innovation playground Idris Mootee

Leadership Without Consensus Is Great Leadership. Great Leadership Means Deciding On What Is Best For the Company. And Sticking With It.

Many times when people walk out of a meeting and look happy it is because they have achieved consensus and can now move forward. I always question if this is a sign of a good outcome or not. While having everyone on the same page and sharing the same vision is without question a good thing. But arriving on a strategic decision based on consensus may not.

So they say a good team worker knows how to get consensus. It is an overly simplistic way of management decisions making. The best teamwork and team leadership is not about getting quick consensus. 99% of the time consensus making is a time wasting exercise (much like those UN meetings) and is a false ideal that many young managers are trying to follow.

Consensus means using the lowest common denominator and is a sure way to achieve under-performance and mediocrity. More, it means poor leadership - you just reduced your leadership capacity to a facilitator and avoided doing the job that you're supposed to do - make decisions that you are capable of and justifiable.

It has been said that true consensus involves "meeting everyone’s or those with the needs." Consensus decision-making is intended to de-emphasize the role of factions and get stakeholders to arrive at a common acceptable solution. Because it seeks to minimize objection, it is great for large organizations so no one will be taking the full responsibility in the event of a bad outcome.

The goal for a CEO is never to seek an OK or acceptable solution for the organization. His/her job is not to please everyone. The job is to make the right decision considering all risks factors and possibilities. Consensus involves debate. It is fine to debate; it is fine to allow people to have a voice; it is also fine to ignore many of these requests; and it is fine to ignore them when there is no logic to support it. Today, if you wait for every last person to agree and add in their feedback, you competition will eat you. Or your great idea will be diluted into some incremental thing that takes 3 years to fully implement.

Consensus often means the status quo. It means not taking the threat lightly and deciding to stay the course, which is human nature. So, when people get together to discuss the possibility of doing something radically innovative, expect 80% of people will vote for avoiding making such changes. Those who push for the status quo will always gain better support because it is easily to show data to support it. Consensus brings people back to the middle where the majority approves but mediocrity reigns.

Consensus often means leaving unresolved conflict or issues and pretending it would go away. Consensus prevents tough conversations from happening and so one will upset anyone so the meeting can end quickly. It helps avoid facing the reality. Then they will talk after meeting. Consensus means forget the idea go big or go home. No one will bet their career on any crazy idea even though deep down in their hearts they like the idea. They are just managerially uncomfortable or incapable of making those bold decisions. They are trained for the opposite.

Good leadership is to make tough decisions and trade offs. Leadership is to know where a company is heading and make decisions that lead to the best results. Good leadership is not wasting too much time to get consensus. Good leadership is making a strategic decision and committing to it.

Random Thoughts On Maturing Companies and Start-Ups. When Do You Need A Reset?

In an interesting conversation with clients this week and discussions were around the question: “should companies plan for the distant future (10 years and beyond) and what is needed to get out of a death spiral where a slow death is in the making?”

There is a big difference between growing with age and growing old. With age, it sometimes comes with wisdom. With more than a dozen of C-suite execs that I have worked with or coached, for most of them, the wisdom came one day after they had passed the age of 50. Growing comes with age, which sometimes take away the energy and urge to make radical change. Ask yourself or your organization, the last 5 years your company or yourself should be referred to as a “growth experience” or “aging experience”.

A CEO’s job is to make sure the company is growing with experience” and not “aging with experience”. Company needs constant renewal, the leadership team is expected to generate enough energy to motivate the entire company. You need a strategy to energize and motivate. Not empty speech and propaganda video and banners. Time doesn’t mean we gain more experience. Reinvention, renewal and resetting are mantras for growing experiences. We shape what we become. When companies are stuck in a stagnant mode or worse in a downward spiral, it is because of the experience they have. Not because the new things that they try. They are usually too old (state of mind), conservative, naive and irrelevant and that managerial mindset is holding the company back for serious reinvention.

A look back at many failing leaders’ biggest attempts to bring their companies back for the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad products, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed uncommitted attempt to create and own a distinct market positioning. Most of the time, the product failed before they are being introduced. No one can do anything at that time. Think about the following:

• We have been very good in making this and we should be fine.
• We always do things this way. It is too risky for us to change.
• Let’s watch where the market is going first. We can wait.
• We need to do what Apple, Nike, Amazon and Starbucks do.
• We should hedge our bets and try different things too.
• Let’s give the market what they want and make sure we have a competitively cheaper offer.

If you do one or a few of the above, you will most likely be somewhere along the downward spiral. For companies to end the spiral of death, it takes more than cost-cutting and requires an orchestrated effort for everyone involved to imagine and see the possibility forward. It is about applying a practical future-oriented foresight to drive strategy and unleashing the company from legacy people, thinking and even management board. There is no place for the “old" in the world of constant resets.

Even If You See The End Is Coming. You Still Need A Strategy Out. It Is The Time To Think New Game.

Almost all companies at some point face some serious crisis. Sometimes it is clear that the end is near or coming and no can see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least not until you see it. Sometimes you know there is a way out but not sure how.Facing with disruptive changes driven by innovative technologies or shifting regulations, it is clear that the strategy is no longer working. You see the demand of your products is disappearing or new business models or low cost payers are eating your lunch. What do you do?

There is often a short window of opportunity to do something radically different; it has to be drastically different. Any incremental change or window dressing will push you closer to the end. If there’s a chance (there are always chances) of saving the company, make sure your executive team is focusing on three things. Read on.

For decades, I have been studying, observing, advising, and directing companies globally on their journeys to find growth, reignite growth, avoid decline, avoid death and reinvent themselves. Here are the three things you must pay attention to:

The first one is stop and think. Don't push the panic button. Go on a short vacation (go somewhere far) and find some time away from the madness and clear your mind. Think how to steer your organization’s course away from the one that got you into this mess in the first place. Don’t madly run around rearranging the decks chairs on a sinking ship. Find the source of problem and stop the leaking. Avoid hanging to the past, board of directors have different views and industry lifecycles are showing something different. The one thing for sure is what was working in the beginning would not work today and in times of uncertainty people go back to the past and hang on to something that once worked well.

Think what strategy will leapfrog you into the future. What business model options are there and what behavior will impact customer preference in the future. You need to think ahead more. Executive focus on rather short-term horizons due to public pressure in the case of public companies and forget about how important it is to create the future. They assume the same formula that gets them there in the first place can get them there to the future. Or they focus on internal politics and as a result cause inactions. The organizations are operating on old mental models and not recognizing that their business models have expired. They failed to reinvent their core and yet they have no clue on to how to invent the future. There are endless debates and power points but no action to invent the future.

The second one is to give your company a larger purpose. Don't underestimate the power of purpose. It needs to be big. It cannot be about you or customers, that’s not enough. What is your version of “making a dent in the universe?”

To keep people focused and inspired, give them something to work toward. We all need a reason to come to work (at least for the best people) and there is not a more important time to remind them. Otherwise they will leave. We all need a purpose; it is the only thing that people can hang on to through tough times. It is what makes the company resilient.

The third one is maintaining positive emotive energy. People are going to be worried, insecure, frustrated and even angry. You need to care about them and allow room for them to express it while making sure leadership radiates a sense of energy, not fear. Energy doesn’t come from empty words but a real sense of optimism backed by strategy and action.

A sound strategy to bring back the company is what forms the core of the energy and radiates them through open dialogue – not newsletter or email. Don’t drive these discussions underground and make sure all senior executives are available to talk with people. Open communication is important to maintain the trust.

All great companies go through very difficult times at some point and some even have near death experiences. They survive disruptions and even self-destruction in order for them to get to the next level. No companies are immune and anytime we think we are safe we are taking the first step on the path to decline. The concept of core competencies is an interesting idea. Whether the companies’ core competencies are giving products and services unique functionality or building a worldwide distribution, this could lead to a decision with companies avoiding to think "New Game." It provides logic for the strategy but also limiting strategic options. In the strategic making process, competencies need to go beyond the core. It is not a time to be academic. Strategy making is a dynamic exercise that allows you to see the whole system (industry) before you zoom into your value-creating activities.

When companies are on a path of rapid decline, and see the decline accelerating, they go into a panic mode and embark on multiple tactical measures that are not addressing the core problems. Being able to frame the core problems even under extreme pressure is critical and not putting 100% of your energy on things that doesn't matter. All the repeated unsuccessful tactical attempts will drain the company’s resources, human energy and customer confidence until they have no turning point. Maintaining the energy or Chi (Chi is a Chinese word meaning aliveness, life force energy or life breath) is vital for turnaround and it doesn’t matter if you have the right strategy, without the energy or Chi, you won’t be able to execute the strategy.

7 Important Business Lessons You Can Learn From a Bank Robbery

During a bank robbery in China, the bank robbers dressed in fake Hugo Boss fashion, carrying AK47s shouted to everyone as they rushed into a bank: "Everyone don't move. This is a robbery. The money belongs to the People. Your life belongs to you. Your designer handbag we will not take. We don’t take your IDs and we are not identity thefts, that’s not ethical at all. We will take only the money from the bank."

This is called “Staying Focus!”

The older robbers shouted “Don’t do any tricks. I know them because I used to work in a bank too. Just do as you are told.” One guys asked. “Which bank did you work for?”. He replied “The Sperm Bank. But we never had a robbery while I worked there.”

This is called “Domain Knowledge!”

Everyone in the bank got down on the floor. One woman was looking at her smartphone and noticed one of the robbers showed up on her Tinder app and shouted hey you look good and is that a real picture! The younger robber said, “We are only here to do work, not looking for a date. Perhaps after. Now I am busy?" The big brother yelled at him ”You should have turned that off!” And then everyone in the bank started looking at their smartphones.

This is called "Avoiding Distraction!”

Then one of the bank’s staff started asking the robbers. “What are you going to do with that much money? You guys should know investment is risky if you don’t know anything about it. You don’t want to risks your hard earned cash. We have different investment vehicles and the money can be placed in Switzerland and safe even if you got caught.”

This is called “Risks Management!”

When the bank robbers returned home, the younger robber told the older robber: "Big brother, let's count how much money we got" The older robber said: "Don’t bother, the news will tell us. Too much work and let them do the job. I'd rather spend the time look at stocks we want to buy with the money. The market is a good buy now.” The young robber said “Ah yes! Let them do the job!”

This is called “Opportunity Cost!”

Right after the robbers were gone, the bank manager held a meeting. But the supervisor said to him: "Shall we add the $10m that we have lend to our friends and families so we can write them off! Perfect timing.”

This is called “Opportunity Mapping!”

The next day, the TV news reported that $100 million was taken from the bank. The robbers counted and counted and counted, but they could only count $10 million. The robbers were upset: "We risked our lives and only took $10 million. The bank manager took $90 million without doing anything. That’s not fair. I guess that’s what happened when people understand business”

This was adapted from a joke I was told when traveling in China and dramatized.

In Algorithms We Trust. Do We?

Let's try to paint a likely not-too-distant future. In this future, everything around us will be managed by algorithms. They manage and recommend what we want to watch; they control traffic of our driver-less cars; they control those drones which deliver our pizza; predict for you which one of your friends will become your future spouse, etc. They will make our life effortless and predict what things will happen next or what's best for us. We all wish that it is that simple.

As we are picking up massive data every second, algorithms are critical to how we make sense of them and our reliance on algorithms is growing by the second. But how much faith should we put into those algorithms, and how reliable they are depends on who you talk to. The accuracy of the algorithmic differentiation (automatic differentiation) is key in dealing with data volatility in many complex cases where accuracy of data is critical to the final outcome. I don’t know when we can have statistical evidence comparing how often driverless cars mistakes and how often human drivers make mistakes or how well a software program investing in stocks makes mistakes and human making investment mistakes.

We need to develop programs to check whether algorithms are working as they were intended and monitoring algorithms by the results they produce based on machine performance metrics. Vetting algorithms in advance isn't practical at all as many are too complex for their outcome to be predicted. Algorithmic differentiation is used to fine tune algorithms that are complex to optimize. We will be placing our faith into the accuracy of these algorithms and trusting that they will deliver. I think we may be over-optimistic and mining a lot of data using statistical analysis still has a very strong random component to it. To optimize these models we need algorithmic differentiation and sometimes it feels like a scientific random number generator. The more data we have, the more simulation is needed and the more reliance on the significance of data, and significance means sensitivities. We’re in the midst of a transformation when industries are exploring how to use big data to create new business models.

There’s one certain thing in big data, it’s that all algorithms are not created equal. The biggest question is how many jobs will disappear when algorithms take over human jobs? People ask the same question during the first industrial revolution when machines started making goods a lot faster and cheaper. Are we entering a world in which the algorithms themselves will be competing with humans? Honestly, I just don't like it when algorithms make decisions for us. They can help me analyze my options and probabilities, but not making a decision until they prove that they can think smarter than me. And so the game begins…

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!

Let's Not Confuse Drawing Circles And Arrows With Real Sensemaking.

As everything is moving faster and less predictable as it seems while organizations struggling to understand what it means and what options to take and how to land on the right decisions at the right time.The results often are inactions or delayed repsonses that cost companies.

Both senior and middle managers’ job include understanding, interpreting and communicating options for executive decisions, both as change agents and advocates. The toolkit that they have is very limited. Sensemaking is a vital skill and a new managerial discipline that is lacking across many organizations and functional units. How do we define sensemaking? It is how we try to make sense of the world and associated challenges so we can see and act in it. It also carries the concept of sufficiency, which is whether we know enough about the interrelationships and dynamics of the scenarios (events, places, people etc.) to make a contextually appropriate decision.

The two main academic thinkers in the field are Karl Weick and Brenda Dervin both of their work are very user readable. Weick I think tends to apply a more normative and organizational approach while Dervin looks at individuals and communication. Karl Weick emphases the importance of “mapping.” It is not enough to collect a lot of data, as we do these days and it is often overwhelming for managers, what is really important is that we need to take that complexity and map it in a simple way that can be communicated and shared so that a team or an organization can have a shared view of what the environment is like right now. Make complexity communicable but yet not making it overly simple.

I have seen people drawing simple circles or big maps with arrows and boxes but fail to communicate anything except the situation is complex and end up comfusing themselves as well as others. So beware of those fancy arrows and boxes that are useless. Good mapping provide managers with the benefit of seeing what’s going on and comparing that with their mental models. Good decisions making depends heavily on good sensemaking that includes important cues and signals so managers and senior executives can have a bigger capacity to make sense of uncertainty and emerging behavior. It has always been a core part of our strategic design thinking toolkit and there is no shortage of demand from clients to learn that skills. 

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.

Diversity Is The Short Cut To Buidling An Innovative Culture. It Is Pretty Simple.

Sometimes I wonder how much progress we’ve actually made over the last 50 years. In Saudi Arabia, women are still not allowed to drive along with many other things. Today, a group of Saudi women have taken to the streets in their cars on a day of collective protest against the ban on female drivers. I am sure they will be getting threats of all kinds and if we’re talking about human rights let's start with this. There were about 17,000 people who signed a petition calling for women to be allowed to drive.

Still, many companies do not understand the importance and benefit of normalizing the workplace for LGBT beyond just offering workplace protection. Protection is one thing, but realizing the power of true diversity is another and creating a diverse, inclusive workforce where we can bring people from all backgrounds together produces a dynamic workplace and actually helps with innovation. Despite how open we think the world is, we’re still living in a very conservative world while technologies are racing us forward and bringing more open-mindedness and thereby widening the gap. Innovation is the core of organization competitiveness and gone are the days when corporations had their workforce that looked the same, trained the same, dressed the same, worked the same, spoke the same language and was predominantly of the same gender (usually male) and lifestyle. No wonder it is hard for them to innovate.

Any homogeneous corporations will not survive the shock that organizations are experiencing. The most basic not-so-secret formula for building an innovation culture is pretty simple - embrace diversity and start to attract, retain and promote a diverse workforce that looks differently, works differently, dress differently, speaks differently and is inclusive of the full spectrum of human sexual orientation and gender identities. Do this before you start hiring consultants and rethinking your innovation process, there is no process that works without true diversity.

In fact, there is a very close correlation between diversity and innovation. Senior executives and employees alike are recognizing that a diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds is crucial to innovation and the development of new ideas in and outside the workplace. All great companies of the future embrace true diversity, not just a policy to satisfy the public, but truly and deeply believe that diversity is the key for the future and the survival of organizations. When Tim Cook stepped into the role of Apple CEO in Aug 2011, the appointment earned him the unofficial title of “the most powerful gay executive in the world.” That move alone convinced me Apple gets it.

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices” ― Henry David Thoreau. I don't thing we are working hard enough. Perhaps someone should design an app to deal with prejudices.

What Do You Want A Smart Watch To Do For You? Or Do You Really Need One?

So you’ve bought yourself a Pebble and you're showing off to your friends. May be you’re even one of those thousands of people who crowd funded them for over $10m in pre-orders last year. In that case you will be among the first to receive $150 slim devices that you can read e-mail, text and Facebook messages that sent from your Smartphone.  I really can’t think of a good reason to get one.

I’ve seen dozens of different smart watches and most of them are cool at a glance, but very limited in function and I can’t see them becoming mainstream. There are others playing the game including Apple’s iWatch, ConnecteDevice (Cookoo watch), I’m Watch, and Sony’s SmartWatch and many others. I’m pretty sure, though, that people saying smart watches will replace smart phones at some point are way too optimistic, it is hard to predict the technology dynamics and how our behavior will evolve, but I am quite confident that it won't be a watch. Sorry Apple.

Apple probably have over 150 engineers and designers working on the development and hopefully to bring something to the market in 12-16 months. It will be the first post-Jobs product/platform and everyone is watching. People will buy because it is an Apple, but can it sustain itself and becoming a success is indeed a big question? I don’t like the watch idea for a number of reasons. First it is purely a novelty and too gimmicky. It is a totally new behavior to read text messages or email from your watch and no reason I need to alter my current behavior. Ok it has a touch screen, big deal. My smartphone is just fine. The smartwatch is at best a niche category.

Any innovation needs to anchor on unmet needs, not cool technology. Apple needs to decide what problem it is trying to solve. It might need to switch to a new interaction paradigm to see the opportunity differently. Apple is too stuck with the world of Apple. I believe there’s no stopping the trend of wearables and but don’t expect to see a clear winner anytime soon. The market potential is huge.

While analysts are expecting people to purchase about 15 million wearable devices this year and growing year after year, but they can’t tell you what that device looks like. We need to examine different adoption barriers and drivers that impact how wearables could bring along next platform wars. It goes beyond sensor and interactions into voice play. Mobile voice recognition, one of the thousands of artificial-intelligence applications, could reach one billion in 2017 from $73 million today, according to ABI Research. AT&T has devoted more than 1 million hours of research to develop AmI technology that can convert speech into text, and deliver responses to spoken questions. The future is exciting. And the future is here. And the future is unknown.

Idea Couture Is Ready To Take Innovation And Design Thinking To The Next Level.

This has been a very tough two months for me in terms of time and I have not been spending much time writing my blog as much as I used to. It is getting a bit difficult to find the time as we were going through a reorganization, adding new offices, putting new management system in place and at the same time trying to finish my two books on the weekends which will be published in May and Oct this year.

I am excited about my new Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation book that I hope to fill a gap in the market place. And management of the company is taking more and more of my time. So the time I can afford to touch projects is shrinking, I think I only spend 25-30% on projects these days instead of 40%. And people think I spend a lot of time on my MISC magazine, the reality is it is less than 2% of my time. I have a great team helping me with that. I only pick the theme, cover girl and the designs.

We have always designed Idea Couture to be a company that is agile, high style and deserve great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because we want style, speed and substance. Not everyone can make it. I remember someone said something like "Out of difficulties and impossibilities grow miracles." Perhaps we’re naïve. Idea Couture is not a place for small thinkers or people with big egos. It is place for people who believe in being AWESOME and won’t spend time fighting for excuses.

I take pride of seeing people that I mentor growing everyday. We’ve come a long way since launching what we called an innovation firm – whatever that means. It is not a design firm with MBAs; or management consulting firms with some designers or digital agencies calling themselves innovation agencies. We are built from the ground up to do what we’re supposed to do – we work with organizations to uncover innovative ideas that sustainably grow market share or create new markets through powerful customer experiences innovation. We are close to the completion of our reorganization and I am very excited to wait for more new people joining us every week.

Our technology team is amazing and we’re now adapting new methodologies so we can deliver better and faster cross-platform solutions. Our strategy team is growing and growing and have so much untapped potential (unsolicited resumes are flying in dozens everyday).

Our design team is world class and I personally make sure they will remain the best all the time. They not only produce great work, but also open minded and egoless, and fun. At Idea Couture, design is at our very core, not the surface. Design here is under transformation and it is not done within a studio, it is done in the real world in future tense. Design is where technology and art breakeven and where love and logic intersects.

Our insight team is AWESOME with all capital and it is our intellectual powerhouse. When the company advanced forward to a new stage, our foresight capability was not meeting the standard that I required both in terms of strategic knowledge and professionalism. So we needed a full upgrade. Now we have a new global team and a plan to fully integrate that into our innovation process.

We have no time for amateurism. People are committed to giving their best. We just launched our idea couture culture page, which is my personal most favorite part of our site that best represents us. It shows us who we are as individuals which really what this company is all about. People are here for a reason, not for a job. They find their best and it is our job to bring out their bests. It is not always easy. It is how they find meanings. There is a strong correlation between job satisfaction and meaning.

We refuse to act like a "grown-up" company; however at times the company and will always want to think we’re small even though we have 6 offices around the world.

We refuse to act like a “think tank" as we don’t just think, we do.We don't just produce report, we ation on them. We use visual output for sensemaking and mobilizing change that increases organization adaptability and agility.

We refuse to act like we "know it all" but we believe we are equipped to find the best available solutions.

We refuse to accept any "best practices" as we are the one who invent “next practices”.

We refuse to accept that “amateur foresights” is better than no foresights. Actually it is better to have no foresights than wasting time on amateur futurists.

We refuse to accept that "ideas are everything", in fact ideas don’t worth much. They are cheap. There are no shortage of people with ideas and can never execute anything. The art of jump starting innovation is strategic commitment and it is more valuable because nothing happens until someone do something.

We refuse to accept people with "big egos", it is simply not part of our culture. But there is one nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk and think about other people at all.

Idea Couture is a working prototype and will remain a working prototype in time to come.

Preparing For The End Of The World.

Today is supposedly the last day for all of us - the end of the world. The silly story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but then moved to Dec 21, 2012. It is estimated that 15% of our population is buying this story. I guess even it doesn't happen there is always an opportunity for an extension and the same 15% people will believe there is the next date.

If you really believe in this, you should attend the End of the World Party at Village Underground. It is the perfect doomsday event with less eating and more drinking and dancing. No one will exchange phone numbers as there is no point for obvious reasons. There’ll be live DJs, great music, a Last Wish room and a countdown so you can keep track of your impending finale. Tickets will cost £4 and make sure you use credit card.

Idea Couture hosted our Christmas party a day before the end of the world just in case it happens people will still have time to post their photos on Facebook to share with friends. The fact is that the Mayans never predicted the end of the world and people don’t know they more than 20 calendars and this one finishes a cycle of 5,200 years and the new one begins on Saturday. So technically speaking Saturday is a good day for personal reinvention as it is the start of another new cycle. 

In case if you believe there is a chance the world will end, this is what I think you should do:

Update your Facebook - In case Facebook databank will be recovered a few hundred years later, make sure you’ve a chance to say what you want to say and make sure your legacy includes good looking photos.

FInd a ticket to get out - Who knows someone will offer some last minute seat on a flight to leave earth if you have the cash. It won’t be on Expedia but you can try Groupon. They take cash only.

Drink the best wine - If you have saved that bottle of 2004 Block 42, this is the time to drink it. Share it with someone special.

Watch your favorite movie - Check out your library of DVDs and pick one that you wanted to watch again. Enjoy your last movie.

Call Visa/Master?Amex to cancel all your credit cards - Because you won’t need it.

Text those special people and tell them you love or hate them - Family, friends, lovers, employers, mentors: Whomever you have in your life, text them.

If the world does end, it is probably not December, and I love how it's December and no one even cares about the end of the world anymore. I'd better to back to writing my strategy plan for 2013, if the world doesn’t end in the next 6 hours, I have a PPT deliverable.

Smart Phone And Health Impact Warning? It Could Take Decades To Fully Understand The Risks.

There were been suggestions for years about health risks regarding using mobile phones. The city of San Francisco is legislating retailers to give outhealth warning material. CTIA attorney is fighting back asking the judge to freeze city ordinance requiring phone retailers to disclose possible health risks. The city stands by its law and believes people should be educated about ways to reduce risk.

The law was adopted two years ago and retailers need to inform mobile buyers the risks. Due to the rise of smart phone adoption in our everyday lives, there have been several questions posed on the safety as a result of radiation as well as heat. Mobile phones use electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range and people believe that this may be harmful to the health of human beings. There are large bodies of research involve both epidemiological and experimental and both on humans and non-humans but no definitive conclusions.

Back to the ordinacne, funny they call it a fact sheet. Is it really a fact? Not until we can prove someone die from radiation as a result of talking too much on your cell phone, can you make that claim now? We are used to health warnings that may not be truthful but of good intent, on the other hand it is hard to have definitive evidence and often scientific studies can prove either way. It could take decades for us to understand whether the risks are real or not.

Lawyers gave an example from Starbucks, which has to post a warning since a chemical produced in the coffee-making process is known to cause cancer. If we use this standard, we will be getting 100 “fact sheets” a day from drinking, eating, reading and simply walking into a store or getting into a car. May be someone can develop an app for that; there’s the unmet needs. The other innovation opportunity is for a low radiation and shielded smart phone, Motorola, Samsung, Blackberry, Nokia.. anyone interested?

I think we get more harm from watching TVs, it is the number 3 activity following sleep and work. According to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers, prolonged TV viewing was associated with increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. The study first appeared in the June 15, 2011, edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. I think this conclusion has a lot more merits. I think all TV programs should have a health warning including physical and mental health implications. I think many programs can reduce our ability to think if you know what I mean.

Another innovation opportunity is to have breaker to limit how each individual spend in front of a smart TV. And it will point you to the gym once you’ve spent more that you are allowed and will monitor your exercise through your iPhone. Isn’t this a cool idea? Need to go to sleep. 5am tomorrow heading to the airport.

It Is Time For India To Think Big And Stop Their Obessions With Jugaad. What They Need Is Bigger Asipirations And Design Thinking Competencies.

I wrote a blog post about two years ago titled “Is the Age of ‘Indovation’ and ‘Chinovation’ Becoming Real?” and it was very popular piece and I’ve got a few publications calling me including Knowledge@Wharton and others seeking out my point-of-view. Two years later and I am writing this post in India and will be in China next week, perhaps it is time for an update.

Let’s start with the question around innovation in India and is it really happening? Or happening enough? Well the answer varies depending who you talk and what industry sectors you’re referring to.  For the Indian pharma industry, it is not without trying but there were no commercial or very little success so far. For the auto industry, there are moderate successes but I won’t call it breakthrough innovation. For IT mainly software, there are hardly any effort and it is not because of there’s a lack of money or talent. These tech companies understand the risks and it is easier to just write codes and make money. 

Was this due to a lack of aspiration, unwilling to commit or was it due to the lack of ability to execute successfully?  In my opinion, India doesn’t really get innovation and seriously lacking robust innovation capability. And I don’t mean R&D. Their world-class engineering capability was not put to use solving problems that yet to exists – unknown and unmet needs of customers. 

They need to stop thinking innovating only at the bottom of the pyramid but start to build aspiration for innovation for bigger ideas.  Instead of engineering down products to fit the needs of the limited buying power constrained mass markets, they need to start thinking engineering up for products that shape industries in the developed markets.

India needs to develop high value industries and actively transform itself from a low-cost software and outsourcing economy to global innovation test bed. How can India learn to overcome the fear of failure? And how do they move away from thinking small hoping it will grow big?

Conversations about innovation in India with anyone always start with jugaad. Jugaad is a Hindi word that loosely translates as "the gutsy art of overcoming harsh constraints by designing an effective solution using limited resources." For them, Jugaad is an antidote to the extreme complexity of Indian societies: a country with pervasive scarcity of resources and infrastructure and good policy. Over the years it has developed a way to fixing things that are broken and mashing up different products for different usage.

Jugaad is not unique to India and they should stop putting that at the core of innovation for India. The future of innovation in India is solving bigger global problems. India can help the world to search for new solutions that do more with less for more. That is to say, they should provide more value using less energy, material, effort or time, and serve more consumers.

To be fair, it’s not just the Indian companies that are grappling with this issue. Companies in UK, US, Canada, Finland, Japan and Korea all grappling with this. Every country has a different need for innovation and needs a different strategy for innovation and not everyone needs to look at frugal engineering. Some have a steeper climb in brining design into the engineering process. By bringing together different sectors of society to think and talk about innovation in a structured manner, India can bring about a new and higher threshold for innovation thinking and practice.