Category Archives: leading

metacool Thought of the Day

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"To create is to potentially embarrass oneself in front of
others. It is about the courage to be oneself and to be seen as
oneself. Putting ink to a page, or pressing one’s fingers against clay,
or typing a line of computer code, or blowing glass and realizing
mistake. Or success. With everyone watching. But most importantly, you.

So it dawned upon me how important it is to be creative. Because
it means you have within you infinite capacity to experiment. You are
unafraid to go somewhere new because you are creating a new thought
process about your own creativity. You know that if you stop and no
longer challenge yourself, you cease to be creative. You become still,
silent, and the bow no longer connect with the strings and music is not
made. And you do not exist. You show you do not have the courage to
exist.

Creativity is courage. The world needs more fearless people that can
influence all disciplines to challenge their very existence. Creativity
is reflection aimed not at yourself, but at the world around you."

–  John Maeda 

Creativity and the Role of the Leader

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Last year I participated in a Harvard Business School colloquium titled Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Organizations of the Future.  I had a great time contributing to the conversation there and learned a lot, too — in other words, it was a classic HBS experience (I really love the place).

The October issue of Harvard Business Review has a summary of the colloquium written by professors Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire.  It is titled "Creativity and the Role of the Leader", and it’s available for free right now on their site.  I’m quoted in it, and so is my blogging and teaching buddy Bob Sutton, among others.

Here’s my favorite portion of the article:

By the colloquium’s end, however, most attendees agreed that there is a role for management in the creative process; it is just different from what the traditional work of management might suggest.  The leadership imperatives we discussed, which we share in this article, reflect a viewpoint we came to hold in common: One doesn’t manage creativity.  One manages for creativity.

What do you think?

Making green red: the ALMS Green Challenge

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This past weekend I watched some fantastic racing at Road Atlanta courtesy of the American Le Mans series.  Audis were dicing with Peugeots, Ferraris with Porsches, Porsches with Acuras, and Corvettes with Aston Martins, among other marques.  All of it awesome, technology-centric racing put on by the American Le Mans Series (ALMS).

What made this particular running of Petit Le Mans unique was the debut of something called the Green Challenge.  An innovative behavioral incentive program developed jointly by the ALMS, the US Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Society of Automotive Engineers, the Green Challenge allows racing teams to score points for sheer speed and for energy usage and carbon footprint.  Teams are evaluated on the total greenhouse gas life cycle of the fuel type they use in the race, which could be cellulosic ethanol, bio-diesel, and ethanol/petroleum blend, or a hybrid internal combustion/electric source.  For the gearheads among you, the following formulas are used to evaluate Green Challenge performance:

  • Performance Energy Coefficient (the amount of energy used):  [total normalized fuel consumption during race] \ [1,000,000]
  • Greenhouse Gas Coefficient (the amount of greenhouse gases emitted): 3 * [ (upstream C02) + (downstream C02)]
  • Petroleum Fuels Displaced: Y * [ (upstream petroleum energy) + (downstream petroleum energy)]

As a general rule, competition is good for spurring on innovation.  From high-minded endeavors such as the X PRIZE, to the (very scary) technological leaps seen during WWII, high stakes seem to breed a combination of focus and access to resources which help support innovative behavior.  In the parlance of Ways to Grow, competition helps set the context for revolutionary innovative outcomes.  To that end, here’s what Margo Oge, Director of the Office of Transportation and Air Quality at the EPA, has to say:

Automobile racing spurs innovation in safety, performance, and now, we are happy to say, clean technologies.  Racing is the ultimate test track.

Amen.

I admire this high-minded, innovative approach on the part of the American Le Man Series.  Rather than take a pessimistic, let’s do less-bad approach to racing — which would have gone in the direction of greatly restricting fuel consumption, which is terrible for competition — they chose to pursue an optimistic, pro-fecundity and consumption approach to being green.  As Bill McDonough has shown us, we can make a paradigm shift to a system where inputs and outputs flow in ways that enable consumption without harming our environment, rather than assume that all consumption must trigger an increase in entropy. This initiative is only the tip of the iceberg, but it is a fantastic start.  I tip my hat to the leadership of ALMS.

And the title of this post?  It refers to an article I wrote for NZZ Folio a year ago, called  Who will be the next millionaire?  My point then was that we need to find ways to go green while going red, which is my code for maintaining our ability to enjoy things that are sexy, fast, and cool.  I still believe this is true, and that we are in the early days of making green tech and clean tech sexy.  This is one of the reasons behind my new blog Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness — it’s an exploration of what makes red red.

For those of you who didn’t catch the race, here’s the last lap.  Allan McNish is a hero, a pure racer.  Here is a drive worthy of the great Nuvolari.  Very inspirational stuff:

 

 

Design thinking in the New York Times

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The New York times ran a great article yesterday called "Design is more than packaging".  Of course, if you’re part of the metacool community, you already know that.  But it is great to see this meme getting out there and sticking.  I’m very happy to see that the article was published in the Business section.  Cool!

Among others, the article mentions IDEO, my employer, and the Stanford d.school, my other employer.

A couple of quotes.

Tim Brown:

Design thinking is inherently about creating new choices, about
divergence.  Most business
processes are about making choices from a set of existing alternatives.
Clearly, if all your competition is doing the same, then
differentiation is tough. In order to innovate, we have to have new
alternatives and new solutions to problems, and that is what design can
do.

George Kembel:

It would be overreaching to say that design thinking solves
everything. That’s putting it too high on a pedestal.  Business thinking plus design thinking ends up being far more
powerful.

Well put, gentlemen!

From Obama to Pink to Oprah

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I was floored by this opening paragraph from a recent Economist article about Barack Obama:

Eight years ago Barack Obama was thoroughly humiliated at the
Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. He had recently lost a
congressional primary in Chicago, and both his political and personal
bank accounts were empty. The rental car company rejected his credit
card. He failed to get hold of a floor pass and ended up watching the
proceedings on a big screen in a car park. He returned home with his
tail between his legs before the week was out—and left the celebrations
to the people who mattered…

Imagine that: Obama’s credit card was rejected and he watched from the outside.  And yet today he is in the middle of it all.  How do you go from the parking lot to the center stage in just eight years?  There is much suffering in life, and also the potential for great happiness and accomplishment, and often the difference between the two is a matter of persistence.  Luck plays a part, but by exerting energy toward a goal, you can make your own luck. 

This is what Dan Pink means when he says that "Persistence trumps talent" in his book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko.  Persistence trumps talent.  In other words, all things being equal, those that try are more likely to be the ones who do.  Here’s an excerpt from Obama’s acceptance speech from this evening that echoes that sentiment:

And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties
of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked
her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite
years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman.
She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off
buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a
better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she
can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that
tonight is her night as well.

Someone who would agree with Obama on these points is Oprah.  And, as you know, she has.  I have to thank Dan Pink for introducing me to Oprah’s magazine in his book A Whole New Mind.  I’m avid reader of Oprah magazine.  I find it to be a reliable monthly source of a good kick in the pants.  It’s a monthly reminder to be think big and to be persistent.  I’ve been reading it for about four years now.  As an aside, I’m mildly tickled to tell you that I’m briefly mentioned (and only by first name) on page 307 of the September issue of Oprah.  Check it out.

But I digress. 

In life, pick where you want to go as much as you can, work like hell to get there, and be persistent.  Learn all the time.  Do good.  Engage everyone around you by pursuing your passions.  Help others.  Do good work.  Bring cool stuff to life.  Above all, start.

More on Startegy

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Seth Godin posted some interesting thoughts earlier this week in a post called ‘Where to’ might not be as important as ‘how loud’.  Here’s an excerpt:

In marketing (and thus, in life) it might be a lot more important to
know, "How are you going to do the next thing?" or "How are you going
to do your vacation?"

Direction is drilled into us. Picking the right direction is
critical. If you don’t know the right direction, sit tight until you
figure it out.

The hyperactive have trouble with this advice. So they flit like a
hummingbird, dashing this way and that, trying this tactic or that
strategy until something works big, then they run with it.

What we’re seeing, again and again, is that both of these strategies rarely work…

The alternative is to do your best to pick a direction (hopefully an
unusual one, hopefully one you have resources to complete, hopefully
one you can do authentically and hopefully one you enjoy) and then do
it. Loudly. With patience and passion. (Loud doesn’t mean boorish. Loud
means proud and joyful and with confidence.)

This feels similar to what I said the other week about the benefits of startegy over strategy (and I’m happy to thinking anything remotely close to Seth).  What do you think?  Should I keep pursuing this startegy thing here at metacool?  Is it of interest?  Is it cool?  Please give me some feedback with a comment below or drop me an email.

Thanks.