Prompted by a NZ Herald article about the shortage of jobs for graduates we advertised a graduate role on Seek recently.  What a disappointment!!!!

• Only 30 or so responses
• 80% from outside NZ
• 85% didn’t bother with a cover letter, despite us requesting one
• With the remainder the cover letter was generic and/or clearly aimed at a job that wasn’t the one we offered
• It appeared that no-one actually visited our website to find out what it is that we actually do.

Where are NZ’s best and brightest?

This keynote was based on John’s book ‘Innovation Nation’.  He argues less that America is in crisis around innovation but more that it is becoming the boiled frog (‘boiled frog’ is the Charles Handy metaphor for situations that worsen gradually so that you don’t realise you’re in trouble it’s all over – the frog is boiled and hence dead).

While John was talking about America the points seemed to be applicable to New Zealand.  Innovation blossoms in diversity hence multi-disciplinary approaches to innovation are often what are needed for success.  This means that if you are an innovative country or company you will need different actors at different parts of the value chain e.g. sales, technology, design etc.

It is possible for countries to focus on just one part of the value chain and get extremely good at delivering that element. So, the good news for NZ is that scale is not necessarily an indicator of success but rather that knowing and focusing on the area of the value chain we want to be good at is important. 

In a global economy to even be a contender what is needed are talent, resources and infrastructure.  John points to the nations who are both buying and acquiring talent.  In one year, China graduated 600,000 engineers and scientists, compared to America’s 70,000.   In addition, China is also seducing top scientists to work there.

Countries are adopting diverse strategies for innovation.  The suggestion is that America’s future lies in being a systems integrator.  In pulling together the design, technology and business inputs from the global supermarket for innovation talent. 

So, for NZ the message is:

·        Have we and should we make the decision to be an innovation economy?

·        Are there particular parts of the innovation value chain that we should be concentrating on?

·        What are we doing about talent, resources and infrastructure?

So for the company I work for I think the message is:

·        That we do a lot of innovation (relative to our size) and yet we don’t really work our way through the value chain in anything other than a random serendipitous way depending upon individual interests, time and priorities.

·        That we need to think, for any innovation endeavour, about whether we have all the multi-disciplinary elements that we need.

·        Are there opportunities for us, on a very small scale, to use the global supermarket?

A couple of people have asked me recently where I get my stories from hence this post. This post gives some insights into how to find and create stories that can be used in business, training or presenting.

Why tell stories?  I think the most compelling reason is that they are fun.  Human beings are hardwired to enjoy stories.  Walk into a classroom of 5 year olds at story time and you’ll see what I mean.  Stories help people to learn while at the same time removing the pressure of learning.  When people know they’re being told a story they often just relax - and that’s when they’re most able to pick up the messages.

It often appears easier to tell other peoples’ stories.  They feel more legitimate and they expose us less.  But I’ve found that people respond best to authenticity and the most compelling stories are often the personal ones.

So, the key to story for me (and I’m just a beginner on this) was actually recognising that I had some.  I started small with one or two stories and have started to build them up.  The easiest place to start is with what Doug Stevenson calls vignettes in his book Never Be Boring Again.  These are short two or three minute pieces designed to illustrate a particular point.  Often, I’ll use several of them in one talk.  These can be practiced and can be applied to more than one situation.  I now have a shorthand word or phrase for these so I can just jot down “the GRiT story” or whatever and I know what the story is and what its point is.

I’m still getting the hang of longer pieces.  A great longer piece I’ve come across is Malcolm Gladwell’s speech on Precociousness where a narrative about running starts his talk.

I find longer pieces really good in eliciting emotions.  In the case of Gladwell’s talk the emotion elicited is curiosity which is good place for an audience to be if they’re about to listen to 45 minutes of someone talking.  I’ll often “bookend” these.  So, I’ve got a couple of stories that I use (one is mine and the other isn’t) where I open a paper with them (and use them to introduce the paper) and then close the paper with them (by using the story to illustrate the key point).  In storytelling parlance these are called “loops”.  The masters, like Billy Connelly, are so accomplished at this that they use what is called “nested loops”.  With nested loops the story opens then leads to another and then leads to another and then they are all closed in reverse order.  Watch a Billy Connelly DVD or hear him perform live to see an expert in action.

So, back to finding stories.  Each of us has a narrative - a number of unique and special things that have happened to us but that have universal meaning.  Some time of quiet reflection will help you to find these.  Or if you want a more structured approach, Jamie Smart’s technique is a good one.  This works best in pairs but you could do it on your own with pen and paper:  

1.  Ask yourself the question “How did you come to be here?” Here could be reading this blog, in this room, at this point in your career, in this town etc… 
2. Answer the question
3. Ask “How did you come to …” picking up on the key point in your first answer. 
4. Go 10 questions deep looking for 10 discrete situations
5. Find out about each situation
6. What stories can you construct about each?  What messages are there that could be applicable.  Think about the point of each of the 10 and how they could be used with an audience.
7. Pick out the two or three that you enjoy the most and work those up
8. Aim for the vignette first

Have fun!

MIT  Sloan Management Review has just published an article on how IBM harnessed the ideas of its 150,000 employees and stakeholders to get its latest technologies to market.

Using bulletin boards and intranet pages, IBM opened discussion of innovation up to its entire global team. 

The findings of the research are that good ideas didn’t bubble up but rather that there was a huge number of ideas identified that then needed sifting and evaluating.  The authors identify the following lessons:

On the positive side:

·         Many people have important strategic ideas

·         Online conversation and sophisticated technology can provide a way for those ideas to impact on problems and generate value for a company

The limitations:

·         Few contributors built constructively on others comments in this online environment.

·         Analysts and managers were essential for taking the ideas generated and making them useful.

IBM’s Jam had a defined goal and process to help manage the movement of a brainstorming task from a real-time, real location exercise to one that took place 24/7 in an electronic environment. 

Recently I’ve been on the wrong end of poor service from a couple of companies.  One is a professional services company, a legal firm, and the other has been providing some of our back-end accounts functions – primarily invoicing, payroll and debt collection.

So, this got me thinking…if I applied those things that I don’t like about the way these companies behave to my own organisation how do we measure up?

This was prompted also by Seth Godin’s entry Four Words in which he makes the point that if you fail to overpromise and under-deliver all of the marketing in the world isn’t going to save you.

Back to my legal firm…what went wrong?

·         Something that should have been reasonably straightforward became intensely complicated and way over the top for the scale of my business.  After four months, I brought my accountant into the picture who came up with a simple solution immediately that all parties agreed would work.

·         The four months!  In fact it has been even longer as we are now into May.  And we have only progressed at the speed we have due to constant prodding.

·         An under-powered junior assigned to my task.  Now, I can see the value of using juniors, especially if the saving is passed on to the customer.  But if it takes longer, and it uses more of my time, and the junior has to be poked and prodded then no thanks I’d rather pay the extra and get someone who knows what they’re doing.

And the accounting services firm:

·         Errors, errors, errors – again it cost us more in internal time checking, correcting and rechecking than it was taking us before we outsourced.

·         Constant reminders and things being missed.

What are the principles that should be distilled for us?  Here’s my top 5:

1.       Assign the right people to the job with the right level of competence. 

2.       Treat our customers’ business like our own – it has to matter to us and we have to get the detail right.

3.       Related to 2. Be proud of our customers.  If we can’t be proud of the work that our customers do and the things that they stand for then we shouldn’t be working with them.  Why not?  Because we won’t bring sufficient commitment and passion to the table.

4.       Our customers should never be chasing us up for deliverables.  That is not their job – it is our job to deliver on time when we say we will.

5.       Pay as much attention to ‘surprising and delighting’ our existing and past customers as we do to getting new customers.  Not just unexpectedly – to both us and them – but by asking ourselves for each assignment: “Is there anything extra here that I can give that would make a difference?”  We are not aiming for world domination, we’re not about grow, grow, grow.  We’re a team of specialists who pride ourselves in doing excellent work and making a contribution to New Zealand competing on the world stage.

Are we always going to get it right?  No…but certainly looking through the lens of these 5 principles will help us to get it right more often.

Here are my top tips for working as a distributed team- as published on Slacker Manager a couple of months ago.

We’re a small business that has only ever worked as a distributed team.

Key success factors for us have been:

1. Technology – we moved all of our information to SharePoint at the start of last year and do everything through the site. This includes all of our administration (time recording, expenses, invoicing etc), our business development, our projects, our intellectual property development and our knowledge management. We contract out our financial administration and so our service provider also works for us through our SharePoint site. Almost everyone in the team is a road warrior so we supplement this with a product called Colligo which allows us to take SharePoint offline, while retaining all of our views.
2. Getting together where possible – we don’t often work in the cities in which we live. This means that at any given time there is a possibility that two or more of us will be working in the same city (although on different assignments). On these occasions we always try to co-ordinate and have dinner.
3. Glue person – we have a person on the team who effectively acts as the team glue ensuring there is regular phone contact with everyone.
4. Annual face-to-face planning meetings – I have to say that before we did this I thought it would be a colossal waste of time (and money). All that bonding – get out of here!! I’ve been surprised by the tangible and intangible benefits and this is now a regular fixture for us.

I was browsing email reminder systems at the weekend but none of them seemed like a huge improvement on what I already do.  Here’s my system which owes a lot to Michael Linenberger:  Total Workday Control and David Allen’s Getting Things Done.   My system is a huge oversimplification of these but works pretty well for me.

Firstly, I only run one email folder in addition to the standard default folders.  So, I have a folder called ‘Inbox’ into which new stuff arrives and a folder called ‘Processed’ where I put things once I have read them – unless they can be instantly deleted.

Why don’t I bother with more folders?  Simply put I’ve tried this many times and either my folders end up out of control; or I stop using them; or I can’t remember which folder I put an email into.  I usually know who the email was from, roughly when I got or what it was about.  So, sorting through my processed mail means I can get to the item within about 30 seconds.  I find that occasionally having to spend a little longer looking (and only very occasionally) is a small price to pay compared to having cascades of folders that I feel guilty if I’m not using.

So, what about the stuff in email that I want to do something with?  Most people leave things in their email inboxes because they know that they have to do something with them but they’re either not sure what or they don’t want to tackle it just yet.

I drag the email to my task area and create a new task with the due date being the date that I want to be reminded about it.  This sounds a little counter-intuitive but works really well.  So if I know I need to reply but don’t have time to do it now, I’ll drag it to my tasks and make the due date Thursday.  I then move the email into the ‘Processed’ folder and I’m done.

On the due date, the item appears on my list of ‘to dos’.   Using this system a few things naturally happen:

·        I can see where I’m procrastinating – some things have lingered on my ‘to do’ list for a couple of months.  Typically these are the things that I actually don’t want to do.

·        Over time the ‘long stayers’ on the ‘to do’ list become either irrelevant or urgent and can then get processed accordingly.

·        I get reminders about things I’ve set weeks or months in advance that would previously have been left to chance. These are often follow-ups.

I’m reasonably disciplined about using the priority settings.  I only tag as a priority something that MUST be done on a particular day.  Of course, some tasks when left too long suddenly become priorities and it is a simple matter to reset their dates to show this.

All in all, this system is extremely effective for me in keeping on top of email and on track of the things that I have to do.  I occasionally (very occasionally) use categories but only for projects that have a finite period in which to run.

I am also becoming more disciplined at storing business related emails on our SharePoint site.  Again, the processes here are very simple.  A drag and drop to the correct library using Colligo and the email is automatically filed with the addition of some simple metadata if I choose.  The best use I have found is actually with sent mail.  Here multiple documents sent in one email to a customer can all be registered with their email wrapper saving time describing each individually.

We are all familiar with the concept of icons - visual cues that tell us what to do or what something means.

Occasionally I come across a word or a phrase that makes it into my vocabulary of verbal shortcuts.  This isn’t something that can be predicted in advance.  It just happens when the phrase fits and feels right.  Like a visual cue it conveys much more meaning than is apparent at first glance/listen.

Seth Godin’s book The Dip has provided us with a phrase that has been the most powerful verbal shortcut that we have used in our business in the past year.  This is not a book review - ‘The Dip’ has been out for a while and many have commented - nor is it a synopsis of the key ideas.  For a succinct summary take a look at Andy Wibbel’s mindmap of The Dip.

Rather this is about how a phrase, that captures the imagination and is simple but conveys much more, can help individuals and organisations accelerate their thinking.

We talk about ‘The Dip’ in relation to where we are on the chart.  Common questions for us are:

• Is this helping us to be best in the world 
• Is this making it harder for others to follow - Seth suggests finding a field with a steep dip and then making it through.  Things worth doing have a dip
• Is this something we should quit - yes, sometimes quitting can be the behaviour of champions.  The key is not to quit when its hard (and emotions and challenges are both running high) but rather to know when to quit before the fact and then to apply that criteria when the pressure comes on - this tells us whether to quit or whether this is part of the dip and we need to persevere.

So, in our business when we say The Dip we’re asking all three questions and accelerating the speed at which we can get to the answers.

Another phrase that we use a lot is Big Rocks. I’ve got no idea who initially coined this phrase but was stunned recently when a group of people I was working with hadn’t heard of it.  Big rocks refers to getting your priorities in place first and then dealing with the other incidentals (the pebbles and the sand) that come up during the course of a week or a month or whatever time period you are considering.  Zen Habits has a useful piece about Big Rocks.  Of course, in my situation the verbal shortcut wasn’t because no-one else had a frame of reference for it so I had to start explaining about priorities and rocks and sand and of course the moment was lost!  Wise to this, I next used the phrase ‘big rocks’ in a training and preceeded it with a volunteer from the audience filling a beaker with rocks, pebbles and sand.

Using ‘big rocks’ in our business discussion helps us shift the focus quickly and smoothly to priorities.

What verbal shortcuts do you use?  Where have they originated from?

In most organisations we come across the information environment is polluted.  It is noisy, smelly and slows down business.  There is information everywhere but users rely on their email in-boxes or google to serve them up the data that they make decisions on.  For all the talk of ‘knowledge workers’ and ‘knowledge economies’ the benefits have failed to arrive. 

Here’s five reasons for this failure:

1.  Weak performance measures that don’t require timely, accurate information - the absence of meaningful, data-based performance measures means that information has little currency in the direction and operation of the organisation.  Take a services organisation that subcontracts to a local Council.  We helped them set up an information environment that was tuned to the management needs of team leaders and direct supervisors.  This was designed to give them explicit daily feedback on quality audit results, tasks actually undertaken versus those scheduled, complaint reports and satisfaction reports.  Has this made a difference?  Absolutely!  Niggles that previously took months to solve, or just hung around like a bad odor were suddenly highlighted for everyone to see.  Decisions started to be made that adjusted course on a daily basis the results of which then got shown up in the next set of measures.

2. Lack of consistent ways of describing business activities - this makes it difficult to compare or aggregate operational activities for overall reporting.  The ability to make course corrections is lost and organisations can simply forget about knowledge creation and sharing.

 3.  Lack of consistent ways of linking documents and data sets - this makes it difficult to gain overall views from a customer perspective and leads to information accidents.  Typically examples, that we often think are often just ‘poor service’ occur when different people in an organisation deal with our problem and we get conflicting advice - and often ending up redescribing our issue or need.

4.  Documents and data don’t mix - we can’t see a consolidated picture of a service transaction or recurring problem as some of the information is held as data and other parts of the information are held as emails or documents.

5.  Toolsets for viewing information don’t meet the needs of users.  Take for example an operational team who have their policies and procedures recorded in a Standard Operating Procedures manual published on the intranet.  This is fine for experienced staff but for new staff it takes them a long time to get to grips with where in the manual to find the answers to their questions.  Imagine, instead, if this manual were sliced up into pieces of information that were searchable by key word or by FAQ.  Accuracy and speed go up immediately.

What’s the answer?  In one phrase it’s simply: “Information environments aligned with organisational and team goals”.  Obviously there’s a lot more below the surface of that phrase.  To find out what this ‘lot more’ is see the article at http://www.sarah-heal.com/BuildingHealthyIAs.pdf

In 2007 I started trialling outsourcing for our small company.  Inspired by the Tim Ferris book The 4 hour work week I started looking for opportunities to move some of our financial tasks out of the organisation.  The responses from off-shore organisations were less than inspiring and, in the end, I chose someone closer to home (in the same city in fact).  There’ve been some glitches but things are now relatively smooth and I have expanded the tasks that we outsource.

Ferris says that outsourcers need to be clear about the tasks that they are asking others to do and suggests instituting controls that check that tasks have been understood and are progessing as expecting. 

The other success factor that I would add is that of identifying tasks that can be moved and allocating the time to actually do this.  While I’ve moved some tasks I’m still drowning in administrivia.  It’s the same old delegation issue - if I have to show someone how to do it I might as well do it myself. 

So, my two part resolution for 2008 is (i) identify more opportunities for outsourcing (ii) make the time to take action on these.