Collaborative Thinking

A Culture Of Ownership

Interesting read... point to ponder: "We have learned repeatedly that there is a pattern in the actions and activities involved in developing strong and adaptive ownership cultures. When an organization consistently builds and reinforces such a culture, it creates a competitive edge that is hard to replicate."

10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture — HBS Working Knowledge

Editor's Note: Why is it that many of the same companies appear repeatedly on lists of the best places to work, the best providers of customer service, and the most profitable in their industries? In their new book, The Ownership Quotient, HBS professors Jim Heskett and Earl Sasser and coauthor Joe Wheeler assert the answer lies in recognizing that strong, adaptive cultures can foster innovation, productivity, and a sense of ownership among employees and customers. They also outlast any individual charismatic leader.

But how can you as a manager create and nurture that special culture? In the following excerpt, the authors outline the top 10 lessons of the best practitioners, from ING Direct to Build-A-Bear Workshop to Harrah's Entertainment.

10 Reasons to Design a Better Corporate Culture — HBS Working Knowledge

Efficiency vs. Exploration

FYI, I enjoyed reading the article:

Wellsprings of Creation: Perturbation and the Paradox of the Highly Disciplined Organization — HBS Working Knowledge

Executive Summary:

Many organizations struggle to balance the conflicting demands of efficiency and innovation. Organizations can become more efficient in the short run by replacing costly, unpredictable problem solving activity with consistent, streamlined routines. However, this efficiency often comes at the cost of long-run adaptability. The more organizational activity is dominated by stable routines, the less the organization learns, and the more rigid and inflexible it becomes. To escape this fate, the authors of this working paper theorize that highly disciplined organizations must actively engage in strategic and selective perturbation of established routines. A perturbation interrupts an established routine and creates an opportunity to innovate and learn. Using illustrations from Toyota, the authors investigate the conditions under which perturbations can sustain exploration in highly disciplined organizations. Key concepts include:

• To sustain adaptability in the long term, perturbations must occur throughout the organization.
• In highly disciplined organizations, adaptability depends on the active participation of organization members in inducing and interpreting perturbations.
• Management must trust employees to perturb processes, teach them to detect and interpret perturbations, and motivate them to do so.
• In the long term, business success depends as much on the commitment and knowledge of frontline employees as on strategic decision-making by senior management.

Wellsprings of Creation: Perturbation and the Paradox of the Highly Disciplined Organization — HBS Working Knowledge

Innovation: Notes From The Field

Some good insight on innovation (which includes reference to a book on the same topic) from a CEO that is often cited as one of the leading example of how to lead such efforts (A. G. Lafley, Procter & Gamble):

Changing the Game With Innovations - Interview - NYTimes.com

Q. You’re putting a lot of emphasis on outside voices. What about internal innovation?

A. The first thing we did was open the internal innovation architecture. We worked on getting engineers and biochemists to work with marketing, and we got people from our different businesses to work with each other.

Each of our businesses used to do its own research. But our core technologies span businesses. We can manipulate surfaces, for example, be they kitchen counters or blouses or hair.

Gil Cloyd, our chief technology officer, and I have set up what we call communities of practice. These are networks of nanotechnologists, of biochemists, of people who specialize in packaging, and who work for all the businesses. And we have regular innovation reviews, where we move ideas and best practices around our 22 businesses.

Q. And yet only half of your product innovations succeed. Why isn’t the rate higher?

A. I don’t really want it to be. Human nature is such that, if we push our people to drive the batting average up, they’ll try to hit more safely, take a shorter swing, go for the singles instead of home runs.

But we try to set milestones that innovations must meet at every step along the development process. As soon as they miss one, we allocate the resources to another product moving through the funnel. That’s another difference from the old days, when P.& G. let bad ideas go too far.

Saturday Interview - Changing the Game With Innovations - Interview - NYTimes.com

Talent Management: Create An Environment, Not An Edict

Worth visiting the site where there is a transcript, audio and video session available:

Ask any CEO or senior level executive what his or her biggest challenge is, and the answer is almost always finding and keeping good people. Yet most executives fail to manage their company's needs in a way that recognizes the unpredictability of the global marketplace. In a book titled, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty, Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, proposes a new approach to this issue based on applying the principles of supply chain management to people. He and Joyce Bradley -- senior vice president and general manager, Delaware Valley region, of Lee Hecht Harrison, a global human capital consulting firm headquartered in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. -- spoke with Knowledge@Wharton about talent management, including the challenges of managing employees in a recessionary economy. An edited transcript of the interview follows.

The Talent Hunt: Getting the People You Need, When You Need Them - Knowledge@Wharton

A glimpse inside Google's secret sauce

Worth reading... including the links to related articles.

Naveen Viswanatha, lead sales engineer for Google Enterprise, gave a presentation on Tuesday as part of a webinar entitled "Innovation @ Google: a Day in the Life" hosted by KMWorld.

Brian Ussery, a technologist at an interactive marketing agency who moderates a Google forum on SearchEngineWatch.com, wrote a recap of the talk on his blog and has made the presentation available in PDF form.

The gist of the presentation is that Google's flat management structure fosters innovation and good ideas get percolating faster with Web-based apps that allow engineers to find information and collaborate.

However, the real meat is in the screen shots. Marked "confidential" and "proprietary," they are so detailed I feel like I'm seeing something I shouldn't. (In a comment on Google Blogoscoped, which posted some screenshots and other information from the presentation, Ussery explains: "This isn't a leaked document, the webcast encouraged sharing and provided the pdf.")

A glimpse inside Google's secret sauce | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

Organizational Effectiveness

Came across my feeds, several interesting points:

IBM CIO Interaction Channel

The new collaboration: Enabling innovation, changing the workplace

While companies see the value of innovation, they frequently fail to put the right tools in place to support those goals. The new collaboration will be built on technologies that enable easy knowledge sharing outside the firewall.

Achieving tangible business benefits with social computing

By collecting and sharing the knowledge scattered throughout departments, companies can better leverage this collective intelligence within the enterprise.

People and innovation: Getting ideas on the table

Many organizations find it difficult to engage their people in the innovation process. Where should they start?

IBM - CIO Interaction Channel - Organizational Effectiveness - Research and insights

Innovation Has Its Own Personality

An article well-worth reading (via Endless Innovation). While the article focus is on architectural design, there are several key points (see below) worth remember and translating into your own organizational context:

A firm’s culture, as succinctly characterized by Jean Valence, Hon. AIA, principal and director of strategic development at Symmes Maini & McKee Associates, Cambridge, Massachusetts, “encompasses its history and accomplishments, its leaders’ ambitions and goals, its definition of and criteria for excellence, its attitude about clients and staff, its traditions and lore, its mood and energy, and its balance between art and business.” In other words, a firm’s values describe its culture, and the subcultural components such as those promoting innovation, continuing education, communication, and so on, impart a distinct personality.

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This is an extreme approach to fostering innovation in an otherwise relatively static office environment that was proposed by Robert I. Sutton. Writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, Sutton argued that fresh perspectives derive from mavericks with wildly diverse backgrounds and no preconceptions who challenge the status quo, champion their own ideas, and illuminate the metaphorical darkness.

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The notion of a council of experts made up of senior members of a practice, as a resource that contributes to a learning environment through mentoring, supporting teams and individuals with new ideas, and sharing best practices, is a powerful cultural attribute.

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Applying cross-disciplinary knowledge to help creatively solve architectural problems—and broaden perspectives—is a time-honored strategy.

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Reorganizing staff can fuel new approaches to engaging everyday problems.

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If you’re successful, you’re in jeopardy of becoming complacent. So get out of your corner office, fail often, argue respectfully with coworkers, adopt a learning culture, don’t accept anything at face value, and start to innovate.

Creating a firm culture that supports innovative design | Practice Matters | Architectural Record

Connectivity Scorecard

Innovation work commissioned by Nokia Siemens Networks. The press release provides some background context (deficiencies in the use of communications technologies). You can download the PDF version of the reports by visiting the site (just click on the citation link below):

New measures provide more comprehensive results on ICT usage

Unlike other research available, the Connectivity Scorecard measures usage and skills such as literacy, the use of enterprise software and the accessibility of women to ICT. It also articulates the benefits of connectivity explicitly in terms of economic and social contributions taking into account varying needs in different countries.

Different economies have different needs

Economic growth of innovation driven economies depends on new ways of using connectivity, whereas for efficiency and resource driven economies social development plays an important role in getting the most from connectivity investments.

The study shows that even the world’s best connected countries such as the Unites States and Sweden are not exploiting communications technologies to their fullest potential. Given the room for improvement on multiple measures of connectivity, there is every reason to believe that the worldwide gain from improving connectivity could be significantly higher.

Connectivity Scorecard

Framing Contests: Putting Decisions In Context

Read the full article for additional insight:

Kaplan's analysis of the "Last Mile" initiative reinforces some specific conclusions about framing practices:

• People have a number of frames to draw upon, built up through past experiences across multiple contexts. These frames shape how they see a situation and what strategies they think a company should pursue.

• Just as actors have a repertoire of frames, they have "multiple, sometimes conflicting, interests, only some of which [in the CommCorp example] were relevant in a particular decision context. Some interests were tangible, such as getting a promotion or preserving one's job. Other interests were intangible, such as being seen as an expert, gaining peer recognition or working on 'cool projects.' Other interests had a collective aspect, such as a chance to contribute to the project team or support one's own functional group," Kaplan writes.

• Where frames about a decision don't align within the organization, actors engage in framing practices to increase the resonance of their own frames and mobilize action in a desired direction. Those actors who most skillfully engage in these practices will shape the frame which prevails. Therefore, frames shape strategic choices -- not in a deterministic fashion but rather in one mediated by organizational framing contests.

• When framing activities are successful, interests can shift, and new coalitions can form. "Coalitions are built around powerful frames (ones which resonate broadly), and powerful coalitions can shape policy," Kaplan notes.

'Framing Contests': When Companies Face Uncertainty, Internal Wrangling Can Lead the Way - Knowledge@Wharton

Making Innovation Strategy Succeed

The topic of innovation continues to garner much attention on all fronts. Some key quotes from the interview:

"...we set out to perform a robust test of the relationship between R&D spending and corporate success and found no statistically significant connection"

"Innovation and new technology are not the same thing. New technology may be a technical advance, but it’s not a real business innovation unless it drives significant new revenue streams."

"...the more tightly aligned innovation strategy is with business, the higher the performance in terms of operating income growth, shareholder return, and so forth."

"...the more companies depend on directly generated customer insight to design their innovation efforts, the higher the level of financial success."

"...every company should have a robust portfolio management process and a process for gathering customer insight."

Here's the interview and a link to the report (which might require registration):

Making Innovation Strategy Succeed
by Amy Bernstein
1/08/08
Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President Barry Jaruzelski discusses the process and findings of the annual Global Innovation 1000 study.

Innovation is a perennial hot topic in business, widely viewed as the key to corporate success. But how closely connected is R&D spending to performance? That is the question behind the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000, a yearly examination of the relationship between R&D investment and corporate success at the world’s 1,000 largest R&D spenders. Since the study’s inception in early 2005, Barry Jaruzelski, a vice president with Booz Allen in New York, has taken a lead role in it. He sat down with strategy+business in December 2007 to discuss his view of the research, including which findings most surprised him.

Making Innovation Strategy Succeed