clair075

I return once again to one of my favorite sayings, by Stephen Covey, who said (I'm paraphrasing): sharpen the saw before you start cutting the wood .  It's a really simple thought - do the right things to prepare before you start a big task, but we lose sight of what adequate preparation looks like in so many activities.  There are several reasons for this. First, many corporate activities are second nature.  We know how to do them by heart, so preparation feels like wasted time.  Second, we are used to last minute requests for information that don't seem to allow time to think or prepare.  This way of working has become second nature.  Third, in a very time bound and time restricted world, preparation doesn't always feel like value added time.  It can easily feel like time that was lost.  Fourth, time spent in preparation calls into question the knowledge and capabilities of the individual or team.  Shouldn't they already know this stuff?...

It's a sign of maturity and experience to be able to determine just where you are in a journey, and I think the time has come to put some stakes in the ground about just exactly where we all are in regards to our innovation journeys.  While some companies have made tremendous strides, becoming much more innovative than their peers, the real truth is that most corporations are still at the very beginning of their innovation work, and as I've written in other places the emerging new management fads around digital transformation combined with the fact that innovation often hasn't lived up to its promises means that our innovation journeys may end before they really got started. Because while it seems many companies have been on an innovation journey for quite some time, the honest reality is that they haven't moved very far.  There's been a significant amount of sound and fury, signifying not so much, to paraphrase a much more ancient bard.  The reality is that right ...

As far as one-hit wonders go, there are few bands that I listened to more than a band called the Godfathers back in the 80s and early 90s.  They had a song that was meant to encapsulate our lived experience.  The title?  Birth, school, work, death .  This is the pattern that we all live.  More importantly, each of us has a fairly regular pattern for our work lives:  get up, go to work, go to meetings, work on some deliverables, drive home, eat dinner.  Rinse and repeat.  These patterns are comfortable and familiar.  More importantly, these patterns - how we work, what we do, decisions we make, risks we take - become ingrained and begin to govern how we think, how we work and even the types of ideas that we contemplate. The more comfortable we become with our patterns of life - breakfast, commute, work, lunch, work, commute, dinner, TV, bed - the more we cling to familiarity and stability.  I think that these patterns and familiarity also...

One factor I've been considering for some time has to do with the power of a corporate bureaucracy to create or block change.  On one hand, bureaucracies are good, in that they codify practices, principles and processes and allow people to get more done quickly as a unit than they might get done alone.  Bureaucracies were created to allow people to scale concepts, inventions, products and ideas. However, any bureaucracy comes with a certain amount of baggage.  That baggage is the inverse of the promise of the bureaucracy.  These issues are exhibited in cultures that are resistant to change, processes that become too rigid when agility is required, limits on decision making and risk taking. In fact I think one could easily say that there are real strengths and real barriers to any bureaucracy, whether that bureaucracy is housed in a government agency - think the driver's license bureau - or a corporation. Where this exploration of the strengths and challenges of burea...

It finally came to me last week.  For over a decade I've been working with corporations, trying to help them accelerate their ability to generate new, interesting ideas to market as viable products and services.  In some instances we've been successful, and in other instances there were interesting failures.  I've recognized for a while that some major challenges exist.  I wrote Relentless Innovation as a way to frame some of the things I'd learned about the way culture resists change, and how a "business as usual" approach can stymie innovation.  But even with these obstacles it would seem we should have more innovation than we do. What came to me finally is that we are trying to do new chemistry in old equipment, equipment that is tailored for a more conservative, slow paced way of working where there is less change and more certainty.  Our businesses are "built to last" and meant to gain scale quickly and then lock in customers and channels to dri...

Over the last year I've been conducting a one person listening tour, talking to a lot of my peers in consulting, as well as prospects, customers and friends who work in government and industry.  Of course many of these conversations revolve around innovation and new product or service development (or the lack thereof), and how people are engaged in their work and their roles. One recurring development that has really troubled me over this period is the uniformity of feedback about innovation, about growth and about large companies' willingness to embrace the evolving future.  I've had the good fortune to talk to hundreds of people, in different industries, in different roles and across different geographies and countries.  One resounding consistent message I'm hearing is that the majority of the people I've spoken with are frustrated by the lack of innovation focus and effort within their organizations and the lack of engagement or emphasis placed on new growth and ...