Wonder Object on Vimeo

Wonder Object from Mark & Angela Walley on Vimeo.

Artist Gary Schott utilizes his skills as a Metalsmith to create playful and beautiful mechanized objects. This documentary was produced in association with Southwest School of Art. Learn more about their BFA program at swschool.org. Learn more about the artist at GarySchott.com. Learn more about the Filmmakers walleyfilms.com.

Innovation: The Six Sides of the Box

Unless you've been in a coma for the past 20 years, I'm sure you're familiar with the phrase "get out of the box." It's everywhere. Whole industries have sprung up around it, including mine.
No one can deny that getting out of the box is a good thing to do. Seems like a no-brainer, eh? Kind of like helping little old ladies cross the street. Or tearing down the Berlin Wall.
But before you start planning your heroic escape, answer me this:
What the heck is the box, anyway?
What is this so-called thing that keeps us so contained, confined, caged, trapped, claustrophobic, and otherwise unable to succeed?
Let's start with the basics. A box has six sides, including the top and the bottom.
If we can understand what these six sides are, we'll know what we're dealing with -- and this knowledge will improve our chances of getting out. Or, as Fritz Perls once said, "Awareness cures."
Let us proceed...
1. FEAR: If you want to raise the odds of being trapped in a box for the rest of your life, all you need to do is increase the amount of fear you feel.

Fear inhibits. Fear paralyzes. Fear subverts action. Indeed, when fear rules the day, even reacting is difficult. Fear not only puts us in the box, it makes it almost impossible to get out the box.
Fear of what?
Fear of judgment. Fear of failure. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being revealed to be an impostor. Fear of this. Fear of that. And fear of the other thing, too.
Do you think it's an accident that Peter Drucker devoted his entire life to driving fear out of the workplace? Or course not.
Fear sucks. And precisely what it sucks is the life right out of you. There is no box without fear. Get rid of fear and you get rid of the box.
2. POWERLESSNESS: Powerlessness is the state of mind in which people think they have no choice -- that they are victims of circumstance, that the act of attempting anything new is futile.
It's why Dilbert has become the patron saint of most cubicle dwellers.

Some in-the-box people have dwelled in the state of powerlessness for their entire life, going all the way back to childhood, overpowered (or disempowered) by parents, schools, and who knows what else.
If you work in a corporation, you've seen this powerlessness paradigm in spades -- as the "powers-that-be" don't always take kindly to the ideas, input, and grumblings of the "rank and file."
If you're feeling powerless, not only are you in the box, it's highly unlikely that you'll be able to muster the energy, intention, or urgency to get out of it.
3. ISOLATION: Boxes are usually small and confining. Rarely is there room for more than one person. Isolation is the result. There's no one to talk to, no one to bounce ideas off of, no one to collaborate with.
Curiously, solitary confinement is the biggest punishment our society doles out -- second only to the death sentence. Being cut off from the tribe has been a very effective "behavior modification" technique for centuries.
When you're in the box, that's exactly what's happening.
And while your isolation may give you a momentary feeling of much-needed privacy, safety, and relief from the judgment of others, it's fool's gold. Sitting in the dark, being completely on your own, vision obscured -- all reduce your chances of getting out.
4. ASSUMPTIONS: Assumptions are the guesses we make based on our subjective interpretation of reality. They are short cuts. Lines drawn in the sand.
We end up taking things for granted because we are either too lazy to get down to the root of things or too entranced by our own beliefs to consider an alternative.
Ultimately, it is our assumptions that shape our world. The world is the screen and we are the projector, seeing only what we project -- which is all too often merely a function of the assumptions we've made.
As one wise pundit once put it, "When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees our pockets."
Bottom line, we see what we are primed to see. Change your assumptions and you change the world -- starting with your own.
5. MENTAL CLUTTER:
If you find yourself in the box, it would be fair to say that the box contains you. But what do you contain?

If you are like most people in today's over-caffeinated, twitterfied, fast food, information overloaded world the answer is: too much.
With the amount of information doubling every few years, most of us have way too much on our minds. Too much to do and not enough time.
We have no time for musing. No time for pondering. No time for reflecting. No time for contemplating, incubating, or making new connections -- behaviors that are essential to true out-of-the-box thinking.
The result? Not a good one.
We glom onto the first seemingly "right idea" that comes our way -- or else desperately try to declutter our minds with an endless series of mindless distractions that only increase the amount of clutter we need to process. Ouch.
6. NARROW MINDEDNESS:
When you're in a box, it's hard to see. Sight lines are limited. Vision is obscured. We become shortsighted. Our vision conforms to that which confines it. We become, soon enough, narrow-minded.
I'm sure you know a few people like this. Their ability to see beyond their immediate surroundings has become disabled.
When this kind of phenomenon becomes institutionalized, we end up with a bad case of "next quarter syndrome" -- especially in organizations ruled by the need to constantly please profit-seeking shareholders.

Few people are thinking six months out. Few are thinking 12 months out. And almost no one is thinking five years out. Everyone is trapped by the short-term.
What we call "focus" becomes a euphemism for tunnel vision -- just another form of narrow-mindedness that makes getting out of the box about as likely as my credit card company rescinding their usurious late payment fees.
OK. I hope I've not depressed you. That's not my purpose. Neither is it my purpose to obsess about the "problem." But until we know what we're really dealing with, all this hot talk about "getting out of the box" is just hype and a complete waste of time.
NEXT WEEK: Tips and techniques for getting out of the box. Until then, reflect on these questions:
1. What are you afraid of?
2. If you are business leader, how can you reduce fear in the workplace?
3. How can you get reclaim your own God-given power?
4. If you are a business leader, how can you start letting go of control?
5. How can you connect with a more diverse group of collaborators?
6. If you are a business leader, what can you do this week to foster more cross-functional collaboration?
7. How can you identify your three biggest limiting assumptions?
8. If you are a business leader, how can you identify your direct reports' three biggest limiting assumptions?
9. What's the simplest thing you can do this week to decrease the amount of mental clutter in your life?
10. If you are a business leader, how can give people more time think creatively?
11. What can you do this week to dream bigger than you usually do?
12. If you are a business leader, what can you do help your organization conceive a more compelling vision of its future?

Innovative Project Managers needed

A good Project manager is not normally a dreamer or spontaneous. A Project managers must be practical, structured and systematic but at the same time they should be open to innovation.

Clearly they need to be structured and systematic to be successful at establishing strong plans and managing a project to implementation. A project manager must have a structured approach, to understand what step goes before another.

A structured, systematic approach is normally linear; it may be multiple paths performed simultaneously, but each individual path is still linear. Unfortunately, the innovative skills may not come as naturally to many project managers.

The act of innovating is defined as “the introduction of new things or methods.” In IT, we know that there is always a better way; the same can be said for how we manage a project. There are aspects of a company’s culture, personalities of key stakeholders, constraints, and limitations that call for a project manager to innovate.

You should view the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) standards as important guidelines but it is not an exact set of rules on how to manage every detail of the project. You should always be challenging yourself to come up with a new, more efficient way of doing things. Innovative project managers are questioning, they set aside “thinking time” to look at the challenge from multiple angles and truly challenge how they have always done things.

I’ve seen so many project managers repeatedly use what went well during the last project. It can makes life appear simple because the outcome is predictable but over time, you might find yourself going with a solution because you’re familiar with it and not necessarily because it’s the best one for the job.

The challenge for project managers is twofold:
Whenever you get that uncertain feeling that occurs when facing a new challenge, and you’re tempted to take one of your “comfortable” tools out of the toolbox, stop and take some time to think and innovate. Instead of repeating what's familiar to you, come up with the best tool for the job.

When faced with a familiar challenge that you have the perfect tools to address, stop, take some think time, and look at the challenge from different angles. Now that you have used this tool successfully for so long, is there a way you can improve it, upgrade it, or replace it with the smarter, better model?

Establishing thinking time takes discipline. I don’t know any successful project manager who isn’t driving projects as hard as they can, dealing with crisis every day. Taking time to think, when time is at a premium has the best results; this thinking time is akin to the planning phase of a project.

When the stakeholder want immediate action, the older wiser project manager will understand that the more time spent in the thinking, planning phase leads to more successful project outcomes.

Psycho Managers: The Crimes of Bad Managers are often Buried

Like many employees, I had a boss who could be a lovely person but had terrible mood swings. She had no idea how to talk nicely to people and was not well liked. She was the wrong choice to manage people and couldn't manage a multi-skilled team to save her life.

One minute she was clearly working hard at being the kind, supportive maternal figure who wouldn't hesitate to pick up the lunch bill or to dole out helpful career advice. The next, she had flipped and became the tight-assed, briefcase-swinging monstorous Psycho killer of film legends.

Immature managers
Typically, when things are not going their way, they will cease to communicate; throw a tantrum; yelling, screaming and then even hiding from the situation.

Being unhappy with your work is one thing and this may incur direct but constructive criticism. All this is to be expected, but to express disgust at a document's content by ripping each page out of the binder and throwing them at the owner, one at a time, and at the same time throwing abuse and insults around like confetti. Well, that's simply childish and immature.

Faulty Hierarchy
Unfortunately, promotion does come too often to people who have a history of terrorising their subordinates. Revealing that the hierarchical selection criteria is flawed and is self-replicating.

It's no secret that many managers land their jobs without having the correct skills or receiving an ounce of leadership training. Their only visible talent being that they 'really' want a bigger office, job title and paycheck. Leaving the acquisition of professional management skills to fate, blind chance or learning how to lead 'on the fly'.

Cardinal Jekyll and Hyde
To be cursed with a boss who could go from "greatest gal /guy to hang out with for drinks" to an hysterical raving lunatic in mere half seconds, is very dusturbing.

Anyone that can carry around 2 separate personalities inside them and can appear to be a friendly person in the morning and a ranting monster in the afternoon, is without doubt, unfit for leadership and is clealry overwhelmed by the pressure of it.

Managing a manic manager
If resigning or getting an internal transfer isn't a viable option, especially in today's employment environment, you have to find and manage your boss's trigger points. If they tend to implode after 3 p.m., seek them out early in the day and check their blood sugar levels.

If they're a holy terror after departmental review meetings with their own manager, stay far, far away but try to find the root cause of the problem, between manager et manager.

If your boss hates long e-mails, and we all do, spread the word to keep the correspondence snappy and to the point.

Tantrums
If you still find yourself the target of an unexpected and undeserved tirade of abuse, don't fight against the storm. Wait patiently until it subsides and is shown to be ineffective. Speak quietly if shouted at and stay calm. Give your boss the opportunity to vent their steam. Don't fight noise with noise or a tantrum with a tantrum.

Micro-management
Micromanagers are rarely the perfectionists they claim to be. They are normally just control freaks, who cannot delegate effectively. They claim that they do not trust others but they are really very aware of their own shortcomings and insecurity. Especially, about how their own results and performance will be perceived upstairs.

Make progress lists and status checklists for them, documenting the tasks and projects you are doing, their status and their completion. Then sit your boss down and show them the last four assignments that you did that they were happy with.

Clarify, Clarify, Clarify
Tell them directly that they're interferring with the steady efficient flow of your work, tasks and company business. Tell them bluntly that you could work more efficiently if they backed off and loosened up the reigns, refraining from asking for excessive copies and repeated rounds of revisions.

Multiple revisions normally come about because your boss has not thought their requirements through, thoroughly enough. So lots of clarification should be demanded at the earliest stage to prevent circular re-iterations at the later stages. You can do this yourself or you can prompt project team members to do so, for their own peace of mind.

You cannot be subtle with a micro-manager. You have to be direct and clear. Hit them over the head with it. If you use standard business terms and phrasing, there is less risk of offending.

Competence
To deal with an obviously incompetent boss, you have to become a role model for them and show them what the correct behaviour is. Try not to look surprised and dumb-founded, when they say something stupid.

There is an old adage that states 'If your boss enjoys success, then you will too'. It is always better to work for a stable, well respected and efficient boss, even if it is you who has made them that way. The ability to control works in both directions. If you are aware of your boss's mistakes, then you are the best person to take the initiative to change this.

Innovation: The dilemma

Innovative ideas are not always popular. It takes hard times to open our minds to innovative ideas. When things are going well enough there is no need to be innovative because innovation means moving outside our comfort zone.

If you believe you are an innovator, then now is the best of times. Remember, you need to be tough because you will cause discomfort and you will not be popular. If it is popularity you seek, then this is the wrong path.

With all the talk about innovation we forget that not everybody can be an innovator. Your most successful innovations in the long run will make you very unpopular in the short run. You’ll upset the established order and cause discomfort to those who depend on that established order. Don’t look for approval, its not there. You must be an innovator only because you have to be and you need to be tough enough to handle the slings, arrows and disapproval of those you threaten.

Remember that Innovation is an art, not a science. Jean Cocteau an innovator in the arts, was an innovator in many fields; in poetry, writing, design, theatre, and film-making. He made himself unpopular in the short run and kept on doing what he did anyway because he was different and he had to. Eventually, he became famous and accepted as part of the 'establishment'. The curse and dilemma of all innovators.

Cocteau said, "Anything of importance cannot help but be unrecognisable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known." So don't confuse innovation with merely making incremental improvements to existing ways of doing things.

He also said: "Listen carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note carefully what it is about your work that the critics don't like, then cultivate it. That's the part of your work that's individual and worth keeping." Do you believe in what you are doing, enough to persevere in the face of veiled threats, withering criticism or deafening silence?

Beware of so called innovators who become very popular very quickly, their easy popularity is a signal that whatever it is they are doing, it is not innovative.

Doing Less With Less leads to less

Where do you stand in today's market? and who's standing there with you?

Now that your company has fashionably reduced its staffing levels and you have survived the axe, are you being asked to do more with less, in the wake of these layoffs?

Yes you say, but are you actually doing more? I'm sorry but the real answer is; probably not. According to a US survey conducted in December by Leadership IQ.

When the US research and training firm polled 4,172 workers at 318 companies that had recently laid off employees, 74% of the people who responded said their own productivity has declined. Other findings:

• 87% of surviving workers said they are less likely to recommend their organisations as good places to work. (Quelle surpris! This is a sign of a badly handled layoff)
  
• 64% of surviving workers said the productivity of their colleagues has also declined. (The bad layoff was indicative of poor management motivational skills in the company)
  
• 81% of surviving workers said the quality of service that customers receive has declined. (This should have alarm bells ringing! This way, monsters lie!)7
• 77% of surviving workers said they see more errors and mistakes being made. (Realistically, they may be looking closer, with a more critical and negative attitude or have access to more info through expanded roles)
• 61% of surviving workers said they believe their companies' future prospects are worse.
  

This summary is probably correct, if their customers are sensing negative vibes and are experiencing reduced service, in today's buyer's market. Staff and management should be made aware that they have a vital role to play in convincing customers that there is value to be had by maintaining their loyalty.

Loyal customers and repeat business should be cherished, protected and sustained through innovation and strong management.

If the company has implemented reduced staffing levels without refreshing the management team, its motivation and its attitudes, then the only changes they will need to manage are the shrinkages of its customer base, the obsolescense of its products and services, with the subsequent failure of the whole lame duck enterprise.

Do not mistake Movement for Action

Babies can't do an adult's job

Walking by the netbook display at PC World, Media Markt and others, you're likely to hear cooing and exclamations of how cute the little baby laptops are.

Beware, if you take one home, your new baby is not yet fully grown and it is barely on solids. It has not built up enough of the resources to do the work that a standard Momma and Poppa notebook or Laptop can do. Its got some growing to do.

Cheeky new Netbooks are just about the only thing these days that are generating any kind of excitement in the hardware market space. The visual appearance and form factor is appealing to many. The idea of having a good workhorse laptop that can carry your workload at half the size and weight is a dream, but I am sorry it has yet to come true.

With a 10-inch screen, these babies are much smaller than the standard-sized notebook, and yes, much lighter. They are also quite a bit cheaper too. Some are as inexpensive as €200, while others can get as expensive as the €1,000 range. Take note, there is a good reason why they are cheaper.

It's hard to walk by a netbook display at a consumer electronics store without hearing someone coo-ing at them and talk about how cute they are, as if they really were little baby notebooks.

Their magnetic appeal to consumers, means that netbooks have been doing their part to boost sales and make PC manufacturers happy. If you look at the earnings report of any PC maker who makes netbooks, you'll notice that netbook unit sales are just about the only thing growing at a healthy pace. This year other hardware sales look positively bleak, with Gartner now forecasting a decline of almost 12 percent in 2009, the worst in IT history.

Although netbook sales seem to be increasing, some in the industry say that netbooks are suffering a greater return rate than other PCs. If that is the case we can predict an increase in th enumber of netbook orphanages opening up. Netbook for sale. 1 disappointed owner!

• On the consumer side, it's said that once users get the machines home and play with them for a little while, they soon realize the smaller machines can't do all the things that their more Momma and Papa (standard-sized and standard-priced) notebooks can do. The very inexpensive netbooks generally come with Linux, an well respected operating system in the techie world but still a little unfamiliar to the Microsoft masses.
  
• On the enterprise side distributors say netbooks have yet to take hold.

So what's the real story? Can that little baby PC do the big jobs you need it to do? Is there a place anywhere for the netbook in 2009? Is it a serious business contender? Consider this;

Screen size. The size really negates th eus eof Windows style operating systems because you only have space for 1 window. Do your users want to run multiple applications and have more than 1 window open at one time? Do they use spreadsheets? Well, while the netbook's small form factor makes it convenient to tote around, but you will not be able to see everything you need to see. Certainly not at the same time and that can get very frustrating.

Storage. To save space, most netbooks are shipped with a small amount of solid state memory rather than a rotating hard drive. This makes sense in a world where memory prices are always falling and solid state, is faster and more reliable. However, many users have become accustomed to more than 100GB of memory and even in netbooks with hard drives, those users may be disappointed.

Processor performance. You would be foolish to buy a PC that isn't dual core, at least. That is, unless your looking at a netbook. Most standard notebooks come with a dual core processor, either from Intel or AMD, but most netbooks use Intel's Atom single core processor. Intel has said that Atom processors have about half the performance of Intel Celeron processors. Party on!

The other features you and your customers have gotten used to have also been downsized or bypassed. You can get the Microsoft Vista Premium OS on some of these notebooks, and you can buy an external DVD player and an additional external hard drive but by the time you have financed that, you could have configured a standard Momma and Poppa low-end laptop that comes with a higher-performance processor.

Some companies are coming out with some interesting new innovative netbooks, including ones with an ARM processor and a detachable keyboard, making it appear more like a tablet notebook.

In Summary. Unless you want what the netbook really is (a lightweight client that functions well in a cloud computing environment for tasks such as e-mail and Web browsing, but is not as capable of heavy lifting) you are probably better off with a standard Momma and Poppa notebook for a few euros more.

If you want something cute and cuddly around the office that can be easily picked up and taken anywhere, there are other more appropriate and interesting things.

Creativity and Innovation

The the creative art of any deal can be enhanced by the art of creativity and innovation.

In truth, "art" is overstating it. "Visualization" is more accurate: if you can draw basic geometric shapes, lines, arrows, and stick figures, you have all the creativity skills you need to put your ideas into practice and produce a vast array of concepts and network models, diagrams, schematics, flow charts, tables, and other visual representations. Welcome to the world of Pictorial analysis.

In 1969, Rudolf Arnheim's Visual Thinking made a compelling case that while perception and reasoning may seem like two distinct mental activities, neither one can occur without the other. More recently, in the business world, the concept of "strategy maps" has been advanced by Robert Kaplan and David Norton (creators of the balanced scorecard) as providing a "visual epiphany" that helps business leaders connect processes to desired outcomes.

Executives should reach for the pencil not only when addressing a discrete task such as drawing a strategy map, but in myriad situations in which "the problem [or the solution] is hard to see." That may be a challenge for finance people, who are accustomed to believing that, 'all answers can be found in the numbers if one simply drills down far enough'.

Those in finance are often "red-pen" people, who question the entire idea of visualization, right up to the point where they grab a red pen and redraw everything. You will need to work harder to convince finance executives, than any other group but, once won over, they will become the most ardent backers of the concept.

The other two classes of people are "black-pen" people, those who are instantly drawn to visualization and "yellow-pen" people, who are happy to build upon someone else's initial stab at visualization.

It may help to know that the finance department at Microsoft, where, not surprisingly, employees can "make spreadsheets do pirouettes in ways mere mortals can't," nonetheless, they "understand that insights often depend on looking at the data from different angles and in a more visual form."

Drawing Conclusions
Most business problems can be framed as a variant of the five W's, or, more accurately, four W's and an H: who, what, when, where, and how.

Use your given creativity to show innovation in your ideas and concepts and engage your audience by involving them in, what should be an organic process.

So for your next meeting, leave the laptop behind and instead bring a few whiteboard markers. You may find that even a lousy picture is worth a thousand rows and columns.