Business Innovations – Where do they come from?

Do innovations come from consumers as a demand or generated from within the company?
Surely a both, but I want to hear your opinion.

How important is it to know if an innovation is push or pull?

Gianluigi Cuccureddu

Consultant ? Marketing Strategist ? Venture Advisor

Innovation can come from any source. So it’s important to be listening and positioned to act when an opportunity arises.

Most often, an innovation will come from someone not accepting the status quo and, instead, finding an alternative solution. So it also helps to encourage rather than discourage the typical “trouble makers” and try to funnel the energy and discontent into coming up with solutions or alternatives. Problem customers, employees and vendors are usually experiencing something that they perceive as an issue with you or your company. Open feedback can often lead to innovation. If anyone has ever said “that’s really dumb”, you have a performance improvement opportunity.

Mistakes and errors are another great source for innovation ideas. Even when it’s human error, there’s often an opportunity to improve a process or even find a radically new (and hopefully, better) way of doing things.

As for identifying push or pull innovations, the main benefit of identifying a pull is that you have an opportunity to capitalize on the fact that you listen and respond to your customers and/or partners. It’s a great PR opportunity and encourages additional feedback from outside. Pulls also tend to have a more direct impact on your sales, marketing and customer loyalty. Innovation from within has a greater impact on employee morale and internal efficiencies, but may never translate to any customer impact. So, I beleive that the distinction is an important one but that they’re both valuable sources to develop.

Just my opinion, of course.

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca

What is true sense of quality in IT projects?

Hi all

Happy New Year 2009!!!

I am seeing some project management techniques and most of them are focused on quantitative approach.

How we can measure & manage knowledge & creativity in quantitative units? How much it is effective to achieve true sense of quality?

Is any project management technique is based on qualitative approach?

Please share your experience and opinion. It will be great help for me.

Thank you very much in advance.

Regards

Ram

Ram Srivastava

Team (Innovation, Marketing & Execution) Lead @ YMSLI. Open Source, LAMP, Agile, CMMI. Success story in recession!!

I have this discussion pretty regularly. Typically, PMs and PMOs become focused on budget and schedule to the exclusion of any other metrics or considerations. As indicators of general project health, they’re not bad. But when organizations start equating them with “project success”, We end up with projects that are deemed “successful” but often fail to deliver any business value. It also leads to a number of bad behaviors such as throwing warm bodies at late projects, skimping on QA, poor risk management, code-like-hell programming, requirements disconnects, poor documentation and traceability, etc. Personally, I believe that there is no greater threat to project success than focusing on the wrong metrics. The approach that I’ve generally tried to promote is a process-centric one. Establish the right processes and behaviors to capture and manage requirements, maintain stakeholder involvement, control changes and scope creep and to ensure proper QA throughout. Then measure process compliance and customer acceptance at each stage (quantitative) with customer satisfaction (qualitative) shortly after major milestones. In addition, when scoping the project, determine what the customer’s real KPIs (key Performance Indicators) and KGI/CSFs (Key Goal Indicators/Critical Success Factors) are and include them in the tracking processes. Having that discussion can be surprising. Unfortunately, you need to have somewhat mature processes to be able to implement something like this and you also need some sort of neutral oversight to review process exceptions to determine if the exception was appropriate or just laziness. A project shouldn’t be penalized for bypassing process steps that aren’t providing business value. However, those decisions need to be made consciously and with some form of review/audit to keep people honest.

How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

I often run into prospects who at first tell me they don’t have an interest or a need… but once I get them talking… it’s a whole different story. Sometimes, they turn into my best clients! How do you engage a prospect who originally tells you, “I’m not interested”?

Doyle Slayton

Sales & Leadership Strategist – SalesBlogcast.com Professional Speaker | Author | Social Media | Web 2.0 | TopLinked.com

Turn it into an opportunity for them to be the expert. Ask them if you can buy them lunch and pick their brains to help refine your approach for the next customer (be careful about walking the line between listening and selling). Get them talking. Ask lots of questions. Try to demonstrate knowledge and insight by asking the *right* questions and try to be complimentary about the things that seem innovative or well executed. If it’s relevant, talk about what you or your other clients have done that might be helpful (but not in the context of a sale. This is a “meeting of minds” and not a sales pitch) People love to be the experts and the valued for their knowledge (just look at Linkedin 🙂 A lot of people also react positively to the “Help me, Obi-Wan!” approach that they’re in a unique situation to be able to save you. If you also get someone who’s passionate about their business, you’ll develop a bond and rapport through this approach that you’ll never get by trying to directly sell to them. At the end of the session, *don’t go in for the kill*!!!!! If they perceive it as a sales pitch, you’re dead. Just thank them profusely, ask if they have any additional leads and try to keep the door open for followups. Then look for opportunities to hook up again (a new product or service offering, some new set of questions or ideas, etc.) Treat it as networking rather than sales and build your reputation with the client before jumping back in for the sale. It’s more difficult once you got the “Not Interested”, but it’s certainly not impossible

Is EPM just one more TLA or can it truely transform corporate performance?

Now that everyone has resource, customer, and supply chain management – all that is left is performance. Do you think sophisticated analytic and reporting tools that integrate nicely across the enterprise and not just vertically within an organization can be a key differentiator against competitors or do you think it provides nice charts but corporations still lack the internal governance to turn this into timely, actionable data?

Kyle Smith

Director of HR at MomentumSI

Enterprise Performance Management, IMHO is hollow without the underlying discipline, process and culture. A lot of companies drop in the tools and expect the discipline and data to magically follow. Instead, people waste inordinate amounts of time and effort learning how to “game the system” to get the results that management expects. A lot of organizations “think” that they have the maturity to get value out of these tools, but very few of them actually do.

The majority of “C” level executives make decisions based on gut feel and trust in subordinates. I don’t know of any of them that pore over the output of an EPM system to guide the business. I find it totally mind-boggling that billions are spent on these systems to collect, analyze and report on data that is rarely used by the supposed target audience and often has no direct correlation to the business goals or KPIs. (did we forget about balanced scorecards at some point?).

EPM in a mature organization is unlikely to be transformative since the underlying trees of metrics, disciplines and systems would already be in place. It could certainly allow for a lot of fine tuning. But it would be an evolutionary tool at best.

However, I think that attempts to implement EPM in a less mature organization can uncover the lack of discipline and the gaps in the other supporting systems. EPM as a catalyst can be revolutionary. Senior management would have to be open to supporting the underlying governance and process work required and the implementers would need to be honest about what gaps were uncovered during the design and implementation. Translating corporate strategy down into the various KGIs and KPIs, rebuilding broken and inefficient processes, blowing out the chaff and aligning around what’s important to the business is where the value would come from.

That’s just my opinion, of course.

Difficult Questions…

……sometimes in my life I have come across very difficult questions. As a leader, people expect my answers to be clear, concise and to meet the standard expected of me.
I have hesitated in answering them before, or deferred them to another time.
We have the power to articulate and think deeply before answering or asking a question but when faced with very difficult questions.

How should we handle It.? What is your experience with difficult questions?

Thank you very much.

Mariéme Jamme- MBA

Social Entrepreneur- Speaker- Founder of Iconscience- Emerging Markets Strategist- CEO at Spotone Global Solutions.

People ask questions because they want answers. I find it very disrespectful when someone “doesn’t answer” a question. The more that they talk around it and pretend to answer, the more disrespectful I find it (since you’re essentially assuming that people are stupid and can be fooled onto thinking that you’ve provided an answer)

Answer the question with honesty and integrity. If you don’t know the answer, say that you don’t know, but that you’ll find out. If you need time to think about it, tell them that and indicate when they can expect an answer. If you can’t answer for some reason, explain and indicate when you might be able to answer. If the answer will cast you in a bad light, get it over with and try to indicate how you intend to turn the situation/answer around.

As an individual, your only true asset is your reputation. If you habitually avoid answering difficult questions, mislead people in your answers, or just brush them off, that will have a much greater impact than your answers likely will. If you address the difficult questions proactively and do so with honesty and integrity, that will help to develop trust and will improve your reputation as a leader and as a coworker.

I’ve known a lot of sales managers who frown upon “meets expectations” performers. What do you think? Is “meets expectations” good enough?

Doyle Slayton

Sales & Leadership Strategist – SalesBlogcast.com Professional Speaker | Author | Social Media | Web 2.0 | TopLinked.com

It depends on whether or not it’s truly “meets expectations” or if it’s really a point on a curve. A good manager should have set the stretch goals up front and the expectations would be based on that. Therefore, “meets expectations” would be exactly that. You’re a model employee that fully earned your salary and your manager had a good idea of what you were capable of when setting your targets.

However, a lot of organizations use the Jack Welch “forced ranking” mechanisms and label the mid-point of the curve as “Meets expectations”. They also apply it to a microcosm rather than using it to prune the dead limbs out of the company as a whole. It confuses the “rankings relative to peers” with the “ability to meet goals and expectations”. If a sales organization has an exceptional team and the curve is applied to the team, you can have 120% performers suddenly showing up as “did not meet expectations” or just “meets expectations” (the bottom and middle of the curve). Similarily, if everyone was incompetent, you could have people with 50% of target showing up as “far exceeds”.

Along a similar vein, can a sales manager “meet expectations” if they have staff that doesn’t? Isn’t it the expectation that the sales manager corrects performance issues or gets rid of the associate?

It’s important to understand where the “meets expectations” is coming from. Is it “making your numbers” or is it “hitting the median” compared to your peers. Whenever I see these terms, I generally assume them to be BS and dig deeper to find out what the person truly accomplished or failed to accomplish.

How do you determine facts vs. fiction in resumes?

With massive lay-offs in almost every industry sector, people are busy finding jobs! Resume writers and career coaches advice applicants to be specific (What was the problem and how you solve it?) and not to give job descriptions or list of positions. One thing they strongly recommend is to “quantify” your achievement.

I like to read patents and resumes. I read resumes posted on-line and find people to do exactly that – “quantify”. We all know that industrial achievements do not come from a single individual but from efforts of many (along the entire value chain). When a sales manager claims to have increased sales by 300% – what S/he exactly means? From $1000to $3000 (easy to do) or from $3 million to $ 9 million (difficult to do). When an egineer or mid level supervisor claims of designing a process/ product/ method which saved company $x millions or cretaed $ x million market, who provides those figures and how do you verify that? We know that changes in industry comes at costs and benefits. I also see, people giving almost a page long achievements for jobs lasting 6 to 9 months, and some are quite astonishing. Either the yard stick for success has shrunk or people have become really good at what they do ! I see people claiming to create market for 100s of millions but were let go!

I also question value of references applicant provides. Everyone will provide references of people they have good raport with. Employers are concerned about legal problems and always ask managers to be careful when they give their name out as reference.

So, my question is – what is the meaning of quantifying achivements for sake of quantifying? How do you screen resumes with such bold claims?

Amit Dharia, Ph.D.

Owner, Transmit Technology Group, LLC, TX

This comes back to a recurring issue that I have with the recruiting industry. It used to be that there was a rapport between a recruiter and a candidate. The recruiter would work as an agent for a group of people and as an agent for a group of companies. They’d come to know the strengths and weaknesses of candidates as well as the cultures and unwritten requirements of the companies. The two of you would work together to determine how best to present your qualifications to the hiring manager. Now it’s just “send me a resume and I’ll forward it”. There are a few of the “old school” recruiters out there. But they’re becoming fewer and farther between.

Recruiting is now such a commodity industry, that it’s created this “tooth-and-nail” approach to resumes. People state accomplishments in the hopes that their “60%” improvement will get them ahead of the people with only a “50%” improvement listed on their resumes. Completing a project 3 months ahead of schedule pushes those meager “completed on schedule” people into the circular file. It’s all about marketing. No product goes to market saying simply “it does exactly what you’re looking for”. Similarly, very few resumes get considered if they simply list skills and experience. They have to have that “Cleans 50% whiter than white!”, “Delivers 20% better than brand X” feel or they end up in the bin.

What makes this worse is that there are so many recruiters that expect you to have a “one-size-fits-all” resume. You have to somehow cram every possible contingency into a single document. For someone like me who has worked in multiple industries, across multiple disciplines and successfully built and run consulting practices (which requires a lot of cross-functional knowledge and skills), my resume ends up reading like a complete work of fiction. Is it too good to be true? No, not really. I consider myself slightly more skilled than the average bear in a wide number of disciplines, but I know that there are a lot of experts who could blow me away in any single area. I also know enough to know what I don’t know and how to surround myself with talented people to fill the gaps.

So, when I have to second-guess what a recruiter may be looking for without knowing anything about the possible job opportunity, company or even industry, the best way to get their attention usually ends up being to bandy around a lot of numbers and accomplishments without a lot of focus on specific skills or expertise. Honestly, I’m more proud of rescuing disasters by the skin of my teeth than I am of pulling off great numbers in a supportive, mature environment. But it’s the big flashy stuff that usually engages the recruiters in conversation. It’s that conversation that allows me to present myself in a more focused manner.

If a resume gets your attention, I’d be more inclined to call the individual on the claims. They should be able to back them up with specifics. How they respond and what skills and knowledge they have to back them up is really what’s important. Selective background checks should be the last step before presenting them to your client. At that point, you can ask specific questions about roles, responsibilities and accomplishments instead of “did they really generate 100M of business?”

How have you managed the transition from a large international organisation and employer, to a smaller organisation?

What challenges have you had to overcome and how has your approach to doing business changed?

Jonathan Brooker

Experienced programmes and commercial director – telecoms / I.T. / media / manufacturing / business intelligence

I have a slightly different view.

I spent approximately 15+ years working in International and dealing with the cultures, politics, regulations and regional ethics of integrating systems and business process across 30+ countries. I was able to work with and touch almost every facet of the business and I had the luxury of a free hand to effect changes that had tangible impact.

My wife and I had our first child and I shifted gears to a domestic-only job with “no travel”, “low stress”, and “<80 hour work-weeks”. My personal life is much better, but it’s frustrating to lose the scope, influence and ability to see changes that you make impact hundreds or thousands of people across a global organization. It’s also difficult to see people repeat your mistakes and no longer be in a position to do anything about it.

I think that the transition pains have much more to do with your relative level and scope of influence within each organization rather than the actual large global/small domestic issue.

However, there are some generalizations:

Larger organizations usually have better process frameworks and more complex bureaucracy. Smaller organizations have better agility, but more chaos and things “slipping through the cracks”.

Larger organizations have much worse end-to-end integration (usually due to a lack of direct communication). Smaller organizations tend to have better internal alignment around goals.

Larger organizations have a “been there, done that” attitude to a lot of things. Smaller organizations are usually learning as they go.

Larger organizations present more opportunities with more competition. Smaller organizations have fewer opportunities, but the ones that are available tend to be much more significant.

Larger organizations have a much greater pool of talent that you can draw from. In a smaller organization, you have to play the hand that you’re dealt.

In some cases, moving to a smaller organization provides a greater ability to effect changes. However, if that organization already has strong leaders and you aren’t hired as one of them, it can be more difficult to have a voice.

My approach used to be “Bash your head against the wall until you see daylight”. Now it’s basically the beginning of the serenity prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

“IT is the Business ” and ” The Business is IT”. What do you think? What does this mean exactly?

It is no longer possible to separate The IT department from the process of delivering the “End
Product” of the business as the IT is now truly “customer facing” in most organizations. It is
also fair to say that the Business cannot ignore or underestimate the importance of IT to its
own survival. The relationship is now a true symbiosis where both sides have to work as one
to survive and prosper.

Hisham Burdini

IT Management & Business Process Re-engineering Practitioner

IT (Information Technology) isn’t the business. But, it should be a strategic partner. Unlike accounting or corporate real estate or payroll or (to a certain extent) HR, it shouldn’t be commoditized as a generic service. There are elements of IT that fit into that category, but to treat all of IT as a commodity would be as naive as considering your sales, marketing or new product development to be commoditized functions. They all require a strong alignment with the business strategy, an in-depth knowledge of the business and continual adjustment based on feedback from the business or they simply won’t provide maximum value.

IT can provide functionality to the business that the business never even considered. I don’t mean to get preachy, but It can enable huge paradigm shifts in customer contact, marketing, sales, service, delivery, process management, quality improvement, etc. By providing a seat at the table to IT and developing a strong knowledge and consideration of the needs of the business within IT, IT can bring appropriate new technologies and models to the business to solve real business problems.

The business can continue just fine with commodity IT. Focus on KTLO (Keep The Lights On) activities and keep IT away in a closet away from the discussion of the actual business issues and strategy and you might as well outsource the whole organization. But if the business takes full advantage of the capabilities of an aligned, mature and engaged IT organization, the benefits can be incredible.

Unfortunately, the trend seems to be to further commoditize IT through outsourcing and offshoring rather than treating it as a potential source of innovation for the business. It’s fine to commoditize operational aspects, but don’t go overboard. Don’t lose sight of the solutions that IT has brought to the table in the past (PCs, PDAs, mobile salesforce, databases, email, web, etc.) and think about what the future may hold. An outsourced organization isn’t going to understand *your* business or see the opportunities that a strategic partner will.

Just my two cents worth.