The Business Sensei

To Siri, With Love…

I don’t know if “To Sir, With Love,” is one of the most spoofed titles of all time, but I have to admit I remember it mainly because of the Get Smart episode, “To Sire, With Love.”

The new “Hey Siri” feature is iOS8 is something I could easily get used to. It’s remarkably convenient, particularly if I’m not, or should not be, holding my phone.

Now, I realize that it’s easy to criticize Apple: Android has had that feature forever, with its “Ok, Google now,” voice activation. “Ok, Google” doesn’t even require that the phone be plugged in. However, I seem to recall that when Google introduced that feature, even their special low-power chip designed to listen for just that phrase wasn’t quite as low-powered as all that! In the interests of battery life, I can live with the limitations.

More to the point, though, this illustrates something very important about innovation: innovation is not necessarily about coming up with something totally new and different. Sometimes, often in fact, it’s about doing something common a little differently or a little better in some key way.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the MP3 player, but he made it beautiful and convenient. It was easy to get music onto the iPod. Steve Jobs didn’t invent the smart phone either; in fact, when the iPhone first appeared, Blackberries dominated the landscape. But the iPhone wasn’t just a phone: it was also an iPod, a video player, and a gaming device. Who said that business phones couldn’t play music? Research in Motion, and Steve Jobs didn’t listen to them.

In other words, Apple has a habit of letting other people show the way and then figuring out something that’s slightly better or more aesthetically pleasing. By limiting when “Hey Siri” works, Apple does two things: first, they solve the battery life problem: the phone has to be plugged in. Second, by focusing us on the situations where actually picking up the phone may be difficult or inconvenient, they remind us how handy this feature is.

Of course, if it doesn’t work, it’ll also remind us how disappointing it is, but somehow I suspect that’s not going to be the case.

The Four Innovation Musts

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As for what you have to do to encourage innovation, that’s actually pretty easy. We’ve discussed all of these elements repeatedly throughout this book:

• Continuous learning – As we discussed in chapter 5, continuous learning is key to motivation. It is also key to innovation. Innovation comes from putting together familiar things in new ways. The more you know, the more likely that is to happen. Steve Jobs knew nothing about building computers, but that didn’t stop him from inventing the iPhone.
• Mistakes – At the risk of beating a dead horse, mistakes are feedback. How many light bulbs have you made?
• Take breaks – Another topic we’ve discussed at length. Creativity doesn’t happen when you’re exhausted. The “Eureka!” moment comes when you take a break and see things differently.
• Patience – Innovation is an ongoing process. If you wait until you desperately need a breakthrough before you start, your odds of success will be better in Vegas. Creativity takes time. Innovation is most important when it seems the least necessary.

I hear from many businesses that they’d like to be more innovative. What’s stopping you?

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters.

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

The Four Innovation Traps

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Practically speaking, innovation is about optimism, risk taking, and effective decision making. It is not the province of one wild-eyed kid in a garage or the iconic lone inventor. No matter how much movies make innovation out to be the result of some crazy inventor having a sudden brilliant insight, innovation comes from the organization; it is about building the environment which fosters creativity and which gives people room to explore. In order to make that happen, we have to avoid four traps and make sure we institute four key elements.

The four innovation traps are:

• Perfection trap – making our products and services more perfect always feels like a worthwhile goal. Make no mistake, to a great extent it is worthwhile. However, each generation has less “gosh wow!” than the previous one. My iPhone 4 was a lot better than an iPhone 3G, but the iPhone 5 wasn’t enough better to convince me to upgrade from the 4. The 5s was. Pursuing perfection can blind us to alternatives, and it’s the alternatives that defeat our “perfect” products. The perfect mousetrap is wonderful until someone shows up with a cat.
• To much to lose trap – we become focused on not hurting our existing products. Just remember, if you don’t turn your cash cow into hamburger, someone else will.
• Identity trap – the company defines itself in terms of its products: “we’re a database company” or “we’re a hardware company.” Specialization is great until your niche becomes irrelevant. IBM reinvented itself to have a life outside of mainframes and is doing quite well.
• The creeping box trap – it’s great to think outside the box. The problem is, once you move outside the box, it eventually grows to surround you again. Yahoo thought it was outside the box until Google came along. As already mentioned, Apple is in the box that Jobs built. Organizations get so focused on their own cleverness that they forget that other people are looking to think outside their box.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

BlackBerry Jam

They sit there in the room, their eyes fixed on the head of the table. There stands a man, quite probably the team’s manager. He is speaking, presenting some gem of long-since-forgotten lore. Those watching him seem rapt, focused, intent upon his brilliance. But look again. Notice the strain around their eyes, the sweat upon their brows. See the twitching of the hands, as though each man and woman in that room could keep their hands upon the table only with great effort. Watch longer; see the hands slipping off the table, sliding towards pockets and purses. See realization cross the faces, observe the hands forced jerkily back towards the table, as if their owners were fighting against some horrid, hypnotic compulsion. Over and over again, the hand is pushed back.

But attention is finite, will power limited. Eventually, a hand reaches a pocket. It slips out seconds later, an object tightly clutched in its grip. A flicker of bliss passes across a man’s face as he glances furtively down at the object in his hand: a BlackBerry.

So it was in 2005, in the days when the Blackberries ruled the world. Coming out of the distant north, from a place, or so it is said, far out on the rim, Blackberries quickly came to dominate the corporate world. Everyone had to have one. At the very thought that the Blackbery network might go down, panic would spread across the land. A few months later, in 2006, Webster’s Dictionary proudly proclaimed the new word of the year : “Crackberry.” BlackBerry seemed unstoppable, its spread inexorable. And then, as rapidly as it had grown, BlackBerry shrank, faded, vaninshed away. Of that invincible empire, but a single outpost remains, fighting to not vanish away and be forgotten. What force, what power broke the might of BlackBerry?

Success.

That is correct: what destroyed BlackBerry was its own success. Confident in their power, they forgot that when you build the perfect mousetrap someone will come along with a cat. Unlike a mousetrap, the cat does not need to be reset, it doesn’t need the mouse to come to it, it is fun to play with, and it keeps your feet warm at night. Also, the purr is soothing. While BlackBerry’s co-CEOs were busily dismissing the iPhone as, “a toy,” Apple and Google were busily striking deep into the heart of their empire. iPhones and Android phones are not just business devices. They are entertainment devices and are fun to use. BlackBerry, or to be more accurate, Research In Motion, stood still while those around them kept moving.

One of the challenges in innovation is that what a company becomes good at, it naturally wants to keep doing. Innovation becomes an exercise in perfecting the existing product and building up impenetrable barriers to competitors. The catch, however, is that the wall that keeps others out also keeps you in. Research In Motion kept making better and better “business” phones. They let their product define them until they could no longer change as the world around them moved on. In 2007, the first iPhone arose to challenge the BlackBerry. Much to RIM’s surprise, this upstart “toy” proved surprisingly popular. RIM’s attempt to respond with a touchscreen phone of its own was a dismal failure, and their attempts at an Appstore and at adding an MP3 player to their phones were equally unsuccessful. From owning some 70% of the market in 2006, the BlackBerry is now less than 2%. That was the price of their success.

Real innovation is a messy business. It requires trying a great many different things and being wrong most of the time. Indeed, successful innovators fail far more often than they succeed. When a company does succeed, though, it naturally wants to protect and extend that success: they start thinking about how much more successful they would be if only all those messy, and costly, mistakes could be eliminated. They start looking for reasons why their product is invincible, instead of experimenting with things that might kill it. Your cash cow is sacred only to you; to everyone else, it’s just hamburger waiting to happen. Guided by their successes, Research In Motion focused ever more tightly in making better and better Blackberries. That single-minded obsession caused them to develop corporate tunnel vision: all they could see in the future was their own inevitable triumph. In that, they joined with other great companies such as Polaroid and Kodak, who missed the digital photography boat, IBM which was dethroned by the PCs it invented, Digital Equipment, whose CEO declared the PC, “a toy,” Barnes & Noble, which was successfully Amazoned, and a host of others.

So how does a company remain innovative?

Recognize that the more tightly you focus, the less you see. Sometimes it pays to take your eyes off the ball and look at the big picture. What else is going on? Pay particular attention to those competitors you see as jokes. What are they offering your current customers and, even more to the point, what are they offering your potential customers? Apple and Google didn’t take on BlackBerry in its corporate strongholds; rather, they vacuumed up all the rest of the oxygen and the corporate strongholds followed.

Remember that mistakes are part of the game. You can learn from them or hide from them: it’s your choice whether you are receiving feedback or experiencing failure.

Put your focus on process and strategy, not just on results. When you think strategically, you can start to anticipate the moves others might make. Unlike chess, the rules don’t have to stay the same. If you’re making the rules, someone else will break them. Why wait for them to do it and seize the initiative? And if someone else is defining the rules, you have nothing to lose by breaking as many of them as you can. Who says a business phone can’t play music, videos, and games? Research In Motion, that’s who.

Those meetings are still going on. Hands are still slipping into pockets. Men and women are still furtively glancing down at the objects in their hands. Today, those objects are Droids and iPhones. Tomorrow?

Steve’s new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, is now available. The initial run sold out in two days at Amazon.com; order your copy now.

Smoke and Mirrors

It’s getting toward fall. Out here in Stow, that means one thing: Apples. Every weekend from now until late October, the world descends on the local apple orchards. At some apple places, the lines can stretch a mile down the road.

That, of course, got me thinking about another kind of Apple. I didn’t really pay attention when they announced that the 5C would be available for pre-order starting today, but the 5S would not be. Both phones will be released on 20 September.

In the past, Apple always made the new phone available for pre-order and guaranteed (assuming you ordered quickly enough) that it would arrive at your door on Release Day. Now, if you want a 5S on Release Day, you have to get on line.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen long lines for Apple products. I’m sure it’ll make a nice visual and generate some serious media coverage.

But it makes me wonder why they need to create such an illusion of popularity. Smoke and mirrors anyone?

Organizational Psychology for Managers is now available at Amazon.com. Order your copy today!

International Apple Day +2

Here we are, two days after that moment when Cupertino becomes the center of the universe: International Apple Day. The day when Apple announces its new devices. The day when everyone yawned.

Last year, when Apple announced the iPhone 5, I commented that:

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful piece of technology. I’ll probably upgrade to one eventually (unless I decide to stick it out and see what the iPhone 6 looks like ). But it’s a lot closer to the iPhone 4s than the iPhone 3g was to the original iPhone. Apple may be growing the box, but it sure isn’t outside it, and they have lots of company in there.

So here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors are looking to find a way out of the box that Steve Jobs created. Is Apple?

Well, as it happened, I didn’t upgrade. I probably will get a 5S though. It’s not the best phone out there, but it’s good enough to make it not worth the effort to switch to another platform. I suppose I might feel differently if I were still doing engineering instead of management consulting. Hacking the phone just isn’t that interesting to me any more.

More to the point, though, is that Apple seems to be stuck in its box, or perhaps Apple Crate would be a better term. Either way, the world is moving past them. Yes, the iPhone 5S is a beautiful piece of technology. Apple put something together that very neatly builds on the previous generations of phones, with nothing out of place. It’s beautiful, it’s powerful, you know exactly what you’ll get. It’s safe.

Two years ago, when the iPhone 4S was announced instead of the i5, I commented that:

Even a bigger question than the i5 was whether or not Tim Cook could fill Steve Jobs’ turtleneck. I, for one, still don’t know.

As a good friend of  mine observed, Apple is turning inward, much as it did the last time Steve Jobs left the company. This time, though, the only way he’s coming back is if they have the services of a really good medium or they manage to build an iSteve gadget, sort of the equivalent of IBM’s Watson but with the personality of Steve Jobs.

Somehow, I suspect that neither of those options are terribly likely to occur. That means it’s up to Tim Cook. He’s got the turtleneck now. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late 1990s, things looked pretty bleak for the company. Jobs took some real risks, and enjoyed some phenomenal successes as a result. So, Mr. Cook, perhaps it’s time to stop playing it safe. Toss the turtleneck, literally and metaphorically, and take a chance. Maybe next time you’ll surprise us.

The Cultural Immune Response

This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

“That person might destroy our culture.”

I hear that line often in organizations, usually to explain why a potential new hire was rejected. The logic of it is somewhat dubious since cultures are extremely robust and do not accept change easily. Indeed, far from being damaged by a new person joining, the culture is more likely to change that person or drive them out.

When someone joins an organization, they need to come up to speed on appropriate behavior fairly quickly. A good orientation program can help with this, as we’ll discuss in chapter 8. The good news is that people tend to be tolerant of newcomers, provided they respond to feedback. In fact, what typically happens is that other employees will informally inform newcomers when their behavior is inappropriate. Provided the person appears to be attempting to respond to the feedback, their occasional lapses will be tolerated. However, should someone not respond to feedback, the intensity of the feedback escalates into a more formal process which may involve disciplinary action. If all that fails, ostracism often results. At that point, the person may then be fired or may quit because they feel they “just don’t fit in.” The culture has rejected them.

When a senior person doesn’t fit, however, the consequences can be more severe. Recall that leaders are viewed as exemplars of the culture; thus, when a leader fails to embody the values of the organization, this creates a great deal of confusion and cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant feeling we get when our actions and values do not match: for example, when the person who does not believe in violence loses his temper and punches someone, he may then feel a great deal of confusion and guilt along the lines of, “How could I have done that?” This will often happen even if the violence was objectively justified, for instance out of self-defense. Similarly, when employees are asked to follow a manager who violates cultural norms, they will often feel guilty or uncomfortable. They might seek to avoid that manager, passively resist instructions, perceive their job as inherently less interesting, and hence less attractive, become less loyal to the company, or even become depressed.

If the person who doesn’t fit the culture is the CEO, the problems are considerably worse. In this case, the reaction will spread throughout the company. Mistakes increase, motivation and loyalty decreases, and many top employees may leave. It also becomes harder to attract new people who quickly find the atmosphere oppressive: an organization filled with unhappy people is painfully obvious and not a fun place to be. Apple under John Scully and Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer are classic examples of this immune response in action. Apple, of course, eventually rejected Scully and brought Steve Jobs back in. DEC went out of business and was eventually bought by Compaq as employees rebelled against Palmer’s efforts to dramatically change the culture.

 

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Lost in Map Land

The map, as many people know, is not the territory. However, as discussed in a recent NY Times editorial, some iPhone 5 users are finding that the map app doesn’t even do a job representing the territory. I haven’t had that particular problem yet; I’ve been too busy with a different irritating feature of iOS6: podcast management.

In iOS5, I could download my podcasts through the Music app and assemble them into playlists on my iPhone. In iOS6, Apple removed that functionality from the Music app — oh, you can still make song playlists, just not podcasts — and moved podcast management to Apple’s podcast app. Not only is this app slow and buggy, it doesn’t allow users to assemble playlists.

This leads me to wonder if Apple is succumbing to the Creeping Box trap. The Creeping Box trap is something I wrote about in my book, The 36-Hour on Organizational Development, and spoke about in several talks I’ve given on organizational culture and innovation. Fundamentally, it’s what happens when the box you’ve been thinking outside of finally catches up with you. In Apple’s case, the original iPhone created a whole new standard for smart phones. The iPad created a whole new space for tablet computing. Apple blazed the trail, and plenty of other companies followed them or are on the way. They are all in a new box that Steve Jobs built.

Here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors have much less to lose than Apple. They are trying to knock Apple off its perch. Assuming the have the sense to not bet the farm, the worst that can happen to them is that the status quo remains unchanged: “The <new, revised, improved> <Google, Amazon, Samsung, Nosuchco> <Nexus, Kindle Fire, Galaxy, Clay Slab> is really nice but doesn’t live up to the <iPhone, iPad>. Still consumers will like… and so they’ll sell enough of their tablets to make it worthwhile to try again. And, if they beat the iPhone or iPad, the rewards are immense. Indeed, I know many people would argue, with a great deal of justification, that there are plenty of phones out there as good or better than the iPhone 5.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful piece of technology. I’ll probably upgrade to one eventually (unless I decide to stick it out and see what the iPhone 6 looks like 🙂 ). But it’s a lot closer to the iPhone 4s than the iPhone 3g was to the original iPhone. Apple may be growing the box, but it sure isn’t outside it, and they have lots of company in there.

So here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors are looking to find a way out of the box that Steve Jobs created. Is Apple?