[Video] How Terminator inspired faster and “liquid” 3D printing

Perfect example of questioning and reframing the challenge and developing innovation from the blind spot

Joseph DeSimone is a scholar, inventor and serial entrepreneur. A longtime professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, he’s taken leave to become the CEO at Carbon3D, the Silicon Valley 3D printing company he co-founded in 2013.

DeSimone, an innovative polymer chemist, has made breakthrough contributions in fluoropolymer synthesis, colloid science, nano-biomaterials, green chemistry and most recently 3D printing. His company’s Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) suggests a breakthrough way to make 3D parts.

Read more about Carbon3D here

 

[Thoughts] Think like a startup… or why you need to doubt to be lean in the corporate world

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard that phrase: “think like a startup, act like a startup”… I guess you stopped counting too.

But this imperative calls for a deeper question, why is it so hard for existing businesses to do so?And aren’t we underestimating the harshness of being a startup?

You need to start with the definition of a startup: A startup is an organization formed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model (according to Steve Blank, in “The four steps to Epiphany”)
Read it again. The startup is formed to seach…
The establish organisations isn’t formed to search – it’s designed to execute.

Startup entrepreneurs undergo tremendous pain and agony through the growth process between idea and product/market fit and revenue generation.
They will have to go through  the hard questioning, doubting, hole-poking and criticism inside an accelerator to make the venture even stronger.  I haven’t met any manager or executive in established businesses willing to go through such pain… because they don’t have time to do so, and they have no incentivized to do so.

So maybe for established businesses to think and act like startups, they need to institutionalise some time to doubt, to assess wrongful assumptions, challenge their limiting beliefs, articulate their intuitions, raise questions (see leads of belief change in one of my previous posts).

Dare to doubt

As I write these posts and continuously research and read about contexts and behaviours enabling innovation and creativity, I have found doubt/skepticism and questioning at the foundation of most approaches.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame (Marshall McLuhan)

To harness doubt in a positive way I often suggest this framework:

• the things you know you know: norms, rules, bright spots, best practices…

check that these facts are still valid or true against data (see my previous post here)

eg. This mobile carrier brand is destined to young adult and teenagers (Sosh by Orange)… when it actually observed great take-up with unemployed population.

• the things you know you don’t know: these are the additional questions and assumptions you’re trying test.

Try to answer the question through further analysis with the data you already have…

eg. How sensitive are our Mom consumers to the presence of this ingredient in our recipe, given growing negative buzz around the topic.

• the things you don’t know you know: that’s you’re intuition, your know how

Try to identify and normalise it to improve effectiveness, efficiency and transferability, Turn your hypothesis into evidence

• finally the things you don’t know you don’t know: that’s you blind spot.

This is the area where you need to accept to doubt and put your discovery skills to practice (the why? the how? the if?)

This is also where the opportunity awaits.

It is a huge task. Startup entrepreneurs have to do it, or they will fail to find a market/product fit and scalable business model or pivot to new markets.

Established businesses have a market/product fit and business model but are alienated by them, and will fail to survive if they don’t adapt to a fast moving and uncertain environment.

Data informed vs Data Driven

In both cases – this framework has to be data informed.

I’m purposefully writing “data informed” and not data-driven as I’ve encountered many data-driven-ish companies loosing sight of the bigger picture, trapped in analysis paralysis or worshiping irrelevant KPIs in the scorecard. I have so many stories it is embarrassing.

The reason I suggest data informed framework is because good metrics change the way you behave, they are a driver of action and incentive specific behaviours to create better alignement with strategy. They make you accountable.

As Jedi Master Yoda would say: “Good metric is the path to the Force. Good Metric leads to clarity, clarity leads to accountability,  accountability leads to alignement”

If you have found an nugget, idea, insight or opportunity during this discovery process it is either in line with your current product/market fit and business model – … or not:

• If you’re a startup, that’s the opportunity to pivot it into a new market…
• if you’re in an establish business, good luck: you are kryptonite (unless you work a P&G) – get an executive sponsor and make sure everyone else knows you’ve got one.

Measuring what matters: Debunking a few myths

• Brand Awareness/Top of Mind: Actually consideration is a better proxy for sales and marketshare in most industries I’ve been working with
• Number of Fans, followers, Likes: that’s a typical vanity metric. If you can’t get them to do something useful for you, they are useless
• Number of contacts in database: as previously, useless unless you know how many will open an email for eg. and act on what’s inside.
• Number of visits / Market Share: is it one person who visits/buys a hundred times or a hundred people who visit/buy one time?
• Number of downloads: Downloads alone have no value. Activations, ARPU do.

Now ask yourself this question – and feel free to contact me if you wish to discuss this further:

• What are the metrics you are working towards?
• How are they aligned to what your business – startup or established is trying to achieve today, tomorrow?
• How many help you make business decisions?
• Can you kill the ones not adding value?
• Some industries use a single or aggregated success metrics for e.g.. NetAdds or CLV or ARPU… would it be possible for you?

[Video] Ricardo Semler: Leading by omission or… why change and disruption can’t happen from inside

I’m exceptionally posting two videos today. Another talk from Ricardo Semler – see my previous post for newest talk at TEDGlobal – and yes, it’s official I’m in love with that guy.

This talk was originally given at MIT Sloan School of Management in 2005.

There’s “something fundamental about organizations and ‘ leadership that makes it almost impossible for people inside a business to change their own industry.

Ricardo Semler discusses why it is difficult or impossible to innovate or disrupt from inside the organisation – giving examples in Automotive and legacies of military hierarchies. Although I don’t agree with his point on intuition alone, I cannot but agree with his point on wishful thinking for having experimented it in multiple companies.

source: MIT Tech TV

[Thoughts] Everything you know is wrong… and it’s exciting

I have discussed in the two previous posts how a belief can determine a reality (“I don’t believe in digital”) and how our beliefs are fundamentally flawed and dangerous anyway (Quantum physics, The Matrix and the corporate world).

There is maybe an opportunity to escape this determinism, as history seems to repeat itself, and the disruptors become the disrupted (eg. Kodak, Motorola, Nokia…).
And the only way is to acknowledge that everything we know is wrong: no industry, category, company or product is safe.

Disruptive change is accelerating, driven by the rapid emergence of new technologies, the blurring of lines between industries, and competition from both traditional and nontraditional players.

As a result, corporate lifespans are shrinking. On average, a company drops out of the S&P 500 list and is replaced once every few weeks. If current trends hold, about 75% of companies on today’s list will fade away or get acquired by 2030.
(Innosight, The strategy confidence Gap, 2015)

U2 – ZooTV Tour

…And that it’s OK. It’s super-exciting. Now we can question everything, even the unquestionable as Einstein did when he questioned the definition of Time or the nature of Gravity.

 

As our biases are cognitive and behavioural, the solution to overcome them lays there too.

In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact.  By identifying behaviours of the world’s best innovators—from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Skype, and Virgin Group—the authors outline specific skills.

They outline that all innovative disruptors have in common: specific cognitive and behavioural skills, institutionalised processes to support a large number of people in the organisation using these skills, and a culture/philosophy to sustain the process.

When you question your beliefs (what I think I know and what I know I don’t know) you’ll have to face your blind spot  (what you don’t know you don’t know).
Innovators cognitive and behavioural skills, people and processes allow them to look into the blind spot by asking questions :Why? How? If?

Why by Carl Richards. Source NY Times For more of his drawings see link in source

“There’s nothing more dangerous that the right answers to the wrong questions”
(Peter Drucker,1994)

• Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom,

How do you ask yourself questions about things you’re unaware of, and incompetent at?
By starting with a clean slate, leaving all of your assumptions away.
Asking yourself how many things you are wrong about.
Simple questions – just a few words. The process is called Catalytic Questioning, as asking questions changes your perspective on the problem.
This step is hard, as it requires being comfortable with being uncomfortable (see an example with Pixar BrainTrust).
The Heath Brothers provide fabulous examples in their book “Decisive” about the importance of the devil’s advocate role.

• Observing: scrutinising the behaviour of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new and different ways of seeing/doing things

… Look for what is surprising and unexpected.

• Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives.

In order to get valuable insights you need to go to different people – different industry, category, gender/age group…
This is a little bit like in Chip & Dan Heath’s Book “Switch”: did someone else answered that question successfully?

• Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge

Make it small, fast and cheap. Experimenting should be accessible and facilitated to all in the organisation.

• finally Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields, the combinatory play: selecting and probing the answers helps new ideas emerge from connecting the un-connected.

Innovation, Strategy, Change even are often mistaken for an Event, when they are a process. It’s everybody’s job, and anchoring it in our behaviour requires routine: we are what we repeatedly do. We are wired to solve problems (see David Kwong’s TED Talk).

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
(Aristotle)

As a 4 y.o. I was always asking Why? and If? I never stopped since.
When did you?

 

Sources:

Innosight – The strategy confidence gap

HBR – Catalytic Questioning

New York Times – Carl Richards Personal Finance on a napkin

Credit Suisse / Forbes – The most innovative companies methodology

FastCompany – Inside Pixar BrainTrust

David Kwong – Two nerdy obsessions meet — and it’s magic