The old and the new... words-less

Fitted to time today!

We strongly suggest the book, The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, or the movie in its entirety. Watch the Howard Rourke speech here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4

About asking questions...

My daughter asked me the other day "am I still asking questions like I used to when I was little?"... At first it seemed out of context... then it figured. A few days earlier I was telling a story about her when she was younger and was always asking "why?", and then more "why?" and even more "why?", and connecting with her almost brother who was doing the same as well when he was three-five years of age.

My daughter must have figured out that this could be a good thing...

Is all "innovation" always good? Unintended consequences? Requirements for renewed innovation?

We once asked a question on a forum on LinkedIn. We shall repeat one answer here, with a set of renewed questions... prompted by a very interesting and insightful answer by a now good friend, Rodica Petrescu (absolutely no connection other than that her husband has the same name as I). Thank you.

_Question_:

Where are you from? "I am from allover the world... " What does this tell us/you?

A few years ago, my then 5 y.o. is asked and asks a boy on the playground in a little university town in Central Pennsylvania "Where are you from?" The little boy answers partly puzzled "I am from here". My little girl answers "I am from allover the world..." To the boy's puzzlement she then answers again with a list of all the places she was feeling connecting to, from Texas to Michigan to Pennsylvania all the way to Europe, particularly Romania.

Hasn't the time already come some time ago imposing thinking this way? Meaning that we relate globally, inclusive with a needed built in lifestyle flexibility? Jobs are dying out in Detroit, we shall be able to seek them out in Europe, Latin America, or China or India or Korea, or even Kazakhstan? (I mean much beyond the obvious culprit in Iraq these days).

How does this trend and potential paradigm shift in lifestyles affect us? Are we ready for it? Have we global-proofed our careers, skill sets, life visions, family adaptability?

How ready is the work environment you work in? Company leadership? Is there a realization of workforce empowerment by way of global mobility? Or does it cut solely the other way (through fear inducing management "techniques" such as 'as much as I like you, Joe, if you're not more careful there, your job ships to China next!')?

I'd love your input, critiques, comments, suggestions. Thank you so much in advance.

_Rodica's Answer_

"From Rose - your friend from 100 years ago

Dear Adrian,

How are you? Is life good to you? I think often of my old village…

Remember 100 years ago, my small grocery shop facing our tiny street and my house at the back and above? And doctor's house (his office in front of the house) across the street, the pharmacist’s, the tailor’s few houses away and yours at the end of the street across from the priest's, close to school, where you were taught all of our kids. I remember those summer days and kids playing together in the street, their laughter and chasing around, while we worked. Sometimes our daughters stormed in my shop to help neighbors with groceries - they always got candies for that. They worked even better and faster than me, while I cooked the soup and stew for lunch. Your daughter loved my stew! I remember how they played in little doll houses, "cooked" in little pots, even made a little "doll grocery shop", telling me how they'll have one bigger than mine when they grow up. After all day’s chores, I was so tired that I'd just simply crawl in bed and fall asleep in seconds. Life was hard and you'd never get a break, work - family – house, all in the same time, but at least we knew each other and never locked front doors.

After 50 years I got this huge career opportunity in the big city. My job was 60 km away from home, so I put my kid in daycare, to be looked after by people that I did not know personally, but with excellent credentials. Heartbreaking to leave her crying in there, but it was better to be educated by professionals instead of aunt Matilda, although to her credit aunt Matilda loved her dearly. She first cried after your daughter but forgot her after a while, as kids always do. She watched TV, played video games - it was fun. Life was better and easier in the big and beautiful house with industrial range kitchen, pizza delivery, on-line groceries and banking. But no time to cook, plus the kitchen cost a fortune and didn't want garlic smell lingering around anyway! My daughter never came to my office but she thought it must be terrible, since everyday I returned home tired and stressed and took work home, as I had such tight deadlines. I thought she was fine, since she declared she will never grow up, just be a child forever, with no worries for mortgage, job security, outsourcing and all those un-imaginable things. I worried for my work-life balance, so and I balanced my life in the evenings. It was rather boring, since my daughter didn't know my colleagues and my work and I didn't know her friends, so we ran out of topics rather soon. Unfortunately I lost touch with old friends, because you always have to prioritize and after you do that, you need to go to sleep. I guess other people are better than me at that.

After other 50 years got my next huge career chance in a multi-national company, offering solutions and counseling for both work-life and work-sleep balance. As you know, work-sleep balance became key because half of people work on the other side of the world. I am very successful and always praised for my positive attitude, hard-work and willingness to stretch beyond limits. Sometimes I wonder if I am indeed happier than I was in my grocery shop, but these moments don't last long. I compare things I missed with my great accomplishments and I am not sorry. Everyone has to sacrifice something to build a successful career. I own a mansion, all for myself now since my daughter is at Yale. The house has everything one dreams of, including a state-of-the-art alarm system - as you cannot be careful enough these days. My daughter is home during vacation; truly brilliant kid and keeps to her studying even when home. We don't spend much time together, but overall life is great!

These are my news. I have to end here, as it is almost 3 am and I have a conference call. Hope is all well with you.

All the best
Yours, Rose"

I am from "all over the world" too... Cheers

[Rodica Petrescu lives and works in Toronto, Ontario Canada]

In innovation one always useful yet not as often used technique is subtraction. Essentially simplifying to essence, as opposed to adding features. The Toyota Prius (and not only) door opening is innovated by a process of subtraction, taking away the need to open/lock the door with a key or by pushing a FOB.

[The subtraction is of a phase from the human open/close door process. Yet, of course in design/production terms it can be seen as an addition of a RFID keyless entry system nonetheless]

If one uses subtraction to innovate about our current mode of life, can one see/find value?

Besides, are all the additions ultra-valuable all in all? What does Rodica's "letter from Rose" tell us?

We used to have in old villages school teachers. Respected members of the community, they served many functions besides teaching school. Trusted advisers to decision-makers, usually elder. Offering counseling to families about raising their children, to children as they grew up about their problems and concerns and why not education and career goals if they had them or if they could be induced/inspired in them. These are now services one can purchase from licensed professionals, for fees paid. I learned over time that students still come often to teachers with their problems, by simply the trust built and authority figure they represent. Whether in middle school or college or graduate school, we all have done it. Many are however too shy to do it. We have available social services when the churches do not do this function or not enough of it.

What do we need to subtract to maybe make these self-help and related available processes more effective and equitably accessible irrespective of one's means or shyness? Certainly, counseling at hundreds $/hour is great when you are a Hollywood star, but when you are not, how does the changes in the "letter from Rose" affect our daily life for people who may not afford help when they need it? Have we inadvertently "subtracted" characteristics of our communities, maybe even subtracted the teachers' roles? Or have we rather added features which in turn subtracted others?

Indeed, the category above is "when to innovate and when not?" Can we trace some answers?

Systemic thinking and… resumes… markets… processes… and innovation…

When one thinks of say Benjamin Franklin, what are we thinking about? What comes to mind? A few possible answers, in no particular order:

+ the person on the hundred dollars bill
+ a printer from Philadelphia before and during the US independence war years
+ the editor of the famed “Poor Richard’s Almanac”
+ the person with the interesting kite electricity experiment, inducted into the UK Royal Academy of Sciences without having asked to be
+ an inventor of a stove he never patented, since he was against diminishing access of the potential beneficiaries of the stove to its benefits (heating, i.e. improvements in quality of life)
+ the person who facilitated (‘recruited’ really may be a better word) the arrival of Baron Friedrich von Steuben at Valley Forge under George Washington’s command of the early and yet very much untrained Union Army (von Steuben helped train it, which contributed much to the “forging” of a true army, and thus to the later emergence of the new Union victorious against the much better trained initially British professional army)
+ the early winner of a first in kind US government contract to print exclusively early “federal money” (as little power said money had compared to the much more valued and circulated British pound)
+ a lover and follower of Socrates, and promoter of his precepts and methods
+ the “inventor” of voluntary fire-fighting companies
+ the “inventor” of the free public library in the US
+ the person who established University of Pennsylvania
+ reputed founding father of the US, and signatory of the Declaration of Independence
+ the name of many avenues, bridges and places in Philadelphia
+ the name of the Philadelphia “Benjamin Franklin Institute, a great Science and Technology hands on museum

There would probably be many more answers… but who was truly Benjamin Franklin during his time?

I would propose as food for thought an even more interesting question: what about in our times? If Benjamin Franklin needed a job today, and was applying for one, what would his resume say? What would his chances to get a job be? And what kind of a job?

One can picture the interview process, if he ever got to one…

What is your area of expertise?

…

You seem a bit lost… let us try a few helping questions…

Education… you seem to have none. We may have some serious trouble here. Maybe you should be seeing a career counselor. They can help you with looking at what degrees may be good for you to grow your career. There are so many programs today available to you, adapted for non-traditional students to get them back to and through college. Ah, wait a second, you haven’t completed highschool. There are those programs too…

… you say you can compensate lack of education with experience. I don’t know about that… But you seem determined… let’s see then…

Sales… Do you have any sales experience? Any major company you have worked for in sales? What was your rate of meeting quotas?

Marketing. What is your marketing experience? Did you work for any major firms? What ratios/percentages of improved market penetration did you achieve? Who can we get references from to confirm these figures?

Branding? What major players in branding have you worked for? Are you “branding specialist” certified?

Printer? Who prints these days anymore? All the newspapers are dying. But, have you had any experience with major newspapers? The NY Times, the Boston Globe? Maybe we could try and fit you in with a small postcards and stationary print shop, but you will need to get certified…

And it could go on like this…

What would the first line on the resume say? Would it be maybe something like this:

Benjamin Franklin
Good to everything and not good to anything

Let us not forget some of the answers we didn’t yet include above.

Benjamin Franklin was also:

+ the “inventor” of mass marketing (in print—fitted to time)
+ a pioneer in applying systemic thinking to small business problem solving (avoiding mud on streets by hiring a street sweeper and improving the rain water collection system would have a major beneficial effect on maintaining customers flow on the street during rainy days, whereas without these process improvements there was little if any business on the street during and/or after bad weather), much before there was/were (a) fancy name(s) for it
+ a pioneer in small business coaching
+ a pioneer in ethics in business practice, and thus in customer empowerment vis-à-vis businesses
+ a potential “early adopter” of a book written many years later, Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”.

Would this help him in his (mental experiment) “interview” process today? Transferable skills? We wonder…

While we ponder on that question, another few forgotten “definitions” are:

+ a reach resource of know how in today’s world
+ someone who is by far not sufficiently well studied and/or understood in schools and universities or training programs today. Less than 10 % of specialty/majors university students in 2008 in a university in the Greater Philadelphia area have read by/about Benjamin Franklin in either highschool/college. Out of those 10 %, less than 20 % could give any more than three definitions about who Franklin was/is out of those listed above. This represents under 2 % from total—but this is from a self-filtered pool/sample. What would the figure look like if calculated from a representative random sample of actual total population?

What are these facts telling us about the labor market today? About what systemic critical thinking would teach us if we looked thoroughly enough at analyzing systematic talent scouting, promotion and development in the environment we live in? What does this do to our ability to optimally utilize resources, primarily intellectual capital? What does it say about (forget renewed, just maintained) innovation capacity of humankind? And what can we do about all the (sources of) bottlenecks we would identify once we look at things seriously?

[Source for most of the proposed answers above is in part Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, freely available here:

http://librivox.org/the-autobigraphy-of-benjamin-franklin-ed-by-frank-woodworth-pine/


Maybe this could be a must read before one goes on to buy say Stephen Covey’s “Seven (then eight) Habits”, and so many other modern well praised books]

What would you rather be? Director of Apple Support or of PC Support? Who would you rather hire?

Another classic story I found much troubling that most of my students never heard yet. I wonder how applicable the lack of knowledge about this story is elsewhere/everywhere.

Well, it isn't really a story, but only a set of questions. Indeed, who would you rather be, Support Director for all the PCs computer labs or for all the Mac computer labs?

[Microsoft and Apple should not sue me. Their company names are used here solely in relationship with an existing stereotype that PCs seem to be less reliable and break more often than Apple computers, thus needing more support. We do not make here thorough cost of ownership assessments, nor do we try to pass judgment on one technology or the other. This is just an anecdote about organizations and their talent promotion practices.]

Rarely do those whom I ask this question have trouble to find answers within minutes.

Those who would prefer less headaches would rather be Director of Apple Support. Those who would prefer "enjoying a challenge" and like to put out fires all too often would take the Director of PC Support option.

Advancing the questioning reveals new things though.

Since there would likely be more work for the team of the manager in charge with keeping the PCs running, he would hire more staff, and would justify higher budgets. The Apple manager would have less incidents, and thus less work, and he would thus have less justification to add more staff than the PC manager. Over time this will translate into the manager of PC support making a valid argument for his promotion, better than the Apple manager, since the PCs Director has managed more and more people and ever growing budgets. Everything else being equal he would stand a chance to make VP for Technology or Chief Information Officer some day, and that much more probable than his Apple colleague.

Yet, how often do we see what truly has just happened here?

What if the Apple manager would make it to be CIO instead?

As it turns out, when prompted to ask some more questions, we all can figure out that the Apple manager would rather be conservative in his approved expenditures, he would be more inclined to economize resources, both financial and personnel, to invest in better, more reliable and lasting, less resources consuming in the ownership cycle, technological solutions. He could even be more inclined to trace down good yet less reputed smaller but innovative vendors with "futuristic" (an all-in-all relative term) yet full-of-promise new solutions, fact which could over time make his company stay ahead of its less so inclined competitors.

We then present the obvious question "who would we rather hire?" Are the processes and criteria we use for talent scouting and promoting consistent with our operational goals? What can we do to make them more adapted to what actually needs to happen?

Or to put it another way, how do we trace down and use to their fullest potential the (early) George Kennan-s of the world? But that is a whole other story, for another time.

Innovation (Coaching/Training/Consulting) as a profession?

At some point in the history of humankind there was the profession of horse carriage driver. We can still see the modern ones offering rides (at some 60 $/hour or more) in a horse driven historic carriage in Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York and many other places with many tourists.

There must have been norms and rules and standards for joining the profession, and there certainly still are (probably many more) regulations for the modern ones also offering tourist guiding services.

The profession in itself got extinct though and rather shifted to being that of limousine driver with the technological changes making the automobile king. It survives as such, but our point is about something else. The act of driving a vehicle has little by little massively shifted from a profession to a habit. After all almost all of us carry a driver's license and drive on a more or less regular basis our own automobile, that is we drive ourselves without a driver, irrespective of who actually owns the vehicle.

Are therefore innovation coaches, trainers or consultants members of a profession? They certainly are, but what type of profession is it? We hold that maybe innovation should be like driving a vehicle. The goal seems to be that all of us should be "carrying" our 'innovative processes certified person' license in our wallet.

Does it not seem that the truly good innovation coaches, trainers and consultants are nothing else but the (self-propelled vehicle) driving school instructors in a world still living in a horse driven carriages time? Is this not a profession that shall strive hardest to fight to extinct itself as no longer necessary by its very nature and scope? After all, the minute everyone learns innovation well from an early age in elementary school, doesn't it become a second nature? Isn't then the future a point in which we do not need coaches and trainers, and we have learned to master innovation from Mom and Dad like we learned to ride a bicycle?

Tracking, chasing, and eliminating deep rooted barriers to innovation...

Another story, another few questions about it...

In our previous story we mentioned a child and his family planting the seed about a novel use of a used tire, transparent plastic foil, and water to concentrate solar radiation for making coffee, while camping...

The way said story developed led to a passion for solar/renewable energy by the child in the story, a passion which he then used to research and develop a few new things and win a few research competitions, and maintain a decades long passion for new technologies and fighting to help getting those to becoming mainstream.

We will not answer here the questions we asked before. We leave those open.

However, we will add another related story in the mix...

In part as a result of the last story about collecting solar rays with a tire made large lens, the same (yet older) child was in high-school when he researched, optimized and built a series of conic solar concentrators, and used them consecutively for further experimentation and design into:

- first a better optimized coffee maker,
- then a solar powered running water heater, with a fitted copper spiral, and
- further a solar powered steam engine coupled to a small electricity generator.

As a member of the physics research group in the high-school, he secured the support of the physics teacher in charge of the student physics research group to talk the school's administration into backing and expanding these research efforts. It all boiled down to a simple lock on a door for a would be storage space, otherwise previously unused...

But please let me explain...

The proposal the high-school student came up with was the signing of an agreement between the high-school and the main technical university in the town to have the university:

- sponsor the research group,
- provide on site visits and guided participation by passionate in physics high-school students to the research facilities in the University,
- provide equipment and guidance to the students research group,
- provide a college/university student recruitment ground based on learning by the high-school students of what the university was doing and a matching with the high-school students' interests and inclinations thus nurtured by the partnership.

The to be donated equipment was there, the plan was written and on the table, the responsible faculty's commitment was there, and even the spot for storing the equipment was found in a small 4 cubic meters (about 320 cubic feet) space with a door located under some stairs, which was not otherwise used at all.

When presented with the offer and the MoU, the school administration's response was one concerned with the potential stealing of the equipment from the storage space. No lock was deemed strong enough to resist a potential break in. The storage space was indeed accessible from the school's inner (fenced) yard. The administration didn't want to take the responsibility of having the equipment in its inventory and then eventually be liable for it if it gets stolen... But furthermore, the lock alone aside, there were really no processes in place designed to allow for this partnership to be developed and established towards its fruition. We wonder today about the (absent) vision to see the value of such partnership and to make it possible irrespective of the small organizational hurdles involved.

... hold that thought for a second... "inertial high-school administrators"

The same child from above, many years later in a different country a world away and decades more into the present, now a parent in the meantime, tries to talk his child's school into taking all the children to one or a few Childrens' Museums on a school field trip. Quite a few options of Science and Technology Centers and Hands On Museums were available in the area, within just some twenty or more miles driving distance.

There was much support from the teacher for the idea, a teacher who has promoted field trips herself, yet who had an explanation for the school administration's impossibility to support and organize such field trips. It was not a lock or equipment security considerations this time, but rather equity... It turns out a half hour go and half hour come with some four-five hours wait bus trip would cost some 6 $/child to offset Diesel fuel and the bus costs, not budgeted for in the school's budget. Some parents were of limited financial means and could thus not afford the 6 $. Trying to avoid creating a socio-economic means discriminatory environment, the school could not propose such trips to parents and organize them.

There was probably little know-how as to grant writing and securing extra funds which would provide sponsorship of the trip for the needy families, or too cumbersome administrative processes (and resources intensive thus costly, dedicating resources away from managing daily operations and from focusing on ensuring a good learning environment overall) involved for securing the extra funds needed to address the equity issue and make a new much needed initiative available to all children.

[For the record, for those such inclined as to research which school we are talking about, in the meantime the "problem" was actually fixed over the following few years from the events described here. One more "fight" won after all. We wholeheartedly thank for this organizational learning and evolution.]

... now please bring back the story stored in memory, about the inertial high-school administrators in the other country a world away, a few decades in the past, and a political system a universe different than the United States.

What are the similarities between these two stories, thousands of miles away and decades apart?

What do the negative outcomes in these stories do to innovation readiness of the young learners many years later?

What are the lessons we need to learn? And once we learn them, what do we do to truly eliminate consciously and systematically the deep rooted barriers to innovation, day in and day out?