How Do Innovators Think? – Bronwyn Fryer

What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick? In a question-and-answer session with HBR contributing editor Bronwyn Fryer, Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University and Hal Gregersen of Insead explain how the “Innovators’ DNA” works.This post is part of HarvardBusiness.org’s Creativity at Work special package.

Fryer: You conducted a six-year study surveying 3,000 creative executives and conducting an additional 500 individual interviews. During this study you found five “discovery skills” that distinguish them. What are these skills?

Dyer: The first skill is what we call “associating.” It’s a cognitive skill that allows creative people to make connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas. The second skill is questioning — an ability to ask “what if”, “why”, and “why not” questions that challenge the status quo and open up the bigger picture. The third is the ability to closely observe details, particularly the details of people’s behavior. Another skill is the ability to experiment — the people we studied are always trying on new experiences and exploring new worlds. And finally, they are really good at networking with smart people who have little in common with them, but from whom they can learn.

Fryer: Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

Dyer: We’ve found that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesn’t have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas aren’t created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they haven’t been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

Gregersen: You might summarize all of the skills we’ve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. It’s the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

Fryer: How else do you think the innovative entrepreneurs you studied differ from average executives?

Dyer: We asked all the executives in our study to tell us about how they came up with a strategic or innovative idea. That one was easy for the creative executives, but surprisingly difficult for the more traditional ones. Interestingly, all the innovative entrepreneurs also talked about being triggered, or having what you might call “eureka” moments. In describing how they came up with a product or business idea, they would use phrases like “I saw someone doing this, or I overheard someone say that, and that’s when it hit me.”

Fryer: But since most executives are very smart, why do you think they can’t, or don’t, think inquisitively?

Dyer: We think there are far more discovery driven people in companies than anyone realizes. We’ve found that 15% of executives are deeply innovative, meaning they’ve invented a new product or started an innovative venture. But the problem is that even the most creative people are often careful about asking questions for fear of looking stupid, or because they know the organization won’t value it.

Gregersen: If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they’re grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas. Unless, of course, they work for a company like Apple or Google.

We also believe that the most innovative entrepreneurs were very lucky to have been raised in an atmosphere where inquisitiveness was encouraged. We were stuck by the stories they told about being sustained by people who cared about experimentation and exploration. Sometimes these people were relatives, but sometimes they were neighbors, teachers or other influential adults. A number of the innovative entrepreneurs also went to Montessori schools, where they learned to follow their curiosity. To paraphrase the famous Apple ad campaign, innovators not only learned early on to think different, they act different (and even talk different).

Professors Jeff Dyer of Brigham Young University, Hal Gregersen of Insead, and Clay Christensen of HBS further explore this topic in an article which will appear in the December issue of Harvard Business Review.

Great Article From Harvard Business blog

GILL CORKINDALE LETTER FROM LONDON RSS Feed
Is Work Taking Over Your Life?
2:56 PM Wednesday September 16, 2009

Tags:Managing yourself, Time management, Work life balance

When I left a large company several years ago to start up my own firm, I imagined a more streamlined life, with less demands on my time from new projects and change initiatives. I could decide how much work I wanted to do and — critically — what I didn’t want to do. For the first time in my life, I had the luxury of deciding what I did and when.

Then I encountered reality. When you start a small business, you have to work long hours to get the company established: marketing, administration, and business development all take as much time as delivering the work itself, and you take every job that is offered. I have become my own worst boss, setting unrealistic goals, initiating new projects and writing lengthy to-do lists. I then order myself to deliver the work, which is often done in far-flung places around the world, develop longer-term projects and continue to run a now-thriving business at home.

I find myself working long hours, traveling far too much and working at weekends, never quite able to catch up with daily tasks, let alone the longer-term projects. My time disappears, my personal life comes second, and I have sometimes felt unwell from stress and pressure. It’s clear that things aren’t working.

One of the interesting things about coaching is how much you learn about yourself in the process of working with clients. Many of the executives I coach are facing the same issues as me, albeit on a much larger scale: they are in a perpetual state of overload and stress from new technology, globalisation, demands for innovation, and a shrinking workforce. On top of this, many have to work in a matrix-run organisation, meaning they are accountable to more than one boss. In sum, they are told to achieve more, more efficiently, faster, and with fewer people.

In many corporate roles, this is achieved by giving more capable people more to do, which leads to stress and burnout, and sacking the less-efficient managers. Many executives I coach are doing the work of two full-time executives. Take Andrew, 40, the CFO of a British retailer who was recently promoted to COO. He has been asked to cover both jobs until his successor as CFO is appointed “some time next year.” He has a deputy, but he is too inexperienced to take on the CFO role, which means long hours for Andrew and the constant anxiety that does neither job very well. He says the quality of his work has suffered as his attention is stretched in too many directions. And while he is bearing up well, he admits that he is occasionally beset by a paralysing fear that something will go horribly wrong.

Of course, this situation is unsustainable in the long run. If Andrew continues to try to do both roles, his anxiety will increase and he could be in danger of derailing his career and his health being affected, perhaps even suffering from burnout. For his company, there is a risk that Andrew may feel it’s simply not worth it and he may choose to walk away and find another role which offers better conditions.

So what can you do if you are in a situation like Andrew, or if you are leading an organisation where this kind of overload has become the norm? Or perhaps you are an entrepreneur like me, who has become your own worst boss in a business which threatens to overrun your life.

I suggest three immediate steps which should go some way to streamlining your working life. These are just initial thoughts — I am sure that you have many better ideas which I encourage you to share with fellow-sufferers! I look forward to hearing them all, but in the meantime, these are my ideas:

1. Manage your time ruthlessly and set clear priorities. It’s often a revelation for executives to analyse exactly where their time is spent during the week — in pointless meetings, with demanding team members, chasing the boss, or staring at an ever-growing list of tasks. Determine how many hours you need to work (I suggest an upper limit of 50-55) and then manage these as you would manage your money: don’t throw them away!

Consider what is really urgent and has to be done, and what is really important to you in the long run. Look at your strategy carefully and rank the strategic importance of goals, tasks, and projects, identifying the essential ones. Focus your energy on these and make sure that you set aside time regularly to reflect on your strategy and what you are doing. Take the time to recharge.

2. Once you have set your priorities and decided where you will spend your time, draw up a list of things you can eliminate. Executives are very good at drawing up lists of things to do and devising new projects and initiatives, but from now on, list what you don’t need to do. Initiatives often become mired in problems and processes, or executives can’t let go because they have invested too much time in them. Again, be ruthless: be clear that killing off projects does not mean personal failure; it’s simply that defunct projects drain energy. Throw out old projects and initiatives that are going nowhere and try to focus on key projects that will deliver results.

If you are unable to decide, ask your team which projects or initiatives are a waste of time and they will no doubt draw up a list for you. If in doubt, discipline yourself to cancel at least one project every time you decide to initiate a new one. Recognise the danger of overloading: energy is a finite resource and you must use it well.

3. Push back against your own boss — or yourself — to ensure that you are not chasing endless initiatives and are focusing your energy on key projects. If your boss is bad at setting priorities, ensure he or she is really committed to a project before you invest your time in it. One of my clients had a very effective way of managing a boss who constantly fired off new ideas and initiatives: she only responded to his requests when he had made them three times — she knew that these were important while the rest were allowed to die quietly.

So what do you think? Do you think overload is inevitable in the current working environment? If so, what are your ideas for managing overload at work or in life? Do you have any strategies to get back to core activities? If not, what are your suggestions for avoiding overload in the first place?

Groupon’s Four Keys to Customer Interaction – John Sviokla – HarvardBusiness.org

a Groupon representative reports that they have doubled in just the past few weeks. First started in November of 2008, they now have 80 employees, and 675,000 email subscribers growing at 40-50% per month. They hope to exit the year with over a million. What are they doing right? How are they gaining customers at such a rate?

After the site was written up by Jennifer Van Grove on Mashable, some of the commenters said that this couponing idea was old news, as there are many other coupon aggregator sites including Daily New Deals. But those sorts of traditional coupon sites are a beast of a different color, as they provide buyers with a lot of choice. By contrast, Groupon is focused: one deal, each city, each day.

There are other group-buying sites, such as Buy With Me, but Groupon does a much better job of making the participation process easy, and the offer alive. Too much choice stifles decision making. For me, Groupon is to couponing what iTunes is to music buying — clean, simple, and exciting.

I see four key lessons that every company can learn from Groupon’s winning approach with customers:

Make the interaction super simple — one deal, one day, one city. What could be clearer?

Create a sense of urgency in your customers. If there are not enough people by midnight, the offer disappears.

Energize your customers to get other customers. Good word of mouth is useless unless it turns into sales.

Make it fun! Groupon’s tone is upbeat, enjoyable, and does not have that yet-another-boring-coupon feel.

Here’s the obvious question to ask yourself: in the myriad investments your company is making online, is there a simple, engaging, fun, fresh, daily interaction aimed to energize your customers? If not, now’s the time to design it. Readers, let me know — what’s your version of Groupon’s daily deal?

via Groupon’s Four Keys to Customer Interaction – John Sviokla – HarvardBusiness.org.

Chicken Recipe

ITALIAN STUFFED CHICKEN

I almost went back with the standby Greek Stuffed Chicken, but the challenge of creating a new stuffed variety was too tempting.  Bisquick came to mind… but after careful consideration:  For the Italian version, I changed up the stuffing and wrapped it in prosciutto ham. Needless to say, it was wicked good!

INGREDIENTS:
4 chicken breasts
9 slices of prosciutto ham
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp white wine
3 tbsp pecorino romano cheese, grated
2 tbsp fontina cheese, grated
2 fresh basil leaves, chopped
4 cloves of minced garlic
1/2 red onion, diced
1/4 tsp of each oregano, salt, black pepper, and crushed red pepper
2 tbsp sundried tomatoes, chopped

STEPS:

In a skillet, add olive oil and onions. Saute until onions are very soft. Add in garlic, basil, sundried tomatoes and one slice of prosciutto. Saute together with dry ingredients until nicely blended. Add white wine and cheeses until cheese melts. Stir and remove from heat. Cut a pocket into the chicken breasts and stuff the mixture into the chicken with a spoon. Wrap the outside of each chicken breast with two sliced of prosciutto making sure to cover the hole used for stuffing.

Pre-heat the grill to 375 degrees. Place the chicken on the grill and turn after 15 minutes. Then, check after 5 minutes for doneness.

first trick on the list this summer…

And another video that made me chuckle:

The Economy…

Financial Peace

Dave Ramsey

Financially Free

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

Be Rich

Thou Shall Prosper

… so obviously I am kinda into finances and the current economic situation is not easy to explain.  Tyler Reagan twittered about this video last week that makes a lot of sense out of the whole thing.  It definitely seemed worth putting on the ole blog.  Let me know if you agree:

 

Huggins Baby Bumpdate 03.13.09

Just wanted to get this posted before the BIG NEWS comes hopefully later this week

WATCH IT IN HD!!!  every thing’s better in HD

The restaurant we all know and love…

Questions

Something I’ve been wrestling with the last few days that I wanted to share: As someone who wants to continually develop as a leader, husband, father to be , and follower of Christ… what are the questions I should be asking myself regularly? How do you keep yourself on track with what God has called you to? How do we continually raise the bar? I’ve found that the right questions are incredibly helpful and would love your input. Ready, set, go!