FROG BLOG

If you haven’t been part of a major failure in your career then you’re not trying hard enough.

As a Scoutmaster I’ve seen adults and children learn faster and more efficiently from their mistakes than from their successes. “Well I won’t do it that way again,” holds a lot more weight than “Aren’t I clever.”

Leading a risky, innovative project automatically ensures that things will go wrong. So the relevant question is how to lead through difficulties to ensure innovation continues.

Whining does not work — “We didn’t have enough resources. It was out of my control….”

Pointing does not work — “The division didn’t step up. The research was wrong….”

Excuses don’t work. If the point of failure comes as a complete surprise to your management then you have already missed a key element of leading a risky project — Managing Expectations.

As chief cheerleader your focus has to be on convincing an organization that the goal is achievable. At the same time you must identify and highlight the areas where organizationally a lot of learning must go on and flag elements that are so critical they could sink the program. This also allows you to break success up into more manageable chunks.

“We learned how to do this.”

“We’ve passed that hurdle”

“We’ve found a solution”

Every success builds momentum to help you get past the next hurdle. A list of meaningful successes creates capital you can tap.

Every innovative project provides learning and output that is useful even if the ultimate goal of the project is not achieved. By identifying those elements you help create a platform for innovation and highlight your value to the organization.

Share This

I’m guilty of preaching the “Don’t fire your innovators who fail” sermon to upper management.
I’ve done it many times.

Sometimes I’ve seen my advice followed, sometimes not.

The idea behind the sermon isn’t wrong. But when I look at the reasons why innovators who fail get pushed aside I find that the reasons lie less with management and more with the innovators themselves.

So assuming a company at least gives lip service to the idea that improvement and innovation is worth the pain of learning through failure, what differentiates the innovator-who-thrives versus the innovator-who-is-sent-packing when things get difficult?

Turns out the push aside vs treat as a learning experience decision depends more on how the innovator communicates and sets expectations than in how the project itself turns out. In a well run organization managers will make their decision based on your perceived future value - not on the cost of your most recent escapade. This allows managers to maintain a significant cost of failure while minimizing its impact on the future of the organization.

Over the next few weeks I’ll look at how Personality, Perseverance and Politicking can determine if you as an innovator will survive the failure (and believe it or not - the success) of your innovative project. Also we’ll look at why it’s useful for managers to maintain that fear of failure while promoting innovation.

Share This

Template thinking leads to under-prioritized laundry lists of to-do’s.

If you’ve been in the business world for more than a few months then you have probably experienced the damage such thinking causes. Lots of work being done, nothing truly important to the organization being accomplished.

Sound familiar? My favorite solution to this problem occurred in a senior management retreat for a major company. The Corporate President asked his team to put together a list of priorities for the coming fiscal year. The list that came back was a staggering 20 points long.

He sent it back. “Shorten it.”

It came back 18 points long. Every point strongly defended.

Bob said, “Fine, we’ll go with this.”

The list was carefully typed up. The first page included our mission and the first three priorities. The second page the other 15 priorities. His team approved the two pages.

Bob then proceeded to forget to copy, distribute or refer to the second page.

Objectives were built off the first page.

Programs were budgeted according to the first page.

People were hired according to the first page.

No organization can have 18 life or death priorities. That’s like being at sea with a compass that stops at North every now and then. Forcing a short list helps everyone fit their personal, team and product concerns within the key priorities of the organization.

What happened to the other 15 priorities? Many of them were accomplished because they were important to a division or a product line. Some of them were key to accomplishing the first three priorities. Some of them disappeared because they sounded more important than they were. They were sorted according to the top three priorities.

To break down template thinking you have to force difficult decisions that prioritize what is truly important for your organization.

Share This

I’m not easily impressed - especially when I feel as if everything is going wrong. But in the end I have to grudgingly tip my hat to ComEd’s Customer Service Group even though I’m sitting here with only half power 6 days after the storm.

Did ComEd’s electronic response system make mistakes? Looks like it.

Did individual ComEd reps make mistakes? Looks like it.

Did the customer (me) make mistakes? Probably.

First, about my problem - Why am I still at half power? Turns out an electrical spike fried my breaker box. Unfortunately, ComEd kept saying the power disruption was their issue until about 5 pm yesterday so I delayed calling an electrician.

I’m writing this from a computer that is running off a series of extension cords strung from from a kitchen outlet that is also running my fridge and stove. I had never heard of half power before, but for us it means that a seemingly random assortment of lights and outlets are working in the house. When we have a power need we re-weave our extension cords to take care of it.

So, I’m a customer who’s problem was not solved or identified until well after it should have been. Why am I not peeved?

Credit goes to well trained and very sympathetic customer service reps that seemed to care no matter how upset I got.

When their electronic response system seemed to reset my request every time I called, the rep was as frustrated as I was. When I was apparently the last house in town that no one had stopped by, I could tell the rep felt my pain. When the notes from the field didn’t explain why I was still sitting in the dark and no excuse seemed reasonable - I could almost hear the conversation between managers that got a truck to my home in 15 minutes. When it turned out to be something in my house the lineman apologized that communication hadn’t been better. Everyone seemed to care and everyone seemed willing to go off script to try and help.

The empathy was what seemed so unusual and disarming. I don’t know if it was from training, from great hiring practices or both. Maybe the situation of having over half a million customers without power just broke down the barriers to create a “We’re all in this together attitude” had something to do with it.

In the end, I was left with the strong impression that they actually cared - admitting their own mistakes and doing what they could to correct them. Now here’s the question that begs to be asked: With all the emphasis on customer service in our economy, why did this feel so unusual that I felt the need to write about it?

Share This

What started as high concept MBA territory and led to today’s templates and $200 boilerplate, strategic business plans have been adopted throughout organizations of all sizes. Unfortunately this infiltration often becomes filler for three ring binders (or misplaced PDF files) and a neglected memory until the next cycle - instead of the dynamic driver it can be.

Template thinking is often the cause for this mismatch. Choose any of the hundreds of outlines available and you create the need to fill in every bullet point with a jargon filled sentence about how your company is going to be so much better than the competition.

• Of course we’re going to outflank competition through the leveraging of of superior human intellectual capital and technological innovativeness.
• Of course we’re going to increase market share without price discounting by increasing emotional value and value-added strategic alliance formation.
• Of course we’re going to meet customer needs and improve relationships through advanced communication, use of the web, and the empowerment of line employees.
• Of course we’re going to win by simply being better than everyone else.
• Of course, Of course, Of course.

The result can be a document that is unimplementable (We’re going to run in every direction at once!), laughable (If you think you can beat your competitors in every way imaginable this year, why didn’t you last year?), or simply a restatement of business basics dressed up to look like strategic advantage. If your strategic business plan lays out the principles of running a good business and reads as if the title could be ‘Your Name Here,’ it will not have meaningful impact on your business. (Ok, I’m assuming that that principles of running a good business are not earth shattering news at your company.)

Strategic Business Plans are where you have to differentiate yourself. This helps focus resources and decision making. Items where you are going to be just as good as the competition are still important but put them somewhere else. The high concept strategy for each level/division/product category needs to be simple enough that everyone in your organization understands its direction but deep enough that tactics are difficult to reproduce by outsiders and/or secret.

So, to improve usefulness, blow-up the template. Make each section and sentence earn its place. Take the ‘of course’ fundamentals and stick them in an ‘of course’ appendix so that they are out of the way (but not forgotten). Choose which competitive baselines you are going to shift to provide the bulk of your wins and focus your efforts on them.

Share This

Creative fire extinguishers are a normal part of our human nature. Change can be uncomfortable. New ideas can cause disaster. It’s natural to want to find ways to avoid disruption.

It would be nice to develop an organization that would drive these tendencies out, but that won’t happen to these deeply ingrained habits. For each habit you break a few others will pop-up. Creative Fire Extinguishers don’t exist because we have developed bad habits. They are here to serve real objectives of stability that exist for individuals and organizations.

So how do you keep Creative Fire Extinguishers under control? Know them. Understand them. Channel them. And then provide support for ideation and creativity to help overcome them.

Truth is ideas should have to survive a rigorous review. There are bad ideas. There is unnecessary disruptive creativity. The point of controlling Creative Fire Extinguishers is to make that review process as balanced as possible, focused on stated issues - not hidden agendas or misunderstood motivations.

I’ve summed up the ten Creative Fire Extinguishers we’ve gone through here:

#1 - “Did Something Like That 12 Years Ago”
#2 - The Fire Hose
#3 - Expect Customers To Be The Visionaries
#4 - Pursue Everything
#5 - The Universal Buy In
#6 - Efficient Use Of Time
#7 - Wasting Time
#8 - Everybody Knows
#9 - Ignore The Little Things
#10 - Expect Everyone to Just ‘Get It’

Share This

Change rapidly becomes personal. No matter how great an idea is for an organization as a whole, there are always going to be individuals who interpret implementation as a threat or as a waste of time. There are also going to be individuals who simply don’t ‘get it’ — at least at first.

You may want to just ignore them or wish them out of the way. But this is a critical target group to understand. They are customers for your idea. You need to understand their motivations and fears and develop elements that address their needs. In many cases their concerns might help you focus development of your idea in a way that more clearly identifies and defines the advantages that will make the sale.

It is dangerous to assume that those who don’t rapidly latch onto an idea are slow or simply wrong. Understanding their issues can smooth the way to your idea’s implementation.

Share This

During the creative process opportunities have to be ranked and evaluated so that decisions can be made about where to expend resources. The danger here is in creating a ranking system so simplistic that critical small ideas never receive focus.

Determining market size and sales opportunity is a natural part of this process. Developing filters to help managers make quick decisions streamlines this process and helps focus human capital. Large organizations often create a cut-off point - “No ideas under $20 million.”

The difficulty with this simplistic approach is three-fold. First, truly breakthrough ideas are very difficult to size correctly. Second, sometimes strategically you’re better off firing 5 small shots at a market than one cannonball. Third, it reduces motivation for employees to explore ideas of anything less than obvious potential.

I’ve addressed the difficulty customers have in comprehending their need for breakthrough products (CFE #3) and therefore your ability to size a market, so I’ll just address the strategic issue here.

Strategically there are three primary reasons why multiple smaller markets may be better for an organization:

• Obviousness - If the huge idea is obvious then competitors are already gunning for the same space. Your chance of success is probably being over estimated. Smaller ideas may allow you to surround competitors and pick off more profitable sales.
• Definition - Your organization seems to be bubbling with exciting, creative apparently tiny ideas but only has a few big, kind of boring opportunities to choose from. Do you go with big and boring or small and creative? Your company is defined by the products and services it delivers. Your employees are motivated by the results they see. The strategic power of defining yourself through creative, unexpected solutions can lift your entire business.
• Resources - This one is pretty obvious - but you might be surprised how often it is missed. You just can’t seem to find that big $20 million idea that makes sense. Hmmmm, four $5 million ideas can provide the same level of growth!

Employee motivation concerns is also of key importance. A thumbnail target used by the president of a company quickly becomes the only evaluation tool used by your staff. Small ideas have no chance of gaining traction because every management level knows they have no hope of being funded. What’s the danger in this? Seems efficient? How many huge ideas jump out of the cosmos fully formed. Focusing on the need for only huge ideas will stop the development of creative huge ideas!

In other words: Most big ideas start off small. If you kill small ideas too efficiently - no more big ideas.

Share This

kin-dling

–noun

1. material that can be readily ignited, used in starting a fire.

2. the act of one who kindles.

( Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2006.)

If you have ever built a fire — indoors or out — you know that you can’t just lay match to log. The preparation that has to occur (the kindling) builds the foundation so that when a spark does occur there is something for it to ignite.

The same is true for creativity and innovation. Without a receptive foundation, the spark will just languish and die.

The question that I believe is the most important is the hardest to answer; How do you create a creative culture in an organization that is productive and consistent?

Our starting point for this series is a quote attributed to Socrates — ” If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you always got.”

Kindling Pieces

Everyone in your business needs to understand and buy into the idea of building an organization that allows new ideas to spark in the hope that each spark will ignite but with the knowledge that most sparks burn-out before they flame.

This means building a creative culture that at times will seem “anti-productivity.” Here are the 5 pieces of kindling we will explore over the next few weeks:

1. Expose your team to the world! Find interesting opportunities to expose your team to ideas that are outside your office. Teach them how to look for new thoughts and how to apply them to your business. Creativity is not just for artists, designers, writers or marketers.
2. Encourage thinking time. We are too connected to the world and it is too easy to fill all our time. Turn off access to your company’s e-mail system and the internet for one day a month. Declare one afternoon a week meeting-free zone. Take all electronic devices hostage before brainstorms. Make thinking a priority for every staff member. (Including yourself.)
3. Excel at failure. Thomas Edison once said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Accept it. Learn from it. Celebrate it. Grow from it!
4. Expect rigorous development, evaluation, and implementation. A creative environment without a way to take the right ideas to market is a waste. No creative visionary wants their ideas to languish only on paper. But, to make sure you are promoting a strong creative culture, it is imperative to know the when and the how. Make sure your culture implements a great development and evaluation program as well as a sturdy structure for implementation in the marketplace.
5. Elevate the priority of creative thinking in your company’s goals and objectives. Hold it out for everyone to see you believe in the creative process. “Talk the talk. Walk the walk.” You have to do both to convince your team that it is safe to go outside of the corporate comfort zone.

One last thing — Creativity is a journey not a destination.

Share This

My partner has been writing an awesome series on “Creativity Killers.” Each and every one dead on as to their effects on an organization’s ability to be creative. Fred and I both agree that most organization’s wield these “weapons” too often with much success — even when they profess to be an organization that embraces innovation and change.

For many years we have worked with clients on the need to create a strong creative culture — one that embraces those who go outside the status quo. Last night I picked up a book (Orbiting the Giant Hairball) from the man who taught me much about creative thinking and how to not get caught up in the “hairball” — Gordon McKenzie.

As the creative guru and and professed burr-under-the-saddle at Hallmark Cards while I was there in the late 80’s/early 90’s, he provided me with great insights on stretching “paradigms” to include things that are uncomfortable but good. (I highly recommend the book for yourself, your team and, most importantly, your boss!)

So, in honor of Mr. Gordon McKenzie, with a little bit of Talking Heads thrown in for good measure….I thought a parallel series on “Creative Kindling or Burning Down the House!” was in order.

And, if you have creative kindling you would like to share, let me know. I am always open to new ideas!

Share This