The Innotribe team is super thrilled having been selected as finalist for the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge on “Innovating Innovation”. The judges and the MIX editorial team poured over more than 140 contributions from innovators from around the world and from every kind of organization—looking for depth, boldness, originality, thoroughness, and the ability to inspire and instruct in equal measure.
This is a fantastic recognition of our work of the last 5 years, especially if you look at the high-caliber of the judges of this challenge, a real who’s who of leading management thinkers and progressive practitioners, including:
Scott Anthony – Managing Director, Innosight Asia-Pacific; author, The Little Black Book of Innovation
Winners will receive significant recognition as management innovators on the MIX, Harvard Business Review and HBR.org, the McKinsey Quarterly and McKinseyQuarterly.com. Winners will also earn the chance to appear at future live events hosted by the MIX and its partners.
UPDATE 20 Feb 2013: we just learned that we did not win. Pity. But still proud to have made it to the last 24 finalists !
We have all been reading the books and hearing the innovation experts and gurus speak and preach about the need for experimentation and failing wisely in innovation environments. All that is good in theory. What about the real life? What happens in your organization when you fail? How does your leadership assist you in this transition? What happens in the team dynamics? What happens with you?
I failed big time recently. And it traumatizes and immobilizes me. It gets me on a rollercoaster of emotions. It’s difficult to deal with the abrupt changes between being celebrated the one day, and being the pariah the other day. Or should I find solace in the fact that at least, I still have highs (and lows) in corporate life? Some friends and colleagues don’t even have that luxury: they are being beaten up all the time.
It’s not the first time this happens to me: failing big time. Being awarded and congratulated for stellar performance in one fiscal year and then being dropped a couple of days later due to changed priorities in the new fiscal year. So where is the pattern? What can I learn from it? How don’t I get “trapped” in the same mechanism of self-defense over and over again?
When the failing hits, I indeed tend to “protect” my vulnerability and myself by avoiding contact, by being silent, not expressing myself, while at the same time feeling deep anger inside. I am turning in circles, can’t concentrate nor focus, and become cynical. It damages my performance. How can I voice my soul, my emotional state and psychology of failing, the human emotions, and the intimate collateral damage that go with all this? How can I resurrect from failure?
It happens that Adam Dachis (@adachis) just wrote a post about this, titled “The Psychology Behind the Importance of Failure”, and quotes Heidi Grant Halvorson (@hghalvorson), shared with me by Jennifer Sertl (@jennifersertl).
The problem with the Be-Good mindset is that it tends to cause problems when we are faced with something unfamiliar or difficult. We start worrying about making mistakes, because mistakes mean that we lack ability, and this creates a lot of anxiety and frustration. Anxiety and frustration, in turn, undermine performance by compromising our working memory, disrupting the many cognitive processes we rely on for creative and analytical thinking. Also, when we focus too much on doing things perfectly (i.e., being good), we don’t engage in the kind of exploratory thinking and behavior that creates new knowledge and innovation.
So here you are: you have read all the books, seen all the greatest speakers, got the best personal coaches, followed all the personal development journeys you can imagine, you even preached yourself to others the benefits and adrenaline effects of going for your true self. And then you get hit. And you don’t know what to do, how to react, how to stand-up, how to reboot, how to get alive again.
Here are a couple of questions for all you innovators out there. Some areas where I would like to know how YOU coped with that situation, and what we all can learn from it.
You have a project of a lifetime. You stick out your neck big time and after lots of blood, sweat and tears, corporate priorities change, and your project is stopped from one day to another. How do you cope with that? Do you have examples of how you turned that sort of failure into a success? A crisis into an opportunity? I don’t know yet a good way how to do this, other than sweating out your time and hoping for the better.
Igniting change and innovating also means being a corporate rebel. You walk the edges of corporate accepted behaviors in 95% of the cases, you succeed keeping that balance. But sometimes you go over the edge. How does that behaviour impact the perception others have of you? Does it impact your performance reviews? How can you avoid paying the price?
In innovation, the pedestal of success and the bin of the pariah are oh-so-close. On the pedestal of success, you are full of energy, even arrogant at times, sometimes preaching. But always with your heart at the right place and a deep intention for doing good for your company and the folks who work for it. Some people call it “irresistible enthusiasm”, and get energized when they hear your voice and they see the sparks in your eyes. Others – the criticasters – believe you are member of the “ego-tribe”. You sense jealousy from those who don’t have your opportunities, who don’t have a flexible boss like yours, who don’t enjoy executive sponsorship, some call it executive “protection”. When you fail, all that positive juice flows away. You’re empty handed. It’s time for revenge, for presenting the emotional invoices. Nobody comes to sit at your table at lunch; nobody wants to be seen with the one who just failed. You have been burned. What’s your experience with that? How do you cope with that?
What is your experience and reaction with abrupt changes of priorities, change of guards, change of budgets? What do you do when your marching orders change from one day to another? What if you don’t feel aligned with the new directions suggested or imposed? Especially when you just failed and are super vulnerable? Should you just brace for a while and hope for the turn of tides, of keep acting based on what your intimate true self tells you about what is right or wrong for yourself or for the organization you work for and deeply care about? Who has ever done and experienced something like that? Please share your wounds and healings.
Corporate world has the reputation of being a world of extroverts. But at least half of the workforce is introvert. I am and never was superman. I am not the vocal extrovert; I am more the reflecting introvert. Many of us are sensitive human beings. Many men have more feminine energy than women and the other way around. Where do you go when you fail? Where do you find a shoulder to cry on? When and how do you deal with pretending to be untouchable in formal settings and/or as team leader? Should you dare to show your vulnerability with trusted colleagues or friends? Can we look through the crack in you and wonder at the light inside?
Is there überhaupt something like trust in business, or is it indeed like one of my first managers in my career told me “never trust anybody in business”. Have I become old and cynical? Judgmental? Control freak? In other words have I become all the things I never wanted to become and ended up on the flip sides of my ideals “Open Heart, Open Mind, Open Will” inspired by Otto Sharmer’s “Theory U”?
The bottom line question really is: how do I keep being present and aligned with my true self, when the going gets though in periods of failure? And who is holding a space for me when I long for help in healing my injuries?
“Life of a frontrunner is hard one; he/she will suffer & many of these injuries will not be accidental” ~ Pele
I know that many Corporate Rebels struggle with this. We can support each other by sharing what works and what does not work in these circumstances. Because I have the deep belief that resurrecting from failure is one of the core elements of creating a practice for value creation.
Credit: Fallen picture by Kerry Skarbakka http://www.skarbakka.com/
I have always been intrigued by identity. Physical-world-Identity or Digital-Identity. But “digital” is an outdated adjective, used my pre-millennial friend to make the distinction with the world as they used to know it.
Today, it is ONE environment, blurring the contours of who-I-am as a human being in flesh and blood and with my own mind, thoughts, and consciousness. Both my body and my mind are getting increasingly augmented and complemented by tools, by ecology of machines, networks, and algorithms. That ecology of an emergent self-correcting organism was labeled as “The Technium” by mastermind Kevin Kelly.
We probably have to invent a new word for this “one environment of me”: maybe the word “Dysical” – as a contraction of Digital and Physical– could do the job? But it is more than one word we need. We need a new language, a new vocabulary, a new grammar; new ways to create the sentences and the narrative that can capture this new form of being. And when we have developed basic literacy in this new language, perfect it like art, like literature, like poetry, for deep and rich self-expressions of the “Dysical-me”.
That rich self-expression will needed a new data order, caused by ubiquitous connectivity and an increasingly pervasive computing environment, and generating two massive transformations: the enablement of peer-to-peer relations, and the explosion of data: big data, small data, augmented data, fast data, real-time data, etc.
I believe it is time to start reflecting on a P2P “Data-Economy”. Thanks to the ubiquitous connectivity, nodes in a grid can now interact and share with each other without central body or governance. The emergence of the Bitcoin currency is a typical example how new and probably more robust and resilient currency exchanges are possible without central banks, central governance.
My “Dysical-Self” is also getting more and more defined by my context and reputation in this new P2P data-economy. My identity not any longer simply equals my identity number or my digital certificate or passport. My identity is deeply correlated with my relationships with other people and other nodes in the grid. Trust suddenly gets defined at the level of the relationship, not at the level of identity.
That sort of trust will also be very much related to our reputation. Whether that reputation is as self experienced with our human antennas, deducted by algorithms (Klout, Peerindex, Kred,…) or Socially Vouched (LinkedIn, Connect.me,…)
It will require some form of Cloud Operating System, where our mobile device becomes the remote control of our personal and interoperable Data Clouds.
But one could go on step further, where we think beyond the device. Dhani Sutandto , Senior Digital Art Director and the creator of the Oyster Card Ring recently indeed quoted in PSFK Magazine:
“There will be mobile devices but they will be something that you would wear discreetly, without making you look out of place. Instead of constantly looking down at a screen, people will wear something discreetly. Your interaction with technology won’t be gone, but it will be seamlessly integrated and we will therefore look up and interact in a human way with one another.”
Indeed, when trillions of devices are inter-connected, we need to think beyond the context of the “device”. Device is no longer the context. We – the “Data-objects” – are the context, are the interface:
“We are the data”
And we – the data – will need a common interface to deal with our Dysical Identity, to deal with Access, Trust and Grid-Literacy.
Just a couple of days ago, I submitted our entry for the MIX (Management Innovation eXchange) HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge. This challenge is about Innovating Innovation and will be judged by some of the greatest thinkers in innovation
Please find below our submission. It is taking stock of a number of innovation evolutions we went through since the start, and also gives some hints on where we will focus in 2013. Enjoy, and if you like what you read, please support us with your “like” on the M-Prize page here.
SUMMARY
Launched in 2009, Innotribe www.innotribe.com is SWIFT’s initiative to enable collaborative innovation in financial services. Innotribe fosters creative thinking in financial services, through debating the options (at Innotribe events) and supporting the creation of innovative new solutions (through the Incubator, Startup Challenge and Proof of Concepts).
CONTEXT
SWIFT www.swift.com is a member-owned cooperative that provides the communications platform, products and services to connect more than 10,000 banking organisations, securities institutions and corporate customers in 212 countries and territories. SWIFT enables its users to exchange automated, standardised financial information securely and reliably, thereby lowering costs, reducing operational risk and eliminating operational inefficiencies. SWIFT also brings the financial community together to work collaboratively to shape market practice, define standards and debate issues of mutual interest.
TRIGGERS
The initial triggers for having a specific innovation focus and creating a dedicated tem was driven by both product and culture requirements.
Product: A good example of a product requirement was the need for a product for low volume customers. Typically, existing products targeted the top and medium segment of our customers, but we did not really have a product for low volume customers. A black-belt team was formed and delivered a brand new product in one-year time. The team not only revamped the product functionality, but also revised fundamentally the buying experience, on-boarding, pricing model, and business UI experience.
Culture: Given the nature of its business, SWIFT has a strong company culture of “Failure-Is-Not-An-Option” (FNAO). Although this culture was inspired on the Apollo 13 mission, where the NASA team would do “whatever it takes” to get the three astronauts back from space, and learning from mistakes, over the years the FNAO mantra was at times misinterpreted as a culture of no-risk taking, not coming up with ideas challenging the status quo, not daring to step forward. We wanted to create a culture where “failing smart” was accepted. To that end, we created a number of tools and techniques to enable collaborative innovation. One example is our own “sandbox”. The concept is introduced on Kosta Peric’s Forbes blog here. Kosta is SWIFT’s Head of Innovation, and has documented the history and activities of Innotribe in a recently published book “The Castle and the Sandbox” available here.
The sandbox is an “incubator” – a protected place where people with ideas can “play”, or to try out their ideas, without impacting the castle. The “castle” is the metaphor for the mothership, the core of the company. The incubator is the place where you can try, experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually learn and succeed.
We also offer tools to the SWIFT employees like Idea Challenges, Brown Bags, Hackatons, and internal TEDx-like events to encourage team members to learn from the edges, to step forward and to reward initiative.
KEY INNOVATIONS & TIMELINE
Innovation team started in 2007 when the new CEO came on board
Prototyping was introduced when one of the innovators challenged an executive on a proposed new product line. The executive agreed in funding 2 competing prototype teams, one for his own idea and one for the idea of the innovator. Each team had to pitch their idea and prototype head to head in front of the full executive team. To the surprise of many, the prototype of the innovator won.
Initially, the innovation team was seen as a fast product development shop where the end deliverables were software products. Black-Belt teams were formed per product, and end-to-end delivery cycles were reduced from 3-5 year to 1 year.
End 2008, based on an in-depth internal customer review, the scope of the team was re-defined as an unit within the company for enabling collaborative innovation
The Innotribe brand was launched in 2009 during SWIFT’s flagship event “Sibos” in Hong-Kong.
Initial focus of the revamped Innotribe was on idea generation and creating serendipities
By end 2010, we had in place:
An innovation framework based on open innovation;
A portfolio of tools and techniques for internal (SWIFT as a company and ecosystem) and external (the financial industry at large) innovation. Most of these tools and techniques were used to create the initial tribe and ideation for the open innovation pipeline;
A group of internal ambassadors, called “megaphones”;
A successful event and facilitation practice
In 2011, the Incubator and the worldwide start-up challenge were added to the mix and we further scaled and perfected our existing tools and techniques. The incubation phase was particularly important as for the first time we had a multi-million dollar fund for investing in promising innovations.
By end 2011, our Innotribe “brand” was considered the most important brand SWIFT launched in the last 30 years.
In 2012, we explored the Acceleration phase to progress the most promising incubation ideas through different forms of co-investment.
In 2013, we will continue and further increase our innovation efforts, with a greater focus on the core activities of the company for internal innovation, and exploring novel funding models for our external innovation.
In 2013, we will also experiment with “Innovation Journeys”, a model for enabling business units to win though co-ideation, co-creation, co-delivering. We also plan to complement our existing toolset with scenario planning and story-telling.
CHALLENGES & SOLUTIONS
Here are some of the key implementation challenges that had to be overcome:
CEO as sponsor is instrumental:
When a new CEO came on board in 2007, he made it crystal clear that innovation was one of his big bets.
A CEO can make or break the innovation agenda, and set the direction and ambition for disruptive innovation or not.
A CEO “protects” the innovators from anti-bodies who try to fight change.
A CEO can “force” certain innovation projects to go ahead.
A CEO can open the door for skip-level meetings to have a direct contact with what’s happening in the field
Executive alignment. Having the CEO as sponsor is one thing, having the whole Executive Team (and the subsequent hierarchies) aligned is another thing.
In 2008, the company engaged in a company wide “Lean” efficiency exercise. Part of the methodology includes an internal customer satisfaction survey: it became clear that the executive team was not aligned on the mission of the innovation team. Expectations ranged from a pure R&D shop to a facilitating unit.
The Lean methodology facilitated clarity on the direction of the innovation team: it was collectively agreed that the mission was to enable collaborative innovation.
Any company wide program with executive attention is a great opportunity for getting executive alignment on innovation.
The concept of “enablers”.
The incubation projects are funded by the Incubation Fund, a 100% SWIFT Fund.
To help us deciding where we put our funds, a group of “enablers” was created. This is a group of senior leaders from our industry ànd from outside our industry. They have been selected for their authority and influence as persons, not necessarily because of the organization they represent.
The role of the “enablers” is to “enable” incubation projects. This is NOT a killing committee or gating process to say “no”. It’s a group of wise people saying “yes” to projects and bringing enabling assets to the table such as contacts, experiences, trend validation, etc
Megaphones iterations.
Very early on we started with the idea of “Megaphones”, some sort of internal innovation ambassadors in different departments of the company.
In the initial version, megaphones were “volunteered”, their mandate was unclear and their management was not motivated or incentivized.
In version 3.0 we got it more or less “right”: we have a novel and very transparent megaphones recruitment campaign, megaphones now have a clear mandate, spend 15% of their time on innovation related activities, and this is part of their objectives, and signed-off at the begin of the year by their managers.
The importance of communication.
If there is one big recommendation it is “communicate like hell”. If “they” don’t know what you do, they can’t support it, they can’t leverage it, and they can’t sponsor it.
Although we were doing a lot of the right things, not many people in the company really knew what we were doing. When we were dumping at the end of the year the list of our activities, many people were surprised of all the things that went on.
For external communication we struggled for finding the appropriate bandwidth from our own communications department. The good intentions were there, not the bandwidth. In the end we mutually agreed with our communications department to hire our own external communications agency. For internal communication, we gave one person in the team that responsibility, and we leverage as much existing communication channels like our corporate intranet, Yammer and Chatter.
Being creative with funding.
When coming up with new ideas, we heard several times an enthusiastic “yes, you should do that, but you have to stay in your existing budget”. So we explored alternative ways of funding such as sponsorship.
A good example here is our Start-Up Challenge that has become fully self-sustainable through sponsoring. This Start-Up Challenge is probably one of the most visible initiatives now of Innotribe. In 2012 more than 600 start-up companies were screened during 3 regional competitions (one for the Americas, one for EMEA and one for APAC), and the two winners get away with a 50K$ cash price. The basic objective of this initiative is to bridge the gap between the start-up community and the heads of innovation of the financial industry. Success story: Mastercard acquired the winner of the 2011 edition in 2012 for 40M $.
Financial: own P/L
Our best motivation is when third parties pro-actively approach the Innotribe team and ask whether they can buy our services.
In 2012, we had our first innovation consulting and facilitation contracts.
Some of the challenges we had were related to accounting of these new revenue and cost streams. In a bigger corporation, it is not so self-evident to create a different P/L and decide what revenues and costs have to be allocated to that new P/L. To be continued…
Legal/Governance: by-laws of the company
SWIFT is a non-profit co-operative. Certain innovation ideas that are for profit and/or for the benefit of only a subset of the community would require a change in the by-laws of the company.
The governance of the company is based on a long tradition of customer consultation and consensus making. For example, our 10,000+ members are represented through 160+ National Member Groups. Consultation takes time, and sometime we want to move faster. We have learned to live with some of these constraints, to choose our battles, and remain passionate, perseverant and patient.
BENEFITS & METRICS
The benefits of Innotribe can be clustered in to three “Impact” vectors: brand, revenue, and people
Brand
The Innotribe-brand has a strong positive effect on the overall SWIFT-brand. During our 2011 Innotribe at Sibos event in Toronto, our CEO referred to the Innotribe brand as the “strongest brand SWIFT has produced in the last 30 years”
The Innotribe-brand is omni-present at internal and external SWIFT events
Our design and facilitation techniques create an immersive learning experience
Our curation expertise brings the finest speakers, igniters and subject matter experts to our staff and to our community
Customers declare it is “their” Innotribe
All our activities are appreciated for their freshness, deep design philosophy, and accessibility.
The brand reflects innovation, collaboration, youth, dynamism, and novelty.
The Innotribe brand is now strong enough to attract dedicated sponsoring, and initial explorations with an own P&L. We are humble enough in knowing that our brand is and will get a substantial part of its value from the connection with the “mothership” SWIFT.
Revenue
From very early on in the Innotribe history, we are getting challenged on the tangibility of our deliverables, how much they contribute to the company strategy and how much they contribute to the revenue objectives.
It is not always easy to find a fine balance between seeing innovation as a means for supporting short-term sales objectives, and innovation as a means to re-define the agenda.
A great success story is one of the incubation projects “MyStandards”. As one of the first true incubation ”sandbox” projects, a dedicated team with its own scrum master delivered a new product in one year time, with first paying customers and revenue contribution 3 months after production launch.
People
Our internal innovation activities touched more than 50% of the company during face-to-face meetings, workshops, events, and facilitation assignments.
More than 10% of the staff participated in our innovation challenges
Several ideas from the challenge have been implemented
But we feel we have to communicate better, at all levels: senior management, middle management, and the workforce at large.
Metrics used
Most of our metrics are quantitative and in essence about influence: we measure people reached, number of events, number of facilitations, number of ideas, velocity of ideas from ideation phase to incubation phase, etc
We regularly perform NPS (Net Promoter Scorecard) surveys. Participants to our events are very satisfied; non-participants (those who never attended) are skeptical and give us lower scores. Another reason why communication is so important
We are not (yet) measured on revenue contribution, but we start feeling the heat in the general crisis-climate of the financial industry, with a tendency to proving short team bottom-line results.
We have also seen some unintended side-effects
Tribe behavior. Our events are really special: we architect serendipities and immersive learning experiences. We create connections at people/human level. Our customers love it. We see tribe behavior – like fans for life, groupies – and return customers, who come back only for the Innotribe vibe and connections.
We did not plan for it, but in 2012 we are seeing the first customers – both from inside and outside our industry – soliciting us for paid facilitation, consultation and event services.
We are also very much in demand by our internal departments. This creates capacity challenges. The biggest challenge is to remain focused and dare to say no. We also have decided to do certain internal/external engagements only against a fee and covered T&E.
LESSONS
Here are some of the most important lessons that other organizations should learn from our Innotribe experience.
Communicate like hell: it’s extremely important to communicate what you do.
Hire a PR agency fully dedicated to your external communication. Design with them a communications plan, plan press events, plan regular press interviews, invite press to your events. Use social media tools like Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Chatter, etc
It may sound obvious, but have a website explaining what you do, what your methods and tools are, what your deliverables are: this should be the landing page for press and other communication contacts.
Appoint at least one person responsible for internal communication. Communicate everything: success stories and lessons learned. Celebrate experimentation, celebrate success. Have small ceremonies for winners of internal challenges. Organise brownbags, hackatons, special staff events
Think in terms of an “Innovation Portfolio”
We recommend you start thinking in terms of an “innovation portfolio”, highlighting how many projects and/or how many budget you will allocate to different areas of innovation: innovation in the core, adjacencies, new functionalities, new territories aka disruptive innovation.
Make sure you have some quick wins in core and adjacencies; it will help you getting credibility for doing more disruptive stuff later.
Keep fighting for disruptive, don’t get complacent or discouraged, it is your mission to challenge the status quo relentlessly.
Accept craziness, stealth work, but capitalize on what works
Innovators do things differently: withhold some ideas that initially sound crazy or impossible.
Stealth work. Sometimes you have to walk on thin ice and do actions behind the scenes that are not fully in line with the script or standard procedures. This does not need to be done in secrecy: you can do stealth work in full transparency with your Head of Innovation and your CEO.
Passion, Perseverance, Patience
Innovation is challenging the status quo. Many people in your organization don’t like change. They will challenge you. They will fight you. Just accept this as part of the job. Don’t get too frustrated too much by it. And if it gets too much, get yourself a trusted friend with whom you can share your frustration, and get on with it.
Your passion is infectious and viral. Talk to as many as possible people in your organization and keep the conversation going. When they see the passion in your eyes and your irresistible enthusiasm, they will follow.
Don’t “force” innovation but do “coach” and enable innovation. The metaphor is that of a parent learning a child to bicycle: at a certain moment, you have to release, let the child experiment and fail until it can bike on its own.
Be patient. Sometimes you have to live with the constraints of your organization, and accept it will take time to get where you want to be
Innovation is human business
Stay fresh, fun and accessible
Almost forgotten, but have fun 😉 Whatever you do, it must have certain lightness, freshness in it.
Design surprises/disruptions in the flow of your brainstorms, events, and facilitations. Make people experiment with their hands and build physical things, metaphors: they will love it and smile.
We design our events on purpose with some “un-polishedness”: we have learned that if what you do is too polished, too finished, you create distance and you don’t leave much room for input and creativity.
CREDITS
This post/submission is only possible because we have a fantastic team building Innotribe into what it is today. Petervan – the submitter of this story – is just one of the team members. Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation SWIFT, heads the team. Key team members are: Mela Atanassova, Martine Deweirdt, Muriel Dewingaerden, Greet Michiels, Karen Declerck, Matteo Rizzi, Nektarios Liolios, Dominik Debuyser.
We would not be where we are without the support of Lazaro Campos (the CEO who put the innovation team in place in 2007) and his successor Gottfried Leibbrandt who has been a sponsor since day one.
We also would like to extend credits to “the tribe”. We feel honored and humbled they consider us as “their” Innotribe.
TAGS
Innovation, Open Innovation, Tribe, Events, Start-Up Challenge, Incubator, Facilitation, Architects of Serendipity
HELPFUL MATERIALS
More information about Innotribe can be found in following resources:
I am coming to a stage in my life where I discover that most if not all of the knowledge, models, methods, and principles I learned at school and the last 30 years of my career are completely outdated and irrelevant for the new reality we live in.
That also applies to the concept of leadership. We’ve all learned about heroic and charismatic leaders. That leaders are leaders when they have followers and when they can create the conditions to engage her followers in a new direction, a place where no one has ever been before, to make 1,000 flowers blossom, etc, etc
With some notable dropout exceptions (Jobs, Gates, Bezos, etc), “leaders” all have the “right” attitude and have MBAs or other impressive certificates. They have the right profile. They went to right schools and the top universities like Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, etc. Career progress and evolution is systematically reserved to this elite. Even upon today, I see companies that reserve certain professional or personal development programs to those who have the right certificates. How sad.
Most of these “leaders” fit a certain “style”, and most have been moulded in the same factories. Well-dressed, always smiling, ready to help, forthcoming, making it in every aspect of the professional and private lives, always reserved, never angry or upset, in control of their emotions, etc. They make impressive careers, mainly by pleasing their hierarchies, by staying in the blueprint and taking no risks.
But over time, I have become suspicious and bitter about these perfectly casted people. In many organisations I have seen how cheer-“leaders” joyfully smile in the face of their subordinates and at the same time put a knife in the back of the same human beings.
Some “leaders” have even “developed” an almost sadistic pleasure in ignoring and destroying well-crafted pieces of work. I would like to illustrate this with a story from during my studies as architect.
We got an assignment to build an exposition hall and the creation of the space had to be based on some repeating element of construction. As part of the coming-out we had to make artistic sketches, draw the precise floor plans and construction details, and work out the whole thing as a model on scale, including the repeating construction element. I think a worked 3 weeks day and night to make the deadline, and I was quite proud of the result. The model was made out of fine balsa wood. During the review session, my “leader” – the professor and coach, I still remember his name – found an immense pleasure in shooting apart with his fingers the fragile construction. I was not amused; in fact I felt deeply hurt and humiliated.
This is of course quite extreme and even psychopathic behaviour but I am sure each of us can find one or more examples in their career where their project-of-a-lifetime was shot in pieces apart. If it would happen again, I would probably kick and scream, or no, be subtler and present a glass of purifying water, as in this great advertisement from Spa Reine.
Some of the perfectly trained leaders also never take the pain to reach out to those who are more introverts who hunger for depth and they only listen to the extroverts who are most vocal that reach out to them. Decisions about subordinates are made in secrecy.
But the secrecy-trick does no longer work out in this hyper-connected environment, and news that is supposed to be kept confidential in the catacombs of the power hierarchies is dripping through the more and more porous walls of our organisations.
This new self-emerging transparency leads of course to a huge credibility crisis for the leader, as she does not know that you already know, and her “in-control” pose becomes painfully revealing of the true nature of those so called leaders.
Of course, Pepsodent, Spa Reine and the external look-and-feel vestimentary attributes are only metaphors for something deeper going on.
Theproblem with this sort of leadership is that it is leadership based on what you are (your power position in a hierarchy) versus who you are, your true internal power as a human.
A monkey in a suit remains a monkey in a suit.
We need a more humanistic approach, inspired by meaning and purpose; an “eudaimonic” economy as so well described by Umair Hague in “Is a Well Lived Life Worth Anything?”
That’s an alternate vision, one I call eudaimonic prosperity, and it’s about living meaningfully well. Its purpose is not merely passive, slack-jawed “consuming” but living: doing, achieving, fulfilling, becoming, inspiring, transcending, creating, accomplishing – all the stuff that matters the most. See the difference? Opulence is Donald Trump. Eudaimonia is the Declaration of Independence.
We have too many Donald Trumps in our organisations We need a culture that is based on deep respect and dignity for the human being. In this context, I recently had a conversation with a very senior businessperson of a multi-billion-technology company, who told me the parable of the Indian King.
The king had hired a consultant to advice him on the performance of the kingdom. The expert told the king to fire ½ of his workforce, as they did not have the same performance and added value to the kingdom as the top performers. The king responded “And what will those people do, once they get fired?”. The consultant answered, “Is that our/your problem? Your kingdom will be more efficient, that’s what you hired me for, no?”. The king did not follow the advice of the consultant, as he deliberately chose for a societal role in giving his citizens an job, a meaning, and a future, even if that meant a little bit of overhead. His choice was driven by people’s dignity.
The leadership that we all learned about starts smelling like a myth: the myth of charismatic leadership. But don’t blame them. That’s how they have been trained and educated. And the “training” or “brainwash” already started at those business schools, provided that you were lucky enough to be born in a family with wealthy parents that could pay the bill, or you were prepared to put yourselves in life-long debts as slaves to the financial institutions of this world.
The first thing I notice about the Harvard Business School campus is the way people walk. No one ambles, strolls, or lingers. They stride, full of forward momentum. The students are even better turned out than their surroundings, if such a thing is possible.
No one is more than five pounds overweight or has bad skin or wears odd accessories. The women are a cross between Head Cheerleader and Most Likely to Succeed. They wear fitted jeans, filmy blouses, and high-heeled peekaboo-toed shoes that make a pleasing clickety–clack on Spangler’s polished wood floors.
Some parade like fashion models, except that they’re social and beaming instead of aloof and impassive. The men are clean-cut and athletic; they look like people who expect to be in charge, but in a friendly, Eagle Scout sort of way.
I have the feeling that if you asked one of them for driving directions, he’d greet you with a can-do smile and throw himself into the task of helping you to your destination—whether or not he knew the way.
“This school is predicated on extroversion,” and “Your grades and social status depend on it. It’s just the norm here. Everyone around you is speaking up and being social and going out.” “Isn’t there anyone on the quieter side?” I ask. They look at me curiously. “I couldn’t tell you,” says the first student dismissively.
The essence of the HBS education is that leaders have to act confidently and make decisions in the face of incomplete information. HBS was once called the “Spiritual Capital of Extroversion” where Top of Form “Socializing here is an extreme sport” and where verbal fluency and sociability are the two most important predictors of success.” writes Susan Chain, and goes on: “It’s so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Exceptional CEOs are known not for their flash or charisma but for extreme humility coupled with intense professional will: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated. We don’t need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run.”
Leadership as we know it does not work anymore. We need something else. We also need a language to articulate what this new “thing” is. Some are starting to look into that.
The MIX http://www.managementexchange.com/ was co-founded by Gary Hamel and Michael Zannini (ex-McKinsey). They have set up a platform to share best practices on innovation, management and leadership. “It’s time to re-invent management” is their tag line, and Gary Hamel has written several books and rants on the subject. And as part of the M-Prize competition series, they just launched a new challenge on “Innovating Innovation”. I will write more about this and the related M-Prize where both Innotribe and Corporate Rebels United will make a submission before the end of the year.
But if you look carefully, many of the contributors are from mainly male-driven organisations with very extrovert people. They fit the HBS mould. We seem to keep on tapping into the same high-testosterone pool of resources.
That becomes very challenging for those who do not fit that mould: the ones who are introvert, and who are rarely listened too (if they ever get the chance to be heard); the ones who don’t have the right MBA or certificate; the ones who have a more feminine rather than masculine energy (some man have lots of feminine energy, like some women hive high doses of testosterone); the ones of the other gender, race, religion, age, education, etc
I hope our future economy is also about including the people who are unseen today. Those who are right in front of us, creating value but then ignored when it comes to be included as leaders, or thinkers to shape the future. No one does this out of bad intent, but out of blindness. Few people will realize that while Hagel and Kelly and Gray etc are mentioned, many well-respected best-selling women management thinkers were not. Our thriving systems HAVE to be open enough to include those that are currently blocked out. Blindness shifts when we start to be more conscious. Instead of perpetuating talking about the change, we have to embodying the change.
Indeed, something deeper is going on….
Bob Marshall (aka @FlowchainSensei) is addressing a somewhat similar dimension of “leadership” in his post “Leadership of Fellowship” and especially the section about dysfunctions of leadership.
The concept of leadership introduces a number of dysfunctions. Rarely are these discussable or discussed in our romanticized conception of the mythological leader:
Leadership inevitably produces implicit (or even explicit) Parent-Child relationships. “Just one of many examples of this type of parent/child exchange is the unwritten pact that if employees do whatever their bosses ask of them (regardless of whether it makes good business sense) the boss will take care of their next promotion/career move.”
Leadership validates “followership” and thus increased risk of “social loafing“
Leadership cultivates “learned helplessness”
Leadership can increases alienation, tribalism and the formation of in-groups
Leadership often encourages favoritism, patriarchy, deference, sycophancy and obsequiousness, with a consequent reduction in both the quality and quantity of meaningful dialogue.
Leadership compounds and perpetuates the Analytic mindset
Leadership subtly undermines systems thinking, by breaking the social body into discrete parts (leaders, followers), and focusing attention on those parts rather than on e.g. the relationships between them, and the whole itself.
But the master of language and insight is for sure Rune Kvist Olsen from Norway. Checkout this excellent article “Leading-Ship: reshaping relationships at work”. Rune’s work is inspired by Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), a visionary in the field of human relations, democratic organization, and management. The tagline of the Mary Parker Follet Network is:
Unity, not uniformity, must be our aim
Rune’s s elaborated thinking blew me away: he is rethinking “leadership” into “leadingship”. It cuts deep in what motivates people. Rune challenges big time all our preconceptions about leaders and followers. I felt deeply inspired by it. So, I got into a conversation with Rune.
During this post-Sibos period of the year, I take off every Friday of the week to create some space for myself to reflect, to catch up on some reading, at times just being there and sitting in silence and trying to make contact with myself again, and then – in that moment of awareness – getting inspired by books and art. One could call it a personal retreat in silence and/or reflection and/or depth.
It was during one of those Fridays that I had scheduled a very long Skype call with Rune so that I could give him my full attention and listen in full presence to the rich language and set of concepts Rune had developed over the years. Since then Rune keeps on sending me wonderful essays and manifestos: describing what is really going on under the hood of human beings in leadership context. It’s very fascinating, and I all encourage you to dive in and discover Rune’s work.
The biggest outcome of Rune’s work is in my opinion that he has developed a language to express this new type of being as a leader in your organisations. It is so new and refreshing, that it needs its own language and vocabulary. Only then you can engage in a conversation trying to understand each other.
A good example of this language is in the following slide (a small extract of a very long presentation)
That language is further elaborated in an essay called “Extracts from Humanistic Management Responsibility in the workplace”. It is about Imposed Responsibility (forced upon from outside) versus ChosenResponsibility:
The practice of “taking control” is a significant way in stimulating and inspiring self-esteem and self-confidence in the art of becoming a responsible and independent person.
Receiving and getting control from managers above implies that the person who is giving, still has control and can withdraw it at any suitable time.
Giving or delegating authority creates and sustain a superior/inferior relationship between the people involved.
This practice of giving as a form of domination is easily encumbered with the feeling of humiliation from the receiver’s point of view. The receiver could suffer the humiliation of not having personal control and not being able to take personal responsibility for the specific action at hand.
By granting power to people in gaining personal control and in becoming personally responsible for their actions, we are at the same time granting them real freedom to become true equals and fully human beings.
It is not difficult to understand that being an object of delegation and a recipient of giving (as a token of shared power), a person can naturally feel the humiliating bitterness engendered by being a powerless and subservient receiver and not having the authority in exercising personal freedom.
The result of this type of submissive role-behaviour, would possible entail the undermining of self- esteem, self-worth, and self-respect.
The most obvious flaw in the context of power concentration in the hands of persons in charge of others is the assumption that delegated responsibility is analogous to a commodity that can be shared among individuals or groups.
Giving or delegating responsibility can be conceived as a disguised way of pretending that people below will be empowered by the person above when this person is handling out some responsibility occasionally.
This is a deception in the sense that managers of other people are not actually entitled to give away any power because their power is connected to the managers’
Rune also signed up for Corporate Rebels United. We are btw now a worldwide group of about 200 people now and counting. And several pods being started up worldwide. More about that later.
As his contribution to the rebels’ story, Rune produced the following essay “The Story of a Corporate Heresy”.
The full version in PDF is here The Story of a Corporate Heresy, but to whet your appetite here are already some salient extracts:
These types of corporate activist movements emerges as a result of profound crisis in the way corporate communities are organizing, managing and leading their organizations. Corporate Rebel United is pointing out the problem:
“Our companies no longer serve our needs. They cannot keep pace with a high- velocity, hyper-connected world. They no longer can do what we need them to do. Change is required.” Corporate Rebel Manifesto 2012.
Why, what and how can offensive, progressive and constructive actions be a part of the solution and not the problem?
The next and last question of the solution in reinforcing engagement and passion amongst everyone in the corporation is: “How can we unblock and reopen the free flow of creativity and innovation for everyone, and create engagement, enthusiasm and passion amongst one and all?”
The resolving answer could be lying in removing the factors that institutionalize the system of vertical power, and in replacing this system with a model that are granting everyone personal authority in exercising power through individual competence, ability and capacity.
All the above are useful reflections about our future leadingship models. But how do we get to that ideal model of leadingship?
As Einstein once said:
“A problem can not be solved
with the same methods
that created the problem”.
Rune – and Bucky, and Einstein – indeed indicated, that part of the solution is to get rid of the leadership that has brought us where we are today. But this is dangerous territory, as those are the leaders who still are in the hierarchical power position to eradicate the subordinates that do not fit the HBS blueprint, and try to challenge the existing system. It makes me think of recursive loops, or the drawings of M.C. Esher. At what point does the transition between night and day really happen?
Rune started sticking out his neck many years ago, in a period where he could not yet amplify his message through social media. Because he attacked the powers and hierarchies without defence, the system expelled him, and he ended up somewhat isolated, albeit in a beautiful self-built house on the borders of a beautiful Nordic lake (the story is correct, the picture below not)
It is not my ambition to get expelled, and I am trying to walk on thin ice every blog again to get your attention for being your true self.
It is in that context that my questions to you are:
How can we get these new practices out of the reflection room and into the daily value creation practice?
Who has already implemented these principles?
What worked and what did not work when rolling it out or letting it emerge?
Let’s share and learn from each other. Let’s document this practice for value creation. This practice of Leadership. Jump in.
Last week, I was attending my third Techonomy conference.
Techonomy explores “the role of technology in business and social progress.”
I love the word “progress.”
It has that gentle flavor of positivism; in the direction of better. I am more and more convinced that we don’t need innovation; we need progress.
How is progress reflected in a modern company? What does a 21st century company look like? Or maybe we should start thinking about what a 22nd century company would look like. (22nd century indeed: somebody born in 2012 will only be 88 years old in 2100. If Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are realized, it will be a piece of cake by then.)
People might grow older, but companies will die younger.
John Hagel proves with the Shift Index that the firm performance (based on Return on Assets) has declined systemically over the last 50 years.
Most companies don’t last longer than 40 years. Most of today’s companies will not exist in 2100.
The question is: What are the characteristics of sustainable companies?
Here is a list of some memes I’ve come across in recent months: the Adaptable Company, the Decentralized Company, the Sharing Company, the Participating Company, the Collaborative Company, the Connected Company, the Connecting Company, the Coherent Enterprise, the Elastic Company, the Human Company, the Learning Company, the Living Company. I could go on.
I propose that there are at least seven characteristics that will be typical in the 22ndcentury company:
1. Peer-to-Peer Networks
Decentralized organizations with peer-to-peer networks of highly skilled knowledge workers will best create and sustain knowledge flows and enable employees to self-organize. The jury is still out on whether knowledge workers will most often be hyper-specialists or hyper-generalists, but the successful company of the future will behave as a living organism where peers organize themselves in “cells.”
In The Connected Company (Amazon Associates Link) Dave Gray calls such organizations “pods”: Hyper-connected cells building relations with other cells based on a common principles, a common set of values, a common pattern language.
2. Architects of Serendipity
Being an architect of serendipity is about creating connections and providing opportunities for collisions between nodes in a network that learn from the collisions and continually adapt. The collisions are not random. Instead, this is designed serendipity, which might sound like an oxymoron.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, the shoe company acquired by Amazon last year, is setting the scene for architected serendipity with his Downtownproject.
Instead of venturing in yet another luxury corporate campus with everything on-site from shops, restaurants, doctors, and central idea-incubation, Hsieh sees the value in integrating the Las Vegas fabric to catalyze collisions. He is investing about $350 million in local startups, small businesses, education, arts, culture, and residential and commercial real estate.
This campus of the future
starts to look more and more
like a complex living organism
Forget the old alliteration, the 4 P’s and 5 C’s of Kottler and Drucker. The C’s of this new era are those of hyper-connected learning organizations: Curated content, Community, Culture of openness, Collaboration, Creativity and optimism, Co-Learning, Co-Working, Co-Creation, Collisions, Connections.
3. Empowered Radicals Instigating a Corporate Spring
“the most striking thing about these new activists and entrepreneurs was the personal chord that reverberated in me when I listened to them talk about their projects and collaborations—and their vision of the progress that would come from all that work.”
In September, I wrote a blog post called Companies Are Movements of Greatness. Catalyst peers in our organizations instigate these movements, whether these organizations are hierarchies or peer-to-peer networks.
The point is we have to unleash the energy of these “positive deviants.” I joined with a group of enthusiasts around the globe to put together a Corporate Rebels Manifesto. It’s all about a common set of principles, a pattern language for helping our companies succeed in the Hyper-Connected economy. It’s about creating a new global practice for value creation. It’s about progress.
4. Empowered Platforms
Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook are celebrated for their platform approach, exposing their core functionality through application program interfaces (APIs) so that other players in their networks–customers, partners, developers–can create new value on top of their platform.
We are only at the beginning of this trend, which will encompass all trade and commerce supply chains. In the end, I believe a wide variety of entities, including people, businesses, devices, and programs will have their own clouds and APIs.
What should come next in this evolution is an interoperability among clouds, a layer of services, protocols, and standards that let a Cambrian Explosion of Everything share data in real time, securely and with the appropriate governance and trust.
Every company may have to carve out
a role as a platform player
5. Empowered and participative customers
Doc Searls has written extensively about The Intention Economy (Amazon Associated Link) and customers taking back control of their data. Many organizations have implemented Open Innovation techniques, calling upon the intelligence in their networks to discover and develop new ideas.
The motto “We know more than me” applies the principles of Crowdsourcing. Barclays Bank recently launched BarclayCardRing, a crowdsourced credit card that empowers customers with highly transparent services and shares the program’s profits and losses and monthly financial statistics. In simple language, the data explain how the program is performing. Customers become producers, in partnership with the companies that serve them.
6. Deeply Digital and Human
It’s been almost 20 years since Techonomist Nicholas Negroponte wrote Being Digital.
We now swim in a sea of data and the sea level, so to speak, is rising rapidly. Billions of connected people, far more billions of sensors, and trillions of transactions now add up to create unimaginable amounts of information. This new environment will require extraordinary adaptability: It is as if we are a species from dry land that has to learn to live in the ocean.
The digital age environment requires a new design for companies, which presents both threats and opportunities. Companies will be disintermediated, will see the erosion of their market share as new entrants muscle in, and technology companies will threaten the position of incumbents in more and more industries, threatening profitability.
But there are also opportunities: sources of rich information are multiplying, and more information is being digitized all the time. Every business is becoming a digital business.
However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the volume of data is being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetization. That’s why my employer, SWIFT, has launched a project called the “Digital Asset Grid.” The Grid is a research initiated by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for collaborative innovation.
With the Grid, Innotribe proposesa new infrastructure for banks to provide a platform for secure peer-to-peer data sharing between trusted people, business, and devices.
7. Diverse Contribution and Leadingship in the Social Era
My initial post on Techonomy only included six ways organizations can survive. Nilofer Merchant kindly drew my attention to the diversity aspect. What follows is an edited version of an e-mail she sent me:
We are all talking about thriving, being more deeply connected in community and thus allowing our organizations to be more adaptive. And my question is… is this system of change more about the same or about something fundamentally shifted in who is allowed to contribute.
I hope our future economy is also about including the people who are unseen today. Those who are right in front of us, creating value but then ignored when it comes to be included as leaders, or thinkers to shape the future. No one does this out of bad intent, but out of blindness. Few people will realize that while Hagel and Kelly and Gray etc are mentioned, many well-respected best-selling women management thinkers were not. Our thriving systems HAVE to be open enough to include those that are currently blocked out.
And we will be surprised by what we create. I remember the story of Fold It. The original inventors of that “game” imagined Phd students more like them than not would be the ones creating value. But in the end, it was a woman who was an admin during the day and the best protein folder at night. If the system had first vetted, she would have been screened out, but when all the rules are evened out… she contributed valuable stuff because she could. (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/just_how_powerful_are_you.html).
Blindness shifts when we start to be more conscious. In stead of perpetuating talking about the change, we have to embodying the change.
Nilofer stroke a cord.
Her new book “11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra” (Amazon Associates link) indeed offers new rules for creating value, leading, and innovating in our rapidly changing world. These social era rules are both provocative and grounded in reality—they cover thorny challenges like forsaking hierarchy and control for collaboration; getting the most out of all talent; allowing your customers to become co-creators in your organization; inspiring employees through purpose in a world where money alone no longer wields power; and soliciting community investment in an idea so that it can take hold and grow.
The Industrial Era and the Information Age are over
and their governing rule are passé
Leading in the Social Era requires a rethink and re-imagination of what can be.
During the same period, I discovered Rune Kvist Olsen in the following YouTube video (1 hour video, you need to be present to fully appreciate the message from Rune)
There is also the excellent article “Leading-Ship: reshaping relationships at work” His thinking blew me away in rethinking leadership into “leadingship”. It cuts deep in what motivates people. There is also an associated slide deck here http://goo.gl/Ds1Qd . Rune challenges big time all our preconceptions about leaders and followers. I feel deeply inspired by it.
I really enjoyed the 2012 edition of Techonomy. The conference convenes discussions among leaders focusing on the implications of technology change. Kevin Kelly put technology “in charge” in his seminal work What Technology Wants (Amazon Associates Link) challenging the notion that humans control the direction of technology. I look at it more and more as a form of symbiosis.
It happens that I met Kevin Kelly face-to-face later that week at Defrag 2012, where he delivered an awesome talk on “The Emerging Technological Superorganism” but that is the subject for a future blog.
The Internet – with it’s built-in peer-to-peer network architecture – made new forms of peer-to-peer collaboration possible. The creative energy unleashed by the edges of our network represent a transformative change and challenge in how we organize our intelligences in a mix of peer-to-peer intensities, supplemented with some structured “companies” that orchestrate some of the overarching memes in our society.
The rules have changed. To quote Robert Safian (Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company) in his Oct 15 blog post “The Secrets of Generation Flux”:
“Business today is nothing if not as paradoxical. We require efficiency and openness, thrift and mind-blowing ambition, nimbleness and a workplace that fosters creativity. Organizational systems based on the Newtonian model are not equipped for these dualities.”
This blog post shares some more details about the Innotribe Health Index. This session will take place on Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.
Whereas we are sure that the main conference will cover main topic areas and trends such as Global Shifts in Economic Power, Regulation, and the financial crisis, Innotribe would like to propose some alternative lenses based on New Economies and New Values thinking, aimed at accelerating a positive re-balancing.
The Innotribe Health Index is a brand new Innotribe initiative. Through six different lenses (Reputation and Sentiment, Social Data Capital, Big Shift Readiness, Technology Readiness, Urbanization and Inequality, and Agility), we will try to give an alternative ‘health check’ of the financial system.
The intention is that the Innotribe Index is an annual checkpoint, where this year we establish the baseline, and in subsequent years we look at the progress we make versus this baseline.
The effect we want to create is a bit like the famous “state of the union” update on Internet trends by Mary Meeker (who moved last year from Morgan Stanley to Kleiner Perkins Caufield Beyers).
That went fast? Yes, indeed. Like a jet-airliner flying through your living room!
We will at least go as fast, if not faster. Indeed, this session is designed as a “high-speed” session.
Each igniter (that’s how we call our speakers) will give a power talk on their specific lens, and where possible come-up with a readiness index score from 1 – 10, giving a sense of the readiness of our community for that particular challenge. That’s six lenses in one hour!
Some background on our igniters for this session, and why we invited them to be part of this session:
The objective of this initiative is to effect a sea-change, a quantum leap for ordinary citizens of developing economies to move from day-to-day survival mode to a personal wealth creation and growth via asset ownership, registry, and mobilization.
To unlock the wealth of nations, we aim to provide practical solutions tailored to the local environment that leverages the convergence of existing technologies. By registering people, their assets, and life events in an eRegistry, and through economic modeling, we will work to mobilize the currently dormant trillions of dollars in local assets in developing nations in order to generate local capital that fuels the economy via asset securitization.
Julius will come with a “Social Data Readiness Index”, as we see the availability of people’s social and identity data as one way to create financial inclusion. This topic will also be covered during one of the breakouts of the Digital Asset Grid session to showcase that unlocking data assets has an important role for the bottom of the pyramid.
Wouter De Ploey
Wouter is Director in Business Technology Office, McKinsey & Company.
He will present results of research done by the McKinsey Global Institute on global economic trends, including urbanization, resource markets, capital markets, and productivity and growth, with a focus on Asia.
The landscape for supply/demand of labor is changing dramatically: where are the jobs for skilled/unskilled workers? Is the inequality in wages going up/down?
More and more people live in cities. Urbanization is driving a lot of growth. McKinsey identified 450 emerging market cities. Capital follows activity. Access to capital gets tighter and more localized. Do banks have the right local footprint?
“What’s the readiness of banks to confront these meta-challenges?” is the subject of this lens.
John writes regular for HBR, on his own blog, and has published several book. His latest “The Power of Pull” (Amazon Affiliates link) has become a business classic, where John highlights how we move from Knowledge Stocks to Knowledge Flows.
This shift is also at the basis of the Big Shift Index that Deloitte’s Center for the Edge has developed to provide a clear, comprehensive, and sustained view of the deep dynamics changing our world, and what companies can do to address them.
The Big Shift Index consists of 3 indices and 25 metrics designed to make longer-term performance trends more visible and actionable. You can download the Big Shift Index here (PDF file)
We are very proud of having such a thought leader as John Hagel with us at Innotribe Sibos to present the Big Shift Index. You don’t want to miss John’s authentic take on this fascinating subject.
This index is built on top of Dachis Group’s Social Business Intelligence Insight Platform, analyzes the effectiveness of strategies and tactics organizations employ to engage the market through social channels.
The Social Business Index analyzes signals from over one hundred million social sources globally and analyzes the performance of the largest global companies and thousands of those companies’ brands. The Index is generated through the use of natural language processing, semantic analysis, and machine learning algorithms.
Think about it as a machine learning engine.
Michael will do a drill down on the data they have available on financial institutions.
He is an entrepreneur, venture capitalist, public policy consultant and educator who has founded start-ups, managed corporations and worked on global information security policy over the past two decades.
To build entrepreneurial spirit in Japan, Saito also acts as CEO for the Innovation Platform Technology Fund (IPTF), a venture capital fund established by ex-Sony CEO Nobuyuki Idei and Kazuhiko Toyama, the former COO of the Industrial Revitalization Corporation of Japan (IRCJ). The IPTF seeks to produce more successful global ventures in Japan by creating a genuine venture environment.
Saito is active in several roles with the World Economic Forum (WEF). In 2011, he was named a Young Global Leader.
With his strong entrepreneur role and his extra-ordinary international perspective, we have asked William – who now lives in Japan – to come up with “The William Saito Index”, an index reflecting agility readiness in financial services.
It will be a very personal take reflecting on entre- and intra-preneurship, in Japan and globally.
Michell Zappa
Michell Zappa is a Berlin-based technology futurist who has spent part of his life between London, São Paulo, Stockholm & Amsterdam.
His work, called Envisioning Technology, focuses on explaining where society is heading in the near future by extrapolating on current technological developments.
His research facilitates understanding the field for those who work in technology by painting a bigger picture of where the landscape is heading. In this, he tries to guide both corporations and public institutions in making better decisions about their (and society’s) future.
I met Michell through a tweet that was forwarded by one of my followers. Once we connected, we immediately spotted a fantastic opportunity to describe the readiness of financial institutions through an amazing interactive infographic. As we get closer to Sibos, we’ll release some pre-views of these amazing insights.
Coming soon: previews of Michell Zappa’s infographic on technology readiness of banks: short, medium and long term.
Michell has really surprised me with his fresh take on technology readiness, and I am very excited by the work-in-progress that I have seen from him in preparation for this session. Next year, I would love to give him a full hour.
So, in summary, fasten your seatbelts for this “faster-than-light” session, were you will be immersed in the readiness of financial institutions based on six different alternative lenses.
See you all in Osaka! Monday 29 Oct 2012 from 11:00 till 12:15 in the Innotribe Space.
This blog post shares some more details about the Future of Big and Small Data session. This session will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 12:30 till 15:30 in the Innotribe Space. This Future of Data session is leading into the next session on Digital Asset Grid. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos is here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.
Picking up where we left off last year with Big Data, this session will de-mystify what we think we know about data. We will hear opinions of different experts and judge together what are the hard facts, half-truths and complete unknowns about data today: big, small, broad, real time. We will dive into artificial intelligence, augmented reality and algorithms and how they impact our analysis and use of data.
This will be one of those Innotribe sessions, where we go “all the way” with super igniters (that’s how we call our speakers) and the amazing group techniques from Innotribster Mariella Atanassova and her team of designers and facilitators.
We will indeed design this session
as architects of serendipity,
creating collisions of ideas,
leading into
immersive learning experiences
The high-level design of the session is organized around debunking the myths that exist about data. We will look at this from different angles:
Who is consuming the data: people, business, devices, applications, API’s (Application Program Interfaces)
Technical and human aspects of data creation, data usage and data management
The different lenses offered by our igniters
I would like to share a bit more about our igniters for this session and why we have invited them:
For the more “technical” angle on the subject:
Sean Gourley, CTO, from Quid.
Sean Gourley is originally from New Zealand and now based in San Francisco where he splits his time between Mathematical research and his venture backed startup Quid.
He has a PhD in physics from Oxford, and his academic research has taken him from Nanotechnology to Complex Systems and the Mathematics of War. Prior to Quid he worked at NASA Ames in Mountain View, Exclusive Analysis in London, and a (very) brief stint as a consultant at BCG in Chicago.
Sean started Quid back in Dec 2009, and they are doing some pretty amazing things with data, mathematics and visualization. They are building a global intelligence platform, a place where open source intelligence is collected, structured and visualized to help people understand and make better decisions about the complex world we live in.
Sean is currently CTO of Quid. Their corporate slogan of Quid is “Augmenting Our Ability to Perceive this Complex World™ ”
Sean will talk about the war of algorithms, a world of machines where black-swans almost become the norm. I have already mentioned this fantastic talk in my blog post about “The Cambrian Explosion of Everything”
Amir Halfon, CTO for Financial Services , MarkLogic
It is Amir’s fourth Innotribe at Sibos.
Before Amir recently joined MarkLogic, he was with Sun/Oracle for more than 12 years, where his last position was Chief Technologist specialized in Financial Services. MarkLogic offers next-generation database technology capable of handling any data, at any volume, in any structure. So, Amir brings the enterprise perspective.
This will not be a product pitch. We specifically invited Amir for his rich background in financial services and his familiarity with the Innotribe-way of doing things, so we can tap into his broad experience to map the generic big data concepts to our specific market.
Anant Jhingran, VP, Data, Apigee
I met Anant for the first time last year during Defrag 2011, where we had breakfast with Sam Ramji, Head of Strategy at Apigee.
Anant is VP of Data at Apigee. Before he 21 years with IBM where he was VP and CTO for IBM’s Information Management Division, Co-Chair of IBM wide Cloud Computing Architecture Board and one of the “IBM Fellows”.
He is our ideal igniter to talk about data as seen by API’s. However, in the session preparation talk I had with Anant, he already highlighted that discussions about APIs are very people centric in the enterprise:
“What is the governance for publishing the APIs? Some enterprises insist on a central gatekeeper for APIs, others believe in a decentralised Darwinian model.”
Anant blogs regularly. Check-out here how his new start-up life changed his thinking. I love his quote:
“Coding is liberating”
Alexander D. Wissner-Gross, Institute Fellow, Harvard University Institute
Alex is an award-winning scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur. He serves as an Institute Fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Applied Computational Science and as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Laboratory.
He has received 107 major distinctions, authored 13 publications, been granted 16 issued, pending, and provisional patents, and founded, managed, and advised 4 technology companies, 1 of which has been acquired. In 1998 and 1999, respectively, he won the U.S.A. Computer Olympiad and the Intel Science Talent Search.
In 2003, he became the last person in MIT history to receive a triple major, with bachelors in Physics, Electrical Science and Engineering, and Mathematics, while graduating first in his class from the MIT School of Engineering. In 2007, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard, where his research on smart matter, pervasive computing, and machine learning was awarded the Hertz Doctoral Thesis Prize.
His work has been featured in over 100 news outlets worldwide including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and BusinessWeek.
Alex will share how HFT is driving a latency arms race. He has a fascinating story about “Sea-Steading”, where financial institutions start building operating centers in the middle of the ocean, just to win a couple of mille-seconds in latency.
He has developed an algorithm that calculates the best geographical spot for an operating center, based on a number of criteria given by the customer.
For the more “human” angle on the subject:
Andrew Keen, Author, Andrew Keen Productions, Author Digital Vertigo
I am very proud to have Andrew Keen on board. Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others.
Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.
He is sometimes called “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award.
Andrew just published his new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo” (Amazon Affiliates Link), a book I highly recommend, and the thinking developed in this book is the main reason why I invited Andrew to Innotribe at Sibos.
Following extract is typical Keen-speak:
“I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and—which is more important—to herself. Person as mystery: This idea of personhood is certainly changing, perhaps has already changed.”
He is a real “contrarian” and therefore our ideal igniter to challenge all your assumptions on data and social media. The myth he would like to challenge is:
“the myth that social media
brings us closer together
and unites the human race”
Daniel Erasmus, Owner, The Digital Thinking Network
I was introduced to Daniel Erasmus by Brewster Kahle (who was critical for the Google’s book digitization) during Jerry Michalski’s retreat when he heard about the Digital Asset Grid. Because Daniel was doing some really advance scenario thinking for some clients in the financial industry, Brewster thought i should meet him.
Since then, I enjoyed numerous calls with Daniel on the importance of scenario thinking, and it was almost by accident we stumbled upon his start-up NewsConsole™, which is all about big data and the co-existence of man and machine and the world of augmented reality, in the sense of augmented information reality.
“Every day, an exabyte of information is created – an amount equivalent to half of all information created up to 2001. You will not read it, nor will any other individual, but some of it will be critical to your business.”
NewsConsole™ reads more than a million news articles per day to give its clients strategic overview of today and tomorrow’s news. The Console is in use in the Financial Services, Governmental, the Energy and other sectors.
I love the way he talks about big data:
“Big data sells the story of “the eyes of god”: sometimes it is there, sometimes is not. It’s about sort of half-truths, I would call them contingent-truths, as half-truths” has something negative”
and
“We see a computation a-symmetry. Google (for example) can do calculations on my data, but I cannot. This a-symmetry will have stunning implications on the power balances in the world. 20th century is all about “mass”. The 21st century is about the interface of one”
Daniel is a very erudite and versatile international businessman. In his scenario thinking work, he uses similar facilitation techniques as the Innotribe team, so Daniel will move between the spaces of advocacy and facilitation.
As for the other Innotribe session, you see that we put quite some effort in architecting, content curating, designing and facilitating our sessions.
We want to do more than just “events”
and listing some speakers.
We’d like to offer you
a memorable experience
In summary, this session is about debunking myths about data. What is the myth YOU would like to debunk?Let me know via the comments option of this blog post.
See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 12:30 in the Innotribe Space.
This blog post shares some more details about the Digital Asset Grid session. The session Digital Asset Grid will take place on Wednesday 31 Oct 2012 from 16:00 till 17:30 in the Conference Room-3. It is part of the Main Conference sessions of Sibos. The overall Innotribe Program at Sibos here, and I try to keep that post up-to-date with the very latest speaker and program announcements.
I have written extensively about the Digital Asset Grid in previous blog posts. Most recently in Banks-as-a-Platform and the Cambrian Explosion of Everything, all reflections on what it means to live in a hyper-connected world, to be immersed in the digital age.
We swim in a sea of data and the sea level is rising rapidly. Tens of millions of connected people, billions of sensors, trillions of transactions now work to create unimaginable amounts of information. A new environment requiring a lot of adaptability. We are species from the land that have to learn to live in the ocean. Like camels that used to live in the desert, that now have to survive in the ocean.
A new environment requires a new design.
The digital age and making the new design presents both threats and opportunities for Banks:
Dis-intermediation and erosion of market share by new entrants, telco’s and dominant technology companies threaten the position of Banks – and are increasing in velocity – reducing margins and profitability.
But there are also opportunities: new sources of rich information are multiplying, and the information that is available is being digitised.
Every business is becoming a digital business,
also banks and financial institutions
However, the potential benefits of the explosion in number of nodes and the data volume explosion are being squandered due to low levels of trust, concerns about security, and barriers to monetisation. The Digital Asset Grid has the ambition to tackle these challenges.
The Digital Asset Grid is a research project by Innotribe, SWIFT’s Innovation initiative for enabling collaborative innovation.
The Digital Asset Grid is probably one of the most forward-looking incubation projects of Innotribe.
The project proposes a new infrastructure
for banks to provide a platform
for secure peer-to-peer data sharing
between trusted people, businesses, and devices
The Digital Asset Grid does for data what SWIFT has already done for payments: providing a new scalable global network that supports “digital data banking”, a trusted peer to peer sharing of any digital asset between two or more nodes on the network. Banks existing qualities in management of de-materialized assets (today this is money but tomorrow this will be data), trust, regulatory compliance, market coverage and risk management puts them in a unique position to assume this role.
Indeed, with the Digital Asset Grid, we believe we are setting the direction for creating an internet-scale digital platform for information logistics.
The Digital Asset Grid acts as a digital map which describes:
The location of the data,
The trust framework governing access,
The digital identities who have access to that data, and
The usage rights these identities have under trust frameworks.
It overcomes the “data frictions” such as lack of security and trust and enables data to flow, leading to the creation of a low cost eco-system of revenue generating apps & services.
In addition, the Digital Asset Grid leverages SWIFT’s core skills and competences regarding governance, identity, security and operational excellence, establishing thus a global data-sharing platform as ubiquitous and reliable as today’s global banking network.
As part of the research, we wanted to go beyond mere PowerPoint presentation of a concept. What we have done is building an end-to-end prototype, with working applications and a working back-end infrastructure, together with a solid business story that is the result of a consultation with several banks of our community. In addition we produced a “foresight”-video of possible use cases.
Innotribe and its collaboration partners will present this prototype at Sibos on Wednesday 31 October 2012 from 4pm – 5:30pm in Conference Room 3. The session is part of the Main Conference Sessions of Sibos.
What we will show-case is:
A very strong opening with a strategy story by Antonio Benjamin – Global Chief Technology Officer & MD Citi GTS/ICG
A exciting intro into the changes in the digital data landscape
A brand new HD video – in the style of “Flowers for Grandma” and “Fly me to the Moon”, taking you into a not so far future 2013-2014, and showing in life environment of what is possible with current technology and the apps that we have built as part of the prototype.
A working prototype of the Digital Asset Grid server, server code and APIs
4 applications illustrating the power of the Digital Asset Grid; some apps are relevant for the retail space, others are more relevant in a B2B context.
A compelling Business Story, where the opportunities are categories in three groups:
Creating new revenue streams through monetization of existing and new data assets
Doing the same better
Delivering New Services
But it would not be Innotribe if we added some elements of performance and interactivity. I can’t reveal everything in this blog post, but the staging of this session will include a motorcycle and smoking server.
Also, we will have facilitated breakout sessions to create an immersive learning experience for the audience. In these breakouts you will have the opportunity to get into person-to-person conversation with the developers of the applications and the back-end infrastructure, and the partners who have built the Business Story.
And at the end, Yobie and senior representatives from two other major banks will wrap-up the sessions with some suggestions on the way forward. And we’ll have some other surprises and some very cool announcements, which of course I cannot share now, if not you would not come to the session 😉
The Digital Asset Grid offers Banks the opportunity to transform their industry, making them and their customers more efficient, generating new value and enabling Banks to launch a range of new services – it is a game changer.
The financial industry has a unique chance to seize this opportunity and position themselves in a very compelling competitive position in a future of real-time information logistics.
I cannot enough emphasise the importance of the Banks-as-a-Platform meme: it means that the value creation moves from the centre to the nodes. The market used to think in monopolistic, silo-ed service providers, that put themselves in the middle of the nodes-universe, leading to non-interoperable silos of data and value creation. By moving from a central to distributed architecture at internet-scale, banks suddenly have the opportunity to be themselves the platform, with SWIFT as a shared beacon of governance and trust.
I believe this is a “good” project. Good for our industry. It comes at the right time and at a tipping point where we see an evolution towards a peer-to-peer economy between trusted nodes in the grid.
It is fantastic that SWIFT – through the Innotribe Incubation Fund – makes this sort of research and experimentation projects possible.
Incubation is in my opinion indeed about “catalysing ideas”: it is about setting waves of thinking into motion, planting seeds in the brain, and getting the chance to develop those ideas in full so that they become foresight scenarios that become in their turn reference points for decision making.
Only when you have some strong foresight scenario/reference in your brain, you can spot and recognise the disruptive change signals from the market and make relevant and inspired decisions on “what would I do if this scenario happens?”
The Digital Asset Grid is one of those foresight scenarios of a catalysed idea, a strong testimony that innovation beyond adjacencies can happen in more traditional environments.
The team has done a great job in depicting the “foresight reference model” of a not-so-far-out possible future. The test for our community will be to validate whether we can rally ourselves to take the foresight model out of its incubation sandbox and move it to the next phase of acceleration and do it for real.
I am very excited to be able to share soon with a wider audience the results of the last couple of months of hard work, and I am very curious to see how and when our industry will seize this opportunity. I feel privileged to witness this turning point, and I am deeply grateful to the team, the customers, and SWIFT who made all this happen.
See you all in Osaka! Wednesday 31 Oct 2012, at 16:00 in Conference Room-3.
A couple of weeks ago, I was attending #BIF8 conference, organized by Saul Kaplan and his team. I was there 2 years ago, when Keith Yamashita from SY Partners did his fabulous talk on “Should I Dare to be Great?”
With hindsight, I found that that 2010 edition of BIF was better curated and had a more consistent level of high quality of speakers or “story tellers” as they are called at BIF.
Whereas 2010 was great, 2012 was good. This year, I was missing that consistency in quality. But there was clearly a theme emerging from the different talks. Initially it was a bit blurry for me what the theme was: companies are communities, creators of serendipity, human community movements, platforms for movements,… ?
In any case, it was clear that something deep is changing about what a company is all about. It made me think about the 1997 (yes, 1997!) book “The Living Company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business” by Arie De Geus (Amazon Affiliate Link).
The foreword by Peter Senge highlighted the big shift that is described in this wonderful book:
“The contrast between these two views – thinking about a company as a machine for making money versus a living being – illuminates a host of core assumptions about management and our organizations”
and
“Seeing a company as a living being leads to seeing its members as human work communities”
Most decision makers in our organizations have and still are trained in the model of the organization as a money making machine. Because this model almost completely ignores the fact that organizations are made out of people, human beings of flesh and blood and emotions and not “human resources” that you can just move around on the check board like physical resources, this has created in many companies an almost toxic environment with little room for happiness.
“Corporate health is experienced as work stress, endless struggles for power and control, and the cynicism and resignation that results from a work environment that stifles rather than releases human imagination, energy and commitment. The day-to-day climate of most organizations is probably more toxic than we care to admit, whether or not these companies are in the midst of obvious decline”
In addition, most of our marketing and strategy managers have been trained in fundamentals like the 4 P’s, the 5 C’s, etc by management gurus like Drucker and Kottler.
Tony was talking about Zappos’ Downtownproject and the slide deck he used was more or less the same as what is on the slideshare here
The story kicks off when Zappos was considering building a new HQ Campus like Google, Apple, Nike, Microsoft etc,
Instead of venturing in yet another megalomaniac luxury campus with everything on-site from shops, restaurants, doctors, and central central incubator garages, he decided to become deep integral part of the city fabric and to create collisions and serendipities. He is investing about 350 million USD in local start-ups, local small businesses, education, arts, culture, and residential & real estate.
It is an amazing story circling and hovering over what are probably the five or ten or whatever number of C’s of the hyper-connected and learning organizations of this new era:
Curated content
Community (Culture of openness, Collaboration, Creativity, and optimism)
As in a real roller-coaster, Tony Hsieh took us from one sensation to another:
“We are creating a space where innovators, dreamers, doers, and though leaders from around the world can come to share ideas to enrich the community, to inspire us all. Call it a residency program”
“We want to make you/us smarter”
“Culture is to a company what Community is to a City See”
“Vibrant, interesting and community focused”
“Short term ROI vs long term ROC Return on Community”
Mind the people: Ability, Knowledge, Desire, Awareness, Reinforcement
Stimulate the network (instigators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards)
Change/Transform the environment: Information, Identity, incentives, infrastructure, institutions
It’s all about being part of the system you are trying to change. But change or incremental innovation is not good enough anymore in this fast moving world. The keyword is “transformation”: bringing into a new state where there is no option back, a risk to fall back into the old toxic habits. It is about a humanization of our organizations; a transformation at deep people level.
This is where my other #BIF8 hero comes in: Susan Shuman @susansyp, CEO of SY Partners.
She did not talk about the executives and the middle managers.
Some participants to the conference found she was too much in pitching mode, pitching her company. That may be true, but the story of what her company does is a very strong one.
I love the tagline “we help companies design their future”. This is a transformation story of Seeing, Believing, Thinking and Acting in meaningful and impactful new ways:
See = Fore-sighting, seeing the options vs constraining the options
Believe = deep sense of what is possible
Think = new solutions, prototyping, fail fast and wisely
Act = liberated in pursuing value driven opportunities
It’s about transformation management (not “change” management). It’s about a new way for creating strategy, grounded in complexity thinking and opening the options versus closing them, seeing through the lens of possibility not the lens of constraints, making visible and enabling options for collaboration.
The sort of collaboration and learning experiences that enable greatness, viral change from the top and from deep in the company fabric. It enables a modern way to look at strategy, an emergent strategy, where we not only look at short term revenue streams, but also for new capabilities and strengths. A different way of content curation, facilitation and design, leading to new collisions of expertise, and long lasting transformations.
The sort of collaboration that exists in great team where “duo’s” or “triads” of highly complementary people create greatness. Teams don’t just happen.
Teams are designed
You have to design for team magic
That’s also why moving around “human resources” from one team to another does not move around the greatness with it.
It’s about a new set of tools to let teams perform at their very best, a network of individuals dedicated to each other’s success, a tribe of humans that envision, believe in, and fight for greatness. It’s about a new practice for value creation.
It is not a coincidence that Innotribe’s updated mission statement includes a couple of these key components for the modern organization: “To enable collaborative innovation for the financial industry and create new value for the people it serves”
Companies are movements
Movements for greatness
Innotribe enables those movements and transformations.
Petervan Studios 