The MIX List

What's your MIX List Pick?

Have you come across a surprising idea, a boundary-pushing practice, a disruptive experiment, a mind-flipping tip, or some clever new language that has you thinking differently about how to work, organize, or lead? Whether it’s a blog post, a video link, a news item, a Tweet, or a memorable remark from a conference stage — if it stretches your thinking and refreshes your energy, submit it. If we think it’s right for The MIX List, we’ll post it and credit you.

Weekly Mix List

Hacking Bureaucracy—Tip #1: Don't Be Chum

Polly LaBarre of MIX :: June 29, 2010 - 10:08am

Does this sound familiar?

In the real world, we generate great ideas, propose elegant solutions, and then force them to run the bureaucratic gauntlet. “the best ideas win” becomes “the safest ideas win” (and then lose eventually) as they travel through the bureaucracy and its meetings.

That's Chris Gram's pitch-perfect description of life in too many of even the most well-intentioned organizations. But he doesn't just define the problem—in a provocative and refreshingly practical post over at Opensource.com, Gram offers up a detailed taxonomy of two species not found in the wild (but which rule the roost in any hothouse bureaucracy): The Devil's Advocate and the Professional Meeting Attendee. Better yet, he offers a some clever workarounds when it comes to facing these creatures down—and some powerful advice on how to put great ideas and good work ahead of the trappings of organization that all-too-often stand in for making genuine progress.

Don't be chum—check the full post out here.

http://opensource.com/business/10/6/two-tips-meeting-survival-entrenched-bureaucracy

0 Comments Tags: bureacuracy, meetings, open source

The Giant Hairball: Wellspring of Creativity

Jena McGregor :: June 17, 2010 - 6:01pm

At some point during the process of trying to create something genuinely new and valuable, the temptation arises to just call it quits. To kill the idea because it didn’t pass through a “stage gate” prescribed from corporate higher ups. To tidy up the mess, flee uncertainty, and to get back to "business."

Resist that urge! So says IDEO partner Diego Rodriguez. Only he puts it differently: "Avoid shaving the hairball"— the 18^th in a list of innovation principles he’s been exploring recently on his blog. “The fuzziness of the innovation hairball makes its very presence uncomfortable for mature organizations,” Rodriguez writes, adding that “leaving a pool of ambiguity unmapped rarely squares well with meeting your quarterly numbers.” The best way to get comfortable with the infamous fuzzy front end, he argues, is to learn by doing. “The more you're in hairy, fuzzy situations, and the more you find your way out of them, the more your confidence in your own creative process will grow.”

Rodriguez’s idea may not be altogether new, but his evolving list of innovation principles (he’s planning 21 in total) offers smart inspiration for any organization trying to create new products or ideas. Here, a sample:

4. Prototype as if you are right. Listen as if you are wrong.

6. Live life at the intersection.

12. Instead of managing, try cultivating.

15. Celebrate errors of commission. Stamp out errors of omission.

17. It’s not the years. It’s the mileage.

http://metacool.typepad.com/metacool/2010/06/metacool-innovation-principle-18.html

0 Comments Tags: creativity, Diego Rodriguez, giant hairball, IDEO, Innovation

Set Your Ideas Free

Jena McGregor :: June 15, 2010 - 10:52am

Can a lack of copyright protection help innovation? Absolutely, argues Johanna Blakley, the deputy director of the Norman Lear Center, a media think tank, in this fascinating video from the TED Talks blog. Many people think of copyrights, trademarks and patents as something that helps to protect innovation. Companies spend millions on intellectual property lawyers to try and keep their hard-earned new ideas from getting co-opted by others.

But in the fashion industry, Blakley argues, innovation benefits from rampant sampling, borrowing and copying. She makes a persuasive case for a lack of copyright protection creating four beneficial results: a further democratization of the industry, faster establishment of global trends, induced obsolescence and an acceleration of the creative process. Want proof? Blakley holds up a slide that shows vastly greater sales in industries without copyright protection.

While your first instinct may be to call in the lawyers, hoard ideas, clamp down on your inventions, try walking in the fashion industry's Jimmy Choos: practice looking for great ideas in unlikely places, cultivate fresh eyes, spend fewer resources on protection and more on exploration.

http://blog.ted.com/2010/05/lessons_from_fa.php

0 Comments Tags: copyright, fashion, Innovation, Johanna Blakley

Forget Strategic Planning—Learn to Tell a Happy Story

Alex Todd of Trust Enablement Inc. :: June 10, 2010 - 11:30am

A brilliant mindflip from the blog of Roger Martin, the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto:

"Think about a strategic option as being just a happy story about the future. It doesn't have to be right and it doesn't even have to be sensible. It just has to result in your organization being in a happy place in the future. In fact, if it were absolutely right and utterly sensible, your company would probably already be doing it."

It's both lighthearted and profound advice—and holds several lessons when it comes to reinventing how we set strategy:

1. Keep it lighthearted and playful to encourage experimentation;
2. Remember that a strategy is just a story, fiction, a figment of one's imagination (i.e. don't fall into the trap of believing your own fiction);
3. Keep it aspirational and rooted in possibilities (based on trust), rather than derived from threats (based on fear);
4. Remember that storytelling is the most powerful means of communicating; and
5. Take the work out of the work of strategic planning by making it a more human activity

http://blogs.hbr.org/martin/2010/06/strategies-as-happy-stories.html

2 Comments Tags: aspiration, business, communication, creativity, discovery, fun, imagination, Management, management innovation, management process, planning, play, possibilities, storytelling, strategic planning, strategy

0.333333

Amazon Bestseller: Tony Hsieh Tells All

Jena McGregor :: June 10, 2010 - 10:12am

In a fascinating story on Inc.com, Zappos founder Tony Hsieh recounts why he sold his company to Amazon last year. The online shoe retail CEO weaves an honest account of his decision to sell the company, complete with profit-hungry board members and Jeff Bezos’s uncanny ability to predict PowerPoint slides. “The board's attitude,” Hsieh writes, “was that my ‘social experiments’ might make for good PR but that they didn't move the overall business forward. The board wanted me, or whoever was CEO, to spend less time on worrying about employee happiness and more time selling shoes.”

There are few better management innovators (or better chronicled) running businesses today than Tony Hsieh, and most followers of new management ideas are at least somewhat familiar with Zappos’s zany brand of management, from customer service representatives who are encouraged to do anything to make shoppers happy to Hsieh’s practice of paying employees $2000 to leave after orientation if they don’t think Zappos is the right fit for them. His logic: Because culture is so important to Zappos, anyone on the bus who doesn’t feel like a fit will only damage the company’s fun, friendly, customer-focused atmosphere. Give them a financial incentive to leave, and those rewards will pay dividends in the form of Zappos’ culture.

Despite the wet blanket board members, Hsieh is still running his "social experiments." One of his latest as he tries to keep the small-company spirit alive: “When employees log in to their computers,” Hsieh writes, “we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person,” with options such as “say hi in the halls” or “we’re going to be longtime friends.” Hsieh is then tracking the strength of those relationships, and looking for ways to make more employees close friends.

You can read the piece, which was adapted from his new book, Delivering Happiness, here.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html

1 Comments Tags: Amazon, culture, employee relationships, Tony Hsieh, Zappos

Leaders: How good are you?

Polly LaBarre of MIX :: June 9, 2010 - 9:38am

The ever-provocative (but scrupulously "evidence-based") Bob Sutton asks the question: what makes a great boss? Rather than take the usual Mr. Potato Head approach of bolting together attributes, styles, and features to create a vision of the ideal leader, Sutton digs a little deeper into the minds of good bosses and comes up with a set of a dozen beliefs that more or less rule their thinking and day-to-day behavior.

The top 12 list reads nothing like the usual scroll of heroic leadership qualities. A sampling:

1. I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me.
5. My job is to serve as a human shield, to protect my people from external intrusions, distractions, and idiocy of every stripe — and to avoid imposing my own idiocy on them as well.
7. I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong — and to teach my people to do the same thing.
9. Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too.
And of course:

12. Because I wield power over others, I am at great risk of acting like an insensitive jerk — and not realizing it.

Sutton's 12 beliefs cover a lot of leadership ground, but they're not a recipe. More important than adopting each and every one is to ask yourself a few critical questions: Have I examined my own beliefs when it comes to how I lead and manage? Which of those beliefs lead to behaviors that lift people up, unleash their best gifts, move the organization forward—and which serve my ego, shore up my sense of control, and grow my personal power and territory?

Check out the full post on his Harvard blog.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/05/12_things_that_good_bosses_bel.html

1 Comments Tags: bad boss, Bob Sutton, good boss, Innovation, Leadership, power

0.818182

Marketing Smackdown: Data vs. Story

Jena McGregor :: June 7, 2010 - 7:38pm

Why do marketers focus so much on focus groups? That’s the question behavioral economist Dan Ariely, whose popular book Predictably Irrational was followed up by The Upside of Irrationality last week, is asking over at his blog. Ariely argues that focus groups are a hopelessly narrow sample, offering marketers anecdotal evidence rather than statistical fact that truly arms marketers with solid consumer research.

It’s a familiar theme for Ariely: companies are set in their ways, look to protect consumers at the expense of new research, or simply, in the case of focus groups, often prefer a good anecdotal story to cold hard research facts. “As human beings, we have an insatiable need for a story,” Ariely writes. “Just one example of customer satisfaction has a stronger emotional impact than a statistic telling us that 87% of customers prefer product A over product B.”

In the comments, several posters take issue with Ariely, defending focus groups and qualitative research. One argues that many web-based companies are already collecting quantitative data real time, studying consumer choices by the choices they make online. Still, most seem to believe there’s a real need for managers to improve the methods they use to study what consumers want and why they want what they do. Surely there's room (and the need) for both when it comes to giving customers what they really want.

http://danariely.com/2010/05/25/a-focus-on-marketing-research/ AND FOR THE SECOND REFERENCE: http://danariely.com/2010/04/10/column-why-businesses-don%E2%80%99t-experiment/

0 Comments Tags: behavioral economics, consumer research, Dan Ariely, focus groups, Marketing

Finally, a Seat at the Table for HR

Jena McGregor :: June 4, 2010 - 2:32pm

For years, shareholders have primarily concerned themselves with a few things: Profits. Revenue Growth. The quality of a company's CEO and board. As a result, operations, finance and occasionally marketing had a seat at the proverbial table. HR most certainly did not.

But that's changing, argues John Sullivan, a human resources advisor and consultant. Increasingly, large institutional shareholders and private equity investors are caring a lot more about HR. He outlines four reasons: HR execs are getting better at containing costs, new research evidence draws a direct connection between talent management and a firm's stock price, greater pressure on boards is prompting them to take a more holistic view of the corporation, and there is more of a realization that employee compensation has a big impact on risk. "While not an accepted fact, but certainly a feasible argument," he argues, "all catastrophic corporate failures are the result of flawed employee compensation schemas (as opposed to executive compensation) that incent employees to take excessive risks."

Sullivan's onto something: Indeed, the Wall Street Journal wrote not too long ago about HR chiefs like IBM's Randall McDonald making it on to corporate boards, a place once reserved for CEOs and CFOs. Clearly, that's a sign shareholders are starting to "care," so to speak, about people. If shareholder attention causes managers to focus on HR the same way they do operations and finance, maybe there's hope that more will begin to live up to that age old truism: "people are our most important asset."

http://www.drjohnsullivan.com/newsletter-archives/514-the-future-of-hr-from-a-shareholders-perspective-part-1-of-6

0 Comments Tags: corporate governance, human resources, John Sullivan, shareholders

The Myth of Stars

Jena McGregor :: June 3, 2010 - 1:10pm

The modern day corporation is obsessed with talent. So much so that HR executives and CEOs sound like American Idol judges with how much they talk about the need to hire and retain the best people. To identify the stars, they grade them. To nurture them, they create special "high potential" programs. And to attract them away from other places, they reward them—all too often with lavish perks and obscenely high salaries.

Therein lies the problem, writes Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg in a smart and well-researched recent book called Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance. Groysberg studied more than a thousand Wall Street analysts, choosing a profession in which performance can be easily measured (how well an analyst picks or pans stocks) and portability is assumed to be the norm (analysts switch firms frequently, lured by heavy pay packages from competing firms). He found that in fact, analysts' performance plunged after moving to another firm on average and remained low for the following five years. His conclusion: What matters is the team and the environment that help a top performer flourish.

Groysberg's book offers an evidence-based case for managers looking for better ways to recruit and reward good people without having to defend their star status. But such management innovation could also be a roadmap for reform, argues Diane Coyle, the blogger behind The Enlightened Economist, a U.K.-based blog. Groysberg should be required reading for governments looking for ways to change the incentive system that drives the financial sector and that played an undeniable role in the economic fallout of the last two years. Coyle writes: "Groysberg has done [a] public service in exposing as false the claims of those in the financial sector who reckon they deserve their bloated pay."

http://blog.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/_archives/2010/6/1/4542202.html

1 Comments Tags: Boris Groysberg, Harvard Business School, incentives, pay, talent, Wall Street

Mind the Gap

Jena McGregor :: June 3, 2010 - 12:14pm

Innovation might seem like a mysterious process—one that requires the perfect recipe of serendipity, brilliance and creativity. Companies spend millions trying to acquire the right creative talent, foster the perfect innovative environment, and acquire the world’s best technology.

But London Business School professor Don Sull thinks much innovation is quite often simply a matter of anomalies. These “gaps between our mental maps and reality,” as he calls them on his Financial Times blog, are far too often ignored. In several recent posts, he outlines the ten anomalies companies often overlook—and the obstacles that prompt them to do so. Several include fascinating stories about innovative accidents, such as how appliance maker Haier discovered its washing machines were being used to wash vegetables in rural China.

Of course, innovation isn’t always as simple as exploiting cheap resources or importing a business idea from overseas. But Sull’s post is a reminder that just like product innovation, management innovation doesn’t need to be so hard. Find a problem that needs to be fixed. Discover the incongruities that could lead to better ways of working. And don’t ignore the gaps between our mental maps and reality.

http://blogs.ft.com/donsullblog/2010/05/22/top-ten-anomalies-that-point-to-opportunity-6-10/#more-12226

0 Comments Tags: big ideas, Don Sull, Financial Times, Haier, Innovation, London Business School