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Expert Failure

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Institutional inability to tolerate failure and mistakes is cited as one of the major impediments to innovation. Most organizational activity is directed at existing operations where people deal primarily with “knowns” and, I would even argue, knowable surprises. As a result, failure and mistakes are pushed to the edges of daily organizational life. In stark contrast, innovation ventures into the unknown where failure sits squarely in the center of things. Avoiding it is impossible. Yet, it seems we are built with a bias against failure.  We are literally wired to avoid it, making innovation that much harder to achieve. How do we find a way to work against the grain of our true natures and stop trying to wish failure and mistakes away?

Perhaps we can start by reconsidering some of our sacred cows – like the belief that experts do not fail.  This seems important to me as innovation itself becomes the domain of experts and we look to them in the same way that we look to other experts – as people with knowledge that prevents them from failing at the thing they are expert at doing. Experts are supposed to be able to size up situations, define outcomes, consider alternatives, and take action to achieve goals while avoiding mistakes. Being an expert requires a large amount of confidence.  But confidence doesn’t always deliver the goods.

In the past few years, there’s been a wave of articles and books exploring the gross fallibility of human judgment, especially expert judgment. There are many reasons why we make lousy decisions and most of them have to do with the crazy extent to which we strive to see patterns in random events. Our drive to make meaning creates a bias toward coherence. The easier it is to believe a story, the more confident we are that it is true. The more that those offering an opinion are credentialed and have long impressive resumes, even if there is no statistical basis that judgment yields a better result than random guesses, we  believe in that expert’s opinion. We derive comfort from the illusion of skill.

Daniel Kahneman, one of the leading theorists on the psychology of judgment and behavioral economics, suggests that a confident expert might make a better decision when at least two criteria are met:

  • The environment in which the judgment is made is sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence.
  • Professionals have adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities of the situation.

The domain of innovation fails on both counts. So, how can we get comfortable with the fact that even our experts are going to make mistakes?  And what can an expert do to incorporate mistake-making into the ongoing process of developing expertise?

An article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker explored the topic of expert failure in the medical profession. Gawande is looking at expert failure at the tiny mistake end of the failure continuum as he examines the medical profession’s bias against coaching and its preference for teaching.  But even tiny mistakes can combine in unanticipated ways to create colossal failures.

Surgical mastery requires familiarity and judgment and is among what Gawande calls late-peaking careers which deal with complexities of people or nature and are tolerant of less than ideal physical stamina. Late-peaking careers stand in contrast to early-peaking careers – most sports or athletic endeavors, certain of the arts (dance), and mathematics (where it appears people peak early because they are unburdened by the weight of their own theories). Whether late- or early-peaking, experts in any field reach a performance plateau. This is where coaching comes in.

Coaches “observe, judge, and guide.”  They don’t have to be good at what it is they are coaching.  Pro sports coaching is based on the premise that it is virtually impossible to achieve and maintain peak performance on one’s own.  I believe that it is easier to coach people in early-peaking careers precisely because we are comfortable with the idea of younger people benefiting from the knowledge of older people. Another bias that makes coaching the late-peaking career expert more difficult comes from the difference between expertise that is conferred through formal academic education and that which is conferred through other sorting methods (such as sports competitions).  Traditional pedagogy is based on the concept of graduating and not requiring further instruction in a particular area.  For experts in many fields, expertise means not needing to be coached.  That doesn’t mean that experts do not need to keep up in their fields, but they are assumed to have the skills needed to do this on their own.

“The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate.  Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for extraordinary things….With a diploma, a few [people] will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could….[Coaching] may prove essential to the success in modern society.”

But, experts getting coached face big problems. When Gawande, a surgeon himself, brought a coach into the operating theatre, it did not reassure his patients.  In fact, it made them nervous.  It made them doubt his skill.  The coach in the operating theatre meant that Gawande might make a mistake, he wasn’t perfect.  Our expectations about perfection, even in the face of what we know is complexity, are not realistic.  We don’t want to believe that our surgeons can fail, even though we sign consent forms that acknowledge this fact.  Intellectually we can accept that there are many variables which are impossible to predict or control.  But emotionally, we are shocked when an expert fails.  We expect experts to succeed.  All the time.

If we must accept mistakes and failure and acknowledge that even experts will encounter them when they operate in highly complex systems, then gaining a better understanding of mistakes and failure despite our wiring to not dwell too much on them seems like a good place to start.  Next up on the blog: a theory of mistakes that might help us learn to love them.

Sources:

  • “Personal Best,” Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, October 3, 2011
  • “The Surety of Fools,” Daniel Kahneman, The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 2011

 

 

Filed Under: Decision-making, Innovation

Back to the Future

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes I’m hard pressed to understand why I read what I do.  What is it that actually interests me about some stories?  Then, after a while, I see that it isn’t the content per se  but rather the narrative which keeps me engaged and draws me along.  Of the handful of narratives that mesmerize me, the recursive innovation narrative (or back to future story) stands out.

In this narrative, innovation comes about by rediscovering something that has been lost along the way.  Typically, the loss occurs because popular or commercial interest becomes caught up with an idea that, in the long run, is either revealed or proven to be false.  Or one idea has become so widespread that it crowds out another idea that is equally, if not more, important.  The innovation lies in reclaiming or reasserting the thing that was once known but became lost in the process.

Here are two stories of recursive innovation:

Running Redux

Humans are born runners.  The combination of an ability to cool ourselves through perspiration (rather than panting as other animals do) and the “springiness” of our legs allowed humans to outlast their prey when it came to running.  So, why is it that close to 80% of all contemporary runners suffer injuries each year despite specially engineered running shoes, running surfaces, and training regimes?  And why is it that in some cultures which lack all of these advantages, people we would consider elderly can run 100-mile races as a matter of course?

Christopher McDougall believes “…we don’t need smarter shoes, we need smarter feet”   He has resurrected an exercise routine that rewires the brain and the body to run the way that nature intended – the 100-Up Exercise.  An undeniably simple routine, the 100-Up (see the YouTube video) is a three-minute exercise that upends modern running dogma.  It isn’t about the shoes, the surface, the intensive training – it’s about rediscovering the way that humans were born to run.

So when and where did it go wrong?  Apparently, not so long ago and also apparently, the commercial shoe industry in the U.S. played a major role in leading runners astray.  In the 1970s and 80s, runners became obsessed with the notion that the proper running shoe was the key to great running because the biggest problem with running was heel-strike impact.  The first inkling that the shoe solution to heel-strike impact might be wrong came when researchers began to observe barefoot runners.  What they noticed was that barefoot runners did not land on their heels, but rather, on the balls of their feet.   This was not a shoe-problem, but a form problem.  However, ingrained notions of running are difficult to dislodge and even though barefoot running has taken off, it is still shoe- rather than form-focused for the most part.  The biggest evidence of shoe-bias is the invention of those strange looking glove-like shoes.  You can shell out the bucks for Vibram Five-Fingers, but if you are still running heel first, you are highly likely to injure yourself.  According to those who practice the new method informed by 100-Up, you can run with the shoes you already have because it’s not the shoes, it’s the way you run that matters.

Apples Lost and Found

The apple as a healthy snack is a relatively new invention.  Apples have been around a long time (from a human civilization perspective), but up to the Civil War period they were primarily used as either feedstock for animals or an alternative to water in the form of hard cider for humans because apples were not particularly tasty to eat.  Prohibition was especially bad for apples (hard cider was alcoholic), and it was during this period that they got a PR makeover with an adage promoting their health (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”) and an agricultural focus on propagating better tasting varieties. Before industrial scale refrigeration, most people enjoyed local apples and there are a multitude of types associated with particular geographies.

Some Fun Apples (Esopus Spitzenberg and Yellow Newton Pippin):

However, with the advent of refrigerated rail cars, apples could be transported over long distances.  Refrigeration and the rise of the national grocery chain combined to promote the apple attributes of durability, long shelf life and aesthetic appeal.  As a result, the plethora of apple species dwindled to three – McIntosh, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious — and apples as a local treat gave way to the national grocery produce staple.  Apple breeding increasingly focused on making sure apples looked rather than tasted good.  We all know how delicious apples can look and how disappointing they can taste.  That shiny, beautiful outside masking a mushy, mealy, flavorless inside.  This is how it came to be that Americans now consume about half the amount of apples as their European counterparts.

The sorry state of affairs persisted for some time until a confluence of events turned the tide to favor a tasty apple with great texture and crunch.  In the 1970s, several new apple varieties – so called “super apples” – were imported from outside the U.S. and began to be cultivated here.   At the same time, price controls were imposed to help the U.S. deal with stagflation, but produce was exempt from this constraint creating an opening for these new apples.   Americans got a taste of delicious, but less than perfectly formed apples and loved them. Once again, the apple as a flavorful, nutritious food found in many varieties was back on the scene and apple consumption began to increase.

Recursive Innovation

The article from which my much abbreviated apple mini-history is derived goes on to describe the equally fascinating business model of patenting and controlling the production of apple varieties.  But what struck me as I read about apples past and present was how much it reminded me of the story about running.   The themes in both stories are the same. In the push to scale an innovation, to achieve industrial capacity, a critical artisanal element was lost, left by the wayside because its importance was not understood.  This element would turn out to be a sustainability factor which had to be rediscovered in order to breathe life back into the innovation.

I am not suggesting that the sustainability factor is always apparent.  Clearly if people knew what it was they would not so casually allow it to be jettisoned in favor of other elements which might turn out to be helpful for a time, but ultimately outlive their usefulness.   Yet this challenge – knowing what to discard and what to retain – remains a key challenge of innovation.

As we come to the close of the year, this question – what to hold onto and what to let go of as we move ahead – has particular resonance, both organizationally and individually.  Much of the world is  captivated by the idea of sustainability whose light and fluffy exterior is characterized by “doing well by doing good” and whose dark underbelly is the stuff of self-preservation.   What I like most about sustainability as a screen for what should be retained or discarded is its strategic urgency.  Strategic – doing well by doing good.  Urgency – self-preservation.  I’ve been told and have experienced it to be true in my own life that what gets done is whatever is threatened by a burning platform (regrets to the “what gets measured, gets done” crowd – burning platform trumps measurement).   As we move into the new year and look for new ways to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, one possibility might be found in the recursive innovation narrative and its North Star of sustainability.

Sources:

  • “The Once and Future Way to Run,” Christopher McDougall, The New York Times Magazine, November 6, 2011
  • “Crunch,” John Seabrook, The New Yorker, November 21, 2011
Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Strategy, Sustainability

Timing Might NOT Be Everything

October 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Recently when I’ve been in the middle of political discussions with friends or family, I’ve found myself on the side of an argument where I rather sadly concede that President Obama might not be the right person for the times.   It occurs to me that this point of view might have less to do with the President and more to do with a middle-aged belief about what has limited or supported my personal accomplishments to-date – a belief that I’ve been fortunate to have predilections about what I do to make a living and a temperament about how I do it that have been well-suited to the particular state of the business world during my career lifetime (so far, at least).  A feeling that timing is everything.

A few weeks ago, I attended a one day seminar on the topic of Forecasting in the Face of Risk and Uncertainty.  Most of the people attending this event were involved in the financial markets and their main (and in most cases, only) interest is figuring out how to make money.  Ironically, virtually all of the presenters (other than the final session panelists) were people who are mostly interested in thinking about BIG problems – scientists and academics – and relatively unconcerned about how to convert their ideas into money.   The seminar’s major themes that interested me were these:

  • Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability
  • Risk should not be confused with Uncertainty.  Risk implies that future events will occur with measurable probability.  Uncertainty implies that the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable.
  • It appears that uncertainty is increasing as systems become more complex and tightly coupled.
  • The more complex and tightly coupled the system, the greater the likelihood that there will be accidents.  In these environments, adding more controls or safeguards in attempts to offset the likelihood of accidents will have the perverse effect of increasing the likelihood that accidents will occur because the controls increase both the complexity and tight coupling of the system.
  • But, simplicity is not necessarily the solution to complexity because simple systems are just as vulnerable to phase shifts or environmental disruptions.  In fact, simple systems and complex, tightly coupled systems share one design feature – they tend to be optimized perfectly for a specific environment.  If the environment changes even slightly in a way that makes it difficult for the system to adapt, the system is prone to collapse.

During the final session one of the panelists observed that the cockroach is a very successful creature – having survived massive disruptions in its external environment time and time again.  Apparently, cockroach survival has been enhanced by its extreme sensitivity to puffs of wind (indicating a potential predator on the move).  Puff of wind, cockroach senses it,  and initiates evasive maneuvers (turns and moves in the opposite direction).  However, cockroaches are not very well-designed insects.  In fact, this panelist described them as a perennial runner up in the competition for best insect design.  However, their less than perfect optimization for the environment has served them well in the long run.  They haven’t gotten to dominate the planet at any given time, but they’ve outlasted many other perfectly adapted insects (and other life forms as well).

Optimizing for a particular set of circumstances (tightly coupled complex or simple system design) is analogous to being the right person at the right time at the right place (etc., etc.).  In business settings we often talk about a process being well designed if it gets the right information to the right person at the right time.  But what if all this rightness is wrong?   What if it’s better in the long run to be almost right?  What if the right time is too short a timeframe for rightness?  What if timing is not everything?

Organizational innovation, it seems to me, is an attempt to survive (retain relevance) over the long term.  But, some of the limitations that organizations place on themselves in order to manage the inherent risks and uncertainty that accompany innovation might inadvertently increase those risks and not effectively manage uncertainty.  For example, companies believe that it is risk limiting to hew close to their existing markets – explore adjacencies where they can leverage existing resources and expertise.  And, on some level, this makes sense – you’ve got all this stuff (resources, expertise, infrastructure, systems) available and you know how to use it to make money (or create value if you’re a non-profit or an institution with a mission that has a broader definition of value than a financial one).  But what if by staying close to what you know and using similar or the same resources and expertise, you are adding complexity to your system and more tightly coupling success to the same set of value drivers and risk factors?  What if what looks like you’re managing risk is actually creating more risk and giving you a false sense that you are prepared to handle uncertainty?  Rather than having created a more robust and resilient organization, you have created one that is ever more sensitive to slight shifts in its environment and has a reduced capacity to adapt.  So you get to be the perfectly right organization for the time, but you have not become the organization that has a better chance of being around for a long time.

So, how do organizations use innovation to help manage for the long term?  First, I think we need to distinguish between the long term and forever.  While this might seem obvious, I’m not sure that most of us really acknowledge that every major organizational system will cease to exist at some point – nothing is forever.  Even serially successful innovative companies like Apple will not last forever.  Among the many musings about the significance of Steve Jobs and Apple in the wake of his untimely, recent death, one rang most true to me because it seemed like a perfect restatement of Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation from below.

In this article (some of it is excerpted below), Cliff Kuang makes the point that Steve Jobs understood design better than anyone.   For a long time, personal computing devices were pretty ugly and hard to use – they were badly designed – but they were fast and powerful.  And, for an equally long time, design was too costly to be delivered to or desired by more than the elite.  (Market penetration of Macs was always a fraction of the PC.)   But, not very long ago, the price point of delivering great design in computing devices fell within reach of the many and computing power was a given, no longer a differentiator.  Today, great design has become a standard feature required of computing devices.  So, it’s possible that the wave of great design as an innovation in technology has passed.  That, more than anything else, may cause Apple to stumble going forward, but Apple has already figured out how to use innovation to manage for the long term.  The company has survived failures (NeXT Cube, Lisa, Newton), customer unhappiness (the iPhone 4’s antennae), and now, the death of its visionary founder/leader.

So, what makes systems resilient?  Just the sort of things that have been engineered out of lean organizations – slack and redundancy – the less than perfect design.  I frequently hear executives bemoaning the “hobbies” that employees pursue as evidence of innovation gone wrong.  But, I think that hobbies are the quintessential redundancies that pop up when there’s a bit of slack.  They’re good and necessary for innovation.  At the same time, organizations must also be willing to invest in some of the hobbies that appear to be scalable which requires leadership in the face of risk and uncertainty.

And what does it look like if you’re on the wrong side of a bet?  Ask yourself if you’d like to be Reed Hastings of Netflix – a guy who is experiencing what looks like BIG failure at the level of the institution. Or if you’d have been happy being Steve Jobs when Apple decided to offer Lisa customers the option of trading in their purchase for a Mac as a mea culpa for having sold them an expensive product that the company was not going to support because it was a failure.  Probably not.  But, if you are almost right (rather than perfectly right) and if you have a resilient organization that can absorb shocks to the system, you probably have a much better chance of thriving over the long haul because timing is not everything, even if it helps.

Sources:

“Wind Direction Coding in the Cockroach Escape Response: Winner Does Not Take All,” Rafael Levi and Jeffrey M. Camhi, sourced on 10/12/11 at  http://www.jneurosci.org/content/20/10/3814.full.pdf

“What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?,” Cliff Kuang, Fast Company Newsletter, October 5 2011, sourced on 10/14/11 at http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us

From What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?:

A decisive factor that aided Steve Jobs was fortuitous timing. He came of age just in time to become a founding father of the personal-computer movement. And he was still young enough when he returned to Apple, in 1997, that his own instinctive sense of what a computer might become could be brought to life. In the 1980s and 1990s, computers were sold on their speed and technical capabilities. But by 2000, these features had largely become commoditized–it no longer mattered how fast a computer was when basic issues of usability and integration became paramount. What did speed matter if you didn’t know what all the menus meant, or if you were hit with pop-up errors every time you clicked your mouse?

Before 1997, Jobs was ahead of his time: The computers he made were overpriced for the market, because he thought that usability was more important than capability. But as computers reached maturity and became a staple in every home, his obsessions became more relevant to the market. Indeed, many of Apple’s recent signature products, such as the iPad or the iPhone, were ideas first conceived in the 1990s or even the 1980s–they had to bide their time.

Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company.

And for fun, it appears that cockroaches will NOT inherit the earth even though they are more resilient than humans.

Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Risk Management

Make Your Own Mistakes!

April 4, 2011 By 1 Comment

I have never liked best practices. In part, this may be due to my contrary nature. My first impulse when I’m told what to do is to push the advice far enough away until I can examine it at arm’s length and determine whether or not it makes sense for me to follow it. I’m not inclined to think that just because someone else is doing something that is working out for them that it means it’s something I should do or that even if I do it, I would necessarily get the same results. If you put a better spin on my attitude, you’d say that I have a strong independent streak.

So, some of my reaction to best practices is a matter of temperament. But some of it has to do with a feeling that the whole notion of best practices is deeply flawed.

Best practices is about the “what.” What does that company (or group or individual) do and how does it compare to what we do? Teasing out the differences, the “gaps” in business-speak, is like panning for gold. You find the little (or big) nuggets that, if adopted, can help your organization improve performance.

Part of the problem is that best practices really don’t stand the test of time. For the aspirant, it takes time and real effort to make the changes required to perform the best practice and by the time that this has occurred, it’s more than likely that the best practice itself is no longer a best practice (the best practice organization having perfected an even better practice). For the best practice organization, if it doesn’t move on and continue to evolve, the best practice is no longer best and it is no longer the bellwether.

But the most flawed aspect of best practices is that they seem to be about avoiding mistakes. They are about learning from the mistakes of others, so you don’t have to make them yourself. But what if the only way you can really learn, really master anything, is precisely by making mistakes yourself? What if it’s more risky to avoid making mistakes than to figure out how to become good at making them?

When people acquire new skills they typically progress through three stages:

Stage Characteristics
1. Cognitive intellectualize the task, discover new strategies to accomplish it proficiently
2. Associative concentrate less, make fewer errors, become more efficient
3. Autonomous become as good as we need to be, run on autopilot reaching a sustainable plateau

For a very long time, the autonomous stage was viewed as the highest level of innate capability. Sir Francis Galton identified it back in 1869 as a point beyond which an individual “…cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” However, it seems that hitting the wall is more a matter of belief than reality.

Very high achievers, those who continuously bust through limits, develop strategies to stay out of the autonomous zone. These masters use three main strategies: 1) focus on technique, 2) stay goal-oriented, and 3) get immediate feedback on performance. Nothing too shocking or out of the ordinary here. However, the first strategy is not as obvious as it might first appear and the way in which masters go about it is different from those who are good or even very good.

The key to the first strategy is technique. Observations of amateur and virtuoso musicians note that when amateurs practice, they typically play musical pieces. When virtuoso musicians practice, they play scales and difficult parts of pieces. I’d put it this way, the amateur wants the kind of feedback that makes him feel good. The virtuoso is looking for feedback that tells her how to improve. The virtuoso is looking for opportunities to make mistakes and is paying close attention to why and how failure happens. Achieving mastery is very boring and tedious. That’s why very few have the passion and commitment to persist at it.

If what it takes to be the best is a constantly moving target and requires a huge amount of humility (how else can one persist in seeking out opportunities to make mistakes and then make them?), it’s clear that simply aping a best practice is hardly likely to transform an individual or an organization. It seems to me that what does have the potential to transform performance is the process of making mistakes as one seeks improvement. But to do that, individuals and organizations have to make their own mistakes and never stop making them, something that is not readily apparent in the flawless performance that we see when we observe best practices.

Source for information about achieving mastery:

  • “Secrets of a mind-gamer,” Joshua Foer, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 15, 2011
Filed Under: Innovation, Knowledge Management

Dessert, Happiness, and Innovation

February 2, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Reading about the dessert revolution that was sparked in Barcelona a decade ago made me think about how limitations and the lack of them combine in subtle ways to unleash innovation.  Around the same time, I had come across the concept of synthetic happiness which also examines the interplay of limitation and freedom.  I began to wonder:  How much freedom and how much limitation create the optimal conditions for innovation?  Are happiness and innovation somehow related?

The dessert revolution was kick-started by the molecular gastronomy movement – the ascendance of chemistry in the professional kitchen.  Molecular gastronomy has been a rule-breaking phenomenon.  Rules like the order of tastes, flavors, and sensations in a meal: the rules that say savory comes before sweet and hot before cold.  Molecular gastronomy has appropriated the tools of industrial food-making and applied them to haute cuisine.  Tools that extract essential oils from fruits and flowers and tools that blow air into liquids to create foams are used to transform food and the experience of eating.  Suddenly, main courses are sweet and cold while desserts are savory and hot (one holy grail – hot ice cream).  Textures and flavors upend expectations and suddenly eating dinner is an adventure.

What is most interesting about the culinary transformation in Barcelona is that it emerged from the realm of the pastry chef in regions of the world where the pastry chef does not dominate the food culture and from individuals who are mostly the younger or youngest sibling in a family business.  As the younger or youngest sibling, these men were forced into the pastry chef role because it has lower prestige; the higher prestige roles went to the older siblings.  In this region of Spain, the culture of dessert had been limited to a few custards and cakes.  It is the antithesis of places such as France or Germany with dessert traditions that span tarts, creams, cakes, cookies, and more.   Stuck in the pastry chef role, but unburdened by a well-developed dessert culture, these young pastry chefs experienced both limitation and freedom and an explosion of wildly innovative desserts have emerged from their kitchens and spilled into the rest of the meal, putting Barcelona on the culinary map.   

What, you might ask, does innovation in Barcelona’s dessert culture have to do with happiness? 

Let’s start with a definition of happiness that comes from Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert differentiates between natural and synthetic happiness.  Natural happiness is how you feel when you get what you want – when you are not forced to face limitations.  Synthetic happiness is how you feel when you change your view of how much it really mattered that you didn’t get what you wanted – when you are face to face with a big solid wall that stands between you and your aspirations and there is no way around it.  In Gilbert’s TED talk (I encourage you to listen to it), one of his main points is that we believe that natural happiness is better than synthetic happiness. But evidence suggests that both kinds of happiness make us equally happy.  That turns out to be a very good thing because most of the happiness we experience is synthetic.  Few of us go through life without experiencing setbacks or bumping into limits. 

Gilbert then moves on to describe the series of non-conscious cognitive processes that allow human beings to revise our view of the meaning of certain experiences.  Gilbert calls this capacity a psychological immune system and it is essential to synthesizing happiness.  We might not need these processes so much if we weren’t also blessed with a capacity to simulate experiences before we have them thanks to our frontal cortex.  This unique aspect of our brain structure allows us to imagine outcomes from situations before we actually experience them and guides us to make certain choices.  For example, presented with a choice between eating mud or a nice warm buttery croissant, we will choose to eat the croissant because we imagine that we will be happier doing so (good choice!).  However, there are many more instances where what we imagine will make us happy and how happy we report feeling after we have had the experience suggest that we really don’t have a clue. 

Gilbert cites several different experiments – most of them share similar characteristics.  Groups that have what most people would call a lousy experience (becoming a paraplegic) and groups that have a terrific experience (winning the lottery) are basically as happy or unhappy as they were before the experience after some time has passed (sometimes as little as 3 months).   People who were generally happy before becoming paraplegics dig something positive out of the experience as awful as it is.  They synthesize happiness (make lemonade out of lemons).   Even in less dire circumstances, we tend to be poor predictors of what will make us happy.  And, as mentioned earlier, we tend to believe that natural happiness – not having to deal with limitations, having ultimate freedom – is better than synthetic happiness.  But, it turns out that this is not the case.

To demonstrate this fact, Gilbert describes another set of experiments in which students are allowed to select a print of a photograph that they can keep.  (I’m going to simplify the experiment design here, go to his TED talk for the more complete description.)  Some students are told that they cannot change their minds – they must keep the photo print they choose.  Other students are allowed to have several days to think it over.  You can probably already guess which group turns out to be happiest with their paintings several weeks later.  Yes, it’s the group that didn’t get to think it over; the group that had to deal with limitations.  Freedom to choose – the ability to make up your mind and change your mind – may be the friend of natural happiness but it is the enemy of synthetic happiness.

When we think about innovation we often imagine that it requires a completely unbounded intellectual space in which we are free to explore anything and everything, a space in which we will find something new and exciting.  Gilbert says that this is the prevailing view of natural happiness – it is something that we must find.  Somehow we believe that this approach – that of seeking in complete freedom – and the happiness and innovations that emerge from it are the best kind.  But what if another equally valid and productive path to innovation is more comparable to synthetic happiness?  The same path that the young pastry chefs in Barcelona experienced – faced with limitations and only afforded certain degrees of freedom.  That would be especially good news since few organizations operate without limitations.  Start-ups lack resources and established organizations have brands to protect.   How we synthesize happiness might provide an alternate way of thinking about how to pursue innovation – without contriving situations that bear little resemblance to the realities that most organizations experience.  If natural innovation requires being out of the box, perhaps synthetic innovation can be produced inside the box as long as the lid is open.  And, it is highly likely that they are both equally good kinds of innovation that will lead to happy results.

Sources:

Filed Under: Change, Innovation

Bye Bye Business Model

December 20, 2010 By Leave a Comment

It seems a fitting way to wrap up 2010 by looking at business models that are on the way out as we head into 2011.

Business models change without warning to those who are invested in them.  Standing outside of an industry looking in, it isn’t hard to see when big changes are in the works or to conclude that the way things are is not going to continue.  In a conversation with a former Chief Investment Officer of a foundation a few weeks ago I heard the phrase “expected surprise” which I think nicely expresses what I’m talking about.  While it may be close to impossible to predict when a change will occur, it’s not at all difficult to predict with certainty that it will occur.  Yet somehow, the argument among those cashing in on an existing business model shifts to knowing when it will occur which has the effect of kicking the can down the road.  If change isn’t imminent, then more important and pressing things take precedence, always.  Which is why when the change inevitably comes, it seems to have been utterly unpredictable and unknowable – a complete (unexpected) surprise. 

Story #1:  The book publishing industry.

The paper-based, time-intensive, highly complex process that brings us books has been convulsing for many years now, but the glue that has bound writers and editors and publishers and publicists and book sellers and even e-sellers of books and e-books is rapidly losing its stickiness.  In August 2010, Seth Godin, a prolific, best-selling author, announced his departure from his longtime publisher, Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group because “…his blog attracts an estimated 438,000 followers…” and that means he knows who reads his books.  “’Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don’t know who reads their books…”, but that isn’t the case for Mr. Godin.  What are Mr. Godin’s plans for the future?  He’ll hire his own editor and someone who can format his book for electronic distribution and then, it’s up to him to decide how he wants to “package” up the work, how to price it, and how to sell it.  

While Mr. Godin thinks that there still is role for publishers, not everyone agrees.  An e-book publisher, Mark Coker of Smashwords, says that not only will major authors consider this approach, but also those mid-list authors who don’t get much marketing support from publishers.   Those who are not on any list are already in the business of self-publishing, self-promoting and self-distributing.  If top-list, mid-list, and not-on-a-list writers don’t need publishers – who does?

 Story #2:  Knowledge creation.

That’s right – knowledge creation.   When the developers of new knowledge (scholars and researchers) seek to publish their work in career-making academic or professional journals – the ones that christen what is and what is not knowledge – they participate in another time-intensive, complex, opaque process – peer review.  But even in the change-resistant halls of liberal arts academe, a big change has come to the business model of peer-reviewed articles.  A crowd-sourced approach has emerged.   

The Shakespeare Quarterly “posted online four essays not yet accepted for publication, and a core group of experts…were invited to post their signed comments on the Web site MediaCommons, a scholarly digital network.”  This process contrasts with the traditional method in which a hand-selected and small group of academics evaluate submissions anonymously over a period of time which can drag on for years.   And how did what is now regarded as the traditional process come to be?  Like so many traditions which are resistant to change, “[it]…is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field.”   

Yet, the belief persists that democratizing the peer review is not in the best interests of academics.  Many hold fast to the dogma that only experts in the field can truly evaluate whether work makes a significant and unique contribution to the field.  This belief is anchored by the reality that to receive tenure, scholars must be published in peer-reviewed journals.  Only when the authors of the articles that underwent this new process were assured that, if accepted, their pieces would be counted as “peer-reviewed” were they willing to participate.   (Much like the process of ending foot-binding in China, the system (a set of practices) has to change in order to make change stick.   See a previous blog post Formula for Positive Change.)

Story #3:  Manufacturing by printer.

Order of magnitude cost reductions, extreme customization, and just-in-time production – the 3-D printer is bringing all of this to the manufacture of prosthetics, architectural models, furniture, fixtures, cars, and houses.  3-D printers deposit layers of material, often plastic or metal, one on top of the other, controlled by algorithms, to build up an object, layer by layer. 

Bespoke Innovations will use the technology to create customized prosthetics at about one-tenth the cost of traditional prosthetics which are, by comparison, generic templates.  Contour Crafting is using the technology to transform the business of building homes.   A 3-D printer that sits on a tractor trailer does away with most of the manual labor involved in the construction of the structure of the house by not only fabricating walls, but also structural supports and conduits for electrical, plumbing, and heating and cooling systems in one pass.  The Urbee is a completely printed car.  Kor Ecologic, the venture behind the Urbee, is using a volunteer-based, collective approach to bring the car to the market (you can make a donation via PayPal to fund the project).  The president and chief technology officer of Kor Ecologic (Jim Kor) says that the 3D printing technology “lets us eliminate tooling, machining, and handwork, and it brings incredible efficiency when a design change is needed…If you can get to a pilot run without any tooling, you have advantages.”

As the software required to create the design programs plummets in cost and the cost of accessing the printers puts them in reach of more commercial applications, a new business ecosystem is developing in which designers use software to encode their visions and then send these programs to printers whose equipment produces them.  As entire classes of labor costs are removed from the equation, the dynamics of labor cost arbitrage are rebalanced making outsourcing to cheap labor countries which must factor in shipping costs less attractive.  What has seemed inexorable, the United States’ inability to retain its position as a dominant player in the manufacture of goods, might not be as much of a foregone conclusion as it once appeared.

Conclusion

These stories about systems that are in the midst of or on the cusp of radical disruption are all stories about expected surprise.  If you are willing to move outside of the system of which you are a part, and look at it as if you were an outsider, no matter what system you are part of, you would most likely see signs that big changes are coming.  If you subscribe to the idea of the expected surprise, then you know what happens to the rest of a business model when one key element undergoes a transformation. It’s like dominoes that are lined up in such a way that they connect ever so slightly with one another – when one falls, the others must follow.

Sources:

  • “Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans,” Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “Scholars Test a Web Alternative to the Venerable Peer Review,” Patricia Cohen, The New York Times, Tuesday, August 24, 2010.
  • “3D Printing Spurs a Manufacturing Revolution,” Ashlee Vance, September 13, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/technology/14print.html
  • “The Urbee Hybrid – the first 3D printed car,” Ariel Schwartz, October 29, 2010, sourced on 12/17/10 at :   http://www.fastcompany.com/1698943/the-urbee-hybrid-the-first-car-to-have-its-body-3-d-printed
Filed Under: Business Model, Change, Innovation

The Collaboration Cure

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Recently, a series of articles have appeared in which collaboration is offered up as the cure for what ails us – as a species, as a country, and as organizations. 

  • Collaboration (in the form of trade or exchange) is a form of cultural evolution – when practiced, ideas have sex.  
  • Our better than average position as a collaboration hub could be what keeps the US in its top economic position. 
  • Collaboration is the key to long term organizational health.

Matt Ridley, speaking at TED and blogging for Frog Design by way of FAST Company, provocatively states that ideas having sex is the bedrock of innovation.  (I say that ideas having sex = collaboration.)  Ridley argues that human beings in our capacity for trade or exchange beyond our tribe or clan are distinct from every other living creature on the face of the earth.  Other living creatures have cultures and pass on traditions, but these traditions remain within the tribe or clan.  Only human beings trade objects and ideas with those who live outside the boundaries of the tribe or clan.   This capacity to embed ideas in other cultures is analogous to the formation of genomes during sexual reproduction.  During procreation it gives rise to incredible diversity and vitality in the species, during trade or exchange the same occurs in human civilization.

Fast forward thousands of years and we have evolved to the point where everyone works for everyone else because no one knows enough about anything to make it on his or her own.  Ridley cites the pencil and the computer mouse as cases in point – very different technologies, but even in the mid 1800’s when something like the modern pencil came to be, no one person or company possessed sufficient knowledge to make a pencil.  Graphite had to be mined, trees had to be felled, machines had to be fabricated to shape the pencil and insert grooves for the lead.  The computer mouse is infinitely more complicated, involving industries spanning oil & gas, chemicals, electronics, and consumer retail.  As with the pencil, no one person or company knows how to make a computer mouse.   Radical collaboration (many ideas having lots of sex) has pushed innovation beyond the capacity of the human brain by uniting millions of human brains in a complex web of connections that is constantly evolving.  For Ridley, the computing cloud, with its limitless potential to connect all human brains will boost our innovation capacity even further by providing a totally accessible collaboration platform, freed from constraints of time, place, and (almost) cost.

Modulating downward from the computing cloud to the US economy, David Brooks in his New York Times editorial column, The Crossroads Nation, makes essentially the same point as Ridley that innovation will be the economic driver of success in the future.  But Brooks is more focused on the infrastructure of collaboration than on the act of collaboration itself.  For Brooks, America’s economic identity in the future might lie in the very openness and diversity that permeates our culture making us the ideal “hub” nation.  He quotes an essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter – “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”   Collaboration flourishes in places that are free, but fair, where people can come together with relative ease to connect with ideas and resources.   Brooks wants America to invest in connections to cement our potential position as “the crossroads nation.”   If collaboration is the bedrock of innovation, then to be the “go-to” place/space for innovation means nurturing the United State’s potential to provide the infrastructure and cultural openness that create a vibrant collaboration hub.

Finally, an interview with Martha Samuelson, president and CEO of the Analysis Group, a consulting firm, speaks to what collaboration actually looks like on a day-to-day basis in a company.  Ridley and Brooks get you thinking, but Samuelson addresses the nitty gritty – how do you make it happen?  What encourages people to collaborate once the tools are in place?   To foster cooperation, the Analysis Group operates as one P&L even though they have 10 offices and multiple practice areas.  “We have a trust-based system for setting partner compensation, and it’s based on a belief that we’re in a long game together.”  Samuelson goes on to state that sometimes they get the compensation a little wrong in the short term, but “[t]he people who have stayed and thrived have been people for whom this collaboration issue is so important that they’re willing to leave some money on the table over it.” They are not a precision shop when it comes to getting it exactly right about compensation (which Samuelson notes is ironic since they are economists).   The Analysis Group gets greater accountability from individuals by measuring at the group level than it would if it measured at the level of the individual – current “best practice” in most performance management systems.  For people to pull together, to collaborate, they have to be in it together and being in it together means compromise and getting it approximately right (which means it is slightly wrong).  In practice, getting ideas to have sex is a messy, nearly right sort of thing that relies on goodwill and trust which take time to establish and can be extinguished in an instant. 

Collaboration is essential for innovation – at the level of the species, the country, and the organization.  Ridley believes we have what it takes as a species.  Brooks implores political leaders to embrace the moment and invest in a future in which the US is the collaboration hub par excellence.  Samuelson knows that for her organization, collaboration is so critical to success that even economists are willing to live with imprecise measurement.  Collaboration requires freedom to think and act, incentive to move beyond the boundaries of what is known and safe, an infrastructure to support exchange, a willingness to embrace messiness and uncertainty, and a very long view.   Does your organization have what it takes to innovate? 

Sources:

Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation

Leadership in the Age of Influence

August 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Influence.  Control.  The line has been drawn in the sand.  There are some who say that the battle has already been won or lost, depending on your point of view.   However, few would dispute that a battle is underway.  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube:  Are they the three Furies of Social Networking sent to torment those who still believe that what it means to be in charge, in control, has not changed irrevocably?

In an article(1) describing how social networking is changing the face of diplomacy in the State Department,  Hillary Clinton’s position is described as weighing in on the side of the benefits being greater than the risks of engaging in experiments that test the value of “…breaking through..by having people who are doing the work of our government be human beings, be personalized, be relatable.”   The article showcases two relatively young members of the State Department who share not only information about their work, but also about their personal lives via Twitter, and who encourage others to engage with them to share information about the political goings on in their parts of the world.  Compared with the tightly controlled environment in which most State Department communication takes place, this is the Wild West. 

Supposedly, before the explosion of social networking, information and people could be controlled.  Information leaks could be kept to a manageable minimum and if they did occur, broad dissemination could be contained.  Now, the argument goes, that kind of control is gone.  Proof point du jour:  WikiLeaks recently scored a major coup with the publication of tens of thousands of pages of intelligence reports that have been dubbed the Afghan War Diary (http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/) detailing the bleak state of US Army efforts in that beleaguered country from 2004-2010.  While not top secret, the information is secret and its release has prompted investigations and news coverage. The information has generated global debate which has doubled and redoubled the information that is available on the topic, an information spiral that has achieved a self-sustaining momentum, spinning out of control. 

These developments in the public domain are affecting what goes on inside organizations.  It is no longer acceptable, productive, or even possible to rely exclusively on control as a means of eliciting desired behaviors among employees.   As someone who is interested in the confluence of knowledge management, radical collaboration, and innovation within organizational systems, the tension between control and influence seems to be stirring the pot when these three domains intersect (or collide).   As information becomes harder to control, it seems that people are harder to control as well.  Those who are charged with stewardship of an organization’s brand may understand that they are no longer in control when it comes to consumers or customers, but they are now grappling with the challenge of not being securely in control when it comes to employees either.  For this reason, understanding what it means to lead in the age of influence seems acutely important. 

Fast Company is running a project to find “2010’s Most Influential Person Online”    (http://influenceproject.fastcompany.com/).  This is what it says about influence: 

Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation. When you post a link or recommend a site, how many people actually bother to check it out? And what’s the likelihood of those people then forwarding it on? How far does your influence spread?

So, what are ways that people affect the behavior of others through influence rather than control.  What really is the difference? (2)

  • Control – to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.
  • Influence – to move or impel to some action.

Control implies that individuals have no real choice or freedom to act, influence suggests that they do, that there is no negative consequence if individuals choose to act in a way other than what is being suggested.  Perhaps this is why in most organizational systems, reality lies somewhere between control and influence.  In many cases, there are very real, very negative consequences to not acting in the way that is being suggested.   Career development may evaporate, demotion or sidelining may occur – the subtle or not so subtle understanding may develop that it’s time to go elsewhere.   If in organizational systems today, reality is more complicated than being on one side or the other of the control/influence divide, how do leaders determine when it is best to impel rather than compel?  Can both be true at the same time or then is neither true?  How do leaders inspire if they must also control? 

The fact that the answers to these questions are murky is one reason why there is debate about how open and transparent organizations must be to succeed in the marketplace and society.  It makes choices about knowledge management, innovation, and radical collaboration complicated and fraught with uncertainty.   Learning how to lead in the age of influence might well be the next critical leadership skill.

Sources:

  • (1) Digital Diplomacy, Jesse Lichtenstein, The New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2010 
  • (2) Definitions from www.dictionary.com 
Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Leadership

Salted Licorice and the Secret of Customer Delight

July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hibiscus Beet.  Boccalone Prosciutto.  Chocolate Smoked Sea Salt.   These are all ice cream flavors.  They are sold at Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco, an ice cream parlor for people who are bored with traditional ice cream, people who want to be surprised, and I would claim, delighted.  Its founder/owner, Jake Godby, opened the store in 2008.  His goal was to “create a challenging ice cream store.”  In the New York Times Magazine profile that describes Godby and his ice cream parlor, Godby is likened to an artist. 

In the past six months, I have been working with the latest incarnation of a tool that helps organizations understand, serve, and ideally delight their customers – the customer journey map.  A process flow that charts a customer’s experience with purchasing and using a product or service and elicits expectations about that experience; the customer journey map highlights areas where the experience fails to meet expectations.  When it is compared with the organization’s process map, the differences bring into relief another set of disconnects.  The claim is made that by uncovering these failure points and disconnects between expectations and experience, an organization can rethink how and what it delivers to customers so that it can exceed expectations and delight them.

Reading about Jake Godby’s ice cream parlor made me wonder about that.   Can you engineer delight?  Can people tell you what will delight them?  It seems highly unlikely to me that Jake Godby’s customers could have told him that they wanted to be challenged by an ice cream store.  Maybe they were tired of fudge ripple and chocolate chip mint ice cream, but could they have dreamed up Peanut Butter Curry?  Could they have known that they wanted to be surprised and intrigued by wacky dessert options in the form of ice cream that made them think differently about ice cream altogether?

Delight seems to contain an element of surprise, something that is hard to predict, something that changes your perception of an experience.   Mapping the customer experience and hearing what customers expect can tell you how to conform to those expectations, but how do you exceed them?  How do you engineer delight?   You need to understand what your customers expect, of course, but you can’t expect them to tell you what will delight them.  Customer journey maps are one step on the journey to delight.  They are part of the critical understanding of “what is” and hint at “what might be.”  But they only provide hints.  Achieving and maintaining delight demands alertness, adaptability, and artistry from organizations.  You will have to take risks.  You will have to experiment.  Like Jake Godby, you will have to be an artist, a provocateur.  You have to be willing to fail.  If Jake Godby fails, he gets immediate feedback, the costs are manageable, and he lives to innovate another day (apparently porcini ice cream was not a hit).   What would it mean for your organization to offer the equivalent of Strawberry Candied Jalapeno?   Delight or disaster?    Is your organization willing to take the big gamble of innovation to achieve customer delight or does its risk tolerance set a limit at meeting expectations?

Sources: 

Filed Under: Customer capital, Innovation

Blurred Vision

June 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

 “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.”  (Western Union internal memo, 1876)

 “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” (Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895) 

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” (Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943) 

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” (Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” (Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, 1981)

“The hubris of Tesla is ‘We’re not going to fall into the trap of being like Detroit – we’re going to be the Silicon Valley guys, nimble and innovative,’” Lutz said. “Everyone who tries to reinvent this business believes that auto companies are populated by dummies who don’t understand Moore’s Law.  But, unlike a silicon chip, the modern automobile has to be a certain size, and carry a certain number of people, at a certain speed.  Over thirty-five hundred parts sourced from around the world have to come together at the right place and the right time to produce sixty to seventy of these things an hour.  These things are called cars.  And to make them you need a large engineering staff, a workforce that demands retirement benefits, a tax staff, a fleet of accountants, and an unbelievable amount of reliability testing that Tesla can’t afford to do right now – and we can’t afford not to do.  Inevitably, Tesla will discover that the only way to succeed on the scale we have is to be exactly like us.”  (Bob Lutz, vice chairman of GM, 2009) 

While not as pithy as the other famously wrong quotes unless you reduce it to the last sentence, the amount of hubris in Bob Lutz’s statement about Tesla is astonishing.  The number of statements that assert absolutes in terms of how people will travel from place to place using vehicles is telling.  I count 12 and that’s being charitable (not breaking some of the statements into even smaller statements and not counting the culmination of the argument which itself is an absolute). 

I suppose that’s what we look for in leaders – confidence and vision.  But it seems to me that it is precisely this kind of confidence that is the enemy of innovation.  In fact, this doesn’t seem like confidence to me at all – it seems more like overconfidence.  One way to understand overconfidence is as the “illusion of control:  confidence spills over from areas where it may be warranted…to areas where it isn’t warranted at all.”  This is how overconfidence leads to bad decisions and an inability to imagine a future outcome that is different from what you currently believe it will be. 

At the same time, social scientists view human overconfidence as an adaptive trait.  “’In conflicts involving mutual assessment, an exaggerated assessment of the probability of winning increases the probability of winning,’ Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, writes.”  As human beings, there is a benefit to seeing things with rose-colored glasses or what “social psychologist Roy Baumeister [calls]…an ‘optimal margin of illusion.’”  The real trick, of course, is knowing where to draw the line.  Nobody seems to have a good rule of thumb for that.  However, “all we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, ‘globally maladaptive.’”  If everybody is overconfident then a kind of colossal one-upmanship results in which the stakes become higher and higher and if everyone is wrong, losses can be catastrophic.

How does one reconcile the notion of vision – having a passionate belief or conviction about the future – with overconfidence?  We want our leaders to have vision.  Innovation is in large measure a visionary act.  And yet, as we read famously bad predictions from visionary leaders, we see that their success in certain areas has spilled over into confidence about making predictions in areas that seem to be, but turn out not to be, related.  

The personal transportation industry is just one example of how difficult it is predict the future.  Andrew McAfee’s blog that relates the evolution of cloud computing to the evolution of electrification describes why it is difficult to predict the path that a profoundly transformative technology will take as it evolves.   To a large extent that is because the evolution occurs over a long period of time and the development process itself contributes to the direction that the evolutionary path takes.  However, at some juncture, a combination of factors leads to an inflection point that draws a bright line between before and after. 

Very smart people have a very hard time imagining that the future could look different from an extrapolation of the present.  Maybe it isn’t as important to be able to imagine that kind of future as it is to admit that a future which is discontinuous with the present is possible and even probable.  Holding that perspective might provide leaders with a wider, if not clearer, view and encourage them to make a few more small bets on a future that is nothing like the past.

Sources:

Famously Wrong Quotes from:  http://wilk4.com/humor/humore10.htm

Tesla quote from: “Plugged In,” Tad Friend.  The New Yorker, August 24, 2009.  An article about Tesla Motors and its founder, Elon Musk, and the electric cars that the company is producing.

Comments about overconfidence from: “Cocksure,” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, July 27, 2009.  An article about how overconfidence leads to bad decisions and its possible contribution to the collapse of Bear Stearns.

Andrew McAfee’s blog: http://andrewmcafee.org/?s=Cloudy+future+of+IT

Filed Under: Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
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