Fail Like You Really Mean it

Innovation is all about risk and failure so....

Fail quick, fail fast, give yourself room to fail. Then write it up, learn from it. Share it put it where others can easily find it and move on.

Apart from keeping you fast on your feet it simply helps undermine the emotional baggage that failure implies and allows you to move on and take more risks. Prevarication wastes more money than any aspect of innovation management and we keep throwing good money and time after something which isn’t working. Risk and failure happen. Most things fail- get over it and move on to the next opportunity.

But the crucial factor learn from it, don’t repeat the same thing. Know what failure looks like and trust your gut instincts along with the metrics. Don’t rely on just the numbers.

And if you want to change innovation into stagnation, don’t bonus your management on individual project successes. They will just keep persevering and spend too much of their energy to find something to blame when it does go pear shaped. You end up paying twice. At least.

Value added innovation

There is new value phrase that I’m hearing. Heard it in the early eighties too. Remember them? The last recession? The phrase is ‘If you can save me money PDQ, I’ll buy it.

That's the new value proposition for today, and you'll do well to think about the phrase as you look to grow or maintain your top line.

The number one concern for many organisations today (beyond mere survival for some) is cost reduction. So, if you can give them the chance to do this quickly, they'll be willing to pay you a premium to do so

This line of thinking was reinforced when I spent time two weeks ago with some friends in the South West. They gave a up a small but very successful pharmacy chain and settled down to ‘have a life’ .They've got a solution that can help families save quite a bit of money on their overall holiday spend. Given the scope of the potential savings, and the fact that they have maintained growth despite economic turmoil, they've got a key innovation strategy nailed. It’s called a camp site, but one with electricity and wifi. And some of the most stunning scenery in England as a perfect after dinner treat. It helps if you have a good product to start with of course.

What can you learn from this line of thinking? Well the key questions to ask could be....

How can you partner up with your customers to help them achieve cost savings with what they would like to do?

How can you help them quickly achieve those cost savings : faster, say, than in the alternate economy of a few months past? Remember, faster is better.


Are there changes that you might make to your product/service line that can help to accelerate cost savings?

Can you innovate like mad -- thinking about what you do and how you do it -- to generate cost savings for those who rely upon you?

Think about it in the context of any industry. If you are in travel/hospitality, and you offer cost savings with what you are selling, you've got a leg up on the competition. If you are selling a service, get the potential cost savings that the service provides out front, and clearly defined -- highlight them. If you are selling an industry solution, re-examine the cost savings that your solution provides -- and see what you can do to make them bigger.

Add value, drive down cost. Business is easy if you remember that.

Think about the phrase, and look for the innovation opportunity in it.

30 Email tips for Innovation Amplification

Love it or curse it, email provides either the super-lubricating oil or the over boiled jam in the gears of any organisation, depending on the skill of the writers and the culture of the organisation. How the hell did we manage to communicate before Outlook, or put a man on the moon, or organise Live Aid? The fact is we did and, some would say, communicate a whole lot better in the process. Certainly we wasted far less time, and had less 'noise' to deal with.

Following are 30 tips which will reduce the time we all spend wrapped up in our mail mess and hopefully gives us more time for productive and creative thinking and... er...work:

Email tips

1. Use subject lines and titles that mean something, precisely. It gives people a clue about what they have to do with it. And helps retrieving information from the fossil record of their in-box at some late date.

2. Switch off email incoming warnings. There is nothing that important that can't wait an hour or so. If it is mission critical then use telephone! They still work.

3. If you really have to write a long email put a 'contents' at the top and tell people what’s in the rest. And what they need to do, if anything.If nothing then tell them that too.

4. Think! Do I have another way of distributing this information; Intranet, Blog, or bless us, by getting off our behinds and walking over to the individual or using the phone. Word of mouth - that works too.

5. One sentence paragraphs are fine, absolutely.

6. Use Headings.

7. Use Bullet points.

8. Put the main information you want to convey at the top of the message. And work down in descending importance - Mission critical to, why am I actually writing this at all?

9. Ask continually 'Why am I writing this at all'.

10. Write warmly, not like a robot, which is a bit jerky and boring.

11. Bring your personality to work.

12. Remember the Three Tee’s

Clarity - Brevity - Personality.

13. Make sure the links you may put in actually work.

14. Don’t attach whole documents, just paste the relevant bits into the message. A 20 page PDF that you have to read through just to get to the with one relevant paragraph is worse than useless?

15. Use the spill chacker.

16. Don’t use texteese unless it’s for a colleague (you actually know)

17. Don’t send ‘thank you’ replies.

18. Don’t abuse the priority buttons.

19. One subject per email… or find another way of doing it.

20. Always bear in mind that you are, in general, asking somebody to put your email on their to-do list and they may be up to their eyeballs in their own to-do’s. Virtually every email is a sales letter to get somebody to do something, even if it is just to read the damn thing.

21. Wait 5 hours before replying to emails that wrankle. DO NOT hit the reply button immediately. Email is the fastest way to unintentionally upset people known to man. 80% of communication is non-verbal and it is very easy not to see or appreciate the smile or irony behind the phrase somebody may think was very clever when they wrote it. And if they are being a bit tart,.......... then a short pause helps everyone to cool down a bit.

22. If you can’t reply fully immediately tell them when you can and then do it. Under promise over deliver.

23. Your colleague is a customer too. Teatr them as if they were your best customer.

24. 90% of emails are persuading somebody to do something.

25. 80 % of emails travel less than 50 meters. Why not get off your ...... and go to see them and have a chat. Guess what? That works too. Probably better and it certainly helps for the next time you need some help.

26. Emails are not 'buck passers' or 'insurance policies'.

27. Think, before you CC, do the c-ceed really, really need to see this.

28. Use CC only when absolutely necessary. If they aren’t the prime recipient why are you CC’ing them at all?

29. Use the Intranet more. If you can’t, then fix it quickly. Spending £50K on a great intranet will save at least in less than a month in productivity for any organisation of over 100 people - FACT!

30. Try using other technology. Twitter, SMS, anything that works; If you don't know how then get a technology coach

Communication is the fuel for innovation - it shouldn't be the brake

Ready, set .... BANG!

More often than not, in my teaching and in writing about innovation and change management, I seem to spend a great deal of time looking at trends and explaining how organisations can adapt internally to position themselves to capitalise on the opportunities they may be presented with. And much of that time is currently spent trying to putting into perspective the fact that even though we've always had downturns there are still plenty of growth opportunities. But one thing is for sure, that applying creativity to those plans and making innovation the heart beat of an organisation, to allow you to hit the floor running when the ties loosen and things start to get moving again, isn’t just a nice thing to think about, but is going to be fundamental. And if you don't embrace that then you really will be toast, no matter what your size and resources.

What has become evident, to me at least, is that probably the most pressing issue for any business owner, leader and indeed any organisation leader, today is in bringing things back to the core. In order to take a step up in developing an internal innovation culture we have to take a step back first. While uncertainty and chaos disrupts local and global markets, there continue to be the basic truths that still apply: understanding your industry, competition, skills requirements, the gap in capabilities, but most importantly understanding your customer and having the ability to respond to their requirements quickly and effectively through outstanding internal communication, are the factors that will define any organisations’s future success. Thinking outside the box is all well and good but you still have to look in your own box too to see what really is there hiding in the corners. But look in a different way

So what can you do right now to make sure you are at least on the starting blocks when the pistol is fired?

Think expand.
The current climate it is undoubtedly depressing and demoralising and it's all too easy right now to lose your motivation and direction. It is easy to say but Don't let that happen! The future is out there still! So think opportunity: Apple, GM, (OK, Bad example ;-),Microsoft and my window cleaner, who now has 15 people working for him and is just as much a success as the big guys, were all founded in periods of recession.

Check your reaction times
Agility is the key word. You have to have a team that can react to opportunities faster than the competition. That means giving them the freedom to make decisions, not body-checked by internal processes and management pyramids. Allow them to take real responsibility for their own budgets and have fixed goal posts that everyone understands. Your people are way, way better and more capable than you think. Let them think and be inspired by taking off the shackles.

Immerse in creativity.

Idea generation is now at warp speed- products are insect like in their life span but appear out of nowhere. Twitter didn’t ‘exist’ 12 months ago until Stephen Fry talked about it on national TV. Incidentally have you ever seen an ad for Twitter? Rapid product change is not just desirable it is what is happening now: we don’t have choice in dealing with it, reacting to it and embracing it. We just have to face it.

Check your knowledge.
Your ability to access ever more scarce, specialised skills will define your future success. It's your ability to establish a fast, agile, quick-to-assemble collaborative team that will define your ability to grab all the opportunity that is emerging out there. If you don’t have, it get it. Creative talent is your most valuable asset. Not mini-me’s and karaoke ideation. Look outside your industry. A sign of a truly crap company, waiting like a dinosaur for the meteor to hit, is their recruitment advert which says must have xxx years experience in such and such an industry. The job that should be advertised in that company is for a new CEO .

Know thine enemies.
Where are the threats likely to be coming from? Could new business models, technologies, new regulatory, political or social trends impact your bottom line in a way that you hadn't thought of before? The biggest clothing retailers are now the supermarkets!

Scout for talent.
Heads and ideas are your most precious asset and are going to be a scarcer and scarcer resource. Just as football teams scout the playing field of the world you must do the same. And don’t look in the normal places such as the Universities and the Milk round; look outside, at the new entrepreneurs, the children in school enterprise clubs, the single mums with passion, the new entrepreneurs, give them a platform and develop the management skills to utilise these in the best way for them, not you. People leave bosses, they don’t leave companies. The rewards in developing your talent pool are way above any ROI calculation.


Define your voice.
You have to keep people focused on the future. Not what happened last week. Leadership is largely about keeping your team focused on opportunity and goals, and then carrying the water for them to allow them to deliver. Positivity, talking about the future and consistency reinforce that. If you waver, so will they and then you are on pushing a snowball up a volcano.