schneiderism

1. He just turned 85 and still has a firm and influential grip on high performance car design.

2. He not only built fast, winning racing cars… he raced too and won in his own right.

3. He usually wears a black cowboy hat.

4. In addition to a multitude of fast cars that have his name, there is also his signature chili.

5. Summing up his consistently successful approach to creating winning racecars, he said:

“It’s a massive motor in a tiny, lightweight car. “

As cool as he is, I’m going to have to pass on the chili. That’s Carroll Shelby up in the photo above posing next to one of his winning Ford GT40 Mark IV’s from the 1960’s. I posted a little bit about that a few months ago. I wasn’t born yet, but the Ford team’s victories with Shelby’s direction and leadership are legendary. They were also instrumental in burning in me a passion for fast sports cars, racing, and winning against the odds.

More about Carroll Shelby here, here, and here (ignore the goofy soundtrack…)

The British Design Council has emerged from a period of serious introspection and reinvention. The results? New leadership and direction in the form of Chairman Sir Michael Bichard (pictured above with sleeves rolled up and ready to dig in and get to work), and sharper focus replete with a new tagline:

“Helping businesses become more successful, public services more efficient and designers more effective.”

Not so much catchy as vitally important in describing its direction, I suppose. The Design Council has long been a resource for the design industry, but has suffered mounting criticism in the last few years due to a predominance of product, industrial and graphic design focus in its efforts and events. This despite the reality that the Design Council has done much to show businesses all over the world the real value of design when applied to a diversity of industries.

Sir Michael Bichard’s recent appointment as chairman is in support of the refined Council mission of being the strategic body for design in the UK. The operative word now being “strategic.” Bichard has a long record as a successful public servant, leader in arts and education, and vocal supporter of the value of design. He received attention recently for his Five Rules of Design:

1. Great design can change the world and move people

2. If you think good design is expensive you should look at the real cost of bad design

3. Design, creativity and innovation are essential if we are to meet the global challenges of sustainable development

4. Design is not just about products and communications, it’s also increasingly in the services we receive or buy

5. To consume design is a creative act - and everyone can be creative!

I chuckle each time I read rule number two, as it is so, so true. These rules are important as the Council still finds itself embroiled in debate about exactly how design fits into the British, or global, economy. Despite their best efforts, the design community in the UK still finds itself somewhat adrift from the core of British industry and business. This is partly due to overconfidence, and partly due to the increasing irrelevancy of design education in the face of the realities of real world practice. These challenges are no different than those faced here in the United States, and amount to a massing of missed opportunities for design. Changing this begins, perhaps, with the importance of combining a deep understanding of business and business processes, of business thinking, with the methodologies and practices of design thinking, a concept getting much airplay in a diversity of business magazines as of late. It would seem that the British Design Council is going down this road, and most probably in a smart way, and as they are known for their quality publications and case studies I look forward to learning more about their new focus in the coming months.

via beyond the beyond

It has taken me too long to write about this. I say that because this is an effort that should be an absolute top priority for all of us, at least those of us who value rational, reasonable thought and the support of science as an issue demanding attention from the presidential candidates.

Sciencedebate 2008 has been underway for several weeks, and it is an effort to get the candidates to engage in a substantive debate on science and technology. This is effectively an effort to inject intelligence back into the election process as a barometer of how a presidential prospect will move our society forward. I encourage you to check this out by clicking on the link and if you are so inclined, sign the petition. You’ll be in good company as some of the more notable supporters of this effort are 23 Nobel and Crafoord laureates, 21 government leaders of both parties, 25 University and college presidents, and several thousand concerned citizens, including yours truly.

Another Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld passes and the consumer electronics world breaths a collective sigh of relief. This close to CES, I think everyone is just about exhausted. Though Steve announced a range of smart, cool new gear… those following his keynote presentation seemed a little let down. I believe that this mood was also reflected in Apple’s stock price, which oddly closed lower for the day by 5.45%. Is this the dreaded “iPhone affect”? Was the anticipation and hype around the release of the iPhone too much for Apple to match? Who cares. The fact is that what Apple presented to us today represents the future direction of both personal computing and media.

In the event that you live under a rock, the star of the day was the elegant and minimalist MacBook Air, Apple’s appropriately reductionist take on the laptop computer, stripped down to the important essentials and built for speed. It presents a much more transportable (and beautiful) form factor and clearly shows the influence of the successful experiments with multi-touch from the iPod Touch and iPhone. Apple also offers the opportunity to upgrade to solid state memory, further eliminating moving parts. Interestingly, and not surprisingly given the speculation, the MacBook Air is also a definitive statement by Apple that optical drives are not long for this world, as it does not have one. To my mind, all very cool and a welcomed departure from the now classic Powerbook/MacBook ubiquity. Yeah, I want one. But my MacBook Pro is doing just fine and the reality is that I don’t NEED the MacBook Air. At least, not yet. Though I definitely appreciate what it represents for portable computing, which is to actually be portable.

Back to the pervasive post keynote mood, people are let down today because just about everything released was anticipated by the speculative technology press in detail, relentlessly, over the last few weeks. That, and Apple has set the product launch bar very high - and consumers and market analysts have, perhaps, unreasonable expectations which apparently Steve Jobs did not meet today, given the drop in stock price. Give it a week, the stock market is a terrible indicator of Apple’s Macworld performance.

Incidentally, Steve Jobs also announced today that Apple has moved 4 million iPhones since the launch 200 days ago (do the math). This has garnered Apple a 19% stake in the smartphone market. In 200 days.
See also my post on the iPhone launch from last September.

We’re going through some very important exercises at work. The goal is a real and unflinching assessment of the state of our industry, architecture and design, and the role we play in that industry. The goal is to seriously challenge notions of status quo, and to question accepted practices. Hard questions are being asked. Tough answers are being put up on the white board. None of us disagree. But, what are we to do with this information, with these confirmations?

We are to change.

Actually, we have already been changing. We know that architecture has become a largely commoditized business, that the value provided by many architecture design firms has been slowly and consistently eroded in the United States over the last 20 to 30 years. Architects have allowed this to happen, and it has happened as issues of liability and responsibility have come to dominate project realities. But instead of embracing this and accepting the challenges, architecture has retreated behind drawings and plans and allowed others to step in and manage the process of building, of making. A long list of other trades were only too happy to step in and take on the historically traditional role of the architect, that of a master builder. Allowing this has effectively removed architecture from the value stream of building. Many, many firms now exist to produce drawings. They are production houses.

What we are finding is priority is the importance of reinserting ourselves into the making and effectively taking back the control of the value stream. We know that we must do what it takes to become the most relevant and influential force in building culture, this much is clear. What is unclear is exactly how we will get there, and I suspect we will continue to challenge and explode traditional notions of design and building. Embodied in this is the reinvention of our firm around core goals of design excellence, as we define it, and the reconnection of our design to implementation, to execution. Architecture is a strategic move, and that move will not be successful if architecture does not protect the value and integrity of the idea, the idea power, from inception through implementation.

While I have framed this discussion around my immediate industry, the reality is that it is powerfully meaningful for a diversity of creative professions who face very similar challenges.

Actually, the full quote from Burt Rutan is:

“Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding.“

That puts him in alignment with a number of innovation leaders, those that believe that success is born out of learning from failures and capitalizing on that learning. In an intensely competitive world, not fearing failure and successfully mitigating and taking advantage of risk can be the difference between whether or not you are relevant next year. Anyway, a comment on my post What’s Left For Architects offered up a quote from Burt Rutan in reference to his employees at Scaled Composites, the company building SpaceShipOne, shown behind him in the photo above. Here’s the quote:

“You don’t get the privilege of designing something unless you have the capability of building it with your own hands.”

That’s a powerful statement, and incredibly prescient for a number of industries, the most obvious for myself presently being architecture. Architecture in the United States has done an impressive job moving about as far away from the actual making as possible. In many ways this has occurred due to a fear of failure, and a fear of risk. But that’s changing. Slowly. Stay tuned. Moving on, the comment and the quote it contained motivated me to do this post on Burt Rutan. Easily one of the most prolific innovators and leaders in the world of aerospace, Rutan is championing the first privately funded venture to put humans into orbit. Back in 2004 he and his team won the highly publicized Ansari X Prize for successfully sending SpaceShipOne into orbit. Twice. In two weeks. I do not think that NASA has ever accomplished that with the same launch and orbital vehicles. Though they suffered a tragic setback earlier this year, Rutan and his team are still focused and unwavering on their goal set. That is because this is a really big deal, and smart business people like Sir Richard Branson see the enormous potential of broadening our access to Earth orbit. Beyond SpaceShipOne, though, Rutan has a laundry list of innovations and achievements including Voyager, the first aircraft to circle the Earth without refueling. The man is a relentless, tough, smart, designer, engineer and collaborator. He is also an accomplished team builder, and while it may be his name that is linked to all of these achievements, his success has been from putting together exceptional teams, and supporting them. I leave you with one last smart quote from the man:

“If you don’t have a consensus that it’s nonsense, you don’t have a breakthrough.”

One of the most comprehensive and significant ways in which we can positively enhance the health of individuals, and society, in relation to their interactions with the built environments that we create is through the applied concept of building performance. Building performance is a broad organization of how these environments affect us. This occurs on both a micro, or personal, level as well as a macro, or broader societal level. At the micro-ergonomic level it has to do with the ways buildings balance human factors and provide basic environmental elements and systems that support health and well-being. This includes lighting and daylighting, thermal comfort, air quality, acoustics and privacy. While these all seem like logical qualitative elements of a healthy environment, we all know that they still go largely disregarded. With this is the macro-environment of a building, or how it performs in relation to the whole and in relation to the greater community. Ideally, a building that adheres to certified standards of building performance has been designed with a sustainable agenda and incorporates not only energy savings, but also schema for rain water runoff, waste and recycling, materials life-cycle, and systems that minimize the need for natural resources.

Historically, the science of building performance has done much to honor the perspective and experience of the individual, to ensure that the design of these environments is not in conflict with the health of those who will ultimately inhabit them. More recently, and in line with the larger sustainable movement within design, is how the inclusion of building performance analysis as it impacts the greater environment, and how it exists within this greater context. Taken as a whole this is a sensitive approach to building design, one that embraces constraints that ensure that architecture design is indeed doing no harm. This might sound trivial, but it is a growing movement. Sustainability and human factors are gaining ground within the design of products and services, and those early to this holistic approach are seeing the first financial and productivity based results.

Resources for more information:

Orfield Labs

Carnegie Mellon Center for Building Performance

AIA Center for Building Performance Standards

Department of Energy Building Performance Resource

That question is on the whiteboard of Bill Johns office at Lockheed Martin, and is his mantra as he engages in what is perhaps the most important program for the U.S. space program in the last thirty years. The question has a box around it with a “do not erase” pointing to it. Johns is a senior manager at Lockheed Martin, which in August 2006 won the $8 billion contract to build the next generation of NASA’s reusable space vehicles. Called “Orion,” and depicted in the rendering above in orbit around the moon, this crew capsule is being designed to take six astronauts into orbit in support of the International Space Station, or four astronauts to the moon. The space shuttle, initially the darling of an aggressive NASA in the 1970’s and 1980’s, continues to be plagued with problems and technology challenges. That, and it is incredibly expensive and inefficient to operate. NASA is decommissioning the three remaining space shuttles in 2010. It should be noted that as a wide-eyed 10 year old I wrote a letter to NASA expressing my own excitement with the shuttle program. Not only did NASA respond, but they sent me an enormous trove of images, press releases, and an autographed photo of the first shuttle crew. That was 1979. I think I speak for many when I acknowledge the disappointment that has become the shuttle program.

The Orion crew capsule, part of the larger Constellation program, is scheduled to replace the shuttle by 2015, leaving a five year gap in the United State’s ability to get into space without any help. This is a bit of a digression, but it is important to point out that during those five years we will see a proliferation of space exploration and orbital entry vehicles from Japan, China, India, Russia, the European Space Agency, and private ventures like Virgin Galactic. We are at the beginning of a new space race, and the competition is intense.

So, there is a lot of pressure on Bill and his team. And $8 billion is not that much money for a program of this importance. That is the equivalent of about six weeks of expenses for U.S. operations in Iraq. Needless to say, the Orion and Constellation programs have some daunting challenges to overcome, and it is how they are overcoming these challenges that is immensely interesting. Here are some details on how they are doing it…

1. Build on the successes of the seemingly antique Apollo program:

• - Apollo is the model for Constellation, put a crew capsule on top of a giant rocket
• - The hatch for the crew capsule is from the Apollo capsule with minor changes
• - One of two heat shield technologies being tested is the one used for Apollo
• - The reentry parachutes are slightly modified versions of those from Apollo
• - The launchpad for Orion will be a rebuilt pad that originally launched Apollo 10

2. Take advantage of “off-the-shelf” technologies, which are superior to those currently in use:

• - Flight control computers are engineered versions of those used for the Boeing 777
• - Much of the avionics electronics are from already existing and massively tested craft
• - The solid rocket boosters will be modified versions of those from the space shuttle

3. Utilize a “small,” agile and innovative team:

• - The team that created Apollo numbered in excess of 400,000
• - The Orion team is made up of 1600 at Lockheed Martin and 600 at NASA
• - Orion utilizes rapid prototyping and environment testing with actual astronauts
• - There is a focus outside of the space program for innovation (like NASCAR)

original story via Fast Company

Just read a terrific article on Businessweek online that is absolutely right on and intersects perfectly with The Upside by Adrian Slywotsky, which we discussed here a few weeks back. If you’ve not read this book, do. And soon. Then, let’s chat. Both expand on the whole “Innovate or Die!” theme. The article starts with the assertion that we must learn to embrace the edges of our businesses, edges being the outer limits, the danger area, the unknown. Edges are the peripheries of the global business environment, the places where innovation potential is the highest. The article asserts that comfort with operating at the edge of your business and industry is the most expedient way to identify opportunity and advantage. More:

“Edges define and describe the borders of companies, markets, industries, geographies, intellectual disciplines, and generations. They are the places where unmet customer needs find unexpected solutions, where disruptive innovations and blue oceans get birthed, and where edge capabilities transform the core competencies of the corporation.”

This is important from the perspective of Slywotsky’s concept of strategic risk assessment. First, the edges are the frontiers, the limits, of what is known and accepted, of what has worked up to this point. It is beyond these frontiers where tremendous opportunity resides. Change is self-sustaining as the business environment continues to speed up with improved technologies, communications and time-to-market. And heats up with changing customer loyalties, expectations, and need. In this intense environment we see ideas constantly delivered by companies from the frontier (and quickly), and we also see this opportunity and innovation fundamentally change companies and markets with stupefying speed. We have been inundated by game changing innovation and change, so much so that we are sometimes jaded to it. But think about how business has changed in the last ten years. This change has not only been exponential, it has been paradigmatic. This has been driven by a diversity of catalysts, the most obvious being technology, communications, the internet, and globalization. Companies that harnessed these drivers found themselves in a very different place. Those that did not, most often, disappeared. Adrian Slywotsky’s ideas in The Upside really begins with the notion of surveying the frontiers for strategic risk. Slywotsky asserts that nothing can beat robust strategic risk assessment for both identifying and mitigating potential threats to a company’s health and well-being, but also for identifying what game changing opportunities for innovation might be highlighted as a result of that assessment. Both the article’s authors and Slywotsky agree that for companies to innovate they must understand what is happening at the edges of their business, and to innovate they must bring back from the edge ideas that challenge the status quo in products, markets and practices.

I was reading about devoted modernist, design theorist, teacher and graphic designer Paul Rand and came across this choice quote:

“Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.“

Learning more about Paul Rand brought me to the short film form & content produced by Imaginary Forces for his posthumous induction into the One Club Hall of Fame this year. From the film, which is much of Rand’s work brought to life with a narration pieced together from his many, many interviews:

“Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good.”

Paul Rand (1914-1996)

That’s a quote from Evel Knievel last year. He died today at the age of 69. Definitely the end of an era, and the loss of a personal childhood icon (a pre-Hunter S. Thompson childhood icon… and just as weird and cool). The man jumped his motorcycle over big and scary things. Buses, sharks, and canyons… all were but opportunities for Evel Knievel. And he fractured over 40 bones in the process. Crazy? Yes. Cool? Yes. An American hero? Most definitely, in the most American way, which is to say honest and imperfect. A memorable quote from the man:

“You come to a point in your life when you really don’t care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.”

Evel Knievel (1938-2007)

Update: And not moments after posting I find this kick ass tribute via Coop at Positive Ape Index:

“He was the last relic of the way America used to be, before the lawyers and pussies took over. A holy fool, watched over by angels who drank Old Style and smoked Lucky Strikes. A crazy, fearless, larger-than-life crackpot, last in a long line of same, heir to Davy Crockett, Wild Bill Hickok, P.T. Barnum, Horatio Nelson Jackson, “Cannonball” Baker, and every other kook who refused to listen to reason. The world is a smaller place without him.”

There is a lot of talk around the successes that Toyota has enjoyed as of late, especially when contrasted against the slow demise of the traditional automotive industry leaders G.M. and Ford. Toyota’s success has been remarkable, and here is a quick recap from a recent article in Business Week:

• - Toyota has not lost money in a quarter for over 55 years… since 1951
• - In 2006 Toyota posted net profit of $17 billion (while Ford and G.M. circled insolvency)
• - Over a 25 year span Toyota went from veritable industrial startup to diversified global empire
• - Toyota is now the largest automotive manufacturer in the world

There are a number of reasons why Toyota sustains success in a fiercely competitive industry recognized for unrealistically low margins. The most obvious of these is that Toyota continues to defy convention and determine its own course. In that Business Week article author Keith McFarland reviews “How Toyota Became #1″ by David Magee and digs deep into what has contributed to the success that Toyota enjoys and comes up with some pretty powerful themes. Magee’s book looks at:

• - Focusing on the long term
• - Jumping beyond the current trend
• - Making quality everyone’s responsibility
• - Managing individual strengths

These themes essentially define Toyota’s corporate culture and you see them at work every day. They are operational practices for the entire company, but modeled and executed with prejudice by the executive management. This is consistent with the reality that effective and innovative cultures begin at the top. Beyond all of this, though, McFarland identifies another quality of Toyota’s culture that has helped drive success. Curiosity.

Toyota’s culture was conceived by curiosity. Sakichi Toyoda, the company’s founder, set out to revolutionize weaving technology and build the best looms possible. Not just in Japan. In the world. He went on a tour of looms in Europe and the United States and brought the best ideas and practices back to Japan where he improved on them and secured over 100 patents in the process. His son and successor, Kiichiro, went on his own tour of Detroit automakers in the 1920’s and upon his return moved Toyota into the automobile manufacturing business. 70 years of this approach has empowered Toyota and allowed it to always bring the best back to the company, to continuously improve, and to reward creative thinking. Toyota is not necessarily propelled by the unending belief that things can be done better as much as it is compelled by the constant search to find better ways to do things. This is institutionalized continuous improvement, it is institutionalized curiosity.

In the hyper-competitive reality of today’s business environment much is riding on effective pattern recognition. Business intelligence, and how we use it, has become the identification of business “patterns” or trends with the fewest possible facts, and this identification needs to occur quickly, accurately and efficiently as opportunities come and go with increasing rapidity. Execution on these opportunities needs to also happen quickly as the changing environment can make a late response irrelevant, and ensure that your competitors are responding to the same opportunity. Effective use of business intelligence is the best methodology for sustaining successful pattern recognition and identifying opportunity for your company. This is both data intensive, and incredibly dynamic. As you scan the competitive horizon for opportunities, you must give consideration to:

• Challenges of finding order in chaotic and conflicting inputs of info and data
• The ability to quickly refine options to the best opportunities
• Know when you have enough information to make an effective decision
• Knowing that effectiveness is directly related to your ability to overlap intelligence
• Development of a concept of the pattern, or opportunity, that you are looking for
• Being neutral about the data… optimism defeats the purpose of intelligence
• Don’t be risk averse, mistakes are a learning experience and help you to improve

We’re surrounded by companies that are doing this incredibly well. Think about the pace of change in consumer electronics or the real estate market. Think about the fluid environment of international diplomacy and economics. The business intelligence teams at organizations like Google, Apple, investment banks, insurance companies, large real estate developers, the Chinese government and the CIA devote tremendous resources to the accumulation, analysis, and refining of huge and complex data with the soul purpose of identifying patterns that signify opportunity. By and large all of those organizations also execute on that opportunity with expediency. So should we. This is not to say that we should vacuum vast amounts of information into super computer managed data bases. We should take the intelligence we gather, though, and systematically analyze it for the indication of change, of patterns of change, that signal opportunity for our organizations. This can begin with a simple and ongoing analysis of:

• How have your clients changed in the last year?
• Which client businesses are experiencing growth, and which are challenged?
• How has the economic environment affected the markets you operate in?
• What has changed in the competitive environment?
• What new capabilities/products/services are competitors introducing and why?
• What is happening in related businesses and markets?

Thanks to Marlon Hiralal for the conversation and sharing his thoughts on this.

That might sound threatening, but really… it’s not. I had the opportunity to meet and hear Polly LaBarre, the co-author of Mavericks At Work, last week at a luncheon event sponsored by Larsen and LifeScience Alley. It was an excellent event. Polly spoke about the main theme of her book, that in industry after industry business as usual is not working anymore and that businesses that were once dismissed as “mavericks” are the ones that are now growing fast. The mavericks are the success stories. This is because they stand for something original, and continue to innovate on their business model. She also offered and expanded on a couple important concepts. The one that really resonated with me was the idea of “overthrowing successful companies.” This is not a bad thing, but speaks more to the challenges of creating an environment of creativity, innovation and change in companies that have been historically performing just fine. Her point is that “just fine” is not reflective of the realities of changing markets, customer demands, and operational challenges… not to mention hypercompetiton. In essence, for many companies it is required that they be taken over by new ways of thinking, by a focus on executing on new opportunity. Overthrowing a company means rethinking the logic of how business gets done, and IMPROVING on that logic.

This is not something to take lightly and it is a concept that has revolutionary undertones for a reason. This is because, like nations, organizations resist change and this is in large part due to the difference between those who have power and those who do not. Those who wield power in business are often much more concerned with perpetuating the status quo then with reinventing the business model. Reinvention is hard work, it requires an open mind and a fresh approach. When you are already successful, that is a tough option. The point, really, is that success is fleeting. Those organizations that figure this out and continue to change and evolve stand to sustain and maximize successes. They stand to succeed in the face of innumerable challenges by offering a better way to lead and a better way to compete. A better way to do things. So many businesses are defined by models that were developed decades ago, isn’t it time that we shake those models up and explore better alternatives?

I hope that you are seeing a theme developing here on schneiderism. If not, you’re either new to the blog, or an idiot. Either way, let me quickly recap:

- Creative enterprise of all sorts face a range of new strategic risks

- Business models and business practices demand investigation and innovation

- Many have lost the priority of the relationships between innovation, strategy, and execution

- We’re our own worst enemy, and actively devalue the work we perform

- Design is about value creation, not about providing a service

Last evening I received an article from a colleague who shares my perspective on the state of creative enterprise. Basically, we’re at war. We find ourselves embroiled in the challenges of navigating the mess, risks, and threats before us and orienting organizations in the proper direction. It’s exciting. The email with the article that he sent had this as the subject… “F**K Service…” Well, that definitely got my attention, so I thought it appropriate to headline this piece. But, what did he mean by that?

He meant that creative enterprise is not a service industry. It does not exist to service its clients. It exists to create value for its clients. The mindset of a service business is to operate at the whim of the client. This not only devalues our work, it prevents a creative business from having a relationship with clients that is truly compatible with effective design. You’re too busy reacting to be creative. You’re too busy producing. It is a rock you will never be able to push to the top of the hill. As a service provider you have inverted the value proposition. You may as well be a lawyer or an accountant (note that I have nothing against lawyers or accountants, I just don’t want to be one…).

The article sent is entitled “Will You Become A Master Builder?” Read it. It is from a few years ago but still meaningful.. which only means that we’ve been thinking and talking about this for a long time. And doing precious little about it. The article relates specifically to architecture design professional service firms and their inability to adapt and embrace change. Really, though, it could apply to any number of creative businesses. A terrific quote:

“Those who do not like change will like irrelevance even less.”

James P. Cramer

Cramer points out that design firms, and the environment in which they operate, are changing. Some are evolving. Some are specializing. Some are dominating their markets. Some are struggling with being relevant and are in decline. His article is a call for intervention. I would like to think that it is the clarion call of revolution for creative businesses, and we know that he is most definitely not a lone voice in this call. But what are we going to do about it?

Thinking a lot about how you practically go about creating and fostering a culture of innovation. Discussed this in earnest in a previous post, and threw down some Gary Hamel. In that post it was discussed that an innovation culture must begin at the top. That, and in order to achieve this an organization has to wholesale eschew legacy, arcane management and control methodologies. That is an incredibly tall order for most cultures. They exist to exist, not much more beyond that.

There is obviously a lot more to how you create a culture of innovation. I tried a little experiment, and want to share the results with you. I posted a question regarding how you create such a culture to my LinkedIn network, and received a broad range of answers. Below is the question put out there, and the answers received to date:

How can a company create a culture of innovation?

We hear it all of the time… “we need to create a culture of innovation!” Sounds good. But, where do you start? How do you go about creating that? How do you ensure it has longevity?

Would like your insights and to hear your experiences.

~~~~~

“Man of action never speak. Creativity creates marvels. They don’t need guidence. It is inborn. Can u force somebody to draw or paint?”

Mamta Narang

~~~~~

“Step 1: First you would need to understand your organization culture, evaluating its approach to change…innovation in fact generally implies deep changes, in culture , in perspective, in the day by day apporach to problems, even in the way information are shared and in the way people communicate.

If you realize that your organization is already “transparent” to above mentioned issues, you move to step 2 , otherwise you need first to implement a Change Management Dpt. , leading the people side of change.

Step 2 : you need to encourage your people toward whati is called “lateral thinking”, organizing a rewarding “Best Ideas ” …people need to feel they work in a challenging enviroment.

Step 3: give your best worker time enough to study and to share their toughts”

Private

~~~~~

” There are plenty of corporate examples, like IBM and 3M.
Employees are given time each week for creative exploration of concepts and ideas, as well as the resources (people, material and money) to pursue them.

You have to AND you can structure in innovation.”

Ray Miller

~~~~~

“Flexibility is key. There are few things more guaranteed to stifle innovation than a rigid inflexible business process that must be obeyed at all costs. Another vital ingredient is the acceptance that not every idea can be a roaring commercial success. Often, budget is needed to test an idea, simply to find out that it’s actually not that good. It’s money well spent.”

Alison Coulson

~~~~~

“You have to make it worth while and beneficial for people to share knowledge within the organisation. Most employees with a traditional mindset think they are undermining their own position by sharing their knowledge. As a result no innovations will take place, because in a culture of innovation the lone genious is replaced by inter disciplinary teams. You have to change the cultural environment to stimulate new behaviours.”

Morten Lindholm

~~~~~

“The value system in the company needs to support that culture. Examine the systems, processes, corporate communications and rewards and figure out what the values really are (not what they are stated to be). Often times the heroes are firefighters and systems and processes are about removing variation - attributes that are very much about not innovating. What are the real values that all of your systems, processes, rewards and communications really need to support? It is very likely that each of them must evolve to support a more innovative culture.

That may sound insurmountable, but you can start by determining the most likely areas where innovation would be helpful to the business. Are you most interested in innovative new products, innovative processes or an innovative business model? The answer helps drive what the first moves are. Even when trying to start, adjustments must be made in congruence across all aspects of that part of your systems, processes, rewards and communications.”

Bob Becker

~~~~~

“Check out Phil McKinney’s podcast, Killer Innovations, for some ideas.”

killerinnovations

Kore Peterson

~~~~~

“It MUST come from the very top of the organization, define what innovation means to you and your organization, develop problems for your people to start thinking about, reward systems must be changed to drive toward the creative and innovative behaviors you are seeking, constant and consistent communication of the need and desire to innovate, demonstrated increased tolerance for risk and failure, mandate time for thinking, tinkering and collaboration, increase opportunities for horizontal communications, and finally, implement a few of those promising ideas!!!”

Paul Williams

~~~~~

“In my (our company’s) view from working with innovation for more than 20 years is that the innovation capability (innovativeness) of a company consists of three elements:

1) Steering fo innovation
2) Atmosphere of the organisation
3) Channels

The steering has to do with the fact that in order to generate new ideas, one needs to have some direction, guidance on what the ideas should be about. The atmosphere has greatly to do with the management style in the company (in all levels), how line managers take in new ideas and improvements. The third part has to do with how well the comapny is able to gather the often rough ideas from the people and foster them into readymade innovations. Good ideas are only a start, they need to be implemented well.

First thing you need is a good understanding of the current situation. Without knowing where you are and where the biggest challenges are you can not aim in the right direction. This can be obtained through a number of ways from surveys to consultative analysis. Key is to start at the top, but make sure to go all the way (vertically and horizontally) to the different parts of the organisation. Innovation needs to be built all around, naturally in different ways in different places. The activities may vary from training of innovation methods, building processes and systems, starting up innovation organisations of many sorts, having idea competitions, etc. This depends on what the problems are - this can only be analysed with enough information. ”

Olli Kuismanen

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“Actions will create more innovation than any words you can speak. If you seek to create a culture of innovation it must be more than lip service and must begin at the top.”

Eileen Bonfiglio

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“There is an inherent creativity in everyone - specially when we talk about the subject area of work of people. For modern workplaces, innovation cannot come only with creativity but also require core knowledge about the subject.

I also believe that people are NOT a problem - most people do want to contribute and want to bring their best ideas (unless you are talking about some hopeless crowed where this question anyway doesn’t apply!)

The issue, however, really is that no new idea can succeed without sever effort and keeping faith in it. Unless the management (who determines the resource allocation), support this activity, and if he management is inherently not risk taking in nature, most efforts to create innovations will become a failure.

The ultimate key to organizational innovation i believe an open, transparent and risk taking culture and the real competence of the people. People is the only thing really matters! ”

Diphan Mehta

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Thanks to everyone for taking the time to offer their perspective on creating a culture of innovation. I think the differences and similarities in the answers is indicative of both how seriously we take this question, and how complicated the issue really is.

We hesitate to even utter the word anymore, it is so over-used and abused, but innovation remains part of most company ’s “strategy” and in the motivational speeches of CEO’s everywhere. This, despite the fact that few can really define not only what innovation means, but what it means for their business or their business model. We push through this fog, though, hoping that the presence of innovation in executive job descriptions and on the whiteboards of meeting rooms is enough to get us where we need to go. In many ways, innovation comes and goes in cycles within a company… typically driven by financial and economic realities and the “need to be innovative” to counter poor financial performance or operating inefficiencies. This is reaction, not strategy.

So, innovation talk is seemingly everywhere again… but things are a bit different now. Yes, you will find features in most monthly business periodicals just like five years ago. Yes, the business section at the bookstore is full of “new” perspectives on innovation in business. But as you survey the content, you find that the vernacular has changed a little and there is much more discussion around the practical matters around innovation management. As companies discuss the need to innovate, they find that the managing of innovation is the biggest challenge, the biggest obstacle to actually accomplishing anything.

The reality is that companies need to come up with new ideas and rethink their models, but to do this effectively and meaningfully they also need to develop and support a culture that consistently encourages and rewards innovation. A culture that is defined by the value of bringing new ideas, and executing on those determined to be of the most value. I wrote a post on strategic risk management and the importance of business model innovation in moving companies from stasis to growth. A survey of the last ten years yields abundant contrasts between the companies that managed to pull this off, changing their culture and reinventing their business, and those that did not. The failures are in the news every day, whether they be in consumer electronics or industrial machinery, packaged food products or franchise restaurants. Typically, the companies whose challenges are highlighted in the news are the same companies that, years ago, were dominating their category. The difference, instead of using that momentum and competitive advantage to further develop markets and foster innovation, they focused on exploiting their success, arrogantly thinking that would sustain success in perpetuity. It obviously did not.

The companies that got it, though, are the ones that started with their culture and made endemic the drive to innovate. We also see these companies highlighted every day in the news. Some companies have so deeply ingrained a culture of innovation, and have so effectively managed that innovation, that their business model defies definition in the traditional sense. Look at Toyota. Look at Samsung. In categories rife with competition and low margins, they are successful. How is this possible? Effective innovation management, clear vision, and a determination to execute successfully.

Knowing that your company faces a diversity of risks and challenges to a successful future, and knowing that effectively navigating this situation depends on bringing forth new ideas and setting in motion a cycle of reinvention, it is confusing to know where to even begin. Do you hire innovative people? Do you acquire an innovative company? Do you create an innovation task team? Those may be options, and shorter term in their value, but what about ten years from now? You need to begin with the management culture.

There is a terrific article in Fortune by Gary Hamel that is excerpted from his new book “The Future of Management.” He posits that legacy management thinking, a focus on efficiency over excellence, has thoroughly undermined the development of innovation cultures in business and that to ultimately be successful, the change needs to start at the top:

“The sooner your company starts sloughing off its legacy management beliefs, the sooner it’s going to become truly fit for the future. As we’ve seen, a few companies are already traveling light, having left a lot of their outdated management baggage back there in the 20th century. In the end, there’s really not much of a choice: You can either wait for tomorrow’s management heretics to beat the orthodoxies out of your company, or you can start coaxing them out right now.”

Gary Hamel

In an article titled “Innovate or Perish: New Technologies and Architecture’s Future” for the Harvard Design Magazine author David Celento posits that architecture’s refusal to embrace technological innovations is ensuring irrelevancy to the audiences that have historically valued their services. More directly, architecture is on a path to extinction. He is absolutely right. Architecture struggles with a fixed, backward view and legacy thinking. Let’s just say that the world of “The Fountainhead” is alive and well inside the offices of many a prestigious architecture firm. At issue is the reality that a diversity of professions are claiming the traditional territory of the architect. Technology has efficiently removed architects from the value stream of the built environment (through their unanimous inaction and determined resolve to not evolve their industry, their practice), and empowered any number of competitors, including “furniture system designers, sustainability consultants, construction managers, and engineers.” Celento sites Martin Simpson of the rockstar engineering group Arup Associates as suggesting that architects may “eventually become unnecessary — except, perhaps, as exterior stylists.”

I can’t believe he just said that out loud. Ouch. From an engineer. Somebody get the architects a glass of water.

Honestly, David Celento has only voiced what everybody is already thinking, and what the industry as a whole is struggling with. This is a reality shared with a number of creative enterprises, and those facing this reality have nobody to blame but themselves, really. This storm has been brewing since the advent of desktop workstations in the 1980’s. Go to the business section of your local bookstore and count the books that offer a perspective on the phrase “innovate or die.” Why so many? Because the range of strategic risks facing contemporary business demands a strategy of innovation for survival and longevity. It demands business model reinvention, and architecture has not yet gotten the memo on this.

A parting shot:

“To increase its desirability and market share, architectures need to harness emerging technologies and tap more deeply into consumer desires, using both plurality and branding in product delivery methods. These efforts would be self-correcting — they provide an opportunity for architects to evaluate the success of their offspring quantitatively. Doing so would also encourage architects to move beyond “isms” geared toward revolutionizing aesthetic and social agendas every decade or so — a phenomenon that architects themselves can’t even keep up with — let alone the public at large, since architectural journals which feature these sorts of rapid-fire volleys (including this one) are rarely found nestled between The Economist and Vanity Fair at newsstands. Two decades of fanciful catalogs stuffed in mailboxes have done more to shape popular taste (and educate people about design) than the club of architectural priests that has elevated its game by preaching to the converted while leaving out the laypeople that architects ultimately need.”

David Celento

By the way, he’s an architect and this is classified as tough love.

Ed Wilms, this one’s for you.

In line with the proliferation of talk around execution, there is also much going on as it relates to strategy. Strategy and execution are inextricably linked, they are useless without each other. Without a focus on execution and performance, strategy is a purely academic pursuit. Without a strategic foundation, execution is a “car without a steering wheel” (or any number of fitting clichés). Strategy is one of those things that seemingly everyone talks about, but few actually practice. It is something that is typically top-of-mind as companies think about the imminent new year, but once that new year commences it is quickly forgotten about, and rarely followed through. This plays out everywhere. We have all seen it in one form or another. The same can be said for execution. At the heart of this is determining how an organization is going to get where it needs to go, how it is going to navigate the range of strategic risks before it.

The linking of strategy with execution, and understanding the importance of the relationship between the two, has been gaining important attention. The Harvard Business Review just published an article discussing the rise and importance of the Chief Strategy Officer. There are a number of reasons that companies are creating and assigning this position, the most common of which is most likely that CEO’s now find their attention diverted to an increasing range of priority issues, and the nurturing and development of strategy suffers. The CSO’s entire purpose is around developing and executing on a range of strategies, and ensuring that decision making supports these strategies and aligns with the company vision.

The HBR article does a nice job discussing the importance of linking strategy to execution and lists three critical strategy implementation tasks:

• - Engendering commitment to strategic plans. Articulate a clear definition of your company’s strategy and explain how each person’s work relates to it. This clarity enables the building of the federation necessary to put strategic plans into action.

• - Drive immediate change. Facilitate the change initiatives required to execute the strategy.

• - Promote decision making that sustains change. Ensure that strategic decisions don’t get watered down or ignored as they’re translated throughout the organization. Communicate with managers at all levels to determine whether decisions being made over time continue to be aligned with the strategy.

Now, the role of the CSO is most likely not a reality for many organizations, but the value of this approach is inherent. What this article effectively describes is the role and importance of strategy and implementation for organizations of all types and sizes. This is serious stuff, and with the complexity and speed with which markets change is also potentially the only way to effectively navigate this complexity, stay on track, and begin to anticipate risk.

The mantra of execution is heavy on the minds of everybody these days. Actually, that would be accountability AND execution. Seems that we all need a little primer in business 101 as without a culture based on both… all is lost. Or, at least all is at risk. It turns out that execution is also a top concern with CEO’s around the world. Actually, according to a Conference Board global survey, execution is their number one concern, ranking above profit and top-line growth.

“This year’s overall top challenge shows that CEOs from around the world are realizing that strong execution is a critical factor in driving profits and revenues. These executives are also becoming increasingly aware of the crucial role that people play in growing their companies.”

Jonathan Spector, President and CEO of The Conference Board

As a part of this survey, 769 CEOs from 40 nations were asked to rate their greatest concerns from among 121 challenges. “Excellence of execution” was selected as the top concern with “keeping consistent execution of strategy by top management” the third-greatest concern. Of particular note is that “sustained and steady top-line growth”, which led the list last year, now ranks second, with profit growth fourth, and finding qualified managerial talent fifth. I believe that this indicates a shift in the concept of performance within many organizations, and that the inception of performance is execution. This is being driven by the myriad of strategic risks we face in our industries, and by the ethereal nature of success that is today’s reality.

Of note is that the survey uncovers some interesting regional differences. The European CEOs surveyed expressed greater concern with speed, flexibility and adaptability to change as it relates to getting new, more responsive ideas out sooner. This was a dominant theme in Europe (third place), while in Asia it tied for eighth and the U.S. was back in 10th place.