Category: book riffs

Writers Write, and Innovators Innovate
How big does a new idea have to be to qualify as an innovation?

I read another blog post this morning that tried to tell us that only really big ideas count as innovations. It started something like this:

Innovation is a buzzword now – it’s used so much that it’s lost meaning. Every firm in the world claims to be innovative. But are they really? Does a new flavour of gum really count as innovation? Of course not. Here are five easy steps that will help you do real innovation – big innovation.

The post is, like the many others on this theme, nonsense.

Look – I’ve argued before that we need to be aiming higher, and this is still true. BUT, that doesn’t mean that only big ideas can be innovative.

Austin Kleon has a great way to think about this in his excellent new book Show Your Work. He says:

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

I highlighted the key point – the real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

In other words, we think that the gap is here:

In this view, the opposite of awesome work is terrible work. But it’s not – the opposite of awesome work is no work at all:

That’s why so many people write about how to get work started – because that is actually the big hurdle that we face. Kleon addresses this some in Show Your Work, and it as a big theme in the books from The Domino Project, including Do The Work by Steven Pressfield and Poke the Box by Seth Godin, and in The Flinch by Julien Smith (still available for free on amazon). That’s why Anne Lamont says that the biggest step in writing is getting down a, well, [lousy] first draft.

It’s the same with innovation. The big gap isn’t between people and firms doing incremental innovations and those doing big disruptive ones. The big gap is between those that aren’t innovating at all in any form, and those that are.

Here is why the “only big ideas are innovative” meme is dangerous:
- You need to be on the innovation spectrum. If I’m working with a firm trying to improve their innovation outcomes, it is much easier to have an impact with the firms that are at least doing something. They’re on the innovation spectrum. The firms that are tough are the ones that aren’t doing any innovating at all. The biggest gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
- You can’t tell which ideas are big in advance. Big innovations usually start small. If we start screening for size too early, we’ll knock out too many ideas that could actually be big. That’s why we need to build our skills in experimenting – this is how we figure out which small bets are promising.
- It’s too easy to be critical if you’re in the “doing nothing” group. The biggest issue is that the critics are almost always in the “doing nothing” group. The people that have already done it know how hard it is, so on average they tend to be more generous with people that are putting in the work. The people that tend to be the hardest on incremental innovators are the people that have never done anything innovative themselves.
Here’s the deal:

Writers write.

Painters paint.

Photographers shoot.

And innovators innovate – even if it’s just small stuff.

Remember that from little things, big things grow. Start trying new stuff now.
1 March 2014
When Should We Adopt a New Idea?
Often, it’s easier to predict long-term change than it is to figure out what’s going to happen in the short-term. This makes it really hard to develop a sensible innovation strategy.

Kodak invented digital photography, and they knew full well that eventually this would become the dominant technology. In 1997, they predicted that this transition would happen – around 2017. They picked the long-term trend absolutely correctly – it’s the timing they messed up.

Looking backwards now, everyone thinks that the trends were obvious. Why couldn’t the get this right?

It’s not as easy as it looks – and getting this right is going to become increasingly important as the rate of technological disruption increases. Chunka Mui and Paul B. Carroll in their new book The New Killer Apps
outline six technologies that, in combination, will drive this change: mobile devices, social networks, cameras, sensors, cloud computing and emergent knowledge.

Here’s another example of how this might work – let’s take a look at the construction industry.

One of my collaborators likes to say that the last big innovation in construction was the invention of the brick, in Egypt a couple thousand years ago.

That exaggerates things a bit, but still, it’s not the most dynamic industry around.

And yet, things might be about to change.

A construction drone builds a wall

If you put together those six technologies, you can start to see some change coming. Cameras, sensors and mobile devices can let you build a wall with a construction drone.

Now, combine this with Building Information Modeling (BIM):

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. A BIM is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle; defined as existing from earliest conception to demolition.

BIM uses more of these technologies. When you store the files in the cloud, you can access the plans both on site and in the office. If you network the data internally, you can start to track learning from project to project, creating emergent knowledge.

Now, combine this with sensors – and we can start to track every piece of material, every piece of machinery and every person on a building site.

This is the future of building. But, when?

One of my students has put a lot of thought into this, and here is one of her experiences:

Two weeks ago, I was working with the lead asset management consultant from XXX, who is currently designing the asset management system for the Department of XXX. I broached the subject of BIM with him, and he had a surprisingly negative view. His view was that it was just an IT fad that held no value, and that asset management practitioners would just go back to using excel spread sheets to manage their processes.

This illustrates several important innovation issues:
- Fear is an important obstacle to innovation. How can you possibly think that people will be using spreadsheets to manage projects forever? Partly, it’s fear. Here is how Seth Godin describes it:
  
  … as Steven Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.
  
  The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
  
  The resistance is why the first stage or responding to disruption is ridicule. Fighting through this resistance is one of the keys to innovating.
- You can see the S-Curve in action. Why do ideas spread though an S-Curve:The time it takes to work through the period marked X always takes long than we expect it to. One of the reasons for this is that it takes some time to figure out how to build a business model around the idea.That’s what is happening with BIM right now. At the moment, it is at the flat part of the curve. BIM is expensive, so only top end customers will look for construction bids that use it. However, as it gets used more, costs will come down, and then projects run using BIM will become substantially less expensive than those using spreadsheets for planning. That’s when it will start to take off.
- BIM will win because of emergent knowledge. Platforms that build emergent knowledge have been winning for a while now. Google’s search algorithm gets smarter the more people use it. Nike Fuel gets better at helping you exercise as it compiles more data from its growing user base.This might help crack one of the biggest innovation problems in project-based firms: if we learn something in one project, how do we transfer that knowledge to other ones? With BIM, this learning will be recorded, and communicated. This is huge. It means that the firms using BIM will start to have much smarter internal networks. This will be part of what drives the costs down. Emergent knowledge will win again.
The tricky part if figuring out when the change will happen. You can get away with your spreadsheets for a few more years at least. But that won’t last forever.

It’s probably a good time for construction firms to be thinking about this.

And if even building construction has to be thinking about disruption today, it’s probably a good time for you to think about the impact that these technologies might have in your industry as well.
20 February 2014
Lessons From My Latest Big Mistake
My latest big mistake

I believe that innovation works better if we approach it like scientists – that we should test our ideas and build a business model around them based on experiments and data. This is really the core of the lean startup approach, and we’re starting to see evidence that this really is a more effective way to build new firms than simply treating our idea as perfect and then focusing on execution. And this works better for larger firms too.

One consequence of this belief is that I try to learn from mistakes, and recently I made a big one.

I thought that my friend Jason Tangen was putting too much time into his teaching.

How do academics spend their time?

Academics divide our time into three activities: research, teaching and engagement. You probably have a reasonably good idea about the first two, but the last one has changed over the years. For a long time, the third activity was called service – and it covered things like helping to run the universities, reviewing and editing for journals, and so on. As more of the administration responsibilities have shifted to professional staff, many universities now call this category engagement. This includes all the things in service, but it also covers activities that reach outside of the university – things that help us translate research into real-world outcomes.

This has two important implications:
1. Academic promotion is based on your performance across some mix of all three activities. If you are in an Ivy League university, then it is based almost entirely on research. Teaching well can actually be viewed as a negative – it shows that you’re not paying enough attention to research. In other places, the mix is more even.
2. Academics often judge the performance of other academics based on whether or not the activity breakdown of those being judged looks like the breakdown of the judges.
It’s the second one that led me astray with Jason.

Jason puts a lot of time into his teaching. And he is an awesome teacher. I was concerned about the effort he was putting in there, because it seemed like maybe he wasn’t putting enough into research (where he’s also really good).

Well, I was wrong.

Jason and Matt interviewing Antonia Mantonakis

Think101 proves me wrong

Last year, UQ signed up with EdX to provide some Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). This year, we’re delivering four – including one by Jason called Think101: The Science of Everyday Thinking. He got the gig because it is based on his incredibly successful undergraduate psychology course on how to think more effectively – the one that he was putting all of that effort into.

As part of putting together the course, Jason, his PhD student Matt Thompson and their producer Emma MacKenzie traveled the world to interview people, including many of their intellectual heroes like Daniel Kahneman, Susan Blackmore and the Mythbusters guys.

They’ve had more than 55,000 people sign up for the course so far, and for those that put in the effort, it’s going to have a huge impact on how they think and make decisions.

So, clearly, I was wrong about Jason and the effort he’s been putting into teaching.

Lessons from my big mistake

There are several important innovation lessons here, including:
- We make our own map. Everyone builds their own road to success. Jason’s will be different from mine, which will be different from everyone else’s. Nilofer Merchant calls this “onlyness”:
  
  Onlyness is that thing that only YOU can bring to a situation. As you see yourself, others can see you and the value you bring.
  
  We succeed when we build upon our onlyness, not when we try to conform with everyone else.
- Build on strengths, don’t shore up weaknesses. This is the key point in Youngme Moon‘s book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd. That book included this outstanding graphic:She points out that if you are ahead in one area, you make a bigger difference when you build on that strength. If you try to improve a weakness, everyone just ends up looking the same.
- You can never tell how someone will make their dent on the universe until they’ve done it. I’m not sure if Jason was aiming to do something at this scale all along – and that’s the point. We often can’t tell what people are trying to do until they’ve done it. If we’re too quick to judge while people are building their foundations, we might never see the structure that goes on top.
Learning from mistakes is a key innovation skill. If you do it by design, we call it experimenting. If it’s just random, it’s a mistake. In either case, it’s the learning that provides the value and makes us better.

I’m sure there’s some cognitive bias that explains why I made this mistake. I might have to take Jason’s course to figure out what it was, and how to avoid these mistakes in the future.

Maybe you should too.
13 February 2014
Your Assumptions About Reading Are Wrong
We all know that no one reads books any more, right? It’s because of the internet, and twitter, and Justin Bieber, I think. The argument for this was summed up by Nicholas Carr in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

You can see it in these stats too – this is data from Gallup showing how many people answer “yes” to the question “Are you currently reading any books or novels at present?”

That shows a clear decline, right? Well, no. Take a look at the dates on the bottom – for some weird reason, the run from now backwards. So this isn’t a decline in reading, it’s actually a big increase.

You can see the another take on this in data released this week by Pew. The numbers are higher than the ones from Gallup because this shows readers in the past year, not in the moment. And again, the numbers have shot up from what they were 60 years ago, when the average was around 40%:

We’re reading more than ever.

If you add in the amount of reading that we’re doing on the internet, the stuff that Carr blames for his drop in attention, then we’re reading LOTS more than ever.

Why?

In part, because of education. Reading rates are strongly tied to the percentage of the adult population that has some degree beyond high school. This number has climbed consistently since the middle of the 20th century.

Another part of the story is that for the first time in history, lots of kids and teenagers are voluntarily reading books. That is Harry Potter and The Hunger Games at work.

I was surprised when I first saw these stats, because even though I’m reading more than ever personally, the narrative that Carr and others are putting forward makes some sense. And we can have a discussion about whether or not the quality of books being read has gone down. It probably has, but mainly because so many more people are reading! You always get that when an activity jumps from a niche to the mainstream.

Who wouldn’t be surprised by these stats?
- Amazon: they’ve made a ton of money selling books of all kinds. A big percentage of the eBooks in the Pew data will have come through Amazon. Not only did they come up the Kindle, they also made Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for Android, Kindle for tablets. By making it much easier to read books anywhere, they’ve sold a whole lot of books.
- The Strand: the best second-hand bookstore in the world (or, at least, my favourite) had their best sales day in history this Christmas. As many stores selling physical books have gone out of business, The Strand has succeeded by innovating their business model. They provide a great in-store experience, lots of events, and lots of books that are really hard to find anywhere else.
- Writers: one of the reasons that the number of readers has been increasing is that the number of books has gone through the roof. As the barriers to publication drop to nothing, it is easier than ever to publish a book. While this results in a lot of crap, it also means that no matter how obscure your interests, it is also easier than ever to find something to read about them.
The common thread here is that the people and firms that have been winning in the book business these days are the ones that somehow found a way to avoid the assumption that no one is reading any more. What other opportunities does this open up?

As Mark Twain said:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Avoiding false assumptions provides a big innovation opportunity. What do you know for sure that just ain’t so?
27 January 2014
Are You About to be Disrupted?
The New Killer Apps

Here’s a startling quote from Chunka Mui and Paul B. Carroll in their new book The New Killer Apps:

That $36 trillion is the total market valuation of public companies in the ten industries that will be most vulnerable to change over the next few years: financials, consumer staples, information technology, energy, consumer goods, health care, industrials, materials, telecom, and utilities. Incumbent companies will either do the reimagining and lay claim to the markets of the future or they’ll be reimagined out of existence.

Who is covered in that list of 10 industries? Well, everyone.

The six drivers of change that they lay out are:

The technologies are: mobile devices, social networks, cameras, sensors, cloud computing and emergent knowledge. Together, these are the technologies that convert products into platforms.

So here’s a question: what impact will this set of technologies have on your industry?

In my main one, higher education, I suspect that things like MOOCs are actually behind the curve – few of them take advantage of these technologies. What is the next generation of higher education as a platform? I don’t know, but the question is well worth considering.

It’s worth considering for your industry too.

How can you respond to this disruption?

Mui and Carroll make another interesting claim – that big companies are better placed to take advantage of these changes than small ones are:

This book aims to reverse a bit of conventional wisdom that’s taken root in recent decades: that start-ups are destined to out-innovate big, established businesses. The conventional wisdom just isn’t true. Or, at least, it need not be. Yes, small and agile beats big and slow, but big and agile beats anyone—and that combination is now possible.

…

The second reason that we focus our innovation work on incumbents is that they should win. Yes, we all know that big companies are sometimes complacent about threats, especially if those threats start small. But big companies have everything they need to continue to dominate: unmatched people, resources, supply and distribution capabilities, brand power, and customer relationships. And in the context of today’s immense technological opportunities, incumbents have growth platforms that would take start-ups years to build.

The question then, is how do we become big and agile?

Their answer is to do three things:
1. Think big. If you are in one of the industries facing disruption, it’s not enough to think about making changes at the margin. Instead, you have to be thinking about reimagining – you need to look for that 10X performance improvement.
2. Start small. Instead of making big bets, they recommend starting small, then iterating. This means prototyping, and it means experimenting.
3. Learn fast. Mui and Carroll say: “little tests can be cycled through faster than full-scale implementations, and cycle time is crucial when it comes to innovating. If you give us two moves in a chess match for every one you take, we’ll beat you every time, no matter who you are.”
They lay out a compelling case for taking a scientific-method style approach to innovation.

And they’re right in saying that given their resources, big firms should win. But then they spend plenty of time outlining ways in which big firms have failed to leverage the tools available to them.

The danger of ignoring disruption

Mui and Carroll use Google’s driverless car as a case study throughout the book. For me, the most interesting part of this is where they start to look at the impact of driverless cars on other industries. Check out this discussion of the impact that they will have on insurance:

However, based on numerous conversations, it’s clear that insurance-industry executives mostly just roll their eyes if asked to contemplate the implications of driverless cars. Even if driverless cars are possible, conventional wisdom goes, it will be decades before they are relevant. Therefore, there is little need to worry now. Here’s how insurers figure the math: Begin with the assumption that it will be years before the technology matures. Add several more years to sort out the regulatory complexities, including licensing and liability issues. Add some more years to gain consumer confidence. Then, given the long lifespan of cars, add another decade or more before driverless cars make up a significant percentage of the cars on the road. On top of that, the argument goes, even if the frequency of accidents goes down, the severity will go up—as measured in the cost to fix cars with all the cameras, sensors, radars, and so on, that are going into them. And, remember, even if you don’t crash into someone else, someone else might well crash into you. So, it will be decades before anyone could even imagine giving up car insurance. Besides, there might be no short-term cost to being wrong. Fewer accidents would just mean fewer claims, and therefore greater profits, until enough actuarial data proved that driverless technology delivered the conjectured savings and forced premiums down. Thus, the prevailing attitude is probably much like that of Glenn Renwick, CEO of Progressive Insurance, as expressed during Progressive’s February 2013 earnings call: “The technology to do an autonomous car has been around for a while. We’re now seeing them; we’ll see a lot of talk about them. The real issue is exactly how they are able to be part of the fleet of vehicles on the road in America, and that is probably not something that need keep anyone awake for quite some time.”

You can see that they are still at the first stage of dealing with disruption: ridicule.

This is another example of incumbents misunderstanding the S-Curve of technology diffusion. The mismatch between hype and early results makes it very easy to dismiss new technologies. The S-Curve lies underneath Bill Gates’ famous quote about disruption:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

When you dismiss disruptive technology early, you are not thinking big. Mui and Carroll give a compelling explanation for how things are changing across many industries these days. The book is well worth reading.

But acting is more important than reading! My prescription is to take the smart small and learn fast ideas to heart. These are the core skills that you need to build a culture of experimentation, and experimenting is the best way to cope with an uncertain future.

If change is inevitable, it’s always better to be the driver of change, rather than waiting for it to come, and then reacting. If you’re big, you have the resources available to do this. But you also have an existing core business that can keep you from acting. If you’re faced with this conflict, the best step is to start experimenting.

Related articles
22 January 2014
The Role of Innovation in Economic Growth & Inequality
Innovation and Growth

Innovation drives economic growth.

This is one of the most consistent findings in macro-economics, and it’s been true for centuries. Two books that I recommend highly on this topic are The Wealth & Poverty of Nations by David Landes (chapter 1 free here) and Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh – they both describe the history of economic development and the research that tells us what we know about it.

As Christian Sarkar correctly points out, there are real challenges in measuring innovation at the national level, and this complicates things. There are also correlation/causation questions, but the bottom line is that more innovative countries grow faster than less innovative ones do.

This raises an interesting question, though: does innovation also lead to economic inequality?

That is the argument put forward by Klaus Schwab (h/t Nilofer Merchant):

But it also must be recognized that the astonishing technological leaps of recent decades have been accompanied by increased inequality. An innovative society may be a less inclusive and more fragmented one. Silicon Valley in California is a beacon of global technological dynamism but, with its sky-high housing prices and nearly a fifth of its population living in poverty, it is also a warning that innovation cannot divorce itself from the society from which it springs.

Schwab’s argument is actually pretty nuanced, and worth reading. But the idea that innovation leads to inequality isn’t so cut-and-dried.

How Do We Measure Inequality?

The best tool for looking at inequality is the Gini Index. There is a good description by Marvin Chester of this here. This is what it looks like:

Chester says:

The Gini Index is zero (full equality) when everyone in the society earns exactly the same as everyone else. In a thoroughly totalitarian society, where all earn nothing except for the leader who earns everything, the Gini Index is 1 (or 100%). Needless to say, no country exists with Gini Index zero or one. Since the extremes are evidently unstable – they cannot persist – there must be an optimum Gini! What principle governs the optimization? I confess to not knowing. In the real world the Index ranges between about .25 (25% or just 25 in the published tables) to .70 (70 in tables).

Does Innovation Cause Inequality?

Now, the question is how does the Gini Index relate to innovation? First off, take a look at the CIA’s list of global Gini Index data here. Remember that higher numbers mean that the level of inequality is higher. There are a couple of things that jump out from this table:
- Countries with high levels of inequality are not very innovative. This has been true for a long time, actually. If the Gini Coefficient is higher than about 45, innovation levels tend to drop. The argument for this has been that in societies with high inequality, it is very difficult to achieve a reward for coming up with innovative new ideas. In this situation, the returns from innovation are often seized by those with more money and/or power, which is a strong disincentive for innovation.
- The Gini Index and innovation appear to be uncorrelated at lower levels of inequality. If you look up the countries that you tend to think of as innovative, it’s likely that their Gini coefficient is less than 45. However, not every country with a Gini coefficient below 45 is innovative. In other words, having a relatively low level of inequality appears to be necessary, but not sufficient, to support innovation.
This doesn’t support Schwab’s argument that innovative societies are necessarily inequal. In fact, historically, innovation has tended to drive inequality down. Most countries prior to the 19th century had high Gini coefficients – it was economic development innovation that drove these values down.

It was the industrial revolution and the economic boom throughout the 20th century that created middle classes in the developed countries. And it is the existence of a strong middle class that drives the Gini Coefficients down. It is only in the 2nd half of the 20th century that we started to see Gini Coefficients below 40. Through most of this period, the data strongly suggests that more innovative societies were in fact the most likely to have lower levels of income inequality.

However, in the past 25 years, the Gini Coefficients in some developed countries has started to drift back up after 50-100 years of decrease. The income inequality that Schwab identifies is a recent event – and it is not at all clear that it is related to innovation at all. He is correct in saying that we need to understand the societal context for innovation – we absolutely need to pay more attention to this.

But the argument that income inequality is a necessary outcome of high levels of innovation is incorrect. There are plenty of countries innovate quite a bit and still have relatively low levels of income inequality. The level of income inequality in a country is based on societal values and political processes – it is not an inevitable outcome of economic development or innovation.

Related articles
- Gini in the bottle
6 January 2014
How to Succeed in a TL;DR Culture
TL;DR – when attention spans get shorter, we can either accommodate this by going short ourselves, or we can do the opposite and go deep.

Our attention spans may or may not be getting shorter – the evidence is pretty mixed at the moment. But one of the symptoms of shorter attention spans is the Too Long: Didn’t Read (TL;DR) idea – the meme that gets pulled out whenever someone is yammering on online.

There are two possible responses to people avoiding stuff that’s too long:
1. Go short. If everyone wants short, snappy ideas packaged up in easy to read formats (list posts!), then the way to reach everyone is to go short. If that’s where the masses are, that’s where you need to go.
2. Go deep. The other option, of course, is to do the opposite – go deep instead.
This thought was triggered while I was reading Seth Godin’s colossal book This Might Work/This Might Not Work, which was one of the rewards in his kickstarter campaign for The Icarus Deception.

He called it the behemoth before it had a name, and it’s a good example of going deep. It collects probably a couple thousand of his best blog posts, and it puts into one gigantic 800 page book – and you better make sure you bend your knees and keep your back straight when you try to lift it.

Of course, he’s also gone the other direction, and put a bunch of shorter eBooks through The Domino Project. His argument there is that the 250 page book is an artefact of the financial constraints of publishing physical books. Books have normally been about that long because it’s an economical number of pages to print, and it’s about what people expected for their money. But as we shift to digital, and pricing is back in play, neither of those constraints holds any more.

You get an advantage when you go to the extremes – short or deep. The behemoth points us to a third option too: go special. But average is pretty dangerous.

As readers, we face the same choice. We can give in to TL;DR, and skip the harder stuff. Or we can go deep too.

Godin tells this story about one of my favourite writers, David Foster Wallace:

A guy asked his friend, the writer David Foster Wallace,

“Say, Dave, how’d y’get t’be so dang smart?”

His answer:

“I did the reading.”

No one said the preparation part was fun, but yes, it’s important. I wonder why we believe we can skip it and still be so dang smart.

So maybe the opposite of TL;DR is I Did the Reading (IDTR).

The challenge with going short is that this is the world of the outlier – it’s a blockbuster business because you’re aiming for the masses. In news, this is where the Huffington Post has gone. The newspapers that have managed to stick around have been in niches, like The Financial Times, or they have made a point of going deep, like The Guardian.

The same thing is coming in higher education.

For a long time, if you were an academic, it was fine to be average – in fact, most of us were. But the same changes in technology that are wreaking havoc with newspapers, book publishers and record labels are changing the environment for education as well.

In this environment, average is really dangerous.

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent the advent of education as a blockbuster business. Now, instead of having 25 or 100 students in a class, we can have 1000s. That’s a big change. We’re still working out how MOOCs should be structured – just recording lectures combined with assessment lacking any depth at all is a lousy model, even though it’s currently the one receiving the most hype. This is the go short option.

Ultimately, the way forward has to be a system that is built for this technology, like the Connectivist courses put together by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. This is the go special option.

There are business model issues here as well – MOOCs don’t make much money – a feature for Siemens and Downes, who value access, and a bug for those that are trying to use them to get rich.

Eventually, this will get sorted, and MOOCs will be the blockbusters of education – they will fill the “Head” position in this graph from Godin:

What’s the go deep option? I think it’s probably going very high touch. This can be small team experiential learning, or small seminar/workshop classes, or something else that has a very low student/teacher ratio. And the teacher won’t teach – they’re more likely to be a coach/mentor/facilitator. This is region 2 in Godin’s figure – the niche. Region 3 is the long tail, the area where someone makes a little bit from lots of transactions across a wide range of products. I’m not sure what this would be for education.

The interesting thing here is that being an academic in charge of a MOOC and being an academic in charge of a high touch small class both require skills that the current “average” academic doesn’t have at all. The squeeze here will be on people that are just regurgitating material that has been put together by others. You’ll either need to generate new knowledge and be great at communicating it to live in the blockbuster section, or you’ll need to be good at the high touch work that goes into niches. Both require your own deep knowledge and great communication skills.

TL;DR is definitely a part of our culture now. I’m not sure that we need to give into it though by going short. If that’s what everyone is doing, then there are some real advantages to going deep. That’s a pretty good way to be remarkable.

And if you made it all the way to this line of the post, now you can say IDTR! At least, some of it…

Related articles
- Lol My Thesis is the TL;DR of college essays
- The Cobainification of David Foster Wallace
2 January 2014
Don’t Set Goals, Make New Habits Instead
How I Became Large

“Double cheeseburger, no pickles, no ketchup, in a value meal, upsized, with a pepsi.”

That was my lunch order nearly every day at Burger King after we moved to New Zealand. The “no pickles, no ketchup” part was interesting – that was the easiest way to order a burger with only mustard. The BK point-of-sales system didn’t have a key for “only mustard” – instead, it had keys for what to exclude – “no pickles” and “no ketchup.”

One time I asked for a double cheeseburger with mustard only, and the response was “<pause> So… no burger, no bun?” That’s when I figured out I had to learn how to speak Burger King.

Anyway, the point is, that after 3.5 years of this, I had put on 50 pounds or so. Well, since I was in New Zealand, I had put on 23 kg or so.

I had gotten into a bad habit.

How I Became Less Large

When we moved to Australia, I got a new job, but that terrible lunch habit persisted.

Eventually, I said enough is enough. My goal for several years had been to lose weight, but nothing happened until I changed my habits. I changed what I ate. Lunches were now salads, I cut out soft drinks, more exercise and so on – there aren’t really any secrets to this. Over the course of a year, I dropped about 30 kg, and I’ve kept most of that off for ten years now.

Now I have better habits.

As Neil Perkin succinctly puts it: systems trump goals.

What New Habit Will You Build?

While the human body is a complex system, weight it still a relatively straightforward input-output process. So we can address it through habits. Charles Duhigg wrote a great book on how to break bad habits and build better ones – The Power of Habit. Here is his flow chart for building habits (click on the image to see it full-size):

The problem with goals is that most of them are too big, and they take a long time, and that requires work. That’s also what makes them worthwhile! But on a day-to-day basis, you need to figure out how to build the habits that will eventually get you to your goals.

If your goal is to lose weight, you need to change your eating (input) and exercise (output) habits.

If your goal is to write a book, you need to change your writing habits.

Austin Kleon wrote a great post yesterday on breaking goals down into habits. He says to do something small, every day:

Figure out what your little daily chunk of work is, and every day, no matter what, make sure it gets done.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for the work?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time to work if you look for it.

What I usually recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. When you’re done, go about your day…

Do the work every day. Fill the boxes on your calendar. Don’t break the chain.

This approach works pretty well for most of our personal goals. But what if our goal is to make our organisations more innovative?

That’s a bit trickier. The main reason is that innovation is a lot more complex. Complex systems are trickier because they require us to approach our goals indirectly. This excerpt from John Kay’s terrific book Obliquity outlines the issue:

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.

…

What is true of forests is equally true of businesses. The great corporations of the modern world were not built by people whose overriding interest was wealth, profit, or shareholder value. To paraphrase Mill: their focus was on business followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they found profit by the way.

This is how Hewlett Packard described it: “Profit is a cornerstone of what we do… but it has never been the point in and of itself. The point, in fact, is to win, and winning is judged in the eyes of the customer and by doing something you can be proud of.”

Obliquity is relevant whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment, and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them.

Innovation is another thing that we need to approach obliquely. So what habits should we build to help? Here are some ideas that I’ve run across in the past couple of days:
- Take care of yourself. Jason Cohen points out that we are happier and more productive when we get enough sleep, exercise, and take time to think.
- Practice divergent thinking. It’s a mistake to jump straight to solutions when we’re trying to innovate. First, we have to explore a broad range of ideas. Olaf Kowalik writes about how to use divergent thinking to do this – and this is a key innovation skill.
- Read widely. Jorge Barba makes an important point at the end of his post recommending some innovation books to read:
  
  One more thing: everything is connected in some way, so read about anything and everything. Not just books that have “innovation” in the title.
  
  Yes – definitely do that.
To innovate, you need the process, but you also need to muddle your way through a bit. So some of the habits you need to build are oblique – like getting enough sleep. Others are more direct, like blocking out time for thinking and allocating resources for building your ideas.

The main point is that things that are worth doing take effort over an extended period of time. You need to build habits that will ensure that you make that effort.

As we hit the new year, don’t set goals – start building new habits instead.

Related articles
- 7 Healthy Habits for Entrepreneurs
31 December 2013
Get Better Ideas by Paying Attention

Could it be that simply paying attention could make us more innovative?

Probably.

The basic premise behind On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz is that we miss a lot of important stuff, all the time. She opens by saying:

You missed that. Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing events unfolding in your body, in the distance, right in front of you.

By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an uthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses…

This ignorance is useful: indeed, we compliment it and call it concentration.

The book, which is wonderful, recounts eleven walks that Horowitz takes with others that allow her to see the world differently, to pay attention to the things that she normally misses.

She sees her neighbourhood in Manhattan through the eyes of her nineteen month old son, her dog. and entomologist, an artist, a typography expert and others (see Maria Popova’s discussion of the book here). Through these walks, Horowitz learns a great deal about what she normally misses.

One of her main points is that even in the seemingly simplest settings, there is far more information available than we are able to process. If we try to process every piece of data in a forest, or on our street, or in our house, we will end up so overwhelmed that we will be paralyzed. We have always suffered from information overload – it’s not new at all.

As it turns out, I was missing pretty much everything. After taking the walks described in this book, I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human. We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders. My deficiency is one of attention: I simply was not paying close enough attention. Though paying attention seems simple, there are numerous forms of payment. I reckon that every child has been admonished by teacher or parent to “pay attention.” But no one tells you how to do that.

Horowitz spends the rest of the book trying to figure how to best pay attention.. By walking with her son and her dog, she has to empathize with their views of the world to learn what is capturing their attention.

Empathy is one part of the equation, and expertise the second. To think about this, take a look at this picture of a swee waxbill that Nancy took last year in South Africa:

First off, look at the depth of field – the bird is in focus, as is the grass it is eating. Everything else is blurry. This is what attention looks like – we select a small amount of data to process, ignoring the rest.

Now, think about what people with different expertise can observe in this relatively simply picture. Birders like me see the bird. A botanist can tell you about the grass, and probably about the plants in the background as well. In addition to that, by looking at the plants, they can tell you what part of the world that is, what kind of climate is there, the characteristics of the soil, and so on. An entomologist can tell you about what bugs you could expect to find.

It’s knowledge that lets you see more than just “hey, a bird!”

In his terrific book Creative Intelligence, Bruce Nussbaum also uses birding as a way to think about innovation:

As a birder, I’ve learned to look and listen for what shouldn’t be there. What’s unusual. What goes against popular wisdom. It involves a certain amount of domain expertise—I’m certainly a better birder now than I was when I began fifteen years ago. But even if you’ve yet to amass experience in a particular field, you can still improve your chances of spotting the surprises you may not be expecting. For birders, it can mean going to strange and sometimes unsavory places. When I was in Singapore for a design conference, I went birding at a municipal waste treatment facility and found a number of birds—including one black swan. It was a rarity in Singapore and a good find. I was surprised, but not shocked. I was, after all, looking for what was not supposed to be there. Just as good detectives are trained to hear the dog that did not bark—so too are good scientists trained to look, and listen, for what’s not there.

We can combine empathy and expertise to find opportunities to innovate. We can do this by seeing things that others miss – by paying attention.

Part of this is pattern recognition. It’s the expertise that helps us recognise patterns that might be unusual and easy to miss for others. This skill becomes even more powerful when we combine expertise in different domains – it is at the edges and borders that the best ideas often lie.

Part of this is seeing as others do – empathy. By seeing from their perspective, we can combine this new view with our own skills and expertise to develop innovative ideas.

We have to filter to make sense of the world – there’s no way around it. But when we fall into routines, it means that we are overfiltering – we end up missing important and interesting things. If we can figure out ways to relax our filters through empathy, or to change them through learning, then we have a chance to see something new.

That’s paying attention. The reward we might get for doing this is seeing a great new idea.

23 December 2013
2013 Holiday Reading List for Innovators
Ideas change lives – so we need to get better at working with them. As I discussed yesterday, a bit part of this is about communication. But it’s also about having better ideas.

So here is a list of books and blogs that have inspired my thinking recently – if you’re looking for gifts for the innovators on your list (or yourself!), these are worth thinking about. I hope they help you have better ideas too.
1. 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era by Nilofer Merchant (discussed here). The world is changing. As we make the transition from the industrial era to the social era, we need to think about developing new skills and new business models to help as adapt. This book outlines the key issues we need to understand to build these things.
2. The End of Competitive Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath (discussed here). This book outlines why and how the world is changing, and makes the argument that the way to win now is by building a series of temporary competitive advantages. The message, again, is that we need new skills and business models to do this.
3. Hugh MacLeod’s Daily Newsletter – subscribe here. The cartoons are great, but what I really love is MacLeod’s writing. The word/drawing combo packs a great deal of business wisdom into a daily package. His books are great too – here is my discussion of his first, Ignore Everybody. Another person doing great work in combining words and visuals is Sacha Chua – her blog is one of my must-reads too.
4. Daring Greatly by Brené Brown (discussed here). We can’t innovate if we don’t try things that might not work. This means that we have to be vulnerable to innovate. Brown’s book discusses the importance of vulnerability, and the role it plays it having an impact.
5. Tips on reading more effectively from Shane Parrish. His Farnam Street blog was one of my finds this year. Two posts worth reading are: The Art of Reading: How to Read a Book and How to Retain more of What You Read.
6. Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz (discussed here). Schulz writes beautifully – I enjoy reading her on any topic. But this book is particularly good. It lays out the reasons for experimenting – a critical innovation skill. It’s through being wrong that we learn – so it’s an essential part of eventually being right.
7. Everything by Jeanne Liedtka (one book discussed here). Liedtka is one of the leading thinkers on how to use design-based approaches to improving innovation. Designing for Growth and Solving Business Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works are both outstanding books. I’d start with Designing for Growth. The other design thinking book that I enjoyed this year was Creative Confidence by Tom and David Kelley (discussed here).
8. How to be Creative by Tara Hunt. This is one of my favourite blog posts of the year, and I will discuss it in more detail here. Hunt is an outstanding thinker, and I believe that we haven’t yet seen her best work. I’m looking forward to seeing what she does next.
9. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (discussed here by Maria Popova). Use the posts by Parrish to get better at reading, and use this book to get better at writing. Popova’s Brain Picking blog is also well worth your time.
10. Conversation Agent by Valeria Maltoni. Another excellent business thinker. Maltoni’s work has been incredibly strong over the past half a year. Add her to your RSS feed, or whatever you use to keep track of new ideas in blogs.
11. Who Do You Want Your Customer to Become? by Michael Schrage (discussed here). This is a terrific book. Too many innovators start by asking “what can I build?” Schrage’s question is more important, and a great place to start when you’re innovating.
The last book brings me to my ulterior motive in this post. Who do I want you to become? Here is what I said in my post on Schrage’s book:

“Here’s the change that I’d like to see from our interactions over ideas: that together we figure out how to make work work better.

For too many people, work is lousy. Most organisations are mediocre, at best (maybe even 90% of them!) We need to innovate how we manage, how we deal with our people, and how we deal with customers.

If my writing this and your reading this helps us take even a small step in that direction, I’d be very happy.”

So that’s a start. My other motive here though is that I want you to have great ideas that change my life. This list of resources is a good way to start on that.

Get going! Let’s make work better.

Related articles
- Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish: Improved Thinking Through Curating ‘Interestingness’
9 December 2013
Ideas Change Lives: How Tom Peters’ Changed Mine
In Which I Try a Bunch of Ideas

My first job when we moved to New Zealand was a 12 month contract. I was filling in for a woman on maternity leave, and I knew that if I wanted to work at the local polytechnic for more than 12 months, I had to have an impact fast. I was managing the student recruitment section, and the management wanted us to increase enrolments by as much as possible. In addition to the limited time, I had another constraint – even though our section’s budget was more than $1.5 million, I couldn’t sign off on anything myself. Any expenditure had to be approved by my manager.

I did the first thing I always do when faced with a new challenge: I started reading. As Valeria Maltoni reminded me recently, books change lives. In the first two weeks on the job, I did a lot of managing by walking around, and I re-read Thriving on Chaos by Tom Peters. Based on this, I did a lot of thinking, and I made a list of 48 things I could try in the 12 months that I had.

And in that time, I ended up trying 44 of them.

They didn’t all work. But a lot of them did. Here is an example of one of the experiments:

One of my teams handled enquiries about classes – both walk-ins and phone calls. After watching them for a week and talking with them, we agreed that they were understaffed. Walk-ins were about twice as likely to apply for a course as phone calls. But one big problem is that the team had to interrupt face-to-face talks to answer the phone.

I asked them to use very simple logs like this one to track how many people they were interacting with. After two weeks, we had enough data to demonstrate to my manager that we needed another person in the Info Centre.

Overall, all the stuff that we tried ended up increasing enrolments by more than 10%. That’s a better than $2 million return on trying 44 experiments that cost nothing.

More importantly, we learned a lot. By collecting data on all of the ideas, we learned a lot about how the student recruitment process really worked. This meant that our decision-making became much more data driven. And by working together on the ideas, my teams and I built a lot of trust.

After all of that, I did end up with a permanent job at the polytech – and I could even sign for my own budget!

Innovation Lessons

There are several innovation lessons in this story:
- You don’t need permission to innovate. All of those 44 ideas were cheap, and they fell within my scope of control as a manager. So we just did them. I had asked permission, the answer probably would have been “no.” Once we had a track record of results, the our scope of control expanded.
- Experiments drive change. We needed to increase enrolments, but we didn’t have the resources to make a big bet. So we made a lot of small ones instead. Once we got into the habit, my teams started to test their own experiments as well. Experimenting is the best way to build an innovation culture.
- The biggest innovations are often ideas. The idea with the biggest impact was deceptively simple. We started finishing every single enquiry by asking the person “would you like to put in an application for the course?” The innovation here was changing the way the Info Team viewed their roles. Originally, they thought their job was to provide information. This question came from thinking about the job as helping people achieve their goals through education. That was a huge innovation.
People often focus on the constraints that make it hard to innovate. But if I hadn’t had the budget constraint, I’m not sure that I would have approached that job as creatively as I did. It was the constraints that created the innovation opportunity.

Ideas Change Lives

The bigger lesson here is that ideas change lives. Reconceptualising the role of the Info Team ended up having an impact on all of the people that went into a higher education program that they might not have otherwise.

And Thriving on Chaos changed my life. I had a fair bit of management experience before this job, but this is the one where I really learned how to manage. I had built my people skills on previous jobs, and that was crucial. But this is where I learned how to convert ideas into action. One of Peters’ favourite innovation quotes is from Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines:

We have a ‘strategic plan.’ It’s called doing things.

Here’s another one from Peters – quoting John Masters, a gas and oil wildcatter:

This is so simple it sounds stupid, but it is amazing how few oil people really understand that you only find oil if you drill wells. You may think you’re finding it when you’re drawing maps and studying logs, but you have to drill.

That’s the big idea I got from Tom Peters, and acting on it made me a much better manager. This was where I developed many of my core ideas about how to innovate.

This is important for one more reason. In the social era, language is a critical source of competitive advantage. Talk is the technology of leadership – and this means that there is a huge innovation opportunity in language.

Read, write, talk – and work on improving on all three skills. Ideas change lives – we need to get better at working with them.
8 December 2013
You Can’t Benchmark Your Way to Greatness

If you want to make your organisation more innovative, you need to figure out how to embed innovation throughout the entire organisation. This is hard work. It means that you have to have a clear strategy, and a clear point of difference. Innovation then needs to be central to improving that advantage.

This takes time, thought and commitment.

You can’t make this change by simply copying the tools and techniques that you see other firms using. The subtitle of The Circle of Innovation by Tom Peters is: You Can’t Shrink Your Way to Greatness.

That’s true, and it’s also true that you can’t benchmark your way to greatness either.

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Bob Sutton talk about this in their outstanding book The Knowing-Doing Gap. Their objective in the book is to figure out why managers and firms don’t do the things that they know they should.

Why has it been so difficult for other automobile manufacturers to copy the Toyota Production System (TPS), even though the details have been described in books and Toyota actually gives tours of its manufacturing facilities? Because “the TPS techniques that visitors see on their tours—the kanban cards, andon cords, and quality circles—represent the surface of TPS but not its soul.” The Toyota Production System is about philosophy and perspective, about such things as people, processes, quality, and continuous improvement. It is not just a set of techniques or practices: On the surface, TPS appears simple…. Mike DaPrile, who runs Toyota’s assembly facilities in Kentucky, describes it as having three levels: techniques, systems, and philosophy. Says he: Many plants have put in an andon cord that you pull to stop the assembly line if there is a problem. A 5-year-old can pull the cord. But it takes a lot of effort to drive the right philosophies down to the plant floor.

…

What is important is not so much what we do—the specific people management techniques and practices—but why we do it—the underlying philosophy and view of people and the business that provides a foundation for the practices. Attempting to copy just what is done—the explicit practices and policies—without holding the underlying philosophy is at once a more difficult task and an approach that is less likely to be successful. Because of the importance of values and philosophy in the management processes of many successful companies, the emphasis on the tangible, explicit aspects of knowledge that characterizes most knowledge management projects is unlikely to provide much value and may be, at worst, a diversion from where and how companies should be focusing their attention.

Here’s the problem with benchmarking. It does nothing to change your underlying philosophy, and without doing this, the tools won’t work.

Peters has recently put together a great summary of what he’s learned over the years on a site called Excellence Now!. Here is one of the quotes from his slide deck on innovation:

A friend who’s CEO of a Fortune 500 company explained his learning experience from benchmarking:

“First, Tom, it’s not about, ‘Here are the benchmarks—they are your new standards.’ It’s very likely that the outlier who has produced exceptional results has changed the culture of his unit—this was the case in our safety campaign. So if others simply copy his successful procedures, they will amount to nothing, or very little, or be un-sustainable, or even counter-productive, unless an altered culture is in place. Second, situations differ from unit to unit—one can learn from the benchmark, but one must adapt to local circumstances, not follow it slavishly. Third, to slavishly follow someone else’s process is often de-motivating—at best you are a copycat; leaders of other units need to give it their own stamp to ensure ‘ownership.’”

Obsession with tools is the large firm equivalent to the start-up’s obsession with features. And the solution to this problem is the same too: don’t focus on tools, focus on the value that you’re creating.

The value created by the Toyota Production System was cars of extremely high quality. This in turn led to an array of tools and techniques that supported and created that value: just-in-time delivery, continuous improvement, the andon cord, and so on.

To replicate Toyota’s success, you can’t just replicate these tools. Instead, you need your own purpose. Every route to success will be different – you need to make your own map. That’s innovation.

Once you have your purpose, then you can take in tools from elsewhere, and adapt them to fit your organisation. That’s innovation too.

But you can’t just take ideas from outside and bolt them on to an organisation that isn’t working. You can’t benchmark your way to greatness. You need to do the hard work of finding a purpose, and build on that.

17 November 2013