by Charles Plant | Apr 5, 2016 | Leadership Development
For some reason, I’ve had three conversations within the last few days, all on the subject of ambiguity. This isn’t a concept that we talk about all the time so I have found it odd that I’m encountering it more on a daily basis.
The first conversation was with a friend whose life is undergoing change. She is transitioning from one long term job into a more entrepreneurial life and she is very unsettled, not being sure how the transition will evolve.
It has been a long time since she has been in such an ambiguous situation and for one who thrives on having a very well defined to-do list, the idea of not knowing what to put on that list is causing emotional turmoil.
The second conversation was with another friend who was trying to figure out how to improve the teaching of leadership in a modern workplace. She knew that the transition from the industrial economy to the knowledge economy had changed how we need to lead and was exploring concepts that explained that change.
Resolving ambiguity came up as a key to success in leadership roles in the knowledge economy. It is much harder now to identify and measure success so leaders need to help employees in their struggles to turn ambiguous situations into actionable plans.
And finally, I was attending a presentation by students who had just finished an internship course at U of T. A number of students expressed both surprise and dismay that when they started their internship, they weren’t told exactly what they had to do. They had to figure it out themselves.
School, with its highly defined system for measuring success, doesn’t lend itself to ambiguous situations that are encountered in the workplace.
As time goes on, I suspect more and more of us will have to face high levels of ambiguity on a daily basis. Success will come to those who can not only cope with it but who can embrace ambiguity and figure out for themselves how to achieve success.
by Charles Plant | Mar 23, 2016 | Entrepreneurship
As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that logic and facts don’t matter. This is tremendously upsetting as I’ve grown up to favour the logical over the emotional. In fact I actually get turned on by facts. (Yes, how nerd-like can one be?)
The death of Rob Ford and the ascendancy of Donald Trump (Drompf?) brought this to the fore. Here are two politicians whose brazen manipulation and ignorance of facts didn’t hurt them at all in political battles. What they understand is that all that matters is emotions. And they did a great job appealing to the basest of human emotions.
I blogged about some of this this yesterday on LinkedIn which I’m experimenting with as a blogging platform. Today though I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review on the Science of Emotions which really focussed my thinking.
Because emotions are messy, hard to predict and difficult to use in marketing, this group created a standard lexicon of emotional motivators that can be used by marketers. This will allow companies to use data analytics to identify emotional motivators and use statistical modelling to determine the most profitable customer motivators.
This is all slightly upsetting to think that I am being manipulated like this all the time. But then I thought about what I buy. For some odd reason, I have an emotional attachment to Apple products because of their design. My hyper-logical son is quick to point out though that I’m buying a closed system at tremendous cost and that it doesn’t make logical sense. But I love Apple products. There’s that emotional reaction.
And I wear a lot of Patagonia clothing. Not because it’s the best manufactured outdoor wear but because I love the image they portray and how I identify with their image.
But does this mean logic and facts are dead? Maybe not dead yet but failing. If we can turn emotional appeal into a science then maybe we have merged emotion and logic in a way that will turn consumerism fully into a new wave religion.
by Charles Plant | Mar 8, 2016 | Entrepreneurship
Commentators have long criticized Canada’s inability to scale high-tech companies to world-class size. Could our habit of ousting the founder os scaling companies be the problem? According to the Centre for Digital Entrepreneurship + Economic Performance, “Canada continues to struggle to produce the type of sustainable, high-growth firms in knowledge-intensive sectors that policy-makers have identified as crucial to the country’s economic future. While the density of high-tech startups and entrepreneurs in Canada is among the world’s highest, the creation of high-growth Canadian firms continues to lag behind” (deepcentre, A Lynchpin in Canada’s Economic Future: Accelerating Growth and Innovation with World-Class Business Acceleration Ecosystem, 2015).
Although Canada has created an ecosystem that produces many startups, few of these companies grow to become Unicorns. These are defined as privately held companies with valuations in excess of one billion dollars. Certainly, we have had world-leading companies such as Blackberry and Mitel, and more recently Unicorns such as HootSuite and Kik Interactive. But most of our successful startups are sold before they reach world-class size. Overcoming this growth hurdle is crucial to positioning Canadian companies favourably in global markets.
In this study, we are looking at the professional history and experience of technology startup leaders to determine whether specific aspects of their backgrounds limit their willingness or ability to scale the company under their leadership. The analysis is guided by two questions:
- Is Canada limited by the amount of CEO talent needed to lead and grow successful technology companies?
- Do founders make good CEOs, or are they outperformed by professional CEOs?
The second question is based on anecdotal evidence; some of the most successful technology companies in history have been led by their founders well after the companies reached their world-class status. This includes Steve Jobs and Apple, Bill Gates and Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from Google, and Ed Oates and Larry Ellison from Oracle . Many of these companies were founded by young people—some were even without undergraduate degrees—who became successful CEOs of game-changing businesses. We also looked at the issue of founder replacement and compared worldwide practices with those in Canada.
Our findings, while limited in scope by the nature of the data available, suggest that:
- Canadian Founder CEOs are just as experienced as the Founder CEOs of Unicorns in terms of prior experience as serial entrepreneurs.
- Our Professional CEOs are more experienced than Unicorn Professional CEOs in terms of prior experience as founders and as CEOs of venture capital-backed companies.
- Founder CEOs outperform Professional CEOs in Unicorns and Canadian companies.
- While Canadians have a habit of ousting Founder CEOs and replacing them with Professional CEOs 47% of the time, Founder CEOs are only replaced 18% of the time in Unicorn companies.
Our conclusion is that Canadian founders have the right backgrounds to grow successful world-class companies and that our reluctance to scale to that level may be attributed partially to our tendency ousting Founder CEOs and replacing them with Professional CEOs.
by Charles Plant | Feb 8, 2016 | Innovation
If it isn’t enough that we lag Americans in innovation performance, this study will add to the Canadian national angst by showing that we as individuals also lag Americans in our attitudes to innovation. For this study, we have defined innovation as the process of translating an idea or invention into a good or service that creates value for which customers will pay. Innovation is more than about inventing but about getting those inventions accepted in the marketplace.
We set out to look at five dimensions of innovative attitudes including:
- Willingness to take risks
- Independence
- Financial drive
- Grit
- Drive to innovate
We selected these characteristics after a review of literature on the subject. Unfortunately there does not seem to be consensus on which attitudes are essential to successful innovation. We felt however that these dimensions covered a wide range of potential attitudes. To conduct the study, we asked 1,000 knowledge workers about their attitudes to innovation, receiving responses from 600 Americans and 400 Canadians.
A greater percentage of Americans look at innovation more positively than Canadians. American respondents score higher in almost every personality trait that is thought to drive innovation at the level of the individual
Our study found that 29% more American knowledge workers have a strongly positive attitude towards innovation than Canadians who have the same attitude:
- 38% more American managers are positive towards innovation than Canadians.
- 23% more American employees are positive.
Canada’s competitiveness hinges on our ability to innovate, and our hope may lie in future generations. In many of the dimensions of innovation, Canadian respondents 35 and under approach—and in one case exceed—the percentage of Americans with positive attitudes to Innovation. Americans who have strongly positive attitudes only exceed Canadians in this age group by 20%. (Americans over 44 exceed Canadians by 44%.)
This is by no means an exhaustive or academically rigorous study. Our intention is to add to the conversation about innovation and identify some reasons why we lag much of the developed world and what we can do about it.
Attitudes to innovation are a good starting point in the broader study of innovation. Attitudes matter because they set the tone. Attitudes can permeate from an individual to larger social networks and govern the organizations and businesses in which these individuals participate.
by Charles Plant | Jan 28, 2016 | Entrepreneurship
In a startup world full of ideas, it’s difficult to separate the Sitcom Startup Ideas from the good ideas. I must admit that I didn’t coin the phrase but am copying something that Paul Graham wrote in his post on How to Get Startup Ideas. To quote his post for those of you too lazy to click on the link, “Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn’t merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.”
And from the research I’m doing, it seems that most ideas that people start Techno with are ideas that could be classified Sitcom Startup Ideas. But there is a problem here as you could think of AirBnB as a Sitcom Startup. After all it was started by a few guys in San Fransisco who couldn’t pay rent so they put up a website to rent out three air mattresses. And Uber was started by another three guys who couldn’t stand waiting in the rain to get a taxi.
I suspect that Sitcom Startup Ideas are in the eye of the beholder. One VC’s sitcom is another’s documentary. After all, Bessemer passed on FaceBook, Google, and EBay. Not only did they pass, they ran away from these ideas and their founders as if they were nuts. You can see the list of all their epic fails here.
Paul Graham goes on to say that: “If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it’s generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind…..The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not “think up” but “notice.” “. Now I don’t want to criticize Paul Graham as he is much more successful than I will ever be but I don’t get the difference between thinking and noticing. After all, AirBnB and Ebay, were not noticed, they were thought up and then noticed.
I’m struggling to come up with a methodology of separating the Sitcom Startup Ideas from the good ones. (If I am successful in doing this maybe it will atone for my earlier bad ideas.) What I have seen as a trend is the good ideas are the things that come out of something the inventor or someone the inventor has actually talked to, would pay for in time or money. When founders stray from something someone would pay for then they risk creating a lousy idea.
And ‘someone’ is not a concept but a person, an actual living person who would put time or money towards purchasing whatever flows from the idea. I’m not married to this concept and still paying with it as it keeps me coming back to an expression I’ve been using lately: “Don’t find the problem, find the budget.”
For some reason, I’ve had three conversations within the last few days, all on the subject of ambiguity. This isn’t a concept that we talk about all the time so I have found it odd that I’m encountering it more on a daily basis.
