Yesterday, a guy in his early 30s was relating a story to my hair stylist as his 5-year-old sat in the chair for his summer buzz cut. 

“It saved my life,” he said passionately.  “I really do think it saved my life.”

He was waving his IPhone 4S around and talking about Siri.  Since I hadn’t gotten a full demonstration of Siri capabilities, I wondered how this nameless, faceless, person-less female voice had saved his life.

“How?,” I asked.

He described how he had suddenly felt the whole side of his body go numb, and then had slumped to the floor.  He couldn’t see and couldn’t move.

“But I could feel the phone in my pocket.  I pushed the button and asked Siri to call my girlfriend because no one was home to help me.  I was really scared because my brother had had a stroke at 15, and still isn’t better 4 years later.”

The man’s girlfriend arrived quickly, rushed him to the hospital where they performed a battery of tests without finding anything but low blood sugar, exhaustion and a lack of food.  He felt fortunate to learn he hadn’t suffered a stroke, and acknowledged that he’s wedded to Siri for life.

Later yesterday, I started thinking about how I once knew how to operate a slide rule, the first math calculator invented in the 17^th Century.  Before I had totally mastered it, my Dad, a gadget nut, bought one of the first-ever Texas Instrument pocket calculators.  My Dad was a visionary because it wasn’t long until pocket calculators were mainstreamed into classrooms.

Pocket calculators scared parents who began to ruminate on the downfall of student math skills. “If they use these calculators, they won’t know how to add simple numbers or even how to make change for a dollar,” many worried.

Today, I can’t remember step one for operating a slide rule.  But I’m fairly certain it doesn’t matter.
I don’t know how to load a musket either.

This morning, I heard a talk by Angela Lee Duckworth. She began by reviewing her many accomplishments before age 35.  A successful career with McKinsey.  Study at Oxford. COO of a non-profit firm.  An impressive track record of leadership in a number of industries.  But when she decided to get her doctorate, she wanted to look into what it really takes to unlock the power of talent.  Others had studied the many characteristics of talent but not specifically how to unleash it.

Ms. Duckworth interviewed many people at the tops of their fields.  She studied people we think of as geniuses like Darwin and Mozart.  She discovered the notion of what she has labeled as “grit.”  She concluded that those with most notable accomplishments – who had changed the world in some way – didn’t have extraordinary intelligence as we’ve come to suspect.  They didn’t have access to extraordinary education. They didn’t have some incredible disposition toward self-discipline.

Instead, they had an unbelievable ability to stay on task. As she puts it, they were not “flakes” who flitted from one professional pursuit to another, as she reminds herself of what she had done until age 35.  They focused on one thing with inspired passion, dogged determination, and perseverance in the face of setbacks.

Ms. Duckworth has now been studying and testing for Grit for a number of years, and her body of work helps determine things such as which candidates at West Point are likely to drop out when they go through a really tough orientation program called Beast Barracks.

Ms. Duckworth will share her work to illustrate how Grit stacks up against, and is a better predictor of talent than, IQ, self-discipline and other traits that we expect to predict greatness, at the CorpU Leadership Congress May 15 through 17 at the University of Pennsylvania.

For me, her work implies an enormous shift in the way we select and develop future leaders, fit people to their passions at work, and evolve K-12 and higher education.  If you consider the potential of focusing minds on what they love and focusing from an early age on today’s wicked problems, we might rethink most of what we currently do in terms of learning, talent development, selecting leaders, and how we organize around the most important topics.  It’s possible that our practices and even the topics we make important are today’s slide rules.

Taking that a step further: if tools like Siri can get us farther, faster than knowing how to conjugate verbs, and can allow each of us to focus with Grit on the ideas most important to future success, what could be possible. It’s really worth thinking about.

Don’t miss the presentation by Angela Lee Duckworth.  It will change your mind.

Go here to register now for: CorpU Global Leadership Congress

Finding great ideas and emerging talent deep within the layers of a huge, global organization can seem like searching for a needle in an ever-expanding haystack.

Look at the difficult problems associated with finding great talent.  Talent processes often rely on observations and reportage from increasingly busy managers who must first recognize, and second, shine the light on up-and-coming professionals and future leaders.  It takes years to develop a capable senior leader.  To accommodate business growth and attrition, those in charge of Leadership Development say they are urgently seeking new ways to find high performers earlier in their careers.  They need alternative sources to find people in case managers miss opportunities to bring people forward.

If finding talent is hard, finding new ideas is harder.  It’s nearly impossible to know where great ideas may be percolating in organization, or stranded in people’s minds with no one to pull them out. Even if you get them out, they often have no place to go and no formal practices to give them hope of long-term survival.

Mitra Best at PwC created a solution to both challenges in one new, bold initiative.

Mitra’s brainchild is a contest, not too unlike the famous singing competition that’s garnered the most viewers in television history for several years running.  Mitra realized – and most companies now acknowledge – that the enduring success of an organization depends on building avenues to connect fresh approaches, new models, and fascinating ideas that build the foundation of future growth.

Mitra also realized that everyone loves to watch a fierce contest among a talented crop of tough competitors.  There’s something so compelling about watching and rooting for people pitted in a fight that tests skill, personality, knowledge and poise for a chance to change the course of their lives.

Mitra combined these thoughts to create a competition that would not only generate new ideas to expand the PwC business model, but also bring their owners, fresh, eager teams of PwC talent, to everyone’s attention.  The competition required teams to choreograph elaborate presentations and explanations to describe the business potential for each of their ideas.

The winning team would not only capture a $100,000 prize but also be invited to carry their ideas to the next steps of design, creation and implementation.  See more highlights on Mitra’s story here in Money’s Online Magazine.

Mitra will describe how she implemented PwC’s Power Pitch Program, and what she did to establish the Office of Innovation at PwC, in a presentation on Wednesday, May 16 at the CorpU Global Leadership Congress at the University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA.

You will learn about the quality of the 800 ideas submitted to the Power Pitch Program, the processes used to sift through ideas over a 9-month period to arrive at the final five teams of presenters, and how winning ideas are now being carried forward by senior leader “sponsors.”

Learn more about the event here at: CORPU GLOBAL LEADERSHIP CONGRESS

If your job depends on finding and developing talent, or teaching leaders to drive innovation, you’ll find many great ideas from PwC – a company known for driving profitable growth through innovation.

Sounds like two characters in a Harry Potter novel, right?  But Seekers and Solvers are actually two critical roles in open innovation tournaments.   Challenges are presented by organizations, or well, anyone who has a tough problem.  On one open innovation site problems include things like:

• Products that Enable The Elderly to Fulfill Their Potential (awards vary)
• Non-permanent Room Heating Solutions – ($20,000)
• Measuring Weight of Live Animals – ($50,000)

The third problem on the list above – measuring the weight of live animals – first sounds like a problem that could be solved by anyone who is at least as smart as a fifth grader.  But as you dig deeper, you learn that the solution calls for a “portable device capable of a no-contact (‘from a distance’) weight measurement for live pigs in a farm setting.”  You can’t touch the pigs but you have to measure their weight.

Note the cash rewards listed to the right of each challenge.  The rewards for solutions are often substantial because the benefits are tens and hundreds of times more valuable in many cases.  Take Procter & Gamble, for example.

P&G raised the attention of the value of open innovation when they launched their Connect & Develop initiative to tap the knowledge of thousands of scientists around the world, rather than try to create every solution internally with the sizeable but limited team in their Research & Development function.  With a goal to deliver a 7% increase in revenue annually, P&G knew success depended on widening the field of “solvers” they could turn to for pieces of the solution to what became the Swiffer duster with its “dust lock adhesive” and Pringles Potato Chips imprinted with jokes written in edible ink.  P&G turned their challenges over to the world, and the world returned answers that contributed to billion dollar product lines.

Innovation tournaments, when done well, identify new paths companies might go down to launch new products and services, or take sizeable bites out of wicked problems, or identify thinking that helps them reshape the problem they thought they had.

 On May 15, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Christian Terwiesch, Professor of Operations and Information Management and author of Innovation Tournaments, will teach Chief Learning Officers and VPs of Talent Management how to tap into the power of Innovation Tournaments by having them participate in one.  Prof. Terwiesch’s programs and tools, which are in high demand all over the world, prepare companies to lead effective innovation tournaments to tap into an unending source of potential for growth and business survival. Senior learning and talent leaders will take home Prof. Terwiesch’s book and success kits they can use to renew and improve the services they deliver internally, and to teach leaders how to execute innovation initiatives.

Learn more about the event at: http://www.corpu.com/leadershipcongress/

And join us to find out if you are more inclined to be a SEEKER or a SOLVER.

CorpU featured a fantastic presentation by Ling Sian Tan who leads the Capgemini Design Centre of Excellence, on how Capgemini is using social learning as a new platform for leadership development. A metaphor Ling used to describe organizations’ current adoption rate for developing social learning programs was a swimming pool, where companies are either:

• still sitting at the bar discussing the possibilities of social learning, (25%)
• about to dive in, (6%)
• wading in the shallow end of the pool, (47%)
• comfortable swimming well in the deep end of the pool, (24%) or
• already up in the lifeguard stand, the masters and purveyors of best practice (0%).

(Percentages next to bullet reflect statuses of audience participants)

Prior to Ling’s presentation, we shared:

CORPU ACADEMY’S 10 IDEAS FOR DESIGNING FUTURE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS using the new paradigm of social learning.  As leaders are facing unprecedented times of change and complexity, we’re beginning to see the opportunities for new technology to meet the demands of our time.

Number 1 – Build Organization Capability.

In your designs, consider how to build organization capability.  We want to build differentiated strength in areas like innovation, solution selling, logistics management, retailing and distribution for example. We have to understand how to design experiences that consider not just personal skills, but that contemplate cross-functional relationships and external network dependencies, systems and processes and culture. Using our past design ideas, research suggests we’ll get a small percentage of the leaders applying a few new skills.  With that approach, we can neither achieve critical mass or escape velocity to make a difference. Our designs
must contemplate the broader needs to build core organization capabilities
that truly are differentiating.

Number 2 – Reach More Leaders.

Technology allows us to reach more leaders, to broaden our discussions on strategy and execution to much deeper levels in the organization.  Technologies not only expand reach but reduce costs.  If it’s too costly to bring 5,000 managers together to hear expert lectures, bring the expert to managers through video or virtual classrooms.  Strengthen knowledge at lower levels to build trust, and strengthen capacity for distributed decision making.  As marketplace complexity increases, we need to support decision-making at the lower, at the local level where contexts are unique.  This will be essential to successful growth, and ultimately to the success of
innovation strategies.

Number 3 – Ensure follow-through.

Again, research suggests that a very small percentage of corporate training is ever effectively applied on the job.  Many barriers prevent true behavior change, thereby delivering minimal business impact.  Learning programs need to integrate follow-through.  We have to stick with people until we see they are achieving value. There are many factors to consider in designing the informal learning follow-on to formal learning.

Number 4 – Add Accelerators.

These are the activities that can accelerate learning and the creation of new knowledge.  Our programs need to encourage debate, and must help teams synthesize and expand new ideas to grow their collective knowledge.  We have to create immersive environments, and try to consider how seemingly unrelated subject areas might enable mashups to spawn originality.

Number 5 – Encourage and Support Experimentation. 

In a world of rapid change, many answers aren’t available to distribute to people through learning programs.  Even experts may suggest several or many possible ways forward. This is a time when leaders have to forge new paths.  The safest way is through safe experiments.  Our designs for leadership development must create environments that support experimentation. We have to help leaders identify experiments worth trying, teach them how to design and conduct safe experiments, and analyze and feedback stories of successes and failures, and help the group codify results so they can move together – a bit smarter.

Number 6 – Help To Tear Down Old Mental Models.

In many aspects of business, the old reliable models and ideas that have worked in the past are like anchors around the feet of leaders who are already treading water.  And sometimes leaders can’t see their old models are actually extra weight that’s pulling them down faster than they realize.  How can we help leaders break out of old models?  Can we discover and hold up examples – sometimes far beyond those we know and are comfortable with, to shed a drop, then a ray, then a flood of light onto new possibilities.

Number 7 – Design Around Leaders’ Immediate Challenges.

Too often development is focused on things we think leaders might need to know.  Perhaps they even misdiagnose what skills and knowledge they need for success.  If focus learning on the challenges they’re facing right now, it highlights their immediate knowledge gaps.  Once we design around their immediate challenges, we begin to make the first steps toward embedding learning into work – at some point, in some areas for some leaders, the two will be indistinguishable.

Number 8 – Invite Leader Teachers. 

Designers should definitely consider how to invite and integrate leader teachers (senior executives, functional leaders and others) to share visions and their teachable points of view on the business, the industry, the global marketplace.  Leader teachers should push the debate and add the pressure that’s required to spur new thinking.  We want to invite their wisdom into leadership discussions.

Number 9 – Provide A New Lens Through Which To See Problems. 

How can we help leaders reframe their problems and challenges? Sometimes they get stuck seeing the same seemingly impossible barriers in front of them.  Can we help them envision the future and work backwards?  Can follow THEORY U principles to help them work from the future?  When they continue to look at problems through a single or the same lens, they often can’t move forward.  Our designs can push them to reframe their problems to overcome their inertia and begin moving again – they don’t even have to move forward – they just have to move.

And finally, Number 10 – Help Them Lock Arms To Move Together Into an Unknowable Future. 

Our designs can create ways for the leadership team to lock arms as they move forward, sharing what works and what doesn’t as they go.  A core principle of social learning is to extend processes and tools for sharing an ongoing dialogue and continuous learning long after the formal learning has ended.

CorpU has designed a new CorpU Academy, new design methodologies and new social learning platform based on insights, discussions and research with its membership community who has been participating for the last 3 years in CorpU’s Leadership Development and Social Learning Institutes.  We’d love to get your feedback as to whether we’re on the right path, or if you’ve found something that’s working well, or just to chat about what we don’t know about what we don’t know.  Please comment below and we’ll begin a dialogue.

Your company is depending on you to build a solid leadership pipeline; to have people ready to step into future leadership positions as the company grows and as current leaders move on.

A critical step – perhaps the most critical in the company’s pursuit of long-term sustainability – is identifying and developing the group called “emerging leaders.”

Emerging leaders:

• Have a solid track record of exceptional performance
• Show potential to move 2 or 3 positions up on the leadership career ladder within 5 to 10 years
• Are adept at motivating and inspiring teams
• Demonstrate adaptability as the company responds to marketplace changes
• Are globally aware and sensitive to cultural differences

The job to get this group ready is harder now due to the unique conditions in the world economy.  The business environment that emerging leaders will face in 2, 3 or 5 years will present problems that are different and more complex than challenges leaders face today.  Future leaders must be ready with the right mix of experiences, skills and knowledge to ensure they will succeed in future leadership roles.

(Go here to complete the survey and become eligible to receive a report on study findings.)  http://members.corpu.com/se.ashx?s=25113745509BAD9A

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Apple recently leapfrogged Microsoft on the list of the “world’s largest companies” and now stands at the number two spot, a mere $38B behind oil and gas giant ExxonMobil. The New York Times called it “one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history” for a company “that had been given up for dead only a decade earlier.”[1]

Apple’s ascension then prompted Fast Company to share the 10 points it believes are the company’s philosophers’ stone, its magical alchemy that turns aluminum and brushed steel gadgets into gold.[2]

Figure 1: World’s top 20 largest companies ranked by market capitalizations.

The writer, who assembled his theories through interviews with devotees, former employees and partners, describes the ways Apple swims against the tide of business. Contrary to common wisdom in many companies, Apple guards (not benchmarks) its practices with the fervor of those protecting national intelligence; shuns (not shares) the tech industry’s leaning toward open and free software; and ignores (not listens to) the pleas of loyalists about how to improve its stable of products and services. It appears on the surface that Apple disdains some cardinal rules of competition, including the one that says customers are king. On that point, writer Farhad Manjoo suggests that CEO Steve Jobs believes his team can envision a better future than can be described by even the most fervent focus group of early adopters.

But at one point the writer misses a really important point. He shares a conversation with a Mac engineer who describes Jobs as the company’s “filter,” the one whose primary role is to say “no” to ideas for new products and proposed features. He reports that Apple engineers share a common refrain about the speed at which Jobs hits the “delete key” when people pitch anything new. Read more »

Within the last two weeks, I’ve had 3 interesting experiences related to immersive learning simulations. While Second Life was all the rage about 2 years ago, it’s rare to hear people talking about it much these days. However, three people have convinced me that simulations and immersive learning experiences continue to gain traction as increasingly more valuable and more effective methods for driving performance improvement.

First, I met Jessica Trybus, Founder & CEO of Etcetera Edutainment. Jessica studied under Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University professor who died from cancer and famously recorded his Last Lecture. I had not known that Randy’s focus as a computer science professor was on human-computer interaction.

Safety Training in 3D

One feature of Randy’s work at CMU was synthetic interview technology that allows people to interact with video. One example I’m familiar with is a 3D video replica of Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War museum in Harrisburg, PA. Visitors can really feel as though they’re talking with Honest Abe himself as the technology is programmed to answer more than 200 questions.

When Jessica met Randy after having worked at Disney’s Pixar, she was amazed by CMU’s new technologies and enrolled in a Master’s Degree program there. Upon graduation, she founded Etcetera Edutainment to build immersive learning programs. She demonstrated her safety training programs for me to show how learners become aware of the dangers, including death, from missing a step in a procedure or forgetting to check equipment carefully.

Read more »

Speed, as we learned through the story of the Cheetah, is not the secret sauce for sustainable business growth. So what is?

New insights are coming through our evolving knowledge of economics. Eric Beinhocker, a senior advisor to McKinsey and Company, Inc. analyzed hundreds of years of history on economics in his book “Origin of Wealth.” His research shows that economists initially borrowed ideas from the world of physics to explain the economy as an equilibrium system – a system at rest. Economists argued that external shocks – like a major drought or a new technology like the steam engine – would significantly shake up the economy for a period of time; until supply would once again meet demand at the right price point, and put everything back to a new state of equilibrium.

After borrowing the physicists’ ideas, Beinhocker says economists stopped paying attention to the other sciences, proposing and defending their own theories to themselves in isolation. Meanwhile, physicists, chemists, and biologists all moved on to discover complex adaptive systems as a new way to explain their worlds. These systems offer us new understanding for how ant colonies work together to build hills and ward off attackers, neurons fire in the brain to create consciousness, and how cities grow from the ground up through the actions of many shopkeepers and supplier networks. A beautiful example of a complex adaptive system is the World Wide Web, which has emerged from the ground up with no central authority guiding its construction, and yet has become a well-organized and highly useful system. Read more »

There are many companies headed to the fate of the Cheetah because they are unable to recognize their own genetic bottlenecks. Outsiders often see the evidence of shrinking gene pools (inability to encourage diversity of thought or to embrace new ideas and ways of doing business) long before Cheetah companies see it themselves. As Noel Tichy writes in The Cycle of Leadership, “The digital, global economy punishes slow, inward-looking dumb-acting organizations.”

Leaders must be prepared to see the signs of cheetah spots like the ones below.

1. Arrogance – The firm believes it own PR (public relations). They perhaps started out as a market leader, and have convinced themselves over time, that their competitive position is impenetrable; they rest on their laurels and believe that if customers defect to “inferior” competitors, it’s more likely they’ve made a decision to fire their customer than that the customer was dissatisfied.

Through their early successes, they often attract very bright people. But because they almost never believe there’s a need for change, they are more likely to appreciate mavericks who work independently and display the kind of hubris that’s characteristic of the company founders. They don’t believe in the wisdom of their own corporate crowd, and usually keep problem-solving and decision-making to a small cadre of senior people at the top of the organization.

2. Feeling No Pain – Some businesses seem to hum along for quite awhile and maintain moderate success and lull themselves into a place of comfort. In time, they seem numb to the concept of striving. Grass roots efforts by employees, who know where to find inefficiencies in their own functions, push for improvements that fall on deaf ears at higher levels. I saw this happen when employees at a major oil company and large tobacco enterprise tried to streamline their functions.
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Genetic diversity is the cornerstone of survival for all living things. It’s through the combining and recombining of differing genetic codes that unique genetic sets are created to survive in new environments. It’s the diversity of attributes and resiliences that help a species thrive in changing environmental circumstances. Companies are no different because they are living, changing, dynamic organisms. Our global marketplace too.

The crisis that has beset our poor cheetahs (introduced in the last blog post) is known in biological circles as a “genetic bottleneck.” When a bottleneck occurs, it’s not long after that the species experiences something called “genetic drift”.

To see what’s happening, picture New York’s cramped Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour, feeding only a single lane of traffic into Manhattan. Imagine that the cars, trucks, buses and SUVs at the mouth of the tunnel represent the Cheetah gene pool a hundred centuries ago. In the original population, all the varieties of vehicles with all their optional gear and all their unique colors could be mixed and matched from generation to generation, creating unique configurations that would be more suited to future conditions.
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