Category Archives: General

General

The year’s first great read

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[Crossposted at A Man with a PhD]

number 1 by Mrs Logic

The Scale Every Business Needs Now:
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Beancounter 1: “Our new widgets business — we think it’s amazing”.

Beancounter 2: “We’ve ridden the learning curve, the product mix is optimized, the supply chain’s streamlined, the market’s tightly segmented.”

Beancounter 3: “But we’ve got a burning question for you, Umair — will it scale?”

UH: “You know what doesn’t scale? The point. Dudes, welcome to the 21st Century. It’s so not about pushing more toxic junk at people.”

Beancounters 1, 2, and 3: (enraged, attack UH with pitchforks).

That’s what happened to me not so long ago in one of the anonymous boardrooms of the universe. And it’s happened quite a few times over the last few months. So in the interest of my own personal safety, let me explain the scale every business should strive for today.

Here’s what the economic historians of the 23rd Century are going to say about the 20th.

“They built giant, globe-spanning organizations, that employed tens of thousands of people working around the clock, to produce… sugar water, fast food, disposable razors, and gas guzzlers. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the paradigm of 20th Century capitalism was its astonishing lack of ambition. Rarely in history has such a void, a poverty of imagination been so deeply woven into the fabric of humankind’s economic systems.”

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Some of these ideas may be too radical but I really think that a big problem in the biotech arena is too little ambition. Start-ups no longer dream of changing medicine. They dream of a Big Pharma buy-out. And VCs act as enablers.

The big ambitions actually beats in the hearts of many non-profit research institutions. They want to change the world, ridding it of centuries old scourges in ways that can change cultures. Their ambition scales so nicely that it may really be successful.

And the companies that recognize this will be able to tag along, making a lot of money on the ambitions of the non-profits.

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General, Knowledge Creation, Science

Innovation on the cheap

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innovate by jordigraells>

Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones

[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

A story last week about the Obama administration committing more than $3 billion to smart grid initiatives caught my eye. It wasn’t really an unusual story. It seems like every day features a slew of stories where leaders commit billions to new geographies, technologies, or acquisitions to demonstrate how serious they are about innovation and growth.

Here’s the thing — these kinds of commitments paradoxically can make it harder for organizations to achieve their aim. In other words, the very act of making a serious financial commitment to solve a problem can make it harder to solve the problem.

Why can large commitments hamstring innovation?

First, they lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown. After all, if you are going to spend a large chunk of change, you better be sure it is going to be going after a large market. Otherwise it is next to impossible to justify the investment. But most growth comes from creating what doesn’t exist, not getting a piece of what already does. It’s no better to rely on projections for tomorrow’s growth markets, because they are notoriously flawed.

Big commitments also lead people to frame problems in technological terms. Innovators spend resources on path-breaking technologies that hold the tantalizing promise of transformation. But as my colleagues Mark Johnson and Josh Suskewicz have shown, the true path to transformation almost always comes from developing a distinct business model.

Finally, large investments lead innovators to shut off “emergent signals.” When you spend a lot, you lock in fixed assets that make it hard to dramatically shift strategy. What, for example, could Motorola do after it invested billions to launch dozens of satellites to support its Iridium service only to learn there just wasn’t a market for it? Painfully little. Early commitments predetermined the venture’s path, and when it turned out the first strategy was wrong — as it almost always is — the big commitment acted as an anchor that inhibited iteration.

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One problem of too much money is that bad ideas get funding also. In fact, there are often many more incremental plans than revolutionary ones. They soak up a lot of time and money.

Plus they create the “We have to spend this money” rather than “Where are we going to get the money to spend?”

Innovations often result in things that save money. But they are often riskier to start with. So how to recognize them and get them the money they need, but not too much?

Encouraging people to work on ‘back burner’ projects in order to demonstrate the usefulness of the approach is one way. Careful vetting can help determine whether it can be moved to the front burner or not.

Part of any innovator’s dilemma is balancing the innovative spirit with sufficient funding to nurture that spirit, without overwhelming the innovator with the debit of too much cash.

General, Knowledge Creation, Web 2.0

Thinking by design

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For anyone not already in IDEO’s PR reach, Tim Brown’s presentation at TED in July has been posted. Tim does a great job talking about how design become a narrow profession—”a priesthood of folks in black turtlenecks and designer glasses working on small things.” And in talking about how design can become something more.

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Design Thinking

Design thinking provides a nice model for fostering innovation. Many of my ideas deal with how to move innovations, particularly disruptive innovations, though a community.

But someone has to create the innovations to begin with.

The TED talk is wonderful because it brings a whole systems approach to the problem. Instead of thinking small and only focussing on one area, design thinking encourages people to see how everything fits together and design innovative approaches to achieve the goal.

The key is to then get these innovations adopted by the community. That can be tough.

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General

Systems Thinking

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Systems Thinking as taught by Ackoff:
[Via CDOQ-Chander’s Diary of Observations and Questions]

One of my heroes is Dr. Russell Ackoff. I have read a few books he has written and have learned Systems Thinking from him. I am surprised that the field of Systems Thinking is not well understood. Following is my attempt to share what I learned from one of Ackoff’s recent lectures.

Albert Einstein once said, “You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it.” According to Dr. Russell Ackoff most managers agree with Einstein’s statement but not many know what it means. It is easy to agree with something whose meaning is vague.

In the Renaissance era, when the science as we know it today was born, a scientific inquiry method called Analysis was developed. Analysis comes naturally to us. Just watch kids breaking new things and being curious about the parts. The understanding of something follows a three step process in analytical thinking:

1. Take it apart
2. Understand (function, role, behavior) what the parts do
3. Assemble the understanding of the parts into understanding of the whole

Thus begins a very nice discussion of what systems thinking is and how it affects business. These approaches will have to be brought to bear on many of the complex problems we now face.

This is because we have pretty much solved all the problems where analysis and reductionism can be used. We are now left with multifunctional, highly linked problems.

For example, many of the drugs we have developed worked against relatively simple diseases. a single drug affects a single receptor that was the major cause for the defect is one example. But things like weight, heart disease, etc, will not have single points of fault and thus are unlikely to have a single cure. Multi-pronged cures may well be necessary and a complete (or nearly complete) understanding of the relevant biological systems will be necessary.

If an organization can not bring synthetic, multidisciplinary approaches to bear, then it will most likely be ineffectual in finding a solution to these types of problems. That is why systems thinking will be important.

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General, Web 2.0

A resilient company

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coinsby Joe Geranio
Social People and The Big Conversation:
[Via A Journey In Social Media]

Sometimes you get things right. Whether you’re smart, or lucky, or a bit of both — it should be a moment for rejoicing since it doesn’t happen as often as you’d like :-)

It’s struck me that when we put our overall corporate social media strategy together, there were two big themes: encouraging social media skills and applying them to ever-wider conversations.

Looks like that was the right thing to do …

The Germ Of An Idea

David Spencer offered up a telling comment to my last post that confirmed my thinking here.

“At EMC we didn’t tell people where to go, what to play with or what not to play with.

We have smart, social people who feel empowered to represent our brand and themselves at the same time all over the place, and the payoff is nearly automatic.

There are certainly other approaches to take, but I really enjoy the organic growth that our approach has led to.”

He’s absolutely spot-on. That’s exactly what we did.

[More]

By empowering its employees, by letting them volunteer rather than be chosen, this company has positioned itself to be able to rapidly deal with the unexpected forces the world throws at a community. Because their online social networks so effectively map real-life social networks (something rarely seen in corporate organizations), they have an added ability other companies lack.

Humans evolved social networks to help them cope with a complex world. The most successful cultures are those with resilience, that allow the entire community to help solve problems. The most fragile are those with a leader at the top, who controls all actions, but who is unable to cope with a changing world.

We have had many years of calm, a Pax Financialis. That is breaking down now, just like the Pax Romana eventually did. We will see more companies like this because they will be the ones who flourish in the coming years. Those following the older models will break and fall away.

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General, Non-Profits, Science

INTJ for me also

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animal animus by even.
Typealyzer says my blog is INTJ:
[Via Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

Typealyzer says that this blog appears to be of the Myer-Briggs type INTJ.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://blog.jackvinson.com is of the type:
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Myers-Briggs is a useful tool for demonstrating that different people have different strategies for solving life’s problems. It is based on Jungian archetypes that, while sometimes simplistic, can offer insights that may be useful. The danger is that people make the analysis definitive, much like some people make genes the final arbiter of all behavior. People are not archetypes and can easily change depending on circumstances.

The truth is that each of us use different parts of the Myer-Briggs types depending on the circumstances. Much like different environments can alter the physical effects of the same genetic sequence, different milieus can alter which MB type we use.

I have taken MB tests several times. What I find interesting is that, for me, there often seems to be only one reasonable answer. I figure everyone feels this way. I am usually an ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving).

While ignoring some of the astrological vagueness of the description, it does come pretty close to describing some important traits of mine. But all of us can act in a different fashion of we need to. We can adapt our ‘style’ for the particular venue we find ourselves.

For instance, this blog, when run through Typelyzer, gives an INTJ type. Now this could just be real hokem, but this does come closer to the style I have tried to apply to this site – a little more grounded and focused on specifics.

But care must be given. Daily Kos, the largest progressive political site, comes out as ISTP – the mechanics

The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

while RedState, one of the largest conservative, comes out as INTP – the thinkers

The logical and analytical type. They are espescially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

I am sure there would be some disagreement in these designations but it sure would make for an interesting discussion.

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