Last year, I volunteered to participate in Brown University's Women's Launchpad Program which pairs women alumni in industry (me) with senior women for mentoring in career and graduate school planning.  My mentee, Sarah, was a Mechanical Engineering major from the Boston area and leader on the Women's Crew Team. Our love of Brown gave us an immediate common ground and we quickly found others. We talked/emailed/texted at least weekly for the academic year. 

Sarah's passion was around designing things. She had a love of designing toys and learned through her summer internship that she just loved designing period!  Her passion for designing really was a passion for solving problems, for improving, for creating.  Her passion for toys was a playful, multi-faceted interest in things that incorporated shape, texture, color, size.  As a leader on the crew team, Sarah knew how to work hard, not just at rowing, but as a scholar-athlete, who also had a job while getting great grades at an Ivy League school - no small feat.  Sarah clearly valued and understood team work.

What did mentoring entail? Guidance on choices, pros/cons, looking at options, proper ‘business' protocol.  But the greatest thing I could offer her was how to network - how to find people, how to reach out - for her to learn to get exposure to as many ideas, types of people, and interests as possible.

When Sarah graduated in May, she went off to her internship at Cummins before returning to Brown for a masters program in Innovation Management & Entrepreneurship for Engineers (PRIME).  Within 4 weeks of her 12 week internship, she was offered a permanent position, even after she completed her masters 1 year later!  After the internship, she came up to visit me so I could introduce her to several different companies that are engineering based, but diverse in their product/service offerings so she could see all the different things her degree, and her passion, enabled her to do.  Well, suffice it to say that what was to be informational interviews turned into a series of job offers virtually on the spot (I will try not to boast about Brown alumni, but it's hard :) ).

While Sarah keeps thanking me and saying how grateful she is, I am the one feeling richly blessed. I feel so proud to know Sarah and to be a part of her future.  Sarah's maturity, wisdom, thoughtfulness, open-mindedness and passion at 22 are so reassuring for our future.  How many of us were this well prepared, this thoughtful at 22?  It is also so encouraging and hopeful to see how Brown, after almost 350 yrs, still turns out fine young people who have and continue to make a difference in the world.

The WLP program is focused on helping senior women...but perhaps the greatest benefit is to us alumni - to be a part of helping this great young generation seize their future and be a small part of making that real.

Go find someone to mentor - in your company, your division, your alma mater, wherever...the rewards are priceless and enduring!

This whole mess with General McChrystal, combined with the BP Oil mess, makes it obvious how management needs to change.  A Washington Post article says to blame Obama, not the General and at the senate hearings, Chevron said they empower their people to say no.  While the military is, and needs to be, command-and-control, business and parts of the military need to move beyond that.

There are lots of theories of why McChrystal did this - naivity, hubris, brashness, his aides failed to protect him or perhaps it was his only way to get this voice heard since it wasn't being heard through the proper channels.  The TransOcean and Halliburton folks say now that they disagreed and knew there were dangers but got overruled by BP - did these guys run this up their command chain to try to overrule BP?

We still have a system where blowing the whistle is formidable for lots of reasons.   So what does this have to do with strategy & innovation?  Lots - you've got to create an environment where it's ok to say no, or stop, or wait, or that's not right.  Without that, you never get an honest perspective of your business, which is dangerous.  We need to know the facts in order to create real strategies that can be executed, to create new products, services, processes, business models, and keep our employees safe.

So, in your organization, with your team, be willing to hear it all - factor it all in and make your decisions, but create a culture that values honesty (nicely) and you will be on your way to creating an innovative culture!

Sorry its taken me so long to blog about the Open Innovation Success Stories forum on May 18^th.  Thank you all for making it such a great success with about 100 people from various industries in Northeast Ohio.  Everyone seemed engaged, some great networking and lots of learning.  Our next big event will be Nov. 16^th so hold the date and more information will follow.  The video will be up shortly and I'll send out the URL but in the meantime, let me summarize. 

Mike Waite, President of Menasha Packaging , spoke first about how he and his team had to reshape the business model and culture of the 160+ yr old Menasha Packaging. Getting people to start contributing ideas was a challenge.  Mike created a President's Award where nominees came from the employees themselves. A rigorous all-employee communication plan was created to continually share all the exciting things going on,  showcase some failures so people would know it was ok to fail and that Menasha had the ability to kill ideas quickly and move on. Success-sharing, where a share of Menasha's profitability is given to all employees as a percent of salary, demonstrates the collaborative nature of innovation.  When the leadership team redirected their management bonus to give to employees the commitment to innovation was further solidified. Innovation came from all over; while the designers were the traditional resource, innovation came from the plant floor and from sales.  Customer-focused innovation made it easier to create a collaborative culture, not just across functions within a plant but across plants so GMs now help other GM's by sharing resources and ideas, facilitated by collaboration tools. This extends to the sales force.  In the old days, sales was king but with changes in sales compensation and reward, sales people realize that they can in fact sell more and increase customer loyalty by bringing in a team, such as designers, customer service, sustainability, to work with the customer, in some cases, even residing at the customer's site.  Finance needs to be a part of the process from the beginning, because finance people can kill more good ideas than IP lawyers can! But how do you know if an idea is good or not? While Menasha has an innovation process, sometimes you just don't know which ideas will be successful - it's partly intuitive, and it's mostly being close to the customer but you need to engage in continous dialogue with your employees so they know it's ok to give ideas, even if they don't work.  You need to remind your people that just because 1 of their ideas didn't work, it doesn't mean the next one won't - that's what the process is for which helps de-emotionalize the idea.  Bottom line? Leadership - Menasha's top leadeship and the GMs can make or break the culture - show and share success, show and share failure, and communicate.  Results? While their industry has been in decline, a few competitors going bancrupt, Menasha has grown in both revenue and profitability, all by meeting and exceeding their customers' needs.

Next, Jackie Hutter, The Hutter Group, talked about a different way to view IP and innovation.   While most innovators look at IP as a way to protect their ideas, IP can be a way to create new ideas.  By nature, we tend to look at our inventions in a siloed manner.  We tend to ignore how others have tried to solve the problem.  Prior art is used to make sure our own invention is patentable instead of using it as a way to learn what has and hasn't worked.  Innovators need to learn "IP Mining".  By searching through patents, you can learn what companies are investing in and what they are not investing in which reveals their strategies, where they think there is a higher likelihood of success and failure, and how they have been approaching the problem.  Furthermore, by looking at what's been patented and if/how it was commercialized, you can learn what types of approaches succeeded and why and it can spur more thinking about the problem to be solved.  So, use patents as a way to stimulate more possible solutions to the problem.  If you start using patents at the front-end of the innovation process, before you finalized a solution, they can provide a plethora of data to help guide and vet your thinking so that you have a higher likelihood of success.  As we've seen, there is rapid growth in the number of patent applications which has increased the number the lawyers needed (going into) patent law and increased the time to process patents and the need for globalization.  The backlog depends on the type of patent, about 6-7yrs at times.  New leadership at the USPTO is trying to improve and streamline the process, and succeeding slowly.  Last year, 2009, more non-US companies filed patents in the USA than US-based companies did.  This clearly demonstrates that the USA remains a critical country in which to patent.  Jackie rarely recommends filing overseas patents because they are so hard to protect and prosecute.  Key take-away is to view patents in a radically different way than most of us have even thought of to increase innovation.

The last speaker, Matt Hlavin, President Thogus Inc ., innovanomics.com -  discussed how he and his team have transformed a 60yr old traditional plastic molding injector into the google of manufacturing.  For years, they were at mercy of the big 3 automakers, with the big 3 setting the terms and as Matt says, being a savings and loan for the auto giants.  So, in the late 1990s, they fired their auto customers, losing about 50% of their business.  Thogus diversified into medical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, aerospace, plumbing and industrial industries. While Thogus had no debt, Matt describes the company as too linear in thinking. They had to change their business model if they wanted to shape the landscape of their business. So, Matt invested in new robotic machines for the injection molding business and new technologies to become an engineering firm focusing on product development. The new technology allows them to make custom prototypes for small business start-ups or large corporations quickly - something unheard of in the industry. Product concepts are electronically transmitted to the machine and out comes a production-ready part.  So far they've made products ranging from custom iPhone covers to a blending machine pitcher.  This technology has allowed them to get a purchase order from a medical device company in a day. Currently, manufacturing accounts for 90% of Thogus's business. But in 5 years, Matt expects to have more rapid prototyping machines than injection molding machines. But, while technology has played a critical part, the underlying success is in transforming the culture.  To make risk-taking ‘safe', Matt uses the analogy of Thogus as a teaching hospital and strongly emphasises mentoring. By using cross-functional teams, with a designated person assigned to the customer, and rapid prototyping to try the idea quickly so that it can be refined or changed, Thogus mitigates risk - many minds, may quick tries, so fail fast and inexpensively.  Additionally, Matt has changed both performance management and professional development - people are paid for performance, with innovation and new ideas included in the critera and people are trained to understand the business, to do their jobs, to stretch their minds. Results? Business is up 80 percent over the previous year, so Thogus has hired 16 people this year.  Local school kids, even elementary age, are given tours of the facility as it becomes a ‘destination' to try ideas and while waiting for the printed part, play a little Wii or ping-pong.

Many of you have heard the story.  A homeless man saves a woman who is being attacked (and fled) but is severely stabbed and left for dead on the sidewalk in Jamaica Queens, part of NYC .  Video surveillance shows people walking by, looking, stopping, ignoring, even a guy taking a picture with his cell phone who didn't bother to stop.  Firefighters responding to a non-life threatening call happened across the homeless man.  He was already dead.

What the heck is wrong with us? How can people just walk by? Not stop or not even, at a bare minimum call 911 from their cell phones? Stop to take a picture but not to help? Have we become so totally depraved, indifferent, scared, what?  Psychologists of course have a label for this - it's called the "Bystander Effect" - the more people around, the less likely people are to help someone in trouble.  If there is an emergency, the people around more inclined to act if there are no or few witnesses with them.  Gee, how terribly encouraging.  We have a label for this ‘syndrome' - let's not call it inhumane, indifferent, lousy human behavior, let's call it ‘Bystander Effect' - makes it sound so much more palatable, justified, rational (or rationalize-able).

This is the basic problem - we can't just call things what they are - we have to have names.  This is a very simple case of political correctness run amok.  Betcha that today, Hitler would be psychoanalyzed and there would be some syndrome or illness for being totally, completely, absolutely evil.  Saddam Hussein's mother was probably not nice to him.  Stalin had ‘issues' he couldn't get over.  I'm not comparing this 1 act to the incredible evil of these men, but it is gradations of what happens when we don't stand up for what is right and call out what is wrong - using real terms like evil, sinful - instead of theraputic terms.

In my weekly email sent out today (a day late I admit), I included a WSJ book review about Dietrich Bonhoeffer - a Christian pastor in Germany during Hitler's rise and who stood up to him, including being part of a plot to assassinate Hitler.  Read the article - it puts things into perspective.

As we start our week, I pray that each of us will be there to help someone in need - of any sort and scale - think of how many lives we touch in a week at work, at home, at play, on the soccer or baseball or track field, the grocery store, the gas station, everywhere!  And don't cower or fear standing up for what is right - instead fear facing yourself in the mirror at the end of the day if you don't.  Preserve and protect one of the gifts that make us human - our ability to care, and do something about it.

 

 Seth Godin's blog today, Rights and Responsibilities , along with an article I read earlier this week from the Cato Institute on Paternalism (slippery slopes) and today's Sound of Ideas on WCPN at 9am on Fighting Fat via Public Policy

got me thinking about the issue of policy-rights-responsibilites-slippery slopes-fine lines.  We've had the bans on smoking, we've now got bans in trans-fats, talk of a soda tax, etc. etc.  

In Ohio (unlike NJ where I grew up), wearing a motorcycle helmet is optional; in Massachusetts, there was (is still?) a $50 surcharge on speeding violations to pay for head injuries in car accidents for uninsured.  We're legislated to wear motorcycle helmets in some states, fined for not wearing a seat belt, etc. etc.  Now one can argue if these are ‘rules' or just consequences (e.g., hey, you really don't HAVE to wear your seatbelt in Ohio, you can just pay the fine, it's your CHOICE). 

The HCR bill will REQUIRE health insurance coverage - and that will be debated as to whether it's constitutional or not - but it's a very strong sign of how the gov't - at all levels - is becoming more and more of big brother.  Ok, I'm certainly not going to argue that trans-fats, sugars, lack of exercise are good for us - they clearly are not. We also know that obesity etc. will cause major issues for the future in terms of quality of life, length of ‘healthy' life, economic costs in terms of entitlements, productivity, work force, competitiveness etc.  But the fine line between what is really proper to regulate and require vs. becoming Orwellian is very fine and the gov't has never dealt with fine lines well.

In general, in America, we've confused liberty, license and freedom ; we've abdicated our own personal responsibility and focused on our rights/entitlements, leaving a large vacuum which our gov't is more than happy to fill. And this one in particular has me very very concerned - I don't want to live in France or Germany, not even in the UK...I want to live here because we are different - tho these differences seem to be evaporating.  We need to be more responsible, teach our kids to be responsible and make it a requirement for civil and ‘citizen' behavior instead of a choice.