Eliminate Your Own Job

May 5, 2012 By 5 Comments

On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for all jobs drops to zero.

“I need to keep my job relevant or I’ll be out of work.” You’ve heard it, seen other people’s faces when they are thinking it and maybe you have had this exact thought yourself. This instinctual thought process is the biggest reason organizations innovate slowly (or sometimes not at all). When they do innovate, it is painful and involves layoffs. The cycle feeds on itself: employees continuously find ways to avoid participating in change in the name of self-preservation. It works for a little while but then ends with self-annihilation.

If you’re thinking “that’s not me”, think again. Even rock stars fear the type of change that is truly self-preserving: eliminating their own job.

We can all claim that we embrace change because we all do to some degree. But self-preserving change is not change around the edges of what we personally do. Making changes that only make you yourself more productive helps you win the short-term race. You can persevere through cost-cutting driven layoffs, get modest raises and receive incremental promotions. You will still be devoured by the disruptive change that will eventually hit your space, though. This is the change that doesn’t do what you do better, it replaces what you do entirely.

Think Fight Club: on a long enough timeline, the survival rate for every job drops to zero. There are people and companies out there designing substitutes for what you do, and they are going to succeed at some point. The situation is ever more urgent because innovation cycles are getting shorter.

You have the advantage, though. [Read more...]

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What Process Teaches Us About People

May 1, 2012 By 8 Comments

Your people are even more important than your processes; use lessons from process improvement to accelerate success.

Process improvement projects fail more often than they succeed. Even though there are many documented lessons from these failures, organizations continue to repeat the same mistakes. The result is millions in wasted project spend and a process that is as bad (or worse) than when the project started. For would-be disrupters this is detrimental. Launching a disruptive idea and failing in execution makes your company trust you less and your customers are not going to risk their continuity with you anymore.

People improvement is a big deal for organizations as well. In fact, the stakes with improving talent are much higher than with processes. But because the cost / benefit analysis is harder to quantify with talent management decisions, mistakes are less often recognized as “failures”. Interestingly, the top causes of failure in process improvement initiatives are the same for people improvement initiatives. Here are the top three issues and the lessons you can apply to people improvement:

[Read more...]

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Disrupter Tools: The Hard Skills

April 24, 2012 By 2 Comments

There are a few hard skills you will need to create disruptive innovation and catapult your career.

It is absolutely true that the most important skills in becoming a disruptive force cannot be gained in a traditional classroom. There is no college major in disruptive studies, no certificate from AMA for killer vision and no HR departments hold training classes on having guts. These semi-soft skills contain nuances that are unique to each person and only so much of their composition can be taught. They are what separates a disrupter from all the rest.

There are hard skills that are critical to success, however. And while normal people use their hard skills to be box-checkers, you can use them to create mega-value. Below are the most important hard skills for disrupters, starting with the basic building blocks to the more complex. If you lack proficiency in any of these areas, find training as soon as possible even if it is on your own dime. The investment will pay you back many times over. One last note: the best certification you can get that covers all of these is Lean Six Sigma. If your company has an LSS program, become a Green Belt candidate (or even a Black Belt candidate) as soon as possible.

  1. SIPOC – SIPOC stands for Supplier-Input-Process-Output-Customer. It is used to focus on a single process so its value can be determined. It is the first step in understanding the meaning of what you do for your customer (the recipient of your output).
  2. Process Mapping – Boxes and arrows that quickly and effectively communicate a process to the reader. Sometimes other shapes are involved as well. It is impossible to design a substitute without maps and SIPOCs.
  3. Measurement & Data Collection – This is not as easy as it sounds. Crucial data points are placed, and sometimes hidden, throughout every process. It’s important to learn what data is important and how to collect it effectively.
  4. Data Analysis – Making meaning out of data. Huge.
  5. Productivity – Generating outputs at a given speed. This is incredibly important to all organizations.
  6. Risk Analysis – This can get very deep, but you need to at least understand how to identify risks and quantify their likelihoods and impacts. Tons of good tools for this are available free on the web.
  7. Cost / Benefit Analysis – Determining the net benefit of making a change. This is your ticket to executive & customer sponsorship of your disruptive idea.

Check out the “disrupter tools” section to the left for cheap (or free) ways to get better in these areas.

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Staying Out of the Ivory Tower

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You can't rock from an ivory tower.

Have you ever noticed that your favorite band or writer was a lot better when they first broke out? Those first couple of albums or books really resonated with you. They inspired and shaped you. Since then, though…meh.

What happens to our favorite artists when they get popular? A lot of things do, but the reason they resonate less is that they’re in an ivory tower. The pains and struggles they sang about when they made their first few albums are gone. The unique perspective they drew upon to write in an original way no longer exists. They are different people. They still have problems and struggles, it’s just that now those are ivory tower problems; problems that are meaningless to you.

This is the same thing that happens when you are promoted up through the ranks. You were a rock star and led your peers in overcoming problems. You led disruptive change – that’s why you are an executive now. The bigger you get and the longer you are away from an individual contributor role, the less you participate in the small picture and flex your critical thinking muscle. Since your role now involves spending more time on big picture communications to executives and external stakeholders, that’s what you focus on. When you talk to your team, you may notice they become quieter over time. They have less to say because they don’t relate to you anymore.

The cool thing about those now-famous artists is that sometimes they hit bottom. They realize they have lost touch with themselves and aren’t relevant to the real world anymore. It hurts them. Bouts of depression, followed by time off and self-discovery, lead to a new album or book that is totally excellent. You love it because they are relevant to you again, only this time they are more evolved and inspire you in new ways.

When it comes to your own corporate ivory tower, you don’t have to hit bottom or go through depression to come out of it. Here are some ways to proactively be more relevant to your direct reports and individual contributors: [Read more...]

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Recognizing Mediocrity and Rising Above It

April 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Work can still be like this even when your ideas are ignored.

Being an innovative employee is made up of two components:

  1. Having innovative ideas
  2. Participating in their execution

Most people have great ideas, but only a very small percentage of these ever sniff execution at all, much less allow the idea generator to participate meaningfully. This is because most management structures enable mediocrity by providing employees with boxes to check, grading them on that box-checking and then believing things are going great.

If you are part of a structure like this, you have most likely had ideas that were either shot down entirely or merely acknowledged in some meaningless way (Good job, buddy! We value you! Here’s a key chain!). This is the tell-tale sign of a mediocre environment: no meaningful action. For innovative ideas to be meaningful they have to be acted on in some way, whether that is the idea actually being implemented or even just a viability analysis that determines it won’t work.

When your ideas are not acted on, it harms your company because they lose to more innovative competitors; there is immediate opportunity loss, but also an ever-devolving workforce. With no action, there is less likelihood you will continue to provide value above and beyond your box-checking duties because you weren’t rewarded for doing them.

You must rise above this mediocrity for your own sake. The burgeoning trend in organizations is to dump layered management structures in favor of smarter, more empowered employees who don’t need heavy management. When that happens to your organization, you want to be retained as one of the folks who can thrive in the new environment, not laid off because you’re just a box-checker. You also need to build your legacy for a successful job hunt if that is an option you are pursuing. You need success stories and a meaningful reason for wanting a new position to win a great job where you are a great fit.

Here is how to rise above mediocrity: [Read more...]

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Cultivate Disruption

April 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

This is going to happen sometimes - let it.

What happens when you anti-manage great people who are addicted to overcoming obstacles? They push you, and sometimes they push you hard.

Human reflexes tell you to be rigid when you are pushed. They tell you to seize control and to settle things down. It is a reflex because it’s overwhelming if you are already busy with something (or several things). You are at capacity, can’t work another 60-hour week and besides, there is enough cool stuff in the pipeline already.

The problem is that your personal capacity doesn’t matter in this situation. If you are being pushed to support an initiative it means your people aren’t yet at their capacity. Unused potential in your people leads to dissatisfaction, lack of fulfillment and declining performance.

It leads to attrition.

You hired and developed these people to critically think their way through problems independently, to cultivate killer big picture vision and to always pursue mega-value. You used to be one of these people. Why would you want to shut them down? [Read more...]

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Confidence: Get It

April 16, 2012 By 2 Comments

Confidence engenders support for your disruptive ideas.

There are a handful of sublimely confident people out there who get approval from their executives or customers to proceed with a solution that is deeply flawed. There are absolutely zero people who receive support from executives and customers for anything if they lack sublime confidence, even when their solutions are brilliantly designed.

For ideas to become real, support from others is imperative. Disruptive innovations directly affect a number of stakeholders, in some cases across multiple companies. These stakeholders include not only executives and customers, but peers in other departments and frontline employees. All of these people care greatly for the continuity of their processes and outputs, and they are not going to support an idea that threatens to harm them. They need to see confidence to take on the change risk. Likewise, when an idea is launched as a project, frontline employees are not going to put their all into executing change if they do not have confidence in the change leader.

How do you develop the level of confidence needed to be a disruptive leader? Here are the key components: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Intrapreneurship, Selling Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

What it Really Means to be Disruptive

April 11, 2012 By 4 Comments

Turn on your disruptive light and start creating substitutes.

Disruptive innovation is the creation and deployment of substitutes. Disruption is great for your customers (internal or external) because it completely eliminates processes that are more time-consuming and expensive for them and replaces them with something better. It is great for you because your competitors are mostly offering products and services that do not replace those processes, they just perform them a little better or cheaper. Being disruptive is a magical feeling and it builds your legacy. Being a little faster or cheaper is a dogfight – it burns you out and is not very valuable to your customers.

Think about critical paper documents: it’s safer and cheaper to ship them via overnight carrier than US Mail, so there is some value in those services. But it’s totally disruptive to the entire process of executing critical documents to never use paper at all. The big picture goal of the customer isn’t to print and ship something, it is to execute a contract, serve official notice or record history. So why spend your valuable energy and talent on helping them print and ship a little better when you can help them execute contracts better? By focusing on the big picture goals of your customers, you can design great substitutes. The more processes and outputs your creation eliminates, the more value it has and the more disruptive it is.

Disruptive innovation is relevant to everyone, not just companies developing new technology or services. It scales perfectly from individual contributors all the way up to executives and companies as a whole. Your role, regardless of how small it is, carries some level of empowerment with it. Use every ounce of that empowerment. Understand what your customer’s (i.e. recipient of your output) big picture goal is and then answer this question:

What can I change about my process and output that creates a substitute?

This is big picture vision, so don’t hold back with the ideas. The nuts and bolts how it gets executed are important later (that’s where small picture vision comes in). If you are a rock star performer, your ideas will be well-received and you are on your way to building a great legacy.

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How to Read

April 3, 2012 By 3 Comments

If it makes you think it makes you better.

Critical thinking is one half of the skill set needed to overcome obstacles. A big part of developing that critical thought muscle is the consumption of subjective viewpoints. This can be done through a variety of media types, but the most practical way to consume a large of amount of information is by reading blogs, books, journals and magazines. The great thing about written subjective views is they are plentiful and diverse. Unfortunately, normal people fail to take advantage of this because they don’t know how to read.

Experts and pontificators are not there to give you an instruction manual on how to be good at your job, but this is how they tend to be used by their readers. Most of the time normal people who are “well read” find a few authors they totally agree with and relate to and stick to them. They attempt to directly implement the things they’ve read into their job function. This is the wrong way to read because it develops critical thinking very slowly. For example, the rise of ‘ten tips’ articles has diminished the value of reading subjective viewpoints because they are used as instruction manuals with minimal thought applied by the consumer. This translates into continued mediocrity by employees and managers who mistakenly think they’ve got it all figured out.

The best way to read is to: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Hiring & Managing, Intrapreneurship Tagged With: , , , , ,

Be an Anti-Manager

April 3, 2012 By 3 Comments

This is not meaningful.

Organizations introduce management controls to reduce output variance, and managers manage their people to gain productivity. But the best productivity tool is meaning, and the problem is that management limits meaning. Too much management is counterproductive.

When you manage your employees or your team members in a project, every mistake that a management tool corrects also takes away their ability to use their own judgment and hence makes their job less meaningful. When you manage, your people don’t solve problems; they do what you tell them to and then they check a box. This certainly makes things predictable and cuts down on variance. It also severely limits the value you get out of your people. Their value stays untapped because you aren’t letting them (or demanding they) use it.

Aspire to be an anti-manager. [Read more...]

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Quality Controls: Keep it Light

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Freedom from controls helps your people develop and makes them more productive.

For many managers, there is a natural tendency to address operational errors with tight controls around the specific process that has experienced a problem. This is especially true in cases where a mistake has a high amount of visibility in the organization and there is pressure from the top to take definitive action and ensure ‘it never happens again’.

This seems necessary at the time it is administered, but continuously adding controls is quite damaging over time. Since controls are applied to processes across all individuals who perform them, every control you implement reduces the productivity of individuals who would otherwise perform the task correctly. The penalty of adding a control to those who don’t need it is greater than the gain of a new control correcting the behavior of those who occasionally mess up. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Hiring & Managing Tagged With: , , , ,

How to Hire: Look for Overcomers

March 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Overcoming obstacles is the ultimate trait in a professional. Overcomers are the people you should be hiring and in fact, the only metric that is valuable to you as a hiring manager is the ability-to-overcome-obstacles metric.

This rule applies astoundingly well across all job functions, even those that are entry-level or seemingly too simple to derive value from problem-solving acumen. Just think about the path that any successful leader has taken when ascending the ranks. They didn’t lead their peers and get promoted because of their technical skills, whether software development or espresso making. All of their peers had those technical skills. But the top performers took the initiative to resolve obstacles that occurred within their own job function while their peers stopped producing and waited for their manager to fix it for them. [Read more...]

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Disruption in Your DNA

March 7, 2012 By 11 Comments

Disrupters make impactful change in their organizations as a course of habit. It is not a special effort and it is not daunting or stressful. It is organic because it’s in their DNA.

Disrupters are different because of how they view their outputs. They became rock stars and now their vision has expanded.

While normal people view their outputs like this:

Disrupters see this:  [Read more...]

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