Are you encouraging innovation in your company?

Yesterday my friend Shiva texted me the following joke:

Teacher: What is half of 8?

Student: Depends sir, if  cut horizontally into half, then its '0' and if vertically it is '8'!

The teacher fainted.

Researchers at the Wolverhampton University looking for the world's oldest jokes have found that jokes ancient and modern shared “a willingness to deal with taboos and a degree of rebellion.” Much the way the student did - no wonder the teacher fainted! 

Innovation like jokes, also requires a willingness to deal with taboos (out-of-the-box thinking) and a streak of rebellion (an ability to take risk). However, no innovation can be called an innovation unless its implemented because, as the graphic below shows, Implementation = Profits and Profits fuel Innovation. An unimplemented innovation remains a mere idea generating zero profit, instead it reduces the time spent on generating and vetting it as cost to the company.

Source: http://www.jpb.com/innovation/index.php

Recently, I happened to facilitate a team of key managers from an engineering company which was one of the oldest in its line of business, but getting battered by the competition. The MD wanted me to help them change their way of doing things. At one of the sessions the MD observed that one of the reasons the company was lagging behind was that few, if any, innovations were happening in the company. Based on this observation, we decided to form a cross-functional team that would work exclusively on innovation projects. However, a few months into the project, the MD suddenly decided that  as it was nearing the end of the sales year, all innovation projects were to be shelved and everyone was to focus only on completing the target. The Innovation projects went out of the window, and the last I knew, they have not been revived either.

The MD may have had his reasons for doing what he did, but imagine the consequences of his decision on his team. If  innovation was be a priority for the company, then the leader should have been communicating this message to his team in all possible ways. In this case, by taking a so called break on the innovation projects, he had sent a message to his team that the projects weren't important enough, generating sales was.

Change management requires several tasks to be done simultaneously. It is therefore very important that leaders drill into their managers that all change management tasks need to be done in addition to their day-to-day tasks. Not in exclusion, or one instead of another.

As the graphic above shows, successful implementation of innovation projects need to be powered by management. By taking his eyes off the "innovation ball", the MD had sent a silent message to his team about where his priorities lay.

PS If you are interested in creativity and innovation, you will find Jeffrey Baumgartner's website http://www.jpb.com//index.php very useful:

The checklist for change

Every evening for going to the gym, I fill my gym bag with two towels, a change of clothes, shoes, socks, and a bottle of drinking water. Every so often, I forget one or the other and have to either do a sweaty  workout (forgotten towel), or miss out on the steam and bath (forgotten bath towel). Now, to save me from the miseries,  I have put up a sticky note on the cupboard door with a checklist of all the things to be carried in the gym bag.

I am not particularly fond of checklists and tend to rely excessively on my memory - unreliable though it is. But reading Atul Gawande's book, The Checklist Manifesto, has been the trigger for change. The book’s main point is simple: no matter how expert you may be, well-designed check lists can improve outcomes. Checklists help foster communication, which in turn lead to teamwork. In a world of complex surgeries, there are so many details to focus on, it’s easy for errors to happen. Often  surgeons have to focus on their own responsibilities and trust that their colleagues are taking care of theirs. The checklist brings them all back to the same page; if nobody can proceed until it’s confirmed that a particular task has been performed, they’re forced to check in with each other. A BBC programme the other day had a doctor from a hospital in the UK recounting his experience of using the checklist. There were times, he said, when a surgeon forgot a swab inside a patient and risking his life considerably. Now, taking a count of the number of surgical swabs prior to, and post the operation, such mishaps have been completely eliminated. In the process, saving many a life - if not a malpractice suit! Even a simple thing like each person on the surgical team introducing himself/herself  to the others, has saved precious moments of time when a patient's life hung by a slender thread!

Personally, I have found the checklist a great tool in my change management projects. Such projects tend to be complex because you are not sure where and how exactly to begin the process. The checklist brings in the much required structure and rigor, providing clarity and saving me much time in laying out the road map for the project.

I have found the resources at ProSci BPR Online Learning Centre  particularly useful. Registering on the site makes you eligible for free tutorials and there are also several change management checklist you can download and use. Steve Banhegyi also has a very useful set of Leadership Checklists you can make use of.

Importance of values in our personal and professional lives

Becoming a leader, says Warren Bennis the leadership guru, is if not identical, similar to becoming a fully integrated human being. Leadership, says Bennis is about self awareness, as well as being aware of the effect of others. I have experienced the truth of Bennis' observation in my coaching practice where I adopt the 'whole person' approach.

A man they say is the sum of his parts and in the whole person model, we call these parts

1. The domain of self management
2. The domain of people management and
3. The domain of organization management

In my experience,  the best outcomes happen when we focus on the first, i.e. the domain of self management. This domain deals with values, attitudes, beliefs and emotional intelligence - the building blocks of self awareness. Once self awareness happens, it becomes much easier to deal with one's relationships and environment (aka organization). Of all the elements in the self management domain, I find working on  values  to be the most useful in getting a handle on one self. Unfortunately however, I find that values in the minds of most business leaders are something which are either too abstract, or thought to be  irrelevant. Why are values so important? 

Jack Welch's definition of values brings out their importance in the organizational context, as well as describes them best.  Values according to Welch, are just behaviors – specific, nitty-gritty, and so descriptive they leave little to the imagination. People must be able to use them as marching orders because they are the how of the mission, the means to the end -- winning. In other words, values are an organization's formula for winning in business. In fact, Welch thought values to be so important, that he developed a matrix of 4 types of managers -  those who lived by their values and those who didn't. Those who lived by them, could continue in his organization and those who did not, were summarily fired!

Thus managers falling in the Q2 and Q3 category, were to be fired, those in Q4 were to be coached and the ones in Q1 were considered invaluable. So invaluable,  that they were to be "handcuffed, making sure they did not leave the company for the next five years!"

Given this understanding and critical importance of values, it is not hard to understand the importance of their role in our personal lives too. Values are our personal formula to winning in life, and inventorying of our values gives us a deep insight into the moorings of our aspirations, and help us immensely in carving a solid goal plan to achieve them.

Here is what Mr A, the MD of a large chain of hospitals, wrote to me after  doing one such exercise,

" ...the coaching process that I went through with you was extremely useful in helping me to understand myself. It helped me to focus myself for the first time of the direction that I always wanted to take and it helped me to make a commitment to myself.  I am now very aware when I take any action as I go along and do question whether the action and outcomes are in sync with the goals that I set for myself."

On Humility

Recently at meeting with an HR head, the conversation veered to the subject of leadership and Jim Collins' take on it - specifically about his concept of  the Level 5 hierarchy of Leadership.

According to Collins,  Level 5 leadership is about humility and fierce resolve. These leaders manifest humility by routinely crediting others, the external factors and good luck with their companies success.But when results are poor they blame themselves.

However, the HR head thought differently. He believed there was no way that humility could be an essential ingredient to success as a leader. Though he did not say so explicitly, he probably meant that success as a leader breeds more arrogance than humility and is not necessarily a deterrent. So firm was in this belief, that he said he intended to do a PhD on the subject and prove Collins wrong! I daresay this observation and conviction left me bemused.

Soon after the meeting with the HR head, I came across an interesting insight on humility by Clayton M. Christiansen, the professor of Business Admin at Harvard University in the July-August issue of the HBR.. The professor had been invited to speak to the Class of 2010, because the financial meltdown had forced the students to recalibrate their careers in view of the changed business world they would be entering. In his talk, Professor Christiansen's  touched upon the importance of humility in the life of a successful leader. 

The professor began by asking all the students to describe the most humble person they knew. One characteristic of these humble people stood out: They had a high level of self-esteem. They knew who they were. The students also decided that humility was defined not by self deprecating behaviour or attitudes but by the self-esteem with which you regard others. "Good behaviour flows naturally from that kind of humility....Generally, you can be humble only if you feel good about yourself - and you want to help those around you feel really good about themselves too."

The HR head's take on humility had left me bemused  and wondering about the importance of humility in the success of a leader. The article helped me to place humility in context and realize the importance of  Jim Collins' findings of the attributes of a successful leader.