Archive for: April, 2010

Declare war on yourself

assumptions

Being unconquerable lies within yourself.

The guys asked me for some blogging tips a few days ago and I posted some at BM that I’m sure will rattle some cages. One of the actions steps at that I recommend at the end of the post is to ‘declare war on yourself’, or more commonly known as .

Assumptions are the shortcuts, rules of thumb, conventional wisdom, common sense, stuff we take for granted, ordinary thinking that as humans we use to get through daily life, which work for awhile, but they soon become stale truths, like weights holding us back from new ways of seeing, thinking and behaving.

Assumptions get us stuck in a never ending loop of repetition, and you know that leads to more of the same.

#Innovation posts of the week: Empathy driven innovation

 

 

IBM: Early failure is a necessary investment in innovation

I’m reading Switch: How to change things when change is hard by the Heath brothers and in one of the middle chapters called Grow your people there’s a very important lesson on the topic of the fear of failure when provoking change. Here are some thoughts:

Since everything is hard before it is easy, in order to create change we have to be able to move people to a different set of behaviors and most of the time this is where the problem exists because people fear situations that are unknown. To keep people motivated in the long road to change, you need to create the expectation of failure.

According to the Heath brothers learning from failure begins with having the right mindset. A person with a is more likely to view failure as learning as opposed to one who has a fixed mindset and prefers routine tasks, therefore we must work to cultivate a growth mindset in your organization.

I think this where it all starts because as humans we’ve been programmed to think that ‘failure is wrong’ when really and so we’re taught to ignore the middle part of the process where all the learning takes place. The middle is the journey, where the ups and downs happen and you need the will to break through.

As the Economist recently mentioned, the key to the success to any change initiative is that first:

 

Leaders of organizations should allow their innovators to be scientists and tell our teams we don’t expect 100 percent success in early experiments. The important thing is to learn from failed experiments early in the process and use those lessons to map out a path to success.

 

For the purpose of credibility here’s a story from the book that I think is worth highlighting:

*Failing is often the best way to learn and because of that early failure is a kind of necessary investment. A famous story about IBM makes the point well. In the 1960’s, an executive at IBM made a decision that ended up losing the company $10 million. The CEO of IBM, Tom Watson, summoned the offending executive to his office at corporate headquarters. The journalist Paul B. Carroll described what happened next:

 

As the executive cowered, Watson asked, “Do you know why I’ve asked you here?”

The man replied, “I assume I’m here so you can fire me.”

Watson looked surprised.

“Fire you?” he asked. “Of course not. I just spent $10 million educating you.”

 

I’m almost finished reading the book and will post any other thoughts I think are worth mentioning.

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A lesson in co-creation

Felt like writing this post because I think it’s pretty awesome.

 

I use Evernote religiously so I was ecstatic to hear that on the EN blog today. Why do this? To improve the product of course. Evernote has some pretty passionate fans (including me!) who care deeply about the product because it’s useful and it’s become part of their daily habits.

It really is like your second brain so who better than the loyal fans to know what might make it a lot better? 

 

 

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phil is done

 

When was the last time you heard a CEO answer people’s questions (all of them!) on a blog and even offer to chat by phone? Not everyday…You see forums, send us an email, a Twitter account, support phone but not the CEO on a ‘let’s improve the product Q&A’ ideation blog post.

 

Takeaway: If you’re a CEO and you’re interested in knowing what your customers think of your product, show it!

Innovation posts of the week: Management innovation at W.L. Gore

Lessons from a Middle-Aged Revolutionary at W.L. Gore &

« Clay Shirky

– PARC blog

– Harvard Business Review

– Harvard Business Review

Experiments – the Key to Innovation – Innovation Leadership Network

– Harvard Business Review

– Harvard Business Review

Beat your competitors by working outside their experience

fire dragon

 What is not different, is not strategic.

This past weekend I went to Ninjutsu camp (Otompo) for two days of training and war. First we train with some training weapons and at night we play war games that are meant to test our creative and strategic thinking as well as our hand to hand combat skills all under the light of the moon.