Seth Godin on Education
This is an absolutely great talk about Education.
Thought for the day
Creative people don’t retire. They just keep on creating.
It’s probably because we love our work that we never want to stop. The question is: Do you love what you do enough to say the same thing? Do you love your work enough to never want to retire? And if you don’t then why not?
Why would you stay doing something that you didn’t absolutely love?
Tele-working is not Tele-leading
Many companies are extolling the benefits of teleworking but to my mind, it’s just an excuse to save money. I don’t believe that you can innovate at a distance, form an effective team at a distance, or lead from a distance. certainly you can manage from a distance but leadership of people on a day to day basis requires an emotional connection.
While you might be able to maintain an emotional connection at a distance, I don’t see how you can create one. Without an emotional connection, you are only managing, not leading remote workers.
The point was driven home in a recent HBR article by Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs. In the article, Jobs is quoted as saying ” There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
The Innovation Formula
The press seems littered these days with articles bemoaning Canada’s poor record at Innovation. Unfortunately, I think much of what is written and said misses the point. Let’s go back to what Innovation actually is: It is successfully taking a new idea, product, process or something to the market. As such, this process involves two distinct parts. The first part involves coming up with the idea, developing it into a product etc., and this is what everyone looks at. They use patents and such to measure new idea creation. However the second part of innovation is actually the most important part. That is taking the idea to the market. This is marketing, sales, business development, whatever you want to call it. In formulaic terms:Innovation = Idea + Marketing
People who comment on innovation continually forget the importance of marketing so they don’t measure it in looking at innovation. Statistics show that rapid growth of new software companies is more of a function of marketing that it is of R&D. The more successful startups spend much more on sales and marketing than they do on R&D and the ratio is 2:1. If marketing is twice as important in successful startups as R&D then this same sort of ratio must hold true for larger companies. This if you want to find innovators, you must look for marketing as a much more important factor than R&D in the success of innovators.
Marketing is the more important part of the innovation formula.
When people talk about innovation, when governments fund it, when companies do it, they forget the second part of innovation, that of marketing and this in fact is the most important factor in success of innovation.
Changes at RIM
Well it’s always sad to see a founder, or even two end up leaving an active management role at their company. It could be a natural evolution but it got me thinking about my love/hate relationship with my Blackberry. I remember the first time I got a Blackberry. It was about 2000/2001 and I thought this was a great new device. It was amazing how quickly I became addicted to it, checking messages regularly and answering them at all hours of the day. The first time I noticed that there was a problem with their use was in a meeting at Arch Venture Partners in Chicago. One of the rites of passage in getting venture capital funding is presenting your pitch to all of the partners. We sat in a windowed boardroom and due to cellular reception, the partners had to place their Blackberries on a window ledge. On a regular basis during the meeting the partners would get up from their seats, go over to the window, retrieve their Blackberry and check and perhaps answer messages. Perhaps I was boring or they just were not interested but that was a defining moment for me. I started to look at how I used the Blackberry and discovered that I was becoming involved in a lot of things that my employees should be handling themselves. It was too easy to get me and to get me to deal with things they should be dealing with. It was also too easy to check email at all hours of the day and mentally to never leave work. RIM has managed to change human behaviour by the introduction of an innovative device and whether history will see this as positive or negative change, here’s a thank-you to Balsillie and Lazaridis for creating a world changing company.
RIM Outages
Today’s service outages from RIM did not cause me any issues as I’ve been sitting at my computer all day trying to write. It did bring to mind though, similar issues that customers of ours had at Synamics. We built mass calling platforms for telcos and the expected level of service from us was referred to as 5 nines reliability. 5 nines meant that our systems (along with every other in-network telecom system) had to be available 99.999% of the time. Clearly RIM is not achieving those levels of reliability as 5 nines reliability means that you are allowed to be out of service something like 5 minutes per year. It will be interesting in the days ahead to see if this service outage is material to RIM’s customers. If they start leaving in droves it will be because this was a material problem. If such is the case then RIM has forsaken what is material in their business for something that is immaterial such as creating new tablets. Apple has been great at figuring out what is material. Now let’s see if Rim can be just as great.