extreme fitness inc
Boxes and Arrows: Stories by Robert Ouellette
Stories by Robert Ouellette
- Innovation Extreme Makeover
“… the practice of innovation is more like a process of obliquity. You get to where you want to go by, in effect, walking away from your destination. ” There is something disturbingly irresistible about the series Extreme Makeover. Watching someone intent on changing their life by changing their skin is, well, like watching an accident in slow motion. The outcome is often going to be bad but we become all-too-willing witnesses to the spectacle before us. Extreme Makeover is an unlikely place to look for useful insights into corporate innovation. Even the fat, awkward, and, let’s face it, hideous bubble-era companies were not going to improve their questionable bottom lines with a nose job, liposuction, and tummy-tuck. In spite of that, the show can offer some useful lessons when trying to understand the dynamics of innovation. Why do we need new lessons? Technology companies that died in the market crash left a legacy that still bloats the collective corporate body of today’s R&D driven enterprises. During the media-stoked bubble years, innovation became a superficial skin that as often as not hid an unhealthy company. Back then, every time we left our computers long enough to read a newspaper or watch television there was another company reportedly on the cutting-edge of innovation. Products became innovative solutions to consumer needs. Managers aspired to benefit from innovative compensation packages. Software engineers assumed the mantle of innovative code warriors. “Our company is innovative” rivaled “I use Botox” as the quintessential California mantra. When money is pouring in the door no matter what you do, it is easy to entrench bad business practices, especially around a concept so amorphous as innovation. The press was complicit in the obesity. It started labeling as innovative any product or service that appeared novel, unique, or too obscure to understand. In fact, the more fantastic and wild-assed an idea was, the more likely it was to be fed ink. A reporter can’t decipher what some twenty-one year old just showed him, well, it must be so innovative that even Tim Berners-Lee would be breathless. Innovation stretched, dyed, and spun itself into the Emperor’s new robes. When the tech bubble burst we learned that true innovation, like beauty, is more than skin deep and is much harder to attain—it takes hard work, rigorous planning, and a robust support network. How can Extreme Makeover help us pump up our flaccid corporate innovation skills? A recent two-part Extreme Makeover episode added a positive twist to the usual plot trajectory. Normally, candidates first go under the knife and then do two months of recovery and workouts to get their bodies fit. In this episode however, they had to lose weight and get fit before being cut and stitched into the external image that best resembled their internal aspirations. No quick-fix liposuctions and breast enhancements for this crew, their sweat equity earned them the right to surgery. The “no pain no gain” alternative seemed by far the better approach to the makeover process. Post bubble knowledge-based companies can learn from their example. But they will need help though. Consultants are to innovation what surgeons are to beauty. Both perform best when the patient already has good bones and is in robust health. When the client is already 90 percent complete and only needs just a few nips and tucks to bring out their existing beauty, it's easy to be a creative genius. That is why many innovation managers can pull out their “cut first and get fit later” scalpel, slice, stitch, and leave a good-looking reference behind. In most real world cases though, effective innovation practices are not easily prescribed, especially when used on a corporate body that is innovation anorexic. What are the “weird” anti-lessons, if I can borrow from innovation theorist Robert Sutton, we can learn from Extreme Innovation Makeover and apply to your company with or without innovation consultants? First, understand that lessons are not rules. Rules are prescriptive. They assume a complete understanding of the organism and every input and reaction that affects it. R&D based companies defy this kind of Fordian thinking. In fact, the practice of innovation is more like a process of obliquity. You get to where you want to go by, in effect, walking away from your destination. Here are the lessons. Innovation Extreme Makeover LessonsEM Lesson #1: Fitness precedes beauty. Healthy bodies are more receptive to beautification than are unhealthy ones. (Innovation evolves from sound business practices, good leadership, talented staff, and strong interpersonal relationships—get fit first then aspire to create innovative products.)EM Lesson #2: Beauty is a subjective measure. Some people think Ivana Trump is beautiful. Ford thought the Edsel was a beautiful car. What is beautiful to one person can sometimes be ugly to another. (Innovation to one company is chaos to another—effective innovation practices are organization and environment specific. Be sure that your new innovation look fits your company’s personality.) EM Lesson #3: Aspiring to beauty can be fatal, be prepared. As the recent plastic surgery related death of Cinar Entertainment co-founder Micheline Charest illustrates, even the rich and powerful are, after all, only mortal. (Be careful what you wish for, the wrong kind of innovation can destabilize and even kill your company. Ask Enron.) EM Lesson #1: Fitness Precedes Beautification Truly innovative companies are usually fit. They have good cash flow, effective business practices, and a strong management team. Many of the founders of these companies have a corporate vision that is more sublime than the MBA mantra of increasing shareholder value. Exceptional shareholder returns are often a by-product of their unique vision. Look at Apple, IDEO or Wal-Mart. These companies grew up on big ideas — and those ideas tended to be personal. People, not processes, can imagine new kinds of products and services and move towards them. This lesson is scalable and is applicable to the macro-economic environment as well as the micro. Dr. Jennifer Montana of Advanced Research Technologies in Cambridge, conveys a general truth about her business. Dr. Montana advises macro-economic entities like Canada (that big, friendly country north of the U.S.) and cities like Philadelphia on how to foster innovative entrepreneurial clusters. Jennifer’s job is quantification based—rigorously so. However, she maintains that strong leadership on a personal level is critical. Dr. Montana is not talking about top-down leadership but collaborative leadership that overcomes parochial barriers and links innovation stakeholders. Why is that important? Innovation is a social process, she explains. Knowledge and information, so critical to the process of innovation, flow in the human context of strong social relationships and networks. On a smaller scale, successful innovative firms tend to better utilize their company’s intellectual capital than do their competitors. Leveraging people and their ideas is a key success factor to them. How do they move ideas from one person to another in a way that benefits everyone? Some use brainstorming sessions. One method generates storyboards that look more like Architect’s drawings than they do business documents. Harvard Business Review’s case study on Florida Power and Light illustrates how effective this technique can be. (Problem solving this way was first seen in the charrettes made popular by Architects. Architecture as a practice has many parallels to innovative processes because, as some say, it is the world’s second oldest profession and has had a long time to get the strategies right). Why does it work? Ideas become visible so everyone can first understand and then improve them. Another way of exchanging and improving ideas in a company is by using new information management and story-telling tools including the soon to be ubiquitous Weblogs or “Blogs.”. Of the many powerful blogging tools like Movable Type and Word Press, it is the visual planning and web publishing tool, “Tinderbox,” from Eastgate Systems Inc., that offers innovation driven companies a unique new way to both manipulate and manage ideas visually. Described as a personal content management assistant, Tinderbox’s early history was as a visual outlining tool for writers. Its interface is a working example of the “Boxes and Arrows” paradigm. Who is using Tinderbox? Doug Miller the CTO of iRobot says, “This is the tool I feel I’ve been waiting fifteen years for.” Doug writes on his weblog: “Last night as I was reading I came to one of my favorite passages, a section where one of the characters is interacting with her computer system, reading mail and scanning news items her filters and clipping services have culled out of the fire hose of information that's constantly directed at her by the ‘net’ of 2039. Brin's descriptions of the technologies she uses are wonderful. We're seeing the beginnings of some of what he describes in today's syndication, content aggregation and weblogging tools. It strikes me as I'm reading that the agents I've set u