Category Archives: leading

When in doubt, just do good stuff

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Metacool Just Do Good Stuff

I found truth in a cup of yogurt today.

I was fortunate to have breakfast with my friend and collaborator Ryan Jacoby today, and he reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's all about making good stuff.  Yes, everything else in your business ecosystem has to be in place, but you need to sell good stuff.  An Apple Store without Apple products would be… not so good.

Back to the cup.  Having intended to purchase a cheap(er) lunch, I just walked out of Whole Foods with a more expensive lunch, natch.  Actually, at around six bucks for a frozen burrito and a couple of yogurts, it is not bank-breaker meal, but I am a semi-Mid Westerner and have a kids to send to college and I'm living in the land of massive taxation… but I digress.  Back to the cup: while wandering the isles, I fell prey to a pricing promotion, and though I can never justify a container of Siggi's yogurt at $2.49 per unit, I certainly was up for two of them being promoted at $2.00 a lid.  Yes, it would seem that I need to turn in my MBA, but I am not a perfect person nor do I want to go through life making rational purchase decisions.

And how very happy I am right now with spoon in mouth and a wallet $4.00 lighter.  Siggi's, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of sampling yet, has exquisite mouth feel.  It is thick without being clompy, smooth without feeling excessively processed.  It comes in some of the standard yogurt flavors — vanilla, blueberry, etc — but also in some unexpected ones, like grapefruit.  Love that grapefruit.  And none of the flavors feel like they feel off the back of a truck destined for IHOP; they are light and complex, not syrupy and bright.  There's a wonderful backstory to Siggi's, too:  the company is led by a passionate, entrepreneurial Icelander named Siggi who is crazy about his native skyr yogurt and so found a bunch of wholesome cows in New York and started cranking out skyr.  The packaging is eco-friendly and the graphic design meets my psychographic needs.  With all of this, $2.49 starts to feel reasonable.

There's no big punchline to this post.  Just do good stuff.  Just do good stuff.  When in doubt, repeat that under your breath:  Just do good stuff.

A conversation with Michael Mauer

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Earlier this year I was very fortunate to have a conversation with Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design.  You can read the complete interview here at Aol Autos.

I thought this thought from Mauer about creative leadership was particularly interesting vis a vis Innovation Principle 12, Instead of Managing, try Cultivating:

… at the end of the day, I do not tell them to move a line exactly 50
mils lower or higher or more to the left or more to the right, because
if the boundaries are too narrow you really kill all the creativity. I
try to motivate people to think for themselves about the solution and
how they could achieve the goal… Even if I have a solution in my
mind, it is just one possible solution. There might be ten other
possible solutions that are maybe much better, but by giving a
direction that is too detailed or showing a solution, a way to the
solution that is too detailed, I kill all the creativity. One of my
major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of
creativity.

This feels very much to me like a "cultivation mindset".  Instead of trying to push his ideas through the system at Porsche, Mauer is trying to develop the ideas of others.  He is a curator, a director, a cultivator.  As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.

Bill Gates, nuclear Yule logs, and the equation of all equations

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This talk by Bill Gates was by far the most important given at TED last week (if not my favorite one). 

The equation he presents is extremely powerful in the way it structures the conversation around energy and society.  Simply put, something has to go to zero, but only one thing can realistically go to zero.

I also found fascinating his discussion of a nuclear power plant which burns depleted uranium as a fuel.  Audacious and of a level of complexity which is hard to fathom, this "nuclear Yule log" could offer the kind of radical step-function we need to meet the needs of the equation he presents.

This is twenty minutes well-spent.  My hat is off to Bill Gates for helping all us become more informed citizens, and for equipping us with a formidable tool for critical thinking.  This was TED at its best.

There were a couple of other talks which also knocked my hat in the creek, so I'll post those as soon as they go up.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"Ship early, ship often, iterate and listen to all of the feedback. I
think that if you have the courage to listen and the ability to take
the feedback and iterate on your product, you will better off than
waiting and trying to deliver something perfect. Imagining your product
or project as a way of communicating with people and thinking of
product development as a conversation might be one way to think about
it."

– Joi Ito

metacool Thought of the Day

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"Today, what defines the most
innovative, and the most successful, people is their willingness to fail. And,
that’s especially true in journalism, media and advertising…

This is the key to the future for all of us. It’s not how we
deal with success but how we embrace and learn from failure that will define
all of us during the Great Inflection…

Instead, dare to fail. Fail fast. Learn from failure. Build
on failure. Share failure. Understand failure.

Most of all, enjoy failure. Life is so short. Hold nothing
back."

– John Winsor

Innovating Day: a new (un)holiday?

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I hereby propose a new (un)holiday.  I'm calling it an (un)holiday because it won't be an occasion for grilling meats and drinking spirits (though that could happen, I suppose).  It's not a day of vacation, for it is meant to remind of us to be mindful of our approach to working through certain types of problems.  It is not a day for celebrations, but it is celebratory in nature: it celebrates not just an event, but an entire way of being.

I hereby declare December 17 to be Innovating Day. 

Innovate.  Take action.  It's about the verb — innovating — and not the noun.  Personally, I'm tired of talking about the noun innovation and reading books about that noun, and only want to help people and organizations get in better touch with their creative confidence so that they can go out and innovate.  Trying to understand how to get to innovative outcomes via a process analyzing the inputs and outputs of innovation is akin to trying to understand love by reading textbooks on biology and genomics.  I'd wager that the best lovers in history didn't read books on the subject.  Much better, methinks, to go out and do it in order to understand it.  Love, innovate, do, live: you'll come to understand your own self and process in due time.  Which is the whole point.

Today is Innovating Day because December 17 marks the anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright completing the first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine.  The Wrights were nothing if not intuitive innovators, deeply in touch with a personal design process which allowed them to go where no man had gone before.  I won't pretend that the Wrights followed any of the principles of innovating which I've been discussing here over the past year, but I will declare that those principles are largely inspired by the lives of the Wrights.  In particular, the events of December 17 helped inspire these specific principles:

 1.  Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world.

 4.  Prototype as if you are right.  Listen as if you are wrong.

10.  Baby steps often lead to big leaps.

14.  Failure sucks, but instructs.

I'd like to ask you to do one thing today:  as you work your way through a situation that's new within the context of your own life experience, be it big or small, try to mindful of your approach to the situation.  Try to see of you can apply any of the principles of innovating to your task at hand.  If you're stuck, I highly recommend proceeding with Principle 3 as a starting point.

So, please spread the news and let your friends and loved ones know that December 17 is Innovating Day.

One final thought:  as the great Gordon MacKenzie wrote, "Orville Wright didn't have a pilot license".  You don't need a degree from a fancy program in design thinking or engineering to start being innovative. 

Just try it.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative.

We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments.

It's time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults."

– Joi Ito

Circles of influence

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As is her way, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has written an essay which not only hits the the nail on the head, but then knocks it clear though to the other side.  Talking about leadership and power in our connected world, she crisply articulates what it means to exert gravitational pull as opposed to hierarchical power.  Here's an excerpt:

Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their
centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not
correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization
structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional
responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal
relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action
that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to
focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace
chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw
from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership —
consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more
effective than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people
act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and
more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to
get things done.

This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be
technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to
the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then
serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are
often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has
the best network wins."

This is more than a style of leadership, it is about a fundamental shift in the structure of power and influence, and I believe it is quite representative of an approach that has existed in our more innovative institutions through time.  According influence to those who are able to get things done by bringing diverse groups of people together sounds like the job description for leadership in an organization full of T-shaped people.  And as far as that goes, I like her essay a lot more than what I wrote in my articulation of Principle 12, so I'm going to have to appropriate some of these ideas.

And by the way, I'd love to connect with you on Twitter, too.  You can find me there @metacool

Here's her article: On Twitter and in the Workplace, It's Power to the Connectors

metacool Thought of the Day

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"I'm not sure what a fairy tale is. In terms of the fact that taking
something which was on its knees and almost finished, and arriving
where we have today is for me an exceptional experience. Just seeing
the resolve of people who didn't give up. They were facing being put
out on the street and we said 'we don't know what's going to happen but
we need your support because if it can happen, without your support, we
won't be in a position to do it. And they just did."

– Ross Brawn