In 2014, Stephenie Landry was finishing up her one-year stint as Technical Advisor to Jeff Wilke, who oversees Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, which is a mentor program that allows high potential executives to shadow a senior leader and learn first-hand. Her next assignment would define her career.
At most companies, an up-and-comer like Stephenie might be given a division to run or work on a big acquisition deal. Amazon, however, is a different kind of place. Landry wrote a memo outlining plans for a new service she’d been thinking about, Prime Now, which today offers one-hour delivery to customers in over 50 cities across 9 countries.
It’s no secret that Amazon is one of the world’s most innovative companies. Starting out as a niche service selling books online, it’s now not only a dominant retailer, but has pioneered new categories such as cloud computing and smart speakers. The key to its success is not any one process, but how it integrates a customer obsession deep within its culture and practice.
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In 1919, Mahatma Gandhi initiated a campaign of civil disobedience, including the sale of banned literature, fasting, prayer and work stoppages, to protest the oppressive Rowlatt Acts the British had recently passed. These were an immediate success, but soon turned disastrous and ultimately ended with the massacre at Amritsar.
He would later call this his Himalayan miscalculation. “I realized that before a people could be fit for offering civil disobedience, they should thoroughly understand its deeper implications,” he would later write in his autobiography. The same can be said for innovation. Before you embark on a game changing initiative, your organization needs to be prepared for it.
In a recent article for Harvard Business Review, columnist Scott Kirsner pointed to a survey of 270 corporate leaders that found that the most significant obstacles to innovation are not things like budget, skill sets or CEO support, but politics and culture. Those are pervasive issues and can’t be solved overnight, but they can be overcome. Here are 4 things you can do:
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“You can’t start building your network the day you need it, Dave Gray pointed out at the most recent Business Innovation Factory (BIF) Summit. The Summit meets every year, in Providence, Rhode, Island to connect an eclectic group of innovators, from technologists and inventors to artists and musicians.
Gray’s remark had a curious irony to it. Just an hour north of Providence sits Route 128, Boston’s famed “technology highway. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, it was an inability to form connections that led Boston’s large, vertically integrated, standalone firms to lose the edge to Silicon Valley’s ecosystem of startups.
So it is perhaps fitting that the theme that emerged from this year’s summit was how connection drives transformation. Make no mistake. Innovation is a team sport. Look behind any conspicuous accomplishment and you will find a community of purpose made up of small, tight-knit groups that form seemingly random connections to other tight-knit groups in order to create something truly new. That’s how an idea becomes a movement.
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By 2004, Don Berwick realized he had reached a crossroads. His organization, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) had been working since the late 80s to promote the quality methods that had transformed manufacturing to do the same for medicine. He had made some headway, but felt that progress had been too slow.
Things changed when he visited his son, who had been working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign at the time. Impressed, Berwick invited some of the political operatives to hold a day-long seminar and train the IHI staff on how a campaign operates. That, in essence, is how The 100,000 Lives Campaign was born.
In his plenary address at the IHI Forum later that year, he declared, “I think we should save 100,000 lives. And I think we should do that by June 14, 2006—18 months from today.” What followed was a movement that not only achieved its ambitious goals, but serves as a model for anybody who wants to create transformational change. Here’s how they did it.
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It’s long been conventional wisdom that the retail industry is dying. We’ve seen unprecedented store closings and bankruptcies at major chains such as Toys R US, Sears and Radio Shack and even successful chains are trimming locations. It seems that in a digital world, physical stores have become a thing of the past.
Yet if that were true, why are Apple, Amazon and now even the Coca-Cola Company investing heavily in retail locations? For every announcement of closures and divestments, there seems to be a similar announcement of investment and rebirth. Some firms, it seems, are learning to love the retail apocalypse.
The truth is that the retail industry isn’t dying, but going through some major shifts and needs to adapt to a world where the primary function of a physical store is not to drive transactions, but to service and support customers. To compete in this new reality, what’s needed is not so much to embrace new technology, but to reimagine the retail businesses.
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In the recession that followed the dotcom crash in 2000, the United States lost 5 million manufacturing jobs and, while there has been an uptick in recent years, all indications are that they are never coming back. Manufacturing, perhaps more than any other sector, relies on deep networks of skills and assets that tend to be highly regional.
The consequences of this loss are deep and pervasive. Losing a significant portion of our manufacturing base has led not only to economic vulnerability, but to political polarization. Clearly, it is important to rebuild our manufacturing base. But to do that, we need to focus on new, more advanced, technologies
That’s the mission of the Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) at the Department of Energy. By providing a crucial link between the cutting edge science done at the National Labs and private industry, it has been able to make considerable progress. As the collaboration between government scientists widen and deepens over time, US manufacturing may well be revived.
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In the first half of the 20th century, Alfred Sloan created the modern corporation at General Motors. In many ways, it was based on the military. Senior leadership at headquarters would make plans, while managers at individual units would be allocated resources and made responsible for for achieving mission objectives.
The rise of digital technology made this kind of structure untenable. By the time strategic information was gathered centrally, it was often too old to be effective. In much the same way, by the time information flowed up from operating units, it was too late to alter the plan. It had already failed.
So in recent years, agility and iteration has become the mantra. Due to pressures from the market and from shareholders, long-term planning is often eschewed for the needs of the moment. Yet today the digital era is ending and organizations will need to shift once again. We’re going to need to learn to combine long-range planning with empowered execution.
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In the seven years since IBM’s Watson beat two human champions in the game show Jeopardy, cognitive technologies have gone from a science fiction pipe-dream to a platform for essential business initiatives. Clearly, if you don’t have a plan for cognitive transformation, your chances for survival will be somewhat dim.
Yet progress to this point has been uneven. While there have clearly been some successes, we’ve all had tortured moments such as trying to access a human on customer service call. In some cases, things have gone seriously awry, such as when Amazon’s Echo has ordered unwanted merchandise.
Progress is never smooth. The early industrial revolution certainly had more than its share of problems, as did the dotcom era (remember Webvan?). The key is to go in with your eyes open, understanding that every transformation has its growing pains. With that in mind, here are four things you should know about big data and artificial intelligence.
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Every era is defined by the problems it tackles. At the beginning of the 20th century, harnessing the power of internal combustion and electricity shaped society. In the 1960s there was the space race. Since the turn of this century, we’ve learned how to decode the human genome and make machines intelligent.
None of these were achieved by one person or even one organization. In the case of electricity, Faraday and Maxwell established key principles in the early and mid 1800s. Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla came up with the first applications later in that century. Scores of people made contributions for decades after that.
The challenges we face today will be fundamentally different because they won’t be solved by humans alone, but through complex human-machine interactions. That will require a new division of labor in which the highest level skills won’t be things like the ability to retain information or manipulate numbers, but to connect and collaborate with other humans.
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In recent decades, innovation has become almost synonymous with digital technology. That wasn’t always true, of course. Long before the microchip was invented, we built an industrial economy based on electricity and internal combustion, harnessed the power of the atom and developed life-saving cures.
Nevertheless, lately everything seems to be digital. Entrepreneurs who create software apps and consumer gadgets can find themselves zillionaires in a matter of just a few years — or even a matter of months. Investors, not surprisingly, search far and wide to find the next Facebook or Google.
Today, however, we are entering a new era of innovation. The basic technology that powered the digital revolution is nearing its theoretical limits and the most exciting opportunities lie in new technologies. Many of these will be rooted in the physical world, as we learn to use bits to transform atoms. Some investors are already making the shift to a new model.
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