Archive for Strategy
Eyes to the future
We know that green and clean technology and the “Click Stream Customer” are two of many trends that will impact the way we do business in the future.
Trend watching has become a business in itself. Futurist James Canton is one of many business futurists who make a living by interpreting the signs of what will be in 5 or 10 years.
But what about translating those trends into a solid business strategy? Interpreting and then planning for the future is crucial to your innovation strategy. It’s one thing to have information on climate shifts or economic conditions that affect our bottom line, but quite another to interpret these signs in a useful way that will help your business ride the wave and come out on top.
Lessons from Tyler Heights: Beware the Unintended Consequences of Metrics and Incentives
One can find many interesting lessons for business and innovation in case studies from ongoing experiments in public education. For example, the Summer 2010 edition of American Educator illustrates a lesson we teach in Conquering Innovation Fatigue: metrics to drive performance can have unintended consequences that may hurt rather than help. Indeed, unintended consequences are a major theme of the book, as we consider the problems arising from metrics, corporate and government policies, innovation initiatives, laws, taxation policies, and other factors, all of which can contribute to what we call innovation fatigue.
In terms of education and the danger of improper metrics, Linda Perlstein’s article, “Unintended Consequences; High Stakes Can Result in Low Standards,” examines a highly celebrated school in Annapolis, Maryland that received media attention and praise for seemingly miraculous success in education. The new principal arrived in 2000 to find Tyler Heights Elementary School in a dismal state with only 17% of its students getting satisfactory scores on the state test. She began redirecting efforts in the school to address this problem. Eventually her laser-focus efforts paid off, delivering the stunning success of 90% of third-graders performing well on the Maryland State Assessment, when only 35% of third-graders did so two years before. Several newspapers recognized the amazing turn-around and people at the school celebrated the success. But was it real success?
To achieve good performance on the Maryland State Assessment, education for the children was largely focused on how to do well on the test. Students learned how to write BCR’s (“Brief Constructed Response”) to deal with expected questions about poems and plays, and practiced writing these short answers for many hours, without actually studying poems or plays. “What gets tested is what gets taught,” the principal told the teachers, even if that meant leaving behind the material that was supposed to be taught according to state standards. Bins of equipment for studying science were largely unused.
Tyler Heights’ third-graders got only the most cursory introduction to economics and Native Americans, and much of the curriculum was skipped altogether. The students were geographically ignorant. . . . The third-graders had heard Africa mentioned a lot but were not sure if it was a city, country, or state. (They never suggested “continent.”) At the end of the year, the children in Johnson’s class were asked to name all the states they could. Cyrus knew the most: three. He couldn’t name any countries, though, and when asked about cities, he thrust his finger in the air triumphantly. “Howard County!”
The state standards required a broad curriculum, but the metrics for assessing that were based on one particular test and all the incentives were for helping students pass that test. In spite of the praise for the miracle at Tyler Heights, had the children really been helped?
The Campbell Effect
The problem with unintended consequences from metrics such as tests is hardly unique to Tyler Heights. Daniel Koretz, also writing in the same issue of American Educator (see page 3 of the PDF file on unintended consequences), explains that in education and other fields, score inflation is a common and well known but widely overlooked problem. In the social sciences, a phenomenon that leads to score inflation is known as Campbell’s Law. While widely applied to education, it was developed while looking at business. Donald Campbell, a prominent social scientist, examined the role of corporate incentives on the performance of employees. His research led to this general formulation: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” (Donald T. Campbell, “Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change,” in Social Research and Public Policies: The Dartmouth/OECD Conference, ed. Gene M. Lyons, Hanover, NH: Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, 1975, p. 35. See also Can New York Clean Up the Testing Mess? by Sol Stern.)
Campbell’s Law is at work when schools game tests to get better scores, at the expense of education. It is at work when cardiologists choose not to operate on patients who might need surgery rather than risk hurting their own published statistics on mortality rates among their patients (Koretz refers to a 2005 story from the New York Times reporting the shocking results of a survey of cardiologists). It is at work when a company tries to boost innovation with metrics or incentives that result in game playing, while leaving the real problems from culture, systems, and vision unaddressed.
In our experience, metrics and incentives can play a valuable role in driving innovation, but only when the corporation has a culture that genuinely encourages innovation, when there is a shared vision of innovation and success, and when sound systems are in place to advance innovation. Without those, you can not only waste a lot of resources in attempting to drive innovation with metrics and incentives, you can actually make a weak culture become pathological and lethal, sometimes exacerbating fatigue factors like the Not Invented Here syndrome, theft of credit for innovation, and breaking the will to share. Adding incentives linked to metrics without the right culture and systems can be sort of like throwing raw meat into a school of sharks or piranhas. You can generate a lot of activity, a lot of exciting thrashing and splashing, but in the end there will just be a lot of blood in the water and fewer thinkers and producers in your school.
As always, innovation success requires that you carefully monitor for harmful unintended consequences from the policies, programs, and incentives you have in place. Innovation metrics, incentives of all kinds, and employee performance evaluation systems and other tools associated with metrics can backfire. Unless you are tuned to the voice of the innovator and understand the impact of unintended consequences, you can be like the company we treat in Chapter 8 of our book that felt like it was a rock star of innovation while they were actually squelching it. Don’t let the unintended consequences of well-intended policies and metrics crush your innovation success.
Let Innovationedge Strengthen Your Approach to Innovation
With our experience at Innovationedge, we are prepared to evaluate your culture and innovation-related systems to help you strengthen your innovation capabilities and create greater ROI. Not happy with the innovation performance you’ve seen? Not sure you are measuring it correctly? Worried about the unintended consequences that your incentives might have? Give us a call and let us help you diagnose your state and provide a roadmap for future innovation success.
The hard truth pays off for Domino’s
What company in its right mind would ever admit to the world that its product was awful? In what many might call a risky move, Domino’s Pizza delivered the tough truth and customers were thrilled. We’ve all seen how Domino’s “got real” in commercials launched last December that openly admitted why their pizza recipe needed big improvements.
The company paid millions of dollars for its Pizza Turnaround Campaign, airing their customers’ biggest complaints about “cardboard crust,” and “ketchup-like sauce.” The commercials then showed real Domino’s employees working to create something better.
The commercials attracted curiosity at first, and then rave reviews. Go check out their pizzaturnaround.com site to see what I mean. Domino’s is brave enough to display all the news coverage and Twitter comments–whether good or bad.
The risk paid off, and Domino’s reported last month that its fourth-quarter profits rose to $23.6 million–more than double last year’s figure. And franchisees report store sales are up 1.4 percent.
With all the corporate scandals and big bailouts that have made headlines these past few years, I find that kind of honesty refreshing. Apparently, so do pizza lovers.
Seven Degrees of Separation: Innovation Lessons from Airline Disasters
For connecting one human to another, it’s been said that any two people can be connected by acquaintances in six steps, hence the concept of “six degrees of separation.” The term “seven degrees of separation” occurred to me when reading Malcolm Gladwell’s discussion of airliner accidents in his outstanding book, Outliers: The Story of Success. He observes that extensive studies of airliner crashes show that the fatal tragedies often require a combination of seven things going wrong, any one of which might just be an inconvenience or minor problem by itself, but in combination with the others can lead to disaster. When it comes to connecting skilled humans to the very disasters that they have been carefully trained to avoid, there are seven degrees of separation to disaster.
While mechanical defects, fatigue, and bad weather are often involved in the seven degrees of separation, these airliner disasters almost always involve flaws in interpersonal communication. For example, there may be a copilot who is afraid to speak up and challenge the pilot when an obvious mistake is being made, or there is a lack of clarity in communicating a problem to the air traffic controllers. When trouble is brewing, success often requires extensive communication between the flight crew, other crew members, ATC staff, and sometimes others. Plans must be made, checked, implemented, revised, clarified, conveyed, and so forth, at many levels to handle an emergency properly. When crew members keep their mouths shut and don’t share what they know or sense, when courtesy or fear stops urgent information from being shared, or when there are cultural or linguistic barriers to effective communication, multiple mistakes and miscues can accumulate, whittling away at the separation between survival and disaster. It’s that way in the world of innovation as well.
Superior IQ and innovative genius is often far less important than the ability to communicate. Disasters in innovation and new product development are often due not to lack of intelligence among the innovators and corporate leaders, but gaps in communication. Launching a product and safely navigating it through the storms of the market can be much trickier than flying an airplane. The flight of a new product always involves malfunctions and emergencies that require communication skills above all. Information from the market must be effectively shared with the developers. Plans must be shared and communicated with external partners and internal teams. Benefits and features must be effectively communicated to end-users. Expectations must be clearly conveyed to suppliers and service providers. A plethora of data must be handled and shared in ways that inspire, motivate, drive action, and keep all parties aligned.
As in an airplane emergency, “yes men” are not the people you need around to help. You don’t want devil’s advocates either or professional naysayers–you need people willing to share what they know and challenge directions and assumptions that may mislead the project or the company. You need people who can help you confront and conquer the brutal facts of your present reality, as Admiral James Stockdale has famously said.
More than words alone are involved in the communication relays that are essential for a successful new product flight. Intangibles related to trust, loyalty, and common agendas must be in place. It’s all about relationships, and these take time and effort to build and maintain. Unreliable or misleading communication can break those relationships and jam navigation systems, as can abusing or taking advantage of partners and employees. Bonds of trust and mutual respect inside and outside the corporation are essential to maintaining effective communication and bringing about the alignment and common purpose needed for innovation to succeed.
As Gladwell notes, the seven errors that tend to accumulate in major airline disasters “are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. . . . The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.” Ditto for the risky, high-flying adventure of innovation, where crashes are the rule rather than the exception. It’s not that the team wasn’t skilled or clever, but fundamental gaps in teamwork and communication resulted in the product launch smashing at full speed into barriers they failed to notice or attempting landings on runways that weren’t there. These disasters are always going to be far more likely than airplane disasters, but improved communication and teamwork across your innovation ecosystem can do much to bring you safely home.
In Conquering Innovation Fatigue, our chapter on the Horn of Innovation is devoted to illustrating the importance of including the innovation team in feedback loops that bring data from the marketplace to the innovators to allow them to make rapid on-the-fly adjustments for iterative innovation. Cut off that communication, and your innovators are flying blind. Blind innovation is what fills the convention “innovation funnel” with numerous abortive attempts that need to be weeded out. Keeping innovators inside the loop with clear and instant communication gives them a more clear map and helps them work with your team to develop the right flight plan for success.
Innovation success is all about abundant communication and teamwork, not hand-offs that isolate those with the vision from those at the helm. Innovation is disaster prone enough when everything is running well–no need wiping our a half-dozen of your degrees of separation from disaster by your own communication and relationship mistakes from the beginning.
At Innovationedge, we are committed to helping your team build the processes, systems, and culture that can translate outstanding skills into outstanding success. We are ready to work with you to review your internal and external ecosystems, strengthen your innovation flight plans (or your innovation roadmap), and help your build healthier approaches to new products and innovation systems that are far more likely to succeed. Give us a call today!
The Circuit of Innovation™
The Circuit of Innovation™ from Innovationedge
This image from Innovationedge is used in our book, Conquering Innovation Fatigue, to describe the relationship that needs to exist between intellectual assets and the marketing plan to complete the circuit that connects the power of the market to inventors. Leave out either a sound IA strategy (holistic or 360 IA™) or the marketing plan, and you’ve short-circuited your chances for success. Ideally, your intellectual assets are in synch with your marketing plan, meaning they reinforce the marketing story and tell a marketable story of their own, in harmony with the marketing plan. The strengths you sell to the market had better be reflected in some way in the intellectual assets (think more broadly than patents alone, of course). This will be part of our conversation tonight on Brian Fried’s hit radio show, GotInvention radio at GotInvention.com, broadcast at 7 pm Central Time.
Be sure to tune in next week on March 25 to hear Cheryl Perkins, CEO of Innovationedge, share more about what it takes to achieve innovation success.
Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™? A White Paper from Innovationedge
Innovationedge is pleased to announce the release of a new white paper on sustainability and green strategy. The paper, “Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?” is available in PDF form. It includes a brief excerpt from Conquering Innovation Fatigue, our recent book published by John Wiley & Sons. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Green Innovation: Do You Have a G-Rated Business™?
The many pressures for businesses and products to become green offer numerous opportunities for true innovation, not just in products and services but in entire business models and in the web of relationships (the “value network”) around a business. But in spite of the rich opportunities for innovation, many companies boast of being green after doing little more than adding a little recycled material to a product or package, or adding some “earth friendly” furniture to their offices.
How can a business pursue the changes and innovations needed to become really green? And what does it mean to be green?
Let’s discuss what green is, and then we’ll address approaches to green innovation.
G-Rated Business™
We recommend that companies think about green issues and sustainability in terms of becoming a “G-Rated Business™.” This concept from Innovationedge draws upon an analogy to movie ratings. For a movie to be G-rated, it needs to be free of gratuitous sex, violence, and profanity. A two-hour movie with 119-minutes of mild content can lose its G-rating for just a few seconds of material. It’s not enough to avoid graphic violence of nudity for 99% of the movie – it generally needs to be clean throughout. While we recognize that there are abundant imperfections in movie ratings, we expect a movie to be substantially free of certain content for the entire movie, not just most of it, to be G-Rated. Now if we let “G” stand for “green”, what is a “G-Rated Business™”? It’s one that seeks to be green throughout its operations, consistently, not just in selected scenes. It is one with sustainability integrated into its operations and business model at many levels.