It's innovation time! believe it or not!

It's been a long time since I wrote a post I apologize to those of you who follow the blog. It is hard to get some time right now to get anything other than our full time jobs done right now, huh? I'm guessing most of you are in the same position I'm in, lots of people getting fired, losing your team to downsizing? No one has time for hobbies or personal interests anymore.

These situations might have made you lose some of your motivation and inspiration, but, if you are anything like me you'll be doing anything you can to manage, even when your team has been cut to half of what it was....

I know this great phrase by Drucker: "to stay in the same place you have to move faster". not a great phrase per se, but great in moments like these. No more team, twice as much work and still the same time to do it, cause you can't slow down. My case? I'll be honest, I've learned how to use 3 platforms i had no idea what they were about, such as ad servers, CMS, e-mail servers, all in the last 3 months or so, with only a day to learn each and get on to it as soon as possible, cause the site need updating, sponsors have to be uploaded, and everything is for....... yeap! yesterday!

There are days when it seems impossible, right? with all this situation going on who has time for innovation? who has time to take care of motivating people you are not sure you can keep on your team, people you have no idea if you'll have to fire tomorrow...

Today we are all expected to be octopuses, manage everything at the same time, multitasking has never been more important. Just remember to keep one of your tentacles on our usual subject!!!!

Here's the octopus theory:
Octopuses are flexible, they adapt to the environment, camouflage, change shapes and through ink, they endure and so should we!
We should all turn to innovation in times like these. Each moment you spend on innovation right now is an optimization of processes that will benefit you tomorrow. Let me make it clear with an example: tiny innovation as new ways of targeting you customers might lead to an optimization of advertising, which will mean a budget optimization and who wouldn't like that right now!???

At the same time you cannot slow down, do it and someone will catch up with you and everything you have worked so hard to achieve will be gone. Don't risk your current value to innovation. be an octopus, manage what you have and think about the future. About a year ago companies could afford someone to manage today and someone else to think about tomorrow. Those times are over. Right now we need to do both at the same time. Of course, no one can do both as fast as before, so yeah, maybe cut down on innovation, or better yet, take innovation to everyday tasks, see how you can optimize your time, talk to your peers they might know a better Way to get things done. Can't think of a way to optimize marketing or whatever you do? Spend five minutes every day questioning you actions.. no harm can come from that!

The trick and the hardest part is realizing early which ideas to ditch and which ones to pursue, which ones to apply and which ones to store in a box for later on. Spend some time with your thoughts, it's no time to be a robot and carry out everyday tasks as before, it's time to wake up, think and re-think every single thing, spend five more minutes, might mean slowing down for 5 minutes, but it might also mean speeding up 5 minutes from now on. 5 minutes on each task count! no one can deny it!

Find your inspiration and motivation in the fact that you still have a job and if you survive this one you'll probably end up in a much better place than before. Crisis is opportunity, don't waste it forgetting your goals.

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WORLD INNOVATION FORUM - Featured Event

Here's an event I recomend for anyone who can make it to NY in May. HSM is the world's leading management content company. Their events or their articles on their sites or newsletters usually light up a spark in the back of your head that stays there until you can apply it, for me it ussually means each event triggers a couple of blogposts.

During two days at the World InnovationForum, learn how to integrate and refine innovation to strengthen your business and gain a competitive advantage in a fiercely competitive marketplace.
Dissect case studies, analyze theory, and join the greatest thought pioneers in the field of innovation - world renowned visionaries, creative problem
solvers, bestselling authors, and business authorities.

Featuring (click to see exactly what it's about)
DAN ARIELY
CLAYTON CHRISTENSEN My personal favourite!
C.K. PRAHALAD
FRED KRUPP
PAUL SAFFO
VIJAY GOVINDARAJAN
AND INNOVATION CASES

I was there for last year's event and found it very inspiring with Gary Hamel talking about how we should change management and Daniel Pink talking about how right-brainers will rule the future. All I can say is it was a great experience and I wish i can make it this year again.

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The Future of Innovation

After a nice long vacation I'm back! back to the routine and city traffic... I miss the beach and the ocean but it couldn't last forever.

So while I was away I thought over and over.. what's going to happen to my blog in 2009? With the current economic situation and automotive companies about to crash and leave who knows how many people unemployed, is there any room for innovation at all. How can someone feel inspired in this new scenario, where does the motivation lie?

These are hard questions... but it appears as if I'm not the only one asking. I've been receiving a lot of visit through search engines with keywords like "how to motivate", "why motivate", "why innovate" and sounds reasonable to go into these subjects as soon as possible.

Innovation is not easy, it never has been... but not is definitely the time for it. With crisis comes opportunity, with some companies falling the few strong enough to innovate will be able to capture the clients; any company who stands by their customers through this will gain more than customers, it will earn a reputation which, with constant innovation could last a life-time.

So how do you get your people to think about innovation when their main concern today is keeping their job and making ends meet? well again: not easy, but the leader comes to play a key role here, no leader with a lack of confidence in their team will be able to succeed. Leaders must become catalysts, today more than ever, to create trust and cooperation strong enough for people to try to focus on the future.

There is a future, it's up to you to decide whether you are going to play an active or reactive role in shaping it. Active roles should be the right choice, strategic spending and spending will motivate people of they understand what you are doing. Keeping a steady goal will be crucial. If your people understand you will not just sit and wait they will feel motivated to not sit and wait themselves.
It might take a while for the first success, but once you reach it, it will be the inspiration everyone needs to keep innovation going. So Motivate, Inspire and Innovate will go on through 2009 and my goal is to present all ideas I can on how to Motivate, Inspire and Innovate in hard times like the ones we'll be facing this year.

So happy new year! and keep the spirit alive, we have tough year ahead but we will survive, it's up to you to decide if you want to or if you are just going to sit back and rest.

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The Clues for Innovation of Business Models

Change and renewal of a business model is not a simple or short process. There are various levels of the organization that need to be coordinated for change. And failure of coordination will hurt the company even further. So here are the keys of motivating, inspiring and innovating in an organization as a whole.

Reading John P. Kotter’s article on the Harvard business review called “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail” I started looking at innovation as a process of the entire organization, which means innovation of the entire business model. In order to succed, there are several levels that need to coordinated. I also found the “56 Reasons Why Most Corporate Innovation Initiatives Fail” in the Heart of innovation blog. However, 56 seems too much, so I written my own guide to success in change process. Most of them include the ones mentioned in the articles I mentioned before, but have a different appreciation.

Without motivations people won’t help, and the change goes nowhere. The motivation lies in communicating the importance of the effort, such as emergence of new markets that no one is targeting, failing to achieve financial goals… it may be an opportunity or a threat that triggers innovation. Communication plays a great role in motivating people for change if people don’t understand the why they won’t react. According to Kotter most companies that fail follow these patterns:
1. Most executives overlook how hard it can be for people to change their comfort zone,
2. They can overestimate how successful they have been in increasing urgency
3. They lack patience: enough with the preliminaries, let’s get on with it.

The truth behind change is leadership. Leaders are the only ones who can succeed in change; managers are great at sustaining the current situation and making it work on a day to day basis. A true leader is the one who constantly finds ways of improvement and encourages these ideas. The need for leaders in senior levels of the company is the clue for transformation. Usually the transformation of a corporation is sparked by the arrival of a new leader with new ideas who spots the need for change right away and acts and motivates on it.

Motivation for change has to start early on in the process. Usually it’s one or two people who think about change but in order to succeed, they need a “coalition” of leaders to achieve the goals. Motivation is a contagious process when you have the right leaders in place. One leader motivates the few he leads, those in turn motivate those they lead, and so on, and the whole company should feel the motivation; that is, assuming you have true leaders in your organization. If the process fails, then the leadership chain is broken in some level of the company.

So what happens when the high levels of the organization don’t buy into the idea? Well, most change processes start because the existing high level is not working, if it were change would come on its own or wouldn’t be needed. In these cases, change is carried out outside of the formal schemes of the corporation, but the problem arises when it’s time to get back inside the formal ways. So the point is getting one agent of change to convince the other and help create a shared view of urgency. So besides leadership teamwork is important too. Without a strong team who shares beliefs the leadership chain we mentioned before will not succeed. The top team will have to agree on ideas and implementation. If every team they lead get different ideas and different implementations, that is, if the plan is communicated based on different beliefs the plan will lack coordination and fail.

Have a vision. The vision is the inspiration part of the equation. But a vision requires a strategy without which the change will eventually transform into uncoordinated projects that will not join efforts on the goal and end up hurting the company. A vision of change needs to be communicated and everyone needs to understand where they are going, no one can help row a boat if they can’t see where his/her team-mates are going. A vision, to be a vision, according to Ben Zander, has to be for everyone; that is, everyone needs to understand it and see the goal immediately. Usually the vision is there but the communication fails and instead you end up with long plans and explanations that no one can understand.

Vision needs to be over communicated. People have to know it and learn it and hear it and see it taking place, they need to know if their efforts are aligned with the vision. If the leader is not aligned with the vision, or his behaviour escapes the vision the troops will not be able to follow it, disbelief will take over and change will be stopped. One effective communication media is the employee evaluation. By telling someone how well he/she is contributing to the vision and rewarding those who are you’ll find that the ones who are aligned will put even more effort into it and those who don’t will change their attitude towards the new plan. This is not the only way to communicate; it’s just one of the most effective ones. The guiding principle is simple, according to John Kotter, use every communication media available, specially those that are being wasted in useless information.

Changing the perception models. Successful transformation, as is said before includes great leaders that encourage ideas for change, these ideas have to be carried out too. But some will encounter obstacles; the importance of removing these rocks on the road is an essential factor of the process. Remember the essential of innovation one? Recognize when you are not helping and look for something else to do. Sometimes the rock might be in the person’s head and you need to convince them that there is no such thing; the perception models must be changed. Remember Jonathan Drori’s video? That’s the clue. By not removing obstacles employees will doubt your commitment to change and efforts will fade.

Crating short term goals is essential since you need to keep the momentum going. Not giving people evidence of success on the way to change will produce a loss of conviction for the cause. Recognition of effort will encourage others to try as hard as those who achieved the short term goals.

Declaring victory too soon can be lethal. Change is not carried out in short periods of time. Even when celebrating short term goals is great motivation, celebrating victory too soon is usually a factor for failure. The leader might be too eager to declare it, but lower levels of the company might know it’s not yet reached the whole organization and will feel as if the change was not successful or not appropriately planed. This will create a lack of continuity of the vision and will hurt the credibility of the leader, especially in any future intent of further change.

Essentially, change is a shift in the corporate culture, without a culture to go with change it won’t last. Change, in the small victories, has to become highly encouraged common practices. Renewal effort has to be understood by the next generation of executives since they will be the next to carry out the change.


Skipping steps only creates an illusion of speed, but few efforts are truly successful. The process of change must be carried out to its completion for it to work and ensure the continuity of renewal.

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Innovation Needed for Education Systems!

I wrote a post on creating the jobs of the future some time ago. Now I've found a post by Susan Copperman on the HSM Inspiring Ideas Blog with the following statistics

• The US is at the bottom of the international ranking of K - 12 education.


• For the last 30 years, 50% of those who enter high school do not graduate (no wonder so much of the population is illiterate....children learn what they live).


• There is virtually no pipeline of talent for good teachers (in the 50's/60's, women had 2 career choices: nursing or teaching....today women have many options).


• Teachers today are teachers by default, representing the bottom 10% of SAT scores.

Now what chance is there if this is the situation tomorrow's leaders face, they are the next generation to go into the labour force... I bet Generation Y will not look so bad when these kids come in for a job interview!

Reconsidering education is part of reconsidering the new global environment. Innovation is needed, reinvention and rethinking the education schemes is necessary! Open innovation models have something to add to the education system.

How about sharing best practices among teachers and schools? Why doesn't a school work as a company? make employees compete and rate them, evaluate them too. Teachers usually like to test students but don't like to be tested. Well, maybe they should. A job in education should be as highly competitive or more than a white collar job. After all these are the people preparing the future leaders, sure not all of them will be leaders, but some of them will... and we don't want the current situation repeating itself. We talk about work ethics and the lack of responsibility of those who made decisions in the past years... how about the responsibility of those who educated them? shouldn't we be working on the education system that generated these leaders?

Where is the inspiration of the future leaders if they know the same education system they are in is sinking?

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The Myths of Innovation

Scott Berkun, bestselling author has a cool blog and here's a video of his ideas. It's long, so take your time cause it's great.

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Lao-Tzu on Leadership

When the best leader's work is done the people say, ''We did it ourselves.''

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