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I recently wrote about Umair Haque's work on smart growth. I spent some time today viewing his "Constructive Capitalism" presentation at Daytona, and it's a worthwhile investment of an hour to see it. One persistent thought I had, as I viewed his peripatetic slide flipping, was how ill suited the slide presentation format is to the way we think and speak.
Slides are assembled -- and meant to be displayed -- serially, moving forward one slide at a time. The presenter is supposed to put together a logical progression, the slides becoming a visual exposition. But thought is only artificially a linear progression. To appear polished, we force our thought process into an artificial presentation; the reality is much messier. We think interactively -- even if you're only interacting within your own mind -- and the connections are all over the place. Thinking moves forward, laterally, back, up down, all around. We go back to some ideas over and over again. And so, Haque keeps flipping back to a couple key slides over and over again, and while I appreciated the content, the experience could be disorienting at times.
This isn't the fault of the presenter - it's the fault of the ubiquitous presentation technology that we all use. I found myself wishing for the next generation of presentation technology. The presenter would have a command screen, with thumbnails of his slides. He would be able to move the thumbnails around to group them at will - and tap the one he wants to display it to the audience, push off the the side any that he's not interested in showing (now). The speaker notes would appear (for the presenter only) with a touch. The software would, in essence, work organically, like our minds do.
I'm sure there are speakers who like the imposed structure of the slide deck. It's the electronic facsimile of the old stack of note cards we used in school presentations: a compromise between reading a prepared speech and speaking ex tempore. But for people who don't want to read their presentation, who rather want to think on their feet and interact with the moment and the audience, we need another tool. How alert an audience would be, if rather than reading through a presenter's slideshow, we were offered the opportunity to engage with the mind of a presenter with something of interest to share. Seems like technology could support this, rather than defeat it.
Discussing a category's performance last week, an executive mentioned the pressure that rising oil prices had placed on the category's profitability over the past year. Foam is petroleum-based, so upholstery and mattress manufacturers had passed along the increase of their raw materials to retailers over the past year. Our business absorbs cost increases as best it can before passing them along to our customers, and margins have been uncomfortably tight. The follow-up question was unavoidable: so, since oil prices have been low for months, we'll start seeing price reductions, won't we? Actually, no. They never reduce the price of a product; instead they'll introduce a new model at a lower price.
Our best selling sofa is a great deal for our customers, and it's been a best seller since it was introduced a couple years ago. Demand continues to be very strong. Yet the normally slim margin we make on it has become a sliver, due to price increases in 2008. How would it make sense to drop an item that our customers love, and replace it with a new, rationalized-cost model that customers may or may not like? I can't see that there's a winner in any corner: not the manufacturer, whose new item cannibalizes the old top seller, and risks lower return on the new model. Not the customer, who sees favorites taken away.
This was the beauty of Wal-Mart's 'roll-back pricing' marketing campaign: what a differentiator! The prevailing belief is that prices can only go up unless you have failed in some way: liquidations, over stocks, distressed goods qualify for reduced pricing. Perhaps the belief is that the consumer will assume that there's something wrong with the item if its price is reduced. This belief takes demand out of the system, it perpetuates a disposable consumer mindset, it is patently destructive. Yet, most of the retail market follows it in lock step.
As we survey a retail environment that is engulfed by economic disaster and uncertainty, it is time to think critically and clearly about the entire supply chain: what can we do to enhance value for all? where can we eliminate practices that destroy value? It is no longer the case that the consumer will rationalize the increase for us; it's our turn.
Still thinking about 'smart growth,' and implications in my own world. I've been working on an organizational development initiative lately, developing and implementing a professional growth program with business unit managers. The curriculum offers no operational or technical competencies; instead it addresses the professional skills required for top-level management and executive leadership. The company is making an investment in their growth, which is, I admit to them, completely portable. They are free to take the skills they acquire into any aspect of their lives, and into a career with another company if they choose. The managers have to make an investment too -- the largest of which is letting go those beliefs we all treasure about ourselves, which ultimately hold us back in self-delusion. They have to take risks and be willing to become a perpetual student. Despite being asked to engage in a very challenging process, every manager has responded not only positively but enthusiastically. In their responses there is, perhaps, a hint of wonder as to why the company is doing this.
Obviously, companies invest in organizational development because they hope to attract qualified candidates, retain high performers, and increase the effectiveness of employees. Not a lot of mystery there. And yet.... the op/ed pages are filled these days with heated debate on the stratospheric bonuses on Wall Street. Certainly, investment firms have believed something quite opposite: you can only attract the best talent if you throw obscene amounts of money at the best and the brightest; extreme compensation is necessary to compensate staff for giving over their lives to the job; talent will leave unless you handcuff them with money. Inside the persistent Wall St worldview, I suppose this rationalization all makes sense. Yet, most other businesses realized long ago that money is not a motivator, and they routinely attract talented staff who give their all to jobs in which growth is measured not only financially but also personally and professionally. The proof of course is in the result, and I guess we can all now see that these Wall St beliefs have outlasted their results. They are still hanging on to definitions of growth that have ceased to function. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" (Upton Sinclair).
So, can we find a paradigm with organizational development that's extensible outside the company, that could transform the entire supply chain? It would be transformative to progress beyond a transaction-based relationship between the retailer & customer, or supplier & retailer (and maybe even contemplate the retailer enabling a supplier-customer relationship, without fear of disintermediation). If the measurement is not how much money one party has made off the other, but where both parties have gained, what could be different? Instead of being frustrated with suppliers who lack technological sophistication, perhaps we invest in helping them gain it -- more for both of us, and we'll risk the supplier using this to advantage with our competitors. Rather than a vendor scorecard that flags every failure, perhaps we should document the vendor's contribution to our growth, and spend more of our time understanding how that happens. Imagine a root cause analysis of exceeding plan: potentially, there's much more to be learned with this than with fault analysis, yet how often do we (ever?) interrogate successes?
Rethinking how the business connects with the consumer is more of a challenge - how many customers does any business really have, and how varied are their needs and goals? This will take some time, but we don't have to start from scratch. Most businesses have a lofty, socially-conscious mission statement. From it, they create the business plans and objectives, and the business becomes focused on achieving those measurements. The mission statement becomes a slide in the corporate Powerpoint deck. Chances are, if you go back and read that mission statement, your opportunities for smart growth are embedded in it.
Last week, my teenage daughter shared a discussion on social hierarchies from her government class. The teacher had posed two different societies and asked a show of hands on which society the students preferred: one society consisted only of a very wealthy class and a very poor class; the other had three levels of middle class but no extremes. My daughter was confused with the students' responses: most of them preferred the first society. She saw that this society would offer no potential for mobility, and its inherent division disturbed her. As best she could tell, kids were attracted to the potential of a huge upside, if you were fortunate enough at birth. To them, the world is just one big reality game show -- the risk of a big payoff is worthwhile, presumably because they have no understanding of consequences. And, they have gleaned from their society that winning big means everything, even if it means also that someone else loses.
I was thinking about this when I read a very insightful post, "The Smart Growth Manifesto", by Umair Haque. No doubt kids are influenced by their television viewing and the marketing that saturate their lives. But these are just manifestations of the consumerist worldview that has shaped not only economic models and business strategy but also our social constructs. It informs the policies our government is crafting to cope with the current meltdown, and the public's perception of them. How else can stimulus and bailout become conflated in peoples' minds, unless stimulus is understood to be another form of pay-out? There seems to be little comprehension in our current thinking of the difference between income and outcome, and hence no understanding why a person would not want the chance to be one of the top sliver of society who own most of the society's wealth. According to JD Trout, we have this capacity to use our empathy selectively as long as we don't have to confront it:
Why do you think people tend to feel more empathy for a puppy with a hurt paw than for a person without health insurance?
Part of the reason is banal. Ease of visualization. The person without health care is likely to appear as a statistic, one among 50 million others.
Considering what 'smart growth' might look like when applied to your own business is both challenging and liberating. Successful outcomes don't require that you run your business as a philanthropy. But it does mean putting relationships (with customers, employees, suppliers) front and center, and using financials as the scorecards they are to run the business responsibly. It requires thinking about the investments we make -- in all of those relationships -- and not about consuming. I work in the retail sector: this almost sounds heretical. So be it. If we continue to use a consumption model, we can only expect remorse for allowing business to eat itself.
New year, new administration, global and domestic outlook not so nice. I've been reading lots of blog entries recently and everyone I'm reading is trying to find an upside. Umair Haque's new rules for creating value in a changed world are an example. ("Innovating from Constraint in the Developing World"; "Detroit's 6 Mistakes and How Not to Make Them") If a business can no longer succeed using old paradigms in established markets, it now looks to new markets and (one hopes) reshaping its paradigm to exploit that market. Haque is not alone in his advise, just a cogent voice worth heeding. And yet I wonder what business leadership makes of it all.
I'm reminded of previous market downturns, and the businesses I was working in at the time. Invariably, I found myself in a boardroom in which the company's leadership worked diligently to locate itself on the life cycle curve, and redefine what its 'real' business was (as in: 'We're not in the buggy whip business; we're in the business of motivating horses!") so to better frame its marketing. None of those businesses actually re-invented itself, although they survived the specific downturn -- and later, it all seemed rather foolish. The new mission statements and value propositions didn't necessarily leverage the business out of the general economic muddle, but coming up with them did focus the leadership on something positive -- so there was no doubt some benefit to the employees in hearing a message of hope and sustainability.
But actually what's needed now is disruptive leadership: breaks with the past and past assumptions. As I read thought leaders such as Haque, I'm reminded (again) of the Zander exhortation to choose to live in a world of abundance, rather than scarcity. As we look forward to what can only be an extended period of economic recovery, it is too easy to feel the world has contracted, and one's immediate world diminished. And yet, that viewpoint is simply one choice of many. Shifting your perspective 45 degrees, you can just as easily see a world of abundance. It does force you to put the world you're used to viewing on pause, and step out of the frame to shift your perspective. What's required is innovation leveraging constraint to create abundance. In recent history, businesses have routinely outsourced their 'innovation' to consultants, as if this is something that can be purchased. What's needed is not Cliff Notes; you have to do the work yourself. This is an exercise that does not reward years of industry experience - not knowing that you can't do something should have a premium, it seems to me.
Leaders need to think outside the boardroom. Get into your teenage mind, when you were so much smarter than the dead men in your history books, and were feeling absolutely bullet proof and so much more confident than the person you became 10 years later. You weren't thinking about mortgages and daycare and surviving the annual review. Along the way you accepted the world of scarcity. What if you let go that illusion, and re-entered the world of abundance you once abandoned?
This week I've been listening to Beethoven's 5th and 7th Symphonies, and found my heart leaping at the beauty of this very familiar music that was made completely new for me. Conducted by Benjamin Zander, the orchestra created a world in a different time: same notes, different tempi. This seemingly subtle change recreated the work; it was as if I was hearing the music for the first time. Change your personal time signature; explore the new associations created from disruption and unlikely juxtaposition; change the world.
Reading this morning's newspaper was an odd, Alice-like experience. First, alarmingly, a story that carries on the madness of using drugs for cosmetic enhancement: the pharmaceutical company that brought you Botox is now marketing its glaucoma drops for growing longer eyelashes. It sometimes seems that I've stepped into the darkest, most dystopian science fiction novel of my youth. I'm appalled by what seems our essential stupidity and superficiality.
But then, a story that took my breath away, in awe of the courage of Afghan schoolgirls (and their parents and teachers) determined to continue their education despite being terrorized and disfigured by acid attacks a month ago.
“My parents told me to keep coming to school even if I am killed,” said Shamsia, 17, in a moment after class. Shamsia’s mother, like nearly all of the adult women in the area, is unable to read or write. “The people who did this to me don’t want women to be educated. They want us to be stupid things.”
How transformative it would be, to refocus our scientific endeavors from the trivial and cosmetic, benefitting few in insignificant ways, to solving problems that would benefit all of humanity and leave the world better for it. But that would require us not to 'be stupid things.' That may be a tall order.
A Commentary ("Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy", Nature.com, 12/7/2008) in Nature's online magazine has generated a lot of discussion off- and online in the past month. The latest I read was an opinion piece by Judith Warner in The New York Times, which is a thoughtful response and yet fairly typical in addressing the Commentary's argument that this use is 'morally equivalent' to other cognitive-enhancing behaviors such as drinking coffee, getting enough sleep, exercising etc. I'm not particularly interested in the moral reading of using drugs to enhance mental performance. I'm much more interested in the nature of these enhancements.
According to the authors, the drugs (such as Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil) act as stimulants that improve a healthy person's alertness, focus and memory use. People who need a short-term brain function 'enhancement' -- such as students taking a final exam or a physician on night call -- would, for the sake of argument, benefit. And so, in the popular mind, these are now 'smart pills': if use of these drugs help a student perform better on a test, why shouldn't we all take them to be the best we can be? The authors even state "..many different kinds of employee may benefit from enhancement and want access to it...".
So, apparently, did Arthur Conan Doyle believe that cocaine enhanced his fictional detective's already considerable mental faculties. In the 1980s in the US, this drug's popular use in creative fields led to heartbreaking losses and - more mundanely - some truly awful creative work. The syllogism is thus: John Belushi was brilliant; he did drugs; doing drugs makes you brilliant. May I suggest that anyone who fails to see the fault in that logic will definitely NOT benefit from taking cognitive-enhancing drugs?
My worry is not that this is the beginning of profligate use of drugs by healthy people, or that the bar for being 'smart' will become unattainable for those who can't afford the drugs. I worry that this argument will result in over-stimulated, under-disciplined brains that over-value their own brilliance.
The kinds of problems we rely on employees to solve in most workplaces do not require the cognitive feats of a student taking a final exam. The ability to access memory banks is not a premium in the workplace, where data is a few clicks away on the office file server or the Internet - you really don't have to remember it all and you don't get extra points if you do. The problems in business cannot be solved by a textbook: how do we increase throughput while decreasing costs? what will it take to capture more market share? how can we increase engagement and retention of staff? Businesses struggle with problems daily, and rely on the brainpower of their people to solve those problems. When a business does more struggling than solving, it's usually not because they lack the caffeine, or because they don't have enough geniuses on the payroll. But how do the people they employ use their native intelligence?
At least a generation of workers has been nurtured by an educational system that has taught to the test: memorization has had primacy. During this time, the obsolescence of technical knowledge has occurred with unprecedented speed. We've rewarded those students who were best able to commit to memory data that have a half-life of maybe a couple years. Teaching students how to synthesize ideas, how to make their thinking more plastic, how to apply rigor to critical thinking -- these efforts cannot so easily be measured, and therefore are not valued. And yet, aren't the problems we need to solve in industry and in the world just the types that require more than memorization -- they require flexible, inventive minds that work in a structured manner. They require the ability to work on problems over lengthy periods of time, much longer than the duration of a drug dose.
Of course, this type of cognitive enhancement is not on offer from the pharma industry. Unfortunately it's not regularly on offer from our educational system either. As long as we're happy to accept our lot as consumers of other nations' inventions, we can take our pills and feel OK about that.
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