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.
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 21st century’s Tom Peters.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
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.
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
July 19th,2013
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Comments Off on The Cultural Immune Response
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?
