Networking & Business

If you want to change sector, your relationships will be of great value. Get out and talk to them. Get to know thier perspective.

In one of the hands-on performances I delivered last week, most of the audience was there to get ideas in order to change industry. They were thinking about working in a different sector.

How do you approach such a change?
Your relationships will be a great asset. The more diverse, the better.
If you are working as an engineer and want to work in finance (by the way, I did this jump once), you will need to speak to as many “weak ties” within the finance sector as possible. [Weak ties = relationships that are not very close to you.]

The majority of that audience last week did only talk to good friends and posted CVs into job boards. Full stop.
Of course, chances of success are very slim if you only do this.

If you want to change sector, go out and talk to as many people as possible. Get new perspectives on the sector and discover why you would be of great value to that sector.

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Why do we keep reinforcing our current perspectives?

When we go to events outside our department or our company, we have the chance to connect with different perspectives. We can start building new relationships with diverse professionals.
However, most of the time we don’t do it. We stay within our comfort zone, with the people we already know.

At the events where I have delivered a speech this month, I’ve made an explicit effort to see how many people were connecting with new perspectives at the coffee breaks. They were the “small minority”. Most people stayed with the same colleagues during the breaks, even when the break was labelled “Networking break”.

We all know we should do it, but we don’t do it often enough. We should use each opportunity for what it’s best suited.
For instance, having lunch at the corporate canteen is most suited to nurture relationships with current colleagues.
On the other hand, events (and their coffee breaks!) are more suited to make the first steps with new relationships, which could bring new perspectives into our radar.

When in a situation where you can connect with diverse perspectives, do it!

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

You need to connect perspectives all along the way in order for your innovation to succeed.

Better Place, the high-profile electric car start-up, has filed for bankruptcy. Their innovation: swapping batteries instead of recharging them.
It all was going very well as an innovative start-up. Let’s note that it’s a capital-intensive industry, very different from a software start-up that can fail fast.

Many commentators are writing about what went wrong. Let’s see what they did in the three stages of innovation: create, prototype and disseminate.

The eureka moment at the creative step came when Agassi (the founder) and Peres connected their perspectives at a Davos World Economic Forum. Shimon Peres told Shai Agassi: “Nice speech, but what are you going to do?”
One had the dreamer’s perspective, while the other had the pragmatic perspective. They connected both perspectives. Better Place was born and started walking.

The prototype step was going well and they had already built some battery swap stations. Batter Place was well equipped with cross-disciplinary teams.

However, the dissemination step requires more perspectives to be connected, and they weren’t. Their first market was Israel. And “Israeli drivers simply don’t embrace environmentalism”.
As we wrote some years ago in a journal article, the spread of innovation depends on the mix of their adopters, which combines “innovators” and “imitators”. Imitators keep the innovation spreading.
In Beter Place’s case there might not have been enough imitators.

Related links:

• Why Better Place failed with swappable batteries, by Steve LeVine at Quartz. Excerpts:
  “John Voelcker, editor of Green Car Reports, told me that Agassi missed important lobbying steps in Israel, his test market. Israel is an unusual place to sell cars, in that half of all new car sales are to fleet owners such as businesses, which provide the vehicles as a perk to their employees.”
  “There were other mis-steps. Agassi figured that Israelis would flock to a cleaner future, as he himself had. But a lot of Israeli drivers simply don’t embrace environmentalism, one local writer said.”
• Predicting the Speed and Patterns of Technology Take-Up. By Jordi Robert-Ribes and Phillip Wing. Australian Venture Capital Journal, 131 (May 2004), ISSN 1038-4324, pp34-36.)

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

You need to empower employees to build true cross-company relationships.

Your company cannot innovate alone. You partner with another company. You as the CEO are in very good terms with the other company’s CEO. This will be enough to achieve great innovation. Will it, really?

From a recent worldwide study by IBM (“Leading Through Connections”) we see that it is extremely important to “foster relationships at each level across partnering organisations.”
It’s not only at the executive level that you need good (and trusting) relationships. You need them at all levels (engineering, product, etc).

You need to empower the employees to build high-power networks. It’s not the number of connections that gives the power to the network. It’s the trust. And to build trust you need time and contact (if possible, face-to-face). It’s not a matter of sending a “memo-to-all-staff” asking them to push the “Trust ON” button.

The IBM study also mentions the importance of creating unconventional teams, mixing very diverse specialities. This seems to be well understood within most companies wishing to improve their innovation.
However, combining this with the previous point (cross-organisation true relationships) is harder to execute. If you get it right, you will get great cross-organisation unconventional teams!

Real relationships with people from other companies seems to be one of the last “benefits” that top executives would like to keep for themselves.
If this is the case, it will be just a matter of time for them to give it away…

Related links:

• Leading Through Connections, Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. IBM (2012).

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Are you persistent? Or are you pursuing a dead avenue?
Your diversified relationships can help to find it out.

Persistence is a “must” for entrepreneurs, CEOs and executives alike. You might have read several articles that mention this mantra one way or another.

You persist with a project and, at the end, it will be a hit. There are many books with examples of projects that didn’t look very good at the start of their lives, the founders’ persistence made it through.

However, there are many more examples of companies that have persisted so much on a wrong path that, in the end, they were lost forever. Just a few books talk about them. They are not role models…

How do you know if you are persisting or taking a path of self-destruction?
It’s very hard to know for certain. You have a limited perspective of things. Here is where the diverse perspectives you can get via your relationships can help you.

Don’t be fooled that you’ll get an unbiased perspective by asking to people in your network the question: “What do you think of my project? Is it doomed?”
People are polite. You need to have a truly diversified network of professional and trusful relationships to whom you can ask that question.

Not only lots of contacts from different fields.
You need true relationships, built on trust.
And remember that trust takes time to build. It is best to have just a few contacts which are very diverse and who really trust you.
If they don’t know each other, even better because the perspectives you will be connecting will be more diverse.

Related links:

• Little Black Book of Entrepreneurship, by Fernando Trias De Bes (2008). (It identifies the 14 Key Failure Factors and gives real examples and interviews about them).

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Innovation is not a lonely activity.
Praise everyone who helps innovate in your company.
They can be found in unexpected departments.

In the case of philosophy innovation, Collin Randall, in one of his greatest books, tells us about the need of a great network:
“In all of world history there are only three significant philosophers who will fill this description [being intellectually isolated]: Wang Ch’ung in China; Bassui Tokusho in Japan; and Ibn Khaldun in Islam. All are secondary figures in the influence they have exerted in the history (…)”

The same would apply to innovation in the corporate world. Innovation is not a lonely activity. However, when reading that paragraph, it made me think about the praise that happens after any successful innovative project, quite far from the philosophy world, in the corporate world.

Often, the most visible individual in an innovation project gets all the congratulations. We all know that it is good leadership practice to include, when giving praise, everyone that worked in the project.
Most people that were involved in the prototyping stage can be identified easily. It is often a very clearly defined team.
However, it’s not so for the ones that could spark the creativity stage.

Take your time to investigate what was the trigger of that innovation. It was probably well before the project started. For instance, it might have come from something that the receptionist told one morning to the Chief Engineer. In such a case, praise the receptionist. On one side, it’s fair. On the other, you might encourage the same process to happen again.

Take your time to discover those “spark initiators”. It is not easy, but it’s worth the effort.

Almost no innovation is the work of just one individual. When praising some innovation that has happened in your corporation or enterprise, compliment everyone that had some input into it.

Related links:

• The sociology of philosophies. Randall Collins (2000). Harvard University Press.
• “iinnovation”, Begins With Two Eyes
• What Type Of Professional Network Fosters Innovation?
• The Click Moment That Helped Windows To Survive
• Diversity Of People Propels Your Innovation

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Will megacities enable great innovation?
Or will it happen at small towns?

“By 2020 80% of Europeans will live in cities.” This sentence in a recent newspaper article by Jordi Bosch i Garcia sparked some questions in my head about its impact to innovation. The author questions wether it’s a non-stop process, a “road of no return”. He suggests that it might be more effective to bring the population close to the resources instead of having to transport the resources to the cities.

Anyway, you know I’ve written about how cities might become too big for innovation (see “Be Proactive With Your City Network” and “Too Big To Be Innovative?”). That recent article made me think that the impact on innovation is often not taken into account. And this is despite that most politicians argue that innovation is the growth engine for the 21st century.

Add to the argument the following passage from “Creating Minds”:
“Metropolises and megatropolises seem as seductive as ever. However, I have no trouble envisioning a future where the proverbial isolated creator (…) seated at her computer could come to the forefront of her field though she’d never met any of the leaders firsthand.”

As you might have read (“Find Another Brain To Get Into Creative Mode” and “Network To Be Better Innovators”), I don’t fully agree with the argument that great creativity happens when you are isolated. However, taking both above arguments together we might envision that some of the innovation steps thrive in cities while some others blossom in towns (or small cities). Thus:

1. idea generation, in towns;
2. idea development, in cities (with labs and production units); and
3. diffusion of developed concepts, in cities (due to the critical mass and the easiness of contact or intersection).

To sum up, there is no one-size-fits all. Each innovation step needs different relationships and different infrastructure.

Related links:

• Be Proactive With Your City Network, previous post.
• Find Another Brain To Get Into Creative Mode, previous post.
• Too Big To Be Innovative?, previous post.
• Network To Be Better Innovators, previous post.
• Creating Minds, by Howard Gardner (1993).

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Your job search strategy can be very similar to the innovation strategy of a company.

Last week I run an “experiential conference” for an alumni group at a leading Business School in Madrid. Most of the attendees were in a job search or career change process.

One way of approaching such a process is sending lots of CVs and posting it to as many job-search web sites as possible. Your chances of success will not be very high.

Another way is doing the steps a company would do for an innovation project.

Let’s consider the three phases described by Hansen and Birkinshaw in their article “The Innovation Value Chain”:

• idea generation,
• idea development, and
• diffusion of developed concepts.

The idea generation is the equivalent of defining your priorities and finding your “transferable skills”.

The idea development equals to meeting people from different industries to investigate how you can apply your skills in those sectors.

The diffusion corresponds to meeting executives (potential employers) and let them know about your skills and availability.

A breakthrough innovation is often very different from what you expected.
In the current economic climate, you might find a job in a sector where you weren’t initially looking into.

You can apply an innovation strategy methodology to your job search.

Related links:

• The Innovation Value Chain, Harvard Business Review, June 2007, Hansen & Birkinshaw.
• Find a Job Using Disruptive Innovation, Harvard Business Review, March 2012, Dyer & Gregersen.

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

You cannot just attend conferences. You must participate in them.

To attend a conference is just a matter of sitting through the sessions and listening to the speakers. To participate in a conference requires being active.

Ask a question
Most participants will attend the first session of a conference, often a plenary with one or more keynote speakers. What is more important than listening to the speakers? It’s asking a question that everyone will listen to!

And even better, they will listen to your single-sentence self-introduction at the beginning of the question. The idea is to make yourself visible to the rest of the attendees and even to the star speaker. This is extremely useful when you are new to the industry.

Attend the breaks
Your preferred session should be the coffee break.

At breaks, meals and cocktails you will be able to talk to people in a more relaxed environment than in the workplace. Susan RoAne authored a book about this called How to Work a Room.

A good starting point will be to approach people who are standing alone, probably because they are intimidated by the thought of approaching other people. You first tell them your self-introduction, you ask them about the conference, and then the dialogue starts.

Schedule the follow-up
Most likely, on the first day back at the office you’ll be swamped by the many tasks that are waiting for you. So you might decide to postpone the follow-up with all those new contacts. Tomorrow will surely be easier. However, tomorrow arrives and you’re back into the office routine and urgent matters arise.

A proven way out of this spiral is never to get into it. When you plan a conference in your diary, you should include some time for follow-ups during the subsequent days.
If it’s not in your diary, it might not happen!

Excerpt from the book Connecting Forward.
You can buy the book or take complementary tests.

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk

Innovation success requires much more than creativity. It needs great execution.

Two articles I read last week made the point. One is about a corporation and the other about a country.

On one side, one article is about how a worldwide leader of automobile-infotainment systems achieved reverse innovation (bringing innovation from emerging countries into western markets). It is the case of Harman International.

It shows clearly that the hardest part to achieve that innovation was not the creativity but the implementation of the new platforms. The implementation goes well beyond the “selling into the market”.

One of the Harman’s challenges was the internal buy-in from different (established) divisions. Leadership involvement and personal bridges across divisions were crucial to the success.

On the other side, the second article (which is in fact composed by three blog posts) is about the proposal by Louis Gallois (French Commissionaire to Investment) to improve innovation in France.

It shows that France has excellent capabilities for creativity. They include great engineering schools.
However, the country seems to lag behind when it comes to bring the innovation to the market.

When thinking innovation, think beyond “just” creativity. Think building bridges.

Related links:

• A Reverse-Innovation Playbook, by Vijay Govindarajan (Harvard Business Review, April 2012)
• Les convictions de Louis Gallois pour réussir l’innovation en France (in French), post by uillaume Villon de Benveniste

Connecting Forward: Buy yours at Amazon.co.uk