Father’s Day, Post Mortem

Last Sunday (Father’s Day) and the days preceding, it was tough to avoid stories and columns about the impact that individuals’ fathers had on them. While all of the tales varied in content, there were consistent themes, the majority of them centering on how dear old dad was such a good mentor. It got me to thinking about who our mentors are when it comes to innovation and creativity.

Just about everybody in business has read the biography of Steve Jobs, who was arguably one of the greatest innovators of all time, and it underscores the fact that anybody can be a mentor—even people you’ve never met. You get to choose whose advice and philosophies you want to explore and perhaps adopt. It can even be that of a company.

While the Jobs of the world are sure bets (as well as Google and other creative organizations), you may be better off finding something different than what everybody else is following. Nothing against Jobs, but since his passing, I’ve heard at least 50 presentations about innovation that quoted him or used his principles verbatim—which means that you could be using what everybody else is using, and that ultimately isn’t very innovative.

Some people are fortunate enough to have a mentor where they work, or a family member or friend who they can rely on when it comes to getting that creative spark that ignites innovation. For others, it’s up to us to choose our mentors, or at least translate and derive lessons from the people around us. Sometimes we need to stretch.

As someone whose dad, as a coach, held the town record for being thrown out of the most Little League baseball games for arguing with umpires, I’ll chalk that record up to passionate beliefs—a trait all innovators share.

The Organization’s Brain

The term “learning organization” got some traction a few years ago and became part of business vocabulary. But learning how to do may not help an organization as much as the exercise of learning in and of itself.

Neuroscientists have found that slowing down, focusing, and thinking deeper is what ultimately makes the brain smarter. So, it would follow that as an organizational collective, we can make the greater whole smarter by applying the same principles.

In our rush to do more with less, multitask, and act on the variety of variables on our daily dashboards, the race could ultimately be won by the organization that focuses on learning—rather than the “learning organization” that emphasizes doing.

Who Are You?

“Who are you? Who, who, who, who?”

Apologies to Pete Townshend and The Who, but JC Penney’s customers have probably been asking the same questions since new CEO Ron Johnson took over. The retailer’s supposed savior has made several missteps since taking the reins of Penney’s in November of 2011, and its recently released fourth-quarter results are nothing short of catastrophic—a 31.7 percent same-store sales decline.

Who are you?

After Johnson arrived, without testing his new, no-more-sales strategy, no more coupons, he promptly alienated the majority of Penney’s existing customers. But, the retailer’s new stores within stores concept hadn’t been launched yet, except for a handful of locations, so there wasn't any new reason to shop at the store except to pay higher prices. And because the new concept hadn’t been realized, there was no reason for new customers to go to Penney’s. Isn’t this Consumer Behavior 101?

Now, Johnson’s done an about face and says that the retailer will have regular sales, but in the meantime, the once-loyal customer base Penney’s once had has found new places to shop like Kohl’s, Macy’s, and Target.

I really wanna know. Who are you? Who, who, who, who?

There’s no doubt that Johnson’s initial strategy was innovative, but where do you draw the line between concept and full-scale implementation? As Johnson reportedly said to somebody who questioned why they weren't testing the new concepts first before rolling them out to all stores, “We never did it at Apple.” About the only thing that Apple and JC Penney have in common are the letters “p” and “e.”

Maybe Johnson was desperate to make something big happen right away; maybe no one dared to tell the new Emperor he was making too poor of a wardrobe choice. One thing is clear: Sometimes when you bet the farm on a big idea, you can wind up losing the farm. While that’s not to say you don’t take risks, because anytime you innovate you’re taking a risk, you just need to assess how big a risk you can afford to take. If you’re essentially risking the entire business, doing some testing upfront is a good idea. How’s that for an understatement. And keep in mind that what people tell you in a focus group or online research isn’t necessarily how they’ll behave in real life; sometimes they have to have the actual experience in order to give an accurate read on how they’ll behave. In this case, it would have made a lot more sense for Penney’s to test its new pricing strategy in a few markets before taking it national.

Innovation Pipeline?

The Keystone Pipeline project, which would route Canadian tar sands through the United States, poses an interesting dilemma regarding innovation. Technology has made it possible to use a new method that allows for the extraction of oil from sources that were previously unavailable for commercial production. Good news for a part of the continent held hostage to the Middle East when it comes to oil production, right?

Not so fast.

The process necessary to extract the oil generates much more environmental damage than conventional oil drilling, so the new technology comes at a high environmental cost. Is it worth it?

Enter the lobbyists and special interest groups on both sides of the issue. In addition to some 500,000 more barrels of oil per day, the Keystone will generate jobs in the United States, something the country needs, given the anemic rate of job growth. But is job growth worth the environmental trade-off of increased pollution? And pro-pipeliners say that a pipeline will be built and oil will be extracted from the tar sands regardless of what the United States decides—just that the pipeline will cross Canada and the oil will go to China instead.

Many times innovation comes at a big price, and the debate is as much about values as it is about progress.

Tips for 2013

As you start the new year, keep in mind some of these suggestions to improve your personal, team, and organizational innovation output.

1) Be open to the possibility. Nothing shuts down creative thought quicker than quickly ruling out potential ideas. No matter how wild or unlikely something might initially seem, give it a chance, because you never know when something good could result from stretching your thinking.

2) Mix up the team. Rather than having the usual suspects at every brainstorm meeting, invite people from different disciplines so you get different perspectives.

3) Mix up the meeting. Don’t use the same methodology for idea generation repeatedly. Consistency can be a good thing, but when it comes to generating ideas, if you use the same approach every time, it’s bound to get stale.

4) Take time to think. Take a tech-break for a day or two to give yourself time to think without the constant distraction of e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

5) Take time to explore. Expose yourself to new experiences, whether it’s taking a day to explore a museum, reading a magazine you’d never usually pick up, or listening to hours of Ted Talks.

6) Get out of the office. While this may go hand-in-hand with No. 4 or No. 5, changing your environment can change your thinking.

7) Generate lots of ideas. Go for quantity initially when you’re generating ideas because you never know what novel combinations may emerge.

8) Keep the dark clouds out. Exclude the naysayers from initial idea generation—nothing kills creativity quicker than someone who takes pride in always being the devil’s advocate. There’s plenty of time for that type of thinking when the process is further along.

9) Reward the effort. Whether it’s a financial gesture or just a thank-you e-mail, people will be more motivated to generate ideas if they know that their efforts are appreciated.

10) Remind yourself. Take this list out from time to time throughout the year and see how many of these things you’re doing. We all get into ruts, and consciously breaking patterns is always helpful to stimulate creative thinking.

Trivial Pursuit

The title of this post doesn’t refer to the game Trivial Pursuit, but rather what author Nicholas Carr thinks about American innovation these days. Carr’s the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Suffice it to say, he’s not a fan.

 

In a recent op-ed piece, Carr claims that we’re becoming more interested in trifle innovation rather than the greater good, or the broader sweeping innovation from the past that changed business and society. By pointing to things like the $1 billion purchase of Instagram and designer drugs, he uses Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to basically say we’ve become a nation more focused on innovation for self. I can’t say I agree.

 

Sure, you can point to myriad things that have been developed to help make us happier, more focused, and to live longer—and what’s wrong with that? His argument about Maslow’s hierarchy, where self-actualization is the pinnacle of development, provides a convenient way to support his perspective. So, are we the Roman Empire, with ultimate fighting and ridiculous reality shows the equivalent of latter-day coliseum spectacles? Nah.

 

While we can point to plenty of innovation that’s self-oriented, there’s a lot outside of the new product box that speaks to other forms of innovation that in fact are geared toward changing the face of the physical world and society.

 

Like it or not, health care reform is an attempt at sweeping innovation. Reducing our dependence on oil and harnessing the power of the wind and sun speak to innovation with far-reaching environmental and economic change. The advances in medicine that allow members of society to live longer and with a better quality of life have implications and impact beyond just the individual.

 

OK, we may be developing a lot of stuff like Instagram and Pinterest, but the innovations we’re creating with regard to environmental, medical, and even political policies can have just the type of impact that Carr argues we’re ignoring. And that’s not a trivial pursuit.

At Your Best, But Maybe Not

We all have a time of day when we do out best, most creative thinking, and if you know yourself well, you know exactly that time of day.

 

You may be wrong.

 

Just when we think we’ve got answers, like knowing when we do our best thinking, some research comes along to dispel those firmly held beliefs. While one study doesn’t completely disprove longstanding beliefs, I’m open to the possibility that what I’ve believed all along could be counterintuitive to the facts.

 

Researchers in Michigan recently published in the journal Thinking & Reasoning the results of a study they conducted on “insight problems,” or the types of problems that require more creative problem-solving skills. The results were surprising.

 

Based on a questionnaire that identified someone’s optimal time of day, researchers asked participants to solve problems that required more creative problem-solving skills and found that people who were categorized as late-afternoon people did better on the tests in the morning, and morning people performed better in late afternoon.

 

Why?

 

We have what’s known as an inhibitory process, and that process helps us to reduce or eliminate distracting data, which is usually a good thing. When that process is performing less efficiently, like when we’re not at our peak or preferred time of day, we’re more open to random thoughts and, as the researchers speculate, more creative thinking.

 

The next time you have a creative problem to solve, you may want to tackle it when you’re not feeling at the top of your game.

Too Smart for Our Own Good?

Maybe the issue with unemployment is that we’ve gotten too smart. Perhaps we’ve become so innovative we’re innovating ourselves out of work. Is that possible?

It’s coming, and according to Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors of a new book called Race Against the Machine, it’s happening already.

While there’s been debate about advances in manufacturing and technology displacing workers dating back to the 1930s when John Maynard Keynes wrote about the concept, the case that Brynjolfsson and McAfee make is pretty compelling.

The authors cite some very convincing facts to back up their theory that “many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.” For example, corporations are posting record profits and should be at a 50-year high as a share of the economy this year, yet unemployment remains high. They note that since June 2009, supposedly when the recession ended, spending on equipment and software has increased 26 percent, yet payrolls have remained flat. Even some occupations like driving, long thought to be irreplaceable by machines, are being infringed upon by robot-driven cars.

A few times in this blog I’ve mentioned Daniel Pink, who basically says we need to develop our right-brain, conceptual skills more because those are the skills that are more difficult to duplicate and replace. True, although not impossible. There have been software programs available for years that help you generate ideas by providing a variety of prompts and questions.

Perhaps what the authors write about is a “new normal” coming where efficiency increases mean employment decreases. They do offer some hope, although no definitive solutions, when they say that in the future, “the key to winning the race is not to compete against the machines but to compete with the machines.”

It all reminds me of the famous Pogo comic strip: “We’ve met the enemy and he is us.”

Taxing Innovation

Columnist Jason Zweig of The Wall Street Journal had some interesting observations this past weekend about the U.S. tax code and the more than $2 trillion in cash, profit and inventories that sit idle in U.S. corporate holdings. And it’s just sitting there overseas, as opposed to being invested in, say, creating jobs, because of U.S. tax policy.

 

According to a tax and accounting expert at Credit Suisse, “. . . companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index have north of $1 trillion in undistributed foreign earnings, or profits that have been parked overseas to avoid U.S. tax. Not all of that is cash; some is in the form of inventories or other assets.”

 

Why is that?

 

It’s because of U.S. tax policy that nails U.S. companies to the tune of 35 percent when they bring earnings generated by their overseas subsidiaries back home to the states. While that makes for a nice payday for Uncle Sam’s IRS, it doesn’t exactly encourage the transfer of dollars back home, and according to the column, we’re the only major country that treats its own this way.

 

Given the general malaise of the economy and lack of growth in the employment sector, wouldn’t a tax break on foreign earnings for U.S. companies for investing in innovation be an innovative idea? It’s not like the government is realizing any tax revenue now from the money anyway, so why not put it to work and put some people to work that would—you got it—generate tax revenue.

 

While there’s been talk in government circles of eliminating the tax, “talk” in Washington is like breathing. Our own Senator Klobuchar recently sponsored an “Innovation Summit” back home, which was great PR for her—now if she can make some things happen on the national front, her stock will only rise more. Even if we can’t eliminate the overseas tax, a one-time break would be a start.

Cairo, Egypt, and Greensboro, NC

What do Cairo, Egypt, and Greensboro, North Carolina, have in common, and what does either have to do with innovation? Both are scenes of movements involving social and political change that have and will lead to innovation—whether it’s desired or not.

In the wake of unsettling changes in government in Egypt, many of us may have overlooked the 51st anniversary this week of a U.S. event in Greensboro that ultimately changed social, business, and political institutions in our country forever.

On February 1, 1960, four African-American freshmen from what is now North Carolina A&T sat down at the whites-only lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth store in downtown Greensboro and stayed seated, refusing to leave even after they were denied service.

Many believe that the sit-in in Greensboro—even though it was not the first event of its kind—was responsible for revitalizing a civil rights movement that was losing momentum. Although the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 required public schools to be desegregated, by 1960 the process was proceeding at a rate of just 1 percent a year—hardly progress.

Within a year of the Greensboro sit-in, an estimated 50,000 people had taken part in sit-ins in roughly 100 cities, and 20,000 people had been arrested. And while sit-ins had taken place as early as the 1940s, Greensboro was the first to garner significant national media attention, and many historians believe it was the galvanizing event for the resurgence of the civil rights movement.

Like those in Greensboro, the events unfolding this past week in Egypt—while broader in scope and creating more immediate action—are a reminder that oftentimes “every act of creation is first an act of destruction.” Both are reminders that sometimes the act of innovation is thrust upon us by changes we underestimate or choose to ignore. Whether it’s a political system or cultural order that is “destroyed,” such events are catalysts for innovation, and the correlation between change and innovation is almost always inevitable.

In business, we can be too narrowly focused, paying attention to competitors and tracking societal and governmental changes only as they relate to our immediate concerns and industry-specific perspective. But there are broader, sweeping movements that can swell like waves, sometimes breaking and crashing sooner than we ever anticipated, or hadn't anticipated at all.

It’s hard to believe that it took four to five years after Greensboro for the United States to pass significant civil rights legislation (Civil Rights Act of 1964; Voting Rights Act of 1965). In today’s world, technology enables change to occur much more rapidly, as evidenced by the current happenings in Egypt.

When it comes to innovation, sometimes you have to be ready for what you’re not ready for at all.