How many times have you signed a contract barely scanning its force majeure clause? You know the paragraph, the one with all the legalese that basically lets both parties out of their obligations due to an extraordinary event like the outbreak of a civil war or an act of God such as an earthquake.  You don’t read the clause because you never ever expect it to take effect.  These things don’t happen, at least not to you.  Or do they?  Just in the last three months alone we have witnessed a catastrophic earthquake in Haiti killing an estimated 230,000 people and leaving 1,000,000 homeless, over 9 inches of rain causing the worst flooding in 200 years in my home state of Rhode Island, and of course Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull (I couldn’t resist getting this great name in to a blog post) volcano erupting for the first time in 190 years opening up a 2000 foot fissure spewing ash across Europe bringing air travel and the continent to its knees. No one expected any of these events to happen. It seems force majeure is not so rare.  Maybe we need to get better at expecting the unexpected.  Stuff happens. Read more

Unleashing the power of innovation to solve the big social challenges of our time including health care, education, and energy is as simple and plain as our belly buttons.  In the spirit of navel gazing I think a lot about how to simplify the innovation narrative, make it more inclusive, and become more experimental. I offer a belly button theory of innovation and its three constructs: one belly button at a time, from innies to outies, and beyond navel gazing.

One Belly Button at a Time

For starters we need a shared definition for innovation.  Our rhetoric is all over the place and innovation has become a buzzword.  Everything is an innovation and everyone is an innovator and of course when that happens nothing and no one is.  We conflate invention with innovation. They are not the same.  A simple definition: Innovation is a better way to deliver value.  It is not an innovation until value is delivered one belly button at a time. Often we don’t have to invent anything new to deliver value or solve a problem.  We have to get better at reconfiguring and recombining existing capabilities and technologies in order to deliver value. We have more technology available to us than we know how to absorb or deploy. It is not technology that gets in the way of innovation it is stubborn humans and organizations that resist change. Read more

March Madness turning in to Spring Fever unleashes a Pavlovian optimism. I love this time of year.  It is a luxury of riches for many sports nuts like me who can’t curb their enthusiasm as winter fades away replaced by nice weather, budding trees, and perennial sports favorites including the NCAA basketball tournament, opening day of baseball season, and the start of the Masters.  With all the great sports images to choose from there is one from this season that is haunting me. (No, It isn’t Tiger Woods. Just play golf for heaven’s sake. I don’t care about what Tiger does off the golf course.) I can’t get the image of Da’Sean Butler writhing in pain out of my head.  This is a human story that is about more than sports.

There was Da’Sean laying on the court for what seemed like an eternity late in the Duke-West Virginia semi-final NCAA tournament game.  It wasn’t supposed to happen.  I mean really, there were only 9 minutes left in a game that was all but over with West Virginia’s Mountaineers down by 15 points. No one told that to Da’Sean as he drove to the hoop as if the outcome of the game and his career was at stake.  He planted his left foot with determination in an effort to will his way around a giant.  No exaggeration, he was trying to get by Brian Zoubek the Duke center who is 7′1″ 260 lbs. (Just ask the Butler Bulldogs how hard it is get around Brian.) I swear you could hear Da’Sean’s knee blow out as he crashed to the court, just lying there in obvious pain, as the entire stadium went ominously silent.  Anyone who knows basketball knew immediately that it was serious and that we had just witnessed a promising NBA career get destroyed.  How sad. Read more

Did you see the announcement that US Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is turning to NASA scientists for help analyzing Toyota electronic throttles? Secretary LaHood, Why did you wait so long?  “We are determined to get to the bottom of unintended acceleration”, said LaHood. This comment coming after 8.5 million Toyota vehicles have been recalled over the last six months and probably just as many law suits on the drawing board. Why does it take us so long to look beyond the boundaries of our organizations for answers?  When will we figure out that solutions are rarely found inside the silos we cocoon ourselves within?  It is impossible to innovate from inside a cocoon.

I suspect that Secretary LaHood is only turning to NASA due to political pressure.  I am sure he preferred to keep the federal analysis within the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that he oversees.  The problem is that they have been investigating sudden acceleration within the agency since 2004 and have found no throttle problems.  The pressure on the agency now to bring in outside expertise is too great to withstand.  Secretary LaHood has been drilled during Congressional hearings.  I doubt when he signed up for the job he thought he would have more air time than the Secretary of State.  The Secretary is a colorful character and fun to listen to. He even tweets for heaven’s sake. (@RayLaHood) Read more

Dan Pink always makes me think.  Each of his books elicits an “AHA” moment with staying power.  Free Agent Nation changed the way I think about work and relate to institutions forever.  A Whole New Mind rescued the right side of my brain from its inferiority complex and ignited a long-term love affair with design thinking.  Dan’s new book, Drive, is no different.  It has crystallized my life-long instinct that our thinking about motivation and incentives is out of synch with the possibilities of the 21^st century.  Time to reboot motivation.

The 20^th century was all about management.  The North Star was how to get more people to go through the motions efficiently. Seeking personal meaning in work was a distraction. The best workers follow the rules, work hard, and smile.  Work boiled down to an algorithm rendering out any creativity or autonomy.  Fulfillment and empowerment were HR buzzwords and the “soft stuff” relegated to off-site retreats that don’t get in the way of real work.  Incentives in the industrial era were all about carrots and sticks.  Motivation was based solely on external factors including compensation, title, office, and promotion opportunities. Read more

Calling all innovators and designers.  It is time to get below the buzzwords and to mobilize our networks with urgency and purpose. Waiting for public and private sector institutions to transform our urban economies won’t work. It is up to us to deliver on the promise of social media platforms and self-organizing networks. We must mobilize purposeful networks to address the big social challenges of our time including education, economic, and workforce development. I got a big wake up call last week while visiting Detroit for the first time.  Talk about a burning platform. If you need a call to action just visit Detroit and see the devastation for yourself.

This once great industrial city is a shell of its former self.  Detroit has lost half of its population going from a peak in the 1950’s of 2 million to under 1 million in the 2000 census.  It is expected that the population will settle below 700,000 as unemployment and home foreclosures continue to fuel out-migration.  What is to become of those that can’t get out and are left behind? Read more

My latest blog post about turning our cities in to innovation hot spots has been published in Business Week as part of a special report, Eye On Architecture 2010. You can see the article, Needed: Urban Innovation Hot Spots here.  My friend and editor, Helen Walters, has worked her magic on my original post. Clearly, Helen makes me a better writer.  I am looking forward to the roundtable discussion in Detroit this week.  I will share observations when I return.  I am excited to catalyze a needed conversation about how our cities can play offense to transform our economy.  Citizens are waiting.

I have been asked by Living Cities to participate in an upcoming Economic Development Roundtable to take place in Detroit on March 5^th.  They asked each of the participants to provide an answer to the following question:

Given your experience, what are the most ‘game-changing’ ways to use a significant amount of grant funding ($100 million+) to change the trajectory of an urban economy?  In other words, if you were given a free hand to use $100+ million of grants, what would you do?

Here is my answer.  I suggest that we turn cities in to innovation hotspots.  It should be an interesting conversation.  What would you do with the money? Read more

Are you more like Shaun White or Evan Lysacek?  Both are bringing home Olympic gold but each took a different path to the podium.  Evan took the less risky path avoiding a quad jump in his final performance while Shaun did his signature risky move, a back-to-back double cork, under the pressure of an Olympic medal competition.  Both Evan and Shaun were awesome with performances that captured the spirit of Olympic competition and gave Americans a source of great national pride.  Evan nailed the fundamentals avoiding mistakes and beat out a competitor that attempted a bigger more risky move and missed.  Shaun was competing for more than the gold medal.  He is reinventing his sport and setting a higher standard that all other competitors are left trying to emulate.  Which athlete will be more memorable? Which path do you take to the medal stand?  Read more

OK. I admit it. I am rapidly descending down the rabbit hole of social media.  Not to point fingers, but if you are reading this, you are probably descending along with me.  And then right in the midst of our free-fall here comes Buzz. One more social media platform to soak up attention and precious hours is just what we all needed.  Yet there we were, well there I was, waiting for the much ballyhooed Buzz icon to pop on to my Gmail account.  Since Buzz launched I have been trying to figure out why.  I still don’t have a clue except for a gut feeling Buzz has the potential to take social media to an entirely new level of connectivity and enabling purposeful networks.  I was determined to be there at the start.

When it comes to new technology I am usually a second wave kinda guy.  While I have a strong inclination to play with all new tech toys I like to wait for a while after their launch so others can work out the initial bugs.  I patiently waited for the second release before jumping on an iPhone and Kindle.  I waited until Twitter was around for a while before wading in.  I never did the Facebook thing.  Initially I was prohibited because Facebook was my kid’s domain.  The deal was that I could have Twitter and Linked-in if I stayed away from their digital domain. Now they are older and the original deal no longer applies but Facebook seems too daunting a hill to climb at this point.  And then along comes Buzz offering me a similar ground floor opportunity.  I was not going to pass it up. Read more