Get a Life and Get Alive

Posted on May 2, 2010 by petervan

It’s quite some time ago i did a post with brand new content. It’s partly because i also have a family and a job, but mainly because i only feel the urge to blog when i have real content to contribute.

These days i also share an awful lot via twitter: that’s where the day-to-day action is. So if you are interested in my lens on technology and values for the 21st century, you can also follow we on twitter @petervan . There is an almost daily stream of tweets on these subjects.

I “reserve” the blog to share some more elaborated thoughts on stuff that keeps me going or that touches me one way or another way emotionally, in the way i am.

This time, the post is about

People, Culture, Excitement and

Sculptural Integrity

And I’d like to share what happens if you truly stand for who you are and have the courage to stand up and stick out your neck.

The title of this post is of course a word-spiel on get-a-life and get alive. The discussion was part of an off-site recently attended in the wonderful city of Barcelona.

It was about 20 years ago i was in Barcelona, and the only thing i remembered were the ‘”Ramblas” and the “Plaza de Espagna”. Given my education as an architect (non many people know this ;-), i of course knew that Barcelona was the city of the Sagrada Familia of Gaudi.

The off-site was facilitated by Dan Newman and his team from The Value Web.

The off-site was our reflection moment about our company for the next 5 years.

Dan really “got me” with his opening speech: he used two words that deeply resonated very strong with me – at an emotional level.

The architect aims for

“Sculptural Integrity”

Especially in sculpting the old with the new. Old game and new game. And that the old and the new should be connected by more than just a link or a tunnel. That the end-result should show a deep sense of unity. And that this “sculptural integrity” and other architectural thoughts were the also the basis of facilitation work and techniques of the Value Web, because that was also how group dynamics could be looked upon.

The words entered by body and mind, as they reminded me of a piece of my true self and my youth 30 years ago when i was making drawings and sketches myself of the most bizarre and bold architectural designs.

Dan mentioned also a book: “The Timeless Way of Building” by Christopher Alexander.

The real and ultimate question in this book is:

What is it that makes a building “work” ?

When you see something that works, you just know it. And it’s something that has a timeless quality.

I was intrigued by the subject, and kept researching, and quickly discovered the site of Tomorrow Makers.

And especially the blog post titled “Happiness Pandemic (HP101) Hits Worldwide”. Just read and internalize the first two bullets:

The tendency to let yourself be guided by intuition instead of acting under pressure of fear, forced ideas and pre-conditioned behavior.

A total loss of interest in: – judging others, convicting yourself and preoccupation with things that create conflict.

During the off-site, Dan did something else that was brilliant. He took us out of the hotel into the city. In our case we went to the CosmoCaixa Barcelona, the Museum of Science.

Besides being a perfect metaphor for blending old and new with “sculptural integrity”, it also put all of us in a different context and mindset to look in quite different and innovative ways to our off-site subject.

I don’t know what happened exactly, but when we returned to the conference hotel, we were looking for topics likes

space

freedom

excitement

playfulness

culture

people

At a certain moment, we could form a small group of people, sort of a tribe around a subject that was not yet addressed.

I put the word “excitement” on a post-it, and look: 10 min later, we had 7 or so colleagues interested in discussing the subject.

I asked a simple question: “how excited do you get by the work done so far at this off-site” and rate it on a scale of 1-10. To my astonishment, the average rating was 3.

So we then looked for the root-cause of this score. A lot had to do with company culture, but also by the need for a new vocabulary, and not just words, but a vocabulary that was inspired by the value set that is needed for the 21st century.

In a follow-up session on people and culture this topic re-appeared in full force.

Although initially we were looking at symptoms and superficial quick fixes, it suddenly dawned to us that

the real root cause was about

the openness of

our minds, hearts, and minds.

I have used the following slide many times in my postings.

In black the old game: full of macho behavior and Machiavellian attitudes and states of mind.

In white the new game. With true, genuine interest in the other and the true self – not based on tricks or quick fixes.

The discussions on these topics were deep and full of enthusiasm. We were looking at talent development, both the professional skills ànd the Personal Development side of it.

And i keep on fighting that “Personal Development” is NOT about “soft” skills.

It’s really about having and keeping

cutting-edge “good” people

on board

and nurturing them so that they can function optimally in today’s highly connected networked society.

You need to “train” and get exposed to a number of essential hard skills and values for the 21st century.

In this context, i get very inspired by the work of Vanessa Miemis, a Gen-Y student with a fantastic blog “Emergent by Design”. Look for example at her latest blog entry “Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part-3 Network Weaving”

Or the post “Framework for a Strengths Based Society”

Do you feel how powerful this is ?

“Strengths Based Society”

Should we not invite her to Sibos ? To be part of Innotribe at Sibos. As part of our “Gen-Y meet Bankers” Face-to-Face interactive workshop ? Maybe with the help of some strong Gen-Y-power, we will be able to keep the sharpness of our ideas and dreams.

Because at the end of the off-site, each team had to boil it down its ideas to a pitch of 5 minutes and I was surprised to witness how in this pitching work, we lost quite some of the “cutting" edge”. Also surprised on how fear creeps in when people are volunteered to deliver the pitch to the executives.

And a strange behavior of watering down the message, and even scratching the most provocative words in the end deliverable.

We seem to have lost

our desire for

boldness

We also “frame” too conservatively. So, in order not to loose some of these more provocative statements, here are some examples:

In 5 years time, 10% of our workforce should be Generation-Y folks
By 2015, our company should be in the Top-10 of best companies to work for in the financial industry. Worldwide.
Gen-Y should drive the composition of the Leadership council of the future
90% of the people in the 2015 leaders team should be new. Only 10% of today’s group should be the same
Doing things 10,000 time better rather than twice as good
“Do no evil” is not good enough anymore. “Great to Good” is the new paradigm.
“Get-a-Life and Get Alive !” Was the original title of our pitch. Somebody changed the title to the more boring “people and values for 2015”
Chief Corporate Activist
About framing: from “our company is 37 years old, are we in a mid-life crisis” to “our company is 37 years old, we are just-born, who do we want to feel “right” or “it works” in 500 years from now?”

At this moment, I decided to have a short break in my blogging activity, and go for my Sunday trip to the bakery. I bumped into a friend, who shared me a wonderful story about going for your dreams.

The story was basically about context. Of not waiting to be called. Of doing what you intuitively know is right. What works. In his case it was about seeing a wonderful motorbike, feeling it was just designed perfectly, and following your intuition and impulse and buying the motorbike. It happened to be a Can-Am Spyder Roadster. This was not just about buying something desirable. It was a story about contextual living. About flow. About following your compass. And not delaying your dreams till when you’re dead.

The story reminded me of the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

You can find “flow” is everything you do. From the most banal activities like cleaning or motorbike maintenance to writing an inspiring blog and making a pitch that makes others dream and wanting to go after their dream.

When i started this blog in April 2009, i wanted it to be in line with my purpose in life “Inspire other people to dream” – and execute their dreams. I hope i have not disappointed you so far.

Last week, somebody said i should start writing a book. Maybe i will do that. Maybe using the funding model experimented by Stowe Boyd fro writing his report on Social Architecture: Microstreams In Business.

Last week, somebody gave me the greatest compliment somebody can give to a man of the 21st century:

“you have the most feminine mindset

of all the men i ever met”

Let’s eradicate the macho culture of judging, being cynical, and control freaks.

Let’s build a culture based on open mind, open heart and open will.

Are you also fed-up waiting on the side-line and do you feel the hunger to join me on the drawing board to help us sketch the “sculptural integrity” required for the 21st century ?

Then please use abundantly the comments feature of this blog.

Doing what you want to do, not waiting to be called. Stand-up and stand as you are. In your true self. Without fear. Living your dreams.

Get-a-Life !

Get ALIVE !

If you feel energized by this blog, you can get an extra doze at following previous posts:

No more collateral damage

Who am i really ?

Great to Good: New Value Kit

Broken Will

Our company is infected

Brand, Workforce and Innovation

The Medici Effect

Posted on March 1, 2010 by petervan

The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures.

Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

These introductory words come from a book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics” by Frans Johansson (Author).

The book is not that new (it dates from 2006), but it is very relevant to today’s innovation challenges. You can find the book on Amazon.com via the links above, but there is also a free PDF summary here and a Google Book edition here. And obviously, there is the website www.themedicieffect.com .

There was also a 2004 book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

The core of these books is about two types of ideas:

Directional ideas
Intersectional ideas

Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. Examples of directional innovation are all around us because they represent the majority of all innovations. This is what we call incremental improvements (Innovation is in my opinion a bit on the optimistic, even window-dressing side).

The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards for doing so are reasonably predictable and attained relatively quickly. People and organizations do this all the time through increasing level of expertise and specialization. It is absolutely necessary if one does not wish to squander the value of an idea. Even an intersectional idea will, once it has become established, develop and evolve along a specific direction.

Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions. This is what Guy Kawasaki calls “jumping the curve”. These ideas are game changers. I am preparing a whitepaper on how NIBC (Nano, Info, Bio, Cogno)) technologies are major game changers.

Although intersectional innovations are radical, they can work in both large and small ways. They can involve the design of a large department store or the topic of a novella; they can include a special-effects technique or the product development for a multinational corporation.

In summary, intersectional innovations share the following characteristics:

They are surprising and fascinating.
They take leaps in new directions.
They open up entirely new fields.
They provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
They generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
They provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
They can affect the world in unprecedented ways.

The Medici Effect is about bringing together people of different fields of expertise and

let the magic of

cross-fertilization of ideas

happen

What sort of people do we need to invite ? In essence, we are looking for people who succeeded at

breaking down

their associative barriers

because they did one or more of the following things:

Exposed themselves to a range of cultures
Learned differently
Reversed their assumptions
Took on multiple perspectives

The explosion of concept combinations at the Intersection can offer a myriad of uniquely combined, extraordinary ideas.

I have a dream

That we can turn Innotribe.com into a Medici Effect: the place where different disciplines find each other, and through that intersection come up with intersectional innovations.

I have a dream

That we can turn the SWIFT Campus into a hosting environment, where we facilitate those intersections to happen.

I have a dream

That i can blend my personal interest of creating a Think Tank on Long Term Future with my professional endeavors at SWIFT.

I have a dream

That together we can write The Readiness Manifesto. The strategies and focus areas to prepare the Net.Generation – the 20-25 years old of today – to stand up as our leaders in 20 years from now in 2030.

But NIBC technologies are not the holy grail. There was a fantastic quote in one of Fred Destin’s latest blogs on Venture Capital 2.1:

The fundamentals of the business have changed. Technology is a quasi-commodity, the spread of ideas is instantaneous, competition is global, in other words the market is more efficient.

“Technology is a quasi-commodity”

Wow ! So what will be your differentiator ?

I believe it will be in the HOW of delivering products and services. And i can’t help re-quoting Umair Hague in his Good to Great Manifesto and my related post some days ago. Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

So, the question is not only “What will be the technical readiness kit that we will need to provide ?”.

The question really is:

What will be the value kit

that will have to underpin

this highly technological environment ?

As i mentioned in a previous post, I have accepted an opinion article/essay on technical readiness for The Fifth Conference. See also my posting “No more collateral damage”.

Below an extract of my initial input for this essay:

We must carefully analyze and think-through on how all this will influence the way we will and want to live and work in the future. What sort of life-quality we aim for? What the socio-economic impact of all this may be? How we want education to be organized? Where we still can and want to influence? How are we going to deal with the Technical and Value Readiness of our region to be competitive in this new era ? To lead the change, and not only be mediocre followers?

I believe it’s time for action. I believe The Fifth Conference and its natural network of inspiring leaders bears deep in itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” on long term future. A movement and an energy that prepares our Net-Generation for the next 20 years. To focus on our technical and value readiness. A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030. Cross-fertilizing each other’s disciplines. With “savants” from different contexts & worldviews that can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live, work in 2030.

Or will we find ourselves in 2030 like this medieval knight trying to get his cup of coffee in the local deli ?

No, in 2030 we want our children to be in a position to lead and not be the “behaving” followers in some old-European country that is by-passed by countries and regions that work at the speed of light, that have higher education standards, higher ethical standards, in other words who have found the “how-differentiator”.

My desire is to create

a movement

a tribe

a Medici Effect

where the dream can come true.

Who feels connected ? Who would like to join this tribe ?

Let me know via the comments of the blog, or contacting me directly. Please also let me know where the model flaws. What you would add to it ? Do you believe i am on to something or just living an illusion ? Let me know.

Maslow for Stakeholder Relations

Posted on February 21, 2010 by petervan

If you have any role in Stakeholder Relations (in some companies this is called “PR” and/or “Investor Relations” and/or “HR”), i can recommend reading Chip Conley’s book “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”

Conley, the CEO and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, turned to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s iconic Hierarchy of Needs. This book explores how Conley’s company "the second largest boutique hotelier in the world" overcame the storm that hit the travel industry by applying Maslow’s theory to what Conley identifies as the key Relationship Truths in business with Employees, Customers and Investors.

To be honest, the essence of the book is in the first chapter. The other chapters are endless variations and illustrations of the same with rather simplistic, naive, and even romantic examples.

For those not-familiar with the work of Abraham Maslow:

Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. This enabled him to discover that people experience “peak experiences,”high points in life, when the individual is harmony with himself and his surroundings. A visual aid Maslow created to explain his theory, which he called the Hierarchy of Needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid he reaches self actualization.

Maslow for dummies is summarized in the table below (all tables below come from Chip Conley’s “Peak” book).

In his book “Peak”, Chip Conley applies this hierarchy of needs to the three main groups of Stakeholders for any company:

Employees
Customers
Investors

Conley may be over-simplifying, as he reduces Maslow’s five layers to three.

But in the end, i found this an interesting way to assess and improves a company’s stakeholder relations.

1. Employee pyramid

Chris Conley basically says that most companies offer a salary and perks in compensation for the employee’s time. Fewer companies succeed in giving true recognition to their staff, and only a very few know that their company should shape the conditions for the employee to find meaning in his work.

2. Customer pyramid

The same principles apply to the customer pyramid. At the top, the customer is truly delighted. Not because you got a “”license to operate” (btw the minimum level pursued in the Lean “Kano” model, but because you address unrecognized needs. You will NOT identify those unrecognized needs through customer surveys, consultations or market research. And the risk exists - if your organization has been “leaned” to offer in a scalable way the “license to kill” satisfaction – that you won’t have any resources left to try to “create evangelism” by your customers.

3. Investor Pyramid

When we look at the relation with the investors, most companies are transaction oriented in their Shareholder’s Relations: when they assess the relation, they ask whether the Board member gets regular and sufficient information or whether the dining and site-seeing arrangements are to everybody’s satisfaction. However, the ultimate nirvana in Investor relations is that your investors are PROUD of being your investor. This is much more than “being treated well”. It’s much more that just being a happy shareholder, or somebody who would recommend doing business with you.

Reaching the top-levels for each of the three categories of stakeholders is already an unreachable dream for many organizations.

However, shareholder relations should aim for an even higher goal.

Anybody who has been reading Maslow, should be familiar with Richard Barrett. Chip Conley missed that opportunity. One of the best books to get familiar with the thinking of Barrett, i can recommend “Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation”.

In essence Barrett is saying that Maslow levels focus on our personal self-interest – meeting the needs of the ego.

Beyond Maslow’s level-5 (transformation/self-actualization), Barrettt sees 3 higher levels:

Level-6: Internal Cohesion: this is about finding personal meaning in existence
Level-7: Making a Difference: about making a positive difference in the world
Level-8: Service: leading a life of self-less service

Barrett’s levels beyond transformation are about being ego-less, at the service of others.

The fears of the ego lead us to believe that we do not have enough of what we need. Consequently, we are never fully happy because we do not have enough money, we do not have enough love, and we do not have enough respect.

In this situation, we lead a dependency-based existence.

What if we would apply these upper-levels from Barrett to our Stakeholders Relations ambitions ?

Do you have the courage to assess your stakeholder relations based on the Maslow of the Barrett models ?
What would you change in your shareholder relations if you would just aim for one higher level then where you are today ?

It’s becoming a trend/pattern: today’s business is not anymore about transactional and technical readiness.

The more important under stream is to develop and execute a solid stakeholders architecture. It’s about an openness and transparency. Often Social Media tools are used to support such strategy and ambition. But they are just tools. They are worthless and only become “tricks for the quick fix” in the absence of a genuine stakeholders architecture.

Execution on this is what you could call innovation in stakeholder relations

In the end, our new-game economy is about doing good, giving meaning, and realizing your relationships.

In the end, its all a matter of

ambition

The level of ambition will define how innovative your company wants to be.

No ambitions leads to no innovation or incremental improvements at best.

Ambition will force you to look into other corners, will let you discover how you truly can redefine your marketplace and change the game.

Ambition will lead to radical innovation: in your products, services, and in your stakeholder relations.

So, what’s your ambition ?

No more collateral damage

Posted on February 20, 2010 by petervan

There was this week a really interesting article in Trends Magazine about “The Blue Economy”, about a guy called Gunter Pauli, and his ZERI foundation.

I started googling this stuff, and was amazed about what i found.

Apparently, Gunter Pauli is busy doing what he does for quite some time, as can be seen in the Fastcompany article dating back 1993 !

Surprise, surprise: Gunter is from Flanders, Belgium. He was co-founder of Ecover. In 1991, Pauli launched the concept of zero waste and zero emissions for industry through the clustering of activities at his detergent factory in Belgium.

Gunter Pauli is Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Creative Fellow of the Club of Budapest and a long term advisor to the Japanese Government and the United Nations. He is professor at the Politecnico di Torino in charge of “systems design” at the Faculty of Architecture and the School of Design.

“The Blue Economy” is introduced as:

a new business model to inspire entrepreneurs to shape a new economy based on competitive innovations, creating JOBS and SOCIAL CAPITAL”

“The Blue Economy: Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis” is based on the new book “The Blue Economy: 10 years, 100 Innovations. 100 Million Jobs”, published by Paradigm Publications (New Mexico, USA) with the support of UNEP and IUCN.

I could not yet find the book on Amazon, but the paper that was input to the Club of Rome can be downloaded here.

From the intro:

The form of capitalism that has dominated world societies is entirely disconnected from peoples’ real needs. Some two billion people struggle to get by on less than two dollars a day, lacking access to food, water, health, and energy, the most basic requirements for survival. Over 25% of the world’s youth are unemployed. Yet one billion of us are over nourished and swim in 400 million tons of electronic waste with higher metal concentrations than the ores extracted from the earth. Conservatively, the top 70% of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the top 10% of the population.

Fortunately, times are changing. This book is about that change. As the second decade of the 21st century sets the stage for a new economy, the core question we answer is, “What is the business
framework we really need?”

And the Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives (ZERI) is introduced as:

a global network of creative minds seeking solutions to world challenges. The common vision shared by the members of the ZERI family is to view waste as resource and seek solutions using nature’s design principles as inspiration.

I continued clicking through the different ZERI sites, and was thrilled by the ZERI Education Initiative:

The opening song is

“I want to live in a better world”

This is about an innovative learning project for children, developed by Gunter Pauli and a team from ZERI Network of scientists, scholars, pedagogues and artists.

It’s about learning children to ask the right questions.

It’s about teaching children

the 5 intelligences

Academic Knowledge
Emotional Intelligence
Artistic Expression
Eco-Literacy
Capacity to implement change

Apparently Pauli and friends published a whole series of books “Gunter’s Fables”. And yes, you can buy them at Amazon 😉

Also check-out this fantastic talk "How Can We Use Finite Resources To Propel Ourselves In The Future?" of TEDxTokyo 2009, held on May 22 at National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.

It all makes me think very much about the book “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author), a book that was a real eye-opener for me at the time, and a book that i already mentioned several times in this blog.

“Let the future emerge” is the tagline for this blog. And things seem to emerge with an astounding sense for synchronicity. Just last week, i discovered The Fifth Conference.

The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.

It is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future !

So, last week, i had a chat with Frank Boermeester, co-founder of The Fifth Conference.

Lots of synergies!

Frank invited me to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, for the next publication. Will certainly do so, and cross-post on this blog.

However, as we were chatting, we suddenly became aware of

the “understream”

that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health.

Its about the theme of Cradle-to-Cradle that “reducing waste” is not good enough anymore, we need to “add value”. Its about the notion that Google’s “Don’t do evil” is not good enough anymore, and we need to “Do Good”.

It’s about what keeps Gunter Pauli going, and what he refers to in his video as

“no more

collateral damage”

And not anymore

and yes, create a sustainable society.

See also some related blog posts on this site on:

Thought experiment: who am i really ?

Posted on February 17, 2010 by petervan

About a year ago, I did my “coming-out” of the Leading by Being program. That program led to the start of this blog in April 2009.

Leading by Being is in essence a deep search for yourself and how you function in groups and in the world in general. It’s trying to answer the question “Who am I ?”.

Read that again:

“Who am i REALLY ?”

A couple of weeks, i “lost” my right foot – luckily only temporarily. Reflecting a bit during my extra free time sitting in my sofa with my right leg in the air, i started doing the following thought experiment:

What if i would loose not only my foot but everything ?

My job, my lovely wife and daughter, my family, my friends,…

Would that change who i am ?

And more related to this blog:

Would i write about the same things

in my blog as today ?

And if about the same things,

would i write about them

with the same intensity ?

The answer for me is yes.

Yes, i would write about different things
Yes, i would write about the same things but with a different intensity

What different things ?

Probably much much more about the realness of innovation.
Probably more on the themes like “Sex, Money, Happiness, and Death”
Probably more about ethics and ethical reboot
Probably more about meaning
Probably more about Love/Hate relationships
Probably more about digital identity. Not so much as a technology, but more as a philosophical aspiration
Probably more about soft things like poetry, romance, melancholy, more introspecting
Probably about my daughter and my wife. Without compromising them.
Probably about some nice sentences i read in novels.
Probably some writing of my own. As in my very first post:

I want to be playful like the birds,

showing little tricks,

challenge and pursue

but not limited

by any form of danger

In essence, it’s about a free mind.

What different intensity ?

I would be more radical on the innovation themes. Yes, even more radical 😉 I feel i still withhold, because of – real or imaginary ? – fear for reactions of my employer.

I would set-up the Think Tank Long Term Future on my own. With less dependency on others. Going my own way. I would look at setting up a open innovation web-site with online fund raising.

All the above is basically struggling with the fear of

“how naked do i dare to go ?”

There seems to be an interesting book on this topic: “Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty” by by Patrick M. Lencioni (Author)

“Naked” is a term that refers to the idea of being vulnerable with clients, being completely open and honest with no sense of pretense or cover. The book looks at 3 basic and well-known fears:

1) Fear of Losing the Business – No service provider wants to lose clients or revenue. Interestingly, it is this very notion that prevents many service providers from having the difficult conversations that actually build greater loyalty and trust. Clients want to know that their service providers are more interested in helping succeed in business than protecting their revenue source.

2) Fear of Being Embarrassed – This fear is rooted in pride. No one likes to publicly make mistakes, endure scrutiny or be embarrassed. Naked service providers are willing to ask questions and make suggestions even if those questions and suggestions turn out to be laughably wrong. Clients trust naked service providers because they know that they will not hold back their ideas, hide their mistakes, or edit themselves to save face.

3) Fear of Being Inferior – Similar to the previous fear, this one is rooted in ego. Fear of being inferior is not about being intellectually wrong (as in Fear of being Embarrassed) it is about preserving social standing with the client. Naked service providers are able to overcome the need to feel important in the eyes of their client and basically do whatever a client needs to help the client improve – even if that calls for the service provider to be overlooked or temporarily looked down upon.

The last one is in my opinion also related to your relation with your employer and how prepared you are to stick out your neck, and to evangelize your ideas, because you have a genuine desire to make your employer succeed and improve.

The worst than could happen is when your employer gives you a negative appraisal for sticking out your neck, or pushing change too hard. Especially if you are part of the innovation team. Though everybody in the company has creative juices and is an innovator.

And what do you do when this happens ? What do you do when you discover that the innovation your company proclaims is not real ? What do you do when you find out or get confirmed it’s all a big illusion ?

How much do you once again want to compromise your own authenticity and just go on ? Or are you prepared to go through the resistance of big changes and boldly daring to pursue your own dreams as suggested in Seth Godin’s Linchpin ?

Or how long are you prepared to you hide in your own shadows and have your will broken ?

In Leading by Being, one of the exercises was to think about one of your “shadow”-sides, some negative something about yourself, something that you would not like others to identify you with, such as being arrogant or manipulative or … and then the do a play-role yourself “playing” / “acting” that shadow role for 3 hours. It’s pretty confrontational !

What if i would start blogging under an alias

to express those shadow thoughts ?

It’s an interesting thought experiment that helps you assess how Trapped or Free your are in your worldviews.

Yes, i am still trapped

But much less then a year ago

What would you like me to explore further ? What different things would you like most ? Where would you like to see a different intensity ?

Let me know. Give me clarifying, supportive and challenging feedback.

Great to Good: new value kit

Posted on February 13, 2010 by petervan

Umair Hague did it again. He just published the Great to Good Manifesto.

He starts with “Pepsi‘s great at producing something that’s bad for you (sugar water)”. And goes on by stating that “Do no evil” “Don’t do evil” is not the same as “Doing Good”.

Umair’s blog is in essence about an Ethical Re-Boot. We all feel that we cannot go on with the greed-economy. We cannot go on with killing our earth. We cannot go on with hurting other people.

It is about a new value kit for the 21st century. About old game vs. new game.

In the table below, you’ll find some other examples.

I made this table about 2 years ago during my Leading by Being adventure. In fact it even started before that. The trigger was the book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things” by by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author)

The book is from 2003 (almost 10 years old !), and i bought it after seeing a BBC documentary on the work of William McDonough. The key insight that opened my eyes was when McDonough explained that

reducing waste

was not good enough

There is a better alternative, and that is producing products that do not generate (less) waste, but that add value, that add goodness.

This is the essence of Great to Good. The difference between “Do no evil” “Don’t do evil” and “Doing good”.

In that sense, also the famous TED one-liner “Ideas Worth Spreading” is not good-enough anymore. Better is “Ideas Worth Executing”.

This must become a huge PR issue for Google, who have surfed the wave of “do no evil” “Don’t do evil” for 10 years now. They are also more and more seen as the “Beast of Mountain View”. If you read the wave of protest following the release of Buzz and the resulting privacy issues, you’ll get a good feel why

“don’t do evil”

does not work anymore

Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

Umair asks the right questions:

How many of the principles are at work in your company, industry, or sector?
What would your company, country, or life look like if each of the principles was applied to it?
How would applying each principle disrupt “business as usual”?

Defining, building, evangelizing, and nurturing this

new value kit

for the next 10-20 years

is all what our Think Tank on Long Term Future is about.

Hotel Mama

Posted on February 13, 2010 by petervan

This blog post is a little tribute to my wife Mieke.

The picture above are home baked muffins. This is how i get treated during my 6 weeks stay home after my broken foot accident.

I am now 100% dependent on her. As walking on crutches usually requires using both hands, i can not help her in any way. Not even opening the fridge, or cleaning up some of the kid’s toys.

But it’s going to be better 😉 I had a check-up with the surgeon yesterday, and i am rid of the plaster. Hurray ! And i also will get a wheelchair, so that i can contribute a bit more to the daily small things to be done in our household.

But for the time being, the only thing i can do is laying in the sofa the whole day, with my right foot up in the air. I have my laptop and Kindle. So not completely contactless or inspiration-less.

The high (inter)-dependency makes me feel uncomfortable. But at the same time grateful for all the little and big things Mieke is managing.

A friendly colleague sent me a very nice mail on this saying: “it will confront you with yourself, and also will make you appreciate your wife’s dependency on you” (when you were 100% fit, and were so busy not noticing it).

It’s true. My broken foot accident helps me to re-calibrate. To see what really important.

In summary, my wife is everything in one: all CxO tasks combined, complemented by a absolute unbeatable care-factor. And my 4-year old daughter gives a lot of kisses to accelerate my healing. I am sure it works !

No place like home. It’s my personal personalized 5 stars Hotel Mama.

Thank you, mama !

Digital Identity Weavers

Posted on February 11, 2010 by petervan

I have a job where i regularly meet fascinating people.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Gary Thompson from CLOUD, Inc.

CLOUD Inc. is the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data, a non-profit organization that has filed for 501(c)(6) status with the IRS and is open to people, companies, and other organizations. CLOUD has been formed to create standards to give people property rights in their personal information on the Web and in the cloud, including the right to decide how and when others might use personal information and whether others might be allowed to connect personal information with identifying information.

So all this is about your personal digital identity, and giving back control of these data to the user. Kim Cameron (Chief Architect Identity at Microsoft and the man behind www.identityblog.com will love this – and i am not cynical 😉

A couple of weeks ago, i had a fascinating chat on identity. How identity is all about context. Where you are, what you do, etc. During that conversation, Gary suddenly used a metaphor of what i would call “identity weavers”.

I found this metaphor really powerful. And i suggested Gary he should blog about it, and that i would offer him a guest post 😉

So, here is Gary with his post on Reweaving the Fabric of the Internet on his personal blog The End of Linearity. Peter Hinssen will love this story, as so closely related to the Explore the Limits story.

I just have cut&pasted some strong one-liners. For the full story, check out Gary’s blog.

From health to education to finance and beyond, the ability to bring together people, concepts, and ideas (threads) in new ways is an invigorating journey. Our “weavers” of the future can design beautiful new fabrics from cures to cancer to dynamic global learning communities to rapidly evolving financial models. When thread and fabric are unleashed, when weaver and woven can dynamically change places, when loom and head are released from the bonds of the physical, the Internet can take a vital step forward. By applying an end of linearity to how we think about the Internet, we can see the true beauty of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn’s creation. It is a connector of people, not of web pages, and it is at the heart of a new future, a rewoven future.

This compelling vision goes way beyond the web of pages, goes way beyond the early thinking on Semantic Web. It is in essence proposing an identity architecture for the Internet. Because the internet is broken. It was never designed with identity in mind.

By now, you will notice that Digital Identity is much more than distributing hardware tokens, or putting an PKI infrastructure in place.

Its about user control of personal data. It’s about context awareness. It’s about who i am, how i am, and what i do and intend to do in an on-line world.

Innovation to the Core

Posted on February 10, 2010 by petervan

I just finished “Innovation to the Core” by by Peter Skarzynski (Author), Rowan Gibson (Author)

This is a modern, up-to-date, and indispensible book on Innovation.

More precisely on how to make Innovation a core capability of everything you do in your company.

Anybody who is deeply or remotely

involved with innovation

must read this book.

It’s a book that explains why radical innovation is the only option forward.

It’s a book that clearly explains the tension between efficiency and innovation, and what to do about it.

Both efficiency and innovation have value. More, they should be equal partners ! If you are serious about innovation, then you should spend at least as much on your innovation program as on your efficiency program. Check out how much resources you spent this and last year on efficiency. Take that amount and number of FTE’s and there is your budget for innovation for the next 2 years.

So it is not about being Lean OR Mean,

it’s about being Lean ànd Mean !

My biggest lessons learned from this book:

Dare to challenge everything, and especially your company “orthodoxies”, the taboos that have been taken for granted for the last 10-20 years.
Let the focus area of your innovation emerge bottom-up. Don’t define your innovation priorities in a leadership group. If you want everybody to be an innovator, you need input from everybody at all levels in your company when defining your innovation architecture. If not you end up with an impossible sell exercise towards the basis afterwards.
Make your executives and regional heads accountable for innovation. Some companies make 30% of the bonus dependent on innovation objectives.
There is an enormous responsibility for HR in getting the creative and innovation skills trained across the company at all levels.

But THE biggest lesson learned is probably about the difference between managing the supply and the demand for innovation ideas:

I believe most of us do a decent job on the supply side: we have plenty of initiatives and tools to gather, generate and follow-up on new ideas. That’s the supply side
But there remains a lot to be done on the demand side. I love the suggestions in the book that each division, region, product manager, etc is held accountable for at least picking-up 3-4 ideas coming from the supply side. Stronger: each of these groups has to reserve 10% or more of their existing budgets to spend on innovation projects. And this without changing the existing performance metrics.

Getting innovation into the objectives of managers is key. The book refers to this as the

“Management Process Make-Over”

Regular readers of this blog know that i have a strong opinions about:

Radical innovation vs. incremental innovation

The role HR has to play

Getting innovation deep into the DNA of your company, at ALL levels, all regions, all divisions.

This book only confirms and reinforces the thinking that i have previously shared in following posts on this blog:

Cubicle 3B23: Chief Happiness Officer

Posted on February 10, 2010 by petervan

There is a great comments from Joe on one of the previous Cubicle 3B23 stories. It’s too good to be hidden in the comments section.

You are a CHO; now what?

Yesterday I was asked what was my title, and got a puzzled pair of raised eyebrows when I responded that my unofficial self-adopted title and vocation in life is Chief Happiness officer… It got me thinking – what exactly is a CHO? (And no, I’m not the corporate clown that everyone likes to pick on or that is famous for telling the best jokes – even though occasionally I find myself at the receiving end of a joke… )

Happiness officer is a very serious and heavy responsibility – a temperature meter, detecting the health of an organization, noticing the first signs of trouble and trying to heal them. It is like the shaman of a tribe, the healer or the local witch.

A healthy organization is one that not just functions and produces but is energized, gives a feeling of belonging and meaning to all the people that make it. A happy organization is made of happy balanced people – happy not in the sense of joking around all the time, but in the sense of having a deep feeling of satisfaction.

It is like a healthy bee swarm. Even though the swarm is nearly a creature in its own right, with mind and memory of its own, it is made of little individual parts who influence greatly its health. The swarm is very resilient, but only if its bees are healthy. When they are not, the swarm falls apart. When all the workers leave the hive in despair, it doesn’t matter if the queen is still there and healthy. A queen alone does not make a swarm – it stars it, but does is not equal to it.

Bee doctors watch the behavior of the individual worker bees to know the health of the hive. It is the same with the Happiness officer… He watches for small tell-tale signs: more and more people who have the nagging thought that even though rationally speaking they should feel perfectly satisfied with their position in life, they are somehow not; more and more people with the uncomfortable feeling that there is something missing, a feeling which gradually grows into discomfort and distress.

And distress is a powerful force – a force that pushes you to change.

This is what the happiness officer watches for and helps – by encouragement, nudge, energy boost – helping people one by one find what makes them tick and nurturing their belief that it is worth going for.It is a fine balance between wild optimism and integrity…

The ultimate success for a CHO? A company that does not need him; a company where everyone is their own CHO…

Joe – the CHO in Cubicle 3B21

Petervan Studios

Artistic Interventions – Interruptions – Provocations

Category Archives: Personal Values

Get a Life and Get Alive

The Medici Effect

No more collateral damage

Thought experiment: who am i really ?

Great to Good: new value kit

Hotel Mama

Digital Identity Weavers

Innovation to the Core

Cubicle 3B23: Chief Happiness Officer

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