Driving your own upturn

Screen shot 2011-03-17 at 9.20.12 PMThere is no more normal.  No back to normal. No creation of normal.  There is only readiness and the acceptance that certainty in business has been removed.

What is required is a nimbleness and a feeling of empowerment to quickly synthesize and work out the emerging opportunities and the dangers that can be found in the ever-changing markets, changing technology, and changing pressures that surround us.

An organization’s readiness to make decisions, to take risks, to learn along the way, to adjust, becomes the new standard. An organizational culture that supports, encourages, embraces and celebrates new information and innovation. One that equates change with opportunity and an exciting future.

Competition has never been greater.  Competition for talent, competition for resources, competition for your customers, competition to be heard and valued by the people who matter to you – your customers.

Choosing to compete on price is no win for anyone – you lose profits and someone, somewhere is likely to do it cheaper, followed by someone else offering it cheaper again.

Competing on first to market is also time-limited.  Someone will follow and offer the same, maybe more, maybe better and certainly followed by a number of others.

Competing with the product and services you serve today will not serve you tomorrow. They will be substituted by new, better, sexier and more personalized or smarter versions or something that supersedes them entirely.

To remain relevant and of interest to your customers, you can compete on one thing only – your ability to consistently evolve and differentiate and to create the best possible customer experience.

You need to implement a model that supports sustainable and continuous innovation.  To build an organization that supports innovation that supports the improvement of your customer’s lives in a way that is valued and meaningful to them.

And critically, an organization that allows your people to be free to innovate, to think, to create, to build, to serve, to deliver growth.

Who is going to be the hero?  The leader of change? The leader of innovation? The leader of your success and future? The leader of growth and upturn?

The answer is You. Yes, You.

You need to create the space in your organization to shine. You need to create space to allow your team to shine and enough to allow all your people to shine.

You need to get every non-differentiating system and innovation-roadblock, innovation-killer and time-wasting activity out of the way so you can spend time on:

  • Finding ways to introduce new products and services to existing customers.
  • Identifying new customer segments to target new, innovative, personalized and relevant offers.
  • Capitalizing on opportunities in emerging markets and enhancing your performance in existing markets.
  • Delighting your customer through their unique experience dealing with you

If you are not already finding this time, thinking or operating this way, then your time is already limited.  Either you will be replaced by others who are, or your organization’s ability to compete will be time-limited.

Tic toc tic toc.

Time is ticking.  Time for change. Time to do things differently. To think differently.

If you want growth and are under pressure to deliver numbers, then take ownership within your organization to drive your own upturn and success.

Compliance vs Engagement

goldfish-taking-actionDoing the basic job required of us, in most cases, is easy to do.  In fact we can often do much of what we do without having to really engage, invest and stretch ourselves. 

We learn from an early age to follow instructions. To have our creative thinking ordered with a set of pre-determined decisions to create structure, harmony and order. 

Certainly it helps to learn the consequences of taking actions that are outside of what is expected of us. However do we consider the dangers to progress if we merely look and teach others to comply?

How often do you hear “I do this because that is what is asked of me.”  Or “I don’t do this, because the rules say not to.”  In business we can often provide more processes, instructions and parameters to reduce risk and error margins, but what happens when it stops people from thinking or taking ownership all together?

In this past week, I saw two separate cases where perfectly intelligent and capable people were discussing a problem within their working environments.  In being challenged as to why they did not see those problems as ones they could solve, the dutiful responses were offered around it not being their job, it wasn’t done that way, there was red tape, a usual way to solve this etc.

In reality, they had become compliant.  Stopped thinking, stopped ownership, stopped engaging with the broader objectives and motivations for their companies and themselves.

It didn’t take long to unlock their thinking and to see alternate ways to own and solve the problems they were facing. 

Unfortunately once I started looking for examples of compliance over engagement elsewhere, I started to see it everywhere – in customer service across multiple businesses, in my children, and in me.  It has made for an interesting point for reflection.

Key to solving passive compliance is engagement ourselves and encouraging engagement in others.  It is not enough to just observe or be present.  Not enough to comply even if it gets you over the line and off the hook.  What is required of us is to really engage with a problem you see and view it as something you can own, influence and drive towards a solution. 

In these cases I refer to this week, by engaging with the problem didn’t mean these clients had to make the problem their own completely and feel the pressure to solve it on their own. 

In both cases it was enough to shift the thinking from it being someone else’s problem to being “our problem” to solve.  And to get them thinking about how they could lead and influence change.  To think about possible options and opportunities.  

Seeing the bigger picture and not being hamstrung by barriers – perceived or real, allows for progress. 

By engaging fully with what you are hoping to achieve and not the process of getting there, promotes critical thinking and creativity. It brings action and results.

Where do you need to switch gears and move from compliance to engagement to really generate progress?

Preventing the corrective mindset

jugglingWe are all under enormous time pressures.  We juggle our competing interests, responsibilities and deadlines.  We rely on others to help us get to the finish line. We want their input to equal a standard that allows us to juggle uninterrupted, taking pleasure from keeping everything successfully in the air.  There is no room for errors.  Just juggle, juggle, juggle.

Ooops!  A ball is dropped and something is broken.  

Invariably with all the things we need to focus upon, it is not unusual to find something will drop or break.  As we juggle the remaining elements, we know we can only afford to make a quick stop to correct the fallen or broken element.  And get back to juggling.

Following this path is only going to lead to more balls being dropped and more items to be juggled.  Sometimes we drop things for the same reason.  Deep down it doesn’t feel good knowing we or others are making the same mistake, but to stop and do anything differently, puts pressure on all the balls and the decision to stop and rethink the situation can feel bigger than it needs to.

To break this pattern we need to think about the corrective mindset vs. the preventive mindset.  This is a well known concept in manufacturing and Quality Management Systems where the focus may be on continuous improvement and customer satisfaction.  However the concepts can equally apply to our own professional and personal lives.   

When operating in a corrective mindset, you will focus on fixing the immediate problem, and maybe even be able to stop the next occurrence.   But it may not solve the bigger issue of being more effective, getting the best out of your time, based on focusing on the right priorities and the best strategies for achieving the outcomes you are looking for.

Another way to look at this is Past vs. Future.  One is looking backwards to the past and trying to fix what didn’t work.  But this often means we assume the way things are being done today is the right way, so we only fix what we have in place.

The other way is to look to the future to try to work out what is likely to happen and what are the likely influences and inputs that you will or can be working with.  Time can be spent then determining what you are really looking  to achieve, what is required to get there, the best way of getting there and what may be required to prevent any likely roadblocks or the undesirable from happening. 

We know we can’t accurately predict the future so we need to build a flexible approach to deal with all the possibilities. Flexibility is far more important to develop as a mindset rather than as a well constructed disaster recovery plan covering every conceivable problem. 

By taking time out to reflect and reconsider the corrective measure of past and the preventive measures you may choose to take in the future, you may find a much more powerful approach to the things you wish to achieve.  Edward de Bono once said “It is well known that “problem avoidance” is an important part of problem solving.  Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place”.

By looking to the future you can ensure you are investing your time on what is most important to you and what is likely to bring the best and most preferred outcomes in the bigger scheme of life. 

Whether as a boss or a parent, the best outcome may no longer involve you.  A far more powerful approach may require you to stop and develop people (your team or children) or to devise a better system, one that no longer involves you or the thing you think you need to do because you have always done it that way.

One of the things that always stopped me in my tracks opening my mind to future possibilities was the challenge to ask myself “does this need to be done at all” and “what are the real consequence if this was no longer being done”.

By taking time out, deliberately stopping the juggling process and allowing time to move out of the corrective mindset, you now have the chance to strategize around your priorities and plan for the future resulting in greater creativity, enjoyment, satisfaction and rewards.

The King and I…(and a story of learning courage)

This is not the start of some fictional story or make believe anecdote.  Nor is it about my special memories of my mother, sisters and I all singing along to the Friday night movie special of The King and I, imagining what those days were like of impossible dresses and outrageous social expectations of women.  This story is about courage and how The King and I played a role in teaching me about courage.

Picture credit to Daily Mail UK - Deborah Kerr (in the King and I)There were many messages of courage throughout the movie – the courage to follow your dreams, the courage to stand up to a bully or to fight for better outcomes despite the conventions of the day. 

However my biggest lesson from The King and I came from having the courage to overcome your fears.  Although this may sound corny, it is a real story and I will tell you how I learned to develop courage.

About 3 years into the workforce, I put my hand up to take on a big project.  It involved doing some strategy work for a bunch of super smart, confident, talented, experienced – and as it turned out – extremely demanding people.  

The brief turned out to be much more difficult and challenging than I had first expected.  Certainly it was beyond my experience and knowledge of that time.  I felt out of my depth and felt all the physical signs that come with fearing the enormous task and expectations in front of me – heart racing, legs shaking, stomach knotting and mind racing.  At that moment of fear and crisis, in amongst thinking of all the reasons to not be able to say yes or to limit somehow what was possible to something more reasonable, somewhere out of the depths of memory, a song started playing in the back of my mind. 

It went like this…

Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune, So no one will suspect
I’m afraid.

While shivering in my shoes, I strike a careless pose
And whistle a happy tune,  And no one ever knows
I’m afraid.

The result of this deception, Is very strange to tell
For when I fool the people I fear,
I fool myself as well!

And sure enough by immediately changing my focus from fear to “I will find a way”, and when I showed confidence that what was being demanded was possible, I actually began to believe those project goals could be reached that it was just a matter of finding the way.  It allowed an immediate settling in my mind and an unwinding of my stomach so I could be free to focus on finding the solution and the “how”.  In the example I mentioned, I confidently stated what they briefed could be achieved and shared a rough outline of the strategy and a plan of action.  I included what the dependencies would be and set a new time to meet to present the more detailed strategy which bought me more time to work through the details. 

The result was extremely positive. The goals were reached and a great sense of satisfaction and respect was gained.

But the biggest positive for me was the lesson of courage that it taught me.  I was able to put the art of make believing I was brave, and focusing on the positives in every situation, and finding that I was actually brave and positive enough to face anything.  By finding a strategy to overcome my fears, it allowed me to find the courage to overcome barriers, find solutions and be confident to continuously look for and do new things. 

I have adopted this approach many, many times – whether it be walking into a new networking situation, addressing a large group of people, taking on what may seem to be the impossible brief or role.  Each time you find you can do something, it builds your confidence to explore and overcome any future challenging situation.  This strategy can be adopted as much in our personal lives as it can in our professional lives.

We can all achieve so much more if we allow ourselves to go as close to the edge of impossible as we can before we allow ourselves to feel limitations or constraints.  If we limit our scope to something that feels safer, more comfortable, more easy – we lose the possibility of breaking new ground and achieving something truly new, remarkable and special.

The more we believe we can do something, the more others will believe you can and that they can do it too.  As a leader, you will find that if you demonstrate believe, then you will have your people help you do whatever it is you need to do.

And so as the song continues…

Make believe you’re brave,
And the trick will take you far.

You may be as brave
As you make believe you are.

 

(Lyrics by Rodgers and Hammerstein, 1951.  The Movie “The King and I” starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr by 20th Century Fox, 1956.)

Attending to the elephants

How often have you seen or been in situations where everyone around you is busy discussing, dealing and deciding on the smaller, easiest issues to address, and the item that is most likely to be a showstopper is being overlooked or held-over to address at another time. 

elephant in the room by j_gargThe expression “ignoring the elephant in the room” is based on this very situation.  Just as an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook, we use it to describe those situations where we pretend the elephant is not there, concerning ourselves with smaller, relatively insignificant matters, shuffling around the bigger issue of what to do with the elephant in the room.

The “elephant” is usually a bigger issue we choose to avoid because we know it will be time-consuming, painful and uncomfortable to deal with.  So we take comfort in keeping busy with all the other things that can be done instead.

More often than not, it is the smallest things being left unresolved that prevents us from bringing to conclusion the projects we are working on. 

Just as we can rationalize ignoring the big elephant, it is even easier to rationalize ignoring the smallest of issues, wishing them away and dismissing them as insignificant or as something “easy to deal with later”.   

In reality we find that either issue – big or small – no matter how far forward we move the project or initiative we are working on, it can never be fully resolved and finished until the outstanding matter is resolved. 

Recently I was in discussions with a business.  They had engaged me to discuss their overall business proposition, position and product portfolio ahead of a launch.   There were many outstanding matters to be dealt with and decisions to be made and they were rushing through their list to get feedback on all of them.  However there was a starting showstopper, and no matter how much they wanted to cover all the later issues on the list, if they did not resolve the basic starting proposition, they were not going to be able to resolve anything else, nor achieve a successful outcome.

Through further discussions and exploration, it became evident that there was an issue of avoidance in dealing with perhaps the biggest fundamental showstopper (the elephant in the room).  There was clear conflict in the direction by two key principals of the business.  Each saw it differently, and the rest of the team was busy trying to avoid bringing these differences of opinion into focus let alone to a conclusion and final agreement.  Lots of busy work was being done on other facets, giving a false sense of progress, however it was evident there was no way this could work without getting a common agreement from the two conflicting principals.  And this agreement was fundamental to the success of the next stage of their business.  Once the elephant was attended to, the next stages of business could then move forward.

Discomfort of conflict is often the underlying reason of why issues will be left unresolved although there are many cases where it is avoidance of having to work through the difficult aspects of the project.  It is too easy to spend time on the sexier, easier, showier parts of a project or to spend time on the areas that we have greater confidence, expertise or experience in.  Meanwhile the clock races on towards the deadline.

No matter what the shape or size of it is – a show stopper is a show stopper.  You need to identify when you have a show stopper, and you need to deal with it immediately.  Ideally you would be proactively looking for the elephants or the show stoppers of any size.   

The beauty in attending to the elephants early is the quality of solution that can follow. The earlier you have to solve the issue, the more creative the solution.  And the solution may be very different from what you were first thinking or fitting the rest of the non-critical elements around. 

As I have seen firsthand and Edward de Bono is noted as saying:

“It is well known that “problem avoidance” is an important part of problem solving. Instead of solving the problem you go upstream and alter the system so that the problem does not occur in the first place.”

To get this benefit you need to first attend to the elephants.

Get something positive out of the recession

Get Electronics WeeklyEmma Lo Russo offers five tips (to electronics organizations) for grasping opportunities created by the downturn.   Read the article as published in Electronics Weekly, 24 June 2009, and as promoted on the cover page and published on page 10.  Electronics Weekly targets electronic product organizations and electronics engineers.

Full transcript of article below:

Recessions get a bad press.  But they are really opportunities with halitosis.  Once you get over the shock, you can set to and work with the opportunities to create breakthroughs.  It’s all about channeling recessions in a positive way.

The electronics design sector is ripe for this kind of thinking.  The current recession can be deployed in your favour, to blast away the staid thinking that abounds in the sector.  That things are done the way they are done because they have always been that way is a common refrain.  Time it went the way of the thermionic valve.

Here are five tips, made with appropriate humility, that reflect the opportunities for change under the cover of the current recession:

Innovate

Nothing that has gone before will be good enough for the future.  This is code for “innovate” and innovate means doing different things in different ways, not doing things better.

So take a holistic approach to electronics design that starts with the broader desired user experience.  How do they want to interact with your product (not how you want them to interact)?Microsoft Word - electronics weekly Altium 062409,p10 Art.Lo Rus

And take a close look at the rule book on which you base your design methodology.  Does it still serve your needs, or does it now struggle to do so?  Is it based on a divide-and-conquer approach to electronics design, in which you divide the complexity of the task into manageable elements to conquer the design comlexity, only to find that you have killed off innovation?

Connectivity

It doesn’t matter how cool it is if it’s not connected.  I doubt you need reminding that connectivity is the most important attribute of any device today.  This is also code for saying that making something look cool is the minimum attribute of a successful product, and everyone will copy you very quickly.

If the past 40 years of electronics was the age of miniaturisation, we are already well into the age of connectivity.  The next generation of electronic products will not be stand-alone devices, as they have been in the past.  Instead, electronic products are being promoted, to become elements in much bigger ecosystems.  They are now the means by which users tap into these ecosystems.  The metal, silicon and plastics from which they are made become less relevant in this much broader view of design.

So, design from this perspective.  That means start (once you have worked out the desired user experience, of course) with creating the intelligence you want to pour into the product, and then, and only then, find the right device hardware into which to pour it.  After all, you don’t create a statue by starting with the mould.  You reflect first on the emotional connection you want to make with the work of art you are about to create.

Intelligence

It doesn’t matter how cool it is if it’s dumb.  Intelligence is at the core of successful products, and not just successful consumer electronic products.  The intelligence of a device is also how you will differentiate in the future, and it is much more difficult to copy than hardware. 

Designers must stop thinking of a design as discrete hardware, programmable hardware and software, and instead define a design by its functionality, and then map this functionality to the most appropriate implementation.

The true value inside tomorrow’s products is defined by the soft elements of the design.  These soft elements should be the focus and the place to start.  Don’t constrain the critical properties, its function, connectivity and the user experience of the end product before you have even started.

Changing competition

You no longer know who your competition is, or where they’re based.  Sorry for stating the obvious. But one bad thing about recessions is that they can camouflage a much larger shift that had started before the recession kicked in.

Take a deep breath, Google “innovation” and see what comes up.  These data show one thing: that the design and manufacture of products even as sophisticated as electronic components will likely be done somewhere else in the future.  The question to ask, therefore, is whether you want to play in this game, and what do you do to stay in the game?

Check your tools

Nothing should stop you from doing what you want to do, or have to do.  This is code for assess your tools and support systems right now.  If there is any aspect of what they offer, or how they work, that gets in your way, be ruthless.  Change them.  Change them now under the cover of the recession.

Nurturing and inspiring tomorrow’s heroes

superhero1Most of our kids harbor a burning desire to be number one at something.  They can easily conjure an image of themselves scoring the winning goal, coming first in a race, hitting the winning shot….but how many of them at first call on an image of the invention they are going to create that could change the world?  Or a design of a building that breaks all previous thoughts or examples of possibilities?  How confident beyond the age of two or three (when they really do believe they are a superhero), do they think they have a chance to be society’s hero?  And if you asked them if they wanted to, would they think it is possible for them to be able to do so? 

With three children of my own, and with experience of schooling across 3 stages (preschool, primary school, high school) and across four schools and three schooling types (State, Catholic and Private), I have discovered a distinct gap in our education system in helping nurture and inspire our children to become the inventors, entrepreneurs, and creators of tomorrow.  As many of us know with our children, the connection between what they are learning today in school and how it helps them in their future is rarely understood by them.  And to be honest, unless you raise the level of abstraction in how the skills they are really learning can be applied in life – it is difficult for us to provide an answer to that connection in a way that will satisfy them.  More than that, it seems that whilst our children might get lucky with an inspirational teacher, the exploration of engineering something new, the time given to create and celebrate a new invention, learning how previous inventions have changed our lives and the extraordinary achievement it represented in its time, does seem to be lacking, particularly in the early years of schooling. 

By the time our children hit high school, unless they have a particular self-interest, most do not relate their natural strengths or interest in Mathematics, English, or Art to the possibilities within engineering and invention.   We begin to prescribe requirements for university entry scores in relation to possibilities for pre-defined career paths, but are we really engaging our future minds on the problems, opportunities and possibilities that present every day for them to be inspired to solve and the path to get there?

Thomas Edison claimed that Genius was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.  It seems to me that our education system is putting too much emphasis on, and we are providing too much by way of our own example, of the perspiration element.   We seem to be ignoring the importance and are not providing enough emphasis and example-setting on the inspiration aspect.  By emphasis I am talking within the design of our education system and in the time and responsibility we have as parents in encouraging, nurturing, and inspiring our children’s creativity and exploration of the “what if you could…” scenarios.

As we have increased our protective care, prescribing the after-school activities in a way that gives our children the best possible opportunities (or so we rationalize),  is it possible that we may have not correctly weighed up the cost of preventing or constraining the ability for our children to run free and learn through natural exploration and invention?  As we look to ensure enrichment, gifted and learning, and assisted programs to be supported at schools, have we put the same energy into seeing how creativity and invention is being supported and celebrated at school?

World PopulationIf we think about the future for our children, where do they sit within the world’s estimated population?

We know IQ is distributed evenly through the population.  So how do we help our children make a positive footprint on the world, both for their generation and for their children’s generation?

Australia has an estimated population of 21million, an approximate 0.3% of the total world’s population.  Rather than accepting it is OK to plod along, and accept what is, we have a responsibility and requirement to create a country of global visionaries.  Those who see their playground as bigger than the constraints of our shorelines and the comfort we feel in our history of enjoying “the lucky country” and the “she’ll be right” philosophy. 

It is absolutely critical that we teach our children now the importance and relevance of their uniqueness.  Their unique mix of talent, skills, smarts and experiences.  Of the same opportunity that they have as an individual to anyone, anywhere else in the world.  They have an equal chance to make a difference; and that difference can come from their own creativity and invention.  The problems they can be thinking about to solve may not just be the ones that they face, but rather the problems that we as a global nation of people face.  Or may be something that can be enjoyed by others, enhancing and improving many lives, not just their own.

As a country, as business people, as parents – we have a responsibility to nurture and inspire our children to become tomorrow’s heroes.

I know I don’t have all the answers but I do want to keep asking the right questions.  And help my children to keep pushing and exploring what could be.  I would like for us all to find a way to break inertia, break stereotypical types, break the habits that too much “dead use of technology” like television and electronic games etc provide, and muster the energy to encourage our education system and society in general to promote and support invention and creativity in our children.  For us to celebrate our inventors, engineers and entrepreneurs so they become the leading examples in our society. 

Here are my thoughts of what we can do to nurture and inspire tomorrow’s heroes:

We must accept our responsibility to inspire and nurture our own children.  We must help our children explore what could be and not allow them (or us) to get bogged down on the “how to get there”.  We must make the process of exploration and creativity positive; we must invite it, suspend judgment, and allow for self evaluation.  We must help our children see the beauty and the impact that inventions have bought us – everything from the printing press, microscope, bike, paperclip, microchip, spaceship all the way to the iphone and everything in-between!   They are just a few examples – I am sure you can think of many more exciting examples to inspire others.

And it may be that with this focus, our children will dream bigger dreams, will be given the confidence to explore what could be and take will become tomorrow’s hero.