A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

There is a myth out there that large companies aren’t creative and don’t innovate.

Not only is it a myth, it’s pure BS.

Watch this video for a look at pure innovation as done by Samsung.

So why the persistent myth?

There’s a great answer in the comments.

In two years Apple will come out with the same thing for their semis, call it iPass, and be lauded as innovators. –CommanderCorner

It used to be that if you built a better mousetrap the world would beat a path to your door, but these days the mousetrap matters less than the mystique of the builder and the skill of the marketers.

Image credit: HikingArtist Video credit: Leo Burnett

In bygone days the ‘my father can beat up your father’ was a favorite taunt.

These days it’s more often ‘my father earns more than your mother’.

So goes the gender pay gap and has since women entered the workforce.

Much has been written and many hands have been wrung over the disparity of pay between men and women doing the same job.

But the bias isn’t always intentional.

A vast majority of them are fair-minded guys who want women to succeed. They’re absolutely certain that they don’t have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they’re leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs.

Now an intriguing idea has surfaced playing off the SEC’s new rule forcing companies to publish comparisons of how much chief executive officers take home compared with ordinary employees

The idea is to do the same between males/females within each company.

This would be especially interesting in tech, which admits that diversity may be a great goal, but won’t happen any time soon, even in companies which have made it a priority, such as Apple.

In the event the idea gains any traction you can assume enterprise will fight it as passionately — probably more — as it fought the CEO comparison, which took five years to become reality.

Without the force of law, how likely that the comparison could become a reality?

There are two ways that come to mind.

• The first is to have a company step forward and offer the information voluntarily.
• The second is that an internal whistleblower will publish the information anonymously on social media.

The second is far more likely, especially in the data-driven world in which today’s companies must operate.

Flickr image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

How freely do you discuss the details about how you think, what you like, what you believe and the challenges you face with strangers?

Sites, apps, data brokers and marketing analytics firms are gathering more and more details about people’s personal lives — from their social connections and health concerns to the ways they toggle between their devices. The intelligence is often used to help tailor online experiences or marketing pitches. Such data can also potentially be used to make inferences about people’s financial status, addictions, medical conditions, fitness, politics or religion in ways they may not want or like.

How willing would you be to sell that information to benefit a total stranger?

What if it would benefit a pet company, such as Apple, Facebook or Hulu?

You already give up your personal information in return for better access to their products and services, but you do so with the idea that you won’t be packaged and sold.

In fact, most sites tell you upfront that they won’t “share your personal data with third parties.”

But, as they say, the devil is in the details and buried deep in the privacy statements is a giant ‘but…’

Of the 99 sites with English-language terms of service or privacy policies, 85 said they might transfer users’ information if a merger, acquisition, bankruptcy, asset sale or other transaction occurred, The Times’s analysis found. The sites with these provisions include prominent consumer technology companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and LinkedIn, in addition to Hulu.

It’s a safe bet that if these sites have that caveat, so do thousands of others — both large and small.

The expansion of the Internet of Things provides companies a far more intimate look at your life than ever dreamed possible.

It’s a trend that is likely to widen as companies introduce new Internet-enabled products, like connected cars and video cameras, which can collect and transmit a constant stream of data to the cloud.

Your best hope (if you care) is to assume that caveat emptor reigns.

Generally, caveat emptor is the contract law principle that controls the sale of real property after the date of closing, but may also apply to sales of other goods.

Your data is ‘other goods’.

Stuff happens; economies go up and down and businesses wax and wane.

Any company, no matter how large or seemingly stable can find itself in the position of having to sell or transfer its assets.

Your data is an asset. Period.

Flickr image credit: safwat sayed

Scott Goodson has worked at Apple, Instagram and Facebook; all hot companies known for their creativity, innovation and cultures.

Goodson recently joined Pinterest and found an enormous difference.

“I found Pinterest to be a very different sort of culture than I’m used to. One of the most unique things is that the company really values interdisciplinary work across the different functional areas of the team. The notion of empathy is deeply understood here. At other companies there’s a bit more of a competitive or even ruthless perspective, so it was really refreshing to see the level of cooperation here.”

He goes on to say,

“There’s definitely a stereotype of a successful startup that it’s often this aggressive, type A place and that’s just not necessarily true. You can have geniuses that are nice or geniuses that are really egotistical. But they’re both geniuses. So, we really want to work with the geniuses that are nice to each other and have a common level of respect.”

What neither Goodson nor the article mention is that Pinterest has a strong team of female designers and engineers.

While the founders are male, the culture they developed is one where women thrive.

“It was a revelation to join the team at Pinterest and feel like I was treated like an engineer first, not as a female engineer. In most other places, I felt like people always treated me as a “female engineer,” like I was a novelty. People even called me a unicorn to my face. It was really nice to come here and not have that gender modifier in front of who I am.” –Tracy Chou, Pinterest engineer

Pinterest’s culture fosters creative collaboration and mutual respect because it is the absolute opposite of the typical frat-boy startup culture so common in the Valley.

Flickr image credit: katdaned

“You can make money without doing evil” is number 6 in Google’s 10 point corporate philosophy, but ‘evil’ is a fluid term.

Obviously, invading your privacy and stalking you on and off-line in the name of targeted marketing, AKA, making money, doesn’t count.

Mark Zukerberg of Facebook exhorts you to share everything in your life at the same time he bought all three residences surrounding his home (last paragraph) to assure his own privacy.

Many social sites now track your location and make it public.

93% want control of their personal information, but are resigned that it isn’t going to happen.

Once again, Apple is flying in the face of its tech brethren.

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”  (…)

“We don’t think you should ever have to trade it for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices.”

“We believe the customer should be in control of their own information. You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think some day, customers will see this for what it is.” –Apple CEO Tim Cook, honored for ‘corporate leadership’ during EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington.

So the next time you sign in to Facebook, Google, Square, Twitter, etc., keep in mind that they aren’t selling their souls to make a buck, they are selling yours, your family’s and your friends’.

Flickr image credit: westonhighschool library

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

More and more research is showing that real creativity is a more solo function than a team effort.

Susan Cain spells this out in a thoughtful LinkedIn post that is well worth your time, especially if you are a young founder raised on social media, with a penchant for crowdsourcing and Yelp.

Consider the words of Steve Wozniak in his memoir iWoz.

Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me—they’re shy and they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee. I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has been invented by committee. If you’re that rare engineer who’s an inventor and also an artist, I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. You’re going to be best able to design revolutionary products and features if you’re working on your own. Not on a committee. Not on a team.

Then read, digest and tweak Cain’s ideas to fit your situation, then put the concepts to work in your company.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Back in the early 1980s when there were no cellphones, no email, no WWW and Apple was the hot young company with the great perks a friend of mine interviewed with them.

She was a very talented programmer and Apple wanted her badly.

When I asked her how it went she said it was the dumbest interview she had ever had.

All the manager talked about was how “cool it was to work there” and “the great perks, like the group’s own foosball table” and how much money she would make her and on and on about the stock.

While all that was true, what the manager didn’t spend much time on was the work itself, what she would do, what she could learn, what value she brought and what her career path might look like.

In other words, she was looking for substance and the manager spent almost the entire interview on fluff.

She said he was very surprised when she turned down the offer.

I know it wasn’t that she was female, because I knew many guys who had similar interviews.

And it wasn’t just that manager.

It happened over and over because the perks and stock were constantly spotlighted in the media, like Google and Facebook today, although Apple is the granddaddy of cool perks culture, and the people who worked there couldn’t believe anyone would turn down a chance to join.

The lesson here is that focusing an interview on what the media (real and social) finds noteworthy is not necessarily what attracts people and may cost you real talent.

Image credit: HikingArtist

Last week in The Hypocrites of Tech we found that while companies’ push tech for your kids, e.g., Apple iPads, the CEOs, e.g., Steve Jobs, seriously limit their kids’ use of tech.

Tech is making deep inroads to every part of our educational system, but there’s nothing altruistic about it.

They do it to reap the reward of the tsunami of personally identifiable information they get on your kids, with nary a restriction in place—although that’s changing.

Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.

Legislators in the state [California] passed a law last month prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children’s data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them.

I use DuckDuckGo for search, because I don’t believe that it’s any of Google’s business where I go on the Net—but Google doesn’t approve.

Fortunately for Google tracking, slicing and dicing their customers/users isn’t bad; that’s because evil, as in the motto “Don’t be evil,” is a fluid term, while Facebook is famous for doing first and apologizing later.

Then there is Apple.

If I ever break down and get a cell phone it will be an iPhone, but not because of the bells, whistles and apps.

It will be because of the privacy statement made by Tim Cook.

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.

One very small part of our business does serve advertisers, and that’s iAd. We built an advertising network because some app developers depend on that business model, and we want to support them as well as a free iTunes Radio service. iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.

I understand that there are people who don’t care about being tracked or seeing ads based on what’s in their email.

But the more people are subject to stalking by marketers, the more they learn about how their data is used and the more they see how the EU reigns in the same companies the more they are demanding similar safeguards.

For now, it’s wise to remember the old saying, “If it seems too good to be true it probably is.”

The bottom line is simple; when it comes to most of the free goods and services, especially those involving social media, caveat emptor.

Image credit: MAPping Company Success

Just as a company’s culture reflects its values, its advertising typically reflects its culture.

Most ads are relatively generic, cars, food, even drugs; with minor changes to the words or voiceover you can interchange competing products almost unnoticeably.

Most companies prefer to play it safe, whether in advertising or culture, sticking with the idea that “if it works for them it will work for us.” Call it the no/low risk approach.

Back when Apple’s culture was cutting-edge, so were its ads—remember the ad introducing the Mac? It was shown only once during the 1984 Super Bowl, but is remembered 30 years later.
A far cry from the safe, generic iPhone ads of today, which are quickly forgotten.

According to a new ad from Guinness, “The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.”

A great mantra and absolutely true—for individuals and corporations.

Guinness’ new ad chose to go against every cultural norm found in beer advertising.

Did it work?

Flickr credit: recoverling; YouTube credit: Guinness

When I lived in San Francisco I always found it a point of hilarity that the those in tech assumed that everybody everywhere were as tech-centric as they were and I know from friends that that attitude hasn’t changed.

It was/is also a given that innovation is hottest in the Bay Area/Silicon Valley closely followed by places like Silicon Alley in New York City and similar areas around the world.

And the greatest myth of all is that innovation is hottest in startups; especially those started in a college dorm.

Large public companies must innovate or lose the faith of their investors and the tech-centric world always points with pride to giants like Google, Apple and Amazon as innovation leaders.

But are they?

Not according to Hal Gregersen, Senior Affiliate Professor of Leadership and Innovation at INSEAD, and Jeff Dyer, Professor of Strategy at Brigham Young University, co-authors (with Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School) of the bestseller The Innovator’s DNA.

To compile the list, we use what we call the “Innovation Premium,” which is calculated by:

• Projecting a company’s income as expressed in cash flows from existing businesses;
• Determining anticipated growth from those businesses;
• Comparing the net present value (NPV) of those cash flows with the firm’s current market capitalisation.

We require at least seven years of financial data – a feature that for the moment excludes companies such as Facebook Inc. – and only consider firms with  a market value greater than $10 billion. We also use a “research and development” screen, which requires qualified companies to make some investment in R&D.

Using those criteria to compile a list of the 100 Most Innovative Companies, Google is number 47, while Apple is in 79^th place, both well below number 30 P&G; Amazon is number seven and Salesforce.com is first for the third year in a row.

Facebook hasn’t been around long enough to qualify and there’s no telling if it will be.

Our list illustrates investors’ appreciation of these companies’ potential as innovators for the long term.

That’s the same reason VCs and angels invest in startups for the short term.

Image credit: Insead