Distilling how to get an edge in business

The World Business Forum brings over 5000 business leaders together to hear from thought leaders and luminaries. Some of the big themes across many of the speakers are: people (not companies) leading innovation, digging deeper and looking outside of our own view of the world. As conductor and author Ben Zander said, it’s not about motivational speeches, but looking for transformations that can stay with you the rest of your life. Here are a few quotes and thoughts from Day 1:

Entrepreneur and NBA owner Mark Cuban talked about how there are inefficiencies in the marketplace; if you can give yourself an edge in knowledge or out hustle people, you can succeed. Real estate mogul, Barbara Corcoran said that the first thing that she looks for in hiring is passion, which can not be taught. Bill George (former CEO of Medtronic and author) said that most people only give 30% effort in what they do; only delivering what they are told to do since they are not engaged and working on things that excite themselves. George also said that the size of an organization is inversely proportionate to the propensity to take risk. 21st century leadership isn’t about titles, but rather helping people find the sweet spots where strengths and passions can connect.

 

Photo by PhotographybyDov.com

Malcolm Gladwell said that taking risks is at the core of leadership; need people to innovate and be creative. The problem he points out is that as humans, we are hardwired to seek the approval of our peers. It is much easier to take massive operational risks but not social risk. We see this in teenagers and it was a major component of the recent failures on Wall Street. Leaders can withstand the ridicule of peers. [BTW - Gladwell is working on a new book, he discussed it with a small group of attendees and Dan Rockwell captured some good notes]

There were similar themes at the BIF-7 conference last month. Whitney Johnson, co-founder of Clay Christensen’s investment firm and writer for Harvard Business Review called on people to disrupt themselves. She told her story of the challenges that she faced leaving a Wall Street analyst firm to go to a start-up focused on disruptive innovations. She summed lessons from her personal path to disruption:

1. If it feels scary and lonely, you are probably on the right track
2. Be assured that you have no idea what will come next
3. Throw out the performance metrics you’ve always relied on
4. Your odds of success will improve when you pursue a disruptive course; targeting a new market vs existing will deliver 6x more success and 20x greater revenue

Process and creativity/innovation are opposing forces at companies. Companies need to create spaces for people to try, fail and iterate.

Get a Dose of Innovation

I have had the great pleasure of attending the World Innovation Forum (WIF) in New York City the last two years. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the event this year (be sure to watch #wif11 on Twitter and follow the bloggers on June 7-8), as I will be in Las Vegas for HP Discover. At the HP event, I’m expecting a good dose of tech, good interaction with bloggers and I am very excited that Paul McCartney is the musical guest. HP’s history is tightly tied to innovation and they have also brought in Don Tapscott as one of the keynote speakers (I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Don twice before: at the first EMC Innovation Conference and also at BIF-6). Most companies list being innovative as a top goal, but after listening to thought leaders at previous World Innovation Forum and World Business Forum conferences, the question that arose was can large corporations innovate?

Two of WIF’s speakers that I have seen before give good insight into this question. Clay Christensen is one of the foremost experts on business innovation, and his books are a must-read for anyone in tech. Christensen’s material shows how companies can fail to take advantage of new innovations and find themselves disrupted by startups. Even when companies are aware of the new waves that are coming, the commitment to existing customers and inertia of legacy processes will cause most companies to fail to change as needed as the market demands. One of the most powerful weapons that a company can leverage is the passion of its people; this is the message that WIF participants can expect to hear from Tony Hsieh of Zappos. Tony has a powerful message (and excellent book) of how companies can deliver happiness to customers and employees. I tend to agree with a note that I saw on Twitter recently that said: companies can’t innovate, but they can get out of the way of employees who can.

My friend and former colleague, Steve Todd’s second book, Innovate with Global Influence, continues the discussion of how to be a corporate intrapreneur (see my write-up of his first book). Steve draws on teachings of Vijay Govindarajan, Gary Hamel and Daniel Pink (Steve and I saw Vijay and Gary at previous HSM events, Daniel Pink is at WIF11) to give a framework as to how employees can innovate, delivering results and working with teams around the globe. Steve readily admits that there is strong pressure by management to stay in Vijay’s Box 1 (Managing the Present, which is incremental improvements). Steve encourages employees to deliver on their commitments so that they can move to the journey of innovation in Box 2 (Selectively Abandon the Past) and Box 3 (Create the Future). One of my favorite parts of Steve’s approach is that he recommends indoctrinating new employees immediately in the innovation process. Employees who feel empowered to be innovative and who can be connected with a broad community with similar passions are more likely to be excited and happy with their work. I recommend Steve’s book to anyone who wants to grab some of the power of innovation and help make sure that your company doesn’t stop the passion of its workers.

There are plenty of ways to get a dose of innovation, whether it is hearing an inspiring speaker at a conference, reading a book or blog that makes you think or watching a video; the TED website and iPad app alone can keep you busy for a long time. What have you read or watched that has inspired you?

Disclosure: I received a free copy of Innovate with Global Influence, but am under no obligation to write about it.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

iPad at Home and on the Road

Last month I was lucky enough to make it to my local Best Buy in time to buy a new iPad 2 on launch day. After a month of using it at home and on the road, I am very happy with the purchase and thought I’d share my findings. Last year, when the original iPad came out,  I already had a Mac Book Pro and iPhone 4, so as Louis Gray wrote last year, I had picked my two. I had the opportunity to play with a few iPads and was getting iPad-envy reading articles about families using the new device. I was even seeing the iPad discussion come up at work as more business applications came out for the platform; the iPad was named one of the top two infrastructure innovations of 2010 by Wikibon’s CTO. I was still struggling a bit with justifying the purchase; was it just an expensive toy and would I need to carry yet another device and charger? The clincher for me was that I have a lot of travel to conferences and analyst events this year. The light weight, small form factor and long battery life (listed at 10 hours) would allow for more productivity on planes and less back strain walking around events.

Above is a screen shot that shows my iPad with most of the apps that I have.

Business Travel

I am very happy traveling with the iPad. The battery life is awesome, I have yet to have a day that a full charge hasn’t lasted for my usage. On planes, it’s a fully functional iPod (good for movies too), eReader, notepad (I use Evernote), and game player. Of course WiFi helps since you can’t utilize 3G on planes. At conferences and meetings, I can take notes, use social media, or surf the web. While the OS for the iPad is the same as an iPhone (see some good tips that work on both devices here), there are a few differences worth noting. On the positive side, browsing the web and multimedia apps are generally much better. Apps like Flipbook or even websites like WordPress (including this blog) that are optimized for the iPad are immersive with the touch interface. On the negative side, I’ve found apps crashing much more on the iPad than there are not a lot of free apps that are optimized for the larger screen. For Twitter, I use TweetDeck on my desktop and phone, but it has been too unstable for the iPad, so I’m using the native Twitter app (note that I’ve put it in the home bar for easy access). The knock on the iPad has been that it is a consumption, not creation device; I have found that it’s adequate for drafting blog posts, creating emails, using Google Docs or even giving a presentation. Back at the office, my laptop is still the primary device for all creation activity. There are a few other limitations that I’ve run into: lack of Flash does limit some web activity and opening zip files requires an app and jumping through some hoops. I use email and Dropbox to get files on and off the device – creation of presentations and reports are somewhat limited by not having the usual archive of information that is typical on a desktop/laptop. While I find that the iPad is sufficient for a day of meetings/trade shows, I have still been using my laptop in the evenings.

Home Use

At the office, I rarely touch the iPad, defaulting back to the laptop which I can type faster and don’t have any of the limitations mentioned above. At home, I’m still sorting out when I use the iPad instead of the laptop or phone. My kids (5 & 7) love the iPad and I feel more comfortable letting them play with it than I do the iPhone. They are both adept at playing games (and have caught my Angry Birds addiction), using some of the educational and art apps – the touch interface is so intuitive. The iPad is ideal for taking on errands, giving a parent or child something to do while waiting. I have the 3G version (I have the $15 250MB plan from AT&T and was under 200MB my first month), and just make sure that I’m not doing lots of video when not in a WiFi area. The 3G version makes a decent GPS device for a passenger to help navigate. While lack of Flash does limit video from some sites, YouTube and other apps (like TED) are great for watching video. Facetime is a nice idea on both the iPhone, iPad and even on the Mac, but I’ve used Skype video works well. In testing Facetime with Stephen Foskett, we find that it looks better on the small screen of the iPhone and angling the forward facing camera on the iPad is difficult. The quality of the cameras seem to be the same as the iPhone 4, not great, but fine for 4×6 prints or posting videos to Facebook or YouTube. I do recommend the “smart cover” (I got polyurethane), it helps save battery life by shutting off when closed and makes a good stand for typing or watching video. I also recommend a neoprene case (I got one designed for a netbook) to provide some extra protection, is easy to carry or throw in a laptop backpack. Overall, the iPad provides a much more immersive and enjoyable experience than a smartphone and is much more portable and fast to use than a laptop. While I do think that the iPad is a big step towards moving to a post-PC world, we’re still in the early days of the era of tablets, so hopefully there will be a lot of new uses and innovations that will allow us to do things that we never imagined of for the previous devices.

What cool things have you done with an iPad that you couldn’t do with a smartphone or laptop? I’m sure there are thousands of cool apps that I should be checking out, let me know what I’m missing.

Cheers,

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Is Your Network Hyper-Connected or an Echo Chamber?

Echo Chamber by Hugh McLeod, shared via Creative Commons licence

I recently attended a “Conversation with Stephen Johnson” where there was a group discussion around his latest book Where Good Ideas Come From (click here for a fantastic video which illustrates some of the main points from the book).  During the discussion of his studies of innovators, Stephen said that innovators maintain strong and weak ties across diverse disciplines.  This then led to the question of, does the changing methods on communication including the web lead people to live in an echo chamber or allow them to become hyper-connected.  The answer of course is that the web and social media networks are all tools and it is dependent upon the users as to whether they seek out and embrace diversity and serendipity or instead reinforce their own beliefs and reject new and different ideas.

The argument for diversity of ideas is summarized well in the argument for open innovation that while your organization may have smart people, there are a lot more smart people outside your organization than inside.  So when you turn to what we read on the internet and who we connect with on social media, are you getting a diverse set of ideas or are you only connecting to friends and coworkers?  When I first joined Twitter in 2008, I was forced to interact with new people since few people who I knew were using it.  This has changed a lot in the last two years, not only have many people who I know joined Twitter, but I’ve had the opportunity to meet many that I follow at conferences and industry events.  I try to go out of my way to look for new perspectives and that means that I need to be careful that interactions with my closer connections don’t block out the opportunity to learn and find new ideas from others.

One of the things that social media tools are best for is maintaining loose ties.  According to the Dunbar number, people can only maintain an active social relationship with around 150 people.  When people change jobs or move from an area, closer acquaintances would take more attention than those far away.  With the introduction of sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, connections can be maintained and networks can become more diverse spanning the various geographies and careers that a person travels over a lifetime.  While Facebook is the most ubiquitous of social media sites, I wonder if it is also the most insular.  Facebook is a great place to share photos or something funny or interesting, but from my experience it’s not a place for deep discussions or critical debate.

While the networks of Facebook, Twitter and Google dominate the space, being an early adopter of a new platform can give you the opportunity to explore.  Two new recent additions to the landscape are OneTrueFan and Quora.  Louis Gray has written about OneTrueFan, a tool that tracks and shares the websites that you visit.  Ten years ago, “searching the web” meant more about poking around and finding new interesting places rather than simply searching with Google or Bing.  Today there is not only the use of search, but also the growing usage of applications through mobile devices which tend to limit what places on the web you might go to.  Quora is a site for asking and answering questions which has been attracting a lot of attention and rapidly growing an audience.  My biggest complaints on sites such as LinkedIn and others that have large question sections is that it is difficult to find things or interest or meaningful answers (lots of echo chamber or marketing noise).  Quora has the latest tagging and social tools to allow for following, voting and sharing.  I was beginning to wonder if size of the large networking sites were going to limit small ventures.  It’s a given that some of the features of these sites will be imitated by the large players and the early adopter crowd tend to move on to the next thing after a few months.

Overall there is huge population on the social sites now, so while it is easier to find those with a common interest, it is also easier to end up with a network that shares your point of view.  It’s said that one of the best ways to solve a problem is to explain it to someone who has no idea how your industry works.  I hope that sites such as Quora will help facilitate a place for robust debate and ideas exploration.  I agree with Stephen Johnson‘s belief is that the hyper-connectivity forces of the web outweigh the echo chamber effect.  May 2011 bring you fresh opportunities and your ideas to fruition.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

BIF-6 Dares Us to Take Action and Be Great

Above is a Wordle of my notes from the 2-day BIF-6 summit.  I’m not surprised to see that “people” is the largest word; because more than innovation or technology, it’s what people do that matters the most.

Find Your Place

The second day of the conference started with Richard Leider, Founder and Chairman of The Inventure Group, who has studied the power of purpose for 40 years. He looks at what makes people get out of bed in the morning.  When the elderly are asked what they would do differently in their lives, it came down to three themes: 1) be more reflective, 2) take more risks (authenticity and voice), 3) understand own bottom line/what matters to me.  Leider says that the two most important days in your life are the day that you are born and the day that you discover why you were born.

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world.”  -E.B.White (quote mentioned by Richard Leider)

Take Action

Tired of waiting for the government to take action?  Ben Berkowitz created a website SeeClickFix where citizens can take a photo, report a non-emergency issue such as a graffiti or a pothole and track if it gets fixed.  As Ben said, “Potholes are gateway drug to civic engagement” – so go ahead and load the app for Blackberry, iPhone or Android.

74% of Americans don’t volunteer and Jason Colker, Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries is looking to change how people can get involved.  He has created Sparked.org which looks to match the needs of non-profits with the expertise and cognitive surplus of professionals through micro-volunteering.

Former Deputy Director of the CIA, Carmen Medina, discussed being a change agent for a large organization.  She passed on the advice that she was given which is that we need to stop being uncomfortable being a “heretic” and to fully embrace it and like it!  She equated innovators to an internal rebel alliance which management must tap into.

Optimism is the greatest act of rebellion. -Carmen Medina

Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of MAKE magazine, talked about the difference between understanding and doing.  His magazine is a kind of reboot of Popular Mechanics.  He also has a Makers Faire which is are gatherings of people sharing the technology that they “play” with.  Below is a short video from the mini Makers Faire that they held at the Hotel Providence after the conference.

Dare to be Great

The final storyteller of the event was Founder and Chairman of SYPartners, Keith Yamashita who posed the question: Is it really worth daring to be great?  People grow up with a “null set” hypothesis and think that life is about going ever upward, onward and becoming more successful.  Life is not linear and when there is a break in the expected path, it is a shock to the system.  The first piece of being great starts with “you” – each person on the planet.  Kids are born to greatness and simplicity, we unlearn greatness and make things complicated.  The way to be great is to be fully aware and fully alive when people say NO.  Yamashita says that we need to end the tyranny of the false trade-off.  In the past it was believed that there was infinite possibilities and infinite resources.  During the recent economic downturn there has been talk of finite possibilities and finite resources.  The real answer going forward is that there are infinite possibilities and finite resources (echoing Ntiedo “Nt” Etuk who said we don’t lack resources, we lack resourcefulness).  We have no other choice but to try and be great.

The audio of the stories mentioned above and from the rest of the conference are available on the BIF website (videos are expected in the coming weeks).  I recommend that you take a listen to the segments and check out some of the other blog posts from the other attendees.  I’d welcome and feedback or question that you have about the event.  BIF-6 rocked!

Disclaimer: I attended BIF-6 on a free blogger pass which gives me free admission (conference includes meals and a copy of Hsieh’s book).  I am under no obligation to write.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Beyond the Buzz – Digging Deep on Innovation and Passion at BIF-6

What happens when you pull together 200 people who are passionate about innovation, put a broad spectrum of storytellers in front of them and give them an intimate setting to interact?  This is the idea of the 6th annual Collaborative Innovation Summit of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF-6 for short) at the intimate setting of the Trinity Rep Theatre in Providence, RI (photo on the right of MC/Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan on stage).  Saul started out the conference with a warning that “innovation” must not become a buzzword, or no one will be innovative.  There were no silver bullets in the stories, but rather compelling unique perspectives on innovation, passion and ideas to help change the world.

Dig Deeper

Access to information is not a problem.  As Fast Company founder Alan Webber stated, “Content isn’t King, Context is King”.  Webber talked about the media industry and how news is in full retreat since information is becoming a commodity.  The problem is that there are few original voices and too many fake themes in the news.

24×7 news isn’t news, it’s noise -Alan Webber

The real value that is needed is not more people with opinions, but the context to make sense of the news.   The challenge is that not only do we need people who can do deep investigative reporting, but also an audience that is willing to consume it and a market that can support it.

One success story was shared not long later in the form of the pair of photojournalists Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio.  They have travelled the world, taking photos and telling stories about food and cultures.  Their book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets has photos, stories and a breakdown of  the caloric intake – a nice mix of visuals, analytical data and emotional stories.  When telling their stories, they have to balance their desire to weave in a narrative vs. simply letting the stories come through.  Menzel’s advice is read the coverage, look at the photos and to think for yourself.  Sound advice for everything that you read.

Passion

Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh rode into Providence on the Delivering Happiness Bus Tour (photo on the right).  Zappos is a $1 billion success story, but Hsieh says that their success has nothing to do with shoes or online sales, rather it comes from the passionate engagement of his employees to the company mission which is to provide the very best customer service.  Zappos posts their core values on their website – #9: Passion Is The Fuel That Drives Us And Our Company Forward.  He said that company culture can create sustained high performance and that if you get the culture right, the rest will happen naturally on its own.

Author John Hagel (see 10 take-aways from his book, The Power of Pull) stated that there is not enough depth or understanding of passion.  In facing unexpected challenges, without passion, obstacles will be hidden or ignored rather than conquered.

Passion … demands our engagement and will settle for nothing less.  It propels us forward, giving us both the energy and courage to welcome any challenge as an opportunity to test ourselves, regardless of the risk. -From John Hagel’s blog

Hagel quoted a recent study that only 20% of the workforce is passionate and that the number of passionate people is inverse to the size of the organization.  Most companies only thinking about breakthrough technology or product innovation, they must also think about organizational (culture) innovation.

Change the World

Babson President Len Schlesinger said that we have two options – sit and think or act.  In face of increasing uncertainty, the traditional way of thinking our way into action doesn’t work.  Entrepreneurship is the best tool we have, it equals action.  Don Tapscott (who was a big inspiration to start me blogging when he attended EMC’s first Innovation Conference to discuss Wikinomics) presented via Skype to share the story of how he got into digital media and to discuss his latest book.  In 1981, Don was ridiculed for saying that computers would change the world since no one believed that managers would ever learn to type.  In his latest book, Macrowikinomics, he states that the industrial economy has run out of gas and that the internet has come of age.  Lots of institutions are stalled and they need more than a tweak; they must be reinvented around collaboration and openness.

There were so many great quotes and stories that need to be shared and integrated into action.  As Saul said in his introduction, his goal is for Innovation, Collaboration and Experimentation.

In the 21^st century, to be relevant, we must get better faster. -Saul Kaplan

The videos from the event are expected to be up in the next 2-3 weeks, so be sure to check the BIF-6 website.

Photos via my iPhone 4

Disclaimer: I am attending BIF-6 on a free blogger pass which gives me free admission (conference includes meals and a copy of Hsieh’s book).  I am under no obligation to write.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

vAgents of Change, Positive Deviants and Stories That Inspire

So much going on, wanted to put up a quick summary of some recent and upcoming activity:

VMworld

Amazing week in San Francisco, I got to talk with over 100 people that I met in person for the first time that I knew through online discussions. [here's a photo courtesy of Rich Brambley from the blogger section at the conference keynote - Aaron Delp is next to me, Jase McCarty and John Troyer behind]

On Technology:  ”vAgents of Change.  Virtualization is still relatively new to IT, but it has clearly crossed the chasm into a mainstream product line with 190,000 customers.  Leading the charge to deliver virtualization around the globe are 50,000 VMware Certified Professionals.  The culture of the virtualization community goes far beyond understanding a few products, as can be seen by the volunteer group that puts together the VM User Groups (VMUGs) and the passion of the vExperts.  Will these expert ambassadors of virtualization embrace and drive the change to cloud computing?” – see the full post for my take on ITaaS, Ecosystem, Mobility and xSPs.

On Social Media: “The big takeaway of VMworld 2010 for me from a social perspective was people were using the tools more than talking about them.  While most companies have a long way to fully embedding social into their culture and processes, VMware’s VMworld showed that events can have a multi-dimensional social media offering that supports and amplifies the messaging of the event.” – full post here

Lots of video – I was part of the SiliconANGLE live broadcast during the conference.  I did three segments live (Ed Bugnion of Cisco here, Abner Germanow of Juniper Networks here and Bob Zuber of IBM here), plus 2 recorded segments: with EMC on the journey to the private cloud and Cisco blogger round-up of convergence, VMworld awards and more.

Positive Deviants

I announced a new Wikibon award today which was inspired by Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky.  ”Positive deviants are those who behave better than the norm, even when faced with similar limitations or challenges.”  The PosDev award is “to celebrate those who create a positive impact on the IT community through a collaborative process of sharing information and providing critical thinking on the business and technical challenges of the day.”  The idea of the award is to inspire more people to collaborate and share information – read the full post here.

Stories That Inspire

The PosDev award is an idea that I hope to spread (hat tip to TED – “ideas worth spreading”).  Speaking of great ideas, next week (Sept 15-16 in Providence, RI) I will be attending BIF-6, the summit of the Business Innovation Factory.  BIF is a 2 day event with a fantastic line-up of storytellers in an intimate setting.  You can get a taste of the event from the free “story book“, plus they will be streaming the event live and you can follow the #bif6 hashtag on Twitter.  I’ll be looking to share what I hear and see how it can connect with IT trends and communities.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve got a full quarter at the new job.  I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone that has been so supportive.  I’m very easy to get in touch with, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have a person or topic that I may be able to help with.

Cheers,

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

The Elephant, The Rider and The Path to Cloud Computing

A common thread that runs between IT and innovation in general is that new ideas require change. As Chip Heath said at the World Innovation Forum in June ’10 (that’s him above): change is hard, it can be futile and most people resist and hate change.  Chip and his brother Dan have written two books, the second one is Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (disclosure: I received a free copy at the conference).  Cloud computing is a big and potentially scary change, how is the industry doing at creating the correct environment for customers to undertake the new products and services?  At VMworld, “The Cube” will be broadcasting LIVE and digging deep into this topic – see all the details on SiliconANGLE and be sure to tune in Aug 30-Sept 2 for executives, customers, bloggers and analysts.

“A long journey starts with a single step.”… But you know what else starts with a single step? An ill-conceived amble that you abandon after a few minutes.

The theory of Switch is that when change works, it follows a pattern.  There are three pieces of the pattern which they describe as The Rider, The Elephant and The Path.

The Rider is analytical and works well with concrete examples to follow, a technique discussed is following “bright spots”.  These are not happy thoughts, but finding successful results and replicating and amplifying them.  What may look like resistance to change  may simply be cluelessness of not knowing which direction to go, so scripting the first steps will help get people on the right track.  This is similar to getting the low hanging fruit – what is the one thing that can be done or changed that get people moving in the right direction.  An example in the book was a campaign to get people to switch from whole milk to 1%.  It is a simple change that dramatically lowers the daily fat intake and compared to the food pyramid, it is easily understood and followed.  On the analytical side, customers are confronted with a lot of information about cloud computing, but it is often difficult to distinguish between vision and reality.  Plenty of companies are utilizing public cloud offerings and this puts internal IT organizations in the position of having to be competitive with the flexibility and costs that their lines of business can get directly from the cloud.  When it comes to fully virtualized solutions, the analytical customers are still asking a lot of questions about security and management.  As for scripting the critical moves, turnkey solutions and integrated stacks have been coming to market, allowing customers to deploy virtualized data centers or private clouds.

The Elephant is the automatic reaction and emotional side.  The voice of the elephant tells you to eat the entire quart of ice cream, that you must check email constantly and when it comes to change *THAT’S WRONG*.  In trying to create a major change, the action is not Think > Analyze > Change, but rather See > Feel > Change.  A recommendation for the emotional side is to find the feeling that will allow people to see and connect with the change.  Another method of motivating the elephant is by shrinking the change, breaking it down into pieces that aren’t as scary and get the snowball rolling towards the ultimate goal.  In order to avoid spooking the elephant, people must understand that change is a journey that will have peaks and valleys – “rarely a graceful leap from heigh to height” – and that if failure and challenges are listed as an expected part of the journey, that people will be less likely to give up when there are challenges.  Cloud computing has a way to go on the emotional side.  Many IT practitioners still have the elephant voice telling them that cloud = no job.  There are plenty of ways to create bite-sized changes along the path to cloud such as deploying a single application (take backup as an example).  I’ve yet to see anyone embracing failure as part of the deployment of cloud computing, but would love to hear from customers about learning experiences that they’ve had in this regard.

I’d read plenty in sales and business books dealing with emotional and analytical positioning, but Shaping The Path was new to me and resonated strongly.  Chip said that we often have a fundamental attribution error – that is we focus on people rather than situation.  As an example, if a car cuts you off on a highway, we blame the person, not the situation (which could be the road itself or extenuating circumstances that causes the person to be driving more reckless than they should).  Shaping the Path can be done through adjusting the environment, building habits or “rallying the herd”.  An example given for tweaking the environment was to give software engineers “quiet hours” (or what EMC called the “cone of silence”), specific times where they would not be interrupted and could focus on their job without having to feel guilty for not checking email, answering calls or otherwise being distracted from their primary job.  As part of building habits, Heath advocates that checklists can help people from becoming overconfident.  People think that having a checklist means that you can’t remember or don’t know your job, when it is can be a reminder of the mission-critical things that must be done and help avoid mistakes.  ”So before you conclude that your husband is hopelessly absentminded, always forgetting to pick up the dry cleaning and the milk, maybe you should try shaping his Path. How about taping a checklist to his steering wheel?”  Finally, rallying the herd is about allowing reformers to have a space to discuss their change plans and let the environment become contagious.  Rather than completely separating reformers from resisters, Heath advocates going through an “organizational molting” so that the new culture takes over.  Doing a search, I see that there are plenty of Cloud Computing checklists – has anyone found any good ones?  Industry conferences can often be a great place to rally the herd and as I mentioned earlier, the live broadcast on SiliconANGLE will highlight those customers who can share “next practices” for cloud computing.

Don’t think outside of the box – find a good box and think inside it. -Chip Heath

One of the funniest things that Chip Heath said was that most people think that change is really hard, yet the #1 and #2 most stressful and challenging changes in people’s lives are sought after and embraced.  Getting married (#2) and having children (#1) are a more dramatic change than any merger and acquisition or industry shift.  Sure there are plenty of challenges in implementing cloud computing and other innovations, but with a good pattern to follow, the journey can be undertaken intelligently.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

PS – Speaking of Tweaking the Path, check out the new “Tweet” button (below), a nice new option on WordPress from Twitter to make it easy to share articles like this (go ahead and try it)

Is Twitter Innovative? @biz at #wif10

PhotographybyDov.com

Social Networking was well represented at the World Innovation Forum including discussion of Web 2.0 from former Amazon Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend, technology venture capitalist Brian Shawn Cohen and Twitter co-founder @Biz Stone.  At events, I use Twitter for taking notes (I’ll quote a few in this post).

RT @stephenshapiro: Biz stone from twitter on the stage. Surreal tweeting about twitter. #wif10 < surreal? no, flashback to 2008/9

5:36 PM Jun 8th via TweetDeck  [I also wrote a few blog posts about Twitter in 2008/9, and here I am again writing about it]

How do we innovate?

There are many ways that companies can innovate including internal development, crowdsourcing, and through acquisition.  Twitter has done all of these.  Twitter started as a very simple tool – broadcasting 140-character messages sent via SMS (text) or web for the world to see.  One of the most innovative things that Twitter did was not limit how users used the tool.  Several features created by users, such as hashtags and retweets, were eventually adopted by Twitter and built into the system.

@Biz at #WIF10 People are basically good and if you give them a tool to do good they will

5:36 PM Jun 8th by @KenMcArthur

Twitter has acquired a number of large pieces of the partner ecosystem including search (Summize) and an iPhone application (Tweetie).  They have also followed/copied ideas from other companies such as Lists (as seen on TweetDeck and Seesmic) and location/geo (many tools such as FourSquare and Gowalla).  I have wondered if we can really call Twitter innovative since so much of the improvements have come from outside.  When you consider that Twitter is a very young company (3 years) with a small staff, I think it is innovative that they have used all means possible to grow at such a rapid pace.  The community may be a little disgruntled form time-to-time, but that is even happening with Facebook and Apple.

Twitter had early fame, @biz concerned they don’t become like a crazy famous child actor, want to be like Ron Howard instead #wif10

5:38 PM Jun 8th via TweetDeck

People get all wide-eyed when you hear of the millions of people using the service who are sending over 65 millions tweets a day.  Twitter allows for connection of people.  Case in point of translating online to in-person: click on the tab of “Blogger Photos” at the top of my blog page.  Another example – I posted this question online at the beginning of Biz’s interview.

#wif10 @biz says that the starting point for Twitter is SEARCH – agree, but we need better analytics & access to more data

5:32 PM Jun 8th via TweetDeck

When we reached the Q&A, I ran down and asked Biz the question about analytics in person and got the answer:

Stone: We will provide a metric dashboard for twitter soon.#WIF10

June 8, 2010 5:57:50 PM EDT by @daniel_krauss

The Star Wars reference for 2010! RT @stevetodd @stu is directly asking @biz about Twitters search deficiencies. Brave, young padawan #wif10

5:58 PM Jun 8th by @InnosightTeam

In typical Twitter fashion, friends in person and online were excited that Biz gave me props for my @stu name (which I learned thanks to a RT by Hutch Carpenter of a blog from Jesse Stay).

Twitter Trends

This was the second year that the World Innovation Forum had a Bloggers Hub and there was a significant difference in the Twitter experience.  Last year only about half of the bloggers attending were active Twitter users, yet the conference trended worldwide twice thanks to lots of interaction from people around the world watching the stream.  This year not only were all of the bloggers on Twitter, but there was a lot of other very good Twitter content from the paying audience (which had doubled to 900 people).  There were over 3500 Tweets sent (you can see them all & download them from Twapperkeeper), yet the conference did not even trend locally.  Did Twitter downtime affect this – it was flakier this year than last, did the overload from the new iPhone launch affect the stability for the whole week?  Maybe it was just a mixture of other news and people being very busy (hopefully, with the economy picking up).  Sports, entertainment and news may dominate the trending topics of Twitter, but it is without a doubt that there are a lot of innovative communication going through Twitter’s channel.

RT @frijolita: Open exchange of information *can* have a positive global impact says @biz #WIF10 < such as getting together for beer!

5:48 PM Jun 8th

Stuart Miniman

Twitter: @stu

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Seth Godin: Creating Tribes to Drive Change

Seth Godin, a prolific marketing blogger and author, spoke to the World Innovation Forum about innovation.  Much of his material was from his two most recent books – Tribes and Lynchpin.

Innovation is stuff that’s impossible, because otherwise someone else would have done it

Tribes is about leading the groups that already exist.  Communities in the past were formed around politics, religion or sports, now they can be for anything that can get people passionate.  As people get emotionally engaged, they can overcome fear of change by charging to the new way with a group of like-minded people.

In the IT world, convergence, virtualization and cloud are innovative trends that have the potential for companies to fundamentally alter the way that they do business.  Like any new idea, there is inertia and resistance to making this change.  For a couple of years, there have been thought leaders (including bloggers) that have been trying to lead this revolution.  This top-down messaging was a good start to allow people to become familiar with technology.  We are now starting to see field organizations from vendors adjust their structure to support cross-disciplinary offerings.  The prime example of this are vSpecialists from the VCE coalition – where there are employees from VMware, Cisco and EMC who are cross-trained on the full storage, network and server virtualization stack.  Enterprise IT organizations will also need to adjust to realize the operational efficiencies of the new solutions.  Nick Lippis had reported that some customers are creating a Chief Data Center Officer (CDO) for merging various disciplines.  J Michel Metz (Cisco) recently put a proposal out for a new SLAM (Storage and Local Area Management) Administrator to help with the bottom-up adoption of convergence.

Are you comfortable with the state of things today, or are you willing to help lead change?  I’ll leave with with a couple more words of wisdom from Seth Godin:

If you’re working for a big company, start with small changes, such as writing a blog or changing a meeting and these can grow into larger innovations.  Ask yourself, am I doing what I should be to make a difference or should I give my chair to someone else.

Go make something happen!

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com