Kelly Herrell
Another post by Kelly Herrell, one of our guest bloggers. Kelly is the CEO of Vyatta, “a venture-funded company disrupting the networking industry” and is also a long-time member of ExpertCEO. You can read his blog at http://kellyherrell.wordpress.com/
_________________________________________________
By the time the facts are available, the trend is already underway
_________________________________________________
A CEO I know recently fired his VP Marketing because “he wasn’t innovative enough.” Perhaps a fair point, but it begs the question: Do we hold ourselves to the same standards? CEOs often talk of “fostering” innovation, but we should also be on the hook to be directly innovative ourselves. To do that, we need to be able to see opportunities that others don’t.
Otherwise we’re just cows watching satellites.
Innovation happens when observations are filtered and synthesized. Innovators are always first, in the sense that they do something creative and valuable before someone else does. Their minds were working on it well ahead of everyone else… which means they began seeing trends and opportunities earlier than others.
How does an innovative CEO get ahead of the curve like this? How can we learn to see around corners? It’s a qualitative skill. You don’t find an innovative opportunity by reading about it directly. If the analysts and pundits are covering the evolution of an opportunity, you’re behind. It’s already happened. Satellites 1, Cows 0.
There’s no handbook for how to be innovative, but it seems to me there are a few key elements:
1. Develop some strong mental models of how change occurs. Sometimes history repeats itself, other times new dynamics are at work. If you don’t have good mental frameworks for what drives change, start mooing. Below I list a couple of books that I think are relevant; I’d love to hear what others have found to be useful.
2. Challenge convention. It’s hard to shake things up if you limit yourself to the same rules and assumptions that everyone inside and outside your company is using. So unshackle yourself from the deepest and most sacred assumptions, and let the creativity flow.
3. Look past your own desk. There is a strong possibility that trends in other industries will affect yours. Understand what’s happening before the competition does, and act on it earlier.
Often innovation is sparked from a blend of things that make it possible. Take Apple: They were previously “the Mac company.” Then they harnessed the trends of digitized music and the explosion in bandwidth, and took a new power position in the music industry. Or look at Amazon: Previously the online book seller, they realized that they had developed mad data center skills. Then they noticed that enterprise IT architectures were going to morph toward an evolution of the hosting / SaaS concept, so they blended the two and are now a force in the huge new trend of cloud computing.
Most innovations aren’t so earth-shaking. But innovation is how we break through incrementalism and create step-function increases in the value of our companies. Grok the structure of revolution, challenge convention, and unroll the ball of string farther than others do. Then create a strategy around that. You may sound crazy, but you won’t be suicidal.
To get started, do some mental calisthenics. Get your brain in shape for innovation’s year-round swimsuit season with a steroid injection: The Innovator’s Dilemma by Harvard’s Clayton Christensen. It’s a brilliant integration of discrete theories on technology innovation into one highly actionable model. Internalize it and you will start seeing around corners.
Second, to help break the habit of linear thinking, realize that innovation often occurs when different disciplines interact. The Medici Effect does a quick and good job of describing this effect. And if you really feel like spelunking on this concept, pick up Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos by Mitchell Waldrop. For two decades Citi has funded a research effort that puts prize-winning economists, physicists, biologists, and computer scientists all under one roof. What they are discovering – and how they’re discovering it — will blow your funky innovative mind.
In the end, we’re CEOs not researchers. But we need to take our brains for long daily walks. Henry Ford once said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is. That’s why so few people actually do it.”
What are your thoughts on divining innovation from the CEO? Let’s talk about it in here…
Dear Kelly,
Thank you for the interesting mentions of books to allow CEOs to read more about how to be / become innovative.
But as you well said innovation is a qualitative skill and in my opinion quite hard to ‘just learn’. If someone is not innovative, then I think there is a small chance that he / she will become innovative after reading books. We humans are creature of habit and therefor find it extremely hard to change our habits, something we need to do to ‘challenge conventions’.
As my domain is 2.0 / 3.0 I have found it still too often that people just talk about ‘modern’ web technologies / tools and have debates at seminars about why Social Media or Enterprise 2.0 does or doesn’t work.
Many pshychology researchers (John Bargh, Tanya Chartrand, Peter Gollwitzer, John Kihlstrom and Timothy Wilson) argue that 95% of our habits is automatically and unconsciously and that only 5% of our habit is planned and conscious. Although I have been thinking about habits – also reading the book of 7 habits of effective leadership of Stephen Covey – I saw a Dutch researcher / speaker Ben Tiggelaar at a Health 2.0 conference talking about the theories of how we as humans have a hard time changing our habits / behavior. There is even a test http://www.solidarts.com/ddd/test to test if someone wants change, understands how to get there and understand how self-change is necessary.
In our work, at our level, we need to have people around us who will create an innovative surrounding. At ABN AMRO they have a so called ‘Chief Dialogue Officer’, as dialogue is a basic necessity to learn and understand other perspectives / ideas. From a management perspective, the common American business culture (top-down) might be a tough environment to achieve more dialogue between the common workers, specialists and their top execs. Too often I hear consultancy agencies speak about how ‘social media’ can be used to achieve a more ‘flat’ organization. Well, it’s true but the key is to have leaders who understand that they have to adjust their management / leadership habits to allow innovative thinking and to support the process of it. ABN AMRO even created a ‘Dialogue House’ for it. I guess especially within banks, they need to do a lot more to generate innovation than at IT companies. So understanding how hard it is to change habits, CEOs who are not innovative need to do more things like:
- really create an open environment for ideas / dialgoue
- really take part in it
But even then activities might not generate enough results. How I push myself to be innovative:
- Do a lot of new things, really DO them. Don’t just read reports, books, etc. Try things out for a while and understand how it works by yourself (like Twitter) and do not stop at 101s
- Have a lot of talks / meetings / brainstorming sessions with people who can challenge your ideas
- Give out concrete deadlines for new products / ideas and put consequences to it (less salary / no bonus / resignation)
- And put yourself to the test, let your colleagues assess your innovation and put the consequences to it.
But a CEO is often too arrogant due to his / her position and might often not put such hard consequences upon him/herself. It’s easier to push others than ourselves, but it’s easier to change ourselves than others.
Some of my personal blogs about leadership / innovation:
- http://hhvo.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/2009-a-crisis-always-brings-urgency-to-unite-and-innovate/
- http://hhvo.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/enterprise-20-enterprise-needs-pioneers-who-get-it/
I hope you’ll get more replies to get a decent discussion about this, as I think CEOs MUST be innovative!
- Ha
I absolutely am loving this post! going to need to remember to add this to my bookmarks.