I realize that times have changed… However, I did not internalized the amount of change until my neighbor’s 14-year-old said “I love everything wheat!” And it is not just her; my 10-year-old prefers whole wheat over Wonder Bread. I might be living in a community where there is more sensitivity towards environmental, social and health consciousness. However, I bet there are more communities around the world such as ours. And, those are not the only trends that are shifting. You are probably wondering, what does this have to do with innovation or technology management? Let’s break these trends down; jump in with your own observations and insights.

Going green and ethical consciousness

These days, it seems like every other ad in a magazine is about a firm’s greenness and their new environmentally friendly products or processes. Though the ads might be a fad, the growth of environmental and social consciousness is certainly not. Our new generation is observing the negative impact we have had on our environment, on earth’s natural resources and overall society first hand. That consciousness and society’s learnings are here to stay.

My son recently shared his view on space travel: “We have to find a new planet to colonize, as the human race will be extinct given what we have done to the environment.” I hope it is not as black and white as he sees it.

Let’s not forget ethical consciousness. The Internet, always-connected technologies and social networks have significantly increased the degree of transparency firms once had. With that, consumers are more knowledgeable and demand more from your firm. MIT Sloan Management Review recently published a study on Does Being Ethical Pay? (may require subscription.) The study shows that consumers are willing to pay a slight premium for ethically made goods, and would buy unethically made products only at a steep discounts. The Women of The Buyer’s Army is taking activism to the next level as highlighted in the Ode Magazine. Their mission is to raise shoppers’ awareness on how various products are made.

Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to incorporate green technologies, environmental and ethical consciousness into your organization’s DNA. Right now your customers are demanding it, and tomorrow your workforce will be joining them too.

Talent management

I can’t help but share my observation on the hypocrisy of some of the CEOs out there, in this case Mark Hurd… Anyone that is plugged into the US business news is aware of CEOs’ concerns on dwindling US tech talent. Though I haven’t seen a study, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cause-effect relationship between early US outsourcing trends to current US graduates in the technology field. However, the part that really bothers me is when a CEO complains about dwindling US tech talent on one breath, and then reduce his US workforce in large numbers in another breath.

So, let’s focus on the real issue at hand. It is NOT that the US doesn’t have talent, it is either not the right talent or not at the right price. Given that, along with accelerated technology shifts and US visa procedures, your talent management strategy has become even more relevant.

In search for a meaning

Maybe the generations are in crisis, or finally we are learning there is more to life than just work. Either way, as average life expectancy increases, so does the need for that life to be more meaningful and purposeful at every aspect of our lives. I should know, as I am one in search of meaning.

As a manager, you might already be experiencing these shifts in your workforce. Changes that have been taking place just from the perspective of technology alone have been amazing, mainly driven by kids that never experienced a world without the Internet, have no clue what a floppy drive looks like or why would anyone want to use such a thing in the first place Where the communication is driven by text messaging, instant messaging, emails and MySpace. But even more so, these kids are interested in knowing the purpose, understanding their impact and ensuring a world that is healthy and happy. At the same time, you might be dealing with Generation-Xers that are going through their own career shifts to find that purpose and meaning.

These personal shifts create an interesting challenge for managers: how do you motivate and reward your employees? How do you create growth opportunities that are aligned with their own purposes? How do you ensure the meaning they are looking for matches yours? And, how do you keep those employees?

Our opportunities are global, so are our problems

Globalization is here to stay. No doubt, it has fueled the growth of many firms and improved the lives of many. Unfortunately, it is also highlighting the ever increasing divide between the rich and the poor. (Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making) Lets not forget terrorism, global warming or outbreak of a contagious disease.

As Albert Einstein pointed out “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We need to increase our global reach by building virtual teams around the world. So far this activity has been mainly fueled by firms driven to reduce operational costs. However, we need to shift towards building cultural and social awareness of global communities, and bring that to our product and technology planning activities.

Finally, NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) doesn’t have a relevance in today’s global world. We can’t pretend that just because something doesn’t immediately impact us, we don’t have to care about it. The Story of Stuff highlights in a fun way how everything we do is connected. As consumers we are becoming more aware of how our purchasing decisions are shaping the world we live in. As businesses, we need to take to heart the concepts of: sustainability, zero waste, clean production, renewable energy and a more fulfilling purpose that fuels meaning for all.

Technorati Tags: globalization, sustainability, green

Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Shutterfly, recently spoke at Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. I especially enjoyed his definition of entrepreneurship as well as how he applied this definition throughout his career.

I think entrepreneurship is mostly a state of mind. It is a state of mind about how you create things that people haven’t envisioned before. How you aggregate the resources, motivate people and execute against that vision. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go start your own business. I think the state of mind of entrepreneurship can happen at the largest of corporations … and it can happen at the smallest companies …. Across the whole gamut, entrepreneurship is really about the state of mind: creating new products, creating new markets, creating new ideas, and then creating new businesses. And capturing some of the economic rents from that vision and the hard work.
– Jeff Housenbold

Enjoy the presentation. As you are listening to it, make sure to reflect back on your definition of entrepreneurship, your past experiences of applying it to your career, and explore the opportunities that exist for its application currently and in the future.

Technorati Tags: definition of entrepreneurship, Jeff Housenbold, Shutterfly

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. —Harold Goddard

Storytelling is an art. It is powerful, expressive, and perhaps the quickest path to building deep connections. When you are in the presence of a good storyteller, words take you beyond their meanings where you are presented to the world of possibilities. Its like living Sheherazade and hearing her stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I had the pleasure of working for a General Manager that had an amazing storytelling ability. Stories of our customers, competitors, market changes, hopes and dreams were his way of expressing his experiences, his vision and exploring how we could jointly create a new shared reality. For a startup within a large company, these stories are crucial for building a common future and a culture that would sustain itself when the going gets tough.

I can go on and on about the importance of storytelling for the innovation process and the leadership. However, Steve Denning summarizes the power of storytelling quite eloquently in his blog: The Secret Language of Leadership. You can read his summary here.

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. —Siberian Elder

We are our stories. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and can’t do, how our world operates, and we use these stories to internalize what we experience daily through our clouded filters. If you like to know more about how our stories shapes our lives, take a look at Jim Loehr’s book The Power of Story: Rewrite Your Destiny in Business and in Life, and be ready to explore your own story.

I hope you can see the power of stories, their influence and impact in the innovation process as they shape and form our views of the world. I also hope that you recognize the importance of grounding ourselves when it comes to our stories, so that we are seeing them for what they really are. Before you read the rest of the post, take a moment and think about some of your own stories. Then, see if any of the ideas below can help ground them, so that they are more real.

Stories are a form of assumptions. However, before you take apart the whole plot piece by piece, step back and understand the overall theme, the key characters and the point of view needed for success. Evaluate each, and determine which ones need to be treated as assumptions and which ones are just flashbacks in your story that adds flavor and spice. Record each of these assumptions and start your validation and tracking process. Just as an example, an in depth understanding of your ecosystem is mandatory for a story that evolves around making your technology platform pervasive across the board. Some of those players within your ecosystem will be gatekeepers needing to be infiltrated, while others are accessory providers adding sugar and spice and something nice to your product. Make sure you are focusing on the right problems.

Get to know your storyteller. In the real world, our storytellers are a part of the human machinery that operates the thing called the corporate bureaucracy. The story might be great, and might even be true. But, if it doesn’t fit within the decision making structure of this bigger machine, it will never be a legend. So, get to know your storytellers, the structure and the decision making process they operate in. It will give you the opportunity to evolve your story, if it wasn’t quite right to begin with. Things such as, your firm’s hurdle rate, markets you operate in, revenue projections, type of customers you serve, resource and funding requirements will all play into your story somehow.

Everyone loves a good ending. So, understand your key metrics that you need to measure and track. Lets say that your story is referring to a target market size. Recognize that, it is actually talking about the addressable target market of your product, and put actions in place to grow that size overtime. Or, maybe your success truly depends on your customer connection. Then start building your customer relationship model and your brand where the customer is the keystone of your story from day one.

Every story has a point of view and a perspective that changes depending on the person involved. It is great to have different perspectives, angles and takeaways which will improve your creativity and innovativeness. However, you need common vocabulary, understanding and acknowledgement in order to execute “Ready all…Row” command properly. Take your customer knowledge as an example. Good analysis and understanding of your customer data is priceless. Yet, extracting this data unbiasedly, interpreting it appropriately and creating the right actions are your challenge. For more on this, check out How to Hear the Voice of Your Customers: Hone First-Person Intelligence From All Forms of Feedback by David Bean at MarketingProfs (registration might be required to access). So, use your stories well, and create the language and the vocabulary that your culture will understand and embrace.

Your stories have a structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), and so should your innovation process. Milestones, stage-gate process, iterations, … are great way to ground yourself in the story while it evolves. Whatever process you use, make sure you have frequent checkpoints along the path to keep you honest and accountable.

Finally, share your stories with others and allow them to make it their own. Otherwise, when story is over everyone just goes home. Yes, a meaningful story can be inspiring. But for it to ignite the change you are hoping, individuals will need to believe in the story and make it their own for it to be real. In other words, when you pass the baton, someone is there to take and continue from where you left off, because they believe.

And remember: “The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.” (Jim Harrison)

Technorati Tags: stories, storytelling, grounding yourself

Inspired by David Letterman, here is my Top 10 Signs You Need Help With Innovation Management.

Number 10. Just like a neurotic dog chasing its tail, you seem to be caught chasing a tail. You just can’t tell whose tail you are chasing: yours or your competitor’s.

Number 9. Your managements’ version of thriving on chaos feels more like the final hours on Titanic.

Number 8. Your company wrote the book on bureaucracy: the corporate barber offers volume discounts on pointy hairdos.

Number 7. You missed so many product launch windows that you are thinking about installing garage doors.

Number 6. Your product roadmap has taken its cue from NASA. You retired your core product without a replacement in the works, leaving your customers lost in space.

Number 5. Your data sheets read like John Kerry’s campaign speeches…

Number 4. Your employees refer to your idea management system as the roach motel. Ideas check in, and nothing checks out.

Number 3. Your strategic planning process resembles contestant elimination on a reality show.

Number 2. To reduce casualties, you erect a wall with security checkpoints between your R&D and marketing departments. Remember to use the buddy system: no one crosses the line alone!

And finally, Number 1. You are reading this blog

Happy weekend everyone!

It was the best of times… It was the worst of times… No worries, not when we have strategic agility.

Just as strategy’s roots come from the military with Sun Tzu, the foundations of strategic agility are thanks to Napoleon. By incorporating mobility and flexibility (corps d’armée system) combined with strong communication channels (communication backbone of marshals), Napoleon revolutionized the war strategies of his time. He recognized time as the key strategic element for his success, and gained a competitive advantage by identifying ways to dynamically organize and structure his attacks based on the latest information from the battlefront: a classic example of marrying strategic planning with strategic agility.

I don’t need to point out that our business environment has changed. For some, it might even feel a bit like a battlefront. Every day it is increasingly competitive, with an abundance of information available instantly to everyone, where constantly evolving technologies accelerate the commoditization cycle, not to mention we may be at the brink of an economic depression. With that, every strategic plan has the opportunity to become obsolete overnight, along with what was once your competitive advantage and differentiation. As they say, never a dull moment.

How well and how fast you predict, foresee, adjust, adapt and exploit opportunities in this ever changing environment defines your strategic agility quotient. With that, strategic agility is not just a nice to have. It should be embedded into your culture, your business processes and organization, and you should make it a key core competency and capability to enable continuous value creation for your company.

To foster strategic agility, you need to invest in many facets of your organization.

• Management by Objective (MBO): Originally rooted in HP’s management philosophy, MBOs are a great way to align your workforce to the ever-changing needs of your organization.
• Change management: Your efficiency and effectiveness at mastering change initiatives and handling uncertainty will improve your speed of execution and the flexibility of your organization.
• Communication backbone: Everyone in your organization needs to understand your business and the context for its success. Through this, they can understand the key triggers to watch, to act upon and more importantly their role for making it happen.
• Organizational learning: Your culture not only needs to embrace new and different, but also learn from past experiences.
• Organizational processes and structure: Without a well understood set of processes, new information and knowledge will be lost within the organization. Without an organizational structure that can effectively act on new information and knowledge (prioritization of projects, resources, …), one would be left wishing that the information was never observed.
• Organizational talent: With your HR team, you need to grow and recruit the needed talent and experience to execute for the future.
• Environmental scanning: Build in habits and provide tools for your organization to look for future trends. But don’t stop there; encourage communication and incorporation of your findings into future plans and activities.
• Ecosystem capabilities: You need to extend beyond your organization, to your ecosystem, and build capabilities and a communication backbone for faster response: customer relationship management, supply chain, distribution chain, manufacturing, IT, …
• Maintain a healthy balance: As with everything, you need to maintain a balanced view between adaptiveness, responsiveness, speed, cost, quality, functionality, brand and customer care.

Though strategic agility is a 2-word phrase, building the capability and skills to be strategically agile is more complex. Think of it as a pyramid of capabilities that build on each other, extending beyond your organization’s boundaries. You can utilize this framework to assess your strategic agility. Does your organization and your ecosystem have the intent, the focus towards scanning the horizon and beyond, and to what degree and depth? Do you have the right behaviors to support the intention: avoidance of analysis paralysis, creative analysis, systems thinking, the curiosity to explore and understand? Does your organization and ecosystem extend beyond now to understand new patterns formulating on the horizon, and work collectively to decode the hidden messages? Does your culture welcome new ideas and thoughts at every level? Do you have the processes and structures to make the necessary adjustments and strategic course corrections efficiently and effectively?

Strategic agility is not for everyone, at least not to the same degree. But, recognize that globalization and the speed of change is requiring every industry to embed some aspect of strategic agility into its core in order to survive, even if your sole differentiation is based on operational excellence. So, get to know thyself. Analyze your risk profile, communicate your key boundaries for decision making (hurdle rate, % of customers impacted, resources impacted, ..) and define your key change triggers that your organization must be aware of (new technology, new entrant, shifts in the economy, customer trends, …). Whatever your solution, make sure you are not the frog slowly being brought to a boil…

Technorati Tags: strategic agility, fostering strategic agility

I love the replicator technology from Star Trek. A replicator is a machine that can create and dispose of objects. Talk about easy meals and clean-up! Aside from food, the crew also used replicators to produce spare parts and everyday things.

Looks like theReplicating Rapid-prototyper (RepRap) team, which is an open source activity, has the objective to build a printer that can replicate and update itself. In that sense, RepRap is more like the Stargate Replicators, but hopefully not as deadly :). Using polylactic acid (PLA) the RepRap can duplicate itself, its own components, and other 3D objects. Though 3D printing technologies already exists, RepRap is unique as it is completely open source and can replicate itself. Just imagine the next generations’ science fair projects, or upcoming design meetings, or … Just as any innovation, it is the small steps that creates the giant leaps. Now, only if they came up with blog-writer.

Technorati Tags: RepRap

I was recently pinged regarding to the challenges of managing geographically dispersed teams. The wisdom below is based on my experience. How about you, are your observations different?

Overall, I found the leadership and management challenges of managing geographically distributed teams similar to day-to-day leadership challenges. However, distance, cultural diversity and communication differences make it even more challenging to ensure your teams are aligned with your values, processes and are working together towards the same goal with the same level of urgency. In my experience, I learned that I can’t assume that I am understood (even if I hear “yes, I understand” from the other side). I need to make sure to take the time to educate my teams on our processes, explain the context of my decision making process, discuss my values and how we do business in general. Establishing trust and good communication is essential in managing global teams.

Managing people, regardless of location, is a great reminder that I am in the people business, and not necessarily the technology business. With that, once the processes are understood and a few glitches are dealt with, the coordination process becomes smooth. However, when you are dealing with people, you will always have misunderstandings, miscommunications, etc. These tend to cause the coordination problems, and take the most effort to iron out, since you need to solve the root of the problem and not just deal with the symptom (such as coordination issues, misunderstood expectations, etc.)

Culture and language differences are yet another challenge to deal with. It is important to be aware of cultural diversity, as it can cause unnecessary tension and problems. Language and method of communication tends to be the bigger challenge. As an example, e-mail distribution lists are a great way to convey information and can be used heavily for decision making. However, the quantity and verbosity of email can be quite difficult for non-english speakers. So, your main issue is how to structure your communication such that your audience can understand and act on it as you intended.

When dealing with distance, I think there is always an aspect of out of sight, out of mind, which applies to both sides. Distance and time zones contribute to the challenges of communication and trust. In my experience a few hours of difference (such as the case of neighboring US States) wasn’t an issue. However, when you are dealing with differences of culture, holidays, work days (M-F vs. Su-Th) as well as large time zone differences (8+ hrs), you need to be aware of potentially burning out your teams. Active management of these issues (such as rotating meeting hours, face-to-face meeting locations, establishing quiet days, etc.) certainly helps.

I am a believer in over-communicating. I use face to face meetings (crucial, especially with very diverse teams and at the beginning and the middle of projects for best coordination), phone calls for 1:1s (personal updates), conference calls (web, video, phone, …) with my management staff, conference calls with all my teams, emails and instant messaging. Agendas as well as clearly stating the context of the issue and outcomes expected (including any boundaries, etc.) are key to good communication on both sides.

Technorati Tags: global teams, distributed team management

Our world is full of slogans, so why not use them for our customer-focused initiatives? Unfortunately, slogans are just words and they do not provide the essence of what is needed to build a customer-focused organization. Frankly, just saying something doesn’t make it so.

Every business wants happy customers and strives to turn them into best customers: ones that provide repeat business and becomes your biggest advocate. They work to ensure that the correct employees are in customer-facing positions, put in place reward systems to drive their customer-focused strategy and share customer feedback and stories with the organization.

In-depth customer knowledge is also a key requirement for innovation, commercialization and business success. It boils down to how you are contributing to the success and growth of your existing customers, and how you are positioning yourself for the success and growth of your new customers. So, what you share with your employees about your customers is crucial to your customer-focus strategy. Next time, spice up your team meetings with discussions on the following items.

Define your ‘value’ from the perspective of your customer

Businesses exist because they deliver value to customers through their products and services. Your customers do not buy your product; they buy what your product and firm offers them: a solution to a problem, improvement from their current solution, better performance and quality, feeling of comfort, security, image and overall value. The price premium that your brand commands and your competitive advantage is what your customers value and are willing to pay extra for. How are you incorporating that value into your product development process, your firms services and offerings?

Lifetime value of your customers

We are all human, and our natural tendency is to relate, personally and socially, and build lasting relationships. Your customers are not interested in one-time transactions: they want to know that they can trust you, that you will treat them fairly and that there is a mutual respect. At the same time, with globalization and the Internet, they also know that they have choices.

Lets say a new customer walked through your doors. Do you know the average lifetime value of that customer to your business? How about the cost of acquiring that new customer? Think about it, how many new customers has your business lost over few dollars, bad customer service experience, unintuitive website or misrepresentation of your product capabilities? More importantly, how do you share that knowledge with your employees?

Go beyond requirements

It is all too familiar: marketing requirements, functional requirements, architectural requirements, … But customers don’t buy requirements, they buy products and services to get a job done. They measure the benefits of your product and service against how well, how fast, how cheaply, how profitably and how reliably that job is done.

In What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services, Anthony W. Ulwick outlines that for an innovation process to be successful, firms must understand what jobs/activities/tasks are the customers’ pain point, what outcome they are wanting to achieve and the potential constraints that stop the customer from using your product and service. Aligning this knowledge with your firm’s brand value is the foundation for creating loyal customers. To obtain this intimate knowledge, one needs to go beyond the ‘voice of the customer’ and actually walk a mile in your customers’ shoes.

Know how your customers judge your value

Your development team needs to know your product and service’s performance measures to design and test the product against. Your customers may not be able to articulate this beyond some standard measures: Megapixels? I dunno, just want to take quality pictures with an easy to use camera. But, how do you define and measure image quality or ease of use?

I enjoy working with customers throughout the development process. Alpha and beta tests are also great way to collect and understand what customers value, how they use and interact with your product. However, they are late in the development cycle and can be a challenge on schedules. With that, how you incorporate and learn from your customer research is even more important for your learning organization.

Know all your customers

Do you know all your customers? How well do you understand their jobs, pain points and what keeps them up at night? Just think back to the last time you were at Staples looking at purchasing a printer. Even though those products are targeted to consumers, the distribution channel partner is also a customer. The lack of readily available information about these products in the store is amazing, considering how much this literature will help make a sale. Yet, the store should be concerned about making quick sales and providing good customer service without increases in staff or training costs.

The distribution channel partner is an obvious example. Your customers may vary between obvious, unobvious and opportunistic ones. Examples could include the kids that are buying products for their elderly parents or companies that want to utilize your services for their promotional needs, such as advertisement placements on buses. Think about all customers of your products and services, and address and balance their needs and pain points.

Grow with your customers

Life is about change. Stay connected with your customers and continue to deliver value as their needs, desires, values and tasks change and evolve. If you don’t, your competitors will.

Technorati Tags: customer knowledge, innovation

Previously I wrote about Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan’s comments on innovation and how it will impact management practices and organizational design.

Now you can visit HBS Working Knowledge to read and comment about how you see the future of management changing: Where Will Management Innovation Take Us?

It is no doubt that innovation and the drive to continuously innovate is changing the way work is done and where it is done, how groups are led and organized, and how creativity is encouraged and tapped. Technology is also playing a key role in facilitating this situation, whether it is through social networks, forums, virtual meetings, development environments or knowledge management tools.

However, perhaps the biggest challenge to the future of management will be big corporations and all their bureaucratic bloated supporting departments. As important as the management process itself is to innovation, the alignment of the supporting organizational structures, such as the HR department, is just as vital in order to succeed.

Brought to you by the “Rambling Blogs” department of Kitetail.com.

Technorati Tags: future of management, HBS

First of all, this is no ordinary Shopping Guide! It is The Better World Shopping Guide: Every Dollar Makes a Difference which shows that how you spend every dollar can make a difference in the world.

Ellis Jones compiled an easy to use quick reference guide that can help us steer businesses towards becoming more environmentally conscious and socially responsible. The author shares key information and tips for each area where we spend our money, as well as highlighting how companies are doing relative to one another. Though it is not a comprehensive list, it is a great start. Here are some unfortunate tidbits from the book:

• Here is another good reason to switch to fair trade and/or organic chocolate and coffee: child slavery is involved in the production of up to 40% of all chocolate in the industry, and coffee farmers are on the brink of starvation. Nestle is the corporate villain, which is also #6 in the top 10 worst companies.
• Wal-Mart is #3 on the top 10 worst companies list. Their bad deed includes documented exploitation of child labor, and major toxic waste dumping fines.
• General Motors is #1 polluter in the auto industry. I wonder if they would have maintained that #1 position, if they instead invested the $50M in their operations rather than paying the lobbyists.
• You may have noticed the cigarette industry is heavily targeting the developing countries. If you have to smoke, try American Spirit. They use 100% additive-free tobacco, along with other socially conscious activities.
• Who would have thought vitamins and animal welfare would be related? Centrum (Wyeth) is a corporate villain due to numerous federal ethics violations.

You can check out the better world shopper for more top 10s, sources used for compiling this information as well as a downloadable version of this list for your iPod.

So, what does this have to do with Helvetica, a documentary on typography? Before I jump to that, Helvetica is a delightful movie. The documentary gives a different perspective into something we tend to take for granted everyday: fonts and our emotional connection with them. It is all about the world that Helvetica (Neue Haas Grotesk) was created in, how it appealed to modernists, post-modernists and captured the interest of creatives that continuously push the envelope with design.

A company’s brand is its one of most valuable asset. Brand is a set of intangible values, such as beliefs and attitudes, that differentiate a firm’s product or services from another firm’s. For customers, brand highlights the additional value that they will receive from that firm.

Finally, here is the connection. During the documentary, Helvetica was referred to as the font of choice to give brand image the illusion of having social responsibility and accountability, even if that may not be the case. I know I am now paying more attention to the typefaces used in corporate communications. What do you think, is there a connection?

Technorati Tags: the better world shopping guide, Helvetica, brand