innovation playground Idris Mootee

Managing The Unkowable, Unforecastable And Unplannable - This Is Not What They Teach In Business Schools.

I don’t think anyone will disagree with me when I say that the future is unknowable and no one can accurately predict the future with any level of confidence. I remember when we were working to support the global launch of Lisa and had no idea whether it would take off or not. It was a long shot marketing that to corporate IT folks to convince them to switch to Apple then, many are still not convinced today.  Does it mean we should just give up managing the future? What about the future of Kindle? Their sales was pegged at US$1.2 billion and will become the iPod of ebooks, how likely will that happen?

For any innovative products or services, there are so many unknowns and any forecast seems to be impractical exercise. Strategic planning is often used to describe operational planning, real strategic planning is about planning for the future. Thinking about some planning exercise can effective forecast future sales of innovation new products without seeing what the competitive landscape will look like? To do strategic planning, let’s first admit that there is no way what the long-term future looks like and any vision that you have may not relevant at all.

So how do you manage the unknowable and unforecastable? But at the same time need to make many long-term decisions? This is the big paradox of organizations and management. We need to organize in a way to co-ordinate many parts of the organization to function and to create some stability in the day-to-day running of different units. The art is to co-exist between existing structure and processes with the flexibly (and sometimes instability) to adapt to changes. Some believe senior executives or the board should set the direction of the company and control all strategic directions and resource allocation. In fact, the better approach is to set the overall directions and then create favorable conditions and flexible architectures to support learning and innovation for middle management.

A friend of mine (a senior exec with a bank) uses the analogy that no matter how smart a person is or even the person doesn’t sleep, he or she can never out-think or out-innovate tens of thousand middle managers if each only spend 5 minutes a day thinking about new ideas to improve performance or new ways to serve customers better. How true?

It is far more important to expose senior and middle manages to new mental models, unarticulated customer needs and future industry scenarios that together forms new maps and develop perspectives, this way you can power up their collective imagination and stimulate creative dialogues.

I’ve seen so many flaws in so called “strategic plans” and many fail to demonstrate (let alone guarantee) the millions of dollars in new revenue of savings it promises. It is easy to wave the word "quality", “growth” or “innovation” casually like a magic wand to justify investments, without bothering to define what the possible futures are. I will write more on this the next few weeks on how to avoid the mistakes of “strategic planning”. All strategic planning being rooted in the assumptions that the past dictates the future, that’s merely a limit of the planner and not the plan.

Anyone who are familiar with strategy framework like the Balanced Scorecard/Strategy Map methodology from Kaplan and Norton knows the importance of Leading Indicators: Metrics that are forward focused rather than simply telling past performance. Leading Indicators sometimes disguised as "Weak Signals" and that's why it is more difficult to interpret.

I believe strategic innovation and strategic planning are two very different (not mutually exclusive) approaches that people mixed it up. Strategic innovation is a process to discover new value through new ideas while strategic planning process plan base on what happened and what to respond. Without something happen, planners cannot plan further. In most case, strategic planner assumes business as usual. It is hard to find business as usual today. And often they under estimate the magnitude of change and disruptions. Their job is not to read and interpret “weak signals”. That’s why innovation, strategy and operations and three different functions and require very different skill sets.

“Looking back, it is clearer to me now that these plans — for all their seemingly tight, logical connections between mission, belief, goals, actions, responsibilities, and evaluation — were like beautiful but badly leaking boats.”                           — Mike Schmoker

What Are The Top Jobs That Will Be In High Demand? Teaching, Health Care, Finance And Innovation. When Is "Innovation" A Career Or Profession?

Watching KC and The Sunshine Band performing on American Idol on TV tonight and I realized I know that tune is telling me how time flies. I was in my early 20s when this song was on the top of pop chart. I remember how limited then in terms of career choices. They were medicine, law and accounting. Oh yes and rock stars. I hated all those three. Thinking the last 30 years we have progressed a lot, think about the fact that computer technologies and many other social technologies having been moving so fast that we sometimes have to invent "artful analogies" just to "comprehend the ... speed" of change. Unfortunately education has not advanced as far and as fast as the computer. Same thing can be said about corporate social responsibility, imagine what our societies would be like if it has advanced 20X.

This front page newspaper headline caught my attention. "Teaching, health care, finance and innovation sectors facing demand that can only grow...." First time I've seen "Innovation" being used as a career description. Interesting but a good sign. But I sill don't know what jobs it was referring to.

It is a terrible time for those who will be graduating from school this year and looking for jobs. The short-term pain aside, people need to rethink their career plan as we are anticipating another structural shift in our economy. Many of today’s jobs will not return and many will be shipped offshore.  Many of the jobs that were in high demand will begin to diminish and new job categories will emerge. For young people, choosing a satisfying as well as high demand career is important. Here are some tips of what to pick:

Technology job growth will start winding down and will still have high demand on certain pockets. Software engineering and system support will not be enjoying the demand it did for the last 10 years. The most widely cited estimate by Forrester predicts 3.3M service jobs will be outsourced offshore by 2015. Roughly 400,000 of these will be IT jobs.  Many engineers will move to renewable energy and this has a good chance to drive a big tech wave.

Data entry, tech support and customer service jobs will start disappearing soon (even Indian will be expensive by then). Advanced technology security (not just online) will be an exception and this one will continue to grow as new threats emerge everyday. Media is another big one that goes down fast. New job categories around “everyday life automation and simplification”, that includes design and life-support services. There will also be new jobs that are responsible for lessening the impact on the environment and sustainability.

The next phase of automation will not happened in the factories (there will be no factories left), but in our homes and in our lives. We are not talking about dishwashers and VCRs, but serious automation including robotic machines (hopefully not operating on Windows) and smart homes. 

What does this mean for someone just now planning their careers or deciding what schools to go to. Proximity, personal services and creativity are the key. The creative industries will flourish, as there will be more opportunities to make money from ideas and intellectual capital. Career that requires proximity such as business development will always be safe, it is all about people and connections. The service industry will take over hard goods from a GDP perspective and jobs will range from care giving to life coach etc. The trend towards a growing aging population that is living longer is already creating high demand in products and services tailored to this demographic. AARP may become a $20+ Billion organization and employing tens of thousands of people providing services to support their members.

What about marketing? It depends. If you are one of those old school marketers you have something to worry about. If you understand many of the structural changes happening and re-equip yourself with a “social” mindset to marketing (and business strategy), you future is bright. Those mediocre marketing and advertising professional that exist today will not survive this shift. The Social Marketing Officer (SMO not CMO) is one of those roles where the mediocre and slow-to-adapt don't survive. For marketers, it means that you must keep on learning new things and acquiring new skills just to keep pace with the changing demands of a "social" economy.