Interview: Satish Nambisan

Nambisan is an associate professor of technology management and strategy at the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as well as a widely-recognized researcher and thought-leader in the broad area of technology and innovation management. Over the past ten years or so, he has conducted research on several important issues related to product development, technology strategy, innovation networks, and information technology. Through his countless articles in premier management journals, he continues to influence both research and practice in the above areas. He holds a PhD in Business Administration from the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University and MBA and Bachelor of Technology degrees from India. He was a Visiting Faculty at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in 2006. His latest book, The Global Brain: Your Roadmap for Innovating Faster and Smarter in a Networked World, was co-authored with Mohanbir Sawhney and published by the Wharton School Publishing in November 2007.

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Nambisan. The complete interview is also available.

Morris: What are the underlying principles of collaborative or network-centric innovation?

Nambisan: We identify four core principles of network-centric innovation. First, the partners involved in the innovation initiative should have a set of shared goals and objectives. Second, they should also have a shared “world-view,” – a common way of interpreting the external environment so that they could adapt to changes in a coherent manner. The third principle, social knowledge creation, emphasizes that much of new knowledge created will be through interactions among the different partners. The fourth principle, architecture of participation, relates to the need to offer all the partners a well-defined system to support both the co-creation of value as well as the fair appropriation of value.

Morris: What are the four basic models and key elements of network-centric innovation?

Nambisan: The framework is a very intuitive and simple one based on two dimensions. The first dimension considers the nature of the innovation space – whether it is well defined or something where the goals are not clear at the beginning, but will emerge over time. The other dimension is how much control you want to exercise. Is it a highly centralized network or is it a much more community-oriented or democratic type of network? Based on those two dimensions, one can identify four different types of network-centric innovation.

The first is the “Orchestra” model – wherein the innovation space is well defined and a dominant firm calls the shots. The Boeing 787 project is a good example of that. Boeing assembled a set of global partners whom it could trust with the process of creating entire sections of the plane, from concept to production. The design and development tasks were not just outsourced to these partners. Instead, partners made financial investments in those tasks.

In the second model, the “Creative Bazaar’, the innovation space is much more emergent, but it still involves a dominant firm. As in the case of a bazaar, you can go and get relatively raw ideas and then bring them inside and develop them, or you can buy well-baked product concepts and the only thing you would have to do is bring them inside and get them to the market. As noted earlier, a whole lot of players ranging from InnoCentive, Nine Sigma, etc. to innovation capitalists are involved in intermediating the transactions between the inventors and the firm.

The third model “Jam Central” is one wherein the innovation space is emergent and at the same time there is no one dominant firm; it is a community. As in a jam session, the community members actually share in the responsibility to govern the network, or to manage the flow of the music. There’s a lot of improvisation — nothing is really turned down. That’s how the innovation evolves. In our book, we use the example of the Tropical Disease Initiative (TDI), a community-based innovation initiative launched by a group of academic scientists to find cures for various tropical diseases.
The last model, the “MOD (Modification) Station” model, is one wherein the innovation space is well defined, but still there is no dominant firm. It is governed by a community. One of the interesting examples we came across was Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC Initiative (www.OpenSPARC.net). Sun put a version of it on the open-source community and allowed people to innovate on that platform. Here is an innovation architecture that is well-defined by one firm, but it gets innovated upon in a community. The output from that innovation actually belongs to the community, so it’s an open-source license.
Within each of these four models, we identify the different types of roles that companies can play, either as the dominant firms or intermediary roles. It’s not only crucial to identify the model that fits your company, but also what kind of role you will play. Then you can look at what kind of process infrastructure you need to build internally to support that kind of role. You can also look at the IP-related issues and other organizational structures that you might need to implement or establish to support the role that your company plays.

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If you wish to read the complete article, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

You are invited to check out the resources at these Web sites:

www.ssireview.org/images/articles/2009SU_Feature_Nambisan.pdf

Additional resources are available at these Web sites:

The Global Brain Web: www.theglobalbrain.net

Nambisan’s professional page: http://www.rpi.edu/~ nambis

His innovation blog: http://nambisan.typepad.com

Developing a Love of Reading

Books to love

I have a confession.  I love to read.  It started with comic books, then progressed to the Hardy Boys, and then really took hold with all of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout (I own the entire collection, and re-read them every few years).  I admit that I took a brief trip into Mickey Spillane for awhile (no, I didn’t tell tell my mother).  But for as long as I can remember, I have loved to read.

I speak to residents of retirement communities, and recently one such resident had to move from independent living to assisted living.  He is quite a man, and has read all of his life.  In World War II, he was among those who liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp just a short time after Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at the camp.  (If only they had gotten there a little earlier).  Well, this man moved into assisted living because he has lost his sight.  His greatest loss, in his own words:  “I can’t read any longer.”

My bias is clear.  We need a new generation of folks who love to read.  So I read with enthusiasm this article, A New Assignment: Pick Books You Like, in a recent New York Times.  The approach is simple.  The teachers let the students pick their own books, rather than assigning every one the same book to read.  It’s a middle school inititative, sweeping across the country.  Here’s the key paragraph:

But fans of the reading workshop say that assigning books leaves many children bored or unable to understand the texts. Letting students choose their own books, they say, can help to build a lifelong love of reading.

One Book at a Time

“I feel like almost every kid in my classroom is engaged in a novel that they’re actually interacting with,” Ms. McNeill said, several months into her experiment. “Whereas when I do ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,” I know that I have some kids that just don’t get into it.”

Is it working?  Not for every student, but it is for some.  Here is a letter that every teacher longs for:

In the final week of school Helen Arnold, Jennae’s mother, sent Ms. McNeill an e-mail message thanking her. “She never really just read herself for enjoyment until she took your class,” Ms. Arnold wrote.

This is a primarily a business book blog, usually dealing with business issues.  Here’s a business issue worth pondering – how do we build a generation of people who love to read?  Because if we succeed at this, more will read all types of books – including good business books.

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Personal note — a suggested place to start:  with either Some Buried Caesar, an early volume, or The Doorbell Rang, a later volume, and maybe his best.  These present Nero Wolfe and his Watson, Archie Goodwin, at their best.

About those E-versions of books… The worry mounts

Go to the article to click on the visual for a better view

I have written before about the danger to the “traditional book” (you know — the kind you hold in your hand, the kind with a cover, and pages, and the smell of books if they are old enough) posed by the arrival of the Kindle and its rivals.  The worry is spreading far and wide.

Here are the words of the head of a major French publishing group:

Hardback books could be killed off if Amazon’s e-books and Google’s digital library force publishers to slash prices, Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of French publishing group Hachette, has warned.

His complaint is primarily the fixed price of $9.99.  Out-of-copyright books have no author to pay, and the current hard covers are $9.99, which means:

“On the one hand, you have millions of books for free where there is no longer an author to pay and, on the other hand, there are very recent books, bestsellers at $9.99, which means that all the rest will have to be sold at between zero and $9.99,” Mr Nourry said.

I don’t know the ultimate outcome of this battle.  It is still very early.  But one look at sales figures for Kindle versions of best-sellers and you learn that the market share is rising faster than most imagined it would.  And it is still in its infancy.  As I have said, just wait until Apple comes out with a reader, as is rumored.

And– market share, price point — these do not touch on another key feature, the sheer convenience of the product.  You can literally carry an entire library in your hand.

Let’s keep checking back in on over time.  It is going to be an interesting ride.

I Keep Thinking About Change

Everyone needs to think differently about the future, a future that is riddled with change, challenge, and risk.  It is a new kind of future, not the steady plodding of progress from one moment to the next, punctuated by brief bursts of innovation that characterizes much of history.  Now we face a post-9/11 future.  The future of our lives, of our work, of our businesses – and most of all, the future of our world – depends on us gaining a new understanding of the dizzying changes that lie ahead.  I call this future-readiness.
• James Canton, The Extreme Future:  The Top Ten Trends That Will Reshape the World for the Next 5, 10, and 20 Years

I keep thinking about change.  I’ve posted a lot about change.  And I am, at times, confused.  Do you ever feel that way?

On the one hand, the business books seem to have a very consistent message.  Change is good.  Change is necessary.  Change is inevitable.  Change is already here.  (The Future Arrived Yesterday).   Change is all around us.  Nothing stays the same.  Nothing can stay the same.  We’ve got to embrace change, pursue change, love change, champion change.  We’ve got to be perpetually innovating, we’ve got to be change agents, we’ve got to lead the way to change.

Is there any one left on the business world planet who is ready to argue that change is bad, that we should oppose change?  Anybody?  I didn’t think so.

So, we agree — change is the way we ought to go, the way we must go.

And yet, I read that change is hard, that change is not popular.  I read that people don’t want to change, that people don’t change.  I read that the status quo is the most powerful force in the universe (ok — the 2nd most powerful force in the universe, right behind the irresistible attraction to Blue Bell Homemade Vanilla).

So — I ‘m confused.  And I suspect I am like a whole lot of others.  I have read a lot of books about change.  I know the vocabulary.  I think I understand the concept pretty well.  And I know the warnings that not changing is career/corporate suicide.

But I don’t like to change.  I don’t even think that I want to change.  Do you?  (And if you say you do, do you really think you are telling the truth?)

If we know that change is so good, so necessary, and if we know that change would enhance our lives, further our careers, help make the world a better place — then why do we not like to change, and why is it so very hard to change?

I really don’t know the answer…  but here’s a thought.  To do things the same way is “easy.”  Oh, it is still work, but it is “easy” work.  To do things in a new way requires a whole new level of effort. And we really are tired — tired from dealing with all the change around us.  It is easier, less effort, to just keep doing stuff the same way.  Even when we know that to do it in a new way, a “changed” way, would be better.  In fact, deep down I think we do know that if we don’t learn the new way, the “changed” way, we might really, really lose — our jobs, our careers, our future…

So, we know we should change.  And we don’t change.  Not enough.  Not often enough.

Anyway, I keep thinking about change.

Nickel and Dimed Stands the Test of Time — and Barbara Ehrenreich has a New Book Coming Soon

Vintage Ehrenreich

“I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear..”
Barbara Ehrenreich  (Nickel and Dimed:  On (Not) Getting By in America)

It was August, 2001, when I presented my synopsis of Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling book, Nickel and Dimed:  On  (Not) Getting By in America.  It was a devastating description of the life actually lived by the lowest paid workers among us.  This accomplished woman lived a year of her life as one of “them,” working as a waitress, a cleaning woman at a motel, and a WalMart Associate.  She always had her own money to fall back on (though, if my memory serves me, she only did so once), so she admitted that she wasn’t truly as “desperate” as the ones she worked along side of, but her account is a gripping, moving tale of the way so many of our fellow citizens live.

And things have only gotten worse since then – for many.  Poverty rates have climbed, and even with the recent raise in the minimum wage, many workers live literally at the edge.  Ms. Ehrenreich wrote an op-ed piece in June for the New York Times entitled Too Poor to Make the News that is worth reading.

This morning, Slate.com has an article about “The 18 Books You’ll Be Reading About This Fall,” entitled When Stars Align: So Bright You’ll Need Sunglasses.  I immediately went to the non-fiction portion of the list, and discovered a new Barbara Ehrenriech book, coming out in October:  Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

New from Ehrenreich

It’s hard to argue against optimism. But sometimes, a failure to be realistic can have some pretty serious consequences.  Here is a line about the book (from the Amazon site):

Nowhere, though, has bright-siding taken firmer root than within the business community, where, as Ehrenreich shows, the refusal even to consider negative outcomes—like mortgage defaults—contributed directly to the current economic crisis.

I don’t know that this book will fit what we typically choose for the First Friday Book Synopsis.  But it might.  And I am pretty sure I will present it for the Urban Engagement Book Club for Central Dallas Ministries after it comes out.  This I know – I will read the book, with interest.  Barbara Ehrenrich is a disturbing author.  That is one of the more important functions of a good business book.  Or, as Seth Godin put it, “I read in search of disquiet.”  (I blogged about this here).

When I read this book, I expect to be disquieted.

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• You can order my synopsis of Nickel and Dimed, with audio + handout, at our companion web site, 15 Minute Business Books.

Interview: Jim Champy

Now serving as chairman of Perot Systems’ consulting practice, Champy is recognized throughout the world for his work on leadership and management issues and on organizational change and business reengineering. He is the author of several books that include Reengineering the Corporation co-authored with Michael Hammer, Reengineering Management, The Arc of Ambition co-authored with Nitin Nohria, Fast Forward, and then the first two volumes in a new series, OUTSMART! and INSPIRE! At Perot Systems, Champy provides strategic guidance to the company’s team of business and management consultants and plays a pivotal role in furthering the firm’s goal to create an approach to services design and delivery unlike any in the industry. He consults extensively with senior executives of multinational companies seeking to improve business performance. His approach centers on helping leaders achieve business results through four distinct, yet overlapping areas—business strategy, management and operations, organizational development and change, and information technology

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Champy. The complete interview is also available.

Morris: An economy such as the current one seems to create both unusual perils and unusual opportunities. Two separate but related questions. Which peril do you consider to be the most serious? Which opportunity excites you most?

Champy: It is a time of both challenge and opportunity. I worry most about the actions of government and whether government actions will, inadvertently, dampen the entrepreneurial spirit in this country. We are a great capitalist society, that works most of the time. We do need to take better care of our people and fix the access, cost, and quality of healthcare. But we need to act intelligently. We needed the intervention of government to keep the economy from falling into an abyss, but we must now encourage the creation of business – not burden it.

Even during these times, there is great opportunity – especially for young companies that invent new ways of doing things. We are going to see new, dramatically lower price points for products and services in many industries – just think about information and software and what’s available free today. There is opportunity here for companies that are not burdened with high costs and old operating models.

Morris: In your opinion, what is the one issue that most business leaders do not take into full account when making decisions?

Champy: Most business leaders don’t consider their own causality in the creation of problems. They fail to see that their company could have avoided breakdowns if they had acted differently. We tend to see problems as having been created by someone else or by the “economy”. It’s good to be a little introspective from time to time. Think about how your own behavior might have gotten your company into a problem, and how it may help to get you out.

Morris: Looking ahead (let’s say) 3-5 years, what do you think will be the greatest challenge that business leaders will face and most somehow overcome?

Champy: In 3-5 years, most companies will need to have a global operating model – even if you only sell locally. Even mid-sized companies will source globally. Knowing how to operate in this environment will be critical. We need to train managers and leaders to become citizens of the world.

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If you wish to read the complete interview, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.

To learn more about Jim Champy, please visit www.jimchampy.com.

Book review: The Designful Company

The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation
Marty Neumeier
Peachpit Press/New Riders (2008)

Neumeier addresses the challenge of organizing a company for agility by developing a “designful mind”: that is, a perspective that enables decision-makers to invent the widest range of solutions for the “wicked problems” now facing their company, their industry, and their world. He is president of Neutron, a San Francisco-based firm, that designs and facilitates culture-change programs that spur innovation. In co-sponsorship with Stanford University, his firm conducted a survey to identify “wicked problems”—problems so persistent, pervasive, or slippery that they seem insoluble. Ten are listed on Page 2 and range from “balancing long-term goals with short-term demands” to “aligning strategy with customer experience.” In this book, Neumeier explains how to establish and then sustain a culture of nonstop innovation, one that is guided and informed by a discipline of design so that it generates nonstop solutions to whatever wicked problems it may encounter. (Note: The solution process must be nonstop in response to constant changes of the nature and/or extent of each problem to be solved.)

According to Neumeier, a designful company inserts “making” between “knowing” and “doing”. Its designers don’t actually solve problems. They “work through” them. They use non-logical processes that are difficult to express in words but easier to express in action. They use models, mockups, sketches, and stories as their vocabulary. They operate in the space between “knowing” and “doing,” prototyping new solutions that arise from their four strengths of empathy [i.e. understanding the motivations of stakeholders to forge stronger bonds], intuition [a shortcut to understanding situations], imagination [new ideas are generated by divergent thinking, not convergent thinking], and idealism [an obsession with getting it right, obtaining what is missing, making whatever changes may be necessary, etc.]. One of Neumeier’s most important points is that any organization (regardless of its size or nature) needs designers at all levels and in all areas of its operations. “To build an innovative culture, a company must keep itself in a perpetual state of reinvention. Radical ideas must be the norm, not the exception…Companies don’t fail because they choose the wrong course—they fail because they can’t imagine a better one.”

As these brief remarks indicate, I think this is Neumeier’s most important—indeed his most valuable—book thus far because he addresses issues that are relevant to an organization’s entire culture whereas, previously, he focused on a specific organizational imperative such as bridging the distance between business strategy and customer experience with five interconnected disciplines or using the first and most strategic of those disciplines to achieve radical differentiation.

Note: Peachpit Press/New Riders has just released Marty Neumeier’s first video, Innovation Workshop. This video presents concepts from his three best-selling books – The Brand Gap, Zag, and The Designful Company (especially) – and includes downloadable exercises to help work through crucial brand and innovation questions. Usually Neumeier charges $800 for one of his workshops but this 45-minute video aims to fill that gap with these concepts and exercises.

You can check out the promotion page below for more info:

peachpit.com/innovationvideo

Book Review: Group Genius

Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Keith Sawyer
Basic Books (2008)

Throughout human history, what Keith Sawyer characterizes as “collaborative genius” has made significant contributions in ways and to an extent few (if any) individuals have. In fact, the more I think about all this, the more I appreciate the meaning and significance of Bernard Chartres’ observation (incorrectly attributed to Isaac Newton) that “We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” Here is a brief excerpt which correctly indicates one of Keith Sawyer’s core concepts: “In both an improv group and a successful work team, the members play off one another, each person’s contributions providing the spark for the next. Together, the improvisational team creates a novel emergent product, one that’s more responsive to the changing environment and [key point] better than what anyone could have developed alone. Improvisational teams are the building blocks of innovative organizations, and organizations that can successfully build improvisational teams will be more likely to innovate effectively.”

One of Sawyer’s most valuable insights, examined with both rigor and eloquence, is that people who are steadfastly convinced that they are not “creative” can nonetheless work effectively together to generate (albeit eventually) profoundly innovative ideas. There are some “ifs,” of course. First, senior managers must provide full support (including sufficient resources, especially time) of a collaborative team. Next, they must be patient rather than committing the common mistake of “ripping out a seedling to see how well it’s growing.” Also, they must understand – really understand – the meaning and especially the implications of the aforementioned seven key characteristics of effective creative teams. Finally, they must recognize that each “failure” (however defined) is a unique learning opportunity for them as well as for team members.

Book Review: The Future of Management

The Future of Management
Gary Hamel with Bill Breen
Harvard Business School Press (2007)

As he clearly indicates in his earlier books, notably in Competing for the Future (with C.K. Prahalad) and then in Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel’s mission in life is to exorcise “the poltergeists who inhabit the musty machinery of management” so that decision-makers can free themselves from what James O’Toole aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.” In his Preface to this volume, Hamel asserts that “today’s best practices aren’t good enough” and later suggests that he wrote this book for “dreamers and doers” who want to invent “tomorrow’s best practices today.” In this brilliant book, he explains how to do that.

Here are two brief quotations that are representative of Hamel’s insights:

“To thrive in an increasingly disruptive world, companies must become as strategically adaptable as they are operationally efficient. To safeguard their margins, they must become gushers of rule-breaking innovation. And if they’re going to out-invent and outthink as growing mob of upstarts, they must learn how to inspire their employees to give the very best of themselves every day. These are the challenges that must be addressed by 21st-century management innovators.” (Page 11)

“Many factors contribute to strategic inertia, but three pose a particularly grave threat to timely renewal. The first is the tendency of management teams to deny or ignore the need for a strategy reboot. The second is a dearth of compelling alternatives to the status quo, which often leads to strategic paralysis. And the third: allocational rigidities that make it difficult to deploy talent and capital behind new initiatives. Each of these barriers stands in the way of zero-trauma change; hence each deserves to be a focal point for management innovation.” (Page 44)

I especially appreciate Hamel’s analysis of three exemplary companies: Whole Foods Market (a “community of purpose”), W.L. Gore (an “innovation democracy”), and Google (“brink-of-chaos management”). Hamel focuses his attention to how these companies invent tomorrow’s best practices today. He cleverly juxtaposes a “management innovation challenge” with each company’s “distinctive management practices.” Having established and then sustained a one-on-one rapport with his reader throughout the narrative, Hamel makes it crystal clear that that he is not urging his reader to address the same challenges and develop the same best practices for any one of the three exemplary companies, much less emulate all three. That would be insane.

Book Review: Executive Intelligence

Executive Intelligence: What All Great Leaders Have
Justin Menkes
Collins (2006)

In this volume, Justin Mendes explains that Executive Intelligence(tm) (or ExI) “is the single biggest driver of executive performance” and claims that it is overlooked by current assessment practices. Through his work with some of the most effective executives in the world, Menkes, co-founder of Executive Intelligence Group, sought to understand the qualities of star performers. He found that success could be attributed to intelligence but not to, for example, the academic IQ required for admission into top universities. Instead, Menkes has identified specific patterns of “intelligent executive behavior.” He distilled this behavioral pattern of success and, over three years, designed an assessment methodology to measure it. This is the Executive Intelligence Evaluation.

What does this evaluation involve? I visited executiveintelligence.com and located this explanation: “Structured as a one-on-one interview, the Executive Intelligence Evaluation quantifies and benchmarks an executive on the unique cognitive skills that are essential for leadership excellence. Instead of simply asking an executive about their capabilities, the methodology requires a candidate to demonstrate their skills. To accomplish this, the ExI Evaluation utilizes job relevant scenarios that necessitate: decision making and information gathering, managing the activities of others, and evaluating/adapting one’s own thinking and behavior – in other words, the central responsibilities of any executive. What’s more, a candidate’s capabilities are evaluated in the real-time verbal format in which they must be demonstrated on the job. The interview takes about one-and-a-half hours and is conducted by a highly trained expert. Scores have been shown to have no adverse impact in terms of race, gender, language, or country of origin.”