Becoming a successful executive is a fairly linear path. You start at the bottom and learn to solve basic problems in your field or industry. As you gain experience and improve your skills you are given more responsibility, begin to manage teams and work diligently to set up the practices and processes to help your team succeed.
The best executives make those around them better, by fostering a positive work environment, minimizing drama and providing strategy and direction that will enable the team meet its objectives. That’s how you deliver consistent results and continue to rise up through the ranks to the top of your profession.
At some point, however, you need to do more than just plan and execute strategy, you have to innovate. Every business model is disrupted eventually. Changes in technology, competitive landscape and customer needs make that inevitable and, unfortunately, executive experience doesn’t equip your for it. Here’s how you can make the shift from operations to innovation.
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In 1938, Bill Hewitt and David Packard, two graduates of Stanford University’s engineering program, decided to start a company in a rented garage with an initial investment of $538. In the decades that followed, their company, Hewlett Packard, became one of the most prominent technology firms in the world.
They also planted the seed for what is now known as the Silicon Valley garage startup. Today, we don’t see anything unusual about ambitious young entrepreneurs with an idea to change the world scraping together a prototype, attracting capital from venture investors and disrupting industry giants.
Yet now we’re entering a new era of innovation and things are no longer so simple. For many so-called “hard technologies” – those that do not involve software or consumer gadgets — a prototype typically costs millions of dollars and requires sophisticated equipment to develop. That’s much harder to acheive, but these three companies are working to make it happen.
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“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” Ralph Waldo Emerson is said to have written (he didn’t) and since that time thousands of mousetraps have been patented. Still, despite all that creative energy and all those ideas, the original “snap trap,” invented by William Hooker in 1894, remains the most popular.
We’ve come to glorify ideas, thinking that more of them will lead to better results. This cult of ideas has led to a large cottage industry of consultants that offer workshops to exercise our creative capabilities with tools like brainstorming and SWOT analysis. We are, to a large extent, still chasing better mousetraps.
Still, one thing I constantly hear from executives I work with is that no one wants to hear about their ideas. The truth is that, just like all those mousetrap patents, most ideas are useless, very few are original and many have been tried before. So if you’re frustrated that nobody listens to your ideas, here’s why that happens and what you can do to fix it.
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A decade ago, clean energy seemed like a pipe dream. Solar panels, windmills and electric cars were widely considered to be something for wealthy tree huggers to assuage their conscience, rather than components of a serious energy policy. Now, however, Morgan Stanley predicts that renewables will overtake fossil fuels by 2020.
The appeal of clean energy has gone way beyond climate change and the environment. It’s now being increasingly driven by basic economics. Wind and solar energy have achieved grid parity in many places and, over the next decade, clean energy will become far cheaper than traditional sources.
The sticking point is energy storage. While today’s dominant technology, lithium-ion, has made great strides, it is approaching theoretical limits. So we need to discover fundamentally new chemistries in order to continue to lower costs and increase the clean energy footprint. To get there, we’ll need to forge a new partnership between government and private industry.
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In 2004, I found myself in the unusual position of leading a major news organization during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. During those heady, but confusing days, I struggled to understand the events around me, without much success. It seemed like a strange and mysterious force was propelling events forward.
In the decade and a half since then, I have studied many social movements, both historical and more recent, in an effort to better grasp those events, speaking to revolutionaries of all stripes. One thing I have found is that while all social movements are very different, those that actually succeed are remarkably similar in their principles.
As a diehard football (and Eagles!) fan, I have watched the anthem protests unfold with interest. It is admirable that world class athletes are willing to risk their livelihoods and reputations for a higher cause, but disappointing how little real progress has been made in terms of concrete results. Here’s how you can make your efforts more effective.
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Historically, building technology had been about capabilities and features. Engineers and product designers would come up with new things that they thought people wanted, figure out how to make them work and ship “new and improved” products. The result was often things that were maddeningly difficult to use.
That began to change when Don Norman published his classic, The Design of Everyday Things and introduced concepts like dominant design, affordances and natural mapping into industrial design. The book is largely seen as pioneering the user-centered design movement. Today, UX has become a thriving field.
Yet artificial intelligence poses new challenges. We speak or type into an interface and expect machines to respond appropriately. Often they do not. With the rising popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa and Google Home, we have a dire need for clear principles for human-AI interactions. Two researchers at IBM have embarked on a journey to do just that.
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Entrepreneurship in America recently hit a 40 year low, with far less business creation and new jobs coming from startups than in the past. Productivity numbers show a similar trend, with levels today far below what they were in previous decades. Clearly, these trends are troubling signs that need to be reversed.
To many, this is surprising because we seem to see innovation all around us, from smarter smartphones to speakers that talk to us and respond to our commands. However, the truth is that information and communication technology makes up only 6% of advanced economies. Silicon Valley can’t build the future alone.
Even more disturbing, this decline didn’t begin recently, but way back in the 1970s, with just a brief respite during the late 1990s and early 2000s. So if we want to revive innovation and entrepreneurship in America we have to fix some deep rooted-problems and reverse long-standing trends. Here are three basic things that we can do that will put us on the right path.
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When we think about entrepreneurs, we usually think about young technologists in co-working spaces coming up with the next big smartphone app. Yet some of the smartest innovators aren’t working with code or looking for a lucrative exit. They are working to find sustainable solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems.
At the recent Falak Unreasonable Summit, I met three social entrepreneurs doing just that. One is unlocking the wealth that many of the world’s poor have tied up in livestock. Another is bringing light to some of the world’s most remote places. A third is helping transform refugees into entrepreneurs in war-torn Kurdistan.
What all three have in common is that, rather than merely providing assistance, they are helping some of the world’s most needy communities to leverage assets they already have. We often forget that even the world’s poorest people are not necessarily helpless. They have skills, energy and nonconventional assets that can be unlocked to create a better life.
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When Enron was formed in 1985 through the merger of two natural gas pipeline companies, it became the second largest gas marketer in the America. Over the next decade the firm grew to be a dominant force in the industry and built a sophisticated trading operation that could compete with the biggest New York banks.
It soon became clear that trading could be incredibly profitable. Unlike marketing physical gas, you didn’t have to invest in expensive physical assets. In the years that followed, Enron’s financial wizardry made it a Wall Street darling until, of course, it was all revealed as smoke and mirrors. A scandal erupted and Enron went bust.
Today, once again physical assets are going out of vogue. Pundits preach that instead of building things in the real world, business should “harness the power of networks.” and create platforms based on “digital, intellectual, and relationship assets.” The truth is that this is just a new version of the Enron pixie dust of 20 years ago. Real businesses have real assets.
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It seems like every day we see or hear about a breakthrough new discovery that will change everything. Some, like perovskites in solar cells and CRISPR are improvements on existing technologies. Others, like quantum computing and graphene promise to open up new horizons encompassing many applications.
Nevertheless, we are still waiting for a true market impact. Quantum computing and graphene have been around for decades and still haven’t hit on their “killer app.” Perovskite solar cells and CRISPR are newer, but haven’t really impacted their industries yet. And those are just the most prominent examples.
The problem isn’t necessarily with the discoveries themselves, many of which are truly pathbreaking, but that there’s a fundamental difference between discovering an important new phenomenon in the lab and creating value in the marketplace. To bridge that gap we need to create a new ecosystem for bringing science to market.
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