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.