This is the second of my three favorite talks from TED2008 (Jill Bolte Taylor’s being the first).
Here Benjamin Zander delivers a nice insight in to what makes well-performed classical music a sublime aesthetic experience. But what impressed me so much about Zander’s talk was his message of leadership being about making eyes bright. This is a truly moving TED talk, and an informative one as well.
Two of my favorite books on innovation are The Innovator’s Dilemma and — you guessed it — The Innovator’s Solution. However, not all is well and good in the world when it comes to my relationship with these books: my dilemma is that I am lacking a good solution in terms of influencing people around me to actually read them. Short of actually taking a class with Clay Christensen and reading the books because you’re so afraid he’s going to cold call you on the day when you’ve forgotten to memorize the killer chart on when to spin a venture out versus leaving it inside, I can’t imagine a motivational technique for encouraging each and every page to be read (me, I’ve read each ten plus times… but I’m a geek that way).
But maybe it’s more about getting people to a disruptive state of mind? Maybe it’s about getting them on the bus? If convincing folks to read either edition of Innovators is tantamount to dragging old wild horses to water and teaching them a new trick, then I can’t help but admire this alternative solution from the Boulder office of CP+B:
A Disruptive Thinker Transport! Why didn’t I think of this? I find this fantastic piece of graphic design particularly funny, but then I grew up in Boulder and suffer from a bit of that locale’s typical twisted (or is that disruptive?) sense of humor. When this thing makes its way up to Gunbarrel, massive seas of Legacy Outbacks part and make way. Make way for disruption! Yield to the low end, Volvo 240 wagons of the world!
Read more about it at John Winsor’s fine blog.
"If we have a strong sense of purpose, good friends, loving
relationships, meaningful work, and good health it’s very likely that
we will also quite frequently experience happiness in our lives. Yet,
happiness is a by-product of pursuing those other goals and I think
that analogy applies to business as well. In my business experience,
profits are best achieved by not making them the primary goal of the
business. Rather, long-term profits are the result of having a deeper
business purpose, great products, customer satisfaction, employee
happiness, excellent suppliers, community and environmental
responsibility—these are the keys to maximizing long-term profits. The
paradox of profits is that, like happiness, they are best achieved by
not aiming directly for them."
Cybergenic is the New Telegenic.
Check out this awesome essay by Paul Saffo — he really nails it: Obama’s ‘Cybergenic’ Edge
So many structural shifts are happening right now. Most of the assumptions we have about how the world of power and influence works are based on paradigms dating back to the 50’s and 60’s. New platforms and mindsets open up great value to those willing to work with them. This is an exciting time to be playing with the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.
… a particular 59 seconds of the introductory demo was sheer brilliance. At the Stanford d.school where I teach, I’m all over students like a broken record, repeating a mantra of "show, don’t tell. show, don’t tell. show, don’t tell". A great demo is one where you show how all your hours of process brilliance have created something truly remarkable, but the point of proof lies in only showing that which is remarkable, rather than telling us how you got there. In other words, show, don’t tell.
Take a look at the rhetorical brilliance of Steve Jobs in his iPhone 3G introduction here. Forward the video to the 1:27:21 mark, and watch through 1:28:50 to see an awesome 59 seconds of demo magic. Show, don’t tell.
Here’s a cool example of creating infectious action being done by the folks at Mozilla: Download Day 2008
I found about it via Facebook. Based on the pledge ticker at the Download website, it appears to be working quite well.
Infectious Action = Remarkable Offering + a Sticky, Compelling Message + a System Designed to Spread
"The iPhone is merely a triumph of guts. It’s a triumph of someone forcing
people to do things they were scared of, and thus completely changing the paradigm of a multibillion-dollar industry."
I attended All Things Digital last week, and — much to my surprise —
walked away with more than just a more informed view of where the
digital ecosystem is headed.
As cool a conference as it is, I didn’t expect to have an emotional experience. But there you go, my hat got knocked in to the creek by the amazing work being done by Dean Kamen’s group at DEKA. Take a look at this video and tell me that you aren’t blown away by the wicked combination of elegant engineering, high-minded problem solving, and a darn-it-we’ll-solve-this-challenge-no-matter-what sensibility:
For the impatient among you (and who isn’t in this Web 2.0 world), fast forward to about the 2:30 mark. You can read more about these arms here.
Each time I see this stuff I get tears in my eyes, and to see innovative engineering like this makes me feel optimistic about the future of the profession. As organizations age, I believe there’s a tendency for established disciplines to cease to be creative, to become more critical than generative. Success naturally leads to conservatism and a desire to preserve the status quo. Engineering, more so than other disciplines, is prone to this dynamic. Great engineers push hard to find elegant solutions to seemingly impossible problems. Mediocre ones don’t. Innovation is really about being innovative. In other words, it is a way of being, and it is a personal choice. Let’s keep thinking of these arms from DEKA in all that we do.
Look at an organization which is doing great stuff in the world, and you’ll very likely see leadership which knows whereof it speaks. Not leadership who got there by doing something unrelated. I’ve written recently about leaders who know what they are doing because they’ve done it before they were leaders. Let’s call them "do it – know it – do it" leaders. These are folks such as Takeo Fukui (Honda) and John Heinricy (GM) as exemplars of this. My friend John Lilly of Mozilla is another good example, and the list goes on and on: Steve Jobs, Wendelin Wiedeking, A.G. Lafley — you get the picture.
Roger Penske is another exemplar of this ethos, as illustrated by this New York Times article from a few years ago. Here is a telling example of "do it- know it – do it" leadership at work, describing the scene around the Penske garages as Team Penske prepares to race at the Indy 500:
Early Friday, as crews prepared for the final practice before the
race, a Penske employee, wearing a crisp white shirt, black pants and
black shoes, stood outside the garage, using a paper towel to wipe down
barricades printed with Penske’s logo.Most teams do not have
such barricades. Penske’s employees wear uniforms with embroidered
logos, not stitched-on patches. They share one big toolbox, but each
crew member has a drawer. Parts that can be polished are polished —
every day."The real success is in the details," Penske said as
he sat behind the desk in his motor home Friday. "I’ve tried to be a
leader by getting my own hands dirty."Then he washes them.
Penske cannot say for sure that being fastidious off the racetrack
results in being fast on it. What he can say, though, is that he has
created a culture that has fostered loyalty. And loyal employees
produce results.
Executional excellence is one part of the story. Knowing which details to focus on is something that comes from experience in working in operational settings. Dirty trucks don’t show up on a P&L statement, at least not directly, but as a statement of brand integrity, they most certainly do over time. To have a sense for this, you’d have to get out of the boardroom and take a look around. But just looking isn’t enough. When you look, you need pattern recognition to see what is important, and that ability to see deeply can only be informed by relevant personal experience.
Morale and motivation and alignment are the other big wins of "do it – know it – do it" leadership environments. Al Unser Jr. is quoted in the article as saying ""He is the one car owner of all the car owners I drove for who truly understands what a driver is going through out there." Racing drivers put their existence on the line when they go out on the track, so it’s easy to understand the importance to them of having someone who understand what they’re going through, who will demand perfection in mechanical preparation as Penske does. But why shouldn’t that be the standard for any organization? If I’m going to ask you to do something, especially something really tough and hard such as creating something meaningful from a blank sheet of paper, shouldn’t I understand your task deeply enough to be able to do things that increase the odds that you will come out of it victorious and healthy and happy? Otherwise why would you take the plunge with me instead of with an organization with better odds of success.
If not for that, why are we all here?
If you haven’t yet made Presentation Zen a part of your blog diet, I encourage you to do so. PowerPoint presentations trying to do what should be better done with prose are destined to fail. Getting an audience to believe in what you’re saying, to go somewhere with you, is better done with spoken words over images.
For example, what better way to sum up the state of the Yahoo!/Microsoft transaction than this wonderful image, brought to us by Brad Feld?
Touché, my friend. Touché.
