Tag: "innovation environments"

Metrics: Measure your productivity

Most executives believe that innovation will enable their company to stand out in the marketplace, especially in this economy. Yet, executives do not develop the strategies and execute the follow through necessary to create their innovation environment.

How do you measure that innovation has been optimized? Especially for use as a performance assessment tool? It is not as simple as the perecentage of sales from products introduced within the last five years. Each industry has its on uptake pattern for new products and each category of product has its own lifecycle.

Decisions on product development to proceed to market is based on getting the right information to the right persons at the right time. Optimum information flow requires open communication. One or two key metrics will provide focus, and other metrics help to define other areas that need help.

Using sports as an analogy, the final score of the game is what really matters as the focal point to measure performance, whereas other metrics can be used to illuminate areas needing improvement. In other situations, the obvious problems will arise without the use of metrics.

Clearly,innovation must be driven from the top executive on down throughout the organization. Where do you start? Start in a small part of the organization, assess, fine tune, and modify to optimize for the whole organization.

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Sep 04, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Setting the Example as a Leader

What are the qualities of being a leader? Let’s get to the point: be tactically and technically proficient:
- Know yourself and seek self-improvement, making sound and timely decisions
- Know your colleagues and look out for their welfare, keeping them informed
- Ensure the task is understood, supervised and accomplished
- Train your colleagues as a team, in accordance with their capabilities
- Develop a sense of responsibility in your colleagues
- Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions

People are diverse in their interests, talents and skills, and this diversity fuels the success of the team, and in turn, your success. It is key that a leader creates momentum in the organization and engage the people to understand simply what good looks like and create an environment where they feel empowered to really contribute you need to know and be able to deliver operational performance/results and have to have a certain knowledge to be able to credibly lead and drive improvements. In the words of the psychologist, Carl Jung: “we should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy” (Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation, p. 628, 1921). Albert Einstein said something with similar meaning: “the search and striving for truth and knowledge is one of the highest of man’s qualities – though often, the pride is most loudly voiced by those who strive the least. And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader. This characteristic is reflected in the qualities of its priests, the intellectuals. The intellect has a sharp eye for methods and tools, but is blind to ends and values. So it is no wonder that this fatal blindness is handed on from old to young and today involves a whole generation” (excerpted from: The Goal of Human Existence, November 4, 1943).

The power of balancing one’s technical and people skills, allowing a diversity of thought, backgrounds, and productive behavior drives a sustainable innovation culture. Applying these qualities and behaviors to the innovation environment and using the technical and people skills leads to a sustainable innovation environment. These qualities help the innovation environment develop as one develops their internal and external innovation networks.

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Jul 21, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership and Management of Innovation Environments

Bridge Over Snake RiverLeadership and management are often confused and used interchangeably by many executives. Both involve such an overlap of activities in many situations. Leadership is viewed as the soft stuff needed to build and maintain teams and to motivate everyone to follow the strategic plan, the outcome of management activity. From my experience leadership and management represents a continuum of actions and thinking that are interfaced and interactive. Without a strategic plan to follow and people motivated to follow it, an innovation environment will flounder and stagnate.

To me it all centers around treating people as unique individuals. People tend to think first as individuals, speak often with self-interest in mind, react like people, behave like people, and they change (as people) and only if they decide to change. In my experience as a research executive and a management consultant, leaders who treat people as unique individuals create collaborative successes, they build successful teams, they continually act with integrity, and they build sustainable, innovative platforms to meet the strategic plan of the organization. They need to bridge the gap between leadership and management skills and apply to the situation as needed.

Many executives need to develop their exterior focus on other people. Many are still challenged by their own ability to be introspective, they need to be challenged to evaluate how they think, especially their own behavioral patterns, how they react to certain triggers, learn about their own fears, how they see people, and how they communicate and come across in general. A leader needs to have a great level of self awareness, before even being able to start effectively dealing with other people.

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Jul 06, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Outsourcing Innovation for Greater ROI

Large companies appear to have all of the skill sets necessary to sustain innovation, yet appearance can be deceiving–one cannot valuate what they cannot measure, lost opportunities. Companies have begun to outsource innovation (a.k.a. open innovation) to maximize their opportunities, yet it is important to minimize transaction costs of administering projects, whether outsourced or not. In fact, streamlining R&D processes including outsourcing can provide returns of up to 10 to 85 cents on every dollar of R&D expenditure.

As one develops their cast of headshops and other outsource partnerships, one needs to balance their internal and external resources of skill sets, experience base, and congregate their core competencies to satisfy the need of the corporate strategic plan. Once the system is established, one needs to establish leadership practices to ensure sustainable management of these resources.

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Jun 28, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Balance in Innovation Leadership

Balanced Rock June 2009

Balanced Rock June 2009

Most talk about leadership in the innnovation environment of getting things done and delivering. But how does one develop a “shop” that provides sustained output over time? Like Microsoft, Toyota, Sony and the like, developing an environment that fosters balance contributes to sustainable innovation. Balance between elements of personality temperaments and behavior work along many axes: science vs. art, turfiness vs. facilitating communication, speed to market vs. total solutuion, reactionary vs. pro-activity, and spontaneous creativity vs. disciplined advancing approaches. Balance often takes place without much engineering from management when team members originate from diverse backgrounds–one of the gifts of diversity. As the Eastern philosophy of yin-yang (i.e., the oscillating balance of opposites), leading innovation environments into sustainability often requires balancing changing and opposing forces and characteristics.

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Jun 20, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Aligning Your Stakeholders to Maximize Competitiveness

DSC01758Leadership is often not about the leader but about those surrounding the leader.

Balancing the needs of your stakeholders with those of the greater organization can streamline your innovation process to make your organization more competitive. How does one assess their own str

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May 26, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leading Teams to Sustainability

Were you ever a member of a team that did not work?  Were you part of the problem because you provoked or avoided conflict within the team?

Teams are constructed to provide deliverables of value to the greater organization.  They can be based on a project, product, or administer a department.  Many of us understand through our experience that the leader is ultimately responsible for the outcome of a team, yet it is the membership that should be called on to guarantee the success of the team (as in the analogy of all hands needed to keep a ship afloat). 

Establishing a team with a defined scope and purpose is a major key determinant of success.  Getting the right members on the right seats of the bus is another determinant.  Most often in practice, it is the leader who sets the direction and membership, and that direction is modified by inputs of team members.  These modifications help build cohesiveness and alignment within the team. 

However, alignment of direction should not be confused with a diversity of viewpoints.  The healthiest and most sustainable teams possess disruptive opinions that challenge ideas and viewpoints when discussed in a constructive manner.  It is the responsibility of the leader to reign in “constructive disruption”  to maintain progress toward team goals.  Sometimes, an outside influence, an HR person or team coach, is helpful to monitor team progress and to help the leader with membership and progress. 

These determinants of alignment and constructive disruption help build and maintain sustainable teams with value-added deliverables.

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May 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership Styles in Technical Environments

Wild MustangsMany technical environments are traditionally heirarchical in nature, so in many R&D organizations leadership styles are often the outcome of lord-serf relationships. This situation is an archetype of the academic environment from which so many technical professionals emanate. This leadership style fits well within the heirarchical corporate culture, yet how does one adapt their style to other types of cultures, namely, the market, clan, and adhocracy cultures.

Short answer: flexibility is the trait one needs best to adapt and align with other stakeholders notwithstanding the type of corporate culture, like the approach taken by Strategyn. Clan cultures are typically family owned and dominated by a single dynamic and sometimes charismatic individual who runs almost everything So in some companies, a it is best to be willing to share the limelight and credit yet simultaneously provide “push-back” toward an organizational tendency to switch research initiatives prematurely before fruition. Instead of succumbing to an opportunity du jour environment, a sturdy hand on the rudder approach wins in the long run–in the end, we all need to deliver to provide value.

Market cultures tend to be highly driven from the view of the marketing department’s needs (typically a good thing), which can quickly change from week to week or month to month, depending on the industry. For most companies with the market culture, the research agenda is set well in advance so it is helpful for sustainability to have small skunk works to augment the innovation effort. The adhocracy culture is innovation driven, so the opinion of the technical leadership looms large in the direction of such companies. Most any leadership style that is non-hierarchical can work, because the company’s progress largely depends on the pace of new deliverables.

In sum, flexibility to the particular culture and adaptability to change helps direct the leadership style that best fits with the culture and align with stakeholders.

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May 08, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership at the operational level

Leadership is the key ingredient in the success of any endeavor. Excellence or failure is a reflection of the top because the environment is a product of the people who lead and drive the effort. Attracting and retaining the best–often those better than the hiring manager–is a cardinal sign that an organization cherishes leadership, excellence, and sustainability. Getting the right people into the right places helps to build sustainable innovation environments in which all internal stakeholders and intrapreneurs can align towards strategic goals.

Intelligence, sound judgment, and the capacity to anticipate are characteristics that set front runners from the rest of the crowd who are also expected to possess integrity, a high energy drive to get things done, a balanced ego, and loyalty. Organizations fail because of the caliber of people involved, not just because of strategic and operational plans, endeavors, or management theories and fads.

Colin Powell extolled multiple lessons about leadership from his experience whereby these lessons apply universally across institutional and industry sectors. Perpetual optimism as a force multiplier is also a clear motivating factor to those across the organization. It helps define and mold strategy, it helps everyone cope with the pace of business and change, and it sets the tone and operational level for the whole organization. Taking educated risks is another multiplier that enables everyone in the organization. You don’t know what works until you give a try.  Some fast lessons:

  • Keep it simple
  • Be approachable–it allows you to find the real problems
  • Organization charts tend to freeze movement and communication across heirarchical divides–so mix it up often
  • Keep looking at the details for the facts and rebut the experts to keep them on their toes–it keeps you grounded but your head in the clouds of strategy
  • Lending your ego to a position only diminishes your pride when the position fails
  • Leading, managing, and governing properly help most folks and anger some others.

Above all, we work so that we can provide for and support our loved ones. Spend sufficient time with your loved ones to recharge your cognitive batteries and your maximize your memory. Being close to your loved ones keeps the loneliness of leadership at bay. By being in diverse situations, it cross-trains your brain to enable you to look at issues with multiple perspectives and viewpoints.

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Apr 16, 2009 | 0 comments View Post

Leadership

Road to CommercializationWhat more natural a subject to first talk about than leadership, both personal and organizational. Everything flows from the top; this is true for our own lives and for the life of an organization.

Simply, a leader leads where others will follow. A leader creates a vision, and aligns colleagues’ input to build a strategy to go forward. Tactics and operational goals follow.

Just the same for innovation environments, whether they be mature research departments or venturesome headshops. The strategy and tactics can be program-, project-, or goal-based.

The leader understands a necessity that needs to be satisfied, and creates a path to fulfill that necessity. The necessity could be a customer need, client need, process need, a change, or technological fix.

A leader sets up an environment where folks can flourish. Guidelines and mutually understood values pervade the environment rather than rules and unwritten rules. Otherwise, the motivating factors, such as educated risk taking, that foster creativity become evasive and the shop atrophies.

Staffing a research team is like building a puzzle, where each puzzle piece represents a different discipline to construct the research picture. Doing it right requires thought and gut instinct and a good understanding of the needs and goals of the operation. Once staffed, if every member of a research team is viewed as critical and contributing, then turfiness, zero sum gain attitudes and intra-competitive behaviors are naturally kept to a minimum. Overstaffing often leads to the demise of a creative atmosphere, and reorganization typically results in the formation of a new research team.

Each of the points above will be discuss at length in future postings. At this time, …on the vanguard hopes to provide heuristic topics worth your comment and advise.

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Apr 06, 2009 | 0 comments View Post
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