing new, creative solutions that seriously consider the changing, unmet or unseen needs of the customer.  The battle against best practices can be a wellspring of innovation if you're willing to fight it. 

Clear thinking about risk

John Hagel III, co-author of The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization with John Seely Brown, put up an excellent post on risk last week that I think is quite relevant to all TDIs.  In the post, John references the very useful work of two other authors, but he makes his own important point as well:

Rather than just treating the environment as a given, executives need to realize that in times of rapid change and uncertainty, significant opportunities to shape the environment arise.  Opportunities often exist to shape the environment in ways that would just not be possible in more stable times. By being alert to these opportunities, executives can both increase the potential upside from their business initiatives while reducing the potential downside.

Instead of seeing themselves as being at the mercy of prevailing conditions, leaders must increase their sensitivity to any unexpected opportunity to seize the initiative.  In the process, they can redefine not only their businesses but also the operating environment itself. While the short-term goal is to minimize the impact of risk on the organization's strategy and operations, the long-term goal must be to leverage risk to gain strategic advantage.

How do you do this?  John suggests looking for "edges," what I would describe as the thin spaces between what's being done and what is possible.  I agree, and I would add the "gaps," the spaces between what's being done and what can be done even a little bit better.  What are the gaps and edges in your organization's work?  Please share your thoughts.  We will continue to explore these ideas here on TDI. 

Does this happen in your organization?

From the Dilbert website, the cartoon from September 14, 2005:

TDIs don't let naysayers blame others for failure.  Indeed, TDIs challenge naysayers to be open and courageous in examining how failure occurs and what can be learned from it, even if it requires difficult self-examination.  In your role as a board chair, CEO or team/department leader, it is critical that you not allow the questioning and reflection skills of your colleagues to atrophy from lack of use.  Indeed, you should be the questioner-in-chief, asking the hard questions, not only about failure but also about success.  And you should make reflection a genuine priority, because it is often through learning from reflection that the most unusual and intriguing new ideas emerge.

Innovation is both/and, not either/or

When it comes to innovation in organizations, we are often asked to confront a false choice:  either we serve today's customers or we pursue innovation.  But innovation isn't an "either/or" choice.  It is possible for any organization, regardless of scale or scope, to make innovation a priority even as it provides excellent service to current customers.  Indeed, I would argue that today's service commitment is strengthened in the minds of customers when they recognize that your organization is also tending to the future.

So the next time an innovation naysayers says, "Ah, we can't do that.  We need to put all of our energies into serving today's customers," you must push back!  Innovation isn't an either/or choice, it's a both/and opportunity.