The innovation blog

Ever made a presentation and felt that you didn’t, to lapse into Louis Walsh X Factor parlance, really nail it? Who hasn’t? Tom Peters has given more presentations than most of us and has been kind enough to share his wisdom, for free, on his website. His draft starts with George Bernard Shaw’s remark that “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished” and gets better from there. Enjoy.

Tawnya Starr is the president of an American company called PrinterPresence that makes money by helping printers improve their websites. So when she says too many printers apply to a “do it cheap” mentality online, she is hardly a disinterested party. Unfortunately, she also happens to be absolutely right. Her stats suggest that 76% of print customers look online before spending  – and that’s why she recommends that printing websites enable buyers to design, personalise, proof and place their order without having to make a phone call.

Many bosses say they want innovation, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kantor observes, but “operate by a set of hidden principles designed to prevent innovations from surfacing or succeeding.” You can find her nine ways to kill innovation using the link below, but three struck me as particularly pertinent.

“If I had an hour to save the world,” Albert Einstein once observed, “I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute finding solutions.” And yet, as Stephen Shapiro points out in the European Business Review , most businesses, as they strive to be innovative, do the exact opposite – and fail spectacularly. Shapiro cites the example of a UK bank which did the traditional thing that companies do when they want to innovate but don’t know why or how – asked staff for suggestions to improve the business. 

“You must offer all sorts of value beyond the literal merchandise. Being big will not save you.” 

A quick review of the major social media disasters of 2012 (http://mashable.com/2012/11/25/social-media-business-disasters-2012/ ) is enough to terrify any managing director or sales and marketing director. The funniest catastrophe was this eloquent tweet from a disgruntled employee at the US ticket sales company Stub Hub: “Thank f**k it’s Friday! Can’t wait to get out of this stubsucking hell hole.” Astonishingly, many of these disasters have the same root cause: companies not controlling who Tweets from their corporate account. How many employees have to be fired, how many apologies have to be posted and how many companies have to have their reputations damaged before they learn this simple lesson?

What’s the point of having a strategy when everything is changing so rapidly and radically? That is a question many business executives have raised with Roger Martin (http://rogerlmartin.com), the Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto. While he understands the thinking behind the excuse, he points out: “If we live in an uncertain, turbulent, fast-moving world today, why would it be any different a week, a month, a rear from now?” He argues that that companies that say they don’t ‘do strategy’ actually have one in reality because every day, hour and minute they have to make choices and decisions. If they are taken without any reference to agreed goals, companies risk making daily choices that are incoherent, contradictory and inconsistent. 

When you’re worried about making sure your company doesn’t go into the red, it’s easy to forget about being green. Yet, as a white paper from Oki (http://www.oki.co.uk/corporate/thought_leadership/detail.aspx?id=tcm:122-145872) has just shown, small and medium sized businesses in Europe are increasingly worried about the environmental and financial impact of the energy they use when printing. Is there an opportunity here for print companies to profitably partner with customers?

Schawk! (http://www.schawk.com) started as a print platemaking business in Chicago in 1953. Now, 60 years later, it has become a publicly-quoted global brand management company comprising 150 businesses in 26 countries, with sales of around £290m, which has a thriving wide-format business. The most intriguing aspect of their truly impressive website is a knowledge centre, loaded with white papers, articles and magazines that analyse, discuss and comment on trends that shape the retail sector. This is a far more effective way of proving to customers that you genuinely understand their business than such boiler-plate rhetoric as “We live deep within your markets” which sounds both comic and slightly painful.

In a ferociously competitive world, it can be harder than ever to spend quality time with customers. One way to remedy that would be to brainstorm innovations with them. That’s what a consultancy called Synapse recommends in an article on the useful Management Innovation eXchange website (http://www.managementexchange.com/hack/client-involved-innovation). The principle is sound – why talk to customers only when you’re trying to sell them something? - and, if you cut through the jargon, there’s a half-decent, practical guide to ensure you have a barnstorming brainstorming session.

That is the confrontational message with which Ernesto Sirolli, who runs a non-profit organization (http://www.sirolli.com) that has helped start 40,000 businesses in 300 communities around the world, challenges today’s managers. 

The inspirational Italian advocates what some management theorists call “servant leadership” where a boss, rather than leading his staff like a general in battle, is more of a facilitator, helping staff achieve their goals. Sirolli says: “You don’t just impose your ideas on people. You get rid of your saviour complex. You listen. The passion that somebody has for their own growth is the most important thing.” He defines his aim as a leader as helping people acquire the knowledge they need to succeed. In an age where everything from big data to open innovation is being trumpeted as the crucial competitive edge, maybe the real “killer app” for businesses is the passion of their employees.

They were the best of ideas, they were the worst of ideas. Or so Charles Dickens so nearly said at the start of ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’. As a disturbingly prolific writer, Dickens would almost certainly have agreed with Frans Johansson who suggests in his book ‘The Medici Effect’ that there is a direct correlation between quality of ideas and quantity of ideas. “Pablo Picasso, for instance, produced 20,000 pieces of art; Einstein more than 240 papers and Richard Branson has founded over 250 companies.”

Johansson challenges the conventional mythology of innovation – the idea that innovators get caught in a “virtuous cycle” where past success breeds future opportunities and success – by pointing out that, for example, we play only about 35% of Mozart’s compositions, view only a fraction of Picasso’s works and seldom reference most of Einstein’s papers. Why is this?

Because one great innovation does not guarantee another. Johansson cites research by psychologist Dean Simonton, author of ‘Origins Of Geniu’s, who says: “Innovators don’t produce because they are successful, they are successful because they produce”. So they can be having their best ideas at the same time as they’re having their worst. The really scary aspect of Simonton’s research – both for innovators and for the companies that employ them – is that it suggests scientists don’t produce breakthrough papers in any predictive pattern. They are far more likely to produce their most influential work at random points throughout their careers.