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

Strangling Innovation

Whether called an innovation antibody, organizational antibody, or devil’s advocate, a malcontent employee may effectively shortstop corporate innovation. As Tom Kelley of IDEO said, “The Devil’s Advocate may be the biggest innovation killer in America today…The Devil’s Advocate encourages idea-wreckers to assume the most negative possible perspective, one that sees only the downside, the problems, the disasters-in-waiting. Once those floodgates are open, they can drown a new initiative in negativity.” Tony Davila similarly noted, “Typically, the more radical the innovation and the more it challenges the status quo, the more and stronger are the antibodies. Also, the greater the past successes of the company, the greater are the organizational antibodies,” and, “As complacency grows, organizational antibodies become more prevalent. Good ideas are attacked because they would require more change, and the organization is complacent—so complacent that it encourages rather than fights organizational antibodies.”

Innovation antibodies rarely publicly challenge innovation efforts “head-on.” Instead, one preferred method most commonly used to slow innovation progress to a crawl during times of financial exigency is to quietly influence and take control of the development of corporate policies and procedures surrounding innovation practices. Few bright employees volunteer to review and update procedures manuals, but wily innovation antibodies realize that burying innovation practices in convoluted policies and procedures effectively kills them. If unchecked, the underground control of corporate innovation policies and procedures by corporate antibodies will slow innovation so that it finally experiences death by inertia. Who has volunteered to “refine” your organizational policies and procedures, and where is the bus headed now?

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


Keywords

Innovation, innovation policies and procedures, innovation antibody, leadership, strategy


References

Davila, T., Epstein, M., & Shelton, R. (2006). Making innovation work. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing.
Kelley, T. (2005). The ten faces of innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Recasting Innovation Resistance?

During periods of fiscal exigency, corporate innovation efforts may be associated with greater urgency, pressure, and risk than are similar organizational activities in more tranquil times (Kotter, 1995). Corporate leadership may become more frustrated by and less tolerant of behavior exhibited by employees and customers (Caruth et al., 1985), and may become competitive, defensive, or uncommunicative (Ford & Ford, 2009). Moreover, leaders may label a broad range of behavior as indicative of resistance to innovation efforts, and may consider such behavior as justification for operating in different and potentially more aggressive ways toward employees to signal that the behaviors are not aligned with the innovation process and are therefore unacceptable. Valid questioning of specific planned innovations by employees may receive an uncharacteristically harsh response from leaders who feel mounting economic claustrophobia. Leaders, has your innovation insight been muddied during this economic slump?

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


Keywords

Innovation, corporate communications, employee relations, leadership, strategy


References

Caruth, D., Middlebrook, B., & Rachel, F. (1985). Overcoming resistance to change. SAM Advanced Management Journal, 50(3), 23-28.
Ford, J. & Ford, L. (2009). Decoding resistance to change. Harvard Business Review, 87(4), 99-103.
Kotter, J. (1995). Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73(2), 59–67.

Who Else Is Innovation For?

Today, virtually all innovation in products, services, ideas, processes, and environments, is accomplished for those who reside in the top 20% of the global economic strata. Common logic holds that innovation should be directed to those who can most easily pay for it. “Common” logic is not God’s logic, however. Searching online Bible sites for the keywords “poor,” “money,” or “poverty,” quickly reveals that allusions to the poor are everywhere in Scripture. One example is the challenge of Moses to his people found in Deuteronomy 15:10-11 (Peterson, 1995): “Give freely and spontaneously. Don't have a stingy heart. The way you handle matters like this triggers God, your God's, blessing in everything you do, all your work and ventures. There are always going to be poor and needy people among you. So I command you: Always be generous, open purse and hands, give to your neighbors in trouble, your poor and hurting neighbors.” Our personal relationship with the poor is an indicator of our present status with God.

Perhaps we are obligated to redirect a portion of our innovation resources to those at “the bottom of the pyramid.” The development of efficient markets and effective business models through enterprise innovation should generate a needed economic transformation, but more importantly, must provide members of our global community respect, choice, self-esteem, and a welcomed future (Prahalad, 2006).

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


Keywords

Innovation, poverty, esteem, choice, design, Christian leadership


References

Peterson, E. (1995). The message. Colorado Springs, CO: Navpress.
Prahalad, C. (2006). The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Wharton School Publishing.

In Praise of Amateurs

The entire staff of San Diego, California design firm NDI, Inc., ventured out into the bright sunlight in the company courtyard to view the latest full-scale model of a new automobile code-named “Cocoon.” As NDI CEO Jerry Hirshberg noted, “Under the midday sun, every undulation and nuance of the Cocoon was thrown into mercilessly high relief, helping to throw critical attention on it.” All of the designers, who had worked non-stop for months on the project, stood nearby to listen to the comments offered by the rest of the staff. The remarks were underwhelming. “Not bad at all” said one person, and “Much improved since the last show” said another. The tepid remarks failed to mask their lack of exuberance for the new car.

Cathy Wu, an executive secretary born in China, and educated in Japan and England, stood quietly sipping her tea and listening to the comments of others. Finally she raised her voice and said, “Well, it just looks fat, dumb, and ugly to me!” The designers were stunned by her comments and the review meeting quickly broke up. Deeply chagrined, the designers returned to their studios to meet and discuss the comments and consider possible re-designs. Some months later, when the new car was unveiled at the Tokyo International Automobile Show, it was a major hit with media and consumers alike. Every member of the NDI design team pointed to the comments of Cathy Wu as the origin of the new and remarkably successful design.

As British design icon James Dyson said, “You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking that they have been taught to think.” Listen carefully to amateurs. Their sometimes obtuse observations may ultimately spell the difference between failure and success for your innovative ideas.

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


Keywords

Innovation, leadership, corporate communications, compensatory behavior, design


References

Dyson, J. (2003). Against the odds. New York: Texere.
Hirshberg, J. (1998). The creative priority. New York: HarperBusiness.

Town Crier for Innovation

Andrew and Sirkin said, the “Chief innovator is a role often played by the CEO or chairman, especially when the company must make a change from another business strategy, such as cost cutting, merger and acquisition, or geographic expansion.” IDEO CEO Tom Kelley likewise noted, “The role of Director s more complex and nuanced than any other in the world of innovation…You are not just in charge of today’s operations. You are responsible for making sure there is a tomorrow.”

While the CEO takes numerous actions to encourage innovation, including giving permission and providing specific resources, the most important role of the CEO is to loudly, continually, and convincingly promote the absolute necessity of innovation. Corporate executives must publically endorse innovative work to signal their expectation of others in the company to provide cooperation and assistance. As author Scott Berkun noted, “Whether through power, inspiration, or charisma, managers have the singular burden of protecting their teams…If a project needs more time, money, or political cover fire than its leader can provide, the effort will be discovered, lobotomized, or killed.” It is impossible to over-communicate the necessity of innovation and the CEO should utilize as many communication methods as possible to continually focus employee attention on innovation. Whether through formal speeches, memoranda, emails, annual reports, videos, or face-to-face meetings, the drumbeat must always echo the same theme: “Innovation is critical to our corporate future, and everyone is expected to actively participate.”

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


Keywords

Innovation, leadership, corporate communications, resilience


References

Andrew, J. & Sirkin, H. (2006). Payback: reaping the rewards of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
Kelley, T. (2005). The ten faces of innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Innovation Begins With An Eye

What is visible is an important first element in our process of perception. Common to most creative people is the concept that “Innovation begins with an eye.” Joan Fulton Suri of IDEO noted, “The starting point for most of our projects—whether related to products, spaces, or services—is observation of behavior in its natural setting. Teams do this together, along with clients, as a way of learning firsthand about the context, habits, rituals, priorities, processes, and values of the people we are designing for.” IDEO CEO David Kelley also asserted that, “Focused observation can be a powerful source of innovation. As you observe people in their natural settings, you should not only look for the nuances of human behavior but also strive to infer motivation and emotion.” Mark May said that revising your view may yield different results: “The value to innovation in learning to see lies in changing your perspective on the problem. Viewing the subject from every possible angle is a technique artists, sculptors, and photographers use regularly to enhance their ability to capture and render ‘the truth.’”

Because of the importance of first-hand observation to perception and innovation, Kim & Mauborgne said that field research should be the purview of corporate employees: “Send a team into the field, putting managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of: how people use or don’t use their products or services. This step may seem obvious, but we have found that managers often out-source this part of the strategy-making process. They rely on reports other people (often at one or two removes from the world they report on) have put together. A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself.”

In the 19th century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “Earth's crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” If we have not noticed God’s dynamic presence in the world, perhaps it is because we have outsourced our eyes.

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


Keywords

Innovation, market research, empathic research, observation, customers


References

Browning, E.B. (1864). Aurora Leigh. London: J. Miller.
Kelley, T. (2000). The art of innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Kim, W. & Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue ocean strategy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
May, M. (2007). The elegant solution. New York: Free Press.
Suri, J. (2005). Thoughtless acts? San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

God Changes Minds

Enough was enough! Milton was a popular and highly respected bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and was attending the denomination’s annual conference. The discussion at the conference turned to possible new technologies that would help men achieve greater levels of success and prosperity. A report to the denomination even included the possibility of a future flying machine to transport people from city to city. Milton was furious! From his chair in the audience he rose and loudly decried the absurdity of such talk, noting that it was blasphemy against God to believe that man would ever fly. Milton very publically stomped out of the conference, gathered his wife and children, and caught the next train home.

In the years that followed, Milton underwent a gradual but nevertheless remarkable change. He bought his young sons a toy “helicopter,” based on an invention of French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Penaud. It was roughly a foot long and made of paper, bamboo and cork with a rubber band to twirl its rotor. His sons were captivated by it, and when it eventually wore out, they built another. As their interest in mechanics grew over the years, Milton made sure that his sons had access to the latest books and journals on the subject. Milton provided financial and emotional support when the boys started and grew fledgling companies, and even visited his sons Orville and Wilbur as they experimented with new models of aircraft on the windswept beaches of North Carolina. God changed the mind and heart of Bishop Milton Wright, and his crucial but unheralded support changed the world.

Are you open to a change of mind?


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

Keywords

Innovation, airplane, Wright Brothers, Milton Wright, Holy Spirit

References

Crouch, T. (2003). The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Leadership Obedience

Please check out my recent article entitled “Downstream from Babel: Lessons in Obedience for Contemporary Leaders” in the journal Inner Resources for Leaders.

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

Deciding What Is Right

Christian innovation is not limited to developing the new to replace that which already exists. It also means deciding for and supporting that which is important and should never change. Albert Einstein, one of the most remarkable people in world history, was exiled from Nazi Germany because he was a Jew. He said the following:

“Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love for freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

In this period of moral and ethical ambiguity, what does the Church stand for today?

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

Keywords

Innovation, Einstein, Nazi Germany, doctrine, faithfulness

References

Cochrane, A. (1962). The Church’s Confession Under Hitler. Philadelphia: Westminster.

Minds Limit (And Extend) Innovation

All innovation is dependent on the limitations of the human mind. We are unable to change and improve that which we cannot perceive and understand. As Canadian scholar Alexander Manu noted, “An individual’s or organization’s inability to recognize the meaning and potential of signals—be they in emerging technologies or emergent behavior—comes from the limits of their rational boundaries.” Our minds consistently retreat to the known and familiar.

One fascinating example was provided by Schoemaker & Day. The early morning hours of December 7, 1941 had been exceptionally busy for the captain of the destroyer USS Ward. Just hours earlier the ship had detected an enemy submarine moving toward Pearl Harbor. Releasing its depth charges, the crew of the Ward had sunk the submarine. While sailing toward Pearl Harbor, the captain could hear muffled explosions coming from the mainland. Turning to his lieutenant commander, the captain said, "I guess they are blasting the new road from Pearl Harbor to Honolulu." Even though his ship had engaged a foreign submarine only hours before, the captain made sense of the exploding sounds by reverting to his peacetime mind-set and completely failed to perceive the hostilities that lay just ahead.

How do we expand our sensemaking abilities? Education, experience, interaction with others, intentionally trying on new ideas, and developing multiple perspectives all help. Another important way is to ask God to “open the eyes of our heart.” In Ephesians 1:17-18 (NKJV) we read the prayerful admonition, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints…” There can be no clearer vision than that given by God.

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

Keywords

Innovation, sensemaking, leadership, institutional learning, perception

References

Holy Bible, New King James Version (1982). Nashville: Thomas Holman Publishers.
Manu, A. (2007). The Imagination challenge. Berkeley: New Riders.
Prange, G. (1982). At dawn we slept. New York: Penguin Books.
Schoemaker, P. & Day, G. (Spring 2009). How to make sense of weak signals. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(3), 81-89.

Innovating Christianity(?!)

Organizations, including churches, corporations, and universities, continually face the challenge of new and unsettling ideas. The preservation of longstanding corporate values, ideals, and principles is the sine qua non as new ideas are considered. Personal and group alignment with the “main thing” helps guarantee organizational perseverance, and the organization doesn’t want to fall prey to every new idea. As we learned in Ephesians 4, the faithful are enjoined “that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting…”

And yet, without fresh ideas and innovation, an organization quickly stagnates and dies. IDEO CEO Tom Kelley noted that leadership plays an important role in ushering new ideas into the organization: “You are not just in charge of today’s operations. You are responsible for making sure there is a tomorrow. You must constantly juggle the balls necessary to make new projects happen, to replace a just-finished innovation with a fresh exploration of another opportunity.”

This begs some important questions. Are there definable differences between new and untried ideas, doctrine, and dogma? How do we separate what is cultural baggage from essential biblical truth? When are orthodoxy, tradition, and best practices essential foundations, and when do they become unnecessary weighty impediments? What is the connection between personal and organizational revelation? In the crucible of idea consideration, can the process of discernment be speeded up or improved? What roles do leaders play in organizational acceptance of new information, and what roles do employees play in vetting new ideas prior to the leader’s acceptance of them? These important questions lie at the nexus of change management, the life of ideas, values transmission, and ideals preservation. These are dark woods that many fear and consciously avoid. It is an area that we must nonetheless choose to explore with an open mind and committed heart.

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

Keywords

Innovation, values, corporate history, doctrine, dogma, leadership

References

Kelley, T. (2005). The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Hazy Memories of Innovation

It was Henry Ford who asserted, "History is more or less bunk” to a newspaperman from the Chicago Tribune in 1916. Ford was urging people to live in the present and not to be hobbled by tradition or orthodoxy. Mr. Ford also unintentionally focused on another issue: our historical record of innovation is accidently hazy at best, and intentionally distorted at worst. In brief, the guys who “won,” e.g. created the most successful innovation, were often those who helped write the revisionist history of their innovation efforts. As Scott Berkun noted, “Just because dominant designs developed before we were born, or in fields so far from our own that we’re ignorant of their struggles, doesn’t mean their arrival was predictable, orderly, or even in our best interest. Yet, the dominant designs, the victors of any innovative pursuit, are the ones that get most of history’s positive attention.” Looking in the rear-view mirror can distort historical reality: “Much of the literature of the history of technology is colored by post hoc kinds of explanations—that is, explanations that account for the emergence of a technology based on the final effects that the technology has” (Friedel, 2007). James Utterback similarly discussed historical distortion: “The emergence of a dominant design is not necessarily predetermined, but is the result of the interplay between technical and market choices at any one time.” That history doesn’t have to be too lengthy to be blurred. As Steve Wozniak, inventor of the personal computer for Apple said, “That’s what’s been bothering me—the fact that no one has gotten the story straight about how I built the first computers at Apple and how I designed them, and what happened afterward.” The lesson to be learned is that, to be of value, tales of innovation should come from primary sources, be consistent with other verifiable historical records, and always be considered with a measure of doubt. As my grandmother used to say, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”

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


Keywords

Innovation, historical record, innovation history, technological change

References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Cambridge: O’Reilly.
Friedel, R. (2007). A culture of improvement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Utterback, J. (1996). Mastering the dynamics of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Wozniak, S. (2006). iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon. New York: Norton & Company.

Emergent Innovation

To meet the increasing pressure for innovative ideas, companies often impose new and foreign innovation techniques on company employees. Conversely, emergent innovation is a new paradigm that seeks out, recognizes, and helps promote useful innovation methodologies already successfully being used in the organization by “invisible innovators.” For more details, please read Emergent Innovation: A New Strategic Paradigm in the latest Regent University Journal of Strategic Leadership.

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


Keywords

Innovation, emergent innovation, Christian innovation, leadership, innovation theory