The New Age of Thinkers

I currently work at Cisco, a highly successful technology company that sells routers, tele-presence and even furniture. I admire Chamber's goals in making the company not only the best among its peers, but the best company in the world. I share his vision in making this happen. However, my aspirations for the future go beyond the confines of Cisco's corporate walls to the larger landscape of companies big and small.

This takes me back to the title of this article "The New Age of Thinkers". Looking over the long term, the quality of the education system in most industrialized countries is declining relative to developing nations. Nevertheless, there are sufficient masses of people to execute upon a corporate directive or mission statement. There will always be masses ready and able to improve and fill the supply chain, to sell more products or create new widgets. I am sure that execution over innovation has been given more emphasis than in the past few years.

Unfortunately, since the global economic downturn many companies have put their innovation initiatives on hold to focus on customer driven revenue boosters. In the current economic climate, this sounds like a good idea. However, over the long term without innovation a company cannot leap-frog its peers or revolutionize an industry. What is sorely missed these days is an emphasis on thinking as well as doing. I am not simply talking about generating new ideas to bring to market, but a deeper and more all-encompassing perspective. With each passing day, the amount of information we must review, edit and forward is increasing exponentially. Those of us who are lucky to be employed are doing more in less time, such as multitasking during meetings and communicating through many channels all at once. As a result, productivity is increasing, more slides, spreadsheets, and customer visits are taking place in a work day, but at what cost?

For the past several decades, employee evaluations were and are based on how many projects were completed, on sales quotas reached and cost savings. Shareholders do not care how innovative a company or its impact on humanity; so long as a company generates profits one quarter to the next and rewards its shareholders, things are good. I think that companies that promote thinking as well as doing will perform better over the long term, because employees will find meaning in their roles beyond dollars and cents. Thinking should not be narrowly focused in strategic organizations, such as the strategy and planning, or senior management. There is room for every level within the organization to bring a voice to the mission and corporate directive of a company.

In short, this new age of thinkers should belong to a wider span of people within the organization to bring innovation, a new purpose and vitality. As the economy recovers, we will need more thinkers with a broader purpose that brings companies and nations together. Execution can always be outsourced or automated, but a company that recognizes its great thinkers will easily overcome its competitors in ways that cannot be easily reproduced or without a lot of resources to deconstruct or reverse engineer the new innovative process.

Managing Organizational Change Initiatives for Greater Innovation

If an organization's senior management wants to foster greater innovation, they must master change management. The DICE model improves chances for success. The four key factors are duration, integrity, commitment and effort.

Duration refers the time to execute the change initiatives. The time between reviews is more critical for success than a project's life span. The rule of thumb is eight weeks, if the review period exceeds this time frame then obstacles will surface. The review interval depends on the project's complexity and the comfort level the senior executives have in their implementation team to execute the project without review or supervision. Milestones and assessing their impact, allow executives to identify gaps, and evaluate risks. Most importantly, corrective action and preventing recurring problems from occurring are needed.

Integrity refers to the extent to which senior management can rely on the implementation team to achieve success. Selecting high caliber staff for the implementation team is not enough. Senior management must allocate the team more time by freeing up less important tasks and they need to worry less about day-to-day operations faltering. Research suggests that high performing staff tend to go the extra mile to ensure day-to-day tasks are completed. The best people to run these implementation teams are highly motivated, problem solvers and results-oriented, but do not crave the limelight.

Commitment refers to senior management backing of the change initiative and those most affected by the change (systems, ways of working or processes). The backers do not have to be from the top echelons of the hierarchy, but have strong organizational influence. Top level commitment is vital to gain the commitment from employees most affected by the change. In addition, senior management must communicate effectively the need for change. (Successful communication is based in part on delivering a consistent and unified message from all senior management.

Effort refers to workload of implementation team members. Those building the team must avoid allocating an increased workload greater than 10%. Going beyond this benchmark will adversely affect the outcome of the change initiative. The measure of effort is not only measured in the additional hours of hours worked, but also the outputs achieved overall.

By scoring each factor, the implementation team and senior management can better predict the successful outcome of the change initiative. The first factor is measured on the review intervals. The second factor is measured on the skill-set, motivation of implementation team members and time available for them to execute the project. The third factor is measured on the consistency and effectiveness of message and resources allocated from senior management to the change initiative. Finally, effort is measured by the % increase in team member workload and their resistance to it. Each factor has a score of 1 to 4. The lower the score, the better the outcome. Scores between 7 and 14 indicate high probability of success. Scores more than 14 but less than 17 indicate a great amount of risk. Finally, score above 19 indicate failure.

There is some degree of subjectivity when calculating these scores, and this presents a basis for debate among senior executives. The trick is to establish a set of rules or methodology to achieve greater harmony among individual interpretations from senior managers.

source: The Hard Side of Change Management, H. Sirkin, P. Keenan & A. Jackson, HBS Press, Reprint R0510G, ISBN 978-1-4221-0280-0

The Post American World and Innovation

After reading Fareed Zakaria's book The Post American World, I thought it best to comment on this great book and how it relates to innovation. Mr. Zakaria provides a well researched history of the rise of third world countries and more specifically of China and India. He also compares the United States with the superpower of the 20th century namely Great Britain.


Having a degree myself in History specializing in economic and political history, I relished his explanation of the rise and fall of the British and American empires. The author filled in my world view of history from an Asian perspective. He descriptions of China and India paralleled an article I read in Foreign Affairs.

Zakaria misses the mark when explaining America's rise to power. The eduction system in its current state is a recent phenomenon. The author says that the American education system encourages students to think instead of simply memorize fact and figures about history and science. This in turn, creates a foundation for a more vibrant entrepreneurial class and the birth of new industries flourishing from a greater pool of creative minds. He says that after Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1896, the British Empire had already reached its peak. The British educational system focused on aristocratic interests, such as literature and ancient history, instead of science and technology. The United States focused on more modern subjects that gave it a competitive edge moving forward in time. However, the author fails to understand the evolution of the American education system. In short, for many decades, it followed the same path as Britain in terms of memorization as a methodology until the early 1960s. Starting in the sixties many countries like the United States and Canada embraced a new methodology, namely reasoning and creative thinking to solve problems.

In terms of innovation the author overstates the impact of the American education system on the United States rise to power economically. Even as the education system in the U.S. changed towards a more thinking based methodology, some large institutions, such as Princeton maintained their focus on literature and the classics.

A country's education system does have an impact on its capacity to innovate. Yet Japan and the United States both rose to power economically despite having very different education systems, one focusing on memorization and testing the other on thinking and creative problem solving. A better explanation in my point of view is not the structure of the eduction system ,but the surrounding environments to support an entrepreneurial spirit. For example, the province of Quebec has a large entrepreneurial class and provides subsidies for higher learning and to start a business. Many students start their business in Quebec for these reasons. However, heavy taxation discourages many entrepreneurs from staying in the province once they make it big. The same applies to the educated elite, unless they go into politics, they tend to move or expand their businesses to the United States or elsewhere in Canada.

The point I wish to make is that the United States rose in power, because there were more opportunities for newly educated students to start their businesses after graduating. How students were taught was less important than what they did after graduation. Whereas Britain still had a strong aristocracy where inherited wealth was more common than wealth based on entrepreneurship. As a key source of innovation, entrepreneurship requires a large pool of opportunities, such as easy access to credit, a legal system that favors new businesses and a large enough population with access to higher education. Unfortunately, a heavy tax system encourages the inevitable long-term exodus to geographic areas with lower taxes, such as Ireland, and many developing countries. Margaret Thatcher's poll tax favored large land owners (often with aristocratic titles) as opposed to citizens from lower classes with smaller dwellings. This raises the question of Britain's decline in competitiveness thanks to its unfavorable tax laws.

Source:
The Post-American World by author Fareed Zakaria , Publ. W. W. Norton, May 5, 2008, 288 pages, ISBN-10: 039306235X, ISBN-13: 978-0393062359