I was amused to learn that the show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ is doing away with the phone-a-friend lifeline.   There was Meredith Vieira with her big smile and syrupy voice explaining that the time had come to take away the lifeline that has been a staple since the beginning of the show because too many friends were using the internet (doing Google searches) to help the contestants.  No kidding.  Did the show’s producers just figure that out?  It was plain to see the progression from the early years of the show when contestants would call wicked smart people to today when they just call people that are really fast at doing on-line searches. What’s next, “ask the audience” to check their iPhones at the door of the studio?  Let’s face it lifelines are enabled by the web.  Should we just get used to it or is there something more important than a game show going on here reflecting on the state of human interaction. Read more

On New Year’s Eve I received one of those blast-from-the past emails, made possible by Google, from a long forgotten friend from high school days.   I hadn’t thought about the crew from an after school job 35 years ago at McDonalds forever. (Yes, you heard right, I flipped burgers at McDonalds)  The email moved me and provided a wonderful end-of-the-year gift because this friend had taken the time after all of these years to reach out and thank me for the positive influence I had on her life.  I had no idea that I had said these things and that my passion for mentoring extended all the way back to high school.

Here is an excerpt from the email.  Tell me you wouldn’t have been moved if this popped in to your in-basket on New Year’s Eve.

“Over the holidays I was with a bunch of friends and we were all talking about gratitude, and the fact that we are much more aware of all of the people who have touched our lives in positive ways along the way.

I mentioned that I have always wished I had run into you sometime as an adult so that I could tell you that you changed the entire course of my life when I was 18 and pretty directionless.  You told me that I was smart, too smart not to go to college. Read more

We need to try more stuff.  Innovation is never about silver bullets. It’s about experimentation and doing whatever it takes, even if it means trying 1000 things, to deliver value.

Making progress on the real issues of our time including health care, education, and energy will require a lot more experimentation than we are comfortable with today.  These are all systems challenges that will require systems solutions.  Tweaking the current systems will not work.  Technology as a sustaining innovation may improve the efficiency of current systems but will not result in the transformation that we all know is needed.  We need to learn how to leverage technology for disruptive innovation and to experiment at the systems level.

My mantra is Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast. The imperative for all innovators is R&D for business models and systems.  We know how to do R&D for new products and technologies.  We need to also do R&D for new business models and systems.  It is not technology that is getting in the way, it is humans and the intransigent organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to change. We have plenty of technology available to us. We need to learn how to leverage it to open up transformative ways to deliver value.  Designing and experimenting with new system approaches, particularly those that cut across sectors and silos, is the path to the transformation that we need.  We must design around the end user and learn how to harness the potential of social media platforms and storytelling to enable purposeful networks. Read more

Drip, drip, drip.  One comment on a blog post. One re-tweet of a point of view. One new Facebook friend.  You might not even realize while it is happening but over time an audience is developing that is genuinely interested in what you have to say and gives you permission to share it.  Individuals are learning how to share their stories and gaining confidence by participating actively in social networks. Personal networks have become the new marketing channels and marketing has become the art of dribs and drabs.  The problem is that most organizations haven’t figured it out yet.

I believe the marketing model of companies deploying large internal teams of marketing specialists supported by even larger external advertising and public relations firms is dead.   Watching the series Mad Men reminds me of how little the advertising and communications industry has changed from a model that is clearly being disrupted by the new world of social media. Read more

Maybe we need to bang together the heads of mad scientists and mad designers.

If we are waiting for randomized double blind studies to tell us how to address the big social system challenges of our time including health care, education, and energy we will be waiting a very long time.  That is not how we will transform these systems.  It will take passionate exploration, which is more iterative than traditional scientific methodology.  It will take design thinking and process combined with powerful storytelling to create novel networked systems to deliver the value we need and expect in the 21^st century.  We need to try more stuff.

Last week I spoke at the Business of Aging: Ontario Innovation Summit in Toronto.  It was a great event attended by many innovators from across the public and private sector.  Attendees all shared a passion for focusing innovation on the opportunity emerging as the silver tsunami of an aging global population rapidly approaches.  I shared my point of view on the need to do R&D for new business models and systems and our work at BIF in the Elder Experience Lab.  As I always do, I blathered on about design and storytelling tools as the key enablers to system change, in this case developing age friendly environments and communities. Read more

I love Thanksgiving.  It is my favorite holiday. What’s not to love?  Food, family, and football are three of my favorite things.  The prodromal smell of warm homemade banana bread pervading the house means the aroma of roasting turkey is only days away.  Smiling is easy this week while making sure everything is perfect for the welcome cacophony of our kids returning home for a holiday visit to our empty nest.  Thanksgiving spirit warms the soul.

The best part of Thanksgiving is taking time to reflect on the things we are most thankful for.  It is a strange tumultuous time and yet it seems as if there is more to be thankful for than usual.  Perhaps it is during trying times, with so many people suffering around us, that we are grateful for things we otherwise would take for granted.  I am thankful for many things and figured why not share them openly in the hope that others will share theirs too.  Who knows, maybe the Thanksgiving spirit will catch on. Read more

In my latest Business Week column I assert that the most distinguishing characteristic of an innovator is their vulnerability.

If you hang around innovators long enough, it’s pretty clear they all have a deep-seated confidence in both their ideas and their ability to turn ideas into reality. The best innovators are able to do this on a regular basis, delivering value along the way. To some, they may seem invincible, impervious to the naysayers, roadblocks, and intransigent systems in their way. But I believe that this confidence, however valuable, is not what distinguishes a great innovator. Instead, innovation requires a level of vulnerability with which most are uncomfortable.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, says the hallmark of an innovator is having a confident point of view combined with the self-awareness that something is always missing. I agree. Neurosis-laced vulnerability is what enables innovators to seek critical input and make the random connections needed to fuel innovation. There is always a better way and innovators open themselves up in order to search for missing puzzle pieces.

Continue reading the Business Week Column here.

It is too easy and wrong to think that innovators are egocentric, always admiring themselves and their accomplishments in the mirror.  They are confident but not self absorbed and impervious to outside input.  If anything innovators are vulnerable, self aware, and open to diverse and critical input to improve their ideas and concepts.  The view they see while looking into a mirror is more like the wavy one in the circus fun house that reflects a distorted view.  A view that always causes a gasp and accentuates flaws that need serious work and improvement.  Innovators know they must improve in order to find better ways to deliver value and solve real world problems.

Innovators spend very little time looking in the rear view mirror.  They tend to be forward thinking and looking.  It is important to learn from the past but innovators are never bogged down in it or constrained by the way things have always worked.  Innovators tend to be market makers rather than share takers.  Understanding how a market has worked in the past is helpful but innovators like to tinker across markets to envision and create an entirely new market model or system. Read more

The economic downturn has created a crisis of confidence in organizations across the public and private sector.  Most have resorted to selling primarily on price instead of value.  I wonder if organizations even know what they are selling beyond discounts and rebates. Pricing is the least understood and most poorly implemented element of the marketing mix.  Whenever you see an overreliance on discounts and incentives to boost sales it’s a red flag.  Leading with price is a sure sign of an undifferentiated product or service.

Far too many marketing and sales organizations overuse incentives and discounts. That’s because it’s easier to sell at a lower price than work to convince customers of the value inherent in a higher price. It’s also human nature to sell at a lower price rather than accept the risk of losing a sale. The problem is that discounting behavior sends a message to consumers that the offering isn’t worth the asking price. Inevitably, customers will simply wait for a better deal.  Selling on price is like a drug addiction. Once discounting behavior creeps into an organization it’s difficult to control the habit. Read more

I have been thinking about the notion of form seeking structures since being wowed by MIT researcher Neri Oxman during the BIF-5 Collaborative Innovation Summit. Neri’s exciting work has big implications for organization design as we move from self-limiting industrial era structures to self-organizing networked structures.

Neri is an innovative architect who plumbs the natural world for ingenious ways to create objects or structures that meld harmoniously with their surroundings. Her vision of design is not rooted in the philosophy of the Industrial Revolution, when the machine became the ultimate model of functionality-many parts working together as an integral whole, a kit of parts. Instead, Neri’s model of design is the biological world, where there are no assemblies or individual components, but mostly tissues made of single materials (like a leaf) redistributed perfectly to achieve balance and functionality. Read more