Category Archives: Innovation

Secrets of Success: Erskine Bowles

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This next month signals the end of the Federal budget cycle. There’s been a great deal of passionate conversation about the budget and what can be done.  I re-read a snippet of GEN Shelton’s book, Secrets of Success (p. 65), and saw this snippet of a conversation with Erskine Bowles. I got the privilege to work indirectly with Mr. Bowles while he served as president of the University of North Carolina system.   I learned a lot from working with him on some projects to help our public schools and this snippet reinforces his values-based approach.  He is demanding, fair, and unwavering in his commitment to the needs of the state and nation. It was an honor.

“My understanding of leadership goes back to my father, Skipper Bowles.  When I was just a boy I remember going to a dinner over in Winston Salem, and when my dad was going to get some kind of prestigious award.  He looked at the audience and then at my two sisters and me and said, “Thank you, but I don’t want you to judge me based on what I’ve done.   I want you to judge me on what my children to for others.”  Later we asked him what he by that and he said, “Look, I believe that the success that I’ve had and the good decisions I’ve made in my life are a reflection on the values I got from my parents and the good education that they provided me.  I think the choices that you will make will be similar, a reflection on your mom and me.”  My dad used to always talk about how in the old south when you went out to chop firewood for your own family that you’d always throw a few logs on the community woodpile.  He’d say, “I want you all to feel that it’s always important to add to the community woodpile.”

So all of us – my sisters included – have, in our own distinct ways, tried to do just that, think about that night and what my father said in every leadership effort we’ve undertaken. I’ve had numerous opportunities to lead, and for that I’m very grateful. Working as President Clinton’s chief of staff, head of the small business association, and then later as the UN deputy special envoy to thirteen tsunami-affected countries in Southeast Asia all provided unique experiences. 

 Over the years people have asked me about the balanced budget when I was chief of staff during the Clinton Administration, wondering if that wasn’t the proudest moment of my time in leadership in Washington. My response is, “Yes, in some ways, but my proudest moment was putting together a team that had sharp minds and not sharp elbows.  We really focused on trying to move the country forward rather than to take some kind of partisanship off the table, establishing trust on both sides of the aisle.”  But the part of the balanced budget story that I like the best is this:  while we were balancing the budget we got twenty-seven billion dollars of new funding for health care insurance for five million poor kids. This was values-based leadership.  While being fiscally responsible we were still investing in something that could really make a difference in the lives of the kids.

Culture and Innovation Positively Linked

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Organizations frequently look for innovation to help them help solve thorny organizational problems.  Whether the phrase is uttered, “Do more with less” or “Think outside the box”, innovation is key.  A recent study, “The Global Innovation 1000”, outlined key elements for success:

  1. Innovation strategy tightly aligned with it’s overall organizational strategy
  2. The strategy is communicated consistently throughout the organization
  3. A prioritized set of capabilities that match the strategy
  4. Ensure the innovation strategy translates to a clear, tangible, action plan
  5. A supportive culture

The culture element is so difficult because it is built up “a brick at a time, a point at a time, over decades.  You need consistency; you need persistence; and you need gentle, behind the scenes encouragement in addition to top down support.  And you can lose it very quickly.”

The big takeaway?  The more closely aligned these elements are, the greater set of capabilities you can bring to bear on these thorny organizational challenges.

(Source: Jaruzelski, Loehr, and Holman, Booz & Company, Winter 2011)

2 Questions to Ask Yourself before Making an Unwise Decision

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In an earlier post, I outlined a summary of research from Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues on some reasons why we make unwise decisions. They outline two questions you should ask yourself before making any big decision:

  1. Qui Bono (who benefits?) Do you have any reason to suspect that you or whomever is making the recommendation is motivated by a preference for a certain decision? You should look for two or three realistic different options and recommendations with the potential short and mid term impacts.
  2. The Cupid and GroupThink Syndromes: Has the individual or team who is making the recommendation fallen in love with the recommendation?  I remember working with one very senior leader who told his senior leadership team that he relished the chance to spar with a team making a recommendation when they told him, “We’ve all agreed, this is unarguably the best course of action.”  He pushed and fought for them to argue the different options to get as many dissenting views on the table as possible.  He wanted and actively solicited dissent on the possible options so that they had the best possible chance of making a good decision.  This had the side benefit of helping his team think through different options before coming to him with a recommendation.

How Top Innovators Keep Winning

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Nearly all innovative companies pursue one or more of these main innovative strategies:

  • Need Seekers actively and directly engage current and potential customers to shape new products and services based on superior end-user understanding, and strive to be the first to market with those new offerings.
  • Market Readers watch their customers and competitors carefully, focusing largely on creating value through incremental change and by capitalizing on proven market trends.
  • Technology Drivers follow the direction suggested by their technological capabilities, leveraging their investment in research and development to drive both breakthrough innovation and incremental change, often seeking to solve the unarticulated needs of their customers via new technology.

The success of each of the strategies depends on how closely companies, in pursuing innovation, align their innovation strategy with their business strategy and how much effort they devote to directly understanding the needs of end-users.  The capabilities required to pursue each strategy form a systematic set of skills, processes, and tools that companies must focus on to succeed at each stage of the innovation process.

Focusing on a systematic set of capabilities means that companies must first choose the capabilities that matter most to their particular innovation strategy, and then execute them well.  Their innovation efforts must be in sync with their overall corporate strategy: They must integrate the right innovation capabilities with the right set of firm-wide capabilities, as determined by their overall strategy.

Source: Strategy + Business, Winter 2010

The Great Repeatable Business Model

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As budgets contract while missions expand, one way to accomplish the mission might be to look at how businesses innovate their expertise to grow and become more successful.  Zook and Allen offer some insights below:

  1. Most very successful organizations do not reinvent themselves through periodic “binges and purges”.  Instead, they focus relentlessly on their fundamental strengths, and moving from strength to strength.
  2. Successful organizations learn to deliver their differentiation to the front line, creating an organization that lives and breathes its strategic advantages day in and day out, and sustaining it through constant adaptation from the market.

Four actions you can employ to sustain your competitive advantage:

  1. Ensure  you and your management team agree on differentiation NOW and in the future-ask your top team: what do our end users see as our advantages over others? How do we know?
  2. Ask the same question to those who are on the front lines interacting with end users, customers, and partners. Are the advantages similar?
  3. Write your strategy on an index card-does it include and center on key sources of differentiation?
  4. Translate strategy into a few non-negotiables. Can you describe the simple principles that drive key behaviors, beliefs, values?  Are they adhered to on a daily basis?

The article also has some key categories you can use with your team to describe and distill areas of strategic advantage and innovation.

 (Source: 2011, Zook and Allen, Harvard Business Review)