Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

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Visual and Creative Thinking:What We Learned From Peter Pan and Willy Wonka

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Failure as a Necessary Component of Innovation and Breakthroughs

In most organizations failure is implicitly, sometimes explicitly, understood to be career limiting.

Regardless of the rhetoric, and I have heard loads of it over the years of working with senior executives. They will say things like: "it OK to fail around here"; "we value failure as evidence of pushing the envelope"; "no success without failure" and so on. The truth is failure is not acceptable in most organizations.

Now if we distinguish between carelessness and failure we may have an opening for a new freedom to invent, create, discover, and take responsible risks - and in the process make major advances, even breakthroughs.

Carelessness I distinguish as not paying sufficient attention in performing in task that has a proven and established process or methodology to ensure the desired outcome. This thoughtlessness in executing a step or missing a step means that the desired outcome is not produced. And, in all likelihood what is produced has unwanted consequences.

Failure on the other hand is the consequence of trying to produce an outcome where there is no clear path or process. Where there is no precedent for a successful outcome. 

In every set of accountabilities there should be a component that requires invention, experimentation, and discover so as to produce a new level of performance. People cannot be free to be fully expressed in this area of their accountabilities if failure is taboo. Innovation and creativity will be stifled.

Also see, Some Perspective on Success and Failure.

 

The $100 Billion Collaboration Plan

Before the fact, some innovative or breakthrough ideas are inconceivable. After the fact, I often have two experiences: one is the of-courseness of the idea; and the second is, "where was the innovator looking from that he/she/they saw this possibility and others did not?"

Even after the possibility is fully explained some may not be enrolled. I had that thought when I read Alan Cohen's Opinions and Insights from Cisco. He posits that a change in the meeting process, culture and technology can add $100 billion of productivity gains to the workforce worldwide. I wonder how many will jump on that possibility and garner their share of productivity gains. 

Big Ideas and Hard Times - Can The Possibly Go Together?

We are currently in a period that we can reasonably call hard times - we're in a recession in fact. 

"Some of the most powerful and lasting management methods were launched during tough times, when companies needed new ways to manage costs and grow. Here is a look back at some of the biggest ideas over the past 100 years." Jena McGregor, Business Week.

What innovation or big idea are you working on to add to the list?

Smart Management for Tough Times

A message worth spending time paying attention to from a CEO who knows about innovation - about doing great in an economic slowdown. Listen to John Chambers talking the collaborative approach he has built into Cisco.

Acquisitions in the Pharmaceutical Industry - Evidence of a Failure of Imagination?

Is the rash of acquisitions in the pharma industry a way to cover up, or postpose having to face, what would otherwise be evidence of a failure of imagination, a failure to innovate, on the part of the acquiring company?

What other credible explanation is there?

If the design purpose is to boost the share price of the acquiring company then a chat with Jack Welch might be useful. he had something to say on the subject talking to the FT on the future of capitalism. Not one to be timid about expressing his point of view he said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”.

If the purpose is to generate layoffs and increase unemployment numbers, I guess that purpose will be realized.

What is the fundamental organizing principle of these acquiring CEO's and their Boards? You have to wonder!

A Business Report That Breaks the Paradigm

After the fact a break from accepted ways of doing things seems so obvious - before the fact, nor so obvious.

How come, because we see the world through what Kenneth Burke calls a terministic screen. The world is filtered for us by our screen and we don't even know the screen is there - it is though the mechanism through which we select reality as well as deflect reality.

Take s simple thing like annual reports for example - what's the screen through which we look that has a report be a particular way? Until Audi's business report that is. After seeing their report, an aha! perhaps, an of course, why didn't we think of this, why isn't every report like this?

Innovative? Absolutely!

Innovation is Alive and Well

Or so says Marc Andreessen in a conversation with Charlie Rose.

What's the story in your organization?

On a scale of 1 - 10 how would you rate your organization?:

1 = What's innovation? I don't know what that means.
5 = Every decade of so we come up with something you could say is innovative.
10 = We're up there with Google, and Apple, and Intel, and Facebook, ...

Can We Innovate Ourselves Out This Recession - Really?

We have plenty problems to solve. There is no debate about that. Lots of opportunities to innovate and cause breakthroughs.

Whether the problems are personal ones like finding or keeping a job, paying bills and staying sane as the economy goes south; or organizational ones like doing more with less just to stay competitive or even survive; or national ones like how do we maintain jobs and create new ones and turn the economy around - we have no shortage of problems to solve.

What we do have is a shortage of robust ways to stimulate, unleash, and harness the creativity and innovative thinking that is part of every human beings nature.

Creativity that leads to innovative solutions that are breakthroughs should not be a once in a while, accidental phenomenon, or an activity reserves for special people or special occasions. It needs to be a day-in-day-out discipline like flossing and brushing our teeth.

What we have also learned in the last few years that "leaders", "experts" and "policy-makers" are not as smart as we have implicitly given them credit for. All their forecasting and predicting what is going to happen, if it is about growth and development, has not worked out as they so confidently said it would. The economy is in recession and major financial institutions are loosing money at a rate that is beyond comprehension.

When we shift gears from reacting to circumstances, to working for a commitment we are passionate about, we are brilliant, we are turned on, we are innovative in a way that surprises us, and we do produce desired results. For all their failures in running their businesses, some leaders have made huge fortunes for themselves - maybe that was their only real commitment in the first place. In that they have been innovative and hugely successful.

So we need to put a stake in the ground for our own commitments and say, "this is the problem I am going to solve, and this is the when it will be solved". It sounds counter-intuitive when the circumstances look so bleak and morale and resources are scare.

Counter-intuitive or not, that's the place to start!

Tricking Airport Biometrics

If we are tempted to doubt the capacity of human beings to be inventive and creative, what about this for outside the box thinking and risk taking from The Aviation Nation

"Japanese media are today reporting that a South Korean woman entered Nippon last April passing through the biometric immigration screening despite her previous deportation records.

Her trick: She went through the screening by placing her index fingers over a fingerprint reader after putting a special tape on the fingers. The woman claims she received the tape and a fake passport from a “broker” back in South Korea where she was deported to in July 2007 after working in Japan as a bar hostess.

Following the US, Japan began the biometric immigration screening in November 2007 as part of an antiterrorism measure.  All foreigners aged 16 and up have to undergo fingerprinting and photographing at airports nationwide to see if their data match those of deported or wanted foreigners and terrorists

This is the first time that such an incident was reported.