Henry

iCamp, Bangalore

India’s first Innovation Barcamp (iCamp) is happened in Bangalore on 23rd Feb 2008, more than 80 people participated. It was a great success with interesting topics and discussions.

The camp was started with my presentation on Design Driven Development (D3), many discussions happened around my presentations until we ran out of time.

Some of the other presentations, includes

• Innovation in MBA and Education by Pavan Soni
• Unusual sources for innovation by Kalyan
• Spirituality in innovation by William Miller

Read Saurabh Minni (one of the participants) commentary for more detail

My Presentation

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Bringing Innovation 101: Unlearn everything you know about Innovation

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” - Gloria Steinem

In spite of getting a place in vision statement of every organization and spoken by every CEOs, organizations do very little to bring the innovation in a true sense.

The important thing which stops us from bringing innovation is what we know as Innovation is not innovation.

Unlearning everything we know as innovation, is the first step to innovate.

#1: Innovation is Big

We all taught “Innovation is Big”,

This very thinking makes innovation expensive.

To become an innovative company, YOU NEED NOT TO INVENT THE NEXT BIG THING, PERIOD.

As Hugh Macleod, mentioned in How To Be Creative, "The idea (Innovation) doesn't have to be big. It just has to change the world" 

Anything which brings a small improvement in a way we (especially our customers) do things is INNOVATION.

#2: Innovation is an activity

Most of us think that innovation is an activity, which is need massive investment in terms of resources, to make it worst, many think that it's a non billable activity.

Believe me, Innovation is not an activity, IT JUST A WAY OF THINKING 

Create a culture, Bring defined innovative processes like Design Driven Development(D3), innovation will flourish.

#3: We need Innovators

Innovation is not belong to a set of people or set of skills

Everyone can innovate

"Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten", Hugh Macleod, How To Be Creative

YOU NEED NOT TO HIRE ANY NEW TALENTS.

All you need is a leader, a leader, who can bring the best from people, who can create a culture of innovation

The same Apple, which created  some breakthrough products , was struggled to innovate when Steve Jobs left Apple during 1997.

Every organization needs someone to drive the innovation, this is exactly what Bill Gates do at Microsoft as a Chief Architect.

"Before you can be creative, you must be courageous."
-Joey Reiman, CEO, BrightHouse

Bringing Innovation 101: Managers to Leaders

Software development is not as simple as A + B = C, It is more a collaborative effort of different skills.

As someone said “Building great software is easy: build a great team and they'll make the software for you.”. Building a team is not a managerial job. 

There is an interesting comparison between managers and leaders in their article titled “Are you a manager or leader?”

MANAGERS administer are a copy maintain systems/structure focus control short-term how/when bottom line imitate accept good soldier do things right

LEADERS innovate are an original develop people focus trust long-range what/why horizon originate challenge own person do the right thing

As you can see, it's clear that, what we need leaders not managers. Unfortunately, apart from making every other aspect of the software development unimportant, including quality of code, maintainability and usability, etc., delivery focused approach makes a process based managerial environment, which is completely opposite of the people based environment.

Managers might be good option for a process based controlled environment such as manufacturing, but defiantly not suited for software development.

As quoted by Azim Premji in his memo “Why employees leave organizations” 

Largest studies undertaken by the Gallup Organization. The study surveyed over a million employees and 80,000 managers and was published in a book called First Break All The Rules.

It came up with this surprising finding:

If you're losing good people, look to their immediate supervisor. More than any other single reason, he is the reason people stay and thrive in an organization. And he's the reason why they quit, taking their knowledge, experience and contacts with them. Often, straight to the competition. "People leave managers not companies," write the authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. "So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people - in the form of better pay, better perks and better training - when, in the end, turnover is mostly manager issue." If you have a turnover problem, look first to your managers. Are they driving people away? Beyond a point, an employee's primary need has less to do with money, and more to do with how he's treated and how valued he feels. Much of this depends directly on the immediate manager. And yet, bad bosses seem to happen to good people everywhere.

Innovation can happen only by empowering people, not by following a defined set of processes.

All you need to empower people is Leaders, not Managers.

Here is, what you can do, as an organization

1) Hire Good Leaders
2) Upgrade your Managers to Leaders
3) Reward excellent failures. Punish mediocre successes. - Phil Daniels

Bringing Innovation 101: Delivery to Wow

The systems, processes, culture, environment, people, policies, and behaviors are the result of who we are and what we want to achieve.

The current model used by most of the IT service companies, (especially Indian based) is the result of their focus on ‘Delivery’, which was evolved during the early stage of out sourcing, where these companies are expected to deliver only the code against the given functionalists.

This approach works perfectly for delivering code, but not for creating innovative solutions.
Here are my reasons:

Innovation, who cares?: 
In current model, from the Project Managers to Programmers are rewarded based on deliveries, not on the usefulness on the product/solution. As a result, no one cares about customers and  what they do with the software.

Signoff Syndrome:
Though this is result of Fixed Bid projects, we continue following this in non fixed projects, just to safeguard our delivery commitments. This raises a very fundamental question on why we are in business; Just to Deliver or Make a difference in our customers and customer’s customer life.

Refer my previous post for more details on “Sign-off” syndrome

You are Smart? Keep it with you:
This is the dangerous of all. Since the game is not about innovation, there is no place for smart people with some great ideas. The statistics shows that smart and innovative people tent to change jobs and employer, more frequent than delivery based people.

Am I against ‘Delivery’? Absolutely not

Take the example, Microsoft, Apple, and Sun Microsystems.
They all started in the same time, with similar passionate people, and all on the same business

So, what makes Microsoft and Apple, so successful than Sun.

The answer lies in a small change in their focus

When the wind change,
Microsoft and Apple started writing “Software for Improve People Life”
Sun stayed with “Software for Improve Technology”

Microsoft and Apple still a technology companies, but their focus is on the people and their life

The same way, Changing your focus to Wow, doesn’t mean not delivering.

For me, it is a question of purpose, purpose of our life.
if you are not making a difference
better quit the game

So, How do we move from Delivery to Wow?
The answer is simple

First, Starting thinking about how we can make difference to our customers

Second, Change the pattern of incentives, from Delivery to WoW.

In the book Freakonomics, The authors Steve D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, clearly explains the role ‘Incentives’ in everything we do and there is nothing exceptional to this.

See my earlier post on Freakonomics: Information. Fear. Incentives.

Third, Teach your employees the concepts of Wow Projects a book written by  Tom Peters 

Bringing Innovation 101: Change your focal point

Most Transformations start at changing perception.  All you need to change perception is changing the focal point.

Take the example of business in general, what makes a business successful? Is it money, profit, revenue, or market share? Unfortunately some of the successful entrepreneurs have different opinion.

In a recent interview, when Business Week Senior Writer Steve Hamm asked Narayana Murthy, “did you ever imagine that Infosys would become such an important company in the worldwide tech industry?” this is exactly what he replied

"We were certain of one thing, and that is our value system. In fact, when we sat down in the bedroom of my apartment in 1981, we discussed for four hours what our objective should be. Should it be revenues, profits, market capitalization?

No, we said it should be none of those. We will seek respect from every one of the stakeholders. My view was if we sought respect we'd automatically do the right thing by each of them. We'd satisfy our customers, be fair to our employees, and follow the finest principles with respect to investors, we would not violate laws, and, finally, we'd make a difference to society.

And then, I said, automatically you'll get revenues and profits and all that"

The process, culture, system, which they have built over the years, is the result of focusing on their vision and values.

In a same way, bringing innovation needs a change in where we focus.

The model we follow in software development, especially in the offshore model, is build around what we call ‘Delivery’, it works as long as you are just a ‘Coding Shop‘, not tuned for running an innovative organization. Trying to trying to use this model for innovation is almost like focusing on 'Money' to build an Insofys.

The only way to bring innovation is, changing our focus from

1. Delivery to Wow
2. Software to Solution
3. Manger to Leader
4. Contract Negotiation to Collaboration
5. Customer Satisfaction to Customer Success

Bringing Innovation 101: Innovation is Transformation

‘If life is journey, then business is hiking’ - Henry Jacob (of course me)

Business is a constant process transformation, we always taken that extra mile in order to differentiate ourselves in the crowded market place.

Whether we like it or not, these transformations are inevitable. Not just to differentiate, even to serve our customers better, and to improve the way we work. Quality Initiatives, CMM, Offshore, Outsource are just few of them.

Since it is inevitable; we simply follow. Today every Indian IT company is CMM certified, all consulting companies have their Indian presence (IBM, Accenture, Gap Gemini, etc).

Since everyone follows, there is no other option than moving ahead.

Moving ahead is not simple. Sometime, we need to break rules, unlearn, and even change the organization from the ground up.

Brining Innovation is such a transformation and recognizing this is the first step to win this game.

Bringing Innovation 101: The New Game

Innovation is everywhere; soon every company in the plant is going to claim, even someone will be there to certify you as an innovator.

Often, I get calls from Indian based IT companies to train their employees on innovation, though I am glad that someone in those companies recognized the value of innovation.

But the real question is ‘is it that simple?’

When we faced similar situation in the name of Quality, many IT companies missed the opportunity and fooled themselves in the name of certification.

Let’s not make the same mistake,

This is a great opportunity, an opportunity to correct our mistakes, an opportunity to transform every organization and individual to their highest potential, and an opportunity to make difference.