kevin donaldson

Decent manifesto on stimulating innovation inside the organization.  A few specific nuggets I took away:

•  Watch out for a culture of ‘yeah but…’ instead of the more desirable ‘what if…?’

•  There is no question that limited resources can stifle innovation, but all too often this becomes an easy and convenient excuse for not doing the critical and creative thinking required to push to the next level—the place where elegance is found.  Do people in your organization see limitations as invitations to ingenuity and opportunities to differentiate or excuses for why it can’t be done?

•  People don’t lay down their lives for a job. They don’t give the totality of who they are to line shareholder’s pockets. But, they will give everything they’ve got to play a role in changing the world.

• The fact is, you can’t innovate without experimenting and you can’t experiment without making some mistakes….By giving people permission to fail, gutsy leaders give them permission to try new things.   When was the last time you rewarded someone for an intelligent failure?

I particularly like the idea of an "Intelligent Failure" award where colleagues nominate and award each other for stepping out and trying a smart experiment that failed and what was learned from it.  

A set of brief segments from an McKinsey Interview with behaviorial economist Dan Ariely on the topic of irrationality in the workplace.  My favorite clip from this set is on the topic of 'When to trust your Gut'.  Basically you can trust your gut if with lots of experience AND if you can control all possible influences that might impact the outcome of the decision... his point being - experimentation is the key, and he asks a great question - why don't companies do more experimentation?  We should always be testing leaps of faith.  Organizational agility is the mindset needed to support this type of continuous experimentation.  Agile software shops understand it.  Yes, there are costs to experimentation but the early learnings more than outweigh any of the costs.

Ariely has written a couple of books on irrationality.   One that I have read is Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions -  a really entertaining and worthwhile read. 

Like any type of business the tactics for managing and executing a startup are evolving.  Here is a new presentation by Steve Blank from SXSW 2011 on the topic.  Focusing on 3 topics near and dear to me: Customer Development, Business Models, and Lean Startups.  While the primary slant of this presentation is on software (and also a primary focus of the Lean Startup) these concepts can be applied in any startup environment.  Its more about having the right mindset.

A facinating post entitled The Connected Company by Dave Gray (Xplane) focused on the concept of building companies like cities.... I am still digesting...  I especially like this comment:

Although we tend to design companies like machines, we instinctively and intuitively understand that companies are not made of cogs, levers and gears. In the end, they are made out of people. For top management, it would be wonderful if we could put our business strategy into the machine, push a button and wait for the results. But it doesn’t work that way. You have to put your strategy into people if you want to get results.

Music an amazing form of art and creativity.  I have always been told I have a good ear for tones.  When I was young, I used to help tell a friend of mine who played guitar replicate music from our favorite band.  I could always tell if he was hitting the right note to match the song.  The funny thing though is that I have never really played an instrument myself (beyond classes in high school).  Its one of those things on my life to-do list.  I feel called to play some type of instrument, and listening to this wonderful piece of art today on a 4 string Hawaiian ukulele makes you realize how creative humans can be with instruments.

I recently finished a great book by Randy Komisar and John Mullins called Getting to Plan B:  Breaking through to a better business model.  I originally got turned onto this book from the Startup Lessons Learned Conference in spring of 2010.  While the book has become a must read for startups, and in fact does focus a lot on starting new business's the core aspects of the book can be used across any business that:

• is starting up a new business unit
• carries out new product development
• is developing new service offerings
• is looking at evaluating new business strategies

... so pretty much any modern business that wants to stay competitive will get some benefit from the book.  The title is a good summation of the book:  Always be looking for and testing plan B, C, D etc.  To do this the authors focus on 3 main principals:

1. Analogs:  Don't re-invent the wheel.  Analogs to your idea are successful predecessor companies that are worth mimicking in some way. Portions of others ideas which can be borrowed and/or adapted to you to help understand economics and other aspects of your idea.
2. Antilogs: Be Different.  Antilogs to your idea are predecessor companies compared to which you explicitly choose to do things differently.
3. Leaps of Faith:  Ask the right questions.  Anilogs and Antilogs help you reach conclusions about some things faster with at least some level of certainty, but there will be questions that cannot be answered by historical precedence.  Leaps of faith are the beliefs you hold about the answers to your questions despite having no real evidence that they are actually true.  Therefor you must experiment.

These leaps of faith must be tested, and measured via a dashboard.  This can essentially create the framework for a simple yet effective management framework.  The book has many great examples but I will use one of my own for this post. 

I support and have been involved since the early days with a startup non profit called Create Common Good.  Create Common Good provides training and employment to refugees and others in need through experiential programs that transform lives and enrich communities  One of our programs is a farm program where we train refugees in farming techniques but also use the proceeds from the farm to support our efforts.  One of the ideas that we have had is to create a mobile lunch truck that serves up international cuisine made by refugees based on food from their native homeland using in-season local produce produced at the farm.  In addition to some Anilogs and Antilogs found for mobile food trucks, here is a sample Leap of Faith Dashboard to describe how it can be used.  (results listed below are fictitious:)

Many companies try and create complicated sets of metrics and dashboards, but often they are just patting themselves on the back with metrics that already prove what they know to be true.  Next time try innovating and exploring some leaps of faith in your business using this simple tool to test and measure.

Another great RSA clip overlaying a discussion by Sir Ken Robinson on Changing the Educational Paradigm.

For the past few years I have been doing a personal year end retrospective.  Its a fun and relaxing exercise to do over the holidays as you sip on a warm drink, enjoy the Christmas season, and prepare to kick things back into gear in the new year.  Here are a sample list of questions that I have collected and use to carry out this exercise.  I like to write down my answers to some of these so I can then go back and look at them next year.  Some I just think through.   You can do it solo or go through some of them with a good friend.  (Lance - I will miss doing this with you this year!)

Looking Back...

• What is the greatest lesson you learned this year that you never want your kids to forget?
• How might you have behaved or acted differently in 2010 if you had to do it over again
• Looking back over the year what did you set out to do that you didn’t do and why?
• What key discipline did you live out this past year that had significant impact on your life?  What was the impact?
• What are you most proud of this year?
• What was the biggest triumph this year?
• What were the key surprises (good or bad) that happened this year?
• Which relationship in your life grew this year and which regressed?
• If you could go back to the beginning of this year what piece of advice would you give yourself? Why?
• Looking back, what was the overarching theme for this year? / What one word best sums up your 2010 experience?
• What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2010?
• What was the most loving service you performed in 2010?
• What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2010?
• What are you most happy about completing in 2010?
• Who were the 3 people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2010?
• What was the biggest risk you took in 2010?
• What was I worrying about at this time last year, and how have things changed?
• What are my current allergies (emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and physically)?
• What compliments would you have liked to receive in 2010?
• What compliments would you like to have given in 2010?
• What was the smartest decision you made in 2010?
• What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2010?

Looking Ahead...

• What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2011?
• What advice would you like to give yourself in 2011?
• What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2011?
• What would you be most happy about completing in 2011?
• What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2011?
• What would you most lie to change about yourself in 2011?
• What are you looking forward to learning in 2011?
• What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2011?
• What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2011?
• How should I control/adjust my rhythm/pace in 2011?
• What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2011?
• What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2011?
• Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2011?
• What one word would you like to have as your theme for 2011?

In the creative economy you use your mind to solve interesting and challenging problems at work.  For most, working with your hands involves fingers on a computer or drawing ideas on a whiteboard.  We use our mind much more than our physical bodies, but I feel that humans were meant to use both.    In past generations it was the other way around - all physical labor and very little mental stimulation.  Not good either, but in the right quantities physical labor can be invigorating.  I don't the made up physical activity of going to a gym, but real physical work.  Humans have hands and limbs for a reason - we were meant to use them.  I think that is why I enjoy simple activities such as gardening, or building a patio. 

I recently moved to Bend Oregon for a new job.  I am staying in temporary housing for a few weeks until we find a rental and our furniture gets moved.  The house is very modern but also has a wood stove in the family room in addition to the heating system.  Out back there is a wood shed of sorts, so I went out to get some wood to bring in for the wood stove.  The logs were a little big, so I looked around and found an axe.  I then proceeded to chop wood, and it was intensely satisfying!  The feel of the wood handle in my hands, the sense of power as the axe head hits the wood and the pieces explode off to the sides as the energy was transferred from my arms, through the axe to the wood.   I reminded me of growing up in Southern Ontario (Canada) watching my dad chop wood in the fall and we would stack it in piles in the field behind our house to let it dry for future winters.  We would then take wood from the oldest stack (dryest) and bring it in by wagon behind the tractor and put in the basement to be used in our wood furnace for the winter. 

Maybe its the memories or maybe it was the physical exertion, but it felt good.

A few years back Booze Allen's Strategy+Business(Aug 2006) has a great biographical article about entrepreneur Joi Ito. In this article there was an interesting discussion about how his obsession with World of Warcraft - a MMORPG (massively multi-player online role-playing game), allowed him to experiment with new org design and team management techniques through his WoW guild. This guild was made up of 250 members from all backgrounds from around the globe including a "raid leader" who is an emergency room nurse, and another important player who is an unemployed bartender.

Mr Ito: "I'm playing with all different kinds of management ideas I've had for companies, with a bunch of people who are actually very dedicated. They will set their alarm clocks for 3 a.m. to run a raid of 40 people. They are committed to each other like people in a normal company wouldn't be committed to each other. So as a test bed for these ideas this is actually pretty amazing".

While my wife is against having video games in our home, her view of these is based on what was around when we were kids.  Games have evolved significantly since the days of Donkey Kong and Super Mario.  Many games are  are no longer the mindless couch-surfing, single player games of the late 80's and 90's.  Games now get you moving, and thinking, they can teach strategy, encourage/require collaboration with other real people, and inspire creativity.

Furthermore, the best games win because they figure out how to intrinsically motivate the player to keep playing.  The question is how do they do this, and how can these patterns be used in both business and education more effectively?   Here are two presentations to consider.

The first is a TED talk about 7 ways in which games reward your brain.  (approx 16 min). 

The second is an interactive presentation about Playing to Learn, exploring the role of play in education.