Feb 10, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership
Real, lasting learning comes when you get stuff wrong, then seek to understand why you got it wrong. The obvious paradox is that by doing nothing new, or different, by staying inside the accepted practice, you get nothing wrong, and often receive accolades as a result. However, by working at the edge, of the process, or your own capabilities, and getting things wrong, you learn, often whilst suffering the bruises from others because you “stuffed up”.
As George Bernard Shaw said “all great things start as blasphemies”, so to learn, go out and blaspheme!
Feb 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership
The verb “to Google” took only a few years to emerge as Google changed the world around us.
Peter Norvig was Google’s research director from its early days, playing a key role in building the phenomenon that is Google.
His basic thesis is that you must be prepared to experiment extensively, and be wrong often, indeed, celebrate being wrong, as that is the way to learn.
However, mistake tolerance can be a two edged sword if the same mistakes keep getting made, and no-one pays the piper. An acceptance of repeated similar mistakes, clearly where no learning has taken place is hugely counter-productive, but not far removed from the desired culture of mistake tolerance so valued by successful innovators like Google.
Feb 3, 2011 | Leadership, Management
When was the last time you saw people around the water cooler laughing like a bunch of kids, in work-time?
Did you think that perhaps they were being frivolous, wasting the organisations time?
If you did, you would not be alone, as we seem to take ourselves too seriously, and our organisations tend to frown on what is seen as frivolity.
However, when you think about it, laughter is a sign of strong, positive personal relationships, something most organisations work for, so laughter should be seen as a symptom of success, not frivolity.
In a new book, Tom Rath who leads Gallups workplace consulting practice argues in his new book “Vital Friends” that a person with a “best friend” at work is 7 times more likely to be engaged in work than the average.
The book is a the result of a pile of research, but when you stop and think about it, the notion of productivity being associated with being happy makes absolute sense.
Jan 25, 2011 | Leadership, Personal Rant, Strategy
Amidst all the public utterances on Australia Day by elected representatives keen to be seen for a moment on the tele, in print, or lauded in the blogosphere, calling for a wiser, more compassionate, considerate, and outward thinking Australia, ….. (add your own platitude) it may be impertinent to list a few questions that will get no space, but from the perspective of this blogger require some consideration. This is where I show my colors as an unrepentant optimist, as I really think we can do more than just consider these things, we can do something useful, take action.
- Do we get value for the (roughly) 30% of GDP chewed up by the public sector? Do we really need three levels of Government to have the sort of communities we aspire to?
- Why are our kids graduating from University to no jobs, when we have been extolled to be a “clever country”? and why are we not training the builders, plumbers, electricians, and mechanics of tomorrow, rather we seem to be denigrating these skills compared to a university education.
- Why are the less fortunate than most of us not improving their lot, despite the $billions thrown at their problems? Perhaps it is because but so little gets through to where it is needed, as all the rent seekers clip the ticket on the way through to those who need it?
- Where has manufacturing in this country gone? Why? And what do we need to do to renew Australia’s position as an innovative creator of technology and then producing the products that result?
- How are we going to realistically maintain a standard of living as the baby boom generation retires, when the ratios of taxpayers to “taxconsumers” is reversed ?
- And while we are on baby boomers, why is it that many hundreds of thousands of experienced, talented, and motivated baby boomers cannot be employed fully?
- Why are we not having a fair dinkum debate about what sort of Australia we want to leave for our kids and grandchildren?
- Why can’t we see far enough ahead to recognise that the training we are giving our kids may have been good for last century, but no good for tomorrow?. We need to encourage creativity in all its forms, an understanding of personal responsibility and accountability, a willingness to have a go, not the structured, left brain dominated, narrow vision emphasis we seem to so value. Without these skills, our kids will struggle with a society profoundly altered over the course of their lifetimes. Consider, a child starting school in 2011 will retire around 2070. We cannot predict what the world will be in 5 years, let alone 55, so we must educate for creativity, action, and intellectual agility, not the rigid structures that may have served to date.
- Why have our elected representatives walked away for the “greatest moral issue of our time?”
I could go on, but you get the drift. Lets talk about things that are important, indeed vital to our long term prosperity and sustainability, but not necessarily going to bite us on the arse today, but if we do not do something now to start to address these long term challenges, the cost down the track will be huge.
Happy Australia day.
Jan 13, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Pixar is amongst the great “innovation factories” of recent decades, along with PARC, 3M, Apple, and a very few others. Part of what makes Pixar so effective is a question answered in this McKinsey interview with Brad Bird, the director who won two Oscars with “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles” after joining when Pixar had achieved enormous breakthroughs with “Toy Story”, “Finding Nemo”, and other smash hits.
The core of his success has not been just the great people, but the environment created for them to work in, the processes evolved to manage the execution of creativity, and the restless curiosity and determination to be better, every time.
Jan 9, 2011 | Innovation, Leadership, Social Media
Ideo is an ideas factory, its stock in trade is ideas and the resulting products, that others commercialise. As such, it has been a lab or case study in how to innovate as they have grown. As a small business, they all knew each other, collaboration happened as a part of the DNA of the place, but growth and geographic spread made it increasingly difficult, so they set out to use themselves as the lab for themselves, evolving what they have called the “Tube” in which they mash up all the collaboration tools enabled by web 2.0 into a form that works for them.
Then, god bless them, they put it out there in the spirit of transparency and the collaborative energy that can be created, for us all to learn from.
