The Internet in 1969

Hat tip: Our good neighbour

Diversity drives innovation - notes from this week's diversity symposium

I had such a great time at Thursday's Diversity Symposium, where I was the guest (thanks very much) of the EEO Trust, who put the event on.

Keynote speaker was Frans Johansson, who's well-qualified to speak about diversity, being part Afro-American, part Cherokee and part Swedish. He's the author of the book The Medici Effect.

Without further ado, my notes from Frans' presentation:

• All new ideas are combinations of old ideas.
• Some combinations aren't that exciting; eg spider + web. Big deal.
• But what about spider + goat's milk? Strange, huh? Explore connections between the two and you actually get some of the material they make bulletproof vests out of.
• Far apart ideas and cultures look at the same things differently -> creativity -> innovation

Then he looked at the characteristics of organisations and teams who create great ideas:

• Corning Glass - the world's biggest glass provider - develops 4000 products a year; about 2% go to market.
• Prince has about 1000 unreleased songs in his vault - they're not good enough for him to release.
  
• You have to have lots of ideas to get the good ideas.
  
• The most innovative teams fail the most. (Interestingly, I was hearing much the same thing in ResearchTalk's interview on excellence while waiting for the train Thurs. morning!)
• Diverse teams generate more ideas.

Then he had a really cool example from the world of music: Tubular Bells.

• If you were a rock musician in the 70s and you wanted to do something different, how many variables do you have? There are about 2400 combinations with traditional rock band equipment, chords and vocal styles.
• And if you're a classical musician, you've got about 2400 different combinations to create a new piece of classical music.
• Or you could mash them together like Mike Oldfield, who made an album that stayed at number one for something like 15 weeks!

And now some facts and figures from the world of business:

• hp's quantum lab has 32 scientists from 13 different countries, and 13 disciplines. And no rules!
• Took them 2 years to get established and working together as a team - but once they'd figured out which language to speak (!) they got to be one of the most productive research labs in the USA.

Then a few pieces of advice, supported by examples:

• Find inspiration from fields and cultures other than your own - and dare to explore the connections.
  
• Redefine what you do.
• How to be number one: make a new category.
  
• Combine curiosity, no fear and ideas.
  
• Deliberately staff for innovation - different:
• experiences
• approaches
• concepts
• traditions
• Diversity by design.
• Example: L'Oreal - a French company with a British CEO - launched a hair product for African-American women (why didn't an American company do that?). They accidentally discovered a market of 1 billion people worldwide - all those women with African-origin hair, found in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe!
• Example: Frit-o-lay had an affinity group (self-formed group of people with something in common) of Hispanics who recommended a guacamole-flavoured chip. In its first year it earned $100 million. Ees nice!
• Ignite an explosion of ideas by selecting specific groups.
• Eg Volvo had a concept car designed by all-female engineers. It had - among other things - a side hatch to fill up your washer fluid, instead of having to open the bonnet (or hood). Good only for women? Nah, great for everyone. Diversity drives innovation.
• Intesect ideas from your global offices.
  
• Example Cummins makes generators but makes profit from service. Good in Europe and US but in China there's no infrastructure, so they had to make their generators better so they won't need servicing so much. Ended up thrashing the competition and changing the business model!

Then Frans showed us a graph which showed that homogenous teams get productive straight away, but plateau after a while. Meanwhile, diverse teams take a while to get going but go on to outperform homogenous teams.

"The single most important leadership quality is to move the [time to get productive] to the left (of the graph - in other words to get productive , faster)"

Man there's so much great stuff here, I'm going to have to do another post shortly. Time for tea now!

How's your competitiveness?

"the most important competition is between you and your own imagination"

Thomas Friedman, quoted in Idealog

A CEO asks, "What would you do in my shoes?"

If you're a member of Facebook (and if not, it's free and easy to sign up) you can sit in the CEO's chair of startup company Mahalo.com for a few minutes.

Jason Calacanis, former journalist and now serial entrepreneur, has started a discussion on Facebook to set the future direction of this nascent company.

A very smart move, and with social networking now ubiquitous it's fairly easy to get quality feedback from people all around the world. This is one of the things that the intarweb is really, really good at.

Air travel and branding

When I travelled to Wellington last week, I had a few observations about air travel and branding.

• Air travel is a designed experience - mostly because of safety and regulatory issues. Service people deliver mostly scripted lines, and it has somewhat of an air of liturgy about it.
  
  
• The purely functional design of airplanes and runways is iconic and, even though not designed as art (or maybe it is?) it comes across as art. To me anyway!
  

And yet there are a whole lot of things about air travel that meet the needs of the airline or the airport, but aren't customer-centred.

In an extensive ecosystem like air travel, how can one player make the difference? The article below sheds some light:

Climb Aboard The Plane Of The Future - Forbes.com

Insurance for the hip and trendy

I've often come across insurance brokers who are trying to make insurance more interesting. I don't blame them, it's pretty boring, and it has the added burden of not adding any value - it's the product you don't want to use.

So it's interesting to see a press release about "the first NZ life insurance offerings that specifically target the Internet-savvy ‘Generation C' "!

More here, and I've also blogged about it on our Looksy.org Generation C blog.

Good meetings: Better By Design and Freelance 2007

Yesterday I was at two conferences almost simultaneously. There was the superb Freelance Writers Conference, which I paid to go to, and the Better By Design CEO summit, which Idealog kindly paid for me to report on.

Would've been nice if they weren't on the same day, but it was an exciting day!

My daily reports from the CEO summit (Wednesday and Thursday) were the closest I've come to liveblogging. I don't think I'd be comfortable doing real live, liveblogging. You do need some space to process and make sense of what's being said - unless maybe you have a dual processor brain? Hm.

Meanwhile the Freelance do was both inspiring and a little intimidating for some of the people I spoke with afterwards. It does take guts to be self-employed, to pitch stories, and to interview people. For someone just beginning, it looks like one hell of a mountain to climb.

But it can be done. That was the theme I was hearing from both conferences - whether the story of Bendon's slow climb back from near-death to a powerhouse brand, or Hsin-Yi Cohen's journey "from scratch to specialty in a year". I didn't get to hear Hsin-Yi, but I do remember her email on the Journz email list about a year ago asking for advice from other journos. Now she writes for publications all around the world on niche topics that are personally meaningful to her.

Two factors were a little different at this year's Freelance conference: the majority of us realise we won't be able to retain copyright on articles written for the majority of NZ publications (but maybe for some overseas ones), and it is very, very hard to get more than 40 cents per word from most NZ publications (but not the case for overseas).

One thing that was missing - and this was echoed by Bob from Wellington, whose last name I didn't catch as we walked to the Shakespeare tavern for drinks and awards - was the point that as a freelancer you are running a business, and therefore running your own show. A lot of the talk of unionisation and such is probably necessary but to me just speaks too much of an employee (read: helpless) mindset.

Easy for me to say, I guess. I've established myself in a few niches, built relationships with editors and gotten to a certain comfort level. But you really do need to start the way you mean to go on. Are you going to go on as a winner?