A Nation of Critics

We are quickly devolving into a nation of uninformed critics, satisfied to slouch in our armchairs and hurl nonstop invectives at our television screens. Politicians? Idiots. Corporate executives? Morons. Football coaches? Clueless. Product developers? Out to lunch. The more remarkable problem is that those who so easily dismiss the difficult daily actions and lifelong commitment of so many “doers” in our society have never spent one minute of their own lives trying to accomplish the same activity. With just over half of the population turning out for the last national election, few even find it important enough to choose those best qualified to serve them. Those insisting “anyone could do that” rarely understand that, in fact, very few can, and even fewer try. The critics ultimately resemble Civil War reenactors, comfortably enjoying the spectacle and pageantry of the fight, but without a passion for the cause or the danger of the bullet.

In a recent heated late-night email exchange between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and writer Ryan Tate of gawker.com, Tate leveled withering criticism at Apple, their products, and philosophies. Jobs suddenly changed the tenor of the conversation by pointedly asking, “By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?” Tate’s non-response affirmed Jobs’ conclusion.

It was President Theodore Roosevelt speaking in 1910 at the Sorbonne on “Citizenship in a Republic” who said the following: "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Get off the couch and get involved. Find a problem, no matter how small, and fix it. If you are dissatisfied with anything, start at your most available access point to the problem and go on the attack. If it is bigger than you, go find a friend or two to help. There are innumerable social, economic, and human issues that desperately need attention this very minute. Only if you are willing to commit your personal time and energy to solving a problem do you acquire the knowledge, gain the insight, and earn the right to be a critic of that issue in the future.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Criticism, community involvement, innovation, ideas, participation

Crucial First Step of Innovation

Most innovation fails to survive infancy because people engage in innovation doing before they successfully engage innovation thinking. Well before the learning phase of innovation, each participant should complete an idea “core dump” of everything they know or believe about the subject at hand. Whether completed on a roll of brown butcher paper, laptop, napkin, or whiteboard, every possible idea should be spewed onto the chosen media, and the core dump should not stop until the innovator has posited every idea they have.

Won’t some of these ideas be unscientific, opinion, hearsay, or irrelevant? If the innovator has truly exhaled all ideas related to the subject of study, many of the ideas will fit into these categories. Why, then, should we spend valuable time on this counter-intuitive exercise? Because somewhere in this pile of intellectual debris are clues that are important to development of the innovation. Strategist Gary Hamel said, “In an increasingly nonlinear world, only nonlinear ideas are likely to create new wealth,” and the innovation core-dump is often ripe with nonlinear ideas. Warren Bennis similarly noted, “Great Groups are not realistic places. They are exuberant, irrationally optimistic ones.” Canadian design icon Bruce Mau utilizes the core-dump process in his creative work: “Mau developed a working model that encouraged the designers in his studio to speculate first, and research later. The point was to come up with wild ideas, scenarios, possible solutions; then to sketch them, film them, express them in the form of collage pictures cut out of magazines, tape them to the wall…Mau came to believe that in those earliest stages of thinking about a problem, when people were unencumbered by data and expert opinion and conventional wisdom, they were most likely to happen upon and be open to fresh, unusual, and possibly game-changing ideas.”

Before you begin any creative or innovative endeavor, complete an idea core-dump. Innovation thinking always precedes successful innovation doing.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, ideas, invention, innovation process, ideation, productivity


References

Bennis, W., & Biederman, P. (1997). Organizing genius. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

Berger, W. (2009). Glimmer: how design can transform your life, and maybe even the world. New York: The Penguin Press.

Hamel, G. (2002). Leading the revolution. New York: Plume, 2002.

Persistence

Because of continual media hype, we live in an era of “instapreneurs.” We are led to believe that possessing a good idea allows one to easily build and flip a company in months (if not days). Successful innovation rarely works that way, and is more aligned with the quip, “He was an overnight success in ten years.” As author Scott Berkun noted, “The majority of innovations come from dedicated people in a field working hard to solve a well-defined problem…Often, hard work extends for years. It took Carlson, the inventor of the photocopier, decades of concentrated effort before Xerox released its first copying machine.” Leadership authority Warren Bennis similarly considered the protracted focus and effort required for innovation success: “Great groups are full of indefatigable people who are struggling to turn a vision into a machine and whose lawns and goldfish have died of neglect…They are so taken with the beauty and difficulty of the task that they don’t want to talk about anything else, be anywhere else, do anything else.” Stanford Professor Robert Sutton said that recognizing the ability to buckle down and work a problem into the ground may be helpful as corporations decide which innovation projects to back: “If you can’t decide which new projects or ideas to bet on based on their objective merits, pick those that will be developed by the most committed and persuasive heretics you can find.” One recalls the young computer software coders in Douglas Coupland’s book entitled Microserfs, generously sliding flat foods (pizza, Pop-Tarts, etc.) under the door of their colleague holed up in his office for days at a time. What are you so dedicated to accomplishing?

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, failure, ideas, invention, persistence, productivity


References

Coupland, D. (2004). Microserfs. New York, NY: HarperPerennial.

Bennis, W., & Biederman, P. (1997). Organizing genius. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Sutton, R. (2002). Weird ideas that work. New York, NY: Free Press.

Searching For Crazy Ideas

Modern corporations battling in the frenetic global marketplace are constantly on the hunt for the next great idea. That is a great waste of time and resources, as the best ideas (and those that make a company more competitive) come disguised as bizarre, loony, totally impractical ideas. The Director of one highly innovative firm recounts their weekly staff meetings, when staff members review potential ideas for development. He notes that, when the group unanimously hates an idea, he immediately writes it down, knowing that it likely contains elements of a viable future project. Renowned physicist Freeman Dyson believed that the appearance of wrongness was absolute proof of true creativity: “When the great innovation appears, it will most certainly be in a muddled, incomplete, and confusing form. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope” (Neumeier, 53). Even weird ideas that can’t be developed in their present form can be valuable: “Every idea, even a bad one, incorporates some form of discovery” (Robinson & Schroeder, 40). Losing a “good” idea to others shouldn’t be a concern. Howard Aiken, a famous inventor, said, “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats” (Berkun, 59). Scott Berkun similarly noted that, “Every great idea in history has the fat red stamp of rejection on its face…Big ideas in all fields endure dismissals, mockeries, and persecutions (for them and their creators) on their way to changing the world” (Berkun, 54). As global strategist Gary Hamel asserted, “Only stupid questions create new wealth” (Hamel, 144). The future belongs to those who are actively searching for “stupid” answers.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, failure, ideas, invention, strategy


References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Hamel, G. (2002). Leading the revolution. New York: Plume.

Neumeier, M. (2009) The designful company. Berkeley: New Riders.

Robinson, A. & Schroeder, D. (2003). Ideas are free. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

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Helping Deep Diversity Flourish

Fresh ideas are the foundation of economic progress worldwide. Those new ideas ultimately result in viable products and services, healthy companies, and most importantly, meaningful employment. The only way to get better ideas is to get more ideas, and an organization’s ability to acquire new ideas and innovate is constrained by the diversity of its thought leaders. Stroll the hallways of any company that successfully innovates and you will bump into employees that are remarkably diverse in age, race, country of origin, experience, gender, education, etc. God built this rich diversity into the global population for many reasons, not the least of which is the need for diverse ideas in innovation.

After the tragedy of September 11, visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs became increasingly constricted. Although many involved in the process of innovation believe that we should staple a green-card to the diploma of anyone who completes a technical doctoral degree in the United States, we currently require most foreign-born students who graduate from a U.S. college to leave after graduation, taking their innovative ideas and entrepreneurial zeal with them.

In April 2009, Paul Graham, a partner at Y Combinator in Mountain View, California, wrote a blog post entitled “The Founder Visa,” venting his frustration at the number of young entrepreneurs packing up their remarkable ideas and heading home. Many in the tech community picked up the idea, and a grassroots media campaign sprang up. Soon, a planeload of techies from Silicon Valley, dubbed "Geeks on a Plane," headed to Washington DC to lobby legislators. The incredible result has been the introduction of legislation by Senators John Kerry (D) and Richard Lugar (R) entitled the StartUp Visa Act of 2010. If passed, the bill will provide a special EB-6 category visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who want to start a company in the United States, can demonstrate that they have raised $250,000 from a U.S.-based venture capital firm, and will employ at least five U.S. citizens. While this won’t add thousands of well-paying jobs in the near term, it certainly is a step in the right direction!

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, diversity, StartUp Visa Act of 2010, entrepreneurship, immigration, strategy


References

O’Brien, C. (2010). Why Congress should pass the Startup Visa bill. SiliconValley.com. Retrieved from http://www.siliconvalley.com/opinion/ci_14658639?nclick_check=1

The Middle Ground of Design Thinking

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, corporate leaders have relentlessly pursued operational efficiency. The fundamental institutional goal was that of exploitation—maximizing the payoff from existing knowledge to solve problems. Using historical data, quantitative analysis, and inductive and deductive reasoning, explicit, incremental, step-by-step processes were developed to reliably predict outcomes and assure risk-mitigation. A sterling example is Ray Kroc of McDonald’s, who “Simplified the McDonald’s system down to an exact science, with a rigid set of rules that spelled out exactly how long to cook a hamburger, exactly how to hire people, exactly how to choose locations, exactly how to manage stores, and exactly how to franchise them.”

The polar opposite of exploitation is exploration—the search for entirely new knowledge. Exploration involves creativity and innovation and is based upon gut feelings, intuition, and instincts. Through knowing without reasoning, exploration is focused on achieving valid solutions and often results in false starts and major unexpected leaps forward. Exploration grasps risky new opportunities efficiency thinkers ignored. For example, “Early on, McDonald’s left health issues by the wayside. Subway made healthy eating the centerpiece of its value proposition, touting its fresh ingredients and low-fat specialties in response to consumers’ increasing concerns about unhealthy fast food.”

Are we stuck choosing between exploitation and exploration in our organizations? The answer is a middle ground, call design thinking. Design thinking seeks to balance innovation and efficiency (BOTH are necessary for success), continuously redesigns the business to take advantage of each, and closely matches consumer’s needs with what is technically feasible. Unlike the use of inductive and deductive logic in exploitation, and intuitive thinking in exploration, design thinking utilizes abductive logic. Abductive logic asserts that anything is possible, reaches out toward what might be, and can only be proven when the future arrives.

Martin, Roger (2009). The design of business. Boston: Harvard Business Press