lead/marke | ralf schwartz

[L/M NET] Tim Kastelle > "Am I Allowed? - Nilofer Merchant on Innovation"

(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)

 

Here is an outstanding talk from Nilofer Merchant (and an interesting post about the background to it) – it is well worth your time:

 

Here are some of the key points that jump out at me in this talk:

• New ideas should change us: One of her first points is that even though people frequently talk about being in favour of innovation, in practice many of these same people actually block it. Why? Because new ideas lead to change, and we often don’t like to change. Do we secretly resist innovation? This is a question that merits serious thought.

  I was fortunate enough to talk with Nilofer face-to-face last week. We discussed a variety of things, including management books. She strongly made the point that if we’re going to write things that genuinely have an impact on people, then we should be explicit about how we want them to behave differently after reading these offerings. New ideas should change us, and we should be conscious of this whenever we create, share, or encounter new ideas. And we should be open to this in all of these situations as well.

• The key question that you encounter about innovation is: Am I Allowed Here? Are organisations serious about wanting ideas from people? In many cases, again, there is a gap between the rhetoric and the practice. This relates very strongly with the first point. Seeing the world differently drives innovation. But in many places, seeing the world differently is not welcome – and this contributes to the feeling that you’re not allowed to innovate. Giving yourself permission is often the biggest step you take in becoming innovative. If you’re a manager, supporting people who see the world differently is critical.
• We often filter out ideas that we haven’t encountered before: normal is good, and fitting in is good. At least, that’s what our brain tells us. One consequence of thinking this way is that if we run across an idea that is novel (at least to us), we block it out. This is a problem. A lot of our management practice is designed to reduce variation – to make things more efficient, to eliminate problems, to turn as much of our work as possible into a routine, or an algorithm. But innovation requires increasing variation.
• Ideas grow when they are shared: the last big idea in the talk is that ideas get better when they’re built upon. In order for this to happen, we have to let them go. This again is counterintuitive. Our great ideas are ours, right? Nope.

These are just three of the ways that we block innovation, even if we think we’re in favour of it.

How I’d Like You to Change Your Behaviour After Reading This

Here are some things you can do to address these issues:

• Give yourself permission to innovate, even if you think you’re not allowed to.
• If you’re a manager, find ways to support people that increase the diversity of ideas in your organisation. Don’t just focus on improving efficiency.
• Make a conscious effort to run across new ideas. Subscribe to blogs that you don’t agree with, or that make you mad, and engage with these ideas.
• Let your next idea go. Share it, and see how it grows.

Ideas have power, and great ideas should change how we act. And remember, that’s how we act, collectively.

(ralf says:
Start with small ideas and innovations. Get used to it yourself. Let your people get used to ideas and innovation.
People kill ideas, if they feel uncomfortable, because these ideas change grown behaviour, change ways of working, doing business, getting done your daily routine.
Try to get people to think, ask them for their opinion, their experiences, their ideas(!). Try to get people to write their own agenda, not yours.
Try to get people acquainted to small changes of behaviour. Let them lead the  meeting. ...
If they love all this, talk about that great feeling of embracing change, being creative, and innovative.
Then try the next step, the bigger idea ...

Innovation is a culture - not a process!)

Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle

lead/marke NET: Tom Fishburne > "The Art of Planning"

Note: 2011 ahead we recommend rolling planning, micro strategies, and Tom's quest for the best plan. Please enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Tom's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

 

(to instantly download this cartoon, click here)

For many businesses, planning for 2011 is in full swing, particularly the horse-trading, haggling, and negotiating to choose the revenue target. The core business team develops a bottoms-up plan they feel is achievable. The leadership team sets an top-down stretch target that is much higher. Then everyone bickers over the gap between the two numbers.

There are a few schools of thought on where to draw the line in between. Set your target too low and you can reliably hit the number, but you may not have achieved anything remarkable. Set your target too high and it may spur you to breakthrough growth, but it will feel like failure if you then miss the number. 

A plan is outdated the moment it's inked. Things change: customers change their minds, new opportunities surface, roadblocks appear. The key to hitting a plan is having a constant list of upsides to chase and downsides to mitigate so that you have contingiencies. I once saw a plan with a long list of downsides, but no upsides. Someone asked why the team hadn't come up with a list of upsides. It turned out that they had, but they then baked the upsides into the plan. They then had nowhere to go when bad news inevitably came. 

The best plans are neither sandbagged or full of hot air. They find the right equilibrium in between. But, they then provide extra incentives to the team for beating plan by different levels. This approach motivates the team to find breakthrough growth, but not at the expense to morale of having a plan perpetually out-of-reach.  

Tom, when not cartooning (eg. for Marketing Week), is method's international managing director. Based in London, he frequently speaks at campuses, companies, and conferences about marketing, cartooning, and how to spread business ideas. @tomfishburne

lead/marke NET: Helge Tenno > "Is This a Time for Status Quo?"

Note: Right on Spot, Helge. My Golden Rules 10, 11, and 12 of Leadership: Challenge Yourself! Question Everything! Improve Continuously! - Enjoy!
(lead/marke NET proudly features Helge's inspiring posts on a regular basis.)

Are we challenging the status quo just to settle for an updated version? Is this even a time for status quo?

One of my personal mantras has always been: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”. In an ongoing email discussion William Channer, he asked me to elaborate. I thought the answer would be well worth posting on the blog:

WC: Why is this important to you?:
“Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”

Two reasons:

1. This is not the time for status quo’s. Working in an environment where the pattern of platform usage, media consumption and technology awareness in the general public is in constant development means that the currency of our products needs to meet this change. As we have not yet “landed” on the next big thing but finding our way there (we are currently in between generations), settling down can quickly either leave one stranded or result in the loss of a big opportunity.

For our clients this is the time to gain market opportunities through new business models, utilizing technology and behavior in tailored ways (like Amazon has done for the book industry or Google for the media industry the last fifteen years). If we are not helping our clients discover and develop new opportunities, but milk old ones, are we doing our job?

2. Deconstructing concepts, taking them apart and challenging each fragment is a way of exploring and discovering ideas. Amongst others described by Stephen King in the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: Find one idea and then try to destroy it.

The benefit of this process is both a chance to polish the final concept and make sure every detail is perfect, but also to understand how and why the details work, and uncovering new insight in the process. Deconstructing something you’ve already did that worked gives you great ammunition not for copying it, but for finding out why it was a success, and then understanding which specific details in it made it work and why other details did not.

As an example advertisers have always known what types of communication gave an intended effect, but it is only in the last twenty years brain science has been able to tell us exactly why. Which has led to an offspring of brand new ideas based on the specific knowledge of how the brain works as opposed to just copying known “advertising rules”.

To put it briefly: People constantly adopt and implement new ways of communicating and of fitting technology into their everyday life. By deconstructing our big ideas into smaller fragments we have a better tool for knowing what will work when building solutions on new platforms for new behaviors – and by that the “risk” or “guts” people often talk about when explaining creativity becomes rational and logical – even safe.

This does not make marketing and design boring, but it demands more thinking about thinking. – And it demands as much creativity from the strategic department as from the creative department.

Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. @congbo

Brand Engagement: Growing Your Community Organically

Fine, small case study showing the power of tiny steps towards a bigger goal: "Wacom Tablets: Community Included".

"Simply by listening, getting to know their community members, and enouraging them to spread their wings, Wacom and eROI have built a strong brand-consumer connection. Due to the success of the community they can now move forward, with a large group of loyal brand evangelists. What more could they want?"

Value Creation: Das Logo - Evolution statt Revolution

Ignant zeigt eine Evolution verschiedener Company- und Marken-Logos. Besonders interessant sind die Anfänge von Mozilla/Firefox, LG, die 70er/80-Jahre Aberration von BMW.

Hier das Apple-Logo, dessen Beginn ich überhaupt nicht kannte, aber auch kein Fake ist, wie ein Blick in das Apple Museum zeigt:

Picture courtesy ignant.

Schaut man genau hin beim ersten Apple-Logo, erkennt man den Apfel im Baum. Darunter kann im Grunde nur eine Person der Weltgeschichte sitzen: Steve Jobs oder Newton, der durch den fallenden Apfel die Gravitation entdeckte. (Newton spielte dann nochmal, bei einem der wenigen Flops der Apple-Geschichte, eine Rolle - als Namensgeber des Apple-PDA.)

Die große Kunst der Logo-Evolution sehe ich in dem sich vervollkommnenden Verzicht auf alles Überflüssige, die Konzentration auf das Wesentliche und die Kreation eines unverwechselbaren, eigenständigen Signets, das ohne Worte, in einem einzigen Bild die gesamte Welt der Marke auf den Punkt bringt. Siehe Nike, Apple und Mercedes bei ignant.