Balancing Global Vision with Local Relevance
At the moment, Andrew Deonarine is a third year medical resident at University of British Columbia (UBC) He has developed a passion for improving literacy in developing economies. A few years ago after a trip to India he was inspired by the One Laptop Per Child initiative to improve literacy around the world. And he wondered if there wasn’t an even easier and more ubiquitous platform for delivering literacy learning.
He is also a programmer and technology tinkerer. With a curious mind, he developed a big idea to use simple cellphones to be a platform for distributing literacy learning through PhoneCasting – a push technology in which anyone can author a brief engaging learning script and push-cast it out to deliver simple reading and math literacy to potentially millions of people. He calls it EduCell.
Inventive yes. But how does anyone know about it? They didn’t. Until, he learns about an InnoCentive challenge. He applies and his EduCell proposal wins. He is in talks with Nokia to develop and deliver EduCell universally. Through the innovation crowd-sourcing visibility of Innocentive, Andrew is changing the world. From Ontario.
This is a wonderful story, and indicative of how fast innovation can move in this frictionless economy. How important is speed to market? Last year Jim Barksdale, formerly of Netscape, spent 300 million to dig a gopher hole from the Chicago Mercantile exchange 825 miles to the New York Stock Exchange to lay direct-line fiber optic cable. Why? To gain 3 milliseconds in speed of trading information.
Competition is emerging from everyone, everywhere, and for everything – and one thing is clear: Our most powerful competitive advantage is in the hearts and minds of all the people throughout our global organizations, and we must unlock these capacities. Gone are the days when we could just buy diligence and expertise, and ask people to execute on the strategic bets of a very few in the corner offices. Now, only by tapping into those discretionary qualities of initiative, creativity and passion – that cannot be bought at any price – can we build the competitive value of the future.
Bruce Churchill, president for DirectTV Latin America, said the key to the 300% market growth was to remove the corporate directives from NYC and Miami that decided how and when and where their services were deployed in Latin America, and instead give autonomy and discretionary decision-making authority to the local operators. Who knows better than the people who live in Bogotá, Rio, and Caracas, the culturally relevant TV programming to provide, how to price it, the marketing that would make it stick in each locality.
Michael Byrne, president of Linfox, the biggest shipping and logistics operator in Australia said the key to their remarkable growth in India, Thailand, Vietnam, China and throughout southeast asia over the past ten years has been specifically because tap into the talents and give localized control over operations. With over 2400 employees in India, and as of my conversation with him last year, Linfox had exactly one Aussie ex-pat working there – and he’s not the boss either. By first providing a clear and singular vision of commitment to safety, excellence, product integrity and quality, Linfox provides the shared vision and values that provide the bedrock of the company, and then gives trust and operating control to the local markets for culturally nuanced execution.
Those organizations that learn to balance global unified vision with local relevance are those that will thrive in the new creative age.
Read MoreYou Make Your Own Luck
Friday afternoon I stopped by our local convenience store to gas up. When I went inside, I was surprised to find a sizeable line of people to buy megabucks lottery tickets. I knew about the lottery since it was plastered everywhere but had yet to encounter the fever pitch first hand. The drawing for 650M was in a few short hours. Showing the same wildly irrational hope, I bought a few tickets.
We don’t have much control over whether we win the lottery, but it turns out, we have control over what we perceive as “luck,” and we have a great deal of control over our own happiness by how we interpret events and situations. When events occur we choose whether we believe they happened to us, or we caused them to happen. Bronze medal winners consistently self-describe themselves as happier with the result than Silver medal winners. Because they are not celebrating the facts, but interpreting counter-facts. They are answering the what-if question, and Bronze medal winners are celebrating that they are on the podium, while Silver medal winners are disappointed they lost.
Here’s another example of how we look at the world. In Daniel Kahneman’s book, he describes a bank survey in which they asked two separate questions:
- How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that will pay in the event of death for any reason?
- How much would you pay for $100,000 life insurance that pays in the event of death by terrorist attack incident?
Survey respondents said they would pay much higher rates for the second type of life insurance. This is deeply irrational but speaks directly to how negative emotions and ideas have the ability to cause us to overvalue or over emphasize their likelihood because of our emotional response to the idea.
In Richard Wiseman’s book The Luck Factor, he describes luck in terms of choice. In his research working with over 400 individuals he found some key attributes of those who describe themselves as “lucky.” These are the four big points in the book:
They consistently have chance encounters that lead to interesting new possibilities and opportunities
Lucky people harness the power of curiosity well. They are creative and curious, and everyone can learn to be too. Wiseman has a fun game you can play in which you write down six activities or experiences you have not tried but would be willing. Write them down and then roll a die and go do it.
They make good decisions without consciously knowing why or how they did
Those who describe themselves as lucky make better gut decisions. Which seems impossible to control, yet Wiseman discovered this is a learned trait since he found that those lucky decision-makers actually spent more time reflecting and meditating on the decision once considered, and spent more time envisioning hypothetical circumstances they might have to decide on. So when the situation arose, those lucky were better prepared to make a decision in the moment.
Their dreams and ambitions have a knack of coming true
Lucky people expect the best outcomes, despite any negative past experiences, whereas unlucky people allowed past negative events to dictate future expectations. The lucky people also described their expectations of upcoming interactions with other people as generally positive.
They regularly turn their bad fortune into good luck or opportunity
Wiseman describes two primary ways people turn bad luck into good. Basically they interpret the bad as “could have been much worse.” And when they reflect, they spend a greater amount of time visualizing and selectively remembering the positive. Other words, the bad wasn’t all that bad, and the good was pretty great.
The #1 Motivator in the World
I know. That title is a big call. Not to worry, we have Teresa Amabile, author of The Progress Principle, to back us up. I was fascinated and enthralled by her work and book when it came out early in the fall 0f 2011, and just one week before meeting her to collaborate on an event, I made the following mistake: I was conducting a workshop with 86 senior executives and asked them Teresa’s question in a quiz-format:
Rank-order the following employee motivation factors:
Most people in the room chose Recognition, then Interpersonal Support, then Clear Goals, then Incentives and Progress last. Seven people chose Progress. Less than 10%. Perfect right? Since this is my opportunity to share Teresa’s work and illuminate the truth that the #1 motivator is a sense of progress. More specifically “progress in meaningful work.”
This was supposed to be the moment of ah-ha, the moment of illuminating insight, but instead there were a lot of frowns, and after a beat one executive raised her hand to say, “But without Clear Goals, progress is meaningless. Clear Goals must be the most important.” I couldn’t stop myself and said, “Yes, you are speaking from the perspective of the team leader. You know and understand there must be clear, actionable goals in order to make progress. But the question was ‘What is the most powerful motivator of the members of the team?”
Teresa and her colleague Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000 diary entries from 238 employees in 7 companies to come to the qualified conclusion that the most valuable work motivator is indeed, a sense of progress (in meaningful work). And even though I knew from her research that only 5% of leaders surveyed understood that, still I persisted in pressing the point.
When I met with Teresa, she said she didn’t present her findings in such a “gotcha” format because of that very reason. And her goal was to spread this important message until the needle pushed way past 50%, and then perhaps she would try it in a quiz-format.
Two take-aways:
1. The #1 motivator for contributors is progress (in meaningful work)
2. Never ever make your audience feel stupid
When sharing insight with anyone – either personally one on one or in a large group – allow people to feel like they have come to the insightful conclusion on their own, and build their own insights to apply to their work. Make people feel stronger, smarter, better-equipped to propel their team and drive innovation.
Read MoreThe Meeting After the Meeting
We can easily sabotage our efforts to build the valued trust, rapport and engagement we know are important to drive excellence. Here’s a little way in which we can sometimes show to the team that their opinions aren’t really part of the solution: Having the meeting after the meeting.
Don’t do this. Don’t hijack an hour of time from ten people, ask their thoughtful opinion, and then excuse everyone and hold back your cronies and have that “meeting after the meeting.” Sometimes you hear it on the conference call when a team leader says, “Hey Margaret can you call me right after this to follow up?” What is that all about?
The meeting after the meeting in which the “real” decision-makers call the shots, says to everyone that they don’t really have a voice. Or at best, they are fighting for their opinion to be heard. Or at worst, it’s a polite move so the shot-callers can attest publicly that opinions were heard, that they took in people’s concerns.
Do this instead. Listen more than talk. Ask credible, relevant and probing questions, and then collaboratively work toward decisions in front of everyone that recognizes and includes the voice of everyone. If you don’t intend to value an opinion, you’re not leading, you’re lobbying.
Read MoreIncrease Accidental Intensity for Innovation
What do these products have in common? Anesthesia, cellophane, cholesterol lowering drugs, cornflakes, dynamite, the ice cream soda, the slinky, Ivory soap, NutraSweet, nylon, penicillin, photography, rayon, PVC, smallpox vaccine, stainless steel, Teflon. They were all invented by accident. Of the more famous examples, microwave ovens were first invented by Percy Spencer, the 5th employee of Raytheon. Percy, a curious and skilled engineer, was responsible for scaling up the production of magnetrons for military use in radars. One day in 1946, while walking past one of the magnetrons, he noticed the candy bar in his pocket was melting. Curious, he started experimenting with popcorn and eggs, and immediately discovered the heat generating qualities of magnetrons. The first commercially available microwave oven, the 750 pound Radarange, became available in 1947.
The relationship between error and progress is undeniable. There is intentional innovation, and then there are accidental outcomes beyond intention. Often accidental innovation can be the most powerful and profound. So, we have to want accidents, and induce and examine them, to accelerate innovation. Fail faster, the saying goes.
Since this is true, we need to shift our mindset regarding acceptance and generation of accidents. We should:
1. Look for accidents, and harvest them for value
2. If valuable accidents aren’t frequent enough, generate some
3. Recognize the conditions under which the valuable accident occurred, and try variations on those conditions to magnify valuable accidents
To allow and recognize these happy accidents, we have to set up the right conditions and then be mindful of the changes there to be observed. Here’s one suggestion to magnify your accident intensity, hack your day. One of the most important things we can do is to build variation into our habits. This will increase accidental frequency. Robert Austin, Harvard Business School, interviewed a number of artists who constantly experiment with their method to create new work. One artist described finishing a clay piece and then, before it cured, hitting it with a bat to see what new shape occurred.
I’m suggesting to build both conditional variation and curiosity to recognize the emerging value in the change. But don’t overdo it. You will find a ceiling at which you are able to recognize and harvest value out of the variation you are creating. Don’t let the volume of noise exceed the measurable signal level.
Scott Wallace, in his book The Unconquered, describes trekking through the rich biodiversity in the remote Amazon basin and complained he wished he had the time and skill to slow down and harvest the incredible medicinal value all around him.
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