Think Change

Believe YOU Can

In an significant book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers, he makes the point again and again how the people or groups of people that actually make it put in no less than 10,000 hours before they are remotely in the vicinity of turning out to be successful.

To give an example Gladwell discusses the Beatles. The Beatles were a rather mediocre music group from Liverpool that performed in minor sites. They ended up heading over to Hamburg to perform there simply because they discovered far more young women were interested in them and they could get drunk every night. A significant need for young guys.

But precisely what they were required to perform in Hamburg was perform countless concerts. Hour after hour of performances later on and they came back to the United kingdom an infinitely more polished music group. Besides the training they also needed to cover other songs simply because their own collection was not extensive enough to be able to fill up the actual hours of time they had to perform.

This meant their very own tunes advanced because they took on board a number of the good tunes they were performing within their performances. Their very own compositions were enriched from this practical experience plus the standard associated with their musicianship. The countless hours associated with practice and performing paid once they returned to the Britain.

Believe YOU Can

It is typically said by very talented individuals who the only distinction in between gifted people is always that the profitable people work very much tougher. There are lots of people with comparable talents however only hardly any do get ahead and also create their own mark.

This really is similarly legitimate for music artists, painters, film makers, internet marketers, explorers, sports men and women and each and every arena of field of expertise imaginable. It even applies to remote areas of curiosity like tiddlywinks or spinning a top. The child which is in front of the group and in a position to defeat his opposition on a regular basis has practiced more.

This particular theory of spending the time, the practice is very important to reflect upon whenever anyone is attempting to market you a service which could save you all the practice time. See with mistrust. This applies to offers that guarantee you to have the ability to talk a brand new language in five weeks or make a huge amount of dollars inside twenty four hours, or run a marathon with one month’s coaching.

None of these work. However what allures people to these false claims is the perception that all things arrive quickly. People do believe that achievements can be immediately. Weight loss is just around the corner just drink berry juice. Or perhaps you can start to play the guitar right away by just following the notes being performed by your electric keyboard.

So how do you approach your own targets? Do you think that they will just arrive without any subsequent efforts or perhaps you have looked at them realistically and came to the realization that the only way you will certainly reach them will be by means of working hard as well as persistence?

Is this precisely why there are so few hugely effective individuals and so many people that are prepared to dwell an okay type of life? It all comes from investing in your time and effort, working hard at it and doing this as long as it requires to accomplish your goal.

Believe YOU Can

By: Gary McKenzie

From my childhood I have been traveling by bus in India. And few things I noticed that I want to share with all of you.
In the bus there are two parts for seating and standing. 1) General part and 2) Ladies part.

General part is mentioned for the all types, means Male, female and for others too.
And Ladies part is mentioned only for the females. Ladies part means seat for ladies and standing for the ladies. If there is huge load in bus then there is no chance to secure the place for ladies only. Which mean male could stand there too.
But this article is for those people, who love to stand behind the ladies without the huge load or pressure and to those ladies who loves to tolerate this too.
I noticed some year before there were 20% of people who loved it and now this percentage is gone rise to 40% to 50%.
As example: I was going some where in India by a public bus. On that road there are few buses only so I had to enter in a huge loaded (Loaded by people) bus. And I was tried to stand behind the male as the place is for the general. As I am little tall I generally stand in the middle position of General and Ladies. On that time there were huge load so I didn’t thing anything and couldn’t hear without the sound of engine and crowd of people. On that time there were over 120 people in the bus with two conductors and one driver. But after 30 to 40 minute there were only 50 to 55 people in the bus and the crowd had gone. In the bus there are 40 seats in total with a driver seat. So in 55 people there 39 were on seat and rest 15 people were standing. And between 15 people 5 were female and 10 were male. Oh! I forgot to tell you that I got a seat .
While in this position the bus was running suddenly one of the ladies shouted on a male, “What are you doing? Can’t you stand straight? Can’t you stand on general?” Then the male replied “in the bus every one should understand the matter”. Then again the lady shouted “what!!, if there is any huge load then it can be consider but what for you are standing here now?” Then with the lady all the male and female in the bus also protested the man and he rush to come back on general position and to seeing this there were 4 others male too on the ladies position, they also came back to general .

This is the effect of protest. Every one should protest. If there is any lady who tolerate this type of matters then she is same guilty as the man do. So make a protested mind and live with proud.

By Don Pital

When we make product we start with raw materials. In the manufacturing world with just-in-time and supply chain integration, our raw material suppliers are vetted and their quality assessed, specifications analyzed and sample materials inspected. This happens well in advance of approving the supplier for routine material purchase.

How does this apply in the innovation realm? Our “raw materials” are our people, who create actionable ideas. These include not only the people within our organization’s four walls, but also those outside people with whom we choose to engage for innovation – including suppliers and customers.

If people are the raw material, how are they vetted for creating an innovation culture that leads to quantifiable results? The short answer is that in many cases you may be stuck with a raw material inventory of naysayers, “not invented here” types that if they were actual raw material vendors they might be replaced.

In the company culture, we have to use what we’ve got and “bloom where we are planted,” so to speak. Since we can’t choose the company culture let’s at least understand where people are coming from. Here are some sample survey questions you may want to consider for an anonymous poll of your key decision makers and workers who make it happen every day:

Where should you company focus its innovation efforts in order to be competitive?

How urgent do you think #1 is? How quickly does it need to be done?

How successful in the past has your company been at developing innovative products and services?

How bold has your company been toward taking on new ideas and innovations?

Is creativity/innovation rewarded at your company?

Based on your company culture, how able are your people to take action on new initiatives?

These are just a few examples of survey questions that can help you to better understand your innovation “raw materials.” What questions do you suggest?

Boston Consulting Group recently released the findings of its latest innovation survey, entitled Measuring Innovation 2009: The Need for Action, and it contains some intriguing findings, which I would like to summarize for you here:

Only 32% of executives surveyed were satisfied with their company’s innovation measurement practices.

Most executives (73%) believe that innovation should be tracked as rigorously as other business operations, but only 46% say that the company actually does so.

According to BCG, 10 to 12 metrics are necessary to do an adequate job of measuring innovation, considering how broadly it can be applied in the average organization. But a little over half (52%) admit that their company uses five or fewer metrics.

Why don’t companies do a better job of measuring innovation? The BCG study identified these factors:

• Uncertainty about which metrics to use (32%)
• It’s not a priority (31%)
• Lack of support from top executives (12%)
• The cost of instituting effective measurement program (8%)

What are companies measuring? The BCG study identified these components of innovation, in order of declining importance:

• Overall profitability (79%)
• Customer satisfaction (75%)
• Incremental revenue growth (73%)
• Time to market (59%)
• Idea generation (55%)

Other metrics that the respondents cited include R&D efficiency, time to volume, portfolio health and life cycle performance (each over 40%)

In general, survey participants felt they were better at measuring innovation outputs (results) then inputs (resources such as people and money).

Respondents were also asked if their company had to be limited to three innovation metrics, which ones would they use? The top five were revenue from new offerings (56%), projected versus actual performance (36%), allocation of investment across projects (32%), total funds invested in growth projects (29%) and number of projects that meet planned targets (23%).

One final area that the BCG study looked at was which innovation metrics are employees being encouraged to pay attention to? This is where the rubber meets the road, one of the true measures of the effectiveness of an innovation initiative. If innovation remains a group of platitudes but the average employee does little to support it, then chances are that the organization’s innovation initiatives are not going to get off the ground.

According to the BCG study, few companies are utilizing incentives to compel their employees to pay attention to specific innovation metrics. Only 27% of respondents said their company consistently ties incentives and rewards to their innovation metrics.

There’s a lot of valuable data here – I highly recommend that you read this report!

While large organizations usually innovate through complex innovation management processes, smaller operations more often reinvent. That’s usually because they don’t have as many products or services and aren’t as locked into legacy systems.

Smaller operations are also more nimble, and so are often more responsive to current market, financial, and social conditions. When it come time for a change, as often as not they take change to its farthest degree and may completely overhaul themselves.

Further, smaller organizations such as small businesses and associations are susceptible to different drivers for reinvention than large organizations seeking to innovate. In that way, they are closer to individuals who decide they want to change their behaviors or lifestyles. These drivers include:

Pressure from financial, economic and personal changes: Small organizations tend to operate closer to the bone and so are much more influenced by financial results. For example, the loss of a gorilla client can spell near doom for some small businesses, so they reorganize and reinvent to seek new ones in different markets.

Also, changes in an economy, such as the current recession that is besetting the world, can have an outsize impact on small organizations. When a large organization experiences a drop in revenues, it will impact their stock price, but usually they have the resources to ride out the storm. Not so much the small business.

Lastly, leaders of small organizations rarely have the support services of large organizations, and so are much more personally involved in their operations. A wish to slow down, spend more time with family, or create better work-life balance can lead to a reinvention of the entire business.

Diversification strategies often play a role in a smaller organization’s desire to reinvent. Often these operations rely on one or two core services for the majority of their revenue, but would like to hive off some services to create other streams of income or explore other markets. This diversification is often described in the investment portfolio management term “core and explore,” in which one puts the majority of one’s assets into relatively safe and predictable investments and earmarks a small portion to explore other, more risky investment areas.

Disruptions in an industry can also cause smaller organizations to embark on reinvention. Probably the most egregious example of this is in the technology industry, where disruption is a regular occurrence. A traditional software maker, for example, might have to completely revamp its operation because of the advent of the software as a service (SaaS) or cloud computing models. However, technology is just a first-in leader for most trends. Today, no industry is safe from disruption.

Simple boredom plays a larger part in reinvention than is often acknowledged. Many small operations are entrepreneurial and entrepreneurs are often more excited by the building of companies than they are by the management of them. To get their entrepreneurial juices running again and use their often superior company-building skills, they overhaul their operations to access new markets or take advantage of new opportunities.

“Stay committed to your decisions, but be flexible in your approach” – Tom Robbins

A year or so ago, I had a client come up to me after our problem-finding workshop had ended and say, “I am so sorry that we didn’t find any problems to fix right now…We feel just awful!”

Can you imagine that?  First of all, they weren’t my problems, I was just the facilitator of the session, and quite frankly, they were “problems’ that could wait for a solution.  But the part that was most distressing was that she didn’t consider the weeks of work that went into scouring the organization for problems to solve, for ideas on product improvement, or for ways to better engage customers as a successful outcome to the engagement.

Sometimes, like our in our current economic climate, it just doesn’t make good financial sense to take action on problems or ideas.  Or in other words, sometimes you really can’t afford to “innovate.”  But that certainly doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore your search for problems to solve, shut down idea campaigns, pull the plug on low-cost prototypes or cease to engage in other organizational creativity activities.  Sometimes making the decision to do nothing is the best decision to make.  And yes…that IS okay!

The main point is, even if you aren’t currently in a position to execute on ideas, that doesn’t mean you have to stop challenging your employees to look for pain-points to solve, to think of ideas that might steal a few customers from your biggest competitor or to simply look inside your organization and make certain the current strategic direction is still headed on the right bearing.  Use these challenging times, or any ebb in the cyclical nature of business, to fill up the idea funnel or pipeline.  It costs very little to put people in a room for the day to think about the problems your organization faces.  Then, when the time is right, you’ll have actionable ideas that have been fully explored and considered for immediate execution.  In fact, while your competitor is busy restarting his innovation machine and going on a search for new ideas to bring to market, you’ll already be putting prototypes in front of customers, including some of his!

So let me close by telling you what I told that client last year who felt just awful about deciding not to solve any of the problems they discovered, “The simple act of looking for problems to solve solves a problem.  Think of the things you now know that you didn’t know before.  Believe it or not, that is an incredible competitive advantage.”

Hopefully you see it the same way!

“Technical skill is mastery of complexity, while creativity is mastery of simplicity” – Erik Christopher Zeeman

Sometimes I wonder if all of this positive and cheerleader-like talk about the benefits of organizational creativity and innovation make me sound like a pie-eyed optimist.  So…to prove that my realist-side is alive and well, I thought we’d focus on some of the ways creativity, ideation and innovation can foster unexpected and/or negative consequences:

• In every creative solutioning effort, there comes a time when ideation needs to stop and a solution must be selected for further exploration.  Some of you may have heard the term GEPO or “Good Enough…Press On.”  Keep it in mind, and balance the need to push for the search for new ideas with the need to just move on.  Remember, ideas don’t exist until you do something with them!
• Conversely, sometimes we think we have the right solution early on in the ideation session because it sounds like it will solve the problem and should be easy to implement.  Be particularly wary of the “easy” answer.  This is a dangerous short cut that rarely yields breakthrough solutions.
• Another danger of accepting the easy way out is the temptation to just tweak the problem a bit to fit a particular solution.  Face it, your problem is what it is, and to accept it or “live with part of it” just because a particular idea solves a portion of it is not really solving the full problem.
• One of the most negative and destructive things to creativity is negative reaction to ideas.  You’ve heard and seen them before…
  • They SOUND like these:
    • “That’ll never work”
    • “We tried that already”
    • “Management will never go for it”
    • “We can only afford to cut costs now”
  • They LOOK like these:
    • Eye rolling
    • Putting ideas on a “parking lot” sheet
    • Last item on the agenda…oops…no time left to discuss
    • Written…but never said
• One of the things we have talked about previously as a danger to good innovation is the tendency to over complicate or otherwise create a new problem by “solving” the old problem.  Make sure you are addressing the real problem, not a symptom.  Make sure you are addressing the whole problem, not just applying a bandied to broken arm.
• Finally…be very, very careful of “knowing too much.”  It is dangerous to insert personal bias, assumptions, stereotypes and other starting points of thinking that will cloud and distort your thinking right from the beginning.  This is why role-playing, or thinking outside of you yourself, works so well in ideation.

So, there are a few things to watch out for when problem solving and engaging in organizational creativity.  But now that you know some of the more common pitfalls and trapdoors, you can hopefully steer clear of them to bring true innovative solutions to light.  And yes…I am an optimist…and I do believe that all of the world’s problems are just an idea away from the right person, with the right mindset, in the right set of conditions and circumstances.  How do you think we got to where we are today?

This week my young niece and nephew are visiting us for a few days. As usual, entertaining them is a challenge, and movies are usually a good diversion. Having already seen most of my collection of kid’s movies, we decided on one of my all time favorites – The Sandlot.

I won’t go into the details of the plot line, but as I watched the movie it dawned on me that there is quite a story of innovation subtly hidden amongst the many antics of the pre-teen characters. In short, the story is about a bunch of rag-tag kids who have to retrieve a baseball from the yard next to the sandlot where they play. Not just any baseball though, but one signed by none other than the “Great Bambino.”

Near the middle of the movie there are several scenes where the kids come up with creative ways to retrieve the ball, which is guarded by a dog appropriately named “the beast.” As I watched the movie, I realized there were several lessons to be learned from their trials and tribulations.

Understand and agree upon the driver(s) of your innovation. In their case, it was fear that took on several forms. Fear of “the beast.” Fear of retribution. Fear of failure. They clearly understood what was driving their strategies for creating solutions to their problem. This is a key element in building an innovation strategy. Simply innovating with the hope of creating something or doing something worthwhile has a very low probability of success.

In today’s market where competition is fierce, resources are scarce and chances for survival are tougher than ever, it’s essential to invest your resources as wisely as possible. You must be able to rationalize, agree upon, and communicate your strategy.

Use the resources you have at hand. The setting for the movie was the 1960s, a time when baseballs cost 98 cents. For this bunch of kids, that was a huge amount of money. Creating solutions to their problem required the creative use of items at their disposal – vacuum cleaners, erecter sets, ropes and pulleys. Innovation does not require huge investments. Granted, it can be accelerated by having the latest and greatest tools at your disposal, but creating new capabilities or solutions to problems can be realized through the use of existing corporate assets. The key is discovering them and then using them in creative and innovative ways – feeding the cycle of innovation.

Innovate rapidly. In the movie, the kids were under tremendous pressure to retrieve the ball before its owner (one of the dads) returns from a business trip. This led to the rapid development of different “ball retrieval” solutions in a very short time frame. Product developments cycles that are shorter than ever, combined with intense market pressures, requires that we continue to innovate at a pace heretofore unseen.

The good news is that we can learn from the work of others. No longer are we in isolation (unless we choose to be) when we are working on ideas. We have a wealth of information at our fingertips. Learn from your mistakes and move on – don’t dwell on them.

Know when to change direction. After a few failed attempts at retrieving the ball, one of the kids makes a suggestion that they have been going about it all wrong. Thus a new strategy is born. One of the traps of innovation is sticking with an approach in the hopes that the answer will be found, or just another ounce or two of improvement can be squeezed out, or maybe just a little more competitive advantage can be realized. We should all heed the popular definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over with the hope that the outcome will be different. Don’t waste valuable, scarce resources on minor incremental improvements.

Know when to quit innovating. Unfortunately for the kids, all their great ideas came to the same conclusion – the baseball was still in possession of “the beast.” At some point we all have to make that tough decision to call it quits and declare failure. It’s a tough thing to do, especially when you have invested singificant corporate (or your own) resources in the process. But EVERY innovation cycle should be viewed as a victory. Innovation is about learning. And learning is valuable.

Play to your strengths. One of the kids, Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez, is known for his blazing speed. In the end, he’s the solution the ball retrieval problem. Just like knowing when to quit innovating, going back to and leveraging your core strengths can be a tough decision. Innovation is fun. But at some point you need to be able to step back and make the determination that what you may already have is pretty good. It realizing that value can be tough sometimes – especially when you are caught up in the day-to-day issues of creating shareholder value. But coming to that realization in and of itself is part of the innovation process.

Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. James Earl Jones plays the owner (Mr. Mertle) of the house next to the sandlot -where “the beast” lives. Near the end of the movie the kids finally get up the courage to talk to him about what has happened. To their surprise he asks them a very simple question: “Why didn’t you just knock on the door?”

Sometimes stepping back and asking very simple questions may lead you to a different strategy. Do you really need to invest in innovation for this problem or opportunity? Could our scarce resources be better spent solving another problem? Is there a simpler way to find the answer we are seeking? Will this investment give us the best ROI? Questions may lead you to a better investment strategy for your innovation dollars!

These are simple examples from somewhat of a unique source for innovation inspiration. But I think if you look at them (and maybe watch the movie) you will see that real-world solutions often provide some of the best guidance when embarking on a path of creating something new or solving a tough problem.

Happy changing and innovating!