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June 23 - December 7, 2019
What was amazing about Jeff’s sponsorship of the IB idea was how it forced GE’s entrenched leaders to take it seriously. “Nobody is allowed not to play. Nobody can say, ‘I’m going to sit this one out,’ ” Jeff said.
to grow top line and market share, especially generating new income from new sources.
The STAR System Ideas need time to develop before you can show someone the money. I’ve come to believe that putting out ideas and defending them until they are ready is part of my obligation as a change-maker. Here’s a mnemonic framework that I call STAR that I’ve found helpful in keeping ideas alive and twinkling with possibility.
Shelter, Tell, Ask, Repeat
VG taught us to look at our growth investments as a portfolio of three boxes: Core, Adjacent, and New.
Time is an overlooked resource as well. I make sure I carve out at least 10 percent of my own time in any given workweek for exploring what’s new. For example, I carve out Friday afternoons for discovery, whether it’s meeting with an expert in a new field or reading about a new topic. I created “Field Trip Fridays” once a month to take my marketing team to visit an emerging company or even an exhibit or art installation.
In my personal life, the percentage of time I spend in discovery is much, much higher. I search out new products, venues, exhibits, and experiences as a way of life.
I’ve challenged myself with is to create three segments, along the lines of Things I Love to Do, Things I Have to Do, and Things I Hate to Do. It turns 3D budgeting on its head, with me attempting to have more things I love (Box 1)—like reading and exploring—while find...
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Innovation is not just about generating, analyzing, selecting, and publicizing ideas. It’s about getting an entire community of “customers”—in this case, the company’s executives and employees—to adopt new behaviors and practices.
My friend Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, uses mushroom-hunting as a metaphor to explain how pattern recognition—what he also calls peripheral vision—works. It requires immersion without absorption—a broad awareness of the environment, while resisting the pull to fixate on any one thing. When you go mushroom-hunting, if you focus too deliberately, you won’t find any mushrooms. With your task-oriented mind switched on, you’ll filter out the weak signals, the visual hints of delectable fungi that are nearly, but not quite, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the forest underbrush; however,
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You need to have both: ideas born in deep expertise and then a challenge by someone asking, Where else can this apply?
On a very basic level, change is a conversation. The more vibrant, the more diverse, the more animated and sometimes agitated the conversations an organization is having, the more likely you’ll find an adaptive organization that’s gotten good at learning, creation, innovation, and change.
To be innovative, you have to learn to be comfortable with some level of “maybe.”
“Let’s first figure out what they want to pay for.”
It was at this point that it became clear that to convince skeptical customers and third-party observers, whatever we did would need to be measured by a trusted outsider, a referee whose judgments would not be doubted.
It takes commitment and courage to go forward when you know that you risk being criticized, by customers and investors. The best leaders exhibit humility in their strength, and vice versa. They embrace where they must lead and the changes in themselves that it requires.
We succeeded in many ways. Yet, frustratingly, we could only impact so much despite that the potential to make the future was profound. This is the change-maker’s dilemma.
There were business managers and investors who dismissed Ecomagination as “just marketing.” Time would prove them right: Yes, this is marketing. Ecomagination stands as an example of what new marketing does well—live in the market, create a new business strategy, meet change early, build a coalition of those willing to work for a new future, deliver new growth.
And you need mindshare before you can capture market share. You need to sell a vision, devise a plan, and invite others to help build it. This is how change gets harnessed.
When you’re trying to recognize a pattern, it can be difficult to determine which signals you should pay attention to. One handy rule of thumb is what I call “Go On Three.” The idea comes from newspaper “trend” stories (i.e., “Everyone’s Wearing Bowties!”), in which the rule is that one event is an occurrence, two similar events form a coincidence, and three are a trend. Many futurists use a similar method.
I often advise people to practice this in simple ways: For example, alternate your routes to work in the mornings to see what new things stand out when you do. Read about other industries, and see what kind of similarities you can spot. At the airport newsstand, observe the range of magazines. Buy a few that you’ve never read before (Backpacker magazine will surprise you!). What observations do you make? What questions start to form?
SEEING THE FUTURE Here are a few of the Imagine It Forward scenario planning tactics I use to better “see” or anticipate the future. Try them out with your own team or company:
ask: How much faster can I come up with a good idea here? How much budget do we really need to get to the next phase? Who else has done work in this area that I can learn from or build on?
BRING IN OUTSIDE SPARKS Succinctly identify one issue or problem area where help is needed. How do you think an outside spark can help shine light on the issue? Identify your spark, ideally an outsider. I’ve found that good places to find sparks are at industry conferences, trade publications, and universities. But you can also find experts in other teams or departments within your own organization. Invite them to address your group, using a relevant case study. Most people are flattered to be asked to speak. It doesn’t have to be a formal presentation. Invite them to a team lunch. Leave time
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LOOK FOR THE WEIRD
Record any unsettling trends or observations as you see them and think. Don’t pass judgment. Just keep a running list of weird things you encounter. Return to it often. See if your observations have changed your perspective. Seek out unusual or weird experiences: Challenge yourself to go to one event or exhibit or read one book that seems odd or out of the ordinary. Ask people you know what’s the strangest thing they’ve seen lately.
There is a wide chasm that separates insights about a changing market and important new ideas generated in the discovery phase (or R&D lab), and the commercialization of a new product or service.
Venture capitalists call that chasm the “Valley of Death.” To me, the Valley of Death is the unstable transition where the tensions between vision and reality, idea and action, must get reconciled.
There are politics to navigate, short-term thinking to overcome, capability gaps to address, budgets to allocate, coalitions to build, and many difficult conversations to work through.
Agitated inquiry is the practice of evolving an idea into action steps through heated exchanges and debate.
says Ronald Heifetz, founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, “conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.”
If everyone agrees on the same approach to an idea, perhaps you’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough.
Retail politics is what begets real change inside an organization. You have to build “local majorities.” Businesses in many ways aren’t run from the top, especially now.
You have to use release valves in the office to let the tension out. You can’t avoid it. In fact, you have to surface conflict continuously, before tensions mount too high. Tension is the price of admission when you are innovating.
The real solution, I realized later, was to seek out more genuine, more open, more emotional engagement with him to better offer feedback so it’s not seen as criticism.
one day, I tried a new tactic. I asked myself: What can I learn from Gavin? Instead of being indignant that he didn’t work hard enough and took too much of the credit, I decided to use him as a teacher of how to work differently.
There are still people in my life who can irritate me. Instead of seeing them as adversaries, I have learned to change my mind-set, to think of them as potential teachers.
I’ve never considered it disloyal to discover new potential paths and understand your worth outside your current company.
We had reworked the financial plan several times to find a way to get the payback terms that GE needed to fund it. It was a near frenzy of irrational exuberance.
It was only years later that I learned to trust my doubts, and express them candidly to others.
I had been hired to handle this. So I fell back on old habits and tried to go it alone. That’s tempting but also foolish, I would come to find.
Innovation is a social activity. One person’s ideas build on another’s. Someone else reframes it through the eyes of the customer. It’s never clean or linear. To create an innovative team environment, the person leading the effort needs what entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan calls social capital. Social capital is the mortar that connects team members, the feeling of safety and trust that allows people to ask crazy questions and provide slightly less crazy answers without embarrassment, to iterate to greatness. But social capital has to be built, banked, and stored.
Spend time with your biggest critics—invite them in. Perhaps they have valid points that can improve your plan or make your project better. By incorporating their input, you may find new allies.
Acknowledge that you and your critic have a difference of opinion. But see if you agree on something. For example, do you both agree that the project is worthwhile? Is it just the tactics that you disagree on?
Create ground rules. Here’s one I love: “No But.” Critics have to offer a solution or build a bridge to another idea—they can’t just say no.
The point is that the more time team members spend together, the more social capital, trust, and honesty they build. And the more innovative, risk-taking, and productive they are.
I was experiencing one of NBC’s least pleasant behaviors: the “grinf*ck.”
I was also coming to realize the conundrum that can accompany acquisitions: revenue projections and deal “synergies” are often unrealistic, leaving the team that has to execute left holding a lighter bag of goods than planned.
It’s tempting to look back and think we had our shot at a Facebook. Of course, Facebook had only just emerged out of a Harvard kid’s room at that point. But we did see the possibility looming on the horizon. It was within our grasp, if only we could get out of our own way. Instead, as is too common within established companies, iVillage was wounded before it could even challenge. It stumbled along alone in a sort of twilight, making it look like the failure it was.
Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety to describe the kind of environment we needed, where people feel confident enough to go out on a limb in the pursuit of a new way of doing things. Edmondson found, counterintuitively, that top-performing teams made more mistakes. Or rather, that they admitted to making more mistakes, because they felt safe enough to do so. It was everything iVillage was not.
