Connectivity is Productivity
I’m grateful for an interview the other day with Iqal Quadir, Director of the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT. When Iqbal was quite young, growing up with his siblings in a village in Bangladesh, he was asked by his mother to walk about 10km to another village to fetch medicine. He spent all morning walking to the village to discover the doctor was out attending to patients in other villages and retrieving supplies. So Iqbal spent the afternoon walking home with his pockets empty.
Years later after moving to the U.S. and receiving degrees from Wharton, he became a Wall Street banker. He recalls having another unproductive day in the early 1990s transporting data across Manhatten on floppy disks (remember floppies?). Mobile phones were still in their infancy – expensive, heavy, and with scarce connectivity. But understanding Moore’s Law (processing speed, transistor density, pixal concentration, memory capacity, etc…all doubling every two years), Iqbal knew that in the coming years mobile phones would become cheap, powerful and ubiquitous. If this was to be true, he reasoned, then why not begin the journey now to provide mobile phones to villagers in his home country of Bangladesh.
If twenty years ago having a cow or a goat was a form of currency in a Bangladesh village, then why couldn’t a cell phone be a cow? Iqbal took this argument to Grameen Bank, a micro-credit lender who could realize the potential, as well as Telenor telecommunications of Norway, who could help provide the infrastructure. Today GrameenPhone has nearly 40 million subscribers.
This base of the pyramid approach has vastly increased the productivity of the people of Bangladesh, increased their standard of living, spawned untold number of entrepreneurial ventures employing cell phones, and of course brought some wealth to Grameen Bank and Telenor.
As we learn from Iqbal Quadir, connectivity is productivity, and in the Creative Age it’s about connecting to creative and actionable ideas.
Read MoreMoney is a by product of contributing value and meaning
As the legend goes, Peter Drucker was once asked by a business owner to review his financial statements and see if he could find better, more innovative, ways to make money from studying, and tweaking, his financials. To which Drucker replied, “You don’t make money, you make shoes. Work on making shoes. The money is just a by-product.”
The lesson reminded me of an interview I had with Yvon Chounaird, founder of Patagonia, who said in the interview, “Over the past forty years I have yet to encounter a business problem that cannot be solved by focusing on product excellence and product integrity.” Despite, and because of, the magnificent growth Patagonia has enjoyed over the years, Yvon and Patagonia found sustainability by consistently refocusing their attention on quality and excellence. The journey was not without various hurtles and faltering moments while those around him were distracted by financial growth alone. For the full story see this interview.
But my point is this: Everyone I talk to is talking about building meaning in their work – building meaning into their everyday life and endeavors, As Teresa Amabile reminds us, progress in meaningful work is what motivates and engages us. We’re preparing for an upcoming event with Benjamin Zander, renowned conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, and I listened to him talk recently about the importance and value of contribution, as opposed to competition. They aren’t the same thing – competition is when you mentally compare, evaluate and attempt to trump. Contribution has no such relative marker. Contribution is when you try, when you show up and muster what you got – hopefully from a source of practice and competence – but nevertheless a real try.
Dispel your worries of competitive evaluation, and focus on your best, and give toward your best efforts with honest intention.
Read MoreWhy Change is Hard – Embrace the Unfamiliar
Sometimes you make a leap. Perhaps you buy that new car you’ve been researching, or that slick new piece of software or technology you’ve been eyeing. And suddenly you see it everywhere and wonder if you weren’t on the cutting edge after all. Once you’ve gone through the diligence and effort, it’s become familiar and suddenly you see it everywhere. The same is true about out networks and connections – we know what we know and whille we think we adapt the new, and are open to new experiences, we readily default to the familiar, the known.
The same is true in organizations, and the change initiatives, new processes and designs that we start to adopt can get unhinged by our urge to retreat to the familiar. This psychological effect was documented years ago as the Mere Exposure effect. One of the more classic examples involved showing subjects, and their friends, pictures of the subject – both straight photographs, and a mirrored version, as the subject would see themselves in the mirror every day. Consistently, the subjects found the reversed image more appealing, and the acquaintances found the straight photograph more appealing. Of course because each image is exactly as it appears to themselves, and as it appears to their friends in the world. How we see the world is the most familiar and our most attractive and comfortable version of the world.
An important recognition here, confirmed in the studies, is that the more we expose ourselves to new ideas, the more familiar they become. To create change, in ourselves and within the ways we work, embrace the unfamiliar.
Read MoreEngage. Connect. Deviate.
Theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once said, “You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird.” His point is that, once we label and partition a thing or an idea, it curtails our sense of discovery and curiosity to learn more. We have to regularly nurture curiosity to allow creative value to emerge. But don’t confuse creativity with brainstorming, or divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a critical component but not the end result. Divergent thinking—our ability to come up with a multitude of possibilities—does not necessarily equal creation of recognized and shared value.
What does this mean? www.JasonTheodor.com
For example, I showed a sign of a man throwing litter into a trashcan to my five-year-old daughter Annie and asked her what she thought it meant. She said, “It’s someone putting ice cubes in a hot tub.” Well, could it not be?
Similarly, our son Will watched my wife collect clothing and toys around the house to donate to Goodwill. After half an hour he had a puzzled look and said, “How can good Will wear all of these clothes? How old is good Will?” He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, and it can be a good thing. Preserving a sense of remaining open new truths is a critical component of creativity, and that capacity to interpret the mundane as unexpected is innate in all of us.
To uncover the pleasantly unexpected in something we have known for a long time, or to have a novel interpretation of something we have never seen before, we must remain ever curious. This curiosity allows us to build a growing repertoire of ideas that, when gestated for long enough, can interconnect to create new mash-ups that, hopefully, are recognized by the world as possessing shared value.
When we are in flow—deeply engaged in activity—we can accelerate the duration it takes for those idea mash-ups to reach full potential by connecting ourselves with other people with whom we don’t interact regularly—or by making new relationships. These connections can quicken the process of borrowing brilliance to generate new ideas. Again, it’s those mash-ups of cross-pollinating, disparate ideas that leads to new value creation. Remember the most powerful new creative mash-ups often come when we reach out into our networks of people around us—particularly when we share, connect, and collaborate with those with whom we have weak (occasional) ties—that those new value iterations have a chance to form.
Finally, remember we find the best expression of ourselves when we don’t wait to be tapped by our leadership, our company – when we don’t wait to be asked. In our work, we all see opportunities to be filled, dilemmas to be solved, and possibilities to be executed on. And yet we hesitate. We’re waiting to be asked, ignoring the difficult, or pausing out of fear. That fear is often borne out of trying to anticipate what we think the company wants and expects of us – trying to intuit how the company or leadership thinks we should act.
The truth is, we will bring much greater energy, creativity and passion to our work when we take the lead, when we take the first step. Step boldly.
Read MoreInvite a Penguin to Your Next Meeting
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Years ago, Matt May was consulting to a Detroit car company. After interviewing people in the organization, he discovered theirs was a culture that stifled ideas in a command-and-control hierarchical fashion. The leaders of the company rejected his suggestion, didn’t believe him, and insisted they had an open environment where all ideas were welcome to the table.
So when Matt was asked to conduct a half-day workshop session he created an exercise in which each team, composed of diverse employees from all strata of the organization, had to work in teams to solve a puzzle. The exercise was about selecting the right balance of fuel, food, people, and resources for a successful trip to the moon. In the exercise there is a correct configuration of resources to solve the problem.
Before the exercise started, Matt did this: he took aside the most junior member on each team and gave them the answer. And told them they were free to do anything they chose to make their voice heard and be convincing to make their team successfully win the game except tell the team that Matt gave them the answer key.
Not one team got it right. At the conclusion of the session Matt asked the secret member of each team, who held the answer key, to stand up. The leaders attending the meeting were both appalled and enlightened to discover that contrary to their belief, voices from all levels of the organization really weren’t appreciated and listened to thoughtfully. After all, for each group the answer was sitting right at the table, yet no team delivered the correct solution.
We spoke to Juan, a senior IT leader at a large financial services organization, who had a similar experience, but his voice was heard. Recently, he was puzzled to be invited to a meeting with two of his colleagues from different departments who were trying to solve a business dilemma. As Juan sat through the opening comments of the meeting, he kept wondering silently what in the world was he doing here? Juan was leading the IT group, and clearly what these players needed was a business decision structure that had nothing to do with his team. But despite his puzzlement at why he was invited, Juan stayed and listened intently and shared his best ideas and suggestions during the course of the meeting. Within just a couple days Juan was included in some followup notes and found his colleagues had agreed and implemented the ideas discussed at the meeting.
But he discovered later in water cooler and cafeteria conversations, that it was his presence and divergent opinions and perspectives that bridged the understanding gap between his colleagues who had been too close to the project to see and execute the solution needed.
Maybe next time invite someone from left field to the table. Something interesting and successful might happen.
Read MoreShared beats Borrowed Brilliance
Have you ever worked with a group of carpenters? Then asked to borrow a tool? In my experience it depends on the person, and the tool you ask for, but many are hesitant. Because as your experience grows, so do the selection, quality and personal connection to each tool. They want to know how you intend to use it, how long it’s going to be gone and when they’re going to get it back. More often the response might be, “Well, what are you trying to do?” or “Let me take a look and give you a hand.” Both because they want to help, and because tools are a personal kind of thing.
But what if you work in the creative, conceptual economy? And sharing ideas doesn’t mean surrendering something that can’t be recovered? Once you understand that sharing powerful ideas means creating value, and that hoarding only serves to allow good ideas to die with you, it becomes at once easy and fulfilling to give freely of the ideas you have. Often those enriching opportunities to give remain remote because we’re just too wrapped up in what we’re doing, and because often people just don’t know what to ask for. But recognition of good ideas to adopt is significantly easier than knowing what to ask. We just ‘know it when we see it.’
The other day we learned a fabulous solution when talking to a senior IT leader at a Fortune 500 financial services company. His group of engineers had a steady +/- efficiency rate of about 46%, and the needle hadn’t moved substantially in a few years. Yet he knew that from a competitive standpoint he had some of the best and brightest coders in his group. Here’s what he did: He first went around to some of the more inventive programmers in his group and asked if he could gather up and group some of their unique and valuable hacks and macros they had created in their work. He then grouped them by application and posted them internally on a wiki where other coders could go in, browse and borrow interesting and useful hacks and shortcuts to solve coding problems.
Pretty soon people in the group were adding and swapping their signature solutions and hacks in a shared environment – both benefiting from the collective wisdom of the other programmers and creating a fun environment to brand their work publicly. Efficiencies shot up to over 65% – both through the sharing and iterating on signature solutions, as well as the camaraderie and co-petitive environment created.
In the conceptual economy ideas are still tools, but we are able to share these ideas and still maintain the integrity and personality of thought, and benefit from an idea tool that comes back sharpened by another. And even if it doesn’t come back, we still get the joy and knowledge of having shared and knowing your unique ideation will live on through the work and voice of others.
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