Unlocking Innovation - Innovation Convergence 2005

CASE STUDY
Innovation Journey: Cargill’s Framework for Innovation Promotion

Dr. Vicki Hargrove, Sr. Consultant &

Michael Dockham, Business Application Technologies Manager, Cargill, Inc

Marketing Leadership Council

Marketing Leadership Council

ITAC: IT Architect Certification Program

ITAC: IT Architect Certification Program

ITAC Conformance Requirements

Book: Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

Built to Last : Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
by Jim Collins, Jerry I. Porras

This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings--along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else.

Built to Last identifies 18 "visionary" companies and sets out to determine what's special about them. To get on the list, a company had to be world famous, have a stellar brand image, and be at least 50 years old. We're talking about companies that even a layperson knows to be, well, different: the Disneys, the Wal-Marts, the Mercks.

Whatever the key to the success of these companies, the key to the success of this book is that the authors don't waste time comparing them to business failures. Instead, they use a control group of "successful-but-second-rank" companies to highlight what's special about their 18 "visionary" picks. Thus Disney is compared to Columbia Pictures, Ford to GM, Hewlett Packard to Texas Instruments, and so on.

The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counterexamples--in fact, the majority of the "visionary" companies, including giants like 3M, Sony, and TI, don't fit the model. They were characterized by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a "core ideology" or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into "ideologically commitment" to the company.

The comparison with the business "B"-team does tend to raise a significant methodological problem: which companies are to be counted as "visionary" in the first place? There's an air of circularity here, as if you achieve "visionary" status by ... achieving visionary status. So many roads lead to Rome that the book is less practical than it might appear. But that's exactly the point of an eloquent chapter on 3M. This wildly successful company had no master plan, little structure, and no prima donnas. Instead it had an atmosphere in which bright people were both keen to see the company succeed and unafraid to "try a lot of stuff and keep what works." --Richard Farr

Book: The Practice of Management

The Practice of Management
by Peter F. Drucker

A must read for any manager.

Book: The Power of Full Engagement : Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal

The Power of Full Engagement : Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal
by Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz

The authors, founders of and executives at LGE Performance Systems, an executive training program based on athletic coaching programs, offer a program aimed at stressed individuals who want to find more purpose in their work and ways to better handle their overburdened relationships. Just as athletes train, play and then recover, people need to recognize their own energy levels. "Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings." Case studies demonstrate how some modest changes can have an immediate impact. Loehr (Mental Toughness Training for Sports) and Schwartz (Art of the Deal, writing with Donald Trump) also include a chart highlighting Action Steps, Targeted Muscle, Desired Outcome and Performance Barrier and apply these tenets to individual cases. A chart analyzing the benefits and costs to taking certain action shows the impact negative behavior can have on both physical and mental well-being. However, the actual "training program" whereby readers can learn how to institute certain rituals to change their behavior is less well-defined. Managers and other employees who have attended HR seminars may find this plan easy to use, but self-employed people and others less familiar with "training" may be unable to recognize their behavior patterns and change them.

Book: The Effective Executive

The Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker

Overall Effectiveness

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

Productivity for the knowledge worker means the ability to get the right things done. It means effectiveness.

Assumption is that effectiveness can be learned and that is my over-arching goal, to become more effective.

1. Know Where My Time Goes

Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can brought under their control.

2. Focus on Outward Contribution

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.

3. Build on My Strengths

Effective executives build on strengths – their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.

4. Concentrate on Areas Where Superior Performance Will Produce Outstanding Results

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first – and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.

5. Effective Decisions

Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system – of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

Book: How Full is Your Bucket, Tom Rath & Donald Clifton

How Full Is Your Bucket? Positive Strategies for Work and Life
by Tom Rath, Donald O. Clifton

In this brief but significant book, the authors, a grandfather-grandson team, explore how using positive psychology in everyday interactions can dramatically change our lives. Clifton (coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths) and Rath suggest that we all have a bucket within us that needs to be filled with positive experiences, such as recognition or praise. When we're negative toward others, we use a dipper to remove from their buckets and diminish their positive outlook. When we treat others in a positive manner, we fill not only their buckets but ours as well. The authors illustrate how this principle works in the areas of business and management, marriage and other personal relationships and in parenting through studies covering a 40-year span, many in association with the Gallup Poll. While acknowledging that most lives have their share of misfortune, the authors also make clear that how misfortune affects individuals depends largely on their level of positive energy and confidence. The authors also underscore that our human interactions provide most of the joys or disappointments we receive from life. The book comes with a unique access code to www.bucketbook.com, which offers a positive impact assessment and drop-shaped note cards that can be used to give praise and recognition to others.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Description:
How did you feel after your last interaction with another person? Did that person-your spouse, best friend, coworker, or even a stranger -fill your bucket" by making you feel more positive? Or did that person "dip from your bucket," leaving you more negative than before? The number one New York Times and number one Business Week bestseller, How Full Is Your Bucket? reveals how even the briefest interactions affect your relationships, productivity, health, and longevity. Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket, and grounded in 50 years of research, this book will show you how to greatly increase the positive moments in your work and your life-while reducing the negative. Filled with discoveries, powerful strategies, and engaging stories, How Full Is Your Bucket? is sure to inspire lasting changes and has all the makings of a timeless classic.

How Full is Your Bucket Web Site

Book: Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Peter F. Drucker

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

Peter F. Drucker

According to Drucker, the essential purpose of a business is to create a customer. To this end, only marketing and innovation can produce results; all other activities are simply part of the cost of doing business.

The Practice of Innovation: Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced.

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource.

The purposeful innovation resulting from analysis, system, and hard work is all that can be discussed and presented as the practice of innovation. But this is all that need be presented since it surely covers at least 90 percent of all effective innovations. And the extraordinary performer in innovation, as in every other area, will be effective only if grounded in the discipline and master of it.

Purposeful, systematic innovation begins with the analysis of the opportunities. It begins with the analysis of the opportunities. It begins with thinking through what I have called the sources of innovative opportunities.

All the sources of innovation should be systematically analyzed and systematically studied. It is not enough to be alerted to them. The search has to be organized, and must be done on a regular systematic basis.

Innovation is both conceptual and perceptual. Go out to look, to ask, to listen. The cannot be stressed often enough. They work out analytically what the innovation has to be to satisfy an opportunity. And then they go out and look at the customers, the users, to see what their expectations, their values, their needs are.

An innovation, to be effective, has to be simple and it has to be focused. It should do only one thing, otherwise it confuses. If it is on simple, it won’t work.

All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. Indeed, the greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to say: “This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?”

Effective innovations start small. They are not grandiose. They try to do one specific thing.

A successful innovation aims at leadership. If an innovation does not aim at leadership from the beginning, it is unlikely to be innovative enough, and therefore unlikely to be capable of establishing itself.

Book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

Book: First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently
by Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman expose the fallacies of standard management thinking in First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. In seven chapters, the two consultants for the Gallup Organization debunk some dearly held notions about management, such as "treat people as you like to be treated"; "people are capable of almost anything"; and "a manager's role is diminishing in today's economy." "Great managers are revolutionaries," the authors write. "This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place." The authors have culled their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup during the past 25 years. Quoting leaders such as basketball coach Phil Jackson, Buckingham and Coffman outline "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: Finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and selecting staff for talent--not just knowledge and skills. First, Break All the Rules offers specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job. For instance, the authors show ways to structure a trial period for a new worker and how to create a pay plan that rewards people for their expertise instead of how fast they climb the company ladder. "The point is to focus people toward performance," they write. "The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for this." Written in plain English and well organized, this book tells you exactly how to improve as a supervisor. --Dan Ring

Book: Social Network Analysis : Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)

Social Network Analysis : Methods and Applications (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)


Product Description:
Social network analysis, which focuses on relationships among social entities, is used widely in the social and behavioral sciences, as well as in economics, marketing, and industrial engineering. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications reviews and discusses methods for the analysis of social networks with a focus on applications of these methods to many substantive examples. As the first book to provide a comprehensive coverage of the methodology and applications of the field, this study is both a reference book and a textbook.

Book: The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

The Knowing-Doing Gap – How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert L. Sutton

Every year, companies spend billions of dollars on training programs and management consultants, searching for ways to improve. But it's mostly all talk and no action, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, authors of The Knowing-Doing Gap. "Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice?" ask Stanford University professors Pfeffer and Sutton. "We wondered, too, and so we embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge." The authors describe the most common obstacles to action---such as fear and inertia---and profile successful companies that overcome them.

1. Why before How: Philosophy is Important.

2. Knowing Comes from Doing and Teaching Others How.

3. Action Counts More Than Elegant Plans and Concepts.

4. There is No Doing without Mistakes. What is the company's Response?

5. Fear Fosters Knowing-Doing Gaps, So Drive Out Fear.

6. Beware of False Analogies: Fight the Competition, Not Each Other.

7. Measure What Matters and What Can Help Turn Knowledge into Action.

8. What Leaders Do, How They Spend their Time and How they Allocate Resources, Matters.

WAYS OF OVERCOMING DESTRUCTIVE INTERNAL COMPETITION

: Hire, reward, and retain people in part based on their ability and willingness to work cooperatively with others for the company's welfare

: Fire, demote, and punish people who act only in their individual short-term self-interest.

: Focus people's attention and energy on defeating external competitive threats, not on fighting each other.

: Avoid compensation and performance measurement systems that create internal competition.

: Establish measures that assess cooperation.

: Build a culture that defines individual success partly by the success of the person's peers.

: Encourage leaders to model the right behavior by acting collaboratively, sharing information, and helping others.

: Promote people to top management positions who have a history of building groups where members cooperate, share information, and provide each other mutual assistance.

: Use power and authority to get people and units to share information, to learn from each other, and to work collaboratively to enhance overall performance.

One of the more important insights from our research is that knowledge that is actually implemented is much more likely to be acquired from learning by doing than from learning by reading, listening, or even thinking.

One of our main recommendations is to engage more frequently in thoughtful action. Spend less time just contemplating and talking about organizational problems. Taking action will generate experience from which you can learn.

Great companies get remarkable performance from ordinary people. Not-so-great companies take talented people and manage to lose the benefits of their talent, insight, and motivation. That is why we focus on management practices that either create or reduce the knowing-doing gap.

There is evidence that knowledge of how to enhance performance doesn’t transfer readily even within firms. There are persistent and substantial differences in performance within facilities in the same company.

It is possible that differences in organizational performance come from differences in what firms know – the quality and depth of their insights about business strategy, technologies, products, customers, and operations – rather than from their ability to translate that knowledge into action. There are, however, numerous reasons to doubt this is the case.

A much larger source of variation in performance stems from the ability to turn knowledge into action.

Research demonstrates that the success of most interventions designed to improve organizational performance depends largely on implementing what is already known, rather than from adopting new or previously unknown ways of doing things.

Most workplace learning goes on unbudgeted, unplanned, and un-captured by the organization…Up to 70 percent of workplace learning is informal.

While firms keep investing millions of dollars to set up knowledge management groups, most of the knowledge that is actually used and useful is transferred by the stories people tell to each other, by the trials and errors that occur as people develop knowledge and skill, by inexperienced people watching those more experienced, and by experience people providing close and constant coaching to newcomers.

Knowledge management systems seem to work best when the people who generate the knowledge are also those who store it, explain it to others, and coach them as they try to implement the knowledge.

Part librarian, part consultant, and part coach.

Knowledge is intangible.

Knowledge management tends to focus on specific practices and ignore the importance of philosophy.

It is about philosophy and perspective, about such things as people, processes, quality, and continuous improvement. It is not just a set of techniques or practices – techniques, systems and philosophy.

What is important is not so much what we do – the specific people management techniques and practices – buy why we do it – the underlying philosophy and view of people and the business that provides a foundation for the practices.

Competitive advantage comes from being able to do something that others can’t do.

The trick is in turning the knowledge acquired into organizational action.

If you do it, then you will know.

At one level, the answer to the knowing-doing problem is deceptively simple. Embed more of the process of acquiring new knowledge in the actual doing of the task and less in formal training programs that are frequently ineffective.

How to overcome the tendency to substitute talk for action: impose a real deadline with real measures.

Planning can be a ritualistic exercise disconnected from operations and from transforming knowledge into action. Of course, planning can facilitate developing knowledge and generating action. But it does not invariably do so and often does the opposite.

Asia Trip, October 2004

Photos from my trip to Asia

Book: Now, Discover Your Strengths

Book - Now, Discover Your Strenths
Take the Assessment

Updated book - buy this: StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths (Hardcover)

This is valuable as well: Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance (Hardcover)

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it. Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

Book: Good to Great

Book: Good to Great
Jim Collins web site; Built to Last & Good to Great concepts: http://www.jimcollins.com/

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. --Harry C. Edwards