clair075

I rise neither to praise the British exit from the EU or to condemn it.  There are plenty of people on both sides of the issue who will praise or condemn exceedingly well.  The British people have either fallen for a terrible lie or rid themselves of a burdensome bureaucracy.  This will either be excellent for the UK or terrible.  Right now the markets are asunder, because they hate uncertainty.  Once the rules and process are understood and the actual outcomes are clearer, things will revert to a more normal condition.  Which is what we as innovators should attempt to avoid. In the US, many politicians are enamored of the saying that "you should never let a crisis go to waste".  They say that because most people don't especially like change, but a crisis may demand change.  And when the crisis demands change, politicians and their constituents should get all the change they possibly can, before the crisis ends or is simply part of the social fabr...

I think there are few firms that were more innovative than Intel.  Notice that I'm using the past tense.  Intel, lead by an excellent leader in Andy Grove, had a passion for being the best.  Grove's focus - "only the paranoid survive" kept Intel as an industry leader and innovator.  When I was younger, working for Texas Instruments, Intel seemed to constantly reinvent the computing industry.  Many of us in the semiconductor space could only look on with awe. But now, the innovator has lost its chops.  Not so much because they cannot innovate, but because they failed to notice the shifting markets and demands.  Intel and Microsoft bet big on the PC, a specific platform, a specific user experience.  And while that platform dominated the industry, they could stay one step ahead of the competition.  But when the platform was no longer the dominant platform, they had fewer answers.  When the smartphone came along, Intel was far behind, becaus...

Ralph Ohr and I were exchanging ideas today via Twitter, and we were talking about a recent study of German executives that looked at why innovation failed in German companies.  The top three reasons why innovation didn't move forward came down to fear, uncertainty and doubt. Oh, those weren't exactly the words that were used, but in context for today's post they'll work nicely. For those of you not old enough to remember when IBM was a real powerhouse, I'll need to introduce the idea of FUD.  When IBM ruled the mainframe market, it created FUD to keep its customers from experimenting with other mainframes, the emerging mini-computers like DEC and any other alternatives.  Basically, IBM sales people would introduce fear - what if you tried these new or unproven concepts and they don't work?  If that didn't work, they'd introduce uncertainty - who knows what these new computers can do?  Our mainframes are proven, and you have a big investment in them.  Or...

I've made a simple drawing to illustrate what many of you already know.  Too many people in the innovation arena are apt to talk about ideas, which are relatively easy to get, but fail to consider the effort involved to move from an idea stage to an innovation stage.  I've often compared this to the amount of force it takes to get a rocket into orbit.  You can have thousands of rockets, of all sizes, launching all the time.  But until and unless one of them has the requisite amount of thrust necessary to get it into orbit, they will all crash.  There's no half way.  There's no "almost" in orbital science.  You either got into orbit or you crashed and burned.  The same is true with innovation. You see there's a trap that's set by many innovators.  They like to talk about ideas because ideas are easy.  They are really easy to generate, and once generated we can count them, and everyone likes quantitative results.  We can count how ma...

I'm pissed off today.  I'm pissed off because our elected officials continue to denigrate entrepreneurs and business people.  Yesterday Nancy Pelosi, the democratic demogoge of Hollywood, lectured people about the iPhone.  Steve Jobs and Apple, she claimed, did not create the iPhone .  If this is true you must be wondering, well, how did they get all that revenue and profit then?  Pelosi went on to say that everything in the iPhone, all the technology, design, software integration, and all the rest, was a result of investments by the government. I pause for a minute to relate a joke that will have some meaning at this point.  Bill Gates used to crack jokes about the automotive industry, saying that if GM and others had kept up with technology we'd be driving cars that get 100 miles per gallon and cost $1000.  GM responded that if Microsoft built cars then they would all crash twice a day for no reason whatsoever. Perhaps we'll all stick to what we are...

There are a few relatively hide-bound industries in the US that have to date been somewhat impervious to real innovation.  If you've followed this blog you know that I believe traditional retail banking is one of those industries.  Retail banking is already dead, it just doesn't know it yet. Another industry ripe for innovation is the book publishing industry.  Sure, self-publishing is on the rise, and I published my last book (shameless plug alert!) OutManeuver with Xlibris, after finding out that the traditional book publishers would take nearly twice as long, and provide about the same amount of marketing support:  zero.  And before you accuse me of not fully understanding the traditional book publishing genre, let me also note that I had the good fortune to work with McGraw-Hill on a book (another shameless plug) entitled Relentless Innovation .  If you've ever tried to read a quarterly financial reconciliation from a book publisher, you'll know the de...

I'm a sports guy.  I like all kinds of sports.  Grew up playing baseball, football and running track.  When my kids came along naturally they adopted other sports than the ones I was familiar with so I've learned to "love" swimming and soccer.  If you know swim meets you'll appreciate the joke we pass around our family:  I hope my last day on earth is at a swim meet, because they never end. I grew up in an era where boxing was first a BIG DEAL, full of outsized characters, but eventually became a pariah, because boxing can be so brutal and bloody.  No boxer (at least not one played by Sylvester Stallone) commanded more attention, and moved people more than Muhammad Ali.  But, we come to praise Ali and not to bury him, as we remember his contributions to sport and to the way we live.  Today I'll argue that Ali embodies innovation, and his life is symbolic and perhaps an analogy for what innovators live and do.  Consider: Ali was born an Africa...