1. Imagine it is your first day.  This method is recommended by Andy Grove, CEO of Intel.  Imagine that tomorrow is your first day as CEO.  The previous incumbent has been fired by the Board and it is your job to move in and sort things out.  If you were starting from scratch what would you say to the staff?  What vision and direction would you give them?  Who would you hire and who would you fire?  What projects would you prioritise or cancel?  What would your primary focus be?  If these things are critical for a new starter then surely they are critical for you.  This thinking exercise encourages you to forget about the short-term problems, history and legacy issues – and to focus on the major strategic priorities instead. 
2. Imagine that you have been diagnosed with a very serious condition.  The doctor has said that you must leave your job in two months and take retirement.  What would you do?  Who would you delegate tasks to?  How would you transfer your day to day responsibilities?  Plan your own exit and legacy.  What are the key things to complete in the next two months?  If you could do this and set the company on the right course then why not do it now and so free you to add value in some new and strategic way?  This method was suggested by Oren Harari and Tom Peters.  It will help you to delegate more, build a succession plan, focus on key issues and liberate your time for new ventures. 

We tend to think that a CEO’s job is about execution – and it is.  But it is also about thinking, imagining, envisioning and communicating.  Take more time for these activities and you will be a better leader.

Paul Sloane

Since the early 1990’s Nokia has invested close to €35 billion in research and development to build one of the strongest and broadest intellectual property rights (IPR) portfolios in the wireless industry. They invest heavily in innovation because ‘our business is about delivering new technologies, products and services to our customers and consumers’. Nokia now owns approximately 11,000 patented innovations and its global patent portfolio includes approximately 42,000 patents and patent applications. Nokia files approximately 1,000 new patent applications annually.

One of Nokia’s characteristics is their innovative approach to innovation. For example, their Growth Economy Venture Challenge will provide a venture capital investment in the winning proposal of $1 million. The Challenge is looking for one idea that stands above all the rest; one that could truly change the way people use Nokia mobile devices and that demonstrates how mobility improves the lives of millions of people in developing nations.

The morning will be a great opportunity to learn about innovation from leading practitioners and to network with fellow professionals.

Date: Monday 19 April 2010
Title: Innovation at Nokia
Venue: Central London
Time: Registration and refreshments from 0900. Meeting from 09.30 – 1300 followed by a sandwich lunch
Guest Speakers:

• Pekka Pohjakallio, Vice President, Concepting & Innovation Solutions Unit
• Paul Sloane, Head, BQF Innovation Unit
  Paul will lead an interactive workshop exercise on corporate differentiation and positioning

Please also forward this invitation to others in your organisation who may be interested in attending.  Book here.

Paul Sloane

Stefan Lindegaard has written an interesting piece in Business Week arguing that most CEOs just don’t understand what innovation needs and entails.  As evidence he quotes research by the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, N.C., which interviewed 247 executives and managers who supervised at least 500 people and had more than 15 years of management experience.  When asked what they were doing to promote innovation in their organizations, the most popular strategy, adopting “overt innovation processes,” was named by only 25%. Only 17% said they were undertaking “talent/talent development,” the second most often mentioned answer, and 13% said they had rewards/recognition programs to support innovation.

The author contends that these responses show that chief executives are doing surprisingly little to build innovation cultures in their companies. He gives the following reasons why CEOs and other C-level officers often don’t support innovation, even though the business climate of our time demands it:

1.  The demand for short-term gains nearly always wins the day. Top executives at public companies are under enormous pressure to produce strong financial results each and every quarter. This is the area where they are rewarded for producing results, and their job security increasingly depends on it.

2.   They missed out on innovation education. Many of today’s top executives got their business education before innovation was a significant part of the curriculum at many MBA programs. They could compensate for this with experience, but many also missed on-the-job training, because innovation training usually happens from the top down, not vice versa. They were trained to be problem solvers, not innovators. Innovation education didn’t really take root until the early-to-mid-1990s, when thought leaders such as Clayton Christensen, Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad, and others emerged.

3.  Top executives are risk-averse. Innovation, especially open innovation, is scary on many levels. People who make it to the top because of their knowledge of existing businesses aren’t that interested in considering a new business model or going after an amazing yet high-risk breakthrough when that may undermine their own expertise. And who wants to risk having a major innovation effort fail on their watch?  People who truly understand innovation embrace failure as an inherent part of innovation. They realize that big lessons that lead to success often come from the biggest failures. An attitude that doesn’t allow for failure is contrary to an innovation culture, yet that’s the kind of attitude that too many company leaders possess.

4.   They don’t see why a networking culture is important for open innovation. In a world of open innovation, you need to be an expert at networking and building relationships. This holds true at the corporate level as well as the personal level. So I ask leaders and managers: Where is the strategy, commitment, and structure that you need to create a networking culture? Many of them have not bothered to give this important subject any thought.

5.   Top executives are too far away from the action. It is easy to preach innovation when you do not have to make it happen.  The problem is that top executives reward middle managers for getting stuff done and executing flawlessly. This can be counterintuitive to innovating. But top executives are often too far away from the action to understand how this compensation structure makes it harder for innovation leaders to succeed. Most leaders are more wedded to rewarding the core business rather than pursuing something new and untested.

Paul Sloane

• Give yourself a time limit. Write for ten minutes say, and then stop.
• Keep your hand moving until the time is up.  Do not pause to stare into space or to read what you’ve written. Write quickly but not in a hurry.
• Pay no attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, neatness, or style. Nobody else needs to read what you produce here. The correctness and quality of what you write do not matter; the act of writing does.
• If you get off the topic or run out of ideas, keep writing anyway. If necessary, write nonsense or whatever comes into your head, or simply scribble anything to keep the hand moving.
• If you feel bored or uncomfortable as you’re writing, ask yourself what’s bothering you and write about that.
• When the time is up, look over what you’ve written, and mark passages that contain ideas or phrases that might be worth keeping or elaborating on in a subsequent free-writing session.  

The idea is that the process overcomes apathy, fear, hesitation and other blocks to creation and action.  Once you have reached your time limit, read over what you have written and circle any points of interest.  You can use these as starting points for action, for brainstorming or for further freewriting.  Although this is designed as an individual activity it can be done in groups with people sharing the key points after an agreed time.  Once again the most important thing is that everyone keeps writing.

Paul Sloane

The top 25 countries with their ICI scores are:

1.  Sweden      82.2

2.  Finland     77.8

3.  United States   77.5

4.  Switzerland   77.0

5.  Netherlands    76.6

6.  Singapore   76.5

7.  Canada    74.8

8.  United Kingdom   74.6

9.  Norway    73.5

10.  New Zealand   73.4

11.  Luxembourg    73.3

11.  Denmark   73.3

13.  Taiwan    72.9

14.  Iceland    72.6

15.  Japan    72.1

16.  Hong Kong    71.3

17.  Australia   71.2

18.  Ireland    70.5

19.  Korea    70.0

20.  Germany   68.8

21.  Israel    68.2

22.  Belgium  67.6

23.  Austria    66.7

24.  France    65.4

25.  Estonia   62.7

 And the bottom three are:

129.  Haiti    28.7

130.  Chad    25.6

131.  Afghanistan   24.0

It is notable that China does not do well – it comes in at number 65 with a score of 49.5.

The Executive Summary contains many interesting insights.

Paul Sloane

Spectacles manufacturer in the 1960s

Employee: I think we should investigate a new idea I have heard about called contact lenses.

Boss: How does it work?

Employee: We make prescription lenses that people attach to their eyeballs so that they can see well without spectacles.

Boss: You mean I stick a piece of glass onto my eyeball?

Employee: It could be glass or plastic.

Boss: That is ridiculous. What if it slipped behind the eye? What if it damaged the eye? We could be sued for millions. No-one is going to want something so dangerous and inconvenient. Spectacles are safe, cheap and popular. Let’s focus on doing what we know.

Radio manufacturer in the 1980s

Employee: I read about this guy Trevor Bayliss who has invented a clockwork radio. It is an interesting idea – do you think we should look at this?

Boss: Don’t be silly. I heard about this too. It will never catch on.

Employee: Really?

Boss: Sure. Let me give you three reasons. First radios need electricity and the easiest way to get that is through the mains or batteries – that is what consumers and the trade want. Secondly the radio will have to be really big to contain the winding mechanism. Third, the radio will suddenly stop in the middle of a programme waiting to be wound up – how annoying will that be? Customers want convenience – not the bother of stopping to wind up a radio every 10 minutes.

Employee: I guess you are right.

Website entrepreneur in 2000s

Programmer: I have this idea for a new social media site.

Boss: Great. How does it work?

Programmer: People can make short broadcasts of up to 140 characters.

Boss: 140 characters! Why restrict them? Can they add pictures, music and videos?

Programmer: No – it is just a box for 140 characters of text.

Boss: Don’t be silly. Facebook and Myspace already offer far more than that. We need something more exciting than a text box. How about we copy Facebook and add more features?

See how easy it is? Every day in every organisation bosses are rejecting interesting ideas because the ideas look silly. How can you overcome this problem? You train people to ask questions rather than be judgmental. When somebody comes to you with a bizarre idea do not find fault with it; instead ask questions. How could we make it work? What are the benefits for customers if this happened? Is there a better way to do this?

If you want innovation in your organisation then you must encourage people at all levels to welcome, entertain and explore crazy ideas – they are the ones that can lead to breakthroughs.

Paul Sloane

Alistair Darling (photo by the Sun)

In December the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, announced that he would make cuts of £600m in funding for higher education, research and science by 2012.  Shortly afterwards the Science and Technology Facilities council announced a range of cuts in experimental programmes.  The number of students funded to take PhD degrees is expected to fall by 25%.  It is remarkable that these announcements have not generated national concern because they strike at our national ability to innovate.  On Dec 16^th over 100 leading scientists and academics published a letter criticising the cuts and pointing out that research is essential to scientific discovery and innovation.

Currently interest for postgraduate education is very high but funding is being slashed.  At a national level it is recognised that our dependence on financial services should be reduced.  A good way to do this is to encourage the growth of high-tech start-ups.  There is considerable evidence from the OECD among others that people educated to doctoral level are ‘key players in innovation.’  We clearly need to cut public spending in order to rein in our enormous debts but even so the country needs to increase not reduce spending on science, research and postgraduate studies as these are shown to fuel the technology start-ups that will give us future economic growth and employment.

Paul Sloane

Break the Rules is a workshop method that I use to challenge the fundamental assumptions of your business.  It can be used to illustrate the number and level of restrictions on how you work.  It can also be the basis for new ideas.

Divide into teams of 6 to 8 people.  Each team must list as many rules as they can think of that apply in the organization.  They should spend say 30 minutes capturing as many rules as possible – both obvious explicit rules and the unwritten, implicit rules – ‘the way we do things around here.’   What do you always do?  What do you never do?  What rules apply to hiring, to firing, to people, to finance, to approvals, to customers, to competitors etc.  Typically groups find anywhere from 60 to 100 rules. When you have a long list of rules you then deliberately challenge each of them in turn. For each rule you ask the question – ‘Can we break this rule for the benefit of the business?’  You can use the broken rules as springboards for new ideas.

Say for example you were looking for ways to improve the productivity of a telemarketing department.  Here are some of the rules that you might list as applying to the business today:

1. We use the telephone
2. We call between 9 a.m. and 12 and 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
3. We are always polite and professional.
4. We use a script which has been carefully developed to deliver the right messages.
5. We reward our agents for the number of leads they generate.
6. We follow-up each appointment with a confirmation letter and information pack.

 Now we break the rules:

1. We will use other methods of contacting people than the telephone
2. We will contact people outside normal business hours e.g. early in the morning, at lunch time or in the evening.
3. We will be rude and unprofessional.
4. We will let our agents say whatever they want.
5. We will fine our agents for every lead they get.
6. We will not send out a confirmation by post.

How can any of these ideas help us to make the department more effective?  Items 1 to 3 might suggest that we find creative ways to approach our target prospects as they arrive at or leave work.  The telemarketing team could dress up as clowns and approach commuters getting off trains with humorous and outrageous messages which solicit responses.  Item 4. might prompt us to think of ways in which we could make our message more interesting and less mechanical.  The idea of fines might prompt us to emphasize to potential customers the costs and penalties from not responding.  Finally item 6 might lead to the ideas of confirming appointments through a special website or hand-delivering to customers a package containing an attractive wall calendar with the date and time of our appointment highlighted.

When I facilitate this exercise in my workshops I often find that teams decide that they can break some 40% to 50% of the rules beneficially.  They are surprised at how many self-imposed limits are holding them back.

Paul Sloane

Photo by Bernie Condon

A better approach is to take a little time to generate a long list of possible ideas and then evaluate them in order to select one or more to try.  Our first idea is often the most obvious, the most straightforward response.  It is rarely the best response.  As we mull over the problem and force more and more possible solutions we generate less conventional, less routine, less automatic choices – we come up with the creative, the radical and the better options. 

When men first wanted to fly the most obvious way to do it was to copy birds by beating two large wings against the air.  This was tried and failed many times.  But people kept on trying it.  In the year that the Wright brothers first flew the US Congress voted to stop funding heavier-than-air flying experiments because they were such an obvious waste of time and money. The aerofoil wing section, which gives lift when driven forward, was a very different and much better option than flapping wings.

When you find yourself tempted to rush into a quick answer, force yourself to pause for a moment.  Would it be better to get the opinions of others?  Should you run a short brainstorm meeting?  Should you ponder the issue yourself for a while?  Could you write down several different approaches rather than just one?  Some problems demand an immediate response but many do not; they favour a more considered approach.  The first idea you come up with may be great, but the chances are that the tenth, twentieth or fortieth will be much better.

Paul Sloane

There are details here.

The dates are

London    Feb 25 and Sept 16

Midlands   June 17

These workshops are open to non-members of the British Quality Foundation.  Places are limited so please book early.

Paul Sloane