Doctors or waiters?

How would you describe your company's approach to customer service? Is it a waiter or a doctor? The waiter is friendly and engaging, and after some small talk, takes your order on a pad of paper and disappears for while. Eventually your order arrives, and if you got what you asked for in a timely manner and the quality is good, you're happy.

When you go to a doctor's office with a complaint, the doctor takes some time trying to understand the issue. He or she may order some tests or consult with others before producing a diagnosis and prescribing some treatments. If you respond to treatment and the malady disappears, you're happy.

Of course, there are different kinds of happy. The doctor has provided a different level of professional service than the waiter, who took some simple orders and was reasonably pleasant and efficient in the process. Not surprisingly, the doctor charges a lot more for his or her expertise than the waiter. Can you imagine a doctor listening to you describe your symptoms briefly, then pulling out a pad of paper with a friendly, "OK, now tell me what drugs you want." You'd think the doctor was a fraud. Doctors are trained to understand and diagnose health problems. They aren't order takers, they're problem solvers. Waiters take orders.

So, how would you describe your company? Doctor or waiter? Problem solver or order taker? If you're an IT shop, it makes a big difference to what you can charge your customers.

What if your company gets verbed

Everyone knows what it means to xerox a printed page. A printed page is reproduced on a thermographic sheet of paper. It also implies less directly that the copy is highly accurate and done with a miminum of fuss. Likewise, Fedexing a package means shipping it to a location for delivery the next day. It also implies that the sender can be sure the package will arrive on time. If you're asked to Fedex something and you send it USPS and it doesn't get there overnight, you may find yourself in some trouble. Everyone is probably familiar with the verb "to google."

Verbs are the words for actions, and we can't do without them. To eat, to sleep, to talk, are all things that we have to name because the concepts they capture are so necessary to our lives that we have to call them something. Nouns come and go, especially company and product names. Xerox and Fedex created functions in the business world that have become so necessary that we can't imagine operating without them. In the 1970's the idea that you could ship a package anywhere and guarantee 24 hour delivery was considered ridiculous. Now we expect to be able to Fedex anything anywhere in 24 hours. Need to move 24,000 sea turtle eggs from the Florida gulf coast to the east coast ahead of an oil spill (or "BP'ed")? Just Fedex them.

These companies were rewarded for their status in the business world by having their company names verbed. Other companies may provide a service that fulfills the function, but the verb adopted to name the action comes from the company that invented and fulfilled the service.

So, if your company name was verbed by your customers, what would it mean? Would it mean providing a unique and necessary function with high reliability and outstanding customer service? Or would it mean something else? What would you want it to mean? Do this exercise. Come up with a definition of the intended meaning of your company's verbed name. If you can do that, you just wrote yourself a mission statement.

Whac A Mole ideation sessions

Have you ever been in a brainstorming session where every idea that gets proposed is quickly beaten down by some of the participants? These are what I call "Whac A Mole" sessions, by analogy with the popular arcade game of the same name in which players score points for beating down mechanical moles as they pop up from their holes in the ground.

As we know, good initial brainstorming sessions try to generate a large quantity of high quality ideas, with judgment deferred on each idea until later rounds of refinement. That's a simplification of the ideation process, but you'd be amazed how quickly people join in with others to play whack a mole on new ideas.

"We do that already"

Ever had a great idea and pitched it to a gatekeeper only to hear the words, "We do that already?" Or, in another form, "We know that already." Pretty demotivating, isn't it? You stop pursuing the idea, only to learn later that your idea hasn't been investigated, no one is working on it, or someone started working on it after you made your pitch.

The gatekeeper has one or more reasons for their response. One, they may simply not understand what you are saying, and mistake your idea for an unrelated idea. Sometimes the gatekeeper may be making a snap decision about your standing or ability to pursue the idea. At worst, the gatekeeper is thinking, "That's a pretty good idea. I need to take this back to one of my people and have them look into it."

Keep in mind that responses to your ideas are just data that you should collect and analyze more fully. A response of "We're on that already" should be met with polite skepticism. Keep generating those ideas, and pitch them to a lot of people, and triangulate the responses. You may find that your gatekeepers don't know as much as they claim.

Carolina Student Design Competition

How do aspiring product designers in the Carolinas win acclaim as innovative designers, not to mention prize money? By winning the first Carolinas Student Design Competition, sponsored by Carolinas PDMA. More details coming soon, but the contest winners will present their designs at the Innovate Carolina 2011 conference in Charlotte on April 15.

The Innovate Carolinas 2010 in April of this year at the UNC Kenan Flager School of Business was attended by over 120 professional product designers, product managers, executives, and university faculty. That's a pretty good audience for a winning college design team.

The anti-creativity checklist

I found a nice little feature called The Anti-Creativity Checklist, a tongue in cheek presentation of typical responses to new ideas. It may seem strange, but a lot of people try to make their reputations by shooting down others' ideas rather than generating their own ideas.

Innovate Carolina 2010: review

I attended the Innovate Carolina conference yesterday at the Kenan Flagler business school at UNC Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I was on the conference committee.) The sessions were excellent. The best part of a small conference like that is the chance to talk to the speakers and attendees. I collected cards from people I'll be talking business with in the next few weeks.

By the way, if anyone wants to work on next year's event, please contact me.

Business model generation

I sketch everything. Screens, call flows, processes, hierarchies, etc. It drives me crazy to be in a meeting and people are throwing ideas around and arguing and stating their points and not seeing the connections between things, and no one is trying to capture anything on a whiteboard. It so much easier to see the relationships between things when you write them on a board.

I was so delighted to find the book Business Model Generation by Osterwalder and Pigneur. Here is a book that elevates the importance of sketching and group facilitation and design thinking to the highest importance in creating new business models. It has been out of print for a while but it's finally back. Highly recommended.

Innovate Carolina 2010

The Carolinas Chapter of Product Development and Management Association is organizing the Innovate Carolina conference on April 10 at UNC Kenan Flagler Business School. I'll be there.

A business model based on technological escalation

I've been thinking about technological escalation, or a situation in which two agents in conflict improve their own technology in order to win. Think about police radar and radar detection units employed by drivers, or caller ID used by homeowners and ID blocking used by telemarketers. I read about an admissions officer at an Ivy League college who started her own consulting practice for teenagers (actually, their parents) who want inside information on admission criteria for Ivy League schools. You get the picture.

Some people seem to build their entire business model around supplying the latest and greatest technology to both sides of the conflict, e.g., black hat hackers who change into white hats when trying to get security consulting gigs with e-commerce companies.

I've been wondering whether technological escalation could be developed as an explicit business model. That is, you could look for conflict situations and ethically develop a series of products that sells to both sides. As long as you keep developing products that help one side or the other get an advantage, you're in business. More formally, you create a market that is modeled by the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, and make sure that Nash equilibrium doesn't occur for very long.

"Innovate violently!"

"Innovate violently!" was poet Guillaume Apollinaire's advice to Picasso. And "innovate violently" he did. I went to the fabulous Picasso exhibit at the Nasher Museum in Durham last weekend. The exhibition shows how Picasso used printed language as part of his painting. It presents some of his poetry. It's great that we have a resource like the Nasher in town. The Picasso exhibit runs through January 3rd.

"Doing" innovation: technique or org design?

I've been answering questions lately about how you "do" innovation and "voice of the customer." What are techniques? How do you gather data? Convert the data into new product ideas?

Those are interesting questions, certainly, but there are a lot of resources out there that present valid frameworks and approaches for doing innovation. The trick, of course, is to be able to apply a framework or approach to a real situation in the messy real world of new product development.

An equally interesting and important question, and one I don't hear much, is "How do you need to change the organization to support innovation," rather than focussing on the individuals? Personally, I think that's the harder challenge, since it requires more organizational change and can take managers out of their comfort zones.

Look, sometimes all you need to do to get individuals to innovate is to give them some tools and get out of the way. But setting up and organization that can catch the ideas generated by its employees can be a real challenge. That's the other side of the innovation equation, and the one that's less talked about.

Carrboro Creative Coworking

Do you have an entrepreneurial idea but don't need the hassle of finding/renting/building the office space right away? Want or need interaction with other, like-minded entrepreneurs? Check out Carrboro Creative Coworking, a place where you can find energizing office space at a small cost without the administrative headache. I love this concept. The owners are offering incubator-ish space at a reasonable rate, and also using social networks to build community.

Research parks: best configuration?

Here are a couple of recent BusinessWeek articles on business parks and their role as drivers of economic growth. The first article touts Research Triangle Park as an attractive model for research parks. I live a few minutes away from RTP and attend MBA classes in the park.

The second article is skeptical of the idea of siting a research park in the woods, and argues that research parks need to be part of larger, urban communities. Ideas for new products and companies are hatched when tech workers can easily bump into each other.

Being in and around RTP, I can vouch for the fact that it's hard to find people who are interested in new products and are willing to talk business. The layout of the park, with company campuses hidden behind security gates and trees, doesn't lend itself to meeting and talking with people.

The idea of cities as optimal places for innovation and technology development is laid out in detail in a great book I read recently, Who's Your City, by Richard Florida. Florida shows how important geography is for economic development, and shows that cities are increasingly becoming centers of economic development. Nice read, and a good perspective when talking about siting new research parks.

IBM's Next Five Big Things

This press release from IBM claims that speech recognition for the Web will be a hot technology within five years. As I mentioned previously, IBM has been dedicating some effort to speech recognition. It's a nice idea, I'd like to see it happen, but it's usually a good idea to be skeptical of claims for any speech recognition application.

Here's a slicker presentation on the material in the press release, with a little different spin. The "web" use would be for automatic speech translation, apparently. Automatic translation has been a dream for decades, and in fact it's one of the original AI research projects. I'd like to get a chance to talk to someone in IBM speech research about this.

Burned by the human factor again

Interesting observation by the New York Times on the financial crisis. Fields like finance and economics are the domain of the "quants," the people who build mathematical models of market behavior. However, the models are only good as the assumptions that underlie them, and managers' abilities to see what the models can and can't do. The models aren't reality, despite the economists trying to sell them as such.

The hardest part to understand in any complex system where human behavior plays a part is the human. And that's the part that's invariably over simplified in finance and economics. There's very little "human factor" in economics, except perhaps in the sub-field of behavioral economics.

As a voice user interface designer, I see it all the time. Project teams spend a great deal of time on the technology itself, because the technology is pretty difficult to implement. Unfortunately, the behavior of customers and callers and customer service reps is often given short shrift. That's too bad, because that's the really hard part to understand, and the success of an implementation is dependent on understanding and designing to accomodate the human part of the system.

Remarks on The Future of Managment

For all of the books that are written on the subject of product and service innovation, how many discuss the idea that the structure of management is in dire need of innovation? Gary Hamel's The Future of Management is a wonderful exploration of the idea that workers can effectively manage themselves. Hamel describes the organization of management at companies like Google, WL Gore, and Whole Foods and shows how genuine worker-operated meritocracies can outperform top-down direction from MBA-trained managers. The message is especially compelling coming from Hamel, a long time professor at Harvard Business School.

Chapter titles include "Escaping the Shackles," "Creating a Community of Purpose," "Learning from the Fringe," and "Building an Innovation Democracy." This book is pure inspiration. However, I wonder how many prospective "management innovators" who read the book find Hamel's ideas too radical to be implemented in their own companies.

Remarks on The Innovator's Solution

I read the modern classic The Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor. The authors build a theory of how companies that are leaders in their domains are disrupted by smaller, upstart competitors. The successful smaller competitors start by stealing the leaders' least attractive customers and work their way up market. The authors present numerous cases of how this has been a recurring pattern, and show that managers of the industry leaders are acting rationally by failing to challenge the upstarts immediately. Christensen and Raynor go on to say that large companies need to continuously innovate to capture the low end segment of their markets in order to preempt challengers and create new markets for growth.

The prose is difficult to read sometimes. Christensen and Raynor aren't the most elegant writers. When they describe how to identify products for development they get into design territory, and that's not their specialty. They talk about providing solutions for customers' "jobs" rather than basing product decisions on market segments. That's correct, as far as it goes, but the "jobs" language required me to make an almost constant mental translation into terms that are more familiar to designers. When designing, you do so based on the end users' goals instead of their tasks. Look at Alan Cooper's great discussion of users' personal and practical goals in his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Tom Kelley has a great discussion of the importance of observation in identifying consumers unstated, unmet needs and designing to meet those needs in The Art of Innovation. Christensen and Raynor are trying to cover the same ground but using their own invented terminology.

That quibbling aside, this is a good book. It presents great ideas for upstart companies that want to challenge industry leaders, and ideas for industry leaders about what they need to do to maintain their position. Recommended.

Remarks on The Art of Innovation

Tom Kelley's The Art of Innovation was published in 2001, and I'll bet anyone with a serious interest in design and innovation has read it, so this recommendation won't count for a lot, but I really loved this book. Instead of a cookbook on how to "do innovation," it deals with organizational culture, and what it takes to create and sustain an innovative company. Kelley is general manager of the design shop IDEO, headquartered in Palo Alto.

Every chapter is a delight. If you work (or have worked) for a company that is stumbling down the path to innovation you'll immediately connect with Kelley's stories and observations on company culture. Look at these organizational "Barriers" to innovation in Ch. 9, "Barrier Jumping:"

• "Hierarchy-Based. Innovation and structure are like oil and water. Forcing ideas to start at the top or rigidly follow a vertical path through an organization tends to weigh down new projects...
• Anonymous. There are companies where nobody seems to notice or care. Places where you can cruise slowly up a predictable career path...
• Experts. Expertise is great until it begins to shut you off from new learning. Many self-described experts...talk more than they listen. Experts can inadvertently block innovation by saying, "It's never been done that way.""

I worked at a large company where some managers were interested in "innovation," and designated a few individuals as innovation experts, with predictable results. Had these managers read Kelley's they might have understood that successful innovation depends on breaking down organizational barriers and changing their own behavior. Or not, since the people who benefit the most from hierarchy and structure are usually the last ones to acknowledge its existence.

The part of the book that was a complete surprise to me was the chapter on the effects of space on innovation. Kelley's company IDEO has spent a good deal of effort designing their own workspace in order to encourage their own design activities. I recognized Kelley's descriptions of workspaces that stifle innovation, but had never considered how powerful the workspace is on the functioning of individuals and groups. I had to read the chapter more than once to understand the lessons. I visited IDEO's offices in Palo Alto two years ago and was really impressed with the layout. I realize now how much deliberate activity went into the design of the place.

I've blogged on another of Kelley's excellent books, The Ten Faces of Innovation. It's a great read, too.

Innovation by "The Chosen Few"

Years ago, as I was documenting work processes in my first big call center project, I made what I thought was an astounding discovery. The experienced call center reps I interviewed had some very good ideas for improving their customer service process. They were having to work around some of the constraints of their IT systems in order to deliver service, and often working around the processes they were given by their managers. When I talked to management about the CSRs processes they were surprised to hear some of my findings. Second astounding discovery: managers don't always know their experienced CSRs' best practices. I recall thinking, "these reps really know their business. If someone could organize their ideas and get them pushed through IT and their own management it would really improve service."

Some years later the organization went through a period of identifying and selecting "innovators" whose role it was to produce innovative ideas and pass them to the rest of the organization. Watching the "innovators" from a distance, it was hard to see that anything was of any more value than the ideas produced by my CSRs in the call center, and most of it was probably a good deal less.

Jack & Suzy Welch's recent BusinessWeek article, Finding Innovation Where it Lives, hits the very point that I thought I'd discovered during my first call center gig. The article may be behind a password, so I'll quote the relevant parts. They debunk the notion that innovations come strictly from individual geniuses working alone, but more often come from coworkers "in the trenches" solving problems as a group and trying to make things work well. However, the organization has to make innovation part of its culture. As I saw in the call center, having great ideas means nothing if no one is there to harvest the ideas and push through changes.

The Welches finish by quoting an e-mail they received from someone who had an idea for a product but didn't know how to introduce it into his organization. They write, "How sad...another place where managers send the message that innovation comes from the chosen few. Imagine the possibilities...not to mention the fun, when organizations engage everyone else in the process, too."

That's innovation management, the ability to change the organization and draw everyone into the challenge of improving services and create processes that harvest and organize everyone's ideas, not just those of the "chosen few."