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Quotable Quotes: Of Innovation and Innovators

Yesterday you heard the stories of five innovators, so today I thought we would look at some of the things that have been said about innovation and by innovators.

Just so we are all on the same page, let’s start with Theodore Levitt’s definition, “CREATIVITY is thinking up new things. INNOVATION is doing new things.”

Not that innovation is always welcome—never has been, never will be.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky knew that when he said, “Innovators and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.”

You know the old saying, ‘if you aren’t moving forward you’re going backwards’?

Francis Bacon knew it well and warns all of us, “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”

The how of innovation has changed radically over the years, but one thing hasn’t changed. True innovation isn’t something about which you can ask for suggestions. As Steve Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs

To most people innovation is everything. They can’t wait for the latest version, the newest item, the trendiest trend, the bleeding edge, but not everyone feels that way (I don’t).

I tend to the view of Coco Chanel, “Innovation! One cannot be forever innovating. I want to create classics.”

That’s why I’m known as a digital dinosaur.

stockxchng image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/696902

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Expand Your Mind: Creativity, Innovation and a Warning

Are you middle-aged? Or wonder what you will be like when you are? Then I have great news for you. Creativity and thinking skills—new brain studies show that middle-aged brains are excellent, making new connections and perking along at their prime in lots of areas.

Inductive reasoning and problem solving — the logical use of your brain and actually getting to solutions. We get the gist of an argument better. We’re better at sizing up a situation and reaching a creative solution.

Creativity is a subject that has always fascinated. Why could Rembrandt create magic with a brush while others produced nothing? Many people write, but how many Shakespears has the world produced? What is the difference between them? Perhaps new research will offer some insight.

“Creativity is kind of like pornography — you know it when you see it,” said Rex Jung, a research scientist at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. Dr. Jung, an assistant research professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico, said his team was doing the first systematic research on the neurology of the creative process, including its relationship to personality and intelligence.

Creativity often leads to some kind of innovation, but it doesn’t lend itself to groupthink. As I’ve frequently written, creativity happens in those long, silent times when your mind is free to roam. New research shows that this is true.

To come up with the next iPad, Amazon or Facebook, the last thing potential innovators need is a group brainstorm session. What the pacesetters of the future really require, according to new Wharton research, is some time alone. …a hybrid process — in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers — resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.

It was so-called financial innovation that brought down the global economy. Five years before it happened Warren Buffett called derivatives “financial weapons of mass destruction,” but four years before that Peter Drucker condemned that kind of financial innovation.

In a piece he penned in 1999, “Financial Services: Innovate or Die,” he frowned on the kind of transactions that have done such terrible damage to Goldman’s reputation and, more important, to the world economy. Since the 1970s, he wrote, “the only innovations” among banks “have been any number of allegedly ’scientific’ derivatives.

“But these financial instruments are not designed to provide a service to customers,” Drucker continued. “They are designed to make the trader’s speculations more profitable and at the same time less risky—surely a violation of the basic laws of risk and unlikely to work. In fact, they are unlikely to work better than the inveterate gambler’s equally scientific system for beating the odds at Monte Carlo or Las Vegas.”

Finally, a public service announcement from me to you. No matter how openly you live your life in these days of social networking, I doubt you would post your tax returns of medical records online, let alone send them directly to the bad guys.

But that is exactly what happens when you use a public copier or return a leased one. A decade ago I learned that digital copiers are essentially computers, complete with hard drive, and every document copied is saved on that drive and readable with software that can be downloaded free on the Net. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe CBS News.

Flickr photo credit to: pedroCarvalho on flickr

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Ducks in a Row: How to Kill Creativity

Youngme Moonm, the Donald K. David Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, created The Anti-Creativity Checklist, a wonderfully irreverent video incorporating every cliché, past and present, used to kill creativity.

All around us people kill creativity through their frequent, unconscious use, as shown in a quote from last Thursday’s post by Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who said, “…no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when you could be throwing your money away?”

Not doing something new because there is no proof that it will work is number five in this video by Youngme Moon, a business professor at Harvard Business School.

Which have you heard recently in your workplace?

Which have you used?

Did their use kill creativity or just put it on hold?

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Image credit: Svadilfari on flickr and Youngme Moonm on Harvard Business Review

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Leadership’s Future: Teaching Teachers

Today’s post will be relatively short, because I want you to take time to read a NY Times article called Building a Better Teacher.

Education is an industry and from any viewpoint, it’s obvious that American education is in trouble—poor quality, low productivity, enormous turnover and bad press.

There is a raging argument about who are responsible—politicos (who hold the purse strings), administrators or frontline workers, i.e., teachers.

There is a move to shutdown underperforming plants and fire those frontline workers en masse.

Out with the old ad in with the new; the assumption being that “new” always means “better.”

In education as in any industry there are innovators and traditionalists—think Steve Jobs and the executives of the music industry.

Innovators: Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Michigan State’s school of education assistant professor, part time math teacher and originator of Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, and Doug Lemov, teacher, principal, charter-school founder and author of Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)

Traditionalist: Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. [because]… no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Hmmm, there was no market research to show that a personal music player would sell before the iPod changed history.

Read the article, it points the way to changes that will affect you no matter your age or if you have kids.

Changes that will determine America’s future.

Image credit: St Boniface’s Catholic College on flickr

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Expand Your Mind: Inclined to Innovation

Innovation and how to make it happen is the highest priority item on any company agenda—and if it isn’t it should be.

Just how do you make innovation flourish?

Collaboration ranks high on the list of required actions; as Saul Kaplan, founder and Chief Catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory, says, “It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to experimentation and change.”

“What if” drives innovation according to Jeff Dyer, a professor at Brigham Young University, who started out thinking that creativity and innovation were hard-wired, but decided after six years of research that they aren’t, “One key characteristic among the visionaries? The tendency to ask questions — a lot of them — and to challenge the status quo — plenty.”

Bruce Nussbaum, who writes about design and innovation for Business Week, talks about Diego Rodriquez, who writes Metacool blog, and has developed his own set of 17 Innovation Principles; he illustrates number 12, cultivating innovation instead of managing it, using a conversation with Porsche’s head of design Michael Mauer, “One of my major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of creativity,” to which Rodriquez says, “This feels very much to me like a “cultivation mindset”. … He is a curator, a director, a cultivator.  As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.”

Next, Scott Anthony, Managing Director of Innosight Ventures, talks about what stops innovation. “You can almost always find compelling ideas and well-developed plans. … The hard part is in the doing, in taking the requisite steps to translate an idea that looks great on paper into profits.”

Now two looks at innovation in action at opposite ends of the spectrum.

According to Dan’l Lewin, corporate vice president of strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft, “Innovation is overused as a word. We are at the juncture of where… it’s time to be thinking about how to accelerate, and accelerate using technology as an enabler not an automater.” This approach seems to involve investing in startups where innovation flourishes and buy the results.

Then there is true innovation, the kind based on real-world experience and need as exemplified by Michael Wielgat, a Chicago Fire Dept. lieutenant with 22 years of experience. He invented the “Hero Pipe” to help firefighters battle high-floor blazes. He’s been working on it since 2005, bootstrapping the effort. “Homeland Security has invited Wielgat to apply for a grant to continue development of his invention. He could use the money. He’s tried to get funding before from other sources, but has been turned down, he says, because they supported only fire departments or nonprofit organizations.”

Image credit: pedroCarvalho on flickr

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Book Review: Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

How many times have you heard it—focus on the customer blah, blah, blah?
How often does it prove to be true?

How many times have you said it— it’s about what the customer wants blah, blah, blah?
How often do you practice it?

For too many companies being customer-centric happens when it’s convenient—if it happens at all.

Enter Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Ranjay Gulati, the Jaime and Josefina Chua Tiampo Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, who offers a comprehensive, practical and inplementable guide to creating a customer-centric business.

Utilizing an outside-in approach means focusing on delivering something of value to customers, as opposed to focusing on products and sales.

Gulati discusses 5 key levers from both “why” and “how”:

Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.

Cooperation: Align all employees around the shared goal of customer solutions.

Clout: Redistribute power to “bridge builders” and customer champions.

Capability: Develop employees’ skills at tackling changing customer needs.

Connection: Blend partners’ offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.

Gulati is blunt and his approach isn’t for those who prefer incremental change to revolutionary, but it is MAP that will stop many leaders from embracing Reorganize for Resilience—because you can’t implement that in which you don’t sincerely believe.

Since the advice to be customer-centric isn’t new, following it isn’t easy and may actually require difficult, even painful changes to your MAP, so why bother with Reorganize for Resilience?

Because it carries the biggest bottom-line payoff, both short and long-term, in any economy and for any company—from Fortune 50 to the neighborhood copy shop.

Image credit: Harvard Business Publishing

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Leadership’s Future: Common Core State Standards Initiative

Last week I shared the information that Texas pretty much dictates what goes in K-12 textbooks—scary thought.

But change is in the wind—an amazing change that’s been a long time coming.

Math and English instruction in the United States moved a step closer to uniform – and more rigorous – standards Wednesday as draft new national guidelines were released.

The effort is expected to lead to standardization of textbooks and testing and make learning easier for students who move from state to state.

The support includes the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers so it may actually happen.

Unlike typical efforts that are diluted by politics and ideology, the new standards are fact savvy.

According to Chris Minnich, director of standards and assessment for the Council of Chief State School Officers, the foundation of the standards is hard research, instead of negotiation.

Unlike most efforts to revise standards at a state level, this document was not built on consensus, “We really used evidence in an unprecedented fashion.”

48 states are participating; three guesses which states opted out and the first two don’t count.

Right, Texas and Alaska. (Why am I not surprised?)

“Texas has chosen to preserve its sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools,” Scott wrote in a letter to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “It is clear that the first step toward nationalization of our schools has been put into place.”

Happily, this should break Texas’ de facto control of textbook content as well as those dreams of taking control of the government via a brainwashed next generation.

These standards were created with an eye to having kids ready for work or college, which is very different than just having them graduate.

The draft report also addresses the debate over how much should be expected from immigrants who are just learning English. An introduction to the standards explains that English language learners should be held to the same standards but should be given more time and instructional support to meet the requirements.

Students with disabilities should also be challenged to master as many of the standards as they can, the document argues.

It’s also different because Federal funding is involved, not just an edict.

The Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) has the entire draft up; read it and then add your thoughts.

These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.

Get involved. Have a say in the future. Do it now.

Image credit: HikingArtist on flickr

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Plane Reading

I have a stack of books waiting to be read, some I buy and some are sent by publicists for me to review.

Then there is the constantly growing list of books I hear about or see a review and want to read.

But I have only so much reading time and it’s shrinking as we get closer to the launch of our new product (stay tuned).

So I created a new category called Reviews and Recommendations and included MAPping Company Success’ ‘Book Reviews’ and Leadership Turn’s ‘Reading Recommendations’. I hope you find it useful.

Today, I have some interesting recommendations for you.

The first is from Jeffrey Krames, a literary agent who tells the fascinating story of a self-published book that sells for nearly $50 with an unwieldy title that instantly became a top Amazon seller. Whether or not you want to tackle the book you’ll enjoy its story.

Two European authors—Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur—spent years putting together a stunning book on business models entitled BUSINESS MODEL GENERATION. The two authors had a great deal of help with the design and content of the book, as it was  co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries… Within 48 hours the book ranked as high as #74 on Amazon, an amazing feat for most any business book and especially this one. Since then, the two versions of the book have occupied two of the top 25 slots on Amazon’s list of bestselling management books every single day.

After reading dozens of day-by-day articles and commentary on the financial meltdown, none of the myriad of books written about it really grabbed me. However, when I read a review of Henry Paulson’s newly published On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System in Business Week I was intrigued.

What got my attention (and made me ill) was the following quote.

“All were concerned with excessive risk taking in the markets and appalled by the erosion of underwriting standards,” he writes in his penetrating memoir, On the Brink. Yet they felt forced by competitive pressure to make loans they didn’t like, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary says.

“Isn’t there something you can do to order us not to take all of these risks?” was the gist of a question posed by Chuck Prince, who was still running Citigroup as the bank bumbled toward disaster.

This from some of the most powerful business “leaders” in the country.

Image credit: ginnerobot on flickr

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Leadership’s Future: Kids Respond to Challenge

Last week I wrote about early-college high school and KIPP—both programs buck the trend exemplified by the Dallas Independent School District in lowering standards.

Another move towards greater challenge is program that allows kids to graduate high school two years early.

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early… The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, England, Finland, France and Singapore. … Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years…

The program is organized by the nonprofit National Center on Education and the Economy.

“We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.” –Marc S. Tucker, NCEE President

Education reform has often been hung up by teachers unions; that seems to be changing, but the time and cost to fire an incompetent teacher is still disheartening.

Toughening standards, increasing challenge and meaningful rewards work in the adult space, so there is no reason they won’t work in schools.

There seems to be a lot of good stuff going on to provide us with hope for developing thinking, questioning innovative next generation, but, before you get too excited, please join me next Tuesday to see what is happening on the dark side.

Image credit: svilen001on sxc.hu

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Leadership’s Future: Expectations

Ask any employee at any level what motivates them the most

or

and 9 out of 10 will choose the second list.

So why do school boards do the opposite?

Many school districts follow the lead of the Dallas Independent School District, which follows the first list with slavish devotion.

What happens when the second list is followed instead?

One program is called early-college high school and it mixes college level courses with the normal courses taught in junior and senior years and is offered to at-risk kids, not the over-achieving elite.

North Carolina is the leader and the results are impressive.

“Last year, half our early-college high schools had zero dropouts, and that’s just unprecedented for North Carolina, where only 62 percent of our high school students graduate after four years,” said Tony Habit, president of the North Carolina New Schools Project, the nonprofit group spearheading the state’s high school reform.

In addition, North Carolina’s early-college high school students are getting slightly better grades in their college courses than their older classmates.

Another proponent of the second list is KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), which runs charter schools in several states.

Started in 1994 as an experiment with 50 fifth graders in Houston’s inner city, KIPP has blossomed into the biggest U.S. charter school operator, with 82 schools for poor and minority children in 19 states.

KIPP now has an 85% college matriculation rate, compared with 40% for low-income students nationwide, according to a 2008 report card KIPP prepared and posted on its Web site. About 90% of KIPP’s 20,000 students are black or Hispanic; 80% qualify for subsidized meals.

The difference between the two lists can be summed up in one work—expectations.

The foundation of expectations is a belief that whatever it is can be accomplished.

We humans tend to strive to meet the expectations of those around us, be they bosses, friends, parents, teachers or school administrators.

Actions more than words tell us what is expected.

List 1 = low expectations and kids live up to them.

List 2 = high expectations and the kids live up to them.

Which list do you want at your work?

Which list do you support for your kids?

Image credit: bjornmeansbear on flickr

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