Jeff Dyer on “How to think like an innovator”

Jeff Dyer

Here is a brief (7:02 minute)  excerpt from a videotaped interview of Jeff Dyer during which he outlines the four ways leaders come up with their great ideas. Dyer is a professor at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management and co-author of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, co-authored with Hal B. Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen and published by Harvard Business Review Press (July, 2011). He is now at work completing my interview of him.

To watch the video and check out dozens of other excerpts from interviews of other thought leaders that are also available, please click here.

All In or Don’t Bother

Josh Linkner

Here is a recent blog post by Josh Linkner, author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity. With all due respect to the value of effort and even best effort, Josh is really talking about a mindset that many affirm but few develop: faith in the power of 100% best effort. “In addition to my blog, you’ll find free videos, quizzes, articles, eBooks and more to help fuel your creative fire! ” To visit his website, please click here.

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Imagine you have the chance to win an Olympic Gold Medal in the pole vault.  It’s your big moment and you may even break a world record.  With the intense glow of audience scrutiny, this isn’t the time to hedge your bets.  If you try a safer approach or pause to consider all the risks, the game is over.  Instead, your best chance of reaching greatness is to give the task at hand your every ounce of passion, commitment, and energy.

To reach your true potential, you need to be All In.

Opportunity knocks for us all, sometimes more subtly than we’d like.  Frequently that opportunity is shrouded with doubt and uncertainty; often it looks like a setback or even danger.  Most of us ignore these opportunities altogether, or when we seize them we do so with a halfhearted approach.

“I’ll give it a shot”, we might say.  Or, “Let’s see what happens.”  The problem is – all the energy you put into developing Plan B ends up defusing your focus on the real prize.   It turns out that the most successful people devour each opportunity along their journey with carnivorous ferocity.   They give each shot everything they have, knowing full well that some will ring the victory bell while others crash and burn.

Think how silly Lady Gaga would look spending 10 hours a week working on her CPA license in case her music career flopped.  Or what about a Major League Baseball player who never swung for the fences?  Life is short and opportunities are fleeting.   If you hope to achieve your full potential, you must put all your weight behind each punch.  Start playing to win, and stop playing “not to lose.”

Sure, it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and point fingers.  There are scores of people who achieve nothing of their own, but relish in the setbacks of others.  But, at the end of the day, they’ll look back and wish they took a stand of their own.  They’ll wish they were All In.

Theodore Roosevelt said it best, way back in 1910:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

When you are presented with an opportunity, attack it with everything you’ve got.  No more half-and-half.  It’s time to be All In. 

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Josh Linkner is the New York Times bestselling author of Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity, named one of the top ten business books of 2011. He is the CEO and Managing Partner of Detroit Venture Partners, a venture capital firm helping to rebuild urban areas through technology and entrepreneurship. Josh is the Founder, Chairman and former CEO of ePrize, the largest interactive promotion agency in the world providing digital marketing services for 74 of the top 100 brands. Prior to ePrize, Josh was the founder and CEO of three other successful technology companies.  Josh’s writings are published frequently by Fast Company and Forbes and he’s been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, and on CNBC. Josh is also a professional-level jazz guitarist performing regularly in jazz clubs throughout the United States.

Most importantly, Josh in on a mission to make the world more creative.

 

3 Ways to Get the Most from Your Team

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

Contrary to popular belief, teams are not always the best way to get work done.

Problems with coordination, competition, and motivation can undermine even the most well-designed and expertly-managed team. Here are three ways to give your team the best chance of success:

1. Designate a naysayer. Groupthink is a dangerous byproduct of teamwork. Ask someone to play the role of devil’s advocate to be sure ideas get challenged.

2. Avoid double digits. Teams should be as small as possible—never have a team of more than nine people.

3. Keep the team together. Avoid swapping members out. Established teams work better than those whose composition frequently changes.
Today’s Management Tip was adapted from Harvard Business Review on Building Better Teams.

To check it out and join the discussion, please click here.

Beyond Performance: A book review by Bob Morris

Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage
Scott Keller and Colin Price
John Wiley & Sons (2011)

How to achieve and then sustain both outstanding leadership and management throughout the given enterprise

Scott Keller and Colin Price acknowledge that although there is a “multitude” of books about business leadership and management already in print (actually, Amazon now offers 16,075 titles), they believe that “no other work offers what we are trying to provide. Our approach combines two views. The first view is of a ‘stable equilibrium’ state of organizational excellence in which high performance can be sustained; the second is of the dynamics of the transition required to reach that state…by combining static and dynamic views of organizations, we aim to arrive at a fuller understanding of their fundamental nature. To that end, we aim to shift the ‘installed base’ of management thinking’…Our central message is focusing on organizational health – which we define as the ability of your organization to align, execute, and renew itself faster that your competitors can – is just important as focusing on the traditional drivers of business performance.”

With all that clarified up front, Keller and Price then carefully guide their reader through a five-stage process (appropriately identified as the “5 As”) for developing capabilities beyond their current potentialities for performance in order to achieve and then sustain “ultimate competitive advantage.” Frankly, I am astonished by the fact that so many C-level executives still do not fully understand that their organization’s #1 competitor tomorrow will be what it offers today. Today’s performance is measured in terms of specific results. By nature, results occur at the conclusion of a process of effort. The challenge is to become so “healthy” as an organization that the capabilities are there to align, execute, and renew faster than the competition so that the organization can sustain exceptional performance over time.

Kelly and Price identify and then discuss what they characterize as the “Nine Elements of Organizational Health.” Let’s take a brief look at the first five practices that underpin organizational health:

1. Direction: Shared vision, strategic clarity, and employee involvement/engagement
Question: What is the ultimate destination

2. Leadership: Authoritative, consultative, supportive, and challenging
Question: Who will take us there?

3. Culture and climate: Open and trusting, internally competitive, operationally disciplined, and creative and entrepreneurial
Question: Do we really believe in the power of first-person plural pronouns?

4. Accountability: Role clarity, performance contracts, consequence management, and personal ownership
Question: Do we have almost total buy-in on who we are, what we do, how we do it, and why?

5. Coordination and control: People performance review, operational management, and financial management
Question: Do we do what is most important, constantly improve what we do, and measure it?

The other four elements are Capabilities, Motivation, External Orientation, and Innovation and learning. Kelly and Price rigorously examine within five frames (i.e. the “5): Aspire (“Where do we want to go?”), Assess, (“How ready are we to go there?”), Architect (“What do we need to do to get there?”), Act (“How do we manage the journey?), and Advance (“”How do we keep moving forward?”). In Part II, Kelly and Price devote a separate chapter to each and then in Part III, help their reader to pull it all together. More specifically, they examine the senior leader’s role, how the five separate but interconnected frames can help to make an organization even “healthier,” and finally, what which specific challenges their reader will probably encounter and how the information, insights, and counsel in the book can help the reader to respond effectively to those challenges.

Some readers will accept Kelly and Price’s challenge, others won’t. Some will then succeed, others won’t. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to failure in business is paved with “nice tries.” I agree with the Jedi Master, Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.”