Outside Innovation

Check Out Jonathan Clark's Blog: Wheelbarrow Full of Surprises

Jonathan is a witty, thoughtful change agent who is an Executive VP at Elsevier and an effective innovator! Having just enjoyed his company and his commentary at  our semi-annual Visionaries' meeting, I realized that I there's a good way to bathe myself in Jonathan's  optimistic and pragmatic way of approaching problems and exploring issues, by reading his blog: A Wheelbarrow Full of Surprises and being alerted to new posts by his tweets (@jonathanjo). 

For example, in our recent meeting, he talked about complex vs. complicated problems. Complicated problems can be broken into bite-size chunks. Complex problems are tougher:
In his blog post on the topic, I found more eludication:

"I suggest that there are many problems today to which there is no solution or at least no single solution. These are complex problems.

Complex problems are problems with many interdependent variables. There are so many possible combinations of the variables that it hard to see what is going on. The variables are changing all the time as well and so are the interdependencies. Changing in a non-linear fashion makes it very hard to predict what is going to happen. There seem to be many possible solutions and all of them look feasible. The more we work on the problem, the more details we uncover and the more complex it seems to become. And the further away a solution seems to be.

Complicated problems at first sight appear to be similar to complex problems but as we work on them we see the problem becoming simpler, until eventually the problem is solved. However complicated the problem was to start with, we have untangled it and come up with a solution."

Another issue we discussed at great length, since there were many publishers in our group this time, were the changing business models confronting publishers. Many of us aren't very agile when it comes to figuring out the best business model to use. Jonathan was one of many voices who insisted that there is no one model for publishers; rather we need to offer many parallel business models.

Seph Skerritt suggested that the business model falls out when you think about the "job that the customer is trying to do"... Jonathan provides a useful example in his most recent post, in which he frames a "where do I want to take my family camping? scenario:

"For my question: "where to camp in USA in summer?" a Google search and a general travel advice site was useful

For my question: "where to go in Colorado?" a guidebook was best for me

For my question: "which site is best to choose at this campsite?" the personal experience of a fellow camper was helpful

What if I created a publishing environment that provides some free information on initial holiday planning, the opportunity to buy a guidebook, and a section where people can share experiences and photo's? There's a good chance I would choose to buy a guidebook that was part of such a system. If all the information was cross-referenced and inter-linked, it would be even more compelling."

Interview with Patty Seybold in Idea Connection

Customer-led-Innovation is the title that Vern Burkhardt gave to the meaty interview he did with me a couple of weeks ago, which has just been posted on Idea Connection. I undergo a LOT of interviews. This one was more rewarding than most. It was an in depth conversation. I want to applaud Vern for doing his research, phrasing his questions well, and editing my responses to make them sound more coherent than they probably were at the time.

Here are a few excerpts of my quotes from that interview:

"Loyalty will come from delivering an experience that makes it easy and emotionally satisfying to your customers, and that will really differentiate your brand. People find themselves connecting to your brand in a way that connects to their self-image – such as "I'm an Apple kind of person."

"Often the most important thing that customers care about is their time. For example, we were doing a customer co-design with Amazon and Amazon retailers. Retailers were trying to decide whether or not to host their online shopping site using the Amazon software. The retailers said, "We love your infrastructure, Amazon, but your contracts take us about sixty days to negotiate between your and our lawyers, and we only have thirty days to make this decision and get going before the next Christmas season. So we can't take 60 days to negotiate a contract. We have to have something that can be done in two days." As soon as Amazon realized this was an issue they were able to change their contract terms to make it much easier to quickly reach agreements. As a result, they were able to close a lot more of those deals."

"A customer who is at Harrah's Casino Hotel with $200 to spend over a weekend to enjoy a little fun gambling, spends $150 of it on Friday night may not enjoy the whole weekend if the money for gambling runs out too soon. Harrah's exhibits a customer-focused culture because it monitors customers' net gambling losses so it knows when it's time to give a free theatre or dinner ticket, for example, to stretch their gambling enjoyment across the whole weekend....You can tell if a company is really customer-centred if every employee knows how customers measure success, and how they can meet these expectations."

"We discovered when you engage .. passionate, insightful, thoughtful 'lead customers' in customer scenario mapping sessions you get much better results. These are the folks who are great to engage in customer co-design or customer scenario mapping because they won't merely take you down the tried and true cow paths. They have already tried to do a lot of things with your current products and services, which didn't meet their needs. They're always pushing the envelope to try to invent new things."

Patty Seybold

Read the rest of the Idea Connection Conversation between Vern and Patty.

Re-Inventing the Boston Globe!

Guest Contribution by David Lance

As you may be aware, the Boston Globe, our local paper, is in danger of being shut down--at least the print edition! This has caused one of my readers--David Lance--great angst and some great creativity.. In fact, in his ruminations (below), he came up with some market research suggestions for the Globe and their Union, a Vision of what a useful newspaper should be, and a business plan!!!

Here are Dave's thoughts:

It occurs to me that the Boston Globe union concessions that were made last week did not factor in a single contact by anyone to ask me (the bloody customer) what I want. When customers are so blatantly ignored by the owners and the unions, what can we do to be heard? Since nobody has asked, here are my answers to the questions they might have asked:

• While I like reading news on the Web, it is sporadic and more a distraction than focused information gathering, or relaxed entertainment – such as I get from reading newsprint.
• I dislike the clutter of www.boston.com.
• I love the feeling I get when reading something really compelling from physical newsprint paper while eating a bagel. Perhaps that is reason enough to preserve the media. Perhaps not. Somebody from the newspaper industry might study a person thus focused on a Sunday morning, and create some giveaway accessories they could use to entice some of us back above the fold. Maybe some little gizmo that reliably keeps the orange juice off the bed sheets - for example.

• I want reporters to uncover what I want to read about. I would pay for that.

It would be really nice (not to mention extremely savvy), if somebody from the New York Times or the local unions would maybe talk to me before conceding they can not entice me to trade a hundred pennies for a copy of their newspaper every day.

Join Peter Senge and Mwalimu Musheshe at MIT on May 15th!

Peter Senge is hosting a "bring your own lunch" talk at MIT where Mwalimu Musheshe, the Chairman of the Uganda Rural Development Training Programme (URDT) will be the featured speaker. Musheshe uses many of the principles of systems thinking in his amazing work at URDT. This is going to be a fantastic open discussion and dialogue. Here's the "invitation" to the event, thanks to Bryan Smith, one of the co-authors of Peter's latest book, The Necessary Revolution. (I hope they'll get into a topic about how environmentally sustainable URDT itself is. Perhaps I'll ask that question!).                                                                                        

Mwalimu Musheshe                                                           Peter Senge 

Vision in Action

Mwalimu Musheshe, Co-founder and Chairman
Uganda Rural Development &
Training Program (URDT)

Hosted by Peter Senge

MIT Sloan School of Management
Friday, May 15, 12-2
MIT Tang Building/E51, 70 Memorial Drive, Room 345.

This event is FREE.  You're invited to bring your own lunch.

Come meet Mwalimu Musheshe, co-founder and chairman of URDT. Learn about their visionary, systemic approach to development in Uganda – a model for Africa and the world. URDT provides an aspiration-based, systemic approach grounded in the understanding that to achieve lasting development, people must become empowered in all areas of their lives, including education, health, economic self-reliance, human rights, and civic participation. Since its inception, URDT has helped thousands of people improve their lives and has received accolades from international organizations for its innovative approaches. URDT’s training of local people, especially women, to become leaders and creators, is changing the way rural communities work. Musheshe will be presenting and engaging in dialogue with participants in this session, hosted by Peter Senge.  More information about URDT is at: http://www.urdt.net/

A map to the location can be viewed here: