Specialization - Generalism

If breakthrough insights are at the intersection of ideas, concepts and cultures, it will be generalists - those so-called dabblers and experts of nothing - who find them, who connect them with the specialists that need them, who shape organizations in ways that embrace them, and who sheperd into existence the ideas that will indeed change our world for the better.

Inspired, divergent, lateral thinking is the secret factor for
organizations and individuals that live and work in the realm of ideas. Generalists hold the key to our increasingly specialized world.

Quoted from http://www.creativegeneralist.com

MBWA - Managing By Wandering Around

When Bob Waterman and Tom Peters wrote "In Search of Excellence" in
1982, business was "by the numbers"-and the Americans were struggling
(to put it mildly) wity uyuyuuyuuuh hands on, tactile stuff, like
Japanese quality.

Then, at Hewlett Packard, we were introduced to the famed "HP Way," the
centerpiece of which was in-touch management. HP had a term for this …
MBWA. (Managing By Wandering Around.) They fell immediate in love. Not
only was the idea per se important and cool, but it symbolized
everything they were coming to cherish-enterprises where bosses-leaders
were in immediate touch with and emotionally attached to workers,
customers, the product. The idea is as important or more important in
fast-paced 2007 as it was in 1982.

Tom Peters

Marketing is a battle of perceptions

Tales From The Marketing Wars
The Law Of Perception

Still, many people think marketing is a battle of products. In the long
run, they figure, the best product will win. Thus, Mr. Nardelli's Six
Sigma push.

Marketing people are preoccupied with doing research and "getting the
facts." They analyze the situation to make sure that truth is on their
side. Then they sail confidently into the marketing arena, secure in the
knowledge that they have the best product and ultimately the best
product will win.

It's an illusion. There is no objective reality. There are no facts, no best products. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. The perception is the reality.

Everything else is an illusion.

Jack Trout 01.16.07, 6:00 AM ET

Click here to read the article on Forbes.com..

To seek out ‘zero risk’ is to commit to doing nothing

The Designer's Approach to Risk

Taking bold risks does not feel safe.
But to seek out 'zero risk' is to commit to doing nothing.

How does one move ahead and create growth in such an environment? There is a better way. We applied the design process to this challenge, and set out to understand how designers approach risk.

What we found is very encouraging. In the world of 'design thinking', acknowledging risk is the first step toward taking action, and with action comes insight, evidence, and real options. To increase their odds of innovating routinely and successfully, today's organizations need to learn to live with risk the way designers do.

We've found that this traditional, negative definition doesn't exist in the lexicon of most designers. For them, risk isn't a measure of 'the downside'; instead, it is a measure of upside and opportunity. If the risk isn't great enough, designers might well ask themselves, "why bother?"

Insight #1: Designers don't seek to mitigate risk. They embrace it, even amplify it.

Speaking to a set of experiences gleaned from hundreds of client engagements, he summed up how designers approach risk: "For a designer, trying is more coveted than success. The real risk isn't failing, it is not trying." Trying is a statement of optimism, and a person, a team, or even an entire company grows more by acting than by standing still.

Insight #2: Designers take risks to learn.

All of this might sound scary to someone who practices 'business-as-usual'. Designers aren't hooked on adrenaline: they are hooked on learning, and embracing and amplifying risk is a way to learn. The more you try, the more you learn; and the more you learn, the greater the likelihood that you can design a new and better experience for a user.

Insight #3: Designers embrace risk, but their process of thinking mitigates it.

Design thinking uniquely combines conscious risk taking with structured risk mitigation. This is a fascinating paradox: designers embrace risk, but the way they think mitigates it. Each of the three behavioral building blocks of design thinking—empathy, prototyping, and storytelling—serves to simultaneously embrace and mitigate risk.

Design thinking uniquely combines conscious risk taking with structured risk mitigation. This is a fascinating paradox: designers embrace risk, but the way they think mitigates it. Each of the three behavioral building blocks of design thinking—empathy, prototyping, and storytelling—serves to simultaneously embrace and mitigate risk.

Click this link to read the story at Business week

Is Creative Thinking Important?

Original posting by Bram (in Indonesian)

Judul di atas adalah pertanyaan yang menggelitik untuk kita. Secara spontan, kita pasti akan menjawab bahwa kreatifitas adalah hal yang penting, namun harus kita akui juga bahwa sejak di bangku sekolah, kretifitas kurang mendapatkan porsi yang memadai, kecuali di sekolah-sekolah berkelas yang mahal, dimana para pelajar dan siswa banyak diberikan kebebasan berpikir dan berkreasi. Dan sejak kita lulus dari pendidikan lalu mulai masuk ke dunia kerja, jarang sekali kreatifitas dan inovasi digunakan dalam bekerja, kecuali untuk bidang-bidang kerja yang memang membutuhkan kreatifitas. Sebagian besar dunia kerja justru menuntut skill, pengalaman dan loyalitas. Dan jika kenyataannya seperti itu, apakah kita masih menganggap bahwa kreatifitas adalah penting? Sementara di negara-negara maju seperti Jepang, kultur dan budaya untuk berpikir secara kreatif dan inovatif telah ditanamkan sejak lahir terus menerus, bahkan juga selama dalam kandungan, dan mungkin itulah sebabnya mengapa orang Jepang mempunyai disiplin diri yang tinggi, dan juga tingkat inovasi dan kreatifitas yang sangat tinggi. Pertanyaan selanjutnya adalah, bagaimana dengan Indonesia, mengapa di negara yang kita cintai ini kreatifitas kelihatannya kurang berkembang?

Masyarakat umum mempunyai persepsi tertentu tentang perlunya berpikir kreatif dan inovatif. Persepsi-persepsi tersebut adalah sebagai berikut:

Diposting oleh Bram

To read the full article click this link :

"BERPIKIRLAH!"

"The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan"

By Tom Peters

The above is the Gospel of No Gospel as pronounced by economist William Easterly in his masterly book, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

As I prepared for my recent Kenya trip and seminar, I "read in" as usual. One eye-popping article was an Easterly piece, "The Ideology of Development," in Foreign Policy magazine (July/August 2007). Easterly argues that "Development" is at least as dangerous an ideology as communism and fascism, which is quite an assertion. "Development," he writes, "promises a comprehensive final answer to all of society's problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and despotic rulers. It shares the common ideological characteristic of suggesting there is only one correct answer, and it tolerates little dissent." Easterly blasts, among others, the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and, indirectly, Bono.

The deal is this—and I am drawn to it because it mirrors exactly my own half-century journey and rant: Namely "planners," especially "master planners," more or less believe that the plan is the thing—and that the messy process of implementation on the ground will take care of itself if The Plan is "right." (Reminiscent of Iraq, eh?) In The White Man's Burden, Easterly describes "planners" and "searchers." While planners treat the plan as holy writ, searchers live by rapid trial and error and learn through constant experimentation and adjustment. To wit:

"In foreign aid, Planners announce good intentions but don't motivate anyone to carry them out; Searchers find things that work and get some reward. Planners raise expectations but take no responsibility for meeting them; Searchers accept responsibility for their actions. Planners determine what to supply; Searchers find out what is in demand. Planners apply global blueprints; Searchers adapt to local conditions. Planners at the top lack knowledge of the bottom; Searchers find out what the reality is at the bottom. ... A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn't know the answers in advance; he believes that poverty is a complicated tangle of political, social, historical, institutional and technological factors; a Searcher hopes to find answers to individual problems only by trial and error experimentation. A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions; a Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown."

For me, Easterly's book is a genuine "page-turner." As I said, it confirms a half century plus set of biases. My "ideology"—my only ideology—is unabashedly rapid fire trial and error. (Bob Waterman and I labeled this "a bias for action," our first of Eight Basics that were the centerpiece of In Search of Excellence. Our conclusion was that business's #1 problem was, "Too much talk, too little do." As the pace of change has accelerated, the problem has only gotten worse.)

I lay my biases out as best I can in Part Two ("Innovate. Or die.") of my Master presentation—which I am linking once again to this Post. A small sample therefrom:

"Some people look for things that went wrong and try to fix them. I look for things that went right, and try to build off them."—Bob Stone, head of Al Gore's surprisingly successful program to "re-invent government," which consisted of mostly low visibility, high impact experiments that Stone et al. spread via what we now call "viral marketing."

"Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find these areas of positive deviance and fan the flames." —Richard Pascale & Jerry Sternin, "Your Company's Secret Change Agents," Harvard Business Review

"We made mistakes, of course. Most of them were omissions we didn't think of when we initially wrote the software. We fixed them by doing it over and over, again and again. We do the same today. While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make the design perfect, we're already on prototype version #5. By the time our rivals are ready with wires and screws, we are on version #10. It gets back to planning versus acting: We act from day one; others plan how to plan—for months."—Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Mike Bloomberg's business saga

William Easterly, Mike Bloomberg, and I pretty much agree, to quote Easterly: "The Right Plan Is to Have No Plan."

I urge you to try the book—it is indeed important, especially if we wish to see all the newfound attention to Africa actually lead to real progress. Like Easterly, I think we are mostly on the wrong path.

(My other "bible" for "all this" is Henry Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning.)

(Speaking of Africa, and my recent trip there to, you'll see a blurry picture of a pissed-off leopard above—presumably you can figure out why it's blurry.)

Posted by Tom Peters

Romance and... a story

"People who buy a Porche or Mini buy a story" The proplem is there are too
many people making affordable, boring cars.

Create romance, with design and.. a story"

Embrace the new technologies

Embrace the new technologies with child-like enthusiasm and a revolutionary's zeal

Not your father's health care establishment:
"Our entire facility is digital. No paper, no film, no medical records. Nothing. And it's all integrated—from the lab to X-ray to records to physician order entry. Patients don't have to wait for anything.The information from the physician's office is in registration and vice versa.The referring physician is immediately sent an email telling him his patient has shown up. ... It's wireless in-house. We have 800 notebook computers that are wireless. Physicians can walk around with a computer that's preprogrammed. If the physician wants, we'll go out and wire their house so they can sit on the couch and connect to the network.They can review a chart from 100 miles away."

—David Veillette, CEO, Indiana Heart Hospital, from HealthLeaders

Nothing less than an appetite for dramatic overthrow of 250 years of Industrial Revolution enterprise structures wil do. It's that simple—and that profound.

Tom Peters' "A Baker's Dozen"

Motivation

Most of us would not disagree that the main asset of almost any company is people. But the important question is: "How do you make this asset beneficial for the people themselves and the organiza­tion to which they belong?" This is a great challenge that has caused many a CEO to lose his or her footing.

Carlos Ghosn feels that the first important step is to get the people motivated. They should dream of adventure, the vision thing, the destination and all that they want to realize with their lives. When speaking, Ghosn likes to quote the words of Antoine de Saint­-Exupery, the French pilot and poet who once wrote: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." It is, after all, the workers who must build the ship and the employees who must carry out the necessary changes within an organization to make it profitable. And how do you do it? You do it through motivation. The people must be moti­vated. They must perceive clearly their visions of what they want to realize for their family, town, company or country. They need to know what they should do today and tomorrow to make their dreams a reality. But motivation, like trust, is not something you can com­mand. It is a very personal response that people offer ... or don't. If people are motivated, everything else will follow: wealth, sales, profits and loyalty. If they are not motivated, then you lose everything. An organization can have the most brilliant strategy but if its employees are unable or unwilling to understand the strategy, then can we say the strategy is good?

In practice, how does one motivate a large workforce? People need to have a sense of participation. Like the stonecutters, if they

feel that they are doing enough to get by, then you have not moti­vated them. During the Nissan Revival Plan, motivating the entire workforce involved sharing the vision, building credibility, listening and showing trust. Most importantly, management could not falter or compromise. Ghosn knows that you must lead by example, no matter how difficult the decisions you must make. He knows that words are cheap, and though people may listen politely to what you say, what counts is what you do. Perhaps more than any other corporate leader today, Ghosn has seen that one can accomplish many things that are difficult or that people say cannot be done, as long as one holds the minds and hearts of people to inspire them to go the extra mile.

But motivation works both ways. Ghosn has always given credit for past successes to the employees of the companies where he has worked. He may have been the leader but he never would have been as successful as he has been without having been supported, helped and motivated by his employees.

Ghosn believes that management's first priority is to establish a clear vision and a common long-term plan for the organization. A clear vision will determine strategies, guide action plans, direct performance and boost the motivation of all the people involved. Focused performance will produce measurable, positive results, which, in turn, encourage motivation, confirm unity of purpose, and prompt better performance.

Here are three ideas that Ghosn likes to remind himself and the people who work with him.

• When people are motivated to perform, they can achieve remark­able things.

• Great people are just ordinary people with an extraordinary amount of determination.

• When ordinary people are determined to overcome their difficulties and prove what they can do, the results can indeed be great.

"There is no secret formula for corporate revival, but
there is one common denominator, the motivation of
the people."

Creativity and marketing

By Sirk Verelst

Life is a sequence of events. Some positive, some negative. The good are to be enjoyed, the "bad" form the essence of the lessons of life. Each and everyone of them contains a pearl of wisdom on how to make things better. These unfortunate incidents are either caused by our actions, decisions, or they are due to circumstances beyond our control. Through these experiences, we learn to deal with and anticipate possibilies. Using available resources, personal experience and the wisdom of others combined with creative thinking , a strategy can be formulated.

Creative problem solving is to be everyone's responsibility. As opposed to leaving the creative up to an outside agency, all parties at every level need to be involved. By making them part of the process, an innovative approach can be achieved. Starting from product development, through production to after-sales service, bringing the product closer to the needs and expectations of the end-user.

Traditionally, creativity is only involved at both ends of the product cycle, conception and promotion. The designer starts by translating the brief into a product. After completion, promotion and marketing take the final product, place it into a context and present it to the prospective buyer. To make the creative an integral part of the business cycle, it needs to be involved at every stage. The product ecosystem needs to integrate an inquisitive frame of mind at every stage. The perceived insignificant components and participants need to be subject to introspection. The existence of the product as well as every member of the team need to have his/her contribution questioned. In this way the final result as well as the process can be optimized yielding a maximum level of satisfaction to all, not only an increase of the absolute, but more importantly the perceived value of the product. The latter being far more important.

Click here for Related ideas (Businessweek)..