Innovation is Creativity x Risk Taking

Innovation is impossible to achieve without taking a necessary amount of risk. In a world where the success rate of new product entries in the grocery business is 1 in 100, it is inevitable that every success sees failures along the way.

An effective innovation leader should encourage creativity and risk taking, while also practicing a tolerance for failure.

To foster initiative and innovation, ask yourself these questions.

• Do you allow free research and development (R&D) time?
• Do you invest in innovation: money, people, resources?
• Do you celebrate failure and risk taking?

In a tough economy the willingness to take risks can wither, so it’s critical to let team members know that failure will not result in punitive measures.

A strong leader practices failure management by setting and agreeing on the risk taking bandwidth or budget. It is ok to fail but that failure should be seen and recognized as a learning experience.

Fear of failure is an innovation killer, so here are some simple steps to develop a failure management plan that will lead to a culture of sustainable innovation.

1. Clearly communicate the risk profile you are asking your people to adopt and state why it is important to the organization’s success. This limits your potential loss, while opening up the floor for creativity and risk taking.
2. Never allow an unsuccessful risk to hamper a team member’s opportunities and advancement. A culture of innovation depends on trust.
3. Create and communicate the results of an award program created with a high intraorganizational profile. It should, ideally, reward risks that pay off and “gee, nice try’s” that don’t.
4. Establish a formalized, non-accusatory process for harvesting key learnings from unsuccessful risks. Distribute these lessons learned. The key here is that all risks, whether successful or not, contribute towards the end goal.
5. Give your people the situational risk assessment tools they need to help them improve their risk-taking decisions. This can include risk scoring systems to identify different levels of risk, and ways to deal with adverse situations as part of a preventive strategy.

Glass is no longer Dumb: The growing market for Smart glass

Smart glass is a unique type of material used in windows that is able to electronically control glare and heat. It is primarily used in architecture and transportation, privacy glass and museum artwork expositions.

As a result of new production capacity entering the market within the year, production costs will go down, allowing the sector grow.

A new report from Pike Research predicts that smart glass production could become a nearly $700 million area of the flat glass market by 2020, eight time more than it’s worth today.

“High-performance buildings require a level of control over energy that many of today’s automation systems are only now starting to address,” senior analyst Eric Bloom says in a statement. “Smart glass is an innovative technology that both provides building owners unprecedented control over solar heat gain and offers a visually impressive alternative to flat glass.”

North America and Europe are expected to take the lead in this growth, but researchers also see the potential for a lot of growth in China, where a building boom is now underway.

And as more people start to adopt green building standards, industry will look to smart glass to address these needs.

Pike Research reports:

“This class of high-performance glazing products offers significant energy efficiency, aesthetic, and user comfort and wellbeing benefits as compared to conventional ’static’ glazing.”

To learn more about the report, visit Pike Research.

Innovation: TED Video - DIY Rocket Science Project

Creativity: Everything is a Re-mix

Amateur Innovators Construct Hand-Held Thermal Detection Device

Sick of living in a poorly-heated apartment? You can now expose draughty trouble spots by building your own thermal flashlight and painting colourful heat maps on your walls.

The do-it-yourself technology developed by the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lets homeowners and tenants document the temperature around their home to reveal inadequate insulation.

Last month, during a hacking session at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, students with little electronics experience gathered to make their own flashlights from a multicoloured LED, a thermal sensor, a circuit board and wire.

A programmed mini-processor was used to control how the unit responds to heat. One student exploited the hackable nature of the tool to develop a wand design as an alternative to the standard exterior made from a VHS tape case.

By the end of the afternoon the flashlights were ready for testing. The students waved frozen water bottles in front of the device while capturing a time-lapse of the light painting with the online webcam program Glowdoodle.

To find out more about the device and potential applications for environmental monitoring, read our full news story: "Thermal flashlight 'paints' cold rooms with colour".

Mistakes in Not Making Mistakes

The past year seems to have yielded various waves of content celebrating making mistakes. Advancing the “failure at the heart of innovation” theme seems to have become a cause célèbre for the creativity and innovation set.

Celebrating mistakes as part of innovation was the topic of a July Innochat on Twitter on innovation failure and, most recently, a Wall Street Journal article on “Better Ideas through Failure.”

I grew up with a clear perfectionist streak (or whatever term you would use to suggest whatever is deeper, wide, and more permanent than a “streak”), I wrestle with a gleeful attitude toward failure.

Yet between Kathryn Schulz’s TED talk “On Being Wrong” and recognition of my own experiences where learning from something that did not succeed as planned has led to much better future results, openness to errors clearly has its place in creativity and innovation.

However, I think celebrating mistakes in and of themselves is an easy banner for behaviours that don’t come easily to many people or many organizations, for that matter.

It’s not so much organizations are celebrating failure as the willingness to move forward on efforts before everything is figured out and an appreciation for learning when something doesn’t go right.


Being Bad at Making Mistakes
What really needs to happen in an organization to benefit from an apparent willingness to celebrate and reward failure?

Instead of listing behaviors for celebrating mistakes (which I started to do but failed to complete), it’s much easier to list mistakes individuals and organizations make at making mistakes.

Thinking through the personal perfectionist demons I’ve had to try (and still try) to slay, here are eight mistakes that can shut you off from productive failure:

1. Being afraid of fear
2. Not being able to manage or tolerate ample levels of risk
3. Becoming easily embarrassed – either personally or organizationally
4. Failing to properly frame and learn from experiments
5. Being uncomfortable with unanswered questions
6. Doing a bad job of making assumptions which allow you to keep making progress
7. Focusing too strongly on too much detail
8. Not being able to fix things as you go

To read the full article visit the Innovation Excellence website

Social Media In the C-Suite: Listening, Learning and Creating a Strategy from the Top Down

As social media becomes more pervasive in the modern business landscape, creating a strategy for its use can no longer be confined to the tech or marketing side of any operation.

In the recently released Social Media Leadership: How to Get off the Bench and into the Game, author Michael F. Lewis, chairman and CEO of business services company ILD and consulting firm Social Strategy1, offers managers a guide to understanding and leveraging tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.

Knowledge@Wharton sat down with Lewis, along with Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow and Steve Ennen, president and chief intelligence officer of Social Strategy1, to discuss the opportunities and potential pitfalls of implementing a social media strategy.

An edited version of the transcript appears here

Why we reject creative ideas

Most people view creativity as an asset. So why do we reject creative ideas so often in real life?
Researchers sought to understand this phenomenon and found that the uncertainty of creativity often led to the rejection of such ideas — even when creativity itself is a stated goal.

To find out, Cornell University professor Jack Goncalo, University of Pennsylvania professor Jennifer Mueller and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Shimul Melwani put participants through a series of mental association tests that revealed their reactions to certain words and situations, such as winning a lottery.

They found that study participants associated creative ideas with negative words — such as “vomit,” “poison” and “agony” — even when they said outright that they favoured creativity.

Simply, there was a subtle bias against creativity that favored practicality. And it was motivated by a need to achieve certainty, even in the face of novel new products, such as a nanotechnology-infused running shoe (said to better cool the foot and reduce blisters) used during the study.

The researchers write:

Uncertainty also makes us less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when we need it most. Revealing the existence and nature of a bias against creativity can help explain why people might reject creative ideas and stifle scientific advancements, even in the face of strong intentions to the contrary. …

The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.

Their results will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, but you can read the entire paper here.

The Complex Process of Innovation

The innovation process, in the business context, is a structured action that is remarkably easy to implement.

It begins with a problem and ends with profit. As such, it is the ideal business process.

So it is remarkable that so few businesses have actually implemented this structured innovation process. Fortunately, all you have to do is read this and implement it in your firm!

Read the full article here: Innovation Excellence

The First Study of Open Innovation in France

Click To View in larger format

The first ever study conducted in France ‘Open Innovation in France’ was presented during a Press Conference in Paris on May 31st 2011 and the English version was released online on June 7^th 2011 at the Word Innovation Forum in New York.

An infography summary is available on this link : Open-Innovation-English-3
The detailed version is available in pdf format on this link:  Study 2011 by bluenove ‘OPEN INNOVATION IN FRANCE’ or on our blog.

The summary version is also available on slideshare.

The French version of the detailed study is available on this link.

Bluenove supports international companies to implement Open & Collaborative Innovation projects in France and Europe. For instance, we have helped a Brazilian leader in the Cosmetic industry to detect, assess and map potential innovative partners in Europe.

We also support change management projects to implement collaborative software solutions and dynamics within organizations.

We are also interested to identify consulting partners worldwide who may be interested to conduct a similar study in their own country in order to develop a benchmark approach or map such as our Open Innovation Map: http://www.openinnovationmap.org

Feel free to contact us for more information about the study or our services at contact@bluenove.com

The Eight Pillars of Innovation | Think Quarterly by Google

The greatest innovations are the ones we take for granted, like light bulbs, refrigeration and penicillin. But in a world where the miraculous very quickly becomes common-place, how can a company, especially one as big as Google, maintain a spirit of innovation year after year?

Nurturing a culture that allows for innovation is the key. As we’ve grown to over 26,000 employees in more than 60 offices, we’ve worked hard to maintain the unique spirit that characterized Google way back when I joined as employee #16.

Read the full article:

The Eight Pillars of Innovation | Think Quarterly by Google

Looking at How Creativity Works

Firstly we have to turn our attention to the more accurate view of creativity, with its roots in modern science.

The watershed year is 1998, when Brenda Milner, Larry Squire, and Eric Kandel published a breakthrough article in the journal Neuron, “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory.”

Kandel won the Nobel Prize two years later for his contribution to this work. Since then, neuroscientists have ceased to accept Sperry’s two-sided brain. The new model of the brain is “intelligent memory,” in which analysis and intuition work together in the mind in all modes of thought.

There is no left brain; there is no right. There is only learning and recall, in various combinations, throughout the entire brain.

Neuroscientist Barry Gordon gives an overview of this newer model of the brain in his book Intelligent Memory: Improve the Memory That Makes You Smarter (Viking, 2003), with coauthor Lisa Berger. He portrays the everyday intelligent memory of human beings as the greatest inventory system on earth.

From the moment you’re born, your brain takes things in, breaks them down, and puts them on shelves. As new information comes in, your brain does a search to see how it might fit with other information already stored in your memory.

When it finds a match, the previous memories come off the shelf and combine with the new, and the result is a thought. The breaking down and storing process is analysis. The searching and combining is intuition. Both are necessary for all kinds of thought.

Even a mathematical calculation requires the intuition part, to recall the symbols and formula previously learned in order to apply them to the problem.

When the pieces come off the shelf smoothly, in familiar patterns — such as simple addition you’ve done many times — you don’t even realize it has happened. When lots of different pieces combine into a new pattern, you feel it as a flash of insight, the famous “aha!” moment, but the mental mechanism works the same way in both cases.

Whether it’s working on a familiar formula or a new idea, intelligent memory combines analysis and intuition as learning and recall.

Just as the intelligent memory concept has replaced the old two-sided brain theory in neuroscience, companies need to replace brainstorming with methods that reflect more accurately how creative ideas actually form in the mind, and they don’t need to start from scratch.

Once we understand how intelligent memory works, we find several existing techniques that fit. After all, human beings have innovated for eons. If we study how innovation actually happens, we can learn how to do it more reliably.

Where do Good Ideas come from? - Steven Johnstone

Where do good ideas come from? Places that put us together. Places that allow good hunches to collide with other good hunches, sometimes creating big breakthroughs and innovations.

During the Enlightenment, this all happened in Parisian salons and coffee houses. Nowadays, it’s happening on the web, in places that defy your ordinary definition of “place.”

In four animated minutes, Steven Johnson outlines the argument that he makes more fully in his soon-to-be-published book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. The video is the latest from the RSAnimate series.

The China Strategy book - Author Edward Tse

The China Strategy

China for the World
In The China Strategy, Edward Tse, Booz & Company’s Chairman of Greater China, describes how to build the capabilities that business leaders need for operating an integrated China-global strategy.

Tse explains how to tell which Chinese companies can provide the best alliances for particular purposes, what parts of the country to enter first; how to manage Chinese financing; and how to establish a trajectory for growth that profits with the growth of, rather than just fighting against the growth of, the next wave of Chinese competitors.

Tse also discusses flexible “footprints” for locating innovation, manufacturing, and services; the adaptation of brand names in China’s many markets; and the integration of back-office functions between China and the rest of the world.

Additionally, Tse describes how success in China can be applied globally, using the market knowledge, networks of low-cost suppliers, and scientific talent that can be found there as a platform for reaching a worldwide scale.

In the world’s fastest-growing economy, the experience of the last ten years will not be the best guide to the next ten years. Business leaders around the world who want to be successful—not just in China, but anywhere—will need a new China strategy.

A new China strategy does not merely mean a set of plans for doing business in China. Most big companies are already selling to China’s markets and competing against Chinese companies. Many more, even relatively small enterprises, will join them. But a true China strategy is different. It is a one world strategy: a long-range developmental plan for doing business as a global enterprise in which China is a central and integrated component, in a world where China plays a very different role than it has in the past.

Together, the four drivers of change in China—Open China, Competitive China, Official China, and One World—will transform the way in which businesses operate everywhere.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI Needs

You may be familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a theory Abraham Maslow proposed in 1943, that provides a structure of priorities that relate to human needs. At the bottom of the pyramid are basic physiological needs: breathing, food water, etc.

The fundamentals needed for basic survival. The needs then climb the pyramid, becoming more intangible as one goes along: safety, love/belonging, esteem, self-actualisation, variety.

The theory's structure of moving from tangible/tactical needs to those that are intangible and more impactful is used here to examine the software decision-maker inside modern companies.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Enterprise 2.0 ROI
The decision to purchase an enterprise software application is one that generally demands a variety of different views about benefits. Because with most enterprise systems - Enterprise 2.0 included - there are a variety of benefits:



Cost Savings
Saving money is one of the easier ways for an enterprise decision-maker to justify an investment.

The savings can more than offset the costs of a enterprise system. This correlates to Maslow's original hierarchy of physiological needs. The dollars saved cover the cost to purchase.

Saving money occurs in multiple ways when it comes to software. While a traditional measure is that the new application replaces a more expensive one, that's a benefit that doesn't scale.
A stronger benefit is one which opens up a pipeline of new cost-cutting and operational efficiency measures.

You've covered the lowest level ROI needs with this one, the benefit that is easiest to see and measure. The importance of this should not be underestimated. However, it's also the benefit with the lowest impact on the organization.

Revenue Generation
Next rung up the ROI hierarchy is creating new revenue. In this case, the benefit is more localized to new products and services, as opposed to entirely markets. Increasing the top line is great for the social software ROI calculation. It's not surprising to see the social CRM space heating up.

Getting ideas from employees and customers that lead to new revenue-generating products is a solid business case for Enterprise 2.0. Employees have ideas, but have lacked effective means of making them known to a wider audience.

Customers have great ideas, and provide great direction for new products. They also love to hear about your new product concepts, and will gladly offer feedback.

The reason revenue generation is above cost-cutting is that there is an increased level of uncertainty as to how the revenue will come about, from which idea. Still, this is a solid level that deeply satisfies the ROI needs of companies.

Customer Satisfaction
Happy customers. What every great company wants and continually works for. Anyone with experience on the "front lines" of a company understands the importance of this. Enterprise 2.0 platforms that help companies find ways to increase customer satisfaction hit on an important need for companies.

Having customers suggest their ideas is a valuable approach to improving products and ideas. With an eye toward higher satisfaction and lower churn.

There's also a new factor emerging: social media. Customers who are unhappy can create publicity problems for companies. Companies should factor in the power that social influence has in total Customer Value.

The other value of engaging customers is that while their ideas may be incremental, there may be patterns companies can pick up in what the customers are proposing. In other words, look beyond the tactical feature or service idea, and see what the customer really wants from your service offering.

This benefit scales well, and is of high value to companies. It does have a softer ROI story, however.

Employee Satisfaction
Enterprise 2.0 has more highly engaged and connected employees at its core. The ability to make a more substantive impact. The ability to find that right person to help with an idea or project.

The aha moments of discovering information you need. Making connections with people who see the possibilities you do. The ability to carve out a basis for recognition more broadly than has been available previously.

All of these relate to the issue of more satisfied employees. Now a social software application cannot on its own get you there. But it can play an important role in making that goal a reality. In Ideas Are Core to Enterprise 2.0, four elements of ideas are identified relating to higher employee engagement:

1. Ideas are me
2. Ideas Are the Basis for Finding Like-Minded Colleagues
3. Ideas Are Social Objects
4. Ideas Become Projects

Now the benefit of employee satisfaction is moving higher up the pyramid. Which means its measurability is limited. But it also means its impact is higher.

Cross-Organisation Collaboration
An important objective of companies to getting employees to work together. It's not enough to have the expertise and experience resident in employees. People need to work together to achieve the various objectives of a company.

Cross-organization collaboration does three things:

1.Improves outcomes as a diversity of knowledge and perspectives are brought to bear
2.Strengthen bonds for the next initiative an employee works on
3.Reduces cases of duplicative efforts and unnecessarily starting from scratch

As has been discussed here previously, people with access to a wider range of viewpoints consistently produce higher quality ideas. That only happens when the full intellectual power of employees can be tapped through collaborative networks.

There is a tremendous opportunity for organisations to help their employees increase the closer ties and extract much more value from those who are more distant, away from one's strong ties. Because for most workers, those distant connections are practically non-existent.

We're getting pretty high up on Maslow's ROI Hierarchy. The previous level of employee satisfaction was more emotional. This level weaves in intellectual benefits as well.

Innovation Culture
Innovations that arise from a social software initiative can be measured; indeed they are the most tangible ROI of Enterprise 2.0.

Ideas that are discovered and turned into action have produce an economic return of business value. Where we are finding it tougher to quantify is, determining improvements in team collaboration, communication, individual productivity and the softer side of enterprise 2.0.

It's harder to measure; how deep is a company's innovation culture? This is a culture where the nine principles of innovation management flourish inside an organisation:

1. Innovation benefits from a range of perspectives
2. Four of the most damaging words an employee can say: "Aww, forget about it".
3. Allow some freedom to try things that don't work
4. Create a culture of constant choices
5. Looking at innovation as a discipline
6. Focus employees' innovation priorities
7. Recognize innovation as a funnel with valuable leaks
8. Establish a common platform for innovation
9. Innovation must be more than purely emergent, disorganised and viral

What is the value of creating a sustainable innovation culture - as opposed to a series of one-off innovations? Recent reports tell us that companies that are the innovation leaders in their industries generate 430 basis points more in shareholder returns than do average companies.

We're talking culture here, so it's a soft ROI discussion but the end-results are quite measurable and powerful for this part of Maslow's ROI Hierarchy. Combined with executive commitment, strong incentives and a can-do attitude, social software becomes a critical tool for helping companies achieve an innovation culture.

Organisational Agility
This is the equivalent of self-actualisation, the top of Maslow's needs hierarchy. Companies that have achieved the other benefits, both hard and soft, will find they have a much higher level of organisational agility. Including:

• Seeing changes in the market faster
• Shifting resources in response to new opportunities
• Mixing incremental and disruptive innovation
• Moving on from initiatives, programs,markets, products that no longer work
• Employees can recognise opportunities and threats themselves, and act accordingly

Innovative Project Managers needed

A good Project manager is not normally a dreamer or spontaneous. A Project managers must be practical, structured and systematic but at the same time they should be open to innovation.

Clearly they need to be structured and systematic to be successful at establishing strong plans and managing a project to implementation. A project manager must have a structured approach, to understand what step goes before another.

A structured, systematic approach is normally linear; it may be multiple paths performed simultaneously, but each individual path is still linear. Unfortunately, the innovative skills may not come as naturally to many project managers.

The act of innovating is defined as “the introduction of new things or methods.” In IT, we know that there is always a better way; the same can be said for how we manage a project. There are aspects of a company’s culture, personalities of key stakeholders, constraints, and limitations that call for a project manager to innovate.

You should view the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) standards as important guidelines but it is not an exact set of rules on how to manage every detail of the project. You should always be challenging yourself to come up with a new, more efficient way of doing things. Innovative project managers are questioning, they set aside “thinking time” to look at the challenge from multiple angles and truly challenge how they have always done things.

I’ve seen so many project managers repeatedly use what went well during the last project. It can makes life appear simple because the outcome is predictable but over time, you might find yourself going with a solution because you’re familiar with it and not necessarily because it’s the best one for the job.

The challenge for project managers is twofold:
Whenever you get that uncertain feeling that occurs when facing a new challenge, and you’re tempted to take one of your “comfortable” tools out of the toolbox, stop and take some time to think and innovate. Instead of repeating what's familiar to you, come up with the best tool for the job.

When faced with a familiar challenge that you have the perfect tools to address, stop, take some think time, and look at the challenge from different angles. Now that you have used this tool successfully for so long, is there a way you can improve it, upgrade it, or replace it with the smarter, better model?

Establishing thinking time takes discipline. I don’t know any successful project manager who isn’t driving projects as hard as they can, dealing with crisis every day. Taking time to think, when time is at a premium has the best results; this thinking time is akin to the planning phase of a project.

When the stakeholder want immediate action, the older wiser project manager will understand that the more time spent in the thinking, planning phase leads to more successful project outcomes.

Psycho Managers: The Crimes of Bad Managers are often Buried

Like many employees, I had a boss who could be a lovely person but had terrible mood swings. She had no idea how to talk nicely to people and was not well liked. She was the wrong choice to manage people and couldn't manage a multi-skilled team to save her life.

One minute she was clearly working hard at being the kind, supportive maternal figure who wouldn't hesitate to pick up the lunch bill or to dole out helpful career advice. The next, she had flipped and became the tight-assed, briefcase-swinging monstorous Psycho killer of film legends.

Immature managers
Typically, when things are not going their way, they will cease to communicate; throw a tantrum; yelling, screaming and then even hiding from the situation.

Being unhappy with your work is one thing and this may incur direct but constructive criticism. All this is to be expected, but to express disgust at a document's content by ripping each page out of the binder and throwing them at the owner, one at a time, and at the same time throwing abuse and insults around like confetti. Well, that's simply childish and immature.

Faulty Hierarchy
Unfortunately, promotion does come too often to people who have a history of terrorising their subordinates. Revealing that the hierarchical selection criteria is flawed and is self-replicating.

It's no secret that many managers land their jobs without having the correct skills or receiving an ounce of leadership training. Their only visible talent being that they 'really' want a bigger office, job title and paycheck. Leaving the acquisition of professional management skills to fate, blind chance or learning how to lead 'on the fly'.

Cardinal Jekyll and Hyde
To be cursed with a boss who could go from "greatest gal /guy to hang out with for drinks" to an hysterical raving lunatic in mere half seconds, is very dusturbing.

Anyone that can carry around 2 separate personalities inside them and can appear to be a friendly person in the morning and a ranting monster in the afternoon, is without doubt, unfit for leadership and is clealry overwhelmed by the pressure of it.

Managing a manic manager
If resigning or getting an internal transfer isn't a viable option, especially in today's employment environment, you have to find and manage your boss's trigger points. If they tend to implode after 3 p.m., seek them out early in the day and check their blood sugar levels.

If they're a holy terror after departmental review meetings with their own manager, stay far, far away but try to find the root cause of the problem, between manager et manager.

If your boss hates long e-mails, and we all do, spread the word to keep the correspondence snappy and to the point.

Tantrums
If you still find yourself the target of an unexpected and undeserved tirade of abuse, don't fight against the storm. Wait patiently until it subsides and is shown to be ineffective. Speak quietly if shouted at and stay calm. Give your boss the opportunity to vent their steam. Don't fight noise with noise or a tantrum with a tantrum.

Micro-management
Micromanagers are rarely the perfectionists they claim to be. They are normally just control freaks, who cannot delegate effectively. They claim that they do not trust others but they are really very aware of their own shortcomings and insecurity. Especially, about how their own results and performance will be perceived upstairs.

Make progress lists and status checklists for them, documenting the tasks and projects you are doing, their status and their completion. Then sit your boss down and show them the last four assignments that you did that they were happy with.

Clarify, Clarify, Clarify
Tell them directly that they're interferring with the steady efficient flow of your work, tasks and company business. Tell them bluntly that you could work more efficiently if they backed off and loosened up the reigns, refraining from asking for excessive copies and repeated rounds of revisions.

Multiple revisions normally come about because your boss has not thought their requirements through, thoroughly enough. So lots of clarification should be demanded at the earliest stage to prevent circular re-iterations at the later stages. You can do this yourself or you can prompt project team members to do so, for their own peace of mind.

You cannot be subtle with a micro-manager. You have to be direct and clear. Hit them over the head with it. If you use standard business terms and phrasing, there is less risk of offending.

Competence
To deal with an obviously incompetent boss, you have to become a role model for them and show them what the correct behaviour is. Try not to look surprised and dumb-founded, when they say something stupid.

There is an old adage that states 'If your boss enjoys success, then you will too'. It is always better to work for a stable, well respected and efficient boss, even if it is you who has made them that way. The ability to control works in both directions. If you are aware of your boss's mistakes, then you are the best person to take the initiative to change this.

Innovation: The dilemma

Innovative ideas are not always popular. It takes hard times to open our minds to innovative ideas. When things are going well enough there is no need to be innovative because innovation means moving outside our comfort zone.

If you believe you are an innovator, then now is the best of times. Remember, you need to be tough because you will cause discomfort and you will not be popular. If it is popularity you seek, then this is the wrong path.

With all the talk about innovation we forget that not everybody can be an innovator. Your most successful innovations in the long run will make you very unpopular in the short run. You’ll upset the established order and cause discomfort to those who depend on that established order. Don’t look for approval, its not there. You must be an innovator only because you have to be and you need to be tough enough to handle the slings, arrows and disapproval of those you threaten.

Remember that Innovation is an art, not a science. Jean Cocteau an innovator in the arts, was an innovator in many fields; in poetry, writing, design, theatre, and film-making. He made himself unpopular in the short run and kept on doing what he did anyway because he was different and he had to. Eventually, he became famous and accepted as part of the 'establishment'. The curse and dilemma of all innovators.

Cocteau said, "Anything of importance cannot help but be unrecognisable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known." So don't confuse innovation with merely making incremental improvements to existing ways of doing things.

He also said: "Listen carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note carefully what it is about your work that the critics don't like, then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." Do you believe in what you are doing, enough to persevere in the face of veiled threats, withering criticism or deafening silence?

Beware of so called innovators who become very popular very quickly, their easy popularity is a signal that whatever it is they are doing, it is not innovative.

Doing Less With Less leads to less

Where do you stand in today's market? and who's standing there with you?

Now that your company has fashionably reduced its staffing levels and you have survived the axe, are you being asked to do more with less, in the wake of these layoffs?

Yes you say, but are you actually doing more? I'm sorry but the real answer is; probably not. According to a US survey conducted in December by Leadership IQ.

When the US research and training firm polled 4,172 workers at 318 companies that had recently laid off employees, 74% of the people who responded said their own productivity has declined. Other findings:

• 87% of surviving workers said they are less likely to recommend their organisations as good places to work. (Quelle surpris! This is a sign of a badly handled layoff)
  
• 64% of surviving workers said the productivity of their colleagues has also declined. (The bad layoff was indicative of poor management motivational skills in the company)
  
• 81% of surviving workers said the quality of service that customers receive has declined. (This should have alarm bells ringing! This way, monsters lie!)7
• 77% of surviving workers said they see more errors and mistakes being made. (Realistically, they may be looking closer, with a more critical and negative attitude or have access to more info through expanded roles)
• 61% of surviving workers said they believe their companies' future prospects are worse.
  

This summary is probably correct, if their customers are sensing negative vibes and are experiencing reduced service, in today's buyer's market. Staff and management should be made aware that they have a vital role to play in convincing customers that there is value to be had by maintaining their loyalty.

Loyal customers and repeat business should be cherished, protected and sustained through innovation and strong management.

If the company has implemented reduced staffing levels without refreshing the management team, its motivation and its attitudes, then the only changes they will need to manage are the shrinkages of its customer base, the obsolescense of its products and services, with the subsequent failure of the whole lame duck enterprise.

Do not mistake Movement for Action

Babies can't do an adult's job

Walking by the netbook display at PC World, Media Markt and others, you're likely to hear cooing and exclamations of how cute the little baby laptops are.

Beware, if you take one home, your new baby is not yet fully grown and it is barely on solids. It has not built up enough of the resources to do the work that a standard Momma and Poppa notebook or Laptop can do. Its got some growing to do.

Cheeky new Netbooks are just about the only thing these days that are generating any kind of excitement in the hardware market space. The visual appearance and form factor is appealing to many. The idea of having a good workhorse laptop that can carry your workload at half the size and weight is a dream, but I am sorry it has yet to come true.

With a 10-inch screen, these babies are much smaller than the standard-sized notebook, and yes, much lighter. They are also quite a bit cheaper too. Some are as inexpensive as €200, while others can get as expensive as the €1,000 range. Take note, there is a good reason why they are cheaper.

It's hard to walk by a netbook display at a consumer electronics store without hearing someone coo-ing at them and talk about how cute they are, as if they really were little baby notebooks.

Their magnetic appeal to consumers, means that netbooks have been doing their part to boost sales and make PC manufacturers happy. If you look at the earnings report of any PC maker who makes netbooks, you'll notice that netbook unit sales are just about the only thing growing at a healthy pace. This year other hardware sales look positively bleak, with Gartner now forecasting a decline of almost 12 percent in 2009, the worst in IT history.

Although netbook sales seem to be increasing, some in the industry say that netbooks are suffering a greater return rate than other PCs. If that is the case we can predict an increase in th enumber of netbook orphanages opening up. Netbook for sale. 1 disappointed owner!

• On the consumer side, it's said that once users get the machines home and play with them for a little while, they soon realize the smaller machines can't do all the things that their more Momma and Papa (standard-sized and standard-priced) notebooks can do. The very inexpensive netbooks generally come with Linux, an well respected operating system in the techie world but still a little unfamiliar to the Microsoft masses.
  
• On the enterprise side distributors say netbooks have yet to take hold.

So what's the real story? Can that little baby PC do the big jobs you need it to do? Is there a place anywhere for the netbook in 2009? Is it a serious business contender? Consider this;

Screen size. The size really negates th eus eof Windows style operating systems because you only have space for 1 window. Do your users want to run multiple applications and have more than 1 window open at one time? Do they use spreadsheets? Well, while the netbook's small form factor makes it convenient to tote around, but you will not be able to see everything you need to see. Certainly not at the same time and that can get very frustrating.

Storage. To save space, most netbooks are shipped with a small amount of solid state memory rather than a rotating hard drive. This makes sense in a world where memory prices are always falling and solid state, is faster and more reliable. However, many users have become accustomed to more than 100GB of memory and even in netbooks with hard drives, those users may be disappointed.

Processor performance. You would be foolish to buy a PC that isn't dual core, at least. That is, unless your looking at a netbook. Most standard notebooks come with a dual core processor, either from Intel or AMD, but most netbooks use Intel's Atom single core processor. Intel has said that Atom processors have about half the performance of Intel Celeron processors. Party on!

The other features you and your customers have gotten used to have also been downsized or bypassed. You can get the Microsoft Vista Premium OS on some of these notebooks, and you can buy an external DVD player and an additional external hard drive but by the time you have financed that, you could have configured a standard Momma and Poppa low-end laptop that comes with a higher-performance processor.

Some companies are coming out with some interesting new innovative netbooks, including ones with an ARM processor and a detachable keyboard, making it appear more like a tablet notebook.

In Summary. Unless you want what the netbook really is (a lightweight client that functions well in a cloud computing environment for tasks such as e-mail and Web browsing, but is not as capable of heavy lifting) you are probably better off with a standard Momma and Poppa notebook for a few euros more.

If you want something cute and cuddly around the office that can be easily picked up and taken anywhere, there are other more appropriate and interesting things.