Innovative Groups: Intelligent Failures Vs. Stupid Mistakes

I have been re-reading the book When Sparks Fly: Igniting Creativity in Groups by Dorothy Leonard (Harvard Press, 1999). They offer an insightful distinction between intelligent failures and stupid mistakes. One key component to a creative group is that this concept is understood and practiced.

Some excerpts from the book:

Innovativeness does require a certain tolerance for risk, however, because by definition, doing something creative means breaking away from the usual.

An innovative company or group will inevitable experience some failure, or it isn’t being innovative enough, it is not taking sufficient risks. A climate that supports risk must view failures for as opportunities for growth. However, there are intelligent failures and there are stupid mistakes. Failing forward involves recognizing the difference.

Intelligent failures result from taking known (or anticipated) risks.

Individuals who fail intelligently also have contingency plans in place for the possibility of falling short of the stated goals.

Why old fashioned paperwork is good for innovation

Paperwork is a dirty word in business because it’s associated with waster, bureaucracy, and bloat. This perception comes from the fact that documentation is so often misused. If a policy is documented, or an update is published, and it is never used, then what’s the point?

But documentation is critical to successful innovation because it is an important enabler of the verification step. (I had written earlier how verification prevents new corporate ventures from turning into corporate entertainment endeavors.) Documenting creates transparency in the innovation process because it becomes the standard by which the deliverables are measured against.

Here are two rules that help to manage documentation. First limit most things to a single 8.5” x 11” piece of paper. You’ll find that this space restriction often forces clarity and succinctness in order to tell the story. Second, set a time limit for any documentation that occurs on a regular basis. Also, set the bias so that the documentation stops at the end of that time limit. This is an easy way to determine if the information is really needed because it forces the people who receive it to do something to still get the information.

[Note: I wrote this post long hand yesterday. I was pleasantly surprised to see validation of this idea from the Business 2.0 Article, titled “Best-kept secrets of the World’s Best Companies” A quote A.G. Lafley regarding business strategy, “When we get it right, we can boil it down into a one-page document that provides clarity for everyone.”]

The Power of Technology

Technology never ceases to amaze me. In a world where 1/5 of the population do not have access to safe drinking water I can call 300 miles, while standing in front of the ATM, to ask my wife what the PIN number is.

Is your Innovation Job Safe?

I had an interesting conversation the other day about losing jobs to China. It’s no secret that companies in low cost labor countries are looking to move up-market into things like design, marketing, and sales, in order to improve their margins. This means that the traditional high skilled positions like engineering and marketing will come under direct attack from foreign labor. And, everything else being equal, why wouldn’t the winner be a low cost worker?

Given this view, there is cause for much consternation for the American knowledge worker. But, this outlook is flawed for two reasons. First, it assumes that there is a zero sum pool of work; meaning that if you take work from me there is nothing for me to do. Not true. There is more value-add work in any organization than could ever get done. The trick is that this type of work is not readily evident and therefore you have to ferret it out. Secondly, everything else in the equation is not equal. There will always be geographical advantages to being close to the market which the goods are being sold in. What you have to do is learn and implement a system that raises the switching costs for your company to move that work elsewhere.

The United States has had it very good for a very long time. Technology is becoming the great equalizer that is allowing others to compete on a level playing field with us. So what? Competition has always been brutal. They only real change is where the challenge is coming from.

Grocery Store Flowers

Wegmans, a grocery chain who is consistently on Fortune’s list of the Top Companies to work for, is a $3.3billion plus company.

Being originally from Rochester, the original site of the chain, I am quite familiar with the Wegmans grocery stores. It has had a profound impact on our daily lives. How much? Well, when my wife and I decided to move the first thing that she did was go to the internet and look for the closest store.

What makes them so great? They do not view them selves as a food provider. Rather, they provide comprehensive culinary solution to the needs of today’s family. This view has moved them successfully into things like prepare foods, semi-prepared foods (mix and heat).

They also excel in other areas. Need to get some flowers in addition to the foodstuffs for Easter? No problem. This picture was from one of the smaller displays in the Rochester area and this was the first year that they ran the promotion. They were fairly sold out by Noon.

Two interesting take aways. First, how you view the problems of your customer affects what products you will provide to them. Second, if you were a florist would you have thought that a major source of competition would be the grocery store?

Here's an interesting Fast Company Article on the company. Link

Verification is Insanely Critical

Verification is insanely critical to any new corporate venture. It’s a lot of fun to plan and set up a new corporate initiative. You get to be in on the new stuff, help buy new promotional material, and set up a communication strategy for all your poor peers who don’t get it yet. But the whole exercise is merely corporate entertainment unless there is a verification step.

It’s very easy to get everyone to agree to agree in principle on the idea. But, like any truly good idea, it requires sacrifice from the participants. Unless the organization is prepared to address any incongruities with a verification step then people learn that they are not going to be held accountable for the success of the endeavor. They then can safely ignore it.

Asking for help

As a project team you can’t be afraid to admit that you do not know that answer. Unless you are trying to create nuclear fusion, chances are someone in the world knows how to do what you are doing. Too often I have seen project teams wander off in to the weeds, aimlessly trying different solutions rather than asking for help.

What I have found works the best is to find the person who has been down this path before. They may be in the company or they may be an external resource. It will take many hours to find the right person, but once you find them they can usually fix your problem in five minutes.

Be back on 4-17

Sorry for the unanticipated absence. Regular posting will resume 4-17. Thanks for stopping by.

Is this Innovative?

I caught the TV ad for the Manfield Dual-Drill over the weekend. My first thought was, “Wow, that’s pretty cool!” As the infomercial droned on I began to wonder, “What loser would pay $120 because they don’t want to change the bit?” Then, still attached to the ad, I think, “Does this count as innovative?”

Granted this will not be given space in any quarterly technology reviews, no Noble Prizes will be awarded, but if it has not been done before and it makes money does it count as an innovative product? The “not-seen-before” test is fairly obvious, but the making money test may not be so intuitive. Making money is the market voting that the product does provide value.

Despite its low impact on the future human condition, this drill counts as innovative. Just like Tae Bo and the Butt Blaster.

Leverage

As a project manager you use leverage quite a lot. If you have a large dollar spend you can get the supplier to provide extra services. If your project has high visibility you can get other departments to work on your needs first. But what happens when you don’t have any leverage?

For example, I am talking with a builder about possibly building a house. The market is good where I want to build so while the total cost is a big deal to me, it doesn’t mean a whole lot to the builder. What I’ve been asking for is the materials list for a particular style house. I am interested to learn exactly what quality of house is being built and where I can make cost adjustments to bring the total cost within budget. The builder doesn’t want to provide the list.

So what to do? Here’s my plan. One, try and separate his personal worth from the business information. I don’t want to link him giving me the information with how much I like him. He may not be able to give that information without getting in trouble. I have no idea. Second, understand what constraints he is under. So, what exactly is the reason he doesn’t want to give me the information? Three, I will try and explain why it is in his personal best interest to let me have that information. And fourth, I will accept the fact that I don’t hold a lot of cards. If he doesn’t want my business, there is nothing I can do about it.

The important thing, and this is applicable to your projects at work, is to lay the foundation for trust. Even though I can’t accomplish what I want right now I can set the stage for things to happen when the context of the situation changes in the future.

Who's Interested In Innovation?

Granted that I only represent a small portion of the convesation on innovation, but I found this map telling. The map is a lifetime summary of where people are when they look at this website. The United States, by a wide margin, has more people reading about innovation than other countries. China, Russia, South America, and Africa are noticeable absent.

I draw a couple of conclusions from this chart. First, mankind is only harnessing a small portion of its total capabilities. A massive number of people are not a part of the innovation discussion. Second, the talk about the immenent danger of competition from China in the innovation space is a bit overblown. If you believe, as I do, that free open conversations lead to better results than this map indicates that the U.S. still has a significant lead.

The map itself it part of a free suite of tools from Google Analytics for tracking website metrics.

The Great Robot Race

Over the weekend I had a chance to watch Nova’s recap of last year’s Grand Challenge. The Grand Challenge was the 131+ mile race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The race participants were unmanned vehicles.

The show was an excellent recap of the race, the scientific challenge, and the scientific spirit of the participants. While the race and the science are interesting on their own, what really floored me was the spirit of the participants. Unpaid volunteers staffed a majority of the teams, but you wouldn’t know it by the way that they worked. The commitment and enthusiasm that they displayed made me wish that I could have been part of one of the teams. This race is a great example of what an organization can achieve if it’s participants willingly enroll themselves in the cause.

Everyday Innovation

Hooray for CBS’s choice of Katie Couric as their next news anchor. I applaud CBS for taking the risk to place a younger, not to mention female, person in the anchor role. Hopefully, Katie holds this role for years to come. The effect that her presence will have to the millions of girls who grow up watching her will be of immeasurable value.

Learning what to work on

So, as a product producer, how do you know what aspect of your product you should focus on? There are lots of cool tools that can be used, like customer anthropology, but one of the methods that I like best is also one of the simplest.

Retailers are extremely smart people, and if you pay attention, they’ll tell you a lot about what is happening in their industry. Retailer Sunday circulars and in-store services offer a great insight as to the basis of competition in any industry category. For example, the Comp USA circular, in last Sunday’s paper had this callout, “We’ll install any advertised software for just $9.99 each, in-store.” This tells me that someone believes that there is a group of people who are willing to lug their computer into a store and pay ten bucks to have someone load software onto their computer. Put another way, software installation is still too complicated and therefore consumers are willing to pay a premium for someone else to do it. Therefore, the basis of competition is still convenience for the software market.

Another example comes from Office Max (I guess I happen to be on an office supply store kick this week). Behind the counter they had an ink cartridge refilling machine. Evidently you can take in old cartridges and for the fraction of a price of a new cartridge have your old one refilled. For Office Max to risk offending the ink jet cartridge makers, and the associated margins on the product, to offer this service means that the performance, quality, and convenience needs of the market have been met, but, the markets need for a better price has not. Obviously, they feel they can make a nice profit in the refilling business.

Of course these tools are lagging indicators of what’s happening in the market, but they are a cheap and effective way to validate what other sources of information are telling you.