stargeek
CAMERA'S ROLLINGCAMERA'S
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| If
you're patient, I think I'm now ready to test videoconferencing using
AOL IM, MSN Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger. I picked up the webcam on
the weekend and configured it for these three services. My addresses
are: AOL - DaveLPollard MSN - same as my e-mail address (click on 'E-mail me' link in upper right sidebar) Yahoo - harpoon_dodger My Skype address is davepollard, if you want to test it out (not yet webcam compatible). I will be configuring the webcam for SightSpeed and some of the other tools recommended by readers in the comments to my Help Me Test Desktop Videoconferencing post, as soon as time permits. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 Two weeks ago I reported on the upcoming June 28 Canadian election, and predicted that there would be a Liberal minority government, with the NDP holding the balance of power. Since then, groupthink has taken hold, and the anger that many Canadians feel about the incompetence of the federal Liberals to detect either wasteful spending or the 'sponsorship' fraud by some government workers, plus the anger of many Ontarians about the new Provincial Liberal government's reneging on promises to avoid tax increases, has led another 8% of Canadians to vow not to re-elect them. This 8% swing has been predominantly older men in Ontario, who seem unwilling to believe that the Conservatives are as right-wing as Liberal Prime Minister Martin has portrayed them, and younger people, whose support for the Green Party has significantly increased. The province-by-province projections now stand as follows -- 155 of the 308 seats are needed for a majority:
Next week we'll hear the all-important leader debates, but they are likely to change nothing. The Conservatives are muzzling their own right-wing extremists, who are virulently anti-abortion, gay-hating, anti-gun control, anti-immigation, pro closer ties with the US, anti-Kyoto accord, and militaristic (Stephen Harper, the new Conservative leader and former head of a Western separatist party, wanted Canada in the Iraq war). The Conservative strategists are determined to portray Harper as a moderate, despite the fact that he is on record as having taken right-wing positions on many social, economic and environmental position. If this sounds a lot like Dubya, and the spin doctor white-washing of his extremism reminds you of 'compassionate conservatism' in 2000, it should, because the tactics are the same -- say anything to get elected, and then trot out the real agenda of the people who paid for the campaign. But it's even more frightening than that. Small-c conservatives make up only 30% of Canadians, and the capital-c Conservatives are already above that point, with some of their voters coming from angry liberals. But if the figures above don't change, the Conservatives will get 38% of the seats with 33% of the vote. And the Bloc Québecois, the Québec separatist party that runs candidates only in that province, will get 19% of the seats with only 11% of the vote. Add them together and you get a distortion almost identical to what happened in the US in 2000, where Dubya 'won' with only 46% of the popular vote. If the Conservatives and Bloc combine their seats in a strange-bedfellows anti-federalist coalition, they'll have 57% of the seats with only 44% of the votes, while liberal-centrist parties will have only 43% of the seats, even though they will have received 56% of the votes. There is no other coalition that would have enough seats to form a government. Problem is, this coalition won't hold for more than a few months. The Bloc is a left-wing, Francophone party, liberal on all social, economic and environmental issues. The Conservatives have diametrically-opposed views on every issue but one: their dislike of federalism. The cost of Bloc support would be to grant Québec limited sovereignty, kind of 'independence light'. The very idea of this is repugnant to core Western Conservatives. And the Bloc has already said that it would not support any Conservative government that tried to recriminalize abortion, and has made it clear that it would not tolerate abandoning Canada's support for the Kyoto Accord, or anti-gay laws, both of which are bedrock principles of the Western Conservatives. And Ontario Conservatives would quickly cross the floor to the Liberals to save their political skin if the Bush-style right-wing social agenda of the Western Conservatives was trotted out. The role of the media in the final two weeks of the campaign will be interesting. Conservative media are likely to present Harper as the 'heir-apparent', the surprise winner and a fresh new face for Canada. Liberal media will be torn over whether to simply relate the campaign stories as they are spun out by the parties, or to go behind the scenes and surface what Harper has said, in writing, in past, on many issues he is now trying to paint himself as moderate on. The current Liberal campaign has attempted to do just that, but it has backfired, being portrayed as negative 'US-style' electioneering, sour grapes or desperation politics, so the liberal media could be subject to similar admonishments if they get proccupied with the 'secret agenda' of the Conservatives. But media being what they are, expect Harper, the new frontrunner, to face increasing heat over unanswered questions from his decidedly non-moderate past. Not to mention some of his decidedly wacko neophyte candidates. So what do I think will happen? The Conservatives will win a small plurality, and have to either form a coalition with, or try to manage with the tacit support of, the Bloc Québecois. Paul Martin will resign right after the election, and the Liberals will choose a new leader not tainted by the recent scandals. The Conservatives will start to self-destruct right after the election, with hard-line right-wingers expelled or resigning, and moderates crossing the floor to the Liberals, especially after it selects a new leader. The new government will last 3-6 months, accomplish nothing, and fall when the Bloc Québecois withdraws its support. Then we'll have another election, and perhaps even a third, until the 70% of Canadians with moderate-to-liberal social and political views get a government they can live with. Ontario and Québec have 60% of Canada's population, and no party has ever successfully governed the country without healthy support from both provinces. Stephen Harper is on record as opposing bilingualism, although he is now waffling on what his precise position on this is, which makes him unelectable in Québec. And his previously stated positions on many other issues will, if they become widely known, make him unelectable anywhere. It's going to be messy, and stay that way for quite awhile. And if the Martin Liberals hadn't been so politically stupid, it could all have been avoided. Cartoon by Tom Cheney -- buy his stuff at Cartoon Bank. |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the first part
below. The remaining parts will follow on successive Tuesdays. Introduction: Why I'm Here My modest objective in this presentation is first, to tell you some new, interesting and useful things about innovation, and, second, to persuade you that innovation is the most important determinant of every business' success, and perhaps even the quality of our lives. I want to convince you that in your business, whether it employs one person or one million, innovation is probably the solution to whatever is currently keeping you awake at night -- whether that be sales growth, cost control, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or maximizing shareholder value. And if you, like me, spend some of your sleepless hours worrying about things more altruistic than your personal and business success, I want to convince you that innovation is probably also the solution to most of the problems that have befallen our suffering planet, in part because past innovations have created many of these problems. And finally, if I'm successful in this evangelical task, I want you to leave today not only with renewed hope about the future of your company and our world, but with some new tools to make innovation happen in your business. I would like to ask you to listen to these ideas with an open mind, suspend briefly your disbelief, and give this your full attention. If this was that easy to explain, someone much smarter than I would have done it years ago. One: Learning from our past: How Need Drives Innovation The advent of a new millennium has recently given many business, political and economic thinkers pause to consider what will be, as most put it, the 'Next Big Thing':
Technophiles who favour the Acceleration Model tend to be infatuated with artifacts of the last thirty years: more digital, faster, smaller, lighter. Advocates of the Chaos Model, on the other hand, believe there are no rules for our brave new world of the 21st century. Their advice for business and other leaders is to be opportunistic and think short-term. I lean towards the Evolutionary Model. I believe that using an understanding of the past, with the right perspective, can help businesses anticipate the future with exceptional clarity and probability of success. There are two reasons I hold this belief, and they form the basis for much of the rest of this presentation:
 Figure One: How Fundamental Needs spawn Innovations & Technologies (Adapted from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis) According to this model, innovations like crop cultivation, the printing press, and the harnessing of solar energy, have always arisen in response to an urgent human need -- overcoming the sudden food scarcity after the Ice Age, bringing literacy to the masses, and solving the energy crisis respectively in these three examples. Technologies are applications of these innovations. The intriguing organic-looking ovals for each technology are also from the Credit Suisse Synthesis, which proposes are technologies are best developed using the following process:  Figure Two: Development Process for Technologies (from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis) Let's now take a look at this synthesis model in more detail, to test whether it represents the way in which historical innovations have occurred, and then what this might tell us about innovations of the future. Two: Man's Earliest Innovations: A Brief History of Technology The first humans to walk on our planet, according to most anthropologists, were not the mighty hunters most of us might picture. In fact we were particularly disadvantaged, lacking both keen senses and a hide adapted to changing climates and weather. As a result, early humans were scavengers, ignominiously surviving off the leftovers of creatures with better innate hunting 'equipment'. In the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick & Clarke hypothesize that a carrion bone was the first human tool. Marshall McLuhan explained in his book Understanding Media that this early human was using the bone, this very first tool or technology, as an extension of his hand, giving it strength, reach and durability his hand alone did not have. McLuhan argued that all technologies are extensions of the human body and the human senses, and it is these technologies that have allowed the poor, badly-pelted, sensory-deprived human species to buck Darwin's odds and survive. So picture our poor shivering proto-human looking among the bones of a wolf's recent meal for new tools beside the greasy bone, and thinking, in true McLuhanesque and 20th century economics terms: 'If the bone as an extension of my hand helps me to compensate for my competitive disadvantage in the hunter-gatherer marketplace, why can I not use other tools similarly? Then, lacking the appropriate scientific training but still intoxicated over his first innovation, he or she comes across a dead wolf and considers the following applications of this technological insight:
Without animal domestication and crop cultivation, we as a species might well not have survived to come up with newer and more sophisticated innovations like the wheel, paper and the computer. Three: Six Principles about the Innovation Process The first humans used precisely the process shown in Figure Two to develop and 'commercialize' the technology applications of the innovations of animal domestication and crop cultivation. It is the same commercialization process taught in business schools today. However, the success of the process is only as good as the idea, the innovation, that lies at its front end. Business schools are actually very good at explaining the recipe, but they, and most educational and business institutions, are absolutely terrible at teaching people how to find the essential new ingredients -- the 'grey matter' at the left side of Figure Two, the ideas & innovations that make the recipe work. The problem isn't a scarcity of good ideas either -- it is the lack of rigour and investment in infrastructure to surface, capture, develop and qualify new ideas prior to commercialization. Figure Two also recognizes that many innovations and technologies are derived from other innovations and technologies, and often come from applying an idea or a technology from one application domain, or from nature, to an unrelated application domain. The BBC/Discovery program Connections made this point very powerfully, and its author James Burke continues to develop both examples of such non-obvious connections, and exercises to help us learn to discover more -- in essence, to become more innovative. Burke's latest book explains how a problem with the irrigation of Italian gardens led to the invention of the carburetor, for example. Furthermore, Figure Two acknowledges the importance of the story in the successful commercialization of innovations. It is hard to pick up a business book or attend a business conference these days without being lectured on the importance of story-telling, but the idea is neither new nor complicated: Stories convey the context for the application, they explain how it can be used in the user's or developer's day to day life. Knowledge transfer is an essential precondition to commercialization. The easiest way to transfer knowledge, i.e. to explain or persuade, is to do so in a way that lets the learner internalize what they are hearing i.e. to fit it into their own mental models of how things work. And the simplest way to enable internalization is by telling a story, be it a Utopia or Future State Vision, a parable with a built in lesson, or a simple recounting of processes and events that lets the learner relive the teacher's experience as if it were their own. From all this we can derive six basic principles about the Innovation Process (again, the names given to them are mine), to add to the two espoused earlier about cultural resistance to innovation:
|
 I have just updated
the full Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by
clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my
e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject
of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and
inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Schnauzer Logic
#3435
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post
below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.Connecting the Dots 3437 Vanitas Personae 3446 Cassandra Predicts 3456 Two Fawn's American Indian Movement Pages 3467 Mindboggling Adventure Tales 3488 Bartholomew's Notes on Religion 3494 Saunter & Repose 3517 Avon Calling 3522 Bill Penrose's Radio Weblog 3530 The Cassandra Frost Collection 3531 Lumberg Boinked Her 3552 Screwing the Pooch 3557 Poli Sigh 3566 The Outer Edge 3573 Matriarch 3577 Oh My Stars 3580 The Poche 3591 Bob Rich's Weblog 3592 Douglas Moran's Radio Weblog 3597 XXX Rated Realist 3602 Rich Whiteley's Radio Weblog 3605 Manhattan Waiter 3612 The Grace Pages 3622 Lucy 3627 Vietnam Moving Wall in Worland WY 3628 Ashent TwentyThree's Radio Weblog 3632 What's in Scott's Head 3635 Monkey Labs 3637 Carnival Knowledge 3641 Infidelia 3744 1.21 Giggawats 3746 Docta Puella 3751 Enough 3752 Steve Simard's Radio Weblog 3753 Heart Attack Diaries 3757 |
 Time
for another of life's imponderables. Both in Canada and the US, family
farmers and small business people have, in recent years, consistently
voted conservative, and show every intention of doing so again this
year. This makes absolutely no sense: Most farm states and provinces
are net recipients of government largesse (i.e. they receive in
equalization payments and services more than they pay for, subsidized
by the more urban and more liberal states and provinces). And even
though in the past 20 years conservative governments have spent more
than liberal governments, that money has largely gone to tax cuts for
the very rich and defense spending, creating huge deficits that small
farmers and small business people have to repay in taxes, and receive
almost no benefit from.I talked to a few local farmers and small business people to try to find out why they vote conservative. This small sample may not be representative, but what they told me was:
In Canada, which has five parties to choose from, the 'first past the post' electoral system undoes the benefits of party pluralism. With the three small parties all socially liberal, Canadian liberals are forced to 'vote strategically', which means voting for the Liberal Party instead of their real choice, the NDP or the Green Party, to prevent the 30% of Canadian conservatives, who have only one voting choice, from stealing the election. We'll find out in ten days whether they did so or not. Alas, both the US Republican and the Canadian Conservative parties are consistently and heavily propped up by small farmers and small businesspeople. Without that support, these parties would be history. It doesn't make any sense, but it's the reality that both right-wing parties are counting on for election success this year. It's a brilliant con. |
 Graham Westwood of ProCarta gave me a copy of Bill Jensen's Simplicity, a book that claims
most business problems are a result of unnecessarily complex
decision-making processes. I recently
wrote
that if Knowledge Management were relabeled Work Effectiveness
Improvement, both the requirements of the job and the customers'
expectations would be much clearer, and we might finally get the job
done. Jensen's book offers a prescription for WEI.Jensen's thesis is that poor decision-making is the root cause of business error and ineffectiveness, and his diagnosis of the four causes for it is shown at right. Most employees, he says, want to do good work, but are impeded by these four causes, which produce unnecessary complexity in each of our jobs. I concur with this diagnosis, though I'm not sure large organization have either the capacity or the will to fix these four problems. At the individual and team level, Jensen suggests* five behaviour or learning changes that could alleviate these problems:
These are useful suggestions for improving work effectiveness and hence decision-making in organizations, but none of them is new. Those that would take up WEI (or KM) as a career need to understand why these techniques have not worked in the past, before they attempt to implement them in their organizations. In many companies, both employees and managers raise their eyebrows at 'soft skills' courses like time management, effective communication and story-telling. We know how to do that, they will say, the problem is more systemic, more entrenched than merely teaching common-sense skills can hope to solve. These critics are half-right. Many problems in business are structural, strategic, or systemic, and raising people's hopes by suggesting that these basic work management techniques are suddenly going to work bottom-up when they didn't work before, will merely create disappointment. Excessive size and hierarchy, poor managers, and inappropriate success measures (that reward executives more for cutting staff than for making staff more effective, for example) are at the heart of much work ineffectiveness, and need very different solutions. But these critics are also half-wrong. Each of us today is increasingly in charge of our own careers, our own jobs, and hence our own work effectiveness. The five skills listed above are critical skills for every entrepreneur and every front-line worker, and we should each ensure we have these 'core competencies'. If the big, cumbersome organizations we work for do not allow these skills proper exercise, then the answer is either to leave them or reform them, not to revel in our ineffectiveness and just blame management (even when they are to blame). The remainder of Jensen's book prescribes some higher-level organizational 'disciplines' that can enable improvements in work effectiveness:
Nevertheless, this book provides some of the much-needed definition for WEI, which I believe will be the next wave of organizational change, and will accomplish much of what reengineering and knowledge management failed to do. The #1 purpose of management must become empowering people to know and do what's important to achieve the organization's goals, and enabling them to stop doing the other stuff that, today, takes up most of their time. * Jensen uses different words for these, and for many of the key ideas in this book. As much as I liked his messages, I found sometimes his choice of labels for his key concepts confusing. |
| A
friend of mine in executive recruiting is looking for a substantial
number of consultants in, believe it or not, business process
re-engineering. Requirements include a good general knowledge of the
discipline, willingness to travel very extensively, and an ability to
deal comfortably with senior executives. The positions are mostly
full-time, starting ASAP, and the work is all over North America.
Salary is in the high five figures Canadian. Probably of greatest
interest to the young and unattached, but I thought I'd ask anyway. If
you're interested, e-mail me your CV, any
requirements/conditions, and any companies you don't want to receive your info.
|
 I have very limited patience with those who deny human responsibility for upper-atmosphere pollution and ozone depletion, or deny their impact on the geothermal dynamics of our planet, or the potentially disastrous consequences of the resultant climate instability on Earth's ecosystems. To me there is no intellectual difference between the Lomborgians who steadfastly refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence of human-caused global warming from scientists of unquestioned reputation, and the neo-Nazi holocaust denyers of Ernst Zundel's ilk. Unfortunately, the Lomborgians are heavily financed in their campaign of misinformation by Big Oil and other corporate oligopolies, who bear a disproportionate responsibility for global warming. Sooner or later they will, like Big Tobacco, be called to account financially and criminally for their negligent actions and fraudulent misrepresentations. In the meantime it has been expedient for George Bush, who received a huge proportion of his campaign moneys from these liars, to reward their thinly-disguised bribes by undoing almost all of the US environmental regulations and enforcement instituted by previous governments to try to limit atmospheric damage, and to exercise political muscle to prevent the ratification of the Kyoto Accord. By the time these regulatory reversals and delays are rectified, it may be too late for our planet.    Should you have to deal with these dangerous idiots, here is a short list of resources that you can call upon to understand and/or dispense with their ludicrous arguments quickly: US NOAA synopsis of US scientists' consensus on the causes and consequences of global warming Bill McKibben's article in the UK journal Granta explaining the psychology, and cynical political expediency, of denial NASA's studies of urban microclimates and how they contribute to local climate change and instability Union of Concerned Scientists' consensus on global warming and warning< /a> on the Bush regime's distortion of scientific research to forward its own political agenda Fortune Magazine's article on the possibility and chilling implications of global warming producing sudden drastic climate shifts Blogger Carpe Datum's brief but thorough explanation of the science behind global warming, and the reasoning behind scientists' connecting it to human activity and worrying about the risks of resultant instability (it includes the charts above) Each of the above sources have links and references to further studies. |
 My daughter spends much
of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her
hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share
your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book. Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence. It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female. They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words. Scrapbooks are all about composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about, and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on the usual 'bare' family tree. I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies, but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away. And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard on the eyes could browse. Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook (besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes, fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain. |
 Last year I waded through Jeremy Rifkin's The Hydrogen Economy and wrote a blog post that explained what's promising about hydrogen as a fuel, and its two major drawbacks. I used two charts, reproduced here, to explain how it works and what's holding it back. The chart above shows the energy economy we have today. Red boxes are non-renewable, polluting and environmentally damaging energy sources and green ones are clean and renewable. Whether we use hydrocarbon fuels or electricity to light, heat and cool our homes, it's likely that non-renewable, damaging sources are producing it. Our cars likewise burn fossil fuels, and although hybrid cars are certainly an improvement, they still depend on fossil fuels to create ('reform') the hydrogen that the fuel cells convert into electricity. The chart below shows the energy economy in twenty years, if we can solve the two major dilemmas of the hydrogen economy.  Under this scenario, hydrocarbons are replaced by solar, wind and other renewable, non-polluting, non-damaging energy sources. The central hydro utility is replaced by a local energy co-op, which produces energy for your community from its own solar collectors, wind turbines etc. The compressed hydrogen used to power next-generation pure hydrogen vehicles is produced from some of this electricity, and distributed through local service stations. The excess electricity produced by these cars can be used to provide light, heat and cooling to the home or sold back to the local energy co-op. The cars themselves will have no engine, no pedals, clutch or gearshift, make no noise and produce no harmful exhaust. The entire process will require no burning, no pollution, and no grid at the mercy of multinationals and sheikhs. What are the two catches? First, the current cost of electricity produced from non-renewable sources is very expensive, and the process is cumbersome and not yet terribly efficient. Even more problematic is the $100 billion cost of building the infrastructure to generate, distribute and store the electricity and hydrogen, obsolescing a comparable amount of existing energy infrastructure, and probably causing some consternation to and resistance from the owners of that infrastructure.  Yesterday the University of New South Wales
predicted that by 2010 a new generation of photovoltaic
'harvesters' based on titanium dioxide ceramics will both collect
solar energy and
use that energy to produce compressed hydrogen from water. A 10m
square
array, such as that depicted at right, mounted on just half the
households in a sun-rich country like Australia, could produce the
entire country's energy.This would allow an even more distributed, decentralized model than that depicted above: With each household able to produce its own energy, the local energy co-op might be nothing more than a virtual market, and the need for local service stations selling or even producing compressed hydrogen would be obviated. We'd all change from consuming to producing energy. The university has even higher hopes for the titanium dioxide technology behind this advance: They believe it will allow innovations in other areas such as "water purification, anti-viral and bacteriacidal coatings on hospital clothing and surfaces, self-cleaning glasses, and anti-pollution surfaces on buildings and roads". Anyone know anything about titanium? I know it's a metal, but is it plentiful and easy and clean to extract? Is it recyclable? Durable? Toxic in landfill sites? I sense a bit of grandstanding and breast-beating by UNSW here. Is there another catch they're not telling us about? |
 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic
goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how
to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and
a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising. One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM. In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories. Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan. Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information. And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible. I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does. I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about? |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the third part
below. The first part, which reviewed the history of human innovation
and technology, is here,
the second part, which described the current environment for
innovation, is here. Six: Prescription for an Innovative Organization  The
first four years of the century have seen some serious setbacks in
business innovation. The corporatist-backed Bush administration has
introduced legislation to reduce corporate liability to consumers, and
has been extremely lax in enforcing social and environmental laws.
Organizations like the RIAA and Nike have showed that the courts will
allow large corporations great latitude to sue customers (including
infringing on their privacy rights) and to lie to customers in their
advertising (about sweatshop operations, offshoring etc.) Corporations
like Enron have abused public trust and destroyed thousands of
families' livelihoods and life savings. And massive defense and
security expenditures have siphoned off funds that might have been
invested in innovation, and have made corporations and lenders nervous
about any investment while governments and corporations are so
seriously overextended and exposed to interest rate fluctuations. The
result is a climate of great animosity between corporations and
customers, and unprecedented risk aversion.At the same time, recent surveys indicate a growing corporate awareness that "you cannot cut (or offshore) your way to greatness", that the limit to improving profitability by reducing costs and margins has now more or less been reached, and that innovation must again move to the forefront if corporations are to have any hope of sustaining that profitability. So corporations are looking for low-cost, effective ways to develop new products, new processes, new delivery channels and new technologies that will meet important human needs, provide real value to customers, and be affordable by those customers. This challenge occurs at a time when the distribution of wealth among customers is massively skewed, both within and between nations, towards a tiny elite, when many governments and most corporations and individuals are buried under a crushing debt load, and when the need for innovation to solve critical environmental, social and political problems has never been higher. Simply put, we are living in an age when we cannot afford innovation, and cannot afford to be without it. Perhaps the most critical innovation need therefore is for creative mechanisms to finance, price and pay for the costs of innovation itself. Funding, pricing, and cost management are now inseparable parts of the innovation process. The prescription I propose draws on a wide variety of innovation processes that have been advanced by thought leaders on the subject, especially during the 1990s when the appetite for investment in innovation peaked, including Peter Drucker's, Cap Gemini's, Credit Suisse's, Gary Hamel's, and others listed in the bibliography below. This prescription draws as well from several innovation processes that I am personally aware of from my years working with Ernst & Young and its clients, and some lessons from how nature, which has been innovating since long before we appeared on the planet, goes about it. This prescription has eighteen steps in eight stages illustrated in the chart above: Listen, Understand, Organize, Create, Experiment, Listen Again, Design, and Implement. The three stages shown in blue -- Understanding, Organizing and Implementing -- are analytical processes, well-suited to the left-brained deductive thinkers who predominate in most organizations. The three stages shown in green -- Creating, Experimenting, and Designing -- are creative processes, better suited to right-brained inductive thinkers who are relatively scarce in most organizations. The two Listening stages shown in red are communication processes, that need to involve customers and other stakeholders, and everyone in the organization involved in the innovation process. Assigning (or contracting) the right people for each stage in the process is essential to its effectiveness, and to its affordability. If it's done well, it can draw on the strengths of everyone inside and outside the organization who has a stake in a successful innovation effort. Here are the eighteen steps. They are in reasonably sequential order, but are somewhat recursive: For example, as part of creating alternative solutions (step 12) it may be necessary to go back and scan for some additional ideas (step 1). Who should do each step depends to some extent on the industry and size of your organization: Large organizations may benefit from having a dedicated Innovation Team responsible for this, while in a very small organization it may be a scheduled part-time task of the whole management team, drawing as well on the diverse backgrounds and ideas of an informal Advisory Board. Listen 1. Listen broadly for ideas: Appoint your Innovation Team and have them set up an 'environmental scan' that systematically looks for innovations and connections not only in your industry but also outside it, outside your country, outside of business entirely. Have the Team read about, learn about, and meet with people from the broadest possible spectrum of human enterprise and natural discovery. Subscribe to journals like Innovation, and the RSS feeds of periodicals and websites that report ideas and new technologies from a wide range of disciplines. Reward members of the Team for serendipitous readings and meetings, debrief with them promptly and regularly, filter, refine and inventory their ideas and learnings for consideration at the Understand, Create and Design stages of the innovation process. Inputs: readings, newsfeeds, conferences, interviews, meetings. Outputs: a manageable inventory of ideas and insights (categorized and contextualized appropriately so that they can be simply understood and practically applied). 2. Listen to 'pathfinder' customers, competitors, and colleagues: Plug yourself in to the 'voice of the customer'. Set a minimum time quota for everyone in your organization to spend face-to-face with business customers, or with customers' customers or end consumers. Identify 'pathfinder' customers -- those who are most attuned to their organization's future direction and its need to change. Employ a 'Think the Customer Ahead' program that engenders effective listening, elicitation skills, story-telling skills, and creative thinking skills , a capacity explained in Imparato & Harari's book Jumping the Curve. Often the customer isn't able to articulate his or her needs in a way that lends itself to quick technology solution development. Listening to the customer is an iterative process, that entails learning about the customer's business, understanding the things that keep them awake at night, suggesting a lot of 'what if's', proffering opportunities, points-of-view and possibilities, not just asking baldly about needs and offering off-the-shelf solutions. Connect with customers indirectly as well, using all the media at your disposal -- phone surveys, e-mail, website surveys, customer satisfaction surveys (with lots of open-ended questions), self-diagnostic tools, videoconferences, etc., to capture as much information as you can about your customers, their customers, and their markets. Inputs: conversations, interviews, surveys. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories, industry future state visions, five-forces and SWOT analyses. 3. Listen to the front lines: Talk with the people who hear directly from customers and other stakeholders every day -- people in sales, customer service, even delivery and reception staff. Ask them what they're hearing, and what they think most needs improvement or rethinking. Create 'space' -- physical and electronic -- where everyone in the organization can surface, discuss and advance problems, needs and ideas collaboratively. Let anyone 'subscribe' to the inventory of news and ideas created in step 1 above. Consider maintaining a running list of the company's Top 10 Challenges to encourage focus and creative thought from everyone in the organization. Make sure top-level executive sponsorship for innovation is visible to everyone on the front lines. Give people time off their 'regular work' to focus on organized innovation projects, and tools and process guidance to use that time effectively. Reward front-line people for new product and other innovative ideas that they surface from their conversations with customers and others. Inputs: conversations, idea & collaboration spaces, interviews. Outputs: needs, ideas, stories. Understand 4. Understand who your actual and potential customers are: Study companies like The Body Shop that know their customers, their needs, their buying preferences and criteria intimately. These are companies that spend a lot of face time with customers and have rigorous processes in place to capture what they learn, probe what they need, and explore the potential market for new innovations. And identify and get out and meet with potential customers as well, to understand why they're not already customers and what could change that. And then have your Innovation Team cast a wider net and ask who might be customers that are currently not served by either your company or your competitors. Learn the lessons of Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution -- how disruptive innovations can (sometimes inadvertently) transform whole industries, and how that presents your company with both threats and opportunities that could completely change the profile or even definition of your customers. Inputs/Outputs: list of actual and potential customers and what they currently buy, could be buying, and will and won't be buying in the future, and why. 5. Understand and respect what end-consumers want and need: and based on that 6. Understand what immediate customers will need: Start with the end-consumer of your products and services, and the end-consumer of the products of your immediate customers. Their buying patterns, needs and preferences will determine the success of your customers, and that will in turn determine their buying patterns, needs and preferences. The end-consumer has the ultimate power, and, unlike corporations', their buying decisions are based on broader and more subjective criteria than business need and affordability. They buy things they want, not just things they need. If you sell to the auto industry, you need to understand why consumers, against all logic, buy SUVs. And if your company is making money from sweatshop labour or old growth forests, better come clean now. Business needs to end its abusive relationship with consumers -- overcharging them, misleading them, suing them, and selling them inferior, imported merchandise and services. Once consumers realize their true marketplace power, they will get back at adversarial suppliers with a vengeance. Business needs to respect them, respond to them, and be responsible members of the communities in which they operate. The Reputation Economy isn't here yet, but it's coming. If you cause consumers to dislike you or distrust you, you'll soon be dead. Inputs/Outputs: current state analysis and future state vision of wants and needs for both current and future immediate customers, and end-consumers, and a resultant future state vision and emerging needs profile for your industry. 7. Understand why these wants and needs aren't already met: Here's the hard part. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. You know there are wants and needs that aren't being met. The challenge is not to throw in the towel when you find out why. The technology doesn't exist? The solution would be very costly or risky to develop? The solution is not affordable to customers? The solution is too radical for customers to accept or too complex for them to understand? The organization currently lacks the capacity or competencies to produce the solution? That's what innovation is about. Take up the challenge with your eyes open about what must be overcome, but take up the challenge. If it was easy someone else would have already done it. Inputs/Outputs: list of challenges. Organize 8. Organize those with a stake in solving the problem: Now you know what needs to be done, the next step is to organize the troops. Who can help solve the problem, assess the alternatives, provide the needed resources? Outputs: project team member list, including 'pathfinder' customers and other outsiders. (Note that the project team is responsible for solving a specific problem or need, while the Innovation Team has oversight over the entire innovation effort of the organization -- they aren't the same group). 9. Organize the program for solving the problem: There are a lot of techniques and methods that you can use to break through a problem and come up with solutions. The bibliography below is replete with them. In my experience, creative minds need a very broad framework (schedule, budget, high-level process) and a lot of freedom to figure out how to solve the problem within that framework. Self-organizing, self-managed innovation project teams seem to work well in some organizations but not in others. If you insist on imposing more discipline on the process, more hoops to jump through, control points and early-stage go/no-go filters, make sure the people you're imposing it on see the value in these constraints, and that they don't squeeze the boldest and potentially most successful ideas out in the process. Outputs: project schedule, budget, program. 10. Organize the resources needed to solve the problem: The project team needs sufficient tools and knowledge to be able to understand the problem, the customer need, and the variables that could impact the potential solutions. Inputs: all the Outputs from steps 1-7 above, redrafted into a cogent and digestible form. Create 11. Create an environment and capability for innovation: Give the Innovation Team and the project teams permission to fail, and teach them how to fail early and inexpensively. Prevent executives from pushing their 'pet' projects to the detriment of others. Don't let the 'black hats' deep-six good, hairy, audacious ideas prematurely, and ensure that 'black hat' behaviours are not rewarded by senior management. Help the team avoid slipping into excessive caution or incrementalism. Keep the marketing group from unduly influencing the process with antiquated ideas for 'creating market demand' and launching products with press releases and self-serving promotional and advertising campaigns -- In the emerging customer-driven market these techniques will no longer make a mediocre product a success. Provide rewards and incentives for team members, and for other contributors to the innovation effort. Don't tolerate hoarding of ideas and knowledge, or inter-department 'charges' that block knowledge transfer and cross-functional collaboration. Share credit for good ideas and successes, and don't make innovation an area of internal competition. Help bright, creative, quiet people find their voice, and let people promote 'crazy' ideas without fear of ridicule. Teach the Innovation Team and the project teams (and others in the organization who show interest) techniques that will enhance their creativity and improve the innovation process, and give them time and resources to discover other techniques and try them out. Invest adequate, patient capital and resources for innovation. Give ideas sufficient time to find their market but don't throw good money after bad, no matter how well-intentioned. Understand sunk costs and learn from failures. Consider letting those involved in the innovation 'invest' personally in return for a share of the ultimate revenues or profits: Having some 'skin in the game' can be very motivating and empowering. Inputs: time, training, tools, space, sponsorship, leadership and resources. Outputs: people who are inspired, capable and encouraged to contribute productively to the innovation effort. 12. Create lots of alternative solutions: Don't put everything at risk on one option. Use scenario planning and other techniques to identify and assess alternatives. Don't reject the really far-out alternatives prematurely -- cost/risk/benefit decisions usually can't be properly made until the customers have had the chance to say their piece again in step 15 below. Outputs: alternative solutions. Experiment 13. Experiment: Try many things, learn fast from failures, tinker, iterate, combine, transfer: Try several alternatives simultaneously in different markets to speed up the assessment process. Use rapid prototyping and other iteration techniques to expose as many alternatives to the market as possible. Outputs: test results. Listen Again 14. Listen to potential customers and help them imagine: Use prototypes and stories to make the innovative product, service, channel or technology as concrete as possible. Beware customers' propensity to say 'yes' at this stage when there's no required commitment. Go back to what you learned from customers in steps 1-7 and recite what you heard back to the customers for confirmation, explaining how the innovation addresses the need articulated by the customers. Listen objectively for confirmation or dissonance. Outputs: customer evaluations 15. Listen to acceptance criteria -- the ‘if’s: If the product appears to meet the need, the next task is to assess the customers' buying criteria: price and affordability, convenience, options, delivery time, upgradability etc. Some of these criteria may be show-stoppers that will require re-invention or other creative brainstorming, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: customer buying criteria 16. Listen to ‘what could go wrong’: Here's where you let the 'black hats' say their piece: What competitive threats exist or could arise? Is the innovation vulnerable to disruptive innovation from unexpected sources? Are there unforeseen production, quality control, political, regulatory, financial, marketing, or servicing landmines? What's the shelf-life? Could it become a commodity prematurely? Will it be prohibitively expensive to produce or to buy? Will it cannibalize existing product sales? Is it a strategic fit for the organization? Some of these 'what could go wrongs' may require re-invention or other creative resolution by the project team, while others may be able to be addressed in the design stage below. Outputs: list of threats and risks, and resolution plan. Design 17. Design: consider customer-valued attributes, cost, intuitive ease of use, ease of change, ease of enhancement: The greatest idea in the world can still be torpedoed by bad design. The designer has to be told, in no uncertain terms, what attributes are important to the customer, how much at most the solution can cost, and the trade-off between ease-of-use and power. Technology products especially are often over-engineered because additional functions and features are easy and inexpensive to add, but they add complexity disproportionate to the benefits of the additional functionality, often to the point of turning off potential customers. And in this age of constant upgrades and inter-operability requirements, the solution must be easy to change, redesign and enhance. Inputs: specifications based on Outputs from steps 12-16 above. Outputs: completed designs. Implement 18. Make the final go/no-go decision, then implement: If there are still several alternatives on the drawing board, whittle them down to a manageable number. If necessary, send the idea back for reinvention (step 11), re-testing (step 13) or redesign (step 17). If the previous steps have been done properly, this step should be the easiest. Once the decision has been made to go, the set-up, production, viral marketing, sales, distribution, employee and user training, partnering, after-sales service, success measurement and continuous improvement should be problem-free, since the 'what could go wrong' possibilities have already been considered and addressed, and people from all functional areas of the organization should have been involved and consulted during the Create and Design stages. Seven: Applying the Prescription: Some Examples To give you a flavour for how this prescription could work in practice, here are eight fundamental business problems from different industries, and some innovations that have recently been (or are currently being) successfully commercialized to solve them. In each case, the solution shown could reasonably have been derived using the principles and process in the prescription above:
Conclusion This presentation was itself the result of addressing an unmet need: After reading dozens of books on innovation, I was unable to find one source that explained in clear terms what innovation is, in a business context, conveyed the urgent need for businesses to become more innovative, and provided an actionable prescription for doing so. This paper was initially developed to provide the Core Innovation Team of Ernst & Young with background on the history, current state and leading practices in business innovation, and I am now using it to develop part of a core curriculum on entrepreneurship, of which innovation is a critical element. I hope this analysis has given you a better understanding of the subject and its importance, and some useful tools and ideas that you can use to make your organization more innovative as well. I would welcome the opportunity to continue the discussion on this subject, by e-mail or through the comments thread below. You can find more of my writings on business innovation in this index. While I'm optimistic that this prescription will work within business and other organizations, large and small, I am less convinced that it will work to solve some of the more deep-seated human needs and inexorable problems that plague us today, such as global warming, pollution, the energy crisis, biodegradation, endemic war, violence, mental illness and disease, animal cruelty, urban sprawl and decay, crime, unemployment, and the inequitable distribution of resources, income, wealth and power. While the process should work in principle, it is unlikely that this process can be followed with sufficient rigour or resources without (a) a willingness by governments to spend much more money (paid for by taxes) to solve these problems, (b) a political will to solve such problems creatively and by consensus, rather than leaving it to private interests to address them or dealing with them by brute force, and (c) a much greater awareness, commitment and sense of responsibility by the body politic of the urgency and opportunity to solve these problems. But just as business will be driven once again to invest in innovation in the search to sustain profitability, it is likely that private citizens and public institutions will ultimately be driven to invest together in innovation in the search for a liveable, sustainable world. The process they then use will probably look a lot like this prescription. Bibliography
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