innovation playground Idris Mootee

There Is A Difference Between Business Turnaround and Business Transformation. It Is Easy To Tell Which Is Harder.

All companies go through some kind of crisis at some point but what does it take to get out of it? There aren’t many successful turnarounds in large companies and the bigger the company and the longer the history, the more difficult it is for any turnaround and its success rate is lower. 

Harley Davidson in mid-life crisis when Richard Teerlink joined the company in 1981 as CFO, the company had US market share of 15% and reported a loss of $15m. The company was killed by its strong Japanese competitor led by Honda. In 1989, he took over as CEO and returned the company's focus to increasing quality, improving service and producing world-class heavyweight motorcycles. In the end it is the product that turned the company around. Harley Davidson recovered its U.S. market share to 50% and posted annual sales of more than $1.7 billion. Teerlink left his post as CEO in 1997, and served on Harley Davidson’s board of directors for another 5 years. He did a great job as a turnaround manager.

The story of IBM’s brush with bankruptcy is another greatest business comeback of all time. IBM’s problem was that it was quickly becoming irrelevant and experiencing zero growth. The company had also made some bets that didn’t work out. Lou Gerstner took control in 1993 and created more focus in the company. He did a great job as a transformation manager.

One lessons here is not mix up a turnaround with a transformation. It’s very important to distinguish between a transformation and a turnaround.  A turnaround involves a company that has fallen off the rails and has executed poorly and still competing in the same product/market space. It takes a tough driven executive to make it work.

A transformation is truly a lot more difficult and takes a lot more deep wisdom with execution playing a secondary role. The company must fundamentally change its mental and operating model. It is a reinvention and companies who are used to doing things their way find it difficult to start doing things differently. This is not a 3 or 6-month initiative. It’s very, very strategic, foresight driven and problematic.

For any successful transformation, it takes leadership rather than management. “I hire people brighter than me and I get out of their way” as Lee Iacocca puts it. I am not sure who said something like “Inventories and supply chain parts can be managed but people must be led.”

I’ve both architected and supported quite a few successful turnaround behind the scenes as strategic consultant in my career, my simple advice for transformation leaders is people don’t just care what you know unless they know that you care.  You need to earn that by caring and then knowing.  It takes inspirational motivation to motivate managers to commit to the vision of the organization no matter how hard it is to achieve the vision. It also takes intellectual stimulation to foster innovation and creativity to challene the groupthink or yesthink. It is as much an intellectual undertaking as much as an executional exercise.

The world is not ending. Winning for tomorrow requires a vision. Brilliant strategies don’t show up spontaneously particularly for complex and fast moving industries. It comes from strategic dialogues, strategic foresights, options, even failures and mistakes. The ability to see the problem as a whole and then integrate a variety of perspectives and not simple quick fix. There is no simple quick fix.

Do You Know What A Growth Strategy Is?

This marks the end of another year. A very busy and fruitful year for us. Personally I was on the road for more than 200 days and I need to take a break - perhaps 3 days. What about my New Year's resolution? I need to cut down on drive and email. I need to cut down on attending unprodcutive meetings. I need to find three people to mentor that they can become the best. I need to revisit places from my childhood that were memorable. I need to back up my hard drive (I am 96 days behind). I need to produce a mini feature film and shot entirely with my HTC phone. I need to cut down on my public speaking. I need to have more discipline on getting enough sleep.

For companies, it is time to think about growth. Every company wants growth and it is harder and harder to come by. Many companies are busy defending their shares and don't even the luxury to think growth. The most successful growth companies adopt at least four best practices:

• Earn the rights for growth (business design/cash flow/business architecture etc.) and first focus on the core
• Understand discontunuties and when is the next S-curve coming
• Always think like a designer and think "customer value" first
• Seeing the whole opportunity horizon and understand what it means

A common mistake is comanies jumping into some cool ideas that are simply just novelty and blindly believe that it is growth. The secret for growth is having a robust strategy. Here I will share a little of my secrets or not so secrets. Before that I want to make sure you know that easiest way to fail is by jumping into the future without figuring out a path to get there. You must have a plan. A plan that shows the whole opportunity horizon (built-on-robust foresight) and careful analysys of the industry economics.

There’s no magic solution to jump-starting growth. Growth is a strategy but also a mindset, it depends on how you see and shape your future by the action you take today. It takes more than a vision. It goes beyond just having the best product on this planet. Best product is no gurantee of success today. Often good enough products stand a better chance.

Remember, some used to say that strategy is about “Speed, Price, Quality – just pick two.” I’d tell them, even if you picked them all, it is still not enough. You need to pick, “Speed, Agility, Focus, Quality, Relevance and Price”. Not one, but all, if you are playing to win. Despite popular books and articles may be telling you to try and fail often and even to celebrate failure, I don’t buy those ideas at all - these are excuses for people taking uncalculated risks. Risks are not just unavoidable, but needs to be managed. It needs to provide a calculated return, and not just say take risks and fail fast. That’s for amateurs.

Companies need to understand the full spectrum of their opportunity horizon. And once it is understood, then it takes focus. You also cannot just react to the future because by sitting and waiting you will miss it. You also need to understand the opportunity horizons that you are looking at and how each horizon can be impacted by different degrees of uncertainty. It is more than just aspirations; it takes strategic thinking and a lot of sense-making. After all, corporate strategy is a game of sense-making and organizing for the future. Yet there are multiple futures and the trick is how do you decide to play just one or more than one. This is the part that is difficult for many as they see strategic planning as a mechanical and linear exercise.

First we need to look at the future through three different opportunity horizons then we have a pretty good picture on what is needed and how to act to positively impact a winning business strategy. When we look at successful companies that often playing in different horizons while not necessarily winning all, there are a lot of common factors. But that’s a much longer post to write and for today, let’s look at these opportunity horizons in three stages:

Opportunity Horizon 1: Redefine and reinvent the core. This is about rethinking the core and how to make it relevant. Or how to defend against low-cost high value competition etc. At the minimum it needs to stop market share erosion and if done properly it should be able to jumpstart growth. Reinventing the core requires going deep into the company's core belief system and to realign it with what's going on.

Opportunity Horizon 2: Extend core businesses into related adjacencies. Companies should expect 20-30% of their revenue to come from products or services that didn’t exist today and they should share some economic synergies with the core. Not only should it deliver additional revenue, it should enhance the core to strengthen its portfolio.

Opportunity Horizon 3: Initiate strategic transformation. At this stage, the company should in a good position (both strategically, organizationally and financially) to invest in full transformation, which includes shuffling of business units, assets and markets. Not every company can afford a transformation and they need to earn the right to do so. Many make the mistake of starting a transformation on day one when the company was not in any strategically or financially sound position to do so. Transforming without a stabilized core is a recipe for failure.

I have helped many large companies to orchestrate growth and it takes more than creating continuous alignment and killing projects that are sucking up resources. Killing projects that are not strategically aligned means signaling a changing behavior. A lot of energy is needed to deal with changing legacy behaviors — those that are expended toward the old strategy and not the new strategy. Companies often run on auto-pilot without even knowing it.

Implementing a growth strategy means one must balance activity between constant reinvention of existing current management practices and fostering behavioral change to prepare for the new. It means they should challenge managerial assumptions about how do get things done, what risks to take and the rationale behind them, and develop a list of desired or optimal behaviors that align with strategic goals, and have managers create a “let it go” list of legacy behaviors to eliminate. It is about getting rid of the old and creating new ones all at the same time. Perhaps that is the plan for the New Year.

Happy 2015!

Does Social Media Makes All Of Us Phenomenologists?

It is every designer’s dream to design a chair. I have yet to meet an industrial designer that doesn’t want to design a chair or a car. It is designer’s dream for those who study transportation design is to design a car and I get it. Chairs and tables? The reality is how often designers get a chance to design their own chairs? And every transportation designers ended up doing is styling a car that was designed by a computer. There are disproporationately large amount of chairs being designed than to other objects and products.

Any object whether it is chair, a table, a smartphone, or a coffee maker does not exist in a vacuum and are part of a informal system that links to a complex set of interactions both human and machines. And even a complex layer of meanings for a relatively simple object – a chair or a functional tool – a smartphone. For some, the term “phenomenology” is only restricted to the characterization of sensing qualities such as seeing, touching, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of different kinds that forms a human experience. But our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation.

Sensational experience is great but short-lived. To create meanings is the ultimate human experience. To design, in phenomenological terms, is to address the meaning of things or objects have in our own experience, in our own “life-world” and how we "experience" them. Just ask any designers if they see their discipline this way? Mostly not and 90% of designers’ effort are on aesthetics and not phenomenology. Is there a discipline called "design phenomenology"?

Phenomenology is the examination of the structure of various types of experience ranging from a broader and deeper perspectives and including deep diving on perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activities, linguistic activity etc. We need to apply that before we strategize a new business concept, a new service design model or an innovative new product.

It is what we need to understand context of anything. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Edmund Albrecht Husserl (German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology) called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something and this is what makes the jon fun. It is not for someone without imagination. It is all about seeing “intends” as well as “jobs-to-perform” and “concepts of the world”. The idea is studying the units of consciousness is like “giving voice to” and these units of consciousness are called intentional acts or intentional experiences. It is basically the most human centric approach to understanding human experiences.

When designers try to design experiences, perhaps they should need to first consider phenomenology. It is not really a rocket science, for centuries poets, writers, painters, film producers are born phenomenologists. I think most of us are born phenomenologists particular in the days of Facebook and other social media where we share everything, we understand very well by means of words, videos and images, our insights with our friends — we are all practicing phenomenology without knowing it.

How Do Breakthroughs Happen? Here's My Little Secrets For Breakthroughs After Helping Executives For Decades..

How do breakthroughs happen? Can they be engineered? Are they pure luck? Or are they the result of skills that we can develop and improve upon over time? Along with the fear of the unknown and the pressure to make it happen, breakthroughs come with an incredible sense of possibility and satisfaction.

The experience of uncovering a breakthrough is exhilarating and hard to explain. It’s a sense of not knowing exactly where I am going, but knowing that I am going somewhere. Here’s my secrets to achieving breakthroughs:

• Preserve the “Me”. The world we're living in today seems to be a completely different one from 10 or 20 years ago and a crazie one. Sometimes I wonder if the world is really changing that fast at a break-neck pace. There is a notion that if you can’t change the world you should change the way you look at it, but I don’t like the idea of changing myself according to the world and adapting to it. The central core of what’s “me” contains beliefs that we’ve built up over the years and a value system that provides us with perspectives on the world and forms the grey scale of my personality. Black and white only exists in film, photography and my Prada suit; seeing the world in black and white is terribly dangerous. The person who views things only in black and white will always be miserable or unsuccessful in whatever they pursue. That’s not and never was the rule of the universe. Sticking to your core does not necessarily mean you are not open to the world. It means you open the world to “you” and everything you experience adds one more layer of sophistication to the “you” and heightens your awareness and sense of being. Any personal breakthrough need not give away or suppress the “you.” What you experience every day should make a beter “you.” Breakthroughs require the “you” in “you.”

• Anticipate and Leverage Moments. Most breakthroughs don’t happen through excessive rationalization or planning. In fact, almost all breakthroughs are sparked by “moments.” This is one of the things I teach people about looking for breakthroughs. The process of finding any breakthrough – whether in business, technology or design – often involves immersing oneself in large amounts of data and extensive debate and the synthesis of complex information. Most people fail to see the moments when they happen or fail to capture them. I started working to facilitate these moments a long time ago, making them happen more easily and more often. How I ask questions and how I push people to their limits (as I do with my staff) is one way that I try to help them to experience moments. I feel bad for sometimes being seen as critical and demanding, but that’s how I get myself and others to create those moments.
• Expand Awareness through Emotions. There are so many myths about emotions. We often associate them with extreme cases where we overreact, when they prevent us from making the right decision or make us irrational pursuing things that we want. This is all true, but emotions also have a positive side if you know recognize and respond to them. Emotions are our inner sensors at work, sending us weak signals from the outside. They trigger how we expand the operating parameters of our cognition, help us take in more detailed information, hold multiple ideas in our minds at once, and ascribe meaning to the things, people and events in our lives.
• Imagineering as Daily Ritual. Unless you’re in the business of producing film, animation, video games or other highly creative outputs you most likely don’t have a need to use imagination in your daily work. But imagination is not a tool we can call up on demand; we need to practice using it every day in order to maintain our ability to imagine. Imagination is a major part of how we frame and solve problems. Much like yoga, tai chi or voice training, imagining requires that we put in practice time in order to expand our ability. Applied imagination (or imagineering) can increase the number of creative options available for specific problems that we’re trying to solve and help with tasks like ideation. Rather than focusing on developing ideas or how to solve a problem, Imagineering is about rapidly and randomly envisioning what might be, what could be, and what couldn’t be. It's very easy to compare creativity and knowledge in an abstract, metaphorical sense – but we know that our imagination is developed from the knowledge we gain in the experiences of our daily lives and works by employing that information subconsciously until it’s ready to break through into awareness.
• Practice Design of Meanings. Try to design a breakthrough project or pilot activity for yourself as an experiment. Some breakthroughs are sparked by eureka moments based on insights – but far more are based on design. Design-driven innovation is spurred by thinking about possible breakthrough features, meanings and product languages that could emerge in the future. This cannot be done by talking to consumers or looking at current user behaviors. Consumers can’t really imagine radical futures, as they are anchored and invested in the current one; thus they are not helpful in anticipating possible radical changes in new product meanings. Big breakthroughs don’t necessarily come from disruptive applications or advanced functions; sometimes it’s new meanings that shift the universe. Think about how every one of the everyday objects that we see around our home can be transformed: instead of being simply functional, consider how to turn them into symbolic objects of irony, desire and affection.

The Bionic Man/Woman Is Now Possible! It Gives New Meanings To Wearables!

Remember that Six Million Dollar Man TV Series? When ace test-pilot Steve Austin's crashed, he ended up in a poor shape that his only chance of survival was to replace human spare parts with technologies. That was the beginning of “wearables” I supposed. The government decided to invest millions to use the latest technology to rebuild him with cybernetic parts which gave him superhuman speed, response and strength and the superagent.

Thirty-five years later, DARPA's Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) is working on it and  trying to improve the speed and accuracy of neural interfaces. Such interfaces can happen in the brain, as in the case of Hemmes, or someplace else farther down the line, closer to the missing limb. It is a highly complicated task to try to translate these commands to muscles that drives the myoelectric arm. Most important is that any of these won’t need a brain surgery or implant. The challenges include weather change and other external factors can affect the myoelectric arm and there is the issue of electrodes slipping on the skin.

The idea of implanted electrodes is very attractive with the goal to provide near-natural hand movement. Another sign og progress is FDA just approved the world’s first approved bionic eye. The Argus II, which treats patients with the rare genetic condition known as retinitis pigmentosa was approved by the FDA after twenty years of research and $200mm of investments. The Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System, which was approved to treat people with severe to profound retinitis pigmentosa, doesn't actually restore vision or allowing them to see, just enough to detect light and dark and the contrast can identify the movement or location of objects. Almost like the first generation of cell phones. We are a few years away before they have advance features. When the photoreceptor cells in the eye's retina are damaged, people can tell the difference between light and dark.

To restore light and dark vision, a tiny chip containing many electrodes is implanted on the patient's retina. The patient wears a pair of glasses with a video cam attached to it. The camera sends the recorded image wirelessly to the electrodes in the chip, which then turns the information into a signal that the brain can understand. It will be a low-resolution 60-pixel image only and enough to give people a sense of what’s in front of them.

The breakthrough in nanochip will open up tons of opportunities to improve our senses or replace in medical cases or enhance in other cases. In less than ten years, those who can afford to spend $25,000 can get a bionic eye to capture wider light spectrum or advanced your visual search functions through Google. I won’t be an early adopter for sure.

Exploring The Four Biggest Myths of Creativity. Design Educators Take Note.

The party at Idea Couture London office last week was a fantastic event. Get to meet many young talented people there and looking forward to work with them on projects. My work takes me around the world and it is hard to get to know everyone in different offices. I enjoy talking to creative people from creative engineers to designers. And I have a very different idea of what "creative" people means. Idea Couture is a creative powerhose and it is creativity in the deepest and most systematic sense, looking at challenges from new perspectives but achor in a highly logical manner. That's our creative algorithm and it is rooted in every IC office.

Design educators take note. Design schools have built up an expectation that they can equip students to tackle complex problems through the power of creativity alone. They can’t. They don’t. And they continue to fool themselves with four big myths about creativity.

The first myth is that creativity and design are inseparable. Here, we have led ourselves down a garden path of consensus where many of us believe that because designers are designers they are creative. But design is not creativity manifested, and creativity is not the exclusive to the design mind. One can be creative without having any design skills or sensibility, and there are many skilled designers who utterly lack in creativity. Design doesn't = creatiivty. It needs creativity.

The second myth is that analytical people are generally not creative people. Here, in subscribing to the popular oversimplification of human complexity that there are right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers, we assume that those of us who lean towards analysis, process, logic and science are – admit it – a little uninspired. As anyone who understands what goes into big and small leaps of science knows, this is rubbish. The analytic and the creative can, and often do, live side by side in the same brain.

The third myth is that, when it comes to design, creativity must be unbound from the laws, structures and processes of the day-to-day world. Bound up in the long-standing mythology of the artist as a visionary or hero who must be free to do what he/she – and he/she alone – does best, this can sometimes be little more than an excuse for the fact that the artist or visionary lacks the ability to apply his creativity beyond his own imagination. Nowhere is this more prevalent than at the intersection of business and design where many creative people prove themselves incapable or unwilling to grasp (and design for) the realities of what a company does and how it operates.

The fourth and final myth is that which surrounds the recent and very popular theme of ‘design for social change’. While the output of many such projects is little more than a poster and a campaign, not an actual solution, most of us would agree that such work starts with the best of intentions. Here, as in the third myth, the challenge is that designers are generally not educationally or experientially equipped to identify the social or cultural genesis of a problem and are typically blind-sided by the economics of an issue. The result is that many develop ideas (not really solutions) that are irrelevant, unsustainable and, in some cases, lead to further problems. They were one minute inspiration and not sustainable change.

If I was to start a design school (not sure I would)  from scratch tomorrow, the program would be based on Movement, Intuition, Structure and Complexity. These would be the “subjects” that would become the permanent vocabulary of every graduating student for one simple reason: we need to train a new breed of professionals that can live up to the promise of how design can change the world. Only by balancing the ‘general’ with the ‘specific’, the ‘whole’ with the ‘part’, the ‘abstract’ with the ‘concrete’, and the ‘indefinite’ with the ‘definite’ can we prepare young people for the increasingly competitive job market, the stakes of what it means to be a citizen of design in the global community, and the what it means to be a human being who enjoys deeper forms of beauty, meaning and purpose while understanding economics.

Adapted from an article in Dec 2013 issue of MISC magazine.

What Do We Need More? Managers Or Strategists? Or Design Thinkers?

In business school we are taught the difference between a good decision and a bad one, and how to leverage a good one to get the most out of it. We are also taught that the best decisions are those that minimize risk and produce the highest return. On the ground, management decision-making is never that simple.

We want managers to have a vision for the long term but be flexible enough to respond to competition in the short term. We want them to produce consistent results and yet experiment with innovative ideas for growth. We want both change and stability. If change is the only constant, its constant companion is the avoidance of change.

Because the future is full of unknowns, it’s far more comfortable for managers to pursue stability by optimizing existing core business operations than to prepare for change. There is no theory to teach managers how to achieve a balance between the known and the unknown; the ability to do that comes from experience. But if your experience is defined by an unwillingness to step outside the envelope of stability, you will never know if or how the unknown may help you make a better decision. You will never think beyond the immediate tactic. You may become the world’s best manager of the known, but the least able to think strategically about the future. And the future is where the money is supposed to be. Just ask your shareholders. This unwillingness to strategically embrace the unknown is often why companies fail. When they do, we naturally apply 20/20 hindsight to expose all their wrong moves or analyze how management didn’t act fast enough or how it refused to act at all.

Sometimes management acts too slow to transform the organization when the value is shifting to other activities. Sometimes it bets on new things and fails to protect the core. Sometimes it just can’t keep up with rate of change caused by technological disruption. Is the lack of management development progress for the last 30 years a contributing factor? We produce tons of MBAs every year (it’s estimated to be over 150,000 in the US and 375,000 globally). Should we not expect companies to be smarter as a result?

In the current business climate, management tends to prioritize risk-avoidance and career protection over bold strategic action. Managers operate in fear and tend not to bring their imagination and empathy to work. They succeed by avoiding blame when things go wrong and taking credit when things go right. We forget that the best managers take calculated risks and develop strategies to encourage others to do the same.

For the strategist, the only true way to maintain a useful level of predictability is to actively engage in the shaping of the organization’s future. Through conceptualization and development of forward-looking scenarios, an organization can equip and prepare itself for the inevitable future. Our emphasis on education and management development has been on training managers more than training strategists. Today, we need strategies more than ever and we need to convert our top managers to strategists. We need to encourage and empower mid-to-senior managers to take bolder risks and become the innovative force that out-strategizes the competition.

The practice of management needs to move away from purely avoiding risks to a deeper understanding of risks and how to master them to develop business opportunities and create value. Ultimately we need to train people that are equally versatile as managers and strategists. That's why Design Thinking can play a big role. Whether you're a good manager or strategist, you also need to be a good design thinker.

This article is an except from the coming issue of MISC magazine the Balance issue which will be available in bookstores Dec 2013.

Wearables That Promiss To Make Us Smarter. What's Next?

Do you wonder how we measure brain activity? Our brains communicate through the cell sending tiny electric signals to each other and the more signals the more electricity it will produce. An EEG can measure the pattern of this electrical activity. There are some who believe that if we stimulate certain part of the brain (pre-frontal cortex) will improve certain functions. For years, there had been experiments of stimulating the brain using small electric currents and see if it can make us thinker better or smarter.

Some believe the results are temporarily and some belief that it helps us overtime and the impact is long lasting. Not enough studies to prove it but expect products like this availabe in the market as werables soon. But attaching dozens electrodes to your head that shock your brain, a new product called Foc-us headset is designed for gamers (18 years and older and have $249 to spend) promise to make you a better gamer.

If it can do that to gaming, then it should work for other brain activities too. I can see a high end version for stock brokers and probably one for hedge fund manafers too. So far, scientists have tested the technology, but mainly to figure out if it's has any effect but no idea of prolonged use. Brain enhancement wearables can be a big thing and it is like Viagra for the brain.

A recent study published in the journal PLOS ONE, it examines how to identify emotions without relying on people's ability to express themselves. It could be used to assess an individual's emotional response to almost any kind of stimulus including faces, advertising or products. The idea is based on the assumptions that different people tend to neutrally encode emotions in similar ways. The researchers believed that is the case. In the future, wearable means literally wearing our emotions on our sleeves. The method for brain stimulation here istDCS, for transcranial direct current stimulation, and it's a brain stimulation method that involves sending ultra low amounts of electrical current through various parts of the brain to achieve different effects. You probably have seen this in movies for medical treatment and it has been used since 1804.

Actually the design of the device is not complicated, The tDCS enthusiast community is also blossoming, especially considering that stimulation can be replicated with do-it-yourself electrodes and over-the-counter batteries and perhaps it is the next iPhone and we will all be wearing one around with downloadable apps for stocks picking, chessgame, dating, anti-repression, golfing, negotiating and fishing. The competition to become strataight As students will depend on which werables that you use.

Many Made The Mistake Of Taking the Brand Out Of The Innovation Equation On The Fuzzy Front-End. Are You One Of Them?

Companies make many mistakes in their innovation journeys and often they go down the same path again and again and wonder why that is the case. The four main reasons among many are:

1/ They think it is all about creativity and coming up with more ideas.

Coming up with ideas is easy. Coming with good ideas is not difficult. Coming up with more ideas is not helpful. It is the quality of ideas and once ideas are being exhausted, it is time to perform the more difficult job of sensemaking and mapping. This is where most people fail and have no ideas of what and how to do next. They lack a framework of synthesizing these concepts into bigger themes and look at them in a differently way to see how each of ideas-system means to the customers, business and industry.

2/ They think innovation should be separated from the brand. Often people start thinking of new ideas without thinking without understanding the scope and scale requirements and that should be governed by the brand.

These ideas need to link to the current brand or masterbrand in whatever ways and has the potential to scale within a reasonable period of time. No established companies, unless for a very good reason, should start a new brand because of economic reasons and also the brand can be the powerful source to inspire innovation, in addition to the users or customers. Otherwise people can waste a lot of time and realize even they have a good idea, the marketing investment will cost too much making the project not worth pursuing. On the opposite, they also should not confused brand extension or other incremental innovation as strategic innovation.

3/ They think their current capabilities (including that of their agencies) are adequate and can do the job. The learning curve for them is too steep.

In many cases, companies have existing working relationships with their advertising agencies and marketing research firms and naturally would want to work with them on innovation projects. This is a bad decision as for the advertising agencies, they are too deeply embedded with the existing idea of what the brand is and should do rather than a fresh way of looking at it. And most marketing communications people and not equipped to manage the innovation process. Some innovation firm is basically ex-advertising agencies people repackaged themselves as innovation consultants (there are some occastions people successfully migrate). Most marketing research firms are not equipped with the right tools to do research that support innovation, and end up applying the usual quantitative and qualitative research methodologies which were designed for market testing and tracking.

To unlock the full power of applied creativity to drive innovation and economic value, let’s not approach innovation with overly simplified approach to getting the magic and bringing in the money. There is no magic in the innovation process, no one should hide behind this magic black box and the client expect them to show up one day with some magical ideas and then write them a check. Innovation is about applying design thinking and having all the right type of people and capabilities in place.

4/ They are confused between strategic visions, brand and innovation and what comes first?

Executives spend a lot of time on strategic vision – answering questions such as who we are, what we do and what do we want to be when we grow up etc. Then they trying to figure what the brand really stands for. At the same time they also spend time on creating new products and service ideas? What usually happens next is now they struggle bringing the two together to use?

When people hear about vision, they think of it as something that guides the company into the future, and to succeed in the future requires innovation. And innovation is about building a powerful brand and create new market space for the future. While the value of having some kind of strategic vision is obvious, it should never be mistaken as strategy. Strategy is not only about vision, it is about strategic innovation. And brand should guide innovation. It is so easy to get confused.

Moving forward companies need to do two things differently.

1/ Reorient their brand people with the idea that brand needs to get beyond communications. My new book 60-Minute Brand Strategist shows readers step-by-step guide to build a brand from the core and its meanings to customer experience design. Brand Managers should not be stuck in the old world with old-school approach and brand-building model developed in the 80s and take on the roles as Brand Innovators. Every brand manager’s jobs should have two roles: managing brand business performance and managing brand innovation.

2/ Rethink what kind of people and skills that is needed to implement innovation. Implementation innovation is 10X harder is coming up with the ideas and it requires more than a product development person. They need to understand the different roles that they have already – and will need – on the team and each role’s importance in the ideation and activation stages. Idea Couture research on innovation practices shows that many business leaders still believe that innovation is a rare gift that exists mainly in creative people who are in leadership roles or gifted creatively. For example, just think of how often you hear people saying, “That’s why I get paid the big bucks because I am the big idea guy.” Such thinking is not healthy as it usually means that organizations are overlooking other, much better sources of potential innovation. An idea, even a big idea, is not the same as an innovation. Only when an idea is turned in to a product, a service or a business that creates new value can it be considered an innovation. Whether the innovative idea is radical, substitutive, incremental, or complementary, it still needs to fit into the stages of a value chain within an industry.

On another note, my book 60-min Brand Strategist is offically launched this month. It is available in Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other book stores. These are some pages taken from the book. It only takes you 60 minutes to read through it. I know you're busy. Share with me your thoughts.

Media Disruption Is Not Slowing Down. Mobile Is Now The Center Of A New Ecosystem.

The media business is not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel yet. When people asked me about my magazine and the economics of that, they were saying why am I in publishing business. Well that is not my core business, just a hobby. It has been almost three years since the first publication of MISC and readership is growing nicely. We're now in 28 countries and we have have the digital version. I am getting a lot of positive feedback from readers from all over the world. Perhaps I should make the next issue the thickest one. This is the first cover that was shot in Milan. And the next cover will be shot in Shanghai.

The media business is certainly not easy with the never-ending technological disruptions we are experiencing and new behaviors keep evolving, we are nowhere near the end of it. The word social media makes no sense anymore as it is already main stream doesn’t matter how you look at it. Many traditional media types continue to cling to an old way of doing things, based largely on making minor adaptation to existing approaches and some are relentlessly experimenting with finding new revenue stream, largely still through advertising or sponsorship.

There aren’t many new opportunities for business model innovation if you take a strategic view, people are still thinking about advertising or sponsorship. Yahoo and Google are the same. The hybrid model of readers’ empowerment and buttoned-down professional journalism is already fullyoptimized. Media executives are spending a lot of time thinking about the future of their industry and what it will look like in 2020. 

Five years ago everyone is thinking about the online model and suddenly the tablets came and changed everything. And what’s next? Multiple screens device, new interactivity through voice, gestures and more external data sources, and glasses and watches etc. No one knows how content discovery and consumption model will evolve given the abundance of choice consumers have today. Neutrality is probably not the best interest for the media industry.

Media business is still suffering from an identity crisis, at least for another decade. The business model will not change, we will still end up paying for content through transactional, subscription or advertising models although there will be more flexibility on how we purchase them. With every person with a smart phone also has a video camera that can turn them into amateur journalists, news will become real-time and shows us different views of any event. And contextual bits will be consistently updated and events unfold. The Twitters of the world are the instant updates and these short bursts will create more noises than news value and readers need someone to break them down into manageable pieces.

Audience now lives in a multi-screens world. They can choose between raw news and organized news. The three key drivers of mobile disruption are hyper-local (geolocation), integration with home appliances and digital payments. The three together can put mobile at the center of an entirely new ecosystem. It is not merely another form factor. It is the biggest leap forward since writing first arrived about 7,000 years ago, which only impacted a tiny percentage of our population. Word of mouth was the only “information system” for most of humanity and now that will be turbo-charged by mobile as it unlocks an incredibly deep desire and capacity among us (humans) to share personally relevant information and feelings such as “I am waking up happy to a sunny morning” etc. These personal information is competing for attention with other news. And for me, I'd rather be reading what my friends are saying than the news. CNN is depressing.

How Imagination Can Create The Future? Start With Those Old Comic Books and Sci-Fi VHS Tapes From The Flea Markets.

For centuries we show our human spirit with stories about our glories,hopes, desires and dreams for a better future, one filled with modern machines that enable us to do things we long to do from being invisible or traveling in flying cars or telepods (may be not telepods as I always worried that something would go missing during the transmission). These stories manifested itself in art, comics, fictions, movies and even science discoveries.

What was known as “futurism” is the artistic movement that began in Italy and Russia that fast-forward us to the future of the machine age into progressive state of mind. Futurism also championed speed, technology, science, youth and also a lot of uncertainties. It's mantra was that the answers to humankind’s problems lay in the future driven by technology – and not the past. The main literary work of the movement was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, and generally considered the beginning of Futurism. I still enjoy reading that once in a while.

To invent the futures that we desire, business and government leaders need to see things in new ways that trigger their imagination to dream of new possibilities. Many of them are too "stuck" in the present. That’s when Design Thinking comes into play. Design Thinking is not just about understanding  people's needs.  It can also be used to bring people's imagination to propel us into the future. To see the future, Design Thinkers are equipped to creating guidepost for developing strategic foresight. It is called Future Casting.

Future Casting is how people from the past thought of the future. I remember visiting an exhibition in Prague where artists from the former USSR were imagining how the future was like with its futuristic art of space vehicles. Those Russian Futurists were fascinated with the optimism, speed, and restlessness of modern machines and urban life. They were actually performing Future Casting for the public.

I grew up watching Thunderbird and Ultramen and as a boy and they were the only things that were available for me that I could use as a guidepost for imagination. Funny enough, Ironman is like an unfinished prototype based on Ultraman design with the same battery problem. Ultraman highlighted the bottleneck of all technologies decades ago which is the battery. From iPhone to the latest Boeing 787 we still have not solved the battery problem.

We have always tried to look into the future and try to figure out what comes next. Sometimes we create fictions, fantasies of what may come. Will some of these fictions ultimately become real? There is no scientific evidence for this, I suspect the percentage of fiction becomes real is way higher that some thought our research based predictions that never made it close to become real. These materials open a window into the past and in term a perspective of the future… how the future should have been or their fears of how they were afraid it would turn out.

The realities of tomorrow are the fictions of today. If you want to have good strategic foresights, don’t hire designers or futurists. Hire Sci-Fi writers! And pair them up with behavioral economists and anthropologists and you will get good foresights.

The latest issue of MISC The Gadget Issue which has a special design feature Project 2020 about the future of sex, social and beauty. There is also the main feature How New Technologies With The Power To Evolve, Disolve, Disrupt and Democratie Industy which is fun to read. MISC is now in bookstores in 26 countries. And you can get it from Amazon too.

3 Paths Towards A Creative Life. It's Not The "Aha" Moments Or Being Perfect.

You want to be more creative? Sometimes it is not about trying harder to act creative. I see a lot of people trying too hard. Sometimes it’s not just about giving one the space to be creative.  Sometimes it is just being strategic. And sometimes it means apply a healthy dosage of common sense. 

Strategic creativity is more valuable than creativity.  Not everyone needs to be “creative” the same way as other think you should be “creative”. It is not about ideas. It is an attitude. Everyone can live a creative life and be creative how he/she sees live. It seems that when creative people (artist) with certain carft try to solve a problem or achieve a certain end result, particularly when the goal is related to their craft or specialized skills, they have an advantage. But when the problem is too big for them, it takes strategic creativity on a more sophisticated level.

Creativity is in such demand today and it is not the years of schooling or what art schools you attend. The word “Creatives” is used in advertising world to describe those who work on creating advertising campaign or providing craft for production. People in these roles like to believe that they are more creative than others. It is not the case at all.

Creativity is not a job title, crafts, capability or skills. Creativity is state of mind, which you can use in everything you see and do. People should live a creative life rather being creative. By living a creative life and having that state of mind, one naturally becomes creative. Creative is independent of discipline, culture and tools.

So how do you live a creative life? Here are three specific ways that can help you to live a creative life.

1. Be Bipolar. A little madness yield great artists, designers, inventors and scientists. The evidence is growing for a significant link between bipolar disorder and creative temperament and achievements. Seeing the extremes of both sides of anything help you to understand the spectrum of choices and options.  Go to places you don’t normally go and use that space. It is not available for everyone.
2. Be Foolish. Be lazy. Everywhere people are telling you rules and the right ways to do things.  Be acting silly and even lazy can sometimes help you to see easy paths to complex problems. Agatha Christie wrote, “I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention . . . arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.”
3. Be Strategic. Most people see this as the opposite of creative. This is total rubbish. Being strategic can also be creative. And being strategic you need to be very creative. The best strategists are often most creative people who can apply creativity in the context of a specific problem. They don’t’ dress in a funny way or even trying to act like artists. They may wear suits and even a tie, but they could also be the super creative types.

Creativity is not just about “aha” moments or interesting ways to look at things. Creativity is about putting empathy to work. Creativity is not about perfection. Weisberg and Csikszentmihalyi both talked the importance of motivation in creative performance. A notion of Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow is that reaching peak performance is “autotelic”, meaning it is enjoyable for its own sake. So the ‘creative person’ is simply someone who enjoys creativity and therefore does it all the time, even with no reasons and gains nothing from it. Someone just want to be creative all the time. That's different from peope who are strategic in applying creativity. Nothing good of bad. Just two very diffferent creative types.

Creativity is not about opening new doors because something said creativity people have no doors and doors are for those without imagination.

I Am Not A Gadget! Or Am I Becoming One? How Close Are We From A Full Blown Computional Culture?

Sometimes I feel like I am a gadget. We all performing various specialist and general tasks everyday and somehow you feel each of these tasks are not related. And the worst part of our job is to perform something that is so tedius and doesn’t really require any creativity, analytic and imagination. And you wonder why this work cannot be done by a gadget. Or if I am doing the job, does it mean I am a gadget?

There are over 600,000+ personal pocket gadgets out there for whatever purposes and over 700,000 apps for iPhone 7000,000; Android and 99,500 Blackberrys to turn your smartphone into a gadget. There's an app for almost anything and someday my resume will look like my iPhone and people will look at how many apps I have to decide whether I qualify for that job.

Human is supposed to be good at problem solving. Or at least we think we are, I am not getting into that debate. There are differences between the different types of problem solving from pure creativity to system level thinking or analytical processing.  Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to constant calculation or recalculation. You need time for working privately as well as times for group ideation. Encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of self-testing that enables a quest for excellence.

The big question is will the proliferation of gadgets push us towards a more creative culture where our time is better spend on the creative side while our gadgets take care of the rest or in another scenario where these micro-computing machines (gadgets) will take over and we will be pushed towards a computational culture?

All these micro devices, bit data-warehouses and pervasive communication facilities are now omnipresent in our daily activities. The way we live, work, play, communicate and interact with each other is in permanent flux due to the influence of these cool gadgets. Historically speaking, technologies are developed as a result of the need for faster means of calculation to achieve the unachievable before the world emerging into a full-blown computational culture. Emerging in its modern form in the seventeenth century after the introduction of typography, that culture, it is here argued, remains dominant today.

Can future gadgets evolve to a point that they understand our feelings and not just commands and preferences? As part of our extended mind and heart and algorithm that can add feeling to an otherwise mathematical, non-physical, and consequently non-aesthetic, thought? This is the theme of the next issue of MISC for March. Look out for the big Gadget Issue.

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.

Have You Noticed The Emerging of Professional Visual Anthropology? Now You Can Be An Anthropologist Even If You Can't Read And Write!

I carry my camera (Leica) for 2 reasons. One is to capture pictures that remind me of what I've experienced or just something for inspiration and two is to share with others what I am doing. A picture can often tell a story better than a thousand words. Photography can capture the pure spirit and beauty of life, to tell a story to tangiblize humanity or to create a real (or fake) personality and to communicate an idea. I called it the practice of visual anthropology. Does it mean I am now an anthropologist?

Photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Dorothea Lange or Steve McCurry have made their names by using photography to help us see the lives of so many that we may never be exposed to. They are more than artistic expressions, they are creating social meanings and codifying our cultures through the use of photos. As Cartier-Bresson said, “Pictures, regardless of how they are created and recreated, are intended to be looked at. This brings to the forefront not the technology of imaging, which of course is important, but rather what we might call the eyenology (seeing).”

There are many known social scientists and anthropologists who focus on the social meaning of photography including Elizabeth Edwards, Pierre Bourdieu and Jay Ruby to name a few. This is still an emerging field but will continue to add a creative layer of analysis to many existing methodologies. Visual anthropology and ethnographic photography do not currently have a well-articulated theory or method but is an explicit theory even needed? In the beginning, the primary function of photography in anthropology was as an aide-de-memoire, like written field notes, photography served to help reconstitute events or aid in writing. Now we're all using Instagram.

This includes all aspects of our culture that are visible, from nonverbal communication, objects, light, texture, ritual, ceremonial performance, expressions and movement. The study of photography has been dominated and also limited by art historians.

The notion that visual anthropology is a means of scientific research may not be commonly accepted, the camera becomes the main visual anthropological tool. It helps many viewers to see things they would not normally be exposed to; it captures the scene around dialogue; and it depicts the mood and state of people in their natural context. The photos become “ethno displays” capturing moments of observation. There has always been a natural relationship between anthropology and photography - called it "anthrophotography" and I just invented a new term.

As Henri Cartier-Bresson said, “In photography, the smallest thing can become a big subject, an insignificant human detail can become a leitmotif. We see and we make seen as a witness to the world around us; the event, in its natural activity, generates an organic rhythm of forms.”

Visual anthropology can also be used in persona development, adding a tangible element to the identity of a customer. As the camera emulates the anthropological principles of participant observation it makes all things real. Events unfolding in front of the camera, reveal insights by showing – not telling – a specific truth about specific people. An important discipline to master as a photographer is not interfering with the subject; being there by trying not to be there.

When faced with a camera, a photographer will often get one of two very distinct reactions. One is interaction. The camera becomes the point of conversation and people respond by reacting – they come up to you and sometimes even pose for you. The other reaction, is people suddenly become aware of the camera, change their behavior or even retreat away from the interaction.

A point of debate is whether the anthropologist can separate their point of view from that of the camera. Can you capture and analyze? Can both perspectives exist during fieldwork? Each perspective brings different things to the forefront, and it is the combination of these perspectives that give shape to visual anthropology. With a camera, both the expected as well as the unexpected are captured. And it is with the unexpected that analysis becomes interesting. The rapid proliferation of visual media coupled with our already rich visual cultures expands the opportunity for visual anthropology immensely. As culture evolves in tandem with the technology of capturing culture, the field becomes an even richer place of study. Just look around at those who are taking photos of themselves using their iPhone.

Article first appeared in MISC Magazine speicial 'Insight' Issue.