Innovation Zen

The Society of Professional Innovators
No I am not kidding: www.ipinetwork.com

A Form That Makes Sense
I found this form over at MapMyRun.com when I signed up. Notice how they have a green check when they like what you did versus the red splotch. It gives you a chance to fix the form before submitting therefore saving yourself a lot of time. This format should be mandatory on all forms.

Can't Swing a Dead Cat Without Hitting One of 'Em
According to the Pew Internet Life Project one in ten adults have have blogs.

We Are Not Alone

Americans are not alone in their inflation angst.

Prices in France have risen 4x faster than salaries in the last year. For the European Union in general prices have risen 22.5% since 1999.1

Inflation in China is at 7.1% 2 By contrast the US inflation is currently at 5% versus 3% at this time last year.3

There is a lot of liquidity (which I think means that people are willing to invest versus parking their money in safe(r) investment devices) in the World Wide economy. Couple this with strong commodity demand, which raises commodity prices, and you have an era of rising prices for everybody.

What this means is that the demand for innovation is a strong as ever. How do companies further reduce costs in order to maintain margin? How do companies sell more goods when consumers are buying less?

Innovation isn't new. It isn't a blessing of the exceptionally gifted. Innovation has always been about fixing the problem at hand and then setting about fixing the next one.

1http://www.nytimes.com
2http://www.nytimes.com
3http://inflationdata.com

Change in Conusmer Landscape (2)

The NYTimes has run an extensive piece on the American debt landscape.1 Consider this:

• Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.

• College debt has more than doubled since 1995. The average student emerges from college carrying $20,000 in educational debt.

• Household debt, including mortgages and credit cards, represents 19 percent of household assets, according to the Fed, compared with 13 percent in 1980.

• Even as this debt was mounting, incomes stagnated for many Americans. As a result, the percentage of disposable income that consumers must set aside to service their debt - a figure that includes monthly credit card payments, car loans, mortgage interest and principal - has risen to 14.5 percent from 11 percent just 15 years ago.

• By contrast, the nation’s savings rate, which exceeded 8 percent of disposable income in 1968, stood at 0.4 percent at the end of the first quarter of this year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

America, fueled by easy credit, has run up quite a bar tab. Admittedly I am not an economist, but it seems quite clear to me that an economy built on consumer spending is in for a big change when the consumer stops spending. And the consumer will eventually have to stop spending since they can't spend what they don't have forever. (Admittedly they have been able to do this for a long time.)

This retooling has to come with a reduction in the standard of living of the average American because the average American has been living above their means.

1http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/business/20debt.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1

Details Matter

Little things do matter. Details matter.

It seems that the B2 Stealth Bomber crash last February was caused by a couple of drops of water in the 3 of the planes 24 pressure sensors.1 Noticing that the input data from the sensors didn't seem right the ground crew reset the sensors. The problem was that the water in the sensors caused the sensors to reset at the wrong place. When the water dried the sensors were off and therefore bad data was being sent to the flight control system. Result: crash.

In the business world you're often told not to bog down in the details. Just capture the big stuff and get the rest later. And in the business world later means never.

But when you miss the small stuff bad things can happen: Nuclear submarines run a ground, Plane wire harnesses are built too short, and Mars Orbiters crash. (Link)

The intent of focusing on the big stuff is a certainly valid point, there is no sense in rearranging the deck chairs when there is a big hole in the hull, but what separates the great from the good is the willingness to do the ordinary things better than anyone else. This means taking care of the big and little things.

As Tom Peters says: If not excellence, then what? If not now, when?

1http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/worst_case_scenarios/4271563.html

Leading Innovation Teams

The traditional view of projects in a matrixed organization is that the project manager draws all the required resources from the necessary departments to fully staff the project (figure 1).

But really a more accurate depiction of the project is one that depicts the responsibility gaps (figure 2). In figure two, each of the departments represent a fixed area of responsibility and the dotted circle represents the scope of the project. Note that the pink areas represent the gap between the department's and project's areas of concern.
Due to the differences in scope the project manager's see things differently (figure 3) than the department head's (figure 4).
To be successful the project manager needs to make sure that all the gaps are covered. The friction comes from the fact that in order to be successful department managers need to rigorously deliver on what is in their areas of concern. This means not wasting time and resources on ancillary issues.

The department managers, by definition, do not want to work on the gaps. The project managers, by definition, want to work on the gaps.
The answer is simple, but not easy. To close the gaps each of the department areas needs to voluntarily expand their areas of concern and therefore make the project gaps disappear.

The great project manager can get the department managers to increase their areas of responsibility without resorting to direct confrontation. Direct confrontation is a win-the-battle- lose-the-war type of problem for in the long run department managers have an infinite number of ways to sink a project manager

In order to close the gaps the project manager must create transparency; make it overtly obvious as to what needs to be done next. This requires a lot of effort on the program manager's part to create the feedback mechanism so that the data is factual. When presented with an inarguable gap the responsibility for action then shifts to the department managers.

Yesterday's Innovations

REEL TO REEL1

CASSETTE TAPE2

CD3

Image Sources:
1http://members.cox.net/surround/quaddisc/quadQRA.htm
2http://someaudioguy.blogspot.com/2007/05/and-we-shall-mourn-its-passing-cassette.html
3http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/create/savetocd.mspx

Neat Idea

In a lot of places it is required that the service that treats your lawn also leaves a notice that a treatment occurred. How cleaver of TruGreen to turn this expense into an opportunity by printing the reverse side of the notice with a coupon offer to be noticed by those who walk by.

Red Monkey Innovation

Jef Staes, of Belgium, has a neat little book out called My Organization is a Jungle.

To my knowledge this book is the first attempt by anyone to apply a systematic framework to the politics of innovation. Since innovation is a social process it stands to reason that organizations who innovate, that is routinely create insanely great products, have a set of shared values that help foster innovation. Therefore being able to understand the mechanics of such a shared value system would be helpful for those trying to create one of their own.

With the metaphor that our organizations are jungle, Jeff weaves a compelling tale about the red monkeys (the idea), their breeders, and their hunters to show how their relationships in the jungle create the organization's value set.

Much like the books, Who Moved My Cheese and The Goal , My Organization is a Jungle takes a complicated topic and distills it into a simple message.

The one drawback to the book is its attempt to portray business as harder today than ever before. Different? Yes. Harder? No. Business, especially in a free market, has always been unsympathetically hard. Think, for example, of the saddle makers during the boom of the automobile. It would have been better to leave call to change to others but the book's description of the intricacies of group behavior in response to the red monkey overcome any of its initial stumbles.

So What?

There is a crucial element of business that often gets overlooked: The So What?

In business there are a lot of interesting things that happen in a day. Your expense report was rejected because it didn't have an itemized receipt. You find out that the MRP system doesn't list the whole BOM due to the way the item is purchased. And so on.

These things happen and they are important and you take care of them. But rarely do they ever warrant a mention to anyone.

Innovation is a social process which is precedent on people doing things. One of the best ways to help facilitate getting things done is to be able to distill your communication down to the things that pass the So What? test.

The So What? test is this: Does this item of information require me to do something right now? Will this item significantly impact a decision I might have to make in the next month?

99% of things that you know will not pass the So What? test. By distilling your communications down to things that do pass the So What? test you are helping to focus the discussion solely on the things that need to happen next.

Growth Leaders

Today's edition of the online Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article summarizing research into what characteristics are common among innovation leaders. Link

The final list of attributes is interesting in that it includes items that I hadn't previously seen before.

For example the leaders they identify tended to:

• Manage risk
• Hold people ruthlessly accountable for results yet were called caring
• Experts at avoiding corporate interference
  

These traits are different than the usual mantras of "Big Hairy Audacious Goals", or "Excellence Now" that the consultants bandy about so casually. Rather than describe the out front, high gloss cheer leader, they researchers are talking about the results driven politician whose goal is the good of the corporation.

Big bets, favoritism, an corporate infighting is a recipe for doom. Small bets, fair rules, political allies on the other hand is the art of getting things done.

Whale Facts

Things that quite possibly only interest me.

"More than one in 10 adult Internet users in the United States have blogs, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. " 4/18 NYTimes (Link)

"According to Russ Brandon, the [Buffalo Bills'] chief operating officer, Canadians already account for up to 20% of the attendance at any given home game. It has been reported that more than 10% of the team's season-ticket base lives north of the border." 6/16 National Post (Link)

"While scientists discover thousands of species each year, with an estimated 16,969 species considered new to science in 2006, plenty of plants and animals are waiting to be found. Scientists estimate 10 million or so species exist on Earth, with 1.8 million species described since Carl Linnaeus developed the modern system for naming plants and animals in the 18th century." 6/17 Yahoo News (Link)

"The NFL Players Association estimates at least 60 percent of athletes go broke within their first five years after retirement." 6/2 Orlando Sentinel (Link)

"In 2007, 18% of workers had taken a retirement-plan loan within the past year, up from 11% in 2006, says a recent survey by Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies" 6/2 WSJ