A few days ago CB insights shared a link to their collection of quotes about disruption from big name corporate leaders; they called it Foot In Mouth.
I sent it to my “list” with the following comment.
Ignorance? Idiocy? Arrogance?
All of the above?
The replies I received, one from my sister, a retired IT head, and the other from KG, were far more insightful than the queries I sent.
I thought both were worth sharing, so here they are.
From my sister.
Do you know of Joel Barker, the futurist? He’s been around since the mid-70s. I saw a video of his at a conference once, where he talked about paradigm shifts. His example then was Swiss watch makers. When two young kids brought the quartz watch to the Swiss watchmaking community for funding, the Swiss said, “No one will ever want a watch that doesn’t wind.” The kids went to the Japanese and the rest was history. Barker says that when humans have a paradigm, they automatically filter OUT anything that doesn’t support their paradigm. The Japanese had no watch paradigm and so could see the potential. I think those examples from CB are as much paradigm lock-in as stupidity. Or put another way, paradigms lead us to make dumb choices sometimes.
From KG
Upton Sinclair famously stated, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” We may call it stupidity, but it really is vested interests. That’s why innovation comes from those who have little to lose or have no other alternative. No one thinks of vested interests when they work in our favor, only when (usually in hindsight) they are show to have caused loss are they called stupid.
In a time of proven global warming, the US has chosen, as the only nation in the world, to reject the potentially cataclysmic consequences of a warmer globe and have invested $4 trillion to develop the domestic oil & gas industry rather than investing these monies in future technologies that can save the planet. These vested interests are causing an existential crisis, and all the systems we’ve built.
There are so many areas that we are struggling with as a species due to vested interests — things that threaten our survival. These range from the ones that are commonly spoken about, like global warming and environmental destruction. They also include synthetic chemicals and nano materials that are giving us cancer and making us sterile, an economic system that ignores externalities and the tragedy of the commons, and our challenges with making sustainable decisions in an increasingly complex World.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
The mantra of startups is “change the world.”
That slogan seems to be the one thing that startups have in common; they all claim their product/service will do it.
No matter how silly, invasive, unnecessary, or just plain creepy.
One of the creepiest (say the comments) is MobiLimb.
MobiLimb is a robotic finger attachment that plugs in through a smartphone’s Micro USB port, moves using five servo motors, and is powered by an Arduino microcontroller. It can tap the user’s hand in response to phone notifications, be used as a joystick controller, or, with the addition of a little fuzzy sheath accessory, it can turn into a cat tail.
Creativity should be celebrated and innovation can be a wonderful thing — when it isn’t just plain stupid.
Pardon this semi-rant, but humans are so arrogant.
Tech tech are some of the worst, but fintech, animal tech and food tech, may even be worse.
By word and/or action, the idea that they know best resonates through everything they do.
Banker arrogance, and the products it produced, gave us the 2008 financial meltdown.
Animal breeders gave us pets, with a host of enhanced medical problems, in return for a certain look.
And long before people freaked out over today’s GMO, humans have been doing selective breeding for more than 9000 years.
Boy, did they succeed.
On Sunday, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that zookeepers at the Melbourne Zoo are weening some animals off of fruits because they were too sweet for the animals’ own good. Red pandas and primates had been gaining weight, and some had signs of tooth decay as well.
Whole fruits, not juice (aka liquid sugar) are supposed to be healthy for humans, because they are high in fiber, but when the sugar content is increased so drastically do the rules hold? Does the effort our bodies must make to process the fiber truly offset the higher sugar content?
I can’t really answer that, but I do know there aren’t a lot of people who choose veggies over fruit when offered a choice.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
I love sandwiches.
My wife says I grew up in a “sandwich culture.” She grew up in the American South where people sat down to eat full meals a lot. We did that too in New York City, where I grew up, but sandwiches were a key part of life.
I’d stop by the deli on my way to my job after the school day was done and pick up the sandwich that would be my “dinner” that night. I rotated through roast beef and corned beef and pastrami. Cheese. Rye bread. I’d use some of my earnings to buy sandwich fixings for the weekend when I didn’t work. The best sandwiches were the ones you ate leaning over the sink.
Sometime in the last twenty years, sandwiches changed. The bread got flimsy and there was a lot less meat. People wanted to eat healthy so they cut back on the bread and the meat, but kept the cheese. Then came “low calorie” cheese.
Ugh. Low calorie cheese tastes like drywall. I kept my rye bread and I wanted a slab of cheddar or swiss on my roast beef, but I was the exception.
The sandwich in the age of the obesity epidemic
The challenge was pretty straightforward. As cheese became a more and more important part of the sandwich, people wanted it to taste good. Cheese makers responded by making low calorie cheese in various formulations. It tasted like drywall. They tried other formulas. It still tasted like drywall. Then the people at Sargento rethought the challenge.
Sargento: a history of innovation
Sargento is a big player in the packaged cheese business. They’re also a family owned company that’s been around since the 1950s with a history of innovation. In 1969, they introduced the pegbar system that’s now standard in supermarkets. They were the first to use re-sealable packages for cheese and the first to package shredded cheese.
Changing the challenge
The company figured that whatever they came up with would have to meet two criteria. It would have to use real cheese, not low-calorie, horrid tasting “cheese.” In other words, it would have to taste the way customers wanted cheese to taste. And, each slice would have to have no more than 45 calories.
Somebody at Sargento must have thought: “We can’t make low calorie cheese that tastes good. And we can’t offer smaller slices. What if we could reduce the calories in a slice of cheese by slicing real cheese thinner?”
The new challenge
That’s a great idea, but existing equipment couldn’t do it. Sargento could slice the cheese thinner, but then the slices would stick together. Whatever they came up with would have to work with existing packaging. Meeting that challenge took a $20 million investment in new technology. Sargento made it work.
The big payoff
Ultra-Thin Slices were released in 2012 and did $60 million in sales the first year. The second year sales more than doubled to $157 million. Even better, Ultra-Thin Slices attracted a lot of people who weren’t eating packaged cheese before. In other words, much of the sales growth was from new customers. That’s a breakthrough innovation by any standard.
What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: rethinking the challenge
The breakthrough innovation didn’t happen until someone reconceived the challenge. Before, everyone, including Sargento, had conceived the challenge as coming up with a lower calorie cheese. When Sargento changed that to “slice cheese thinner so it’s only 45 calories” solutions became obvious.
What you can learn from Sargento’s Ultra-Thin Slices: the courage of conviction
It looks obvious now, but it took real courage to commit $20 million to develop new technology to support the reconception of the challenge. It may not have been a “bet the company” moment, but it was close.
Bottom Lines
Great innovation will not happen until you think of the challenge differently.
Making a great innovation a reality will not happen without courage.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.
I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.
In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.
He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.
My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.
There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.
Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.
Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”
What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”
There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.
Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).
Start-ups raising $100 million or more from investors — known as a mega-round in Silicon Valley — used to be a rarity. But now, they are practically routine, producing a frenzy around tech companies with enough scale and momentum to absorb a large check.
EACH ONE of Wayfair’s two co-founders made as much money as ALL of Zappos’ shareholders combined. (…) Put another way, Wayfair co-founders made at nearly 10X as much as Hsieh.
Mega rounds hurt employees by substantially diluting their stock and forces you to grow, often at an unreasonable rate.
In these days of frenzied money, some founders, such as Gusto’s founder/CEO Joshua Reeves choose to say no to excessive funding.
Gusto, a payroll and benefits software company, raised $140 million in July, but could have done five times that, according to Joshua Reeves, its chief executive and founder.
Startups seem to have forgotten that the purpose of a company is to make money, not raise it.
Mr. Reeves, of software start-up Gusto, acknowledged that founders who obtain outsize sums of capital can get caught up in a “growth at any cost” mentality. That is why he chose not to maximize his funding round despite the intense interest. “It’s up to the founder to realize that’s a distraction,” he said. “Success is not having more money or a bigger team, but having more customers or revenue.”
In 2011, the Gates Foundation launched the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge to bring sustainable sanitation and hygiene solutions to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who do not have such access. The challenge, which is ongoing, is a global call to researchers around the world to develop innovative and financially profitable systems to manage human waste. The systems must operate off-grid, cost less than $.05 per day, and function in poor, urban settings.
Even corporate giants got into the effort.
Kohler—a leading U.S. manufacturer of toilets (…) received a Gates grant in 2014, describes these toilets as “stand-alone units that take in wastewater, then disinfect and purify it to be reused for toilet flushing.”
But water is also a scarce commodity, even when it’s reused.
Now, from a group of students at the University of British Columbia, comes the MYCOmmunity Toilet.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet consists of a mycelium tank that is small enough to sit inside each individual dwelling. (…) when it’s full, the toilet is buried in the ground or left somewhere out of the way for another 30 days to allow the composting process–aided by the mushroom spores–to finish. Each toilet includes local seeds, which can be planted on top of the toilet, allowing plants or crops to grow from the human waste.
Although it was designed specifically with refugee camps in mind, it would seem to have far greater potential.
The MYCOmmunity Toilet qualifies as an invention — with the potential to truly change the world.
A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here.
Miki and I want to congratulate Jerry Nemorin, founder and CEO of Lendstreet, a fintech startup. As a board member I’ve been with Jerry from the start and know how hard he’s worked, as well as how much he cares.
He cares about his team, his company, and his investors, but most of all he cares about Lendstreet’s ability to help its customers to a better life.
Lendstreet restructures debt for consumers in financial distress. A badly kept secret is that healthcare expenses is the number one reason that people go bankrupt and families lose their homes. In fact, most middle and low income families live on a shoestring — the average family only has a few hundred dollars in the bank to deal with emergencies.
As a consequence, a seemingly small thing like the car breaking down can put an entire family spiraling downward to homelessness. Lendstreet interrupts this cycle by using technology to restructure the debt and ensure that the family has the necessary liquidity to get through hard times. In addition, they educate people on financial best practices, including how to improve their credit score.
In essence, Lendstreet provides technology-based solutions and resources that reduce consumer debt, increase credit scores, and improve savings. Since its inception, Lendstreet has helped customers successfully reduce their debt by nearly 40 percent and improve their credit score by an average of 100 points.
Lendstreet was founded in 2013, and Jerry has spent the intervening years building its business to support some of the most vulnerable people in this country. Sure, he’s raised money, a difficult proposition for a business focused on helping the bottom 80% of the population, instead of the top 20%.
He has been relentlessly tenacious in his drive to bring the company and its products to market and in raising the necessary capital to be able to help an increasing number of people.
This week he reached an important milestone in his quest — he managed to get top institutional investors to participate in funding a solution to the tune of $120 million.
“Lower and middle-income Americans are struggling and relying on high interest credit cards for their day-to-day survival. These investments will enable us to scale our platform and reach more consumers who are struggling with too much debt. Prudential, CIM, Radicle Impact, and our other investors share our vision of finally giving mainstream Americans access to an equitable and transparent alternative for their mounting credit card debt.”–Jerry Nemorin
My hope is that by helping people get back on a solid financial footing, by reducing their debt and coaching them on spending wisely, they will be able to stabilize economically and generate upward mobility, as opposed to treading water or, much worse, drowning.
CONGRATULATIONS, and !
(In 2013 Jerry covered The Innovation Summit for MAPping Company Success.)
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