There's a really interesting discussion thread happening over at Ideaflow regarding the role fear plays with innovation. In particular, the talk is of disruptive innovation and the fear that someone else's new technology will replace rather than enhance your current technology.
Current business leaders... can “either manage the discontinuities and disruptions or lose [or never attain in the first place] their leadership roles.”
So if it’s capitalism itself that is ripe for disruptive innovation, then the new class of successful business leaders won’t be the ethical accountants or the finance gurus. Not even the sharp-as-a-tack strategists. There will be a place and a use for those folks, but the leaders will be the innovators – either currently successful innovators, or really smart people who understand innovation, understand disruption, and who understand how to lead others past their fear.
His name is Al Lubel. Al "Al Lubel" Lubel. And this former trial attorney is an amazingly funny and very cerebral NY comic. Do yourself a favour and go see him next time he is at a comedy club in your city.
His humor is introspective in nature. He rarely does "observational humor" such as, "Did you ever notice?" His humor is philosophically and existentially based. It can best be described as; "Did you ever dwell?" Al bares all, telling you more about himself that you necessarily want to know. He uses his legal ability to put himself on trial. Through this catharsis Al lets the audience know they are not alone in the world – they are with Al Lubel.
The music of Radiohead, as seen by a class of fifth-graders.
We will play a career-spanning selection of Radiohead songs; the kids, equipped with Sharpies and blank sheets of paper, will simply draw whatever the music suggests to them. We don't even give them the name of the band. They don't know anything about Radiohead, the mountain of criticism, the mythology. Their thoughts and interpretations are pure, unsullied, literally unique.
They are also extremely bizarre.
Popular Science and Core 77 partnered up to hold an industrial design contest focusing on the nascent field of e-memory. The challenge: when e-memory is ubiquitous, how will it enhance our wetware memory systems? Sight, sound, scents, and so on.
Informative yet aesthetically pleasing. Instructoart is the creation of Matthew Vescovo, master of the obvious. His useful and amusing diagrams on how to go about regular, mundane tasks -- like achieving appropriate air-kiss cheek distance, signalling a waiter for the bill, or removing nasty hairs from your bar of soup -- have gained notoriety on MTV and are slowly spreading around the web. Says Vescovo of his attempt to combine the art of learning with the art of art, "Instructoart documents the trivial habits and daily customs that humans have developed throughout history. Why anyone would find this entertaining I have no idea, but like everyone else I'm just trying to cash in on it."
To follow-up on Sunday's post about colonizing and consolidating:
Creative problems require a whole different skill set than do linear problems. This is often overlooked when seeking people or teams to solve these problems. Artists work differently than engineers (although there can be much overlap in their respective techniques). However, business problems are usually approached by the more conventional and rational approach, likely because this is how the client organizations themselves approach their work. When asked in an interview why he thought corporate executives thought differently than designers, Tom Peters answered, “Because we are literalists. We're trained as engineers. We have MBAs. Because we still believe that business is a reductionist activity, rather than a holistic activity.” The last thing idea projects need is to be reduced. The first thing they need is to be expanded.
At the centre of this disparity in problem solving approaches is the fundamental difference between generalists and specialists. Specialists work with convergent problems and generalists prefer divergent problems. One of my favorite thinkers, Peter Senge, offers the best definition and distinction between the two in his book The Fifth Discipline:
Convergent problems have a solution: “the more intelligently you study them, the more the answers converge.” Divergent problems have no “correct” solution. The more they are studied by people with knowledge and intelligence the more they “come up with answers which contradict one another.” The difficulty lies not with the experts, but in the nature of the problem itself. (“It is important to note that divergent problems are not convergent problems that have not yet been solved. Rather, they are problems for which there is no single, best solution.”)
Inherent to both approaches is that there are two ingredients: information and knowledge (technically, the first is the ingredients and the second is the outcome). Both a generalist and a specialist work with somehow making information into knowledge. A generalist approaches this process as someone holistically considering a broad range of information, synthesizing it and directing it to where it would be most relevant and useful. A specialist approaches this process as someone analytically considering a deep range of information, refining it and applying it to a particular scenario.
It all comes down to problems and solutions. The unique ways of dealing with these two things really is the core difference between generalism and specialism – particularly in creative business.
Generalists are usually better at helping to define the problem while specialists tend to frame the problem to fit their solutions. Generalists are better equipped to adapt their practice to a project’s requirements whereas specialists tend to be more inclined to ply their trade the way they see it. A solution looking for a problem versus a problem looking for solutions. Intelligently scattered versus diligently deep. Leaping versus digging.
Both generalists and specialists work with ideas, although the nature of the ideas that they are best at working with are quite different. “The goal of a generalist is to solve the problem at hand, to engineer a fitting solution," writes Fred Nichols. "The goal of the specialist is to find problems that fit the solutions at hand. (This is a fine distinction being drawn here but it is an exceedingly important one.)”
Specialists work mostly with incremental ideas. Their work is gradual, methodical and focused on furthering a particular project by solving it or improving it - or only an aspect of it - in numerous small frequently pre-determined steps. Specialists are determined creators and ingenious innovators.
It is in specialized fields that we have made the most progress of late, and it has been technology that has accelerated this progress by providing new tools to work on specific projects faster and more efficiently. The Human Genome Project, for example, is on a narrow point of study that would not be where it is at today without the assistance of advanced computers. And because of this, a plethora of non-genetic issues have also arisen and must be considered from even more perspectives.
Generalists, on the other hand, work mainly with transcending ideas. Their work is also somewhat gradual but more random, furthering a particular project by defining a problem and exploring the best ways that it could conceivably be solved. The problems normally handled by generalists are large in scale and complex in that the absence of apparent direction and solid parameters present a high degree of ambiguity to manage. A good novelist, for example, is someone who is able to build a single, coherent story by piecing together the insightful anecdotes, the unusual (or usual) characters, and the vivid settings we have strewn throughout our lives and in our imaginations.
As with all things, perhaps it is best to have a balance; someone who is well versed in an area but also active in learning about things outside of that area. This is the ideal and some people do this admirably. I say admirably because it is like swimming against the current. With so much information – both broad and deep – few are able to maintain both with equal intensity, especially if something as vital as career has little acceptance of one’s interests and hobbies outside of what one is being paid to do.
_S
The Fall issue of Strategy + Business has an excellent article by Costas Markides and Paul Geroski titled, Colonizers and Consolidators: The Two Cultures of Corporate Strategy (registration required). It's about the fundamental differences between small, nimble, entrepreneurial and innovative firms versus larger, more bureaucratic, process-based and established firms. It touches on the dichotomy of creating ideas and scaling them up to profitability.
Our research, which examined the early evolution of several new markets, provided a number of clues about how markets are created, how they evolve, and what their structural features and characteristics are in their early formative years. In industry after industry, we saw the same pattern unfold: Upon the creation of a new market, there’s a mad entry rush by scores, sometimes hundreds, of players to colonize it. At some stage in the evolution of the market, a “dominant design” emerges, which standardizes the core product or service being produced, gives it its lasting identity, and defines the identity of the market it serves. Upon the emergence of this dominant design, a shakeout and consolidation takes place in the market: The overwhelming majority of early movers that choose the wrong design go out of business; a few prescient (or lucky) ones that bet on the winning design survive, and a handful of these grow to market dominance. ...
The fact that firms that create new product and service markets are rarely the ones that scale them into mass markets carries serious implications for the modern corporation. Our research points to a simple reason for this phenomenon: The skills, mind-sets, and competencies needed for discovery and invention not only are different from those needed for commercialization; they conflict with the needed characteristics. This means that firms good at invention are unlikely to be good at commercialization, and vice versa.
Some firms are natural colonizers, able to explore new technologies quickly and effectively and to make the creative leap from a technological novelty to a product or service that meets customer needs. What these firms are good at is creating new market niches. Other firms are natural consolidators. They are able to organize a market, turning a clever idea into something that reliably and regularly meets the promise, can attract consumers, and can be manufactured and distributed efficiently to a mass market.
Very few firms are good at both sets of activities.
Margaret J. Wheatley, author and organizational development authority, writing in the Indian magazine Vimukt Shiksha, (March 2001):
It isn't just pop culture and fast food that is creating a monoculture across the planet; it's also the spread of one management model, a model that is inherently destructive of life. ... there is at least one other great destructive force at work globally, and that is the American management model. Leaders everywhere, no matter what their culture or tradition, are pressured to focus on numeric measures of efficiency and narrow measures of success, i.e. growth and profit-making. These practices are not sufficient to create a healthy and robust workplace or planet. American businesses that only focus on these narrow goals fail as well. As these too-narrow measures roll out around the world, they create the conditions for large-scale destruction of cultures, habitats, and the human spirit. Yet few local leaders can withstand the pressure to be "modern" and so they forfeit their own experience and wisdom about what works best within their own traditions.
(via Utne)
A Dot-Commer Becomes a Lecturer - Jeffrey A. Dachis, founder of the technology consulting business Razorfish, at New School in Manhattan.
Standing in front of the blackboard, Mr. Dachis ridiculed other classes at the New School and elsewhere that he said taught students simply how to operate a computer program. "Tool monkeys," he called them. With a piece of chalk, he drew two connected squares. Pointing to the top box, he said, "Here is where the tool monkey is."
Then, he pointed to the bottom. "Down here is where the theory is," he said. Without the basis of theory, the result ends up being meaningless, he said. By the end of the two hours, only about two-thirds of the audience remained. One would-be participant who stayed asked Mr. Dachis, "What kind of student will benefit most from this class?"
"Thinkers who understand prepositional and propositional logic," Mr. Dachis said. "We're going to completely shatter everything we know today."
These were yesteryear's promotional pitchmen and packages.
A rant against the current state of journalism and the specialty dished up at today's journalism schools, by the former Saturday Night magazine editor-in-chief John Fraser in his 1994 collection of selected diaries Saturday Night Lives!
Some time ago in the dim, dark past of the history of journalism - about the time Richard Nixon and his U.S. presidency were on the ropes over the Watergate scandal - the avocation of reporting, a hitherto modest craft that was the last safe redoubt of the generalist, took on cultic overtones, complete with priestly practitioners. However honourable were the intentions of the two mighty journalists at The Washington Post who broke and sustained the Watergate story, they have nevertheless spawned several generations of second- and third-rate Carl Bernsteins and Bob Woodwards. We've been paying the price ever since in the demolition of respect for public institutions, in the declining quality of our political leaders, and in the stultifying cynicism of a public that now needs to be mainlined with any old trashy exposé in increasingly frequent and deadly doses. If old-fashioned journalism can fairly be accused of too often ignoring political cupidity and ethical malefactions, new-style journalism is far more guilty of manufacturing scandal and human failure out of innuendo, out of suspicion, and - often enough - out of thin air. ...
What I would really like to do is eliminate the whole lot [journalism schools], take the budding journalists by their collars and pants, and force march them into literature courses, philosophy courses, psychology courses, political science courses, law courses, theology courses, even basket-weaving courses - anything that would keep them away from Journalism 100.
Here's a EuroBusiness column stressing the benefits of combinational possibilities (PDF link); the synthesis of existing ideas to create new ideas.
Remember that someone put a trolley and a suitcase together and got a suitcase with wheels. Someone put a copier and a telephone together and got a fax machine. Someone put a bell and a clock together and got an alarm clock. Someone put a coin punch and a wine press together and we got books.
So the next time you wheel your suitcase or read a fax or a book you are benefiting from someone’s ingenuity in putting together a combination of ideas.
Stephen Zades of Odyssey Network does a fabulous job in the recent Inc of conveying the excitement and intelligence of Robert Redford's inspiring Sundance enterprise. Redford has built a small business empire on holistic, cross-discipline thinking and an organizational imperative to embrace artists, new ideas and creative community - not to mention a strong desire to return elements such as originality, character and humanism to big-screen film-making.
Such prolificacy is not the consequence of mountain air or movie star charisma. Rather it springs from Redford's unshakable belief that growth is not an accounting practice but a creative process. And that goes not just for the entertainment industry, but also for ordinary companies that make sunscreen and software and ceiling fans. "The more I got involved with business, the more I got shocked at how dumb a lot of businesses were. Even the ones that had so much money," Redford says. "And, it's because they lacked a creative, imaginative approach. That's why I got taken with people like Steve Jobs and [Patagonia founder] Yvon Chouinard and [Smith & Hawken founder] Paul Hawken, who understood exactly how important business is but also understood the role of the creative.
"Do you think the earth was created by an accountant?" Redford asks me. "No! The earth was created by the combustion of a creative explosion. Fire and chaos are what started everything. Then order came on top of that."
Creative, experimental tourism...
Joel Henry, the French founder of the Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (Latourex), has developed dozens of similar ideas since coming up with the concept in 1990.
"You increase your receptiveness," the 48-year-old writer said by telephone from his home in Strasbourg in eastern France.
"You work out a set of constraints and you stick to it, and that is your sole purpose for the period you decide to devote to the experience. You are open to all the surprises that will pop up along the way," he explained.
(via Pure Content)
For another great atypical travel company, check out the good folks at Smiling Albino.
A Business Times survey from a few years back concludes that specialists will replace generalists.
One of the major trends expected in the international investment scene over the next few years is a move to greater specialisation. As a generalist it is difficult to differentiate oneself from the competitors as everybody knows what everybody else is doing.
The business model of the Eighties, which was "to be all things to all people" by having one large investment team covering the world, will give way to a new model of teams focusing on their core competencies, and outsourcing areas that can be better provided elsewhere.
It's true - specialists are replacing generalists - we've seen it happening. Brokerages, as in this case, are a good example of an industry determined to focus on very specific market niches. On the one hand it makes great business sense by efficiently utilizing resources but on the other hand it rules out exposure to potentially useful peripheral information (and shouldn't this be getting more important?). As a result, are they becoming even less proactive as they strive to become more reactive?
Where Has All the Ambition Gone? James Champy writes:
When Michael Hammer and I introduced the concept of reengineering in our 1993 book, managers took up the ideas and used them to attack fragmentation, bureaucracy, and the crawl of their organizations. Companies mobilized to bring about work and process changes that contributed to the dramatic improvements in productivity of the 1990s.
Today, in contrast, many leaders are almost cynical about new ideas. If one were to construct an ambition index, you'd find evidence of a growling bear in the idea marketplace. Virtually every barometer is down: published business books, leadership lectures, consulting revenues, corporate investment in developing the knowledge, skills, and abilities of employees, venture capital money and deals, and issued patents. The numbers reflect a severe idea recession.
You wanted the wurst, well you got the wurst - the hottest designer Russian nested dolls in the world... A project by Portlander Jason Sturgill in which a quintet of these wooden dolls are sent out to a varied cast of clever designers to customize in the best way they see fit.
Did you know that bicycle couriers have their own Olympics? Yup, they do and Seattle will play host city to the Games in mid-September.
...[I]t's called the Cycle Messenger World Championships. This is the 11th one; it's gone on in 10 cities all over the world. It's a celebration of the messenger lifestyle, because we're kind of shat on by society. People think of us as those people who cut you off and break the law--we look crazy and we're punks. But really, bike messengers are just a bunch of loners who have said, "No, I don't want to sit in a cubicle and type on a computer all day; I want to ride my bike." I love to ride my bike, feel the rush of traffic, and be on my own time schedule.