Thursday, October 18, 2007

Innovate Like Edison

Edison is probably one of the most referenced inventors ever. Not to undermine his great achievements in the act of creation (1% imagination and 99% perspiration as the saying goes), he also did a remarkable job in developing and marketing products for which were innovative That legacy has manifested itself into one of the greatest companies of the world, GE.

A new book by Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott, Innovate Like Edison, boils down Edison's process to five key steps. Below is an excerpt from the book where the authors " give you a taste of his approach, using the example of Edison's first product, the stock ticker. His system is culled from historical documents and written as Edison might have noted them.

1. Identify trends in the marketplace, observing where and how needs are shifting. In 1868, I read in the newspapers that the rebuilding of the American South after the Civil War has sent commodities prices rising, since demand for lumber, brick, stone, and other building materials has increased and supplies are strained. The reporting of these prices - as well as the price of gold and precious metals - is eagerly sought by American businesses at an increasing rate.

2. Determine if there are any gaps created by these changing needs. I've noted that few efficient machines and few services exist to rapidly - and reliably - report commodities prices, precious-metals prices, and stock prices to businesses around the country.

3. Identify the core insight (the "aha!") or need at the heart of each gap. I think I can apply the principles of -telegraphy to make a machine that reports prices.

4. Link your insights to your capabilities as a company and your strengths and weaknesses in relation to your competitors. I can combine my talents for telegraph equipment assembly and design to develop price--reporting machines that operate rapidly and efficiently.

5. The hypothesis is an "if-then" proposal for a practical experiment about the goal you'd like to fulfill based on the linkage you've created. If I can build an efficient, reliable telegraph-like machine that can help businesses report commodities and metals prices all over the country, then I will make a significant profit.

The result? Edison's stock-reporting machine launched his career as a successful inventor and innovator. "

Quoted section is copyright Michael J. Gelb and Sarah Miller Caldicott

Labels: edison, GE, innovation, inventor

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Are You Wired For Leadership?

Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today on the brain activity of visionary leaders vs. non-visionary leaders. An Arizona State University management professor, Pierre Balthazzard, is strapping electrodes to people's brains, asking them to think about the future and monitoring their brain activity. According to the article 'the first 50 scans of local luminaries suggest that visionary leaders use their brains differently than others'. This program is amongst 'the most ambitious because it seeks both to identify brain patterns, and then train managers to replicate the patterns within their own brains.'



Picture above is copyright Wall Street Journal.

The question is though, do all leaders need to be visionaries? Every organization needs to have a balance of those that worry about the future and those that worry about the present...

Labels: leadership, neuroscience

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Catching Up... few tidbits....

Apologies I haven't posted for a while, we've been pumping out a release of Epiture, and working hard on a variety of client projects, all of which have contributed to my distinct lack of posting...

Anyway, quick round up of interesting snippets...

--> Something near and dear to my heart - the messy desk syndrome... At home, I'm an absolute neat freak, but if you look at my desk at work, you'd be surprised at the paper and book stacks as well as the weird and wonderful that inhabits my space... This story was carried by Reuters, to announce a new book 'A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder', which I have not read yet, but one of the authors Eric Abrahamson is the author of 'Change Without Pain', which was a good read. I do know that my messy desk was a problem when I worked at a Fortune 10 company, that had a 'clean desk' policy, and while I was extremely careful to never leave anything confidential out, I had many policy violations... oh well... what can I say... the hierarchical approach of something is either in one category or another has never and will never worked for me. I'm not a black or white kinda person when it comes to information (though I am with ethics), and knowledge is all shades of gray, and that's how I like it. Of course, that may have something to do with why we've developed the first adaptive knowledge networking software that works on fuzzy networks not hierarchies... (sic)

--> Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths is a book recently sent to us from Harvard Business School Publishing. I thought it was something to do with business innovation from the cover but it turns out to be more of a self-help type of book. Wow. I think this could be a real pioneer. More like therapy for your business-career-soul-n' more-in-a-book. From the blurb, because I'm not good at explaining these kind of things: 'We all experience psychological impasse. This feeling of uncertainty about your next moves in life might come at predictable moments: the loss of a job, the end of a romance etc etc. But pyschological impasse might also come at unpredictable moments: when the career of a lifetime somehow loses its juice, when you find yourself longing o renew a sense of life's adventure. Though uncomfortable, impasse is necessary; it's the only place from which you can define a new vision for your professional or personal life. In Getting Unstuck, business psychologist Timothy Butler leverages more than 20 years of research to offers strategies for finding your way again...'

This book is not for the faint hearted, I looked through some of the chapters, and it asks some tough questions to help you get to the bottom of the reasons for the impasse. It's not a quick fix and feel good coffee-and-a-self-hug pseudo soliloquy. So if you are ready to really resolve your impasse and renew, this may be the book for you...

--> March 15th was ManyWorlds.com's 7th Birthday - SEVEN! Wow! I'm still in shock, it seems like just a few moons again we were creating the site... If you have any comments on how we can improve, please, please email me at n.moneypenny(at)manyworlds.com. I'm all ears to new ideas. The site really is incredibly successful and has a life of its own, much more than we ever intended.... So thank you to you all, for being a part of it...

Labels: business books, clean desk, messy desk, pyschological impasse

Monday, February 12, 2007

Tech in the US still relies on immigrants....

Interesting snippet from R&D magazine this month.

'Of all the engineering and technology companies started in the U.S. from 1995 to 2005, at least one key founder was foreign born in 25.3% of them. And of those immigrant-founded U.S. companies, Indian immigrants (26%) were involved in more of the companies than immigrants from the UK, China, Taiwan, and Japan, combined, according to a recent study, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs”, by researchers at Duke Univ., Durham, N.C. and the Univ. of California, Berkeley. Nationwide in the U.S., these immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.'

'California’s Silicon Valley area was found to have the highest concentration of immigrant-founded companies—52.4%.'

Entire report available in PDF here.

With all the politics and debate on immigration and how that affects business and trade, (see also IBM's VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation Irving Wladawsky-Berger's post and discussion on the subject), fresh ideas and fresh perspectives from whatever source, are still a driving force of the capitalism engine in the US.

See also AnnaLee Saxenian's (Dean at the School of Information at UC Berkeley) book 'Regional Advantage' on why Silicon Valley ascended to greatness vs. Route 128 in the Boston area.

Labels: entrepreneurship, innovation, new employees, talent, virtual teams

Friday, February 02, 2007

Nine-zero Markets, Two-legged Mammals and Singular Technologies

I subscribe to the Josh Wolfe/Forbes Nanotech Insider newsletter, which is devoted to the nano technology industry. This morning I got an email newsletter from them, that I thought was worth sharing here.

In Josh's role at venture fund Lux Capital he says he's interested in three things

"Nine-zero markets, two-legged mammals and singular technologies."

(Excuse the long quote, but I think this is truly excellent writing, and applicable to anyone in a business development role in a company, large or small.)

"Two-legged mammals: these are you - entrepreneurs out there with genius and talent. To us, talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see. We want to be partners with calculated risk-takers who are commanding "centrifuges" spinning with endless-energy to create a gravitational force that pulls in like-minded geniuses. We want doers: not bluffers.

Nine-zero markets: billions of dollars. Investing is about uncertainty—so we need our risk-reward sufficiently skewed so that when things go wrong (and they always do), being off by an order of magnitude still means breathtaking success. Decimal points show only that you've got a sense of humor, not a sense of accuracy. Thing big, now think even bigger. Time is scarce so don’t waste it on something small.

I've written before that my most inspiring personal moments and greatest clarity comes on airplanes in the moments just after take-off and just before landing. You'e granted the perspective to see entire cities, to visualize the products and technologies filling the homes, cabinets, cars, pockets of millions of people. The billions of dollars of wealth created and the life-improving value given to society. From Nylon fabrics and Velcro fasteners in closets, to new chemical compounds that line refrigerators and medicine cabinets YKK zippers, Brita water filters, LCD screens, Teflon pans, Tyvek insulation, Windows -- both the literal insulating ones and the branded virus-prone ones--all billion dollar markets. And whereas consumer markets see their leaders with 30-40% market shares, the history of technology and the law of increasing returns shows that the best technology companies can command 80-90% market shares. Winners can take all.

Singular technologies: singular means not best in class, but only in class: "one of a kind, unique." Clever breakthrough inventions that will change the world -- the kind of technologies that rely more on the creativity and intellectual power that went into their creation, than the marketing that can promote them. They should have moats in trade secrets and patents around them, so that even if someone else had infinite capital, it wouldn't matter -- replication would be really hard if not nearly-impossible. Initially with really great technologies (just like ideas), you don’t have to worry about them being stolen. If they're any good, you'll have to ram them down people’s throats just to listen. But good corporate and legal hygiene shows good judgment. And good judgment inspires confidence in your future decisions."

(Quoted section is full copyright 2007 Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report)

As business people, I think these three ingredients are what we are all interested in, and this pithy 9-0, 2, 1 formula is a fantastic condensation of business success.

On a personal level, erudite and inspirational writing like this helps me with the technical development of our singular technology - Epiture.

Labels: business development, culture, success

Monday, January 29, 2007

The Human Cost of Unused Ideas

Henry Chesbrough @ Berkeley of Open Innovation fame kindly sent me a review copy his new book 'Open Business Models' last week, so we've been fighting over it in the office.... There were some quotes in the accompanying publicity bumpf. But this one quote really struck me... It's the reason I left my high flying job at a supermajor oil company, and took the rollercoaster entrepreneurial route instead.

"...many of the ideas people work on are never deployed in the market. It is reportedly quite common for a pharmaceutical researcher to never see one of her projects ship to market, even over a thirty year career, because the attrition rate of compounds is so high. This is an enormous waste of human talent and must take a toll on any person's initiative."

Can we all say YES to this... in my case it was not new compounds that never made it to market, it was new business ideas, and new ways to use existing assets and capabilities. All those projects, and meetings and MISSED OPPORTUNITIES.

Ok - vent over :)

Thanks Henry for saying it. I needed that.

Seven Habits of Successful Virtual Teams

I wonder when Steven Covey wrote his Seven Habits, whether he could imagine that it would become such a bestseller, and spawn a plethora of similar Seven lists. Try searching on 'seven' in ManyWorlds.com to see what I mean. You can choose from at least 30 articles, including The Seven Habits of Spectacularly Unsuccessful Executives to the Seven Habits for High Effectiveness and Seven Neurotic Styles of Management.

But I digress. Anne Zelenka at Web Worker Daily has penned a great little post on habits for vitual teams here. This is a subject close to my heart, since ManyWorlds is the epitome of the spider organization. Everyday I interact with our far flung team, which includes some full time employees who I've never actually met, but I love 'em dearly all the same. Without IM, my medium of choice, it would be impossible to interact with everyone on the team, and to understand what is going on in their lives, as well as work that we need to discuss. It's even got so that we can tell if someone's having a bad day, from the way they type - I kid you not.

And in whatever form of communication you prefer, don't forget Mr Covey's sage advice, and 'best' habit in my opinion - 'Seek First to Understand, and Then to Be Understood.'

Along the same lines, Anne also has 27 tips for teleconferencing to share.

Labels: culture, virtual teams

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Talent & Compensation

It's an interesting world this week. The business media has been all over Bob Nardelli's step (mostly push) down from Home Depot's leadership, and he will have to be content with his $210 million+ severance pay for a while. Reported to a lesser extent was Hank McKinnell's earlier departure where he has retirement to (coincidently) mull over the $200 million+ that the former Pfizer CEO walked away with; after losing more than $100 BILLION in market cap.

Executive compensation is always a hot topic - I'm a free market kinda person, so I believe people should be compensated commenserate with their talents and results. I never begrudge an athlete the huge salaries they command, because they are the best at what they do. Likewise with talent in organizations. Employers should absolutely pay what top talent deserves. At the same time we have to be mindful that while money may be a good short term incentive to attract new people (and get rid of CEO's that you don't want anymore!) it will not (and should not) be the primary reason they stay at your organization.

Meanwhile things are heating up in the Valley again. Amy Vernetti, an executive recruiter reports, "We are now seeing the inevitable return of rising cash compensation packages, candidates with multiple offers and yes…the signing bonus is back!!! The bonus was popular during the silly period of the late 1999, but universally hated by employers and investors. It's surprising to see it come back, but the good news is, we haven't seen too many of them - yet." She also has some interesting lessons learnt in high tech companies recent struggles for talent.

Time to roll up our sleeves again; battle for talent 2.0. Will cash, not options, be king this time around?

Labels: compensation, culture, hiring practices, new employees, talent