What I learned from Wolff Olins

I like to work with people who like to experiment and push the envelop towards active and unique outcomes that shape our future.  These are the “game changers” who shape industries, galvanise movements and challenge behaviours. I often wondered which qualities forms the perspective of mavericks and why I find working with them so compelling.  Recently Wolff Olins, an international brand consultancy, completed a study of game changing industry leaders which identified five characteristics of this intriguing breed of trailblazers who are using their brands to define new areas of growth.

Creativity is connecting things (quote from Steve Jobs)

High growth businesses distinguish themselves by connecting dots that are usually overlooked, dismissed or unimagined. According to IBM’s 2010 CEO Study, 60% of CEOs see creativity having the biggest impact in business over the next 5 years.  This perspective allows room for “brand-led innovation,”  flexibility and adaptation which accompanies taking risks, failing forward and learning; these are the basis for the attitude one needs to run ahead of the pack.

After examining 500 leaders in various sectors in nine countries the Wolff Olins team identified five root behaviours of revolutionary leaders. These companies tend to:

Be Purposeful - Bringing together what they do in a way that is proactive, consistent and transparent stems from a strong purpose that supports every aspect of what they are trying to accomplish. There is a coupling of the underlying purpose from inception to delivery so that there is a clear link to making improvements in the world that is authentic and not a marketing gimmick. The numbers prove that respectability is what people want; in the past 4 years ethical corporate leaders have outperformed standard S&P 500 companies by 40% (source - Ethisphere).

Be Useful - Game changers empower customers, employees and stakeholders to invent ways to make smarter, more effective use of time and money. This should be what customers see as your company’s priority this is what makes the leading companies profitable, rather than viewing end-users as targets for making money. According to PWC’s 2012 Global CEO Survey 77% of US CEOs are associating and modifying their strategies to reflect the responses of customers.

Be Experimental - These leaders embrace exploration and mistakes as sources for continual learning that helps them remain relevant. Curiosity and invention are integrated into the businesses culture. Experts in agility exhibit a 13% to 38% performance advantage in capital efficiency and value. (Source: BTM Corporation study).

Be Boundaryless - They multiply business by seeing Internal and external boundaries as gateways rather than barriers. They see themselves as part of a constellation which functions like an extended network and ecosystem of shared value partnerships. Highly networked enterprises are 50% more likely than other organisations to report market share gains against their competitors and higher profit margins. (Source: McKinsey Quarterly ‘The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday’)

Be Value-Creative (A personal favourite) - Focus is given to proactively seeking new ways to grow in an unpredictable landscape . “They deliver to a vision, not to a traditional product line.” Opportunities grow exponentially when the focus hems on a principle rather than silos of industry. 70% of CEOs believe they must step away from “traditional opportunities” when developing sustainable strategies but this requires more time on the front-end to generate returns (Source: Accenture, ‘Business at its Best: Driving Sustainable Value Creation’).

Exercising one of these characteristics in your business will change your perceptions and practices; incorporate, 2, 3 or more and your state of affairs will be indelibly disrupted,  hopefully for the good of everyone. 

Wolff Olins helps clients to create game-changing work by developing unique brand experiences, products that drive demand and creatively led business strategies. Their clientele includes (Product) RED, London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Mercedes-Benz, Target and the Smithsonian.

To download the report go to http://gamechangers.wolffolins.com/  

What I learned from Daniel Pink

Have you ever wondered what truly motivates people to give their best and fullest to a project, job, marriage, whatever?  Daniel Pink has captured the study of this very question in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. He combed through research past and present exploring the supposed philosophy that people’s performance is based upon seeking rewards and avoiding punishment.  From Pink’s perspective, both the science and humanity has flipped this belief on it’s head.  

In reality, the reward-punishment scenario works fine with mindless rudimentary tasks, but the minute you invite thought or intuition into the formula, it falls apart at the seams. Using rewards and punishment thwarts and often decreases creativity.  What motivates people most (after meeting our basic needs for survival) is our drive towards freedom, challenge, and purpose. I know it seems contrary to capitalistic economics, but it is actually these “real” motivators that drive innovation and healthy business practices.  The book is filled with experiments, stories and examples of what drives us forward. I highly recommend this book for anyone who works with people (which would be just about anyone).

Autonomy drives productivity

Do you know anyone who really likes micromanagement?  I guess that most people, on either end of this concept, find it tedious and annoying.  Regardless, this has become a fall back position to get people moving. No one likes to feel their every move is monitored and scrutinised nor do we like babysitting adults. A “big-brother is watching” environment that rewards certain behaviours and punishes others tends to encourage a workplace that:

    • Extinguishes intrinsic motivation
    • Diminishes performance
    • Crushes creativity 
    • Crowds out good behaviour  
    • Encourages cheating, shortcuts and unethical behaviour 
    • Creates an addiction to rewards 
    • Generates short-term thinking 

This list is filled with everything one hopes to avoid by keeping a close eye on employees and assuming the worst.  This does not work in situations that require thought, initiative and creativity because we have a strong desire to feel autonomous. People need to feel self-directed and respected to thrive. Focusing on the process of how something gets done, rather than the results often yields poorer outcomes. Autonomy and freedom are about having the space to make decisions and connect with others.  

For years companies like Amazon and Google have became mavericks at creating space for autonomy with ROWE - Results-Only-Work-Environments, based upon trusting employees to get work done in whatever matter they choose to deliver it. Overall productivity and productivity often increase tremendously when a blind-eye approach is taken towards is schedules and monitoring practices. Being accountable to getting the work done on time and correctly far out weighs seeking rewards and avoiding punishment; Cornell University conducted a workers autonomy study with 320 small businesses and discovered that businesses offering autonomy grew four times faster than control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover. It seems research consistently sides with autonomy rather than rigid business cultural traditions.

How can you begin incorporating autonomy into your workplace or organisation?  To start you can create an environment that allows more freedom to those who work with you by allowing freedom over their:

    • Tasks – What they do
    • Time – When they do it
    • Team – Who they do it with  
    • Technique – How they do it

By stepping out of the way, productivity climbs because it fires up an individual’s personal motivation, releasing the little engine that could.

To learn more about what motivates us watch this video by RSAnimate for Daniel Pink’s presentation. The RSA is the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Picture credit Simon Hayter

What I read from Kaihan Krippendorff

I know, I know, but I felt this article was so timely that I had to share it.  Many of the people I’ve spoken to recently are struggling to keep their dreams going.  Some have put them on hold just to make ends meet. Sadly, others have given up.  Hopefully this blog will inspire everyone to keep going.

Where To Find Inspiration When The World Tells You To Give Up

BY FASTCOMPANY EXPERT BLOGGER KAIHAN KRIPPENDORFF Wed Feb 1, 2012

This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert’s views alone.

I am staring through a wall of fog at the vague contours of an empty runway. Airplanes should fill this scene, but they can’t land. At 1:55 p.m., my flight status should read “Departed” but still reads “On Time.” Nothing here seems to be working. I want to quit and tell the 100 people scheduled to show up at my workshop tomorrow morning to take the day off.

Surely you’ve felt the same before. You were launching a new product, leading a once-exciting project, or growing your business. Things started out fun and you made some initial progress. Then you hit a “dip,” as Seth Godin calls it. Your progress slows, your passion evaporates, and everywhere you look the signs seem to be saying “give up.”

Do you quit? How do you generate the energy to push on?

I recently came across a 40-year-old organization dedicated to tackling the issue. They do this because the tendency to quit is costing the United States dearly, potentially hurting our long-term competitiveness.

InventNow was founded 1973 as the National Inventors Hall of Fame to recognize great inventors in history. It has inducted 460 of history’s most significant inventors, like including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Wilson Greatbatch, inventor of the implantable pacemaker.

But the organization came to realize they were addressing the wrong end of the problem. The difficulty is not developing the inspiring vision—“I want to be like Steve Wozniak!”—but to keep young scientists from giving up along the way. So they refocused their efforts, as Jeffery Dollinger, InventNow’s president, explained to me. The U.S. is not producing enough students in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) who can develop new breakthrough technologies.

“To succeed you don’t need to be a rocket scientist; you have to have persistence, willpower,” Dollinger explained. So the organization switched its focus to providing “encouragement and inspiration.”

They launched a series of programs designed to inspire science students to persist. For example, 76,000 1st and 6th graders have passed through InventNow’s Camp Invention program.

Hundreds of more senior students stay on track thanks to InventNow’s Collegiate Inventors Competition, students like Julio D’Arcy, a senior graduate student in the chemistry department at UCLA. D’Arcy had been working on plastics that conduct electricity. He noticed a film form during an experiment and realized that if he could control the process that created it, he could create an environmentally friendly material with a huge breadth of industrial applications.

He was encouraged to apply for the InventNow competition, and the experience set him on a reinvigorated career path. “This competition added a whole new dimension for me because it validated the work I had done and it demonstrated to the scientific community it is useful,” D’Arcy told me. One key was the quality of the judges. The InventNow program pulls together a panel of some the most respected scientists in the world.

“[My work was] peer reviewed by people who are amazing. That made me feel like, wow, my work really matters,” D’Arcy said. He is now going to start a post-doctorate at MIT.

Now, we do not all have an InventNow resource to keep us motivated. What do we do when we need extra inspiration when the world seems to be telling us to give up?

I need an answer to that myself right now. So I talked to a few friends who have built big things and studied a few books. Here is my top-line summary:

  1. Reconnect with “why.” Go back to your original vision and imagine having achieved your goal. Great warriors imagine victory and top athletes imagine winning before stepping onto the field, so why not you?
  2. Know when to quit. We are taught from a young age to “never give up,” or in the words of Winston Churchill, “Never, never, never, never give up.” But great strategists know that great strategies are about making decisions. Look at everything on your plate and decide which things are honestly not worth the effort. This is not about deciding to quit your project but to pinpoint which parts of your project will give you the biggest bang for your effort.
  3. Measure your runway. Do the math to figure out how much time you honestly have to get through the dip. Look at your cash, how much longer your partner will put up with your late nights, how much energy you really have. Calculate how many days, weeks, or months you want to give yourself.
  4. Get tactical. Categorize your priorities into four buckets: wastes of time, tactics, winning moves, and crazy ideas. The winning moves tend to be the opportunities that will pay off in the long term. Since right now you are focused on pushing through today, it’s time to focus on the tactics. You are looking to advance in inches, not miles, so just do the work. Stop asking why (that’s step one) or whether (step two). Pick up the phone, write that proposal, or in my case, write this blog. Check out Steven Pressfield’s new book, Do the Work.

The fog here is clearing, planes are landing again, and the waiting room is starting to empty. This actually works! Give it shot.

[Image: Flickr user Pedro Figueiredo] 

What I learned from David Grayson

Earlier this week I spent an evening at The Hub Amsterdam, to listen to David Grayson, a professor at the Cranfield School of Management and faculty of CSR in Action! at Nyenrode Business University.  Professor Grayson is energetic, lively, and highly personable, which he would have to be as a repeated entrepreneur, researcher, instructor, philanthropist and author (just to call our a few of his many hats).  He shared his findings on social intrapreneurship and what condition and skills are most prevalent to support them within a corporate setting. 

What is a social intrapreneur (SI), you might ask?  It is a “person within an organisation who takes direct initiative for innovation which addresses social and environmental challenges profitably.”  These individuals work beyond maintaining CSR policies, they often push boundaries and structures aside to connect the company’s work to a personal cause.  A SI has a deep sense of purpose, ownership and persistence to take and create new opportunities via their business expertise and network.  I see a great kinship between intra- and entrepreneurs; in many ways, I believe my entrepreneurial spirit was first crafted as an intrapreneur.

You cannot do it alone 

Professor Grayson has conducted extensive research as to what make a SI successful and thrive.  He has uncovered common tenets around their particular mindset, behavior and skills.  They are not all passion; they have an ability to leverage relationships.  Every successful SI has a vast network and is highly connected within their organisation.  They also tend to have at least one sponsor or champion amongst the senior management around their cause.  Partnership building is an essential ingredient to every realised campaign.  Without connections and advocates, their ideas would end in frustration.

As an organisation, communication and connectivity are vital.  Whether you are raising investment capital, launching a campaign or seeking new clients, one must be able to draw people into a vision or cause.  Maverick ideas do drive innovation, but a crowd of one will not get your initiative very far.  Connectors and storytellers must become part of the equation to cultivate forward movement.  The days of the lone ranger are waning, while communal wisdom and action move toward center stage.  Dreaming dreams is often a solitary act, but it often takes a committed band of people to translate a dream into reality.

Picture from Age UK

What I learned from Kelly Cutrone

Over the holiday I caught a few back episodes of her show Kell on Earth and was intrigued. This week I picked up Kelly’s first co-authored book If You Have to Cry Go Outside and I have to say I admire the woman. I may not agree with all her decisions but I love her candour and endorsement of lifelong personal integrity.  She is the “IT” woman of indie fashion public relations and owner of People’s Revolution, in addition to being a single-mother, author, TV producer, mentor and guardian of misfits and rogue hard workers. Kelly has worked hard to achieve extended bouts of balance in her life.  There is seamlessness to Kelly’s life as she moves through work, motherhood and sisterhood; no matter where you catch her, she is always “Kell.”  Always the straightforward, honest warrior – no wonder you can’t keep this woman down!

Check your preconceived notions at the door

This kernel of wisdom is the title of her chapter on becoming a mother. As much as we try to set goals and plan (or have them thrust upon us), reality often throws a wrench in the works, thereby making things harder (and dare I say better at times) that we ever imagined. It is all part of the process of becoming the best in your field, role or endeavours. Being responsible for one’s business and life means that you are able to respond to whatever is happening in the moment rather than lamenting over the fact that things have taken an unexpected turn. If you are open to it and honest with your values and motivations, deviations from the “norm” will occur.  It is life’s way of augmenting and refining the unique brand that is you or your company.

When things go off course, your clients and competitors are watching to see how you continue the journey. You can throw a tantrum and make excuses because things did not go your way or you can assess the situation and move forward. Most of the time organisations work hard to find their way back to the prescribed and expected path but one could just as easily decide to boldly venture toward the unpredictable as most successful entrepreneurs do (Kelly included). People will always find quirkiness intriguing and inviting; what better way to uncover your own, than to embrace what unfolds before you.

Picture from http://www.inc.com