innovation playground Idris Mootee

Forget About Being A "Manager". You Need To Become An "Innopreneur". There Is A Huge Demand For Corporate Entrepreneurs / Innovators Everywhere.

The time for New Year resolutions is here again, not sure if we're all up for the challenge as we can expect more intensified competition, more uncertainty both in politics and economicsl and more disruptive re-organization for all big companies. It is the time for self-reflection and thinking about what do you really want to accomplish this year and what how to bring out the best in you.  If you’re an emerging manager or young leader you should read this.

Drop whatever idea you might have of "what is a manager" in your mind. You don't want to be a "manager". Manager is really not the right title although “managing” is part of the job but a smaller part of it. You are a manager, a knowledge worker, a leader and an entrepreneur. It is easy to learn the skills of being a manager, but very hard to be a great leader and an entrepreneur.

Let me clarify. An entrepreneur doesn’t mean you should be running your own business or start-up; what I am talking is a state of mind. Look around you, do you find a lot of “entrepreneurs” around you? Is your team comprised of people who take ownership of any project or task that comes across their desk or inbox and apply design thinking skills to accomplish them? Do they embrace complex challenges, team skills, and take personal responsibility – for successes and failures alike? Do they think about the good of the larger them than optimzign for their own career gain? Do they provide leadership even they do not have the formal authority?

Corporate entrepreneurs are basically innovators. These “innopreneurs” are hard to find and it is far more difficult to be a corporate entrepreneur than a start-up person. It is relatively easy to say let’s have your start-up and honestly most of them are no more than just an excuse or a way to escape. Entrepreneurship is not about proving a job for yourself, it is about aligning your passion with the right capability and resources that link that to a big idea that create economic value. And not afraid of the challenge of working with the elephant.

A corporate entrepreneur s someone who works in a large corporate setting and his/her job is to create new growth opportunities from coming with the big ideas to launching/managing a corporate venture that is distinct from the parent company either at an adjacency or something that could disrupt the corporate parent. He/she needs to be creative about how to leverage the parent’s assets, market position, core capabilities, brand, channel or other resources. I am estimating that less than 1% of corporate managers are corporate entrepreneurial material or has the quality to sustain as one.

“Corporate innopreneurship” requires the following attributes: (1) a leader that are comfortably to act without authority; (2) a design thinker that enjoy solving complex business challenges with limited information; (3) a manager who understands his everyday job is to resolve dilemmas and not just dreamers; (4) an explorer who can navigate even there are changes in scenarios; and (5) an organizer who can manage people and resources in an agile manner. Every company needs a few of these to achieve innovation-led growth.  Everyday I look around me and try to identify them. The difference may be not only the way they think and self-motivate, but they way they’re being nurtured.

If last year wasn't a great one for you, don't think back. No one can go back in time to change what has happened. So work on your present to make yourself a wonderful future. Happy New Year!

Introducing The 4P’s of Management: Peanut, Peter, Penis, and Perfection.


I used to interview between 200 to 350 fresh MBA grads a year, and many barely understand the basic principles of management let alone strategy and organization design. Most people developed some functional skills attending B-schools but most fail to develop a senior management perspectives despite those case studies method of teaching. Here’s the 4Ps that they need to teach in B-schools.

Here’s the Management 4Ps which I invented to train young managers: The Peanut Effect, The Peter Principles, The Penis Theory, and The Perfectionist Syndrome. If you have not heard all or any one of them, don't worry.


The Peanut Effect can be best described when referring to the lottery. The main reason why so many people play the lottery is because they place disproportionate weight on small probabilities. People don’t realize the true cost of a lottery ticket is a “peanut” and they don’t realize how the cost adds up over time. The same can be applied to buying snacks, coffee, magazines and other “cheap” items. If you are marketing your product or services, what you can learn from this is that you need find a way to emphasize the big benefits even if the probability to reap them is low. This can apply to bringing a vision to the company. Think big. Think possibilities and not only probabilities.

The Peter Principle is a belief that, in an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, that organization's members will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence." In more formal parlance, the effect could be stated as: employees tend to be given more authority until they cannot continue to work competently. It was formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book The Peter Principle, a humorous treatise. Make sure you promote people to a job that is beyond their level of ability no matter how they try to justify the case. It doesn’t matter how long people have been on a job, sometimes younger manager can rise to the challenge in a shorter time. Experience helps .. but not always.

The Penis Theory is about finding your core. Penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis refers to the theorized reaction of a girl, during her psychosexual development, to the realization that she does not have a penis. Freud considers this realization a defining moment in the development of gender and sexual identity for women. In contemporary culture, the term is sometimes used metaphorically to refer to women who wish they had a penis – lucky you don't need one to succeed in business. What you can learn from this is that too many marketers are spending too much time trying to be someone else. Often companies try and emulate the “big-wigs” and try to be like Apple, Amazon, or even Google. These companies however are spending too much time and too many resources trying to be something they are not.  It is more productive to understand who you really are – and what’s your core?

The Perfectionist Syndrome is common among high performance workplace. I have come across many high performers who are perfectionists – but not perfectionists in the true sense because when you look at their work, it is evident that they are too afraid to make calculated mistakes. And as a result, they often reach a performance ceiling. Perfectionism muffles our ability to hear, listen and learn and what you can lean from this is that perfectionism is impossible.

Let me tell you the dirty secret of management – forget about in search of excellence. There’s not a business anywhere in the world that is without problems or a business model that is perfect. Business is complex and imperfect. You can make a spreadsheet perfect but not the financials. Every business is managed by imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect consumers. Empathy makes up for the imperfection. Business is not a machine.

Can We Stop Talking About The Knowledge Management Nonsense Please? Knowledge Is Not Power. The Ability To Act On Knowledge Is Real Power.

The concept of knowledge management is purely an academic topic and has very little relevancy to the real world. When consultants start promoting it as if it is the central piece of strategy or oganizaion, I have a problem with it. When companies are thinking to hire a Chief Knowledge Officer to do the job of managing knowledge, we should first consider Chief Culture Officer or Chief Common Sense Officer, Chief Foresight Officer, Chief Politics Bashing Officer or Chief Human Factor Officer. These are more practical.

If the job of a CKO is to be the chief librarian or chief facilitator, then a company will have 100 chiefs. Some are suggesting CKOs can take a more strategic perspective, scanning across the enterprise to discover how they might improve processes and customer relationship management as well as promote employee learning. That’s called organizational design.

Some even suggest that in complex organizations where cross-business and cross-functional interventions aren’t likely to happen unless someone from the top team takes express responsibility for them, appointing a CKO would seem to be a good idea. That’s unrealistic. No P&L ownership means no influence. We need a better reason to justify another chief.

Forget a knowledge-management strategy, this is what the snake-oil salesmen/consultants invented to make them look good. Why we keep calling many things something they are not. Everything we are talking about is called “management”. If we take strategy, organization, knowledge, innovation away from management, what’s left in management? Perhaps for some management means the art of doing nothing. 

Management is a systematic way of ensuring carrying out of all activities is smooth and well aligned. It is different from leadership. Yes, now should I propose companies should add another chief – Chief Leadership Officer? Unless someone tells me knowledge is more important than leadership.

It is time for us to re-emphasize different aspects of 'management.' 
 Its task is to make managers and staffs capable of having shared vision, joint performance, to make their weaknesses irrelevant, says the Management Guru Peter Drucker. It creates harmony in working together – equilibrium in thoughts and actions, goals and achievements, plans and performance, products and markets

Lack of ‘good’ management causes inefficiency, disorder, confusion, low morale, delay, and negatively impacts company performance. Managing knowledge, money, people, processes and materials in the best possible way is the most important and essential factor for good management.

Knowledge is not the power. Power is power. The ability to act on knowledge is real power. Knowledge is useless when people can make sense of them. The ability comes from leadership.  Many managers in marge organizations do not have the ability and courage to act on the knowledge they possess even though by not doing so will cause the company to suffer or fail. It is not about knowledge. It is about leadership. End of story and please stop selling useless nonsense. Let's get back to work to improve 'management'.

Tim Cook Has A Far More Difficult Job Than Steve Jobs. He Has Been Making All The Right Moves So Far.

Congrats to Tim Cook who is over one year into his tenure as CEO of Apple. Big shoes to be filled and now Apple is moving into a new competitive arena because it is now the industry leader (defender) - the primary target for attackers. Tim has two jobs: 1/develop a competitive business strategy to defend its market share from the low end and block entrants  2/an innovation strategy to find an industry/category to disrupt leveraging Apple’s core capabilities. There were a few bumps like the Siri or Googlemap etc., but those were unavoidable.

Sabotta, a former director of Apple's federal sales group, criticitzes Apple’s CEO Tim Cook in his Kindle book that he is afraid of being wrong, lacks leadership skills, and is a "lightweight" when it comes to understanding technology. According to Sobotta, “Tim will react to the numbers or his fear of being wrong quickly. Fear of being wrong is a managerial trait that runs strong and deep in Apple because of the way Steve ran the company. Even the appearance of being wrong when in the end you might be right is dreaded at Apple. Technology-wise, I think Tim Cook is a lightweight. I never felt passion for technology from Tim like I did from Steve and some of the great engineers.”

I must say I won’t judge Cook’s performance or management style based on these criticisms (Sobotta acknowledges early in his Kindle book about his experience at Apple and that he was asked to leave Apple in 2004.) Being a CEO or Apple’s CEO is not exactly an easy job.

The way I take his comment is actually positive. A technology “lightweight” is more effective and desirable in the case of Apple to avoid the most common mistake in this industry when the technology voice overpowers business and customers. Technology heavyweight is actually less desirable for the CEO job, it is not Apple business strategy for technology big bet.

In his blog, Sobotta is critical of Apple and its Jobs' style of management in many ways. Some titles of his posts include"Do Apple Employees Need A Witness Protection Program?" "Has Apple lost its soul?"  He is basically saying Apple used some of the worst management practices to build the world’s most valuable company.

Apple is what Apple is today because of Steve Jobs’ strategic and aesthetic arrogance, charisma and capacity for work. If there’s one thing worse than a leader who micromanages to the point of stunting the creativity of his team, it’s a leader who knows and feels that there is a better way to work but fails to act on his gut. That wasn’t Jobs. As the master of anti-subopimization, understanding how he and Apple achieved such greatness isn’t about compartmentalizing each facet of Steve Jobs – it’s about recognizing how his various CEO personas were symbiotically entwined so that, when they intersected at crucial points, magic happened.

Maybe Steve Jobs was a perfectionist, not a control freak. Being in control is different from being a control freak. Those accused of being the former are often the victims of those who just don’t have the skin to stay in – and change – the game. Either way, new and extreme times call for new and extreme measures. Sometimes control is exactly what an organization needs. We see grand strategies that look good on paper and in the boardroom, but without an emotionally committed leader with vision, belief and conviction, the successful execution of idea into results won’t happen.

Armchair management critics will continuous to critique Jobs’ management style as ‘control’, even while every CEO from luxury goods to fast-fashion retail seeks to replicate his success. Ultimately, his example begs one simple question: Why aren’t more of us control freaks? Rather than decrying control, maybe it’s time to take the reins of our own ideas, innovations and organizations by studying the attitude, approach and micro-details that were responsible for transforming what those same critics once called a niche computer company into the $700 a share behemoth that everyone – including all those former PC fans – loves today.

As for Cooke, he has a far more difficult job that Jobs, Apple was an attacker and have nothing to lose to change the game. Now Apple is the defender and Cooke has to play both attacker and defender. It is a high risk game and he has every reason to react to the numbers or have ear of being wrong. That’s his job.

Design Thinking Can Make Strategic Management Simpler. But Never Simple. People Are Naive To Think That Management Can Be Explained In A Few Circles.

"Strateic Management" sounds academic. Should management be always scientific?  Since the publication of Frederick Taylor’s 1911 treatise, “The Principles of Scientific Management,” the field of industrial engineering has attempted to improve efficiency through ‘scientific management.’ At almost 100 years old, this form of industrial management is primarily based on a mechanical view of our universe as it relates to finding the ‘best’ ways to work.

Spurring powerful business models like the Ford assembly line, this discipline of speeding up productivity, controlling quality and minimizing cost remains the primary management modus operandi. Ever since then, scientists haven’t made much headway in scientific management.

In the mid-1980s, scientists used advanced computer modeling to seek order in chaos, creating mathematical diagrams at warp speed with the new technology. Though they found some fascinating data visualizations, they couldn't explain or understand the patterns. Like forecasting the weather, one could make educated predictions but never guarantee sunny skies. A decade later, some scientists stopped focusing on chaos and took a new interest in complexity.

Using advanced computer models to uncover the structure of life forms, a new approach was applied to business management. Comparing everything from beehives to genetic DNA to traffic jams to the hyperactive, complex properties of our technological and economical environment, they created many a compelling metaphor for strategic management. Still, these studies fell short of revealing any fail-proof practical applications. Today, Fortune 500s and other companies around the world still manage companies like machines – valuing profits before all else, maintaining authority with command-and-control management and relying on Six Sigma to improve quality, overreliance on the metrics on utilization, output and efficiency of mass production.

Thanks to Mr. Taylor,these practices suddenly serve to create a bureaucratic structure, distance executives from laborers and encourage them to manage rigidly and systematically. They do nothing to benefit companies that are looking to innovate in today's creative economy. If anything, it’s getting harder to weed out the chaos now that we’re bombarded with massive data and enterprise software, which forces managers to think in confining formulas. They get caught in a tangle of technology, complex processes, product portfolios and business units, and the straightjacket only tightens its grips. They watch in paralysis as these systems drain their financial and labor resources overnight.

Design Thinking is what Scientic Management needs to maintain its relevance. The only way to simplify management is to apply the voice we’ve lost touch of amidst all this white noise: our intuition. Intuition is anything but simple, yet it has the remarkable ability to bring clarity to strategic decision-making to light because it reveals a subtle qualitative and quantitative balance that is oftentimes needed for all the parts to click.

Sometimes we need to tune out the algorithms, the data and the consciousness. Sometimes it takes a white board, some weird field trips and a few crazt people to show us the world has changed and our business models have expired. We need to use our sense to get into the rhythm of disuptive competition. We need to free ourselves from the rational-logical-linear model that keeps us frozen or stagnant in a fast-moving and uncertain environment. We need a touch of finesse and the courage to wipe the slate clean.

Apple Vs Samsung - The Verdict Is A Wake-Up Call And Shaping The Very Nature Of What Competitive Strategy Means.

Here I am the first day in our new office - the building is officially named Idea Couture Place and I took the opporunity to talk about who we are and what are really good at to our people. There are still a lot of people that don't quite understand what a strategic innovation firm does and why it is not just another industrial design, strategy firm or creative house.

Now the move is over but it will take abother 2 months before we are really settled as many furnitures and equipment are still shipping from Italty, Belgium and China. I can't wait to see the fully finished office. For now, everyone is really happy. The roof top patio will look like a boutique hotel.

What exactly does Apple’s victory means for many other companies? The overwhelming patent infringement victory over Samsung is shaping the strategies of many and everyone is getting a wake-up call and now they need to revisit how they approach strategic innovation.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook told his employees about how Apple values originality and innovation and pour their lives into making the best products on earth. They do this to delight their customers, not for competitors to flagrantly copy.

The result of this court case actually shapes the playing field of competition and the very nature of competitive strategy. Samsung, Motorola (Google), HTC, RIM, HP, Nokia, RIM, Microsoft, Xerox, Sony, Amazon and IBM . All have quivers full of patents and armies of retained patent lawyers ready to go to court to protect their interests and raise the barriers of entry for new players.

If you look at any new or old product categories, product and user experiences will become more andmore similar over time. Look around you and you realize a lot of cars looks the same and drive the same way. And over time, most phones, laptops or tablets will have similar designs and behaviors, just like TVs, cameras and typewriters. Switches and buttons whether they have rounded or rectangular corners or whatever shaped icons and the overall look and feel aren't likely the key points of differentiation. It has always been part of the commoditization process and companies will continue try to innovate with new ideas.

Every great innovation attracts copycats and it is hard to say whether we are promoting innovation by offering protection or deterring innovation by raising the barriers. There is no easy answer to this one. What’s next? If you’re a small start-up you will have a hard time to make it big as once you gain some attention and market success, you will then discover that you may be infringing on patents even though you think you’re not.

Can anyone realistically come up with an idea that can past the patent test of Apple/Google(Motorola)/Cisco/Xeorx/RIM/Sony/Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures (the world's biggest patent troll) when everone is waiting to collect royalties for what you were pretty sure was an original idea or invention.

I can’t wait for a day when Apple is suing Google and Google is suing Nokia and HP is suing Apple and Samsung is suing HP and everyone is suing everyone – one hell of a party. In the end, it's more likely that these crazy entanglements will result in more cross-licensing agreements than to massive payouts – one big happy family and everyone is getting a check.

As for now, my phone hasn’t stop ringing as every company needs to “out-innovate” and wants Idea Couture to bring Design Thinking to them. Now no one is safe. Welcome to the crazy world.

The Five Rules Of Business Reinvention: What You Can Learn From Burberry?

The word ‘Reinvention” is a beautiful word. It links people to a path of hope, dreams and possibilities. It is a point when people or organizations are ready to claim and design a new defining moment that will cause a major transformation in their lives and in their organizations.  It takes commitment, reflection and action and in the process removing distractions, making peace with realities and sometimes completely letting go of the past.

Business historian can come up with a long list of great names of firms that failed to adapt and change with the times. For every Apple and Jobs; IBM and Gerstner; and GE and Welch, there are dozens of firms - many of which once held great status in households around the world - that are no longer great, good or even exist. 

Companies that have reinvented themselves successfully typically have some combination of factors on their side. Committed leadership, a deep sense of trust among employees and the courage to throw away irrelevant legacy systems are but a few. The new issue of MISC Magazine is the Big Reinvention Issue. The cove feature story is Burberry – the Reinvention of a British Icon.

So, why are some companies successful in reinvention while others fail? To begin to answer that question, consider the road taken by the company that can arguably claim the biggest success story of the past decade, Burberry. What's the difference between Aquascutum and Burberry? Both are famous for their trenchcoats but while Burberry's success is the luxury brand equivalent to the iPod, Aquascutum's is the MP3 player. Here's an excerpt from the article Burberry: Reinvention of A British Icon. You can download the full article here.

So, how did Burberry do it? While its secrets are woven in and out of the ideas, experiences, inspirations and actions of Ahrendts, Bailey and their senior executives, here are five ways that the iconic British brand has reinvented itself over the past six years.

Rule #1 - Reignite The Passion

Too many organizations attempt to spark a reinvention with an over simplified vision or a strategic statement like "double sales by 2015" or "achieve an ROI of 15% by 2015." These goals may be achievable, but they're uninspiring. At best, they provide a measure to evaluate strategic outcome. At worst, they are more suited towards pursuing efficient operations than encouraging innovation.

From smart shareholders to employees, people being told about a reinvention in the works need stories they can get behind. While never losing sight of how to make the firm more competitively effective, Ahrendts and Bailey clearly understood that Burberry needed bigger aspirations and goals powered by passion. They achieved this by making brand the core focus and announcing to executives that art, not business, would drive major decisions. In doing so, they reconnected employees around the world to the legacy of the iconic 150-year-old British brand, enabled strategists, to planners and beyond to experience the real spirit of their industry and inspired everyone to design beauty into every facet of the business.

Rule #2 - Refresh the Brand Core

Having a globally recognized brand is one thing. Making it magical is something very different. In failing to understand meaning, purpose, promise and history as defining features of a brand, too many companies hope to spark reinvention with a new logo, tagline, communications strategy or other 'brand' sleight-of-hand. With years of what some critics suggested was irreparable neglect and damage to the brand caused by copies of its trademark tartan, mass-market designs produced by franchises and a dearth of product presence in discount outlets, Burberry could well have fallen into this trap. It didn't. Instead, since 2006, its comeback has been elegantly executed with constant brand refreshing, courtesy of Bailey and his design team charting a sustainable growth path through collection after collection. Surprising and delighting customers with every new handbag, jacket, trench or dress, Burberry keeps the magic alive by reimagining its spirit of 'disheveled elegance' with every season. From the latest collection inspired by the color and energy of Henry Moore's textiles to the opening of its more causal Brit store in London's Covent Garden, surprises are always around the corner.

Rule #3 - Reinvent The Brand Experience

Companies often think about customer experience in a very limited sense and are often far too conservative in adapting to and using new social technologies. And luxury companies have, arguably, been the most reluctant to embrace and adapt to the new. To reinvent its brand experience, Burberry brought a redefined promise to life by designing a customer experience that was truly global, true to its core and what other luxury houses at the time could never have imagined and would never have implemented: democratized access to luxury. With an agnostic and borderless approach to social media, Burberry gave customers total access to the brand across any device, on multiple platforms and anywhere, anytime. As a result, it's the dominant luxury brand on Facebook. With a belief that fashion is for everyone - not just the press and industry elite - it opened the locked doors to the runway by livestreaming each season's show and then allowing customers to order pieces for home delivery before collections arrived at stores. The result is excitement, interest and loyalty among consumers who are not yet even customers.

Rule #4 - Reinforce A Balanced Culture

Creating a results culture requires not only producing the right results but also producing the right results the right way. For too many companies, that means relentlessly promoting a single way of thinking, working and doing. At Burberry, where 'balance' is one of the key words in the company's vocabulary, there is no single way of thinking, working and doing. Instead, by hiring people with an EQ as high as their IQ, pursuing cross-disciplinary collaboration between right- and left-brain specialists, and encouraging informal mentorships across and between various departments, tacit knowledges, divergent processes and asymmetrical personalities are shared. The result is that ideas are born, decisions are made and designs are discovered in ways that are more organic and holistic. It's not a formula; Burberry recognizes that maintaining balance is not an end game, it's an ongoing practice.

Rule #5 - Reimagine The Future

Making the right trade-offs between investing in today and investing in tomorrow can be one of the most daunting challenges for any organization. Performing well or not, every company feels the short-term pressure that often forces managers to make bad trade-offs. Very few have the capabilities or the culture of trust that empowers management to make the right trade-offs to balance the need for long term strategic health, cash flow and shareholder expectations. Burberry does. In addition to a clear, creative vision at the top, a Strategic Innovation Council pools the interdisciplinary and intergenerational wisdom and experience of some of the company's best and brightest to consider, examine, feel, see and sense what might be ahead. Stacked with Millennials who live and breathe the kind of cultural shifts that are or potentially will be relevant to the industry, it's a place to challenge assumptions, imagine solutions and, ultimately, dream about what this iconic, 150-year-old British brand could become in the years ahead.

(Disclosure: Burberry is a client of Idea Couture)

Five Critical Questions About Organization Culture That People Avoid Asking.

There is a piece on HBR Blog on the topic of organization culture “Culture Takes Over When the CEO Leaves the Room” by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (both HBS professors). It is a good piece worth reading and here's an summary of their ideas:

Excellence = design x culture. Your job as a leader is to get both right. You must build a winning structure for your organization and then foster the often unspoken rules and values that will bring that structure to life.

But if we may be blunt for a second, what the hell is culture? And how exactly do you get any better at it? In short, culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off.

Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn't in the room, which is of course most of the time.

My favorite line is “Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn't in the room.” I have been studying the ‘creation and nurturing” of organization culture for decades looking for practices and patterns among organizations with highly effective and sustainable cultures. Especially those that were not built on incentives such as stock options and those that were transnational.

It is easy to just look at those service intensive companies (Four Seasons, Starbucks, Zappos, Nordstrom and Southwest etc.) where there is close relationships between service and culture, but I am more interested in looking at culture and their relationships with strategy, structure, purpose and their implications on business performance and innovation effectiveness. Some of the questions I have been exploring include:

• The first question is does the CEO or the executive management knows what kind of culture they’re trying to build or what are the conditions required for those culture to flourish and key concepts to build from? Or it is simply unintended consequences of the CEO management style or something inherited from previous management? Do you know what you're building towards?
• The second question is can a company articulate its corporate culture in a way that is both tangible and explicit. A company publishes an annual report about its financies, should they publish a book about the company culture? A company’s prevailing values, mental models, assumptions, attitudes and beliefs all make up the soft, invisible stuff of culture that crate an environment of trust and balance. It determine its outlook—what it finds meaningful and important. Can you capture these stories and communicate them in a tangible way outside a Power Point? And what are the best practices to do this?
• The third question is when company is attempting a culture transformation; do they need a vision of what they want to become? Is there a genuine need to diagnose their present culture so that they can define the current state and the future state? And if the gap is too big, how do they know if the transformation is too drastic and simply not achievable?
• The fourth question is when organization culture gives people a sense of self and identity and determines, rituals, beliefs, style, meanings, values, norms and language, the way in which ‘things are done that way around here’, who should own it or is it possible for any function to own?
• The fifth question is around maintainence. An empowering executive management team can better assess the current status of an organization with an eye to shaping /modifying / eliminating the parts that are dysfunctional or ineffectivel, then replacing them with qualities that will improve the speed of decision making, productivity, and employee engagement. Corporate culture needs a maintainence plan. Do you have one?

Organization culture is not a vision, mission or management system. It is the strategy that guides how a company makes decisions disregard of what industry they compete in or where they play along the value chain and how decisions are made when the CEO is not around. And in particular today’s fast pace turbulent business conditions, a strong corporate culture can provide the strategic agility and empowerment needed to reduce the recovery time from any unavoidable setbacks or disruption.

Organizaion culture is the glue that holds a company today, even when lacking a robust business strategy. Far too many CEOs and executive leadership fail to make the connection between a “hard” strategy and a “soft” strategy and not putting enough effort to make creating, building, and nurturing a winning corporate culture the heart of the company strategy.

“To be an enduring, great company, you have to build a mechanism for preventing or solving problems that will long outlast any one individual leader.”           

                                                                - Howard Schultz

"We needed to integrate as a team inside the company so that we could integrate for the customers on their premises.” 

                                                                - Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.

The Hardest Part Of Any Innovation Process Is Sensemaking. And Sensemaking Is Closely Linked To Insights.

The hardest part of any innovation process is where data and insights come together and trying to make sesen of them. Sensemaking is about using visual mappings and narrative techniques to mine the non-quantitative data. This except is taken from a piece in the current issue of M/I/S/C magazine on Insights and Sensemaking co-written by me and Richard Thomas.

Customer inishgts can be inspiring but insights are only useful when they prompt action and self-reflection. Ideally, the best insights inspire even more insights and them more insights, but vast amounts of insights or the lack of context gives way to a different difficulty – the loss of both inherit and intended meaning leaves insights appearing senseless. For this reason sensemaking and insights are closely related. These pictures are from our M/I/S/C Insight Issue launc party. This is a thick issue and flying off the selves fast.

Sensemaking helps to illustrate unthought-of rules-of-order and insights are the direct experience of these perceived rules. Often they are under pressure and cue toward the yet-to-be but insights, by nature, are descriptive and reflective – retrospective of lived experiences. Insights are the past. They have been separated from life. To exist as unpredictable patterns they may or may not fully characterize the ‘real world’ or persist as perceived. The list of problems and challenges organizations face in managing and applying relevant consumer insights continue to grow. Here are a few:

Insight Speed & Complexity: Organizations believe they are working from a complex abundance of insights at an increasing rate – that they are diverse, independent and conflicting – but at times their insights are not insights at all. The pressure to categorize, prioritize and validate dominates the conversation as opposed to getting at the heart of the matter. How does ‘what is going on,’ effect what you desire to be?

Old Insights: Organizations often work form the same cues, and the same insights from the same reports. Managers facing time restraints carry over insights from project to project and create a self-reinforcing false reality and homogenous actionable intelligence at the organizational level, and a lameness that is visible from the shelf.

Biased Insights: Often projects, products and categories come equipped with bias toward the past and dominant insights that reinforce the known and the safe. They are often out of context, separated from their original time, expired but treated anew.

Insight Translation and Application: Drawing value from out of scope, irrelevant or intangible ‘inactionable’ insights is resource heavy. If they do not fit with the current mental model of the market or consumer, and they are cast aside.

Navigating Misinformation: Mistaking repetition and self-similarity as truth or validation. Aging Insights have resulted in a loss of their meaning – and relevancy over time.

Insight Disbelief and Disregard: The insights and processes are becoming contradictory, trust and belief is bleeding out. The inaccuracy of the processes in the real world occupies our emotional intelligence when it should be ‘feeling opportunity’ – sensing valuable cues for action. People want insights to be singular in their validity but as a reflection of the real world, insights could and should complicate and contradict each other to accurately describe reality and texture.

These problems are symptomatic of more than the solutions they seek. The imperative to describe and validate the past, present and future has engaged tension between hesitations and over eagerness about change, insecurity and confusion associated with ambiguity. These problems stem from an over objectification of ‘the insight’ where we wish to be accurate. Insights have become ‘processed’ from perspectives of existing evaluation techniques to control, predict and guide the outcomes of their application in order to ‘de-risk’.

Overly fetishized instrumentation, metrics and measures have become the source of confidence in decision-making. It is hard to put the "sense" back into our everday managerial settings increase the signal-to-noise ration.

Sensemaking is where we sense of complexity and masstive conflicting information is being sorted through and relationships are mapped out and the emerging themes and weak signals are identified and clarified. I have been training senior managers and executives of applied sensemaking in strategy, marketing, product development, operations and technology planning. It is the most important skill managers need to master today.

Strategic Innovation And The Quest To Reinvent Management.

I spoke at a number of conferences the last few weeks on the same topic of Strategic Innovation in the Age of Reinvention. Reinvention is the word as every individual, practicing professional, multi-nationals, non-profits, education institution and government ought to be thinking about “reinvention”. We desperately need to “totally reinvent ourselves” in order to transform our economy, organizations, politics and societies.

Corporations adopted strategies 20 years back to outsource their production and resulted in loss of ability to innovate and compete. Many corporations cannot even define their core and what they are really good it today, their perceived competitive advantage was merely channel assess and a warehouse of intellectual property and patent documents.

Business leaders and governments are also experiencing a profound crisis of trust and legitimacy and all these factors have triggered a loss of confidence in traditional ways of doing things. The new world of reinvented strategic management requires applied design thinking across all management functional disciplines.

Today the very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure. Leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and are looking to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Companies that fail to make the transition and missing industry breakpoints will be forced to play catch-up or risk being irrelevant or extinction.

One of the problems is we are still training our managers (MBAs) based on theories developed in post-Wold War II which was adequate when there were very little competition and technology was not a key drivers of competitive advantage. The M-form organization design is functionally oriented and the idea is every manager should manage a piece of the business as if optimizing each function means optimizing the whole. They are specialists and as as a result everyone is sub-optimizing the whole. Resulting in turf battles, lack of collaboration and unhealthy internal competition that causes satisfactory underperformance.

The strategic process occurring when the organization already realizes that it is facing an immdiate crisis, usually leads to strategic plans in the way of drastic cost reducing changes - closing of plants, cutting down of manpower, cancellation of investment plans or a change in their direction. These actions can only help them temporary. These are no changes in the present cognitive frame of the organization and these efforts may only enhance the sliding of the organization toward its doom.

The new world of reinvented strategic management requires applied design thinking across all management functional disciplines. The very core of many management theories are being questioned and “management” is close to a point of failure. Leaders are looking to find something new to grasp onto in order to make sense of what’s going on and how to organize for a future of unprecedented uncertainties. Companies that fail to make the transition and missing industry breakpoints will be forced to play catch-up or risk being irrelevant or extinction.

Design Thinking Is A Cognitive And Intellectual Process That Balances The Rational And Emotional. Not Included With Your MBA.

What is Design Thinking? Because of the word “design” and many automatically associate it with the craft of design or design as a profession. Actually it is less to do with “design” and more with “system”. There are many ways to define "design thinking" and this list is not exhaustive:

• A way to instill customer-centricity and empathy
• A framework for exploration and experimentation
• An approach to sense-making and problem solving
• A methodology to foster exploration and experimentation
• A design buzzword to tell you a designer can do more than design
• A management buzzword sold as the “next” strategic tool
• A marketing slogan or tag line
• A self-gratifying term for those who think they are creative

The term “design thinkers” implies that designers are craftsmen and not thinkers, which is NOT always the case. It is also a stretch for traditional industrial or brand/graphic design firms to claim to be able to use "design thinking" to solve complex strategic issues. These firms need to go through a radical transformation and close a big capability gap before they can even attempt to implement it for others.

Today, "design thinking" is frequently compared and contrasted to business. This is often an over simplification that forces us into predetermined roles along with their associated rules, conventions, behaviors and formal expectations. It Is important to recognize that "design thinking" is NOT exclusive to designers or unattainable to those in another discipline. Design thinking is natural and inherent in all of us who are smart and creative.

"Design thinking" is a cognitive and intellectual process that balances the rational and emotional – in effect combining left brain and right brain thinking. When applied, it harmonizes with other modes of thinking and closes knowledge and information gaps, creating order and refining meaning. Because "design thinking" is a dynamic, constructive process that is iterative in nature, developing ideas requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation and assessment.

To achieve those tangible outcomes, you need to open the process to multiple participants and socialize the process and outcomes, visualization is a very critical part of the process, not an outcome. Even the Department of Defence recognizes the needs to train "design thinkers" that are capable of critical and creative thinking to plan operations in dynamic environments with fast-changing uncertainties in extremely complex conditions.

People who are capable of using "design thinking" to identify and develop different military response options within the context of a big strategy are crucial to successful military operations. The development of such skills requires a shift in their focus from the operational and tactical environments to the strategic environment. This is an extremely challenging undertaking given that many military officers spend the majority of their career starting at lower levels and their advancement depends upon how well they perform tactically. This is very much like managers in large organizations who were promoted based on their ability to execute tactically.

To develop senior commanding officers with "design thinking" capabilities require DOF to train them new skills including analysis as well as synthesis. "Design thinkers" possess the ability to think critically on a "system" level; break concepts into simpler parts and mapping out their relationship and system impact before rearranging the elements into a new whole; in other words, to produce something through imaginative skills and quick experiments. And yes, imagination is always needed.

You Think Innovation Is Hard. Business Transformation Is A Hundred Times More Difficult. And In Fact It Is The Number One Barrier For Strategic Innovation.

People think innovation is almost just about new ideas. Funny how many think Blue Ocean Strategy is a big wake-up call when all it does is communicating the very the basic and simple idea of strategic innovation – how not to compete with your competitors in the same game and instead create a new game.

A strategist has the choice between getting back into the fight with existing competitors or creating a new space when there is no competition AND no proven customer demand. This is the hardest part - "no proven customer demand" and let's see what the board has to say when you tell them that your strategy cannot be validated quantitatively. New game strategy is extremely difficult to make happen for a number of reasons:

• It is hard to convince the board to bet on a market that has yet to exist
• Successful founders CEOs are stuck seeing things with an old mental and underestimaing the threats
• It is hard to change the minds of people who wanted (and have vested interest in) the old business to work and not willing to give up
• It is hard to make the switch as it requires new mindset, capabilities and organization design
• It is hard to be credible using the the current brand entering or creating the new market space
• There is the question of how sustainable the new value logic from a customer and market perspective

Looking back at the history of industrial revolution or our information or technology revolution, red oceans vs. blue oceans or a better way to describe it is “today cash flow" vs. "future cash flow" or "defender vs. "attacker" etc. Avoiding competitions in the red oceans give rise to innovation opportunities that create new market space and could triggers a new round of industrial transformation. The author did not address the dynamics of the industry transformation.

Straegy is never that simple as red and blue oceans, organizations are increasingly inter-connected as they leverage brand, patent, talent, technology, knowledge, channels, products and services from each other often located in disparate parts of the world. These complicated inter-connections often prevent companies to reinvent themselves even the opportunity is obvious.

There are many hurdles and barriers for transformation including cognitive, resource, capabilities, motivation and political ones that prevent making a new game strategy implementable. Idea Couture Brand-driven Strategic Transformation goes beyond creating, communicating and maintaining a sense of identity and belonging for the employees, we bring foresights into the process and connect the align the brand with the business strategy and the strategic futures.

The brand is used like a savings account for emotional equity while we develop an engaging and energizing feeling of commitment to the organization by creating and co-creating a shared destiny; this is where it creates the highest impact. Conventional visioning and mission writing exercises often fall short to drive transformation. The idea is to get executives and senior managers in front line employees to move beyond empty, slogan-driven communications, which are more likely to lead to detached cynicism than to engagement, and to help them develop a clear personal commitment to an organizational purpose that will reflect in all aspect of managerial actions.

Business transformation is the execution of an integrated, corporate-wide program aimed at aligning the present and future as well as the organization, strategy and brand, it ensures alignment and internal consistency by reshaping the leadership, strategy, finances, organization and operations of businesses as a whole. It is not a Power Point, it is the energy flow of an oranization.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.

Why Traditional Apporach To Business Transformation Don't Work Anymore?

Over 60% of companies out there are operating on a dated buisness model and 20% operating with a mental model that had expired for more than 5 years. There are little reasons for those 20% of companies to survie another 5 years or even 3 and for the other 60% they have a short window of opportunity to design and orchestrate their transformation.

Rapid changes in external environment, consumer behavior, global economics and disruptive technologies are throwing off the most rigor business strategies and the best trained managers. Although everyone expect to see big changes ahead but people reacts differently to change.

Many people become accustomed to the status quo and don't want to alter the way things are being done -- regardless of the potential benefits or the disruptive threats from emerging competition. For many, fear of the unknowns and the concerned about the ramifications on their careers are barriers to acknowlege the need for change. People don't like change. And winning belongs to those who thrive with change.

Success for operating in a neck-breaking speed and unknown environment often comes from the ability to drive the proper (or mulitple) transformation at different critical points -- for industry breakpoints. “Business as usual” simply means "end of a business or an industry." Being able to reimainge and reinvent offerings and models are critical to addressing economic volatility and staying on top of the market.

Business transformation traditionally takes the form of unfreezing to refreezing and briding the gaps in capabilities, mindset and performance. And these changes which can take the form of business strategy, management style, culture, organization design and business processes.  One most popular model is the classic model proposed by Lewin which argues that the process of change involves three stages 1/ unfreezing, 2/ change and 3/ refreezing. This model was valuable in recognizing the importance of not only new learning, but also “unlearning” old attitudes, habits and behavior patterns. Today many question the practicality of this model suggesting that a “refreeze” implies a resistance to future change and partucular the future is uncertain.

The Idea Couture Brand-Driven Transformation Model has a strong future oritentation and focused on bringing strategic foresights and organization insights to reimage futures. It uses a lot of Design Thinking principles and makes the process very tangible and collaborative. It is a process of organzation co-creation which people put their stake on what shared destinies they wanted to particiapte in creating and thus releasing energy in the process. It will take 80 Power Point slides to illustrate the process, a high-level view of this model is captured by the following formula: Successful Brand-Driven Business Transformation = P+N+C+M+I+F

• P = Develop a perspective of the future(s) informed by strategic foresights (both customer and technology contexts) and deep organizational insights;
• N = Develop a co-created brand narrative that inspired people of possibilities and put purpsoe at the core of the story;
• C = Develop a compelling case for the need for change developed and shared by all executives, investors, employees and B2B business partners;
• M = Develop a practical means to tie innovation (roadmap) and projects to the desired future(s);
• I = Design an incentive systems that are aligned to identify and encourage appropriate behaviors compatible with the desired future;
• F = Develop feedback mechanism for each stage of the process to monitor progress and provide input for continuous improvement.

Any Business Transformation process is painful. The way many organisations manage change or transformation using existing model is facing the challenge of speed. They are too slow and by the time they refreeze, the market has shifted and they need another transformation. The other important issue is key decisions are made in isolation and the change piece comes later which I argue often is too late. The future of Business Transformation is a co-created one.

On Building The Creative Culture And Learning How To "Forget" Creatively.

We had our Idea Couture Christmas staff part last week. Looking back there were a lot being accomplished and a lot more to do. What started as a little experiment bringing multi-disciplinary design thinkers together and now becoming a key driving force and intellectual engine advancing the practice of design thinking in innovation and business applications. Idea Couture is where multidisciplinary thinkers come together with shared purpose and where creativity flourishes. I am looking forward to have our London and Mexico City offices running in 3-6 months. I feel I have the right people in place and that's a great start.

At Idea Couture, creativity means more than just novelty ideas. It means new ways to frame problem, using new lenses and developing new perspectives. I am so happy when I see happy people in the company doing great things. I am happy to see people growing and that's gives me tremendous satisfaction.

At the end of the day, we're in the business of producing the non-conforming super smart and creative thinkers and doers. I am pushing the envelope everyday and so far no one is complaining. Heartiest thanks to my management team who did a great job of putting togther the first Idea Couture Award.  You guys rock!

On the road this week and spending time with people hearing them talk about their innovation challenges and how they apply design thinking. Lots of great meetings. We're aware of the big changes coming ahead. Every business, government and instirutions will be impacted. Change does not creep up on us every 10 or 20 years, it is an ever-present business and organization phenomenon that is disrupting industries and causing firms and industries to disappear. Although the degree and velocity of change is unprecedented.

Everyday we’re dealing with more and more unknown and unknowable, but decisions still need to be made. Many of the challenges today are unique and have few or no precedents, so textbook solutions (and no guru don’t waste time buying whatever best sellers) or trying to find aHarvard Business School case study. Past solutions do not necessarily apply today. The external environment is constantly absorbing shocks from technological advancement, cultural change and systems failure.

Creativity is needed everywhere to rethink and reimagine products, experiences, companies, processes and even industries. Top executives are looking everywhere for new thinking and solutions that are outside the routine of orthodox strategies and old paradigms. So where can you look for new ideas? And how can you design an environment in which creative people can survive, thrive and flourish? We can begin by asking, how can you make people creatively forget what they know in order to reinvent the future? This is where sensemaking comes into play.

A big part of sensemaking is creative “forgetting” and it is first thing you must do. We all create our own environments and then constrained by them. Being able to aware and realize the impact of our own behavior in creating the environment in which we’re in is a very important first step. Forget who we are is something worth practicing. There may not be any scientific evidence to suggest that those who know what to forget can think more creatively about the future, but in the formulation of business strategy, creativity can be seriously constrained if it is burdened by the past. The problem lies in the notion of “core competencies,” which suggest that companies should stick to what they know best. If that’s the case, then why many of those once great companies should still be around.