Why hiring is harder in a downturn

Thanks to Seth Godin, I discovered a couple of great posts on Auren Hoffman's blog.

The first is a terrific argument for why you should always try to hire great people and not settle for good enough, however urgent the need is. This is related to my post last week on collaboration. Auren's reasoning is simple: great people are way,way more productive.

His latest post looks at why hiring these great people is harder in times of recession. His explanation again is simple: noise goes up but the number of great people stays the same.

Don't forget to think!

Deadlines, milestones, actions, sense of urgency, delivery, execution: this is the language of the business environment I work in. We have a strong bias towards action and towards delivery of results. I don't think this is unique to my company. I have seen very many job adverts looking for "results orientated" people with "a track record of delivery". I have yet to see one that says "we are looking for someone who will get off the corporate treadmill once a week and do some thinking".

Of course we all make time for thinking and reflection but how often do we do this in work time? "Reflect on your own time, you're here to deliver!" And if we do, are there the same rewards and recognition for reflection as there are for action? I doubt it, at least not in most companies, and especially not in times of crisis. Why is this a problem? My observation is that when there is no space for thinking the result is content-free meetings with meaningless milestones and asinine action points.

So this is a plea to everyone for whom this sounds familiar: don't forget to think!

If you need food for thought, then here's a random list of things that you might like to use reflect upon:

• More than half the world's population now pay to use a mobile 'phone. Developing countries account for two-thirds of the mobile 'phones in use. What does this mean for your business?
• The average american consumer is hit by 3000 (some say as much as 8000) marketing message per day. What does this mean for your marketing? How are you going to reach people when you are 1 in 3000?
• How would you destroy your business?
• The cost of a heart bypass operation in US is around $100,000, in Europe it is $50,000, in Thailand it is $4800 - the quality of care is the same. What does this mean?
• It took 2 years for Encarta to destroy a 225 year track record of success of Encyclopedia Britannica. It took 8 years for Wikipedia to do the same to Encarta. What can we learn from this?
• If chocolate is not addictive why do I like it so much?

How to be more insightful

Every product manager knows how important it is to meet customers, to speak to them and to observe them. We all do it. I work in healthcare publishing and, of course, we often meet physicians and go to hospitals. So do our competitors. In fact we tend to meet the same people and ask broadly similar questions. Is it any wonder that the products and workflow solutions that we develop tend to look similar?

The challenge for product managers is how to be more insightful, to see and hear things that others do not see or have never seen before.

You can find a great example of this in Tom Kelley's book The Art of Innovation. Ever since toothbrushes were invented in 15th century, kids have had to make do with cut down, smaller sized versions of adult toothbrushes. Until the mid-1990's when IDEO, who were working on a project for Oral-B, watched children playing with toothbrushes. An insightful person realized something that no-one over the centuries had ever realized before, that little kids grasp things with their whole fist and not with their fingertips as adults do. So they made toothbrushes with fat, soft, squishy handles. Nowadays you won't find anything else on sale. So how is it that we give our kids toothbrushes to use for over a 100 years without realizing that it would be better if they were bigger and fatter than our adult ones? Because it is paradoxical. Little people need little things right? Logical. Well no that's wrong.

This is insight in action. The ability to see and hear things that no-one else has never seen before.

Here are some tops tips on how to be more insightful that I hope will be useful (with thanks to ?!):

• Be curious - never take anything at face value but ask why? what's this about? what could be going on here?
• Be playful - children are naturally curious, try to remember what being a child was like; if you were a child again now what would you be thinking?
• Don't look for the ultimate answer, the answer to life, the universe and everything.. look instead for something simple that makes you go "ooh, now that's interesting, I'd like to know more" and then follow your instinct
• Do you ever find yourself thinking "I like that but I don't know why"? That's a sure sign that you just sensed something insightful. Don't let your rational brain dismiss the thought until you've explored it
• Another sure sign of insightfulness is when you find yourself bubbling with questions; you cannot wait to understand why, to explain the observation. Capture that moment.
• Look for something that surprises you, that you didn't expect. If you find nothing that surprises you then look deeper, ask more questions; your brain is probably playing tricks on you by jumping to conclusions and only allowing you to see patterns that you've seen before
• Try being someone else! If you were the Queen what would you ask and what would you think and what would you see?
• Get fresh! Continually bring freshness into your life and work. Go to places you've never been before. Meet people you've never met before. Ask different questions. Break your habits.

And don't forget context. Sometimes unremarkable insights become remarkable when you understand the context better. Here's a great example I heard from Narenda Laljani There are around 2.7 billion searched on Google every day. Taken at face value this sounds unremarkable; I mean Google is big and successful, you expect a big number right? Well the world population is around 6.7 billion..... Wow! Suddenly 2.7 billion sounds like a really big number. When I heard this my mind started asking questions like 'what is everyone searching for?' and 'before Google, where did all these questions go?' and 'has Google increased the number of questions asked worldwide?' and..... I have no idea what's going on but I do know that an apparently unremarkable fact suddenly became fascinating by the addition of context.

Book Review: Sticky Wisdom

“How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work” is the subtitle of this engaging, amusing and enlightening book. It does not disappoint. The book is very easy to read and is full of case studies and advice to help do things differently. The best illustration of this is the section about meetings on pages 135-138 with five terrific ideas to make meetings more effective. I guarantee that these ideas work because I have tried them!

Sticky Wisdom is written by staff of ?WhatIf! The Innovation Company and describes the behaviours they believe are critical for innovation in six chapters: Freshness, Greenhousing, Realness, Momentum, Signalling and Courage. Each chapter starts with some questions to let you know why this chapter is for you. There is short piece of theory and explanation of the behaviour and why it is important. Then there are case studies, examples and advice on how to embed these behaviours into your daily work. The idea is not to change the way you think but to change the way you act.

Those expecting a innovation process will be disappointed. This is not a book about how to do innovation. This is a book about how to behave while doing innovation. ?WhatIf! maintain that 50% of innovation is the doing i.e. the process and 50% is the being i.e. the behaviour. They believe that innovation is best done with a smile on your face. Who can argue with that?

One of the remarkable things I have found about ?WhatIf! is their ability to convey their ideas in a way that is truly memorable. Their use of stories and visual aids helps make their message sticky. I can remember verbatim some of the stories they told me at a workshop a year ago. How often does that happen? They have managed to capture some of that stickiness into this book and like the workshop, I find myself referring to the book even though I read it some time ago.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the very last chapter “a call to arms”. If you ever need reminding why innovation is important then just read this.

Available of course on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com and on other fine online emporiums

Sticky Wisdom by Dave Allan, Matt Kingdon, Kris Murrin and Daz Rudkin

Why is Collaboration so difficult?

Here's an email I received a while ago (the names have been changed!):

"This product is 'owned' by the Golden Egg Division run by Veruca Salt. As such I have no control over it, cannot make any decisions for it, cannot even use it. Certainly, I can start to work with Augustus Gloop on putting something together, but I know that whole Golden Egg group is very much pre-occupied with getting something off the ground re the new laying tool which they have been talking about for years now. So I do not expect much cooperation there. To me that means it is something of a non-starter, even if this suggestion was our best option.

The person who wrote this was not doing the wrong thing or being selfish or having bad turf wars. They are behaving exactly as their reward system dictates, as the culture established by their company dictates. They reason that there is no benefit to working with any other group unless it improves their own bottom line. After all this is what they are accountable for."

Does this sound familiar? I suspect it might. Is it any wonder why collaboration is so difficult in large organizations?

I'm not at all sure how I would go about incentivizing collaboration but I think my first step would be not to actively incentivize against it!

One thing that I have tried to do in the past is to task certain people with driving collaboration or rather brokering collaboration between groups. I still believe this approach is effective but now I also realise that it is much more effective when the people in the groups concerned are natural collaborators. You can take a individualist to water but you cannot get them to drown themselves!

It was Rachel Mooney, Head of Organisational Culture at Google, who reminded me of this at a presentation last year. Google takes enormous effort to hire the right people. She said that they expect 25% of managers' time to be spent on hiring. Google values potential over experience: "we hire people for what they will do with us and not for what they have done before". Interesting since this is the exact opposite of the widely held belief that "past performance is the best predictor of future success". It was also instructive to note how Google's highly structured and bureaucratic hiring process compared to their loose and free-flowing development process.

What else can you do to stimulate collaboration?

You can strengthen the focus on working in teams and consider Project Management training for all. Mind you, there's little point in offering project management training without having projects for folks to work on. One idea that I have tried to push is short-term secondments to projects. My reasoning is that we seem to be able to manage maternity cover for staff for periods of several months, why can we not use the same process to free up people to work for a few months on a project?

In the end I think that collaboration is like communication - even if it comes naturally to you, you still have to work hard at it ALL the time. It requires investment of time and energy, if only to remove the many barriers that block collaboration and make it easier for people to connect. My bottom line is that even if you hire the right people, you still have to work at it.

One final thought. Seth Godin reports that he has "been thinking a lot about issues of scale and units of measure". Many businesses that are in trouble, he says, are in trouble for a simple reason: "they're the wrong size." He goes on: "A newspaper that only had a few dozen employees would be doing great today. But they have hundreds or thousands of employees because that was an appropriate scale twenty years ago. When I started my first web company fifteen years ago, the idea that you could be successful with six or ten employees was crazy, but today many of the most successful companies have not many more than that."

So my question to myself and to you is: is there an appropriate scale for collaboration and if so what is it?

Science Friday

When I lived in the US I discovered how wonderful National Public Radio is. Now I'm back in Europe I listen to it live on my internet radio and to the podcasts of my favourite shows: CarTalk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, News from Lake Wobegon and Science Friday.

The March 20th podcast of Science Friday includes an interview with Harold Kroto, who discovered Buckminster Fullerene. It is absolutely fantastic and I thoroughly recommend it. He describes how he made the discovery and gives a passionate defense of fundamental science. His explanation of nanotechnology is pure genius.

I urge you to listen to the very end of the podcast. Harold's answer to a question from a young member of the audience is simply wonderful. In a few short sentences he reveals the magic of science. A classic NPR driveway moment.

You can listen to the show on the NPR site or download the podcast from iTunes

Let me know what you think

"We have plenty of ideas...."

"We have plenty of ideas, it's the execution that let's us down" I have heard this said very often, especially by senior / executive managers. I think it is something that people keep telling themselves so much that they come to believe it. If this is the root cause, they say to themselves, then the solution is simple: get better at execution and we'll be fine.

They exhort: "innovation is all about execution" or "we need to raise the bar on our execution". Sounds good doesn't it?

I think it is complete crap. Or rather incomplete crap. Incomplete because execution is only part of the picture.

One of the (many) things I love about ?WhatIf! is their equation for innovation, and especially their new and improved version:

Innovation = Insight x Ideas x Impact

What this means is that for Innovation, you need Insights into the problem, the customers, the user or the context. You need Ideas. And you need to DO something with those ideas - i.e. make an Impact. If any one of the these variables is missing or is ineffective and thus of zero value, then there is zero innovation. That's the point of the multiplication signs, if you miss out on any of the elements of the equation, it isn't innovation.

Each part of the ?WhatIf! equation should be innovative and remarkable in its own right. If the insights are not new, remarkable, and different to all previous insights, how likely is it that the ideas that flow from them will be remarkable? If you have remarkable ideas but the delivery of them is through the same old channels using the same processes, how likely is it that these ideas will be truly remarkable?

My advice is that when you hear people say "We have plenty of ideas...", your first question should be "how remarkable are those ideas or how new and different are they?". Your second question should be "and from which insights did the ideas come from and were these truly insightful or surprising or remarkable?"

When you have good answers to these two questions, you can start to work on innovating the way you make ideas happen.

Be nice to your bottom

I was in The Hague the other day with an hour to spare while my daughter was at the Ballet School there. I wandered through the station looking for a place to have coffee. It was a miserable day: cold with drizzly rain.

There are lots of bicycles in the Netherlands and many of them are parked outside in all weathers. On a day like this bicycle saddles become really wet. And sitting on a wet saddle is guaranteed to make you feel even more miserable. This insight has not escaped the marketeers at Kimberly-Clark in the Netherlands.

This is what I saw when I came out of the station

I looked closer and saw that this was a fantastic promotional action from Page WC paper (Page is a Kimberly-Clark brand in the Netherlands). Overnight they had fitted all the bicycles parked outside Den Haag central station with blue plastic saddle covers with this tag-line

Which translates as "be nice to your bottom"!

Inspired

Since then there have been more actions in other Dutch cities

and they didn't stop at bicycles either:

and while I am on the subject of DRM....

Stephen Fry made a great point on DRM in his talk at the Apple Store in London last month (download podcast from iTunes here)*

"People who think that if it can be got for free, no-one going to pay for it..... don't understand the fuzziness of the human mind"

Piracy was a grey area. You are not either a pirate or a good citizen. We have all pirated something in our lives whether it was copying a cassette tape for a school friend or photocopying a chapter of a book or some software. And yet along the way we have bought a hell of a lot of stuff. Our houses are full of CD's and DVD's and books that we have bought legally.

"If the creative industry gets too snotty about pirates and criminalizes and tries to create too much of this "you're a thief" business. People will go <expletive deleted>. They are going to say I've seen you in your Rolls Royce and your house in Barbados, don't come to me moaning like this."

"(The creative industry) have to use their human imagination to find a way to sort this out in such a way there will still be an incentive to own copyrights but also there will be a way of disseminating it around that isn't so locked in in zones and codes and things"

Stephen had artists, writers and singers in mind when he said this, but I think this applies to the whole media business including publishing. Some call our sector "creative and media". It is high time for us to be creative!

*The whole podcast is worth listening to, but if you just want to hear the DRM bit then fast forward the podcast to 44.55 minutes

Innovation

I've lost count of the number of articles and books that are published with advice on how to be more innovative, more creative. I think creativity is an attitude not a skill. It is a way of being.

It reminds me of the classic put down (attributed to J.P. Morgan): "if you have to ask how much it costs, you cannot afford it".

A much better question is "what is stopping me from being more creative?". Then do everything possible to break those barriers down.