Is it Dali Time…Or Hammer Time?

Yesterday I met with Jeff Boudro, the “Director of Really Cool Stuff at Staples.”  And from spending time with him, I can attest to this being the truth!

Case in point is the picture left…

Jeff bought a clock that has 9 dials, each one representing a different timezone.  For example, the top row of clocks from left to right are Los Angeles, New York, and Buenos Aires.

There are two problems with this clock.

1. The clock runs on 9 batteries.  This means that they are constantly being changed.
2. Jeff left the clock on a heater once and melted the bottom middle clock.  If you click on the picture, you will be able to see a larger version.

Instead of throwing it out, Jeff got creative.

He relabeled the melted clock “Dali” to honor the artist’s famous paintings.  If you are not familiar with Dali’s melted clock, you can see an example here.

Then he (and his team) got thinking.  What other times could there be?

Bottom right is “Yabba Dabba Do” time, to honor the late, great Fred Flintstone.  That clock is permanently on 5PM.  No more batteries for that one.

Bottom left is now “Hammer Time.” I’m not sure why the time appears to be random.  Maybe the battery died because “u can’t touch this” clock.

The middle row’s clocks are labeled “Yesterday,” “Today” and “Tomorrow.” They all tell the same time.  Nice.  I’m curious what time the “tomorrow” clock will tell on December 21, 2012, the last day of the Mayan calendar.  Supposedly there is no tomorrow after that day.

Here’s where we need your help…

What would be some cool labels for the top three clocks? If you have any suggestions, please submit them as comments.

Does Stress Limit Creativity?

Friday I was stuck in New York City.  I wasn’t sure I would ever get out.

The Tri-State area was getting hammered by a snow storm.  I was scheduled to leave at 1PM, hours after the snow began.  The airports were closed. And to make matters worse, earlier in the day, two people were struck by a train on the tracks outside of NYC.

This combination of events caused a ripple of delays throughout the rail system.  In fact, every seat on every train for the next few hours were sold.

Knowing that the ride out of New York’s Penn Station can be crazy on a normal day, I decided to invest the few extra dollars for a first class ticket.  This was perfect as I could wait out the delays in the (relative) comfort of the Acela Lounge.

The board said that the train would be delayed about 90 minutes.  Not too bad considering the circumstances.  Right on time (well, an hour and a half after the scheduled time) the announcement came over the loud speaker.  “Train 2164 is now boarding on track 13 East.”  That was my train.

About a dozen of us exited the lounge and headed for track 13 east.  But the escalator was going up?  How would we go down to the tracks?  We looked around but couldn’t find anyone who knew anything.  After a few minutes, our train disappeared from the board indicating it had departed.  We discovered that it had indeed left without us.

The dilemma was not lost on me:  There were no more seats on any trains until late into the evening.

Most people were furious.  Admittedly, I was a bit amused.  Fortunately I did not need to be in Boston by any particular time, so the delay was an inconvenience, but not the end of the world.

We went back to the lounge to discover that the woman there announced the gate information long after our train arrived.  Other were screaming at the woman and the manager.  There were a lot of angry and stressed-out people trying to get home.

I watched.  I let them do the screaming.  And then I started to think through and investigate the options.

1. I could wait for the next train that day, whenever that might be.  I had plenty of work that I could do while waiting.
2. I could stay over night in a hotel.  There were many friends I did not get to see while I was in the City.  And fortunately I did not have anything pressing the next morning.  All of my business could be conducted via phone.  And I knew rooms were available somewhere in NYC.
3. I could rent a car.  Maybe that wasn’t an option given the chaos, but it was worth investigating.  A quick check via my BlackBerry showed that it might indeed be possible.
4. I could share a taxi with someone to Boston.  There were plenty of taxis available.  Although a taxi might be more expensive, it might only be $100 more than the train, if I shared it with a few other people.  Or maybe I could take a taxi to another city, for example, Stamford, CT and either catch a train from there or rent a car.
5. Hitch hiking was not high on my list, but when “brainstorming” (even with yourself) it is best to keep all options open.
6. Take one of the trains that did not require reservations, but did not guarantee a seat.  Worst case would involved sitting on my luggage for 4 hours.
7. Take a train SOUTH a few stations and then try to catch a train from there.  I do this with hotel elevators sometimes.  If I am going down to the lobby from my room during peak hours, sometimes all of the elevators that stop on my floor are full.  So I will take an elevator UP to the top and then catch it down from there.  Surprisingly, it can be faster.

Anyway, the list goes on.  Because I was relaxed, I was able to consider lots of different options.  While everyone else was stressed out, I got creative.  And it got me thinking…

Does stress kill creativity?

The answer is of course, yes.  I wrote about this in the past in articles on the “Performance Paradox” (this link brings you to the AMA website where the article was published).

Stress causes a reduction in athletic and physical performance (read my article on why Barry Bonds performed 10x worse as he got closer to his 755th home run).

Stress also causes a reduction in intellectual abilities to an even greater degree than the impact on physical abilities.  (A brief anecdote is included in the Performance Paradox article)

But stress has the most profound impact on creativity. Or, as I said in the article…

The more creative the work, the less motivation required to hit peak levels of performance. Studies reveal that creativity diminishes when individuals are rewarded (externally motivated) for doing their work. Why? The desire to achieve the goal overtakes the personal interest in the endeavor. A myopic focus on the outcome overshadows the intellectual stimulation of the process. As a result, risk taking becomes reduced and creativity vanishes.

Goal-orientation is one form of stress.  Missing your train when you have a goal of getting home is certainly another.

How did my story end?  There was a 3PM train leaving at 3:15PM.  The manager simply stamped all of our tickets, allowing us on that train.  Of course, given that the train was previously sold out, that caused other problems.  But I’ll write more about that another time.

What We Don’t Know We Know

Last night I went to a seminar.  On the whiteboard, the seminar leader drew an oft-used framework:

There are things you “know.”  For example, I know I can speak English.

There are things you “know you don’t know.”  I know I can’t speak Chinese.

And there are things you “don’t know you don’t know.”  Obviously I don’t have any examples of this.

But it got me thinking.  There is one dimension that is never mentioned…

There are things you “don’t know you know.”

Inside of organizations, there is so much untapped knowledge.  To combat this, over the past two decades, companies have invested millions of dollars in knowledge management systems.  The objective has been to capture the company’s knowledge.

The problem is, the knowledge management databases usually become so large and unwieldy that they are unusable.  I can attest from experience that these systems often end up becoming digital piles of untapped information.  Finding what you want can be like finding a needle in a haystack.  Or, more accurately, it is like finding a specific needle in a stack of needles.

What’s the solution?

You might call it, “reverse knowledge management.”

Instead of posting knowledge which sits passively in a database waiting for someone to find it, you post your question to your “community” so that it can be answered at the time of need.  Of course, asking the world for an answer to your question is not new.  Yahoo/Google Answers did this a few years back.

But internally, especially when you have already invested in knowledge management systems, the dynamics can be quite different.

If you are using an internal collaboration tool like InnoCentive@Work, you might find that reverse knowledge management is an unintended benefit.  When you have a challenge you want solved, the odds are, someone else within your organization has already solved a similar problem.  But you probably don’t know who knows the solution or where to find the solution.

Sometimes the solution can be sitting in your knowledge management system…and you don’t even know it because it is too difficult to find.

Interestingly, “requests for information” posted on internal collaboration tools are sometimes solved not by the individuals with the expertise, by rather by the knowledge management team.  When a question is posted, the knowledge management team masterfully scours their databases to find a solution.  The advantage of this approach is that those with expertise in navigating the knowledge management systems do what they do best, thus freeing the rest of the organization to focus on what they do best.  And it has the added benefit of breathing new life into your old knowledge management initiatives.

So, what is it that you organization doesn’t know what it already knows?

P.S. I have to admit that I am a bit surprised.  If you Google “reverse knowledge management” (in quotes) you will see that the only place this term is used on the entire internet is in this article.

When Open Innovation is not a Tournament

A magazine asked me to write a book review of Innovation Tournaments by Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich. The book arrived in the mail yesterday and I immediately turned to the index to see if InnoCentive was listed. Sure enough, we are mentioned in several places in the book.

This got me thinking: Is InnoCentive a tournament?

The word tournament is derived from the French word for “medieval sport” and is now used to describe a wide variety of competitions.

Most competitions/tournaments are quite entertaining. And by their very nature, there is always a winner. One could argue that tournaments are “spectacles designed to find a champion.”

Given this widely held point-of-view, using the word tournament as a descriptor of InnoCentive seems to be inaccurate.

The NCAA basketball championships are a tournament. The “World Series of Poker” is a tournament. American Idol is a tournament. With each of these, there is always a winner. The purpose of the tournament is to find that winner while (usually) providing entertainment value.

InnoCentive is not interested in finding a winner for the sake of naming the champion. The objective is to find workable solutions to real business problems. Their approach is one I call a “contingency-based, value-driven pricing model.” Admittedly, that does not sound as sexy as calling it an innovation tournament.

Here’s how it works. A company has a problem they want solved. They decide the “value” of finding a workable solution and they offer a “bounty” to anyone who can provide one. The bounty is only paid when they get what they need. This “pay for solution” model outsources the risk associated with complex problem solving.

Here are other examples that illustrate the key difference between the bounty-based approach with the tournament-based approach.

The NetFlix Prize was not a tournament.  They only paid the team that improved the recommendation engine by 10%.  This makes is a bounty-based approach. You only pay the bounty when you get a successful solution.

In contrast, The Cisco iPrize, can be thought of as a tournament. According to their website, they will “select up to 32 semifinalist teams that will work with Cisco experts to build a business plan and presentation… Up to eight finalist teams will present their business ideas to a judging panel to compete for the grand prize: a $250,000 award shared equally by members of the winning team.”  The LG Electronics competition (read my article on it here) was also a tournament-based approach.

The key difference is the way the challenge is articulated.  With the bounty-based approach, the success criteria is clearly defined and you know if someone provided a successful solution:  Did you improve the recommendation engine by 10%?  Did you find a chemical compound that has specific properties?  Did you develop a mathematical model that optimizes solves a specific problem?  The “winner” of the bounty is determined by this success criteria.  If the criteria is not met, the bounty is not paid.

With the tournament-based approach, the success criteria is not defined.  The winner is the “best” of the submissions.  Although these types of competitions can yield excellent solutions, I know from inside-information that the results are often less than stellar.  One company that uses this type of tournament described the results as a “PR success yet a commercial failure.”

Both approaches can provide value to any organization.  It’s just important to recognize that they are useful in different ways.  Tournaments can be great to get a broad set of ideas for an undefined space.  Bounties are great for when you are hunting down usable solutions.

Interview on The Small Business Advocate

Jim Blasingame is one of the best talk show hosts out there. And I had the pleasure, once again, of being on his show. This time I talked about the challenges associated with innovation and the value of open innovation.

This was my 6th appearance on his show. You can listen to all of them here.

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