USS John Kennedy


In Boston, the USS John Kennedy, the aircraft carrier, named for the late President, bids us farewell. The carrier was frequently stationed in the Mediterranean, projecting power and authority in a tumultuous Middle East.

I feel closer to Kennedy than any other president who served in the White House, As a young boy, I stood about three feet from him during his ‘60’s Presidential bid. On its way through Philadelphia to a political rally, his motorcade lumbered by my grade school and I was able to get a glimpse of the man who would be our president.


As much as that was a thrill for me, I imagine it must be quite an honor to have a ship or a building named after you, a way to live in perpetuity or until the building is wrecked or the ship is decommissioned. These days, perpetuity doesn't last as long as it used to,

As I wandered, which is what writers do, along the Boston waterfront on a cold, spring afternoon, I saw the USS John Kennedy for the first and last time. I’d have liked to stop that ship and chat with it, but it had its work to do and I had mine.

If Kennedy had lived, he would now be an elder statesman. I wondered, as I wandered, what advice he would give our leaders and their inevitable showdown with power and fate.

Kennedy believed might and diplomacy are not mutually exclusive alternatives. He believed that the use of force was the last resort, but he also knew that the threatened potential use of force was an essential instrument in diplomacy and an equally important prevention of its ultimate use. He believed that force was the 600 pound gorilla in the room, the heavy hand inside the glove. His focus therefore was on imaginative diplomacy, suggestive diplomacy where the presence of overwhelming force can demonstrate vivid determination without actually showing its shock and awe.

Kennedy also believed “you never negotiate out of fear, but you also never fear to negotiate.” For him, this was more than a clever turn of phrase. It was a principal that valued dialogue and conflict as a means to an end and not the imposition of one will over another.

And finally, I think it was Kennedy’s axiom that “perfection is the enemy of good.” If it wasn’t, it should have been. It is another way of saying, that change occurs with small, first-steps into conflict, rather than one or two giant steps around it, or over it.

As I imagined Kennedy, I also imagined his advice to American business. He may ask us why we are desperately trying and failing to keep up with our technological brilliance.

I imagine Kennedy would point to the last century as a guide. In that time, we have learned to do with two hours less sleep, while millions of children, especially males are being diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In a 24/7 economy, where we’re living with communications so close that we’re comfortable with blinking blue-lit telephones hanging from our ears, Blackberries, beepers, IPods dangling from our belts, he would observe we are enchanted by the beating, vibrating and buzzing of our own importance.

I imagine Kennedy would point out how we see ourselves less as humans and more as efficient machines. Our evolutionary design, he would point out, is not modeled on a machine: we break down with stress-related diseases, depression, heart disease, stokes, cancer, diabetes and chronic bad backs. He might also that that we know that and that in the face of that knowledge we prefer to become trigger-happy in the face of frustration and human-ness, experiencing desk rage, road rage and air rage.

I imagine Kennedy would find parallel between faith and management theory and practice. He might find some interesting points of comparisons, for example, the perfection all members of an organization seek. He might look at some business leaders and their charismatic authority and suggest how the faith of the modern manager is a forward-looking optimism, which, he might point out, is a defense against the anxiety provoked by the experience of chaos and a world that is less than perfect, and their inability to think about…live with it.

I imagine he would have something to say about the foundational beliefs that support our notions of productivity and efficiency. He might suggest that both can be used as a defense against the disappointment of omnipotent phantasies. Paradoxically, he might point out, there is no more persuasive argument for change than the need for productivity, and no where is this need more evident than in the ranks of unemployed and the poor, and that it is not the poor and underserved who keep reins on the status quo, but the powerful. I imagine he would offer the poor and unemployed always seek change.

He might say all of this, or then, he might just pass quietly into history.

When Why Isn’t Important

“Why don’t we innovate more?” I’m asked when a prospective clients calls. I take the question as a good sign. After all, curiosity about oneself, one’s company is usually a good sign of health. But the premise behind the question – that the person who asks the question not only shouldn’t be asking me but that she can identify, define and reliably address the causes of her own corporate innovation deficiencies – is highly overrated.

We all have blind spots, the parts of us that lie beyond fact and reason and knowingness. There is an aspect of each of us that is invisible, out of reach. Blind spots are reasons why doctors have their own doctor. They are the parts of us that remain unquestioned, unknown and unseen. Research psychologists have known this for decades that it’s very difficult to determine the cause or causation of our own behavior and, or suffering. For one reason, we can never perform an experiment. Take Jerry, a 55-year old owner of an international printing company. He is certain that his company’s decade long growth would have never happened if his brother had not forced him into sales when Jerry dropped out of school. We’ll never know if he’s right because we cannot rewind his life, play it again, and see what would have happened if he stayed in school.

Reconstructing the story of our life, our products or the story of our companies is a complicated business for other reasons. It’s what scientists call hindsight bias, which kicks in when we try to figure out the chain of events leading to the current situation. We may very well come up with a story, but it will contain large swaths of revisionist history. It’s not that we bias them deliberately. It’s that we, humans tend to make events in the past appear comprehensible and orderly. We forget the uncertainties as we struggled in real time. Freud thought of this struggle and named its forget-less-ness, as “motivated forgetting.”

Whatever you call it; narratives are shaped by a natural tendency to focus on information that confirms theories on information that confirms theories we already hold. These theories - for example, I was told by a firm’s recent executive team “we hire no one but straight A-students from top colleges and universities and no one in our firm is more visionary, or understands our firm, our clients and our future more than our CEO” – may be formed and informed from those who have a vested interested in maintaining such beliefs and those for whom the validation of the most powerful person in the room has become a motivated reflex.

If our own accounts of our innovative actions are often so slanted and embellished, is composing them simply a misbegotten quest? Certainly no.
To an innovation consultant, the attempts are signals that the company of individuals is aware they have a problem worthy of attention. And the narratives themselves can help make sense out of the confusion. This, in turn, can diminish anxiety and most malignant forms of over thinking. Such relief might be sufficient, and depending on the goals of the consultation, it could embolden the person to make further adjustments.

But the grail-like search for new insight to lead to sustainable innovation can also backfire when it become a way for an individual, team or organization to avoid the hard work of change. Here’s my experience with a long-standing technology company. At every assignment meeting, participants would talk about their tattered relationship with management, seeking new clues for how it damaged their work environment and the technology they created and drove them to under-performance and little-to-no-innovational diversity.

When I tried to change the topic to on-the-job issues, which the participants related to their current discontent, they would rather talk about “the why” of their current situation. They were, each one of them, forestalling the need to make practical changes. The many layered drama of a leading technology company whose crown had grown dull doubled as an excuse for not doing the “work” of change, absolving them of the responsibility of being truly innovative. When I proposed the possibility to them, they said, “Maybe you’re right.” But nothing really changed. Many of the participants were let go by the company in a downsizing reorganization a few months later.

Finally, insight has no guarantee to relationship change or better innovation. A colleague of mine consulted to a consumer product company who came to her because they needed to create some new innovative products. They firmly believed that once they discovered the “reason” why people weren’t buying their existing products, they would be able to turn their situation around.

After a few months, the participants told my colleague that they tried to partner with another company years ago, but it didn’t go well. “You know,” they told my colleague, “but we’ve always avoided strategic alliances and partnerships. It’s as though we didn’t want to get burnt twice.”

Poignant moments, yes, but two months later they still don’t have a partner, and they won’t consider a partner unless they already know them.

I think it’s high time to retire the myth that insight is a prerequisite for innovative change. For many of my clients, change without hard-won insight is the rule. And who has the time to wait? Not a professional services firm. This past month, I’ve worked with my client to help them get an abusive, shiftless executive out of their business, find technology support for their customers and build an executive network of likeminded executives in similar sized organizations to replace the network of sycophants from whom they used to seek advice.

At this stage of their work, awareness of what they need to do will get them further than insight. Less chaos in their business life means less anxiety and that means less chance of regression in the service of more innovation.

Down the road, they may well ask, “Why did we get into this innovation mess?” But in the meantime, what’s important for them is to determine what they are going to do next.

The British psychologist, Fredric Bartlett, coined the term “effort at meaning” to describe the impulse to make sense of feelings and circumstances. Self-explorers are warned: it’s an effort often fraught with distortion and even hazard and often, it prevents one from making the changes that need to be made in the present.

January, 2007

The party ended last night amid popped corks and the snow-covered barren trees. It was the end of the yearly raucous celebration against the heavy weight of winter darkness. The turning of year-end calendar pages has set to rest for another season the darkened ballrooms, and everyone who was invited to dance: to Chris and Crinkle, cook mince pies, pull on sweaters, host galas, and permanently pry one’s thoughts from the green world of Indian summer.

Today, I drove home in the dark – a quirky novelty that will turn, over weeks and months with little to celebrate, into a minor incarceration, a lack of day-light from which there is no escape. A sign on the water fountain outside, in the Public Garden indicates the water in the fountain has been turned off. The reflecting pool outside the Christian Science Monitor here in the land of hot political battles and frozen pipes is also turned off for the season. The flu is everywhere. Heating oil prices following the post the mid-term elections – regain their bossy relevance. Am I really surprised? Soon wind chill factors will keep people in their homes.

And the region spins into frenzy. In just a month or two, racing hopscotch though all the wind, snow and ice: from Martin Luther King’s birthday to the first day of spring. Gardeners just starting to think about spring seeding – they’re already late. Just as Thanksgiving is no longer the launch pad, the holiday scene-stealing minds of anxious retailers, many of whom already cast their springtime fare upon the earth just after Labor Day, they will stuff mailboxes with hoses and hoes and seeds and brass plant holders filled with photos of life from of last-year’s photography.

Still, today, now the soldiers of winter cheer face considerable opposition from an unrepentant tribe of left-over Ebenezers. Their spiteful hearts beat chilly rhymes even in the brightest sun. These neighbors, friends, relations and politicians will sermonize for gloom now, then mock spring when it comes.

Dickens wrote, “no wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon it’s purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty.” In this, Dickens writes of Scrooge and of the businessman’s like-minded, real-life kin.

So as the New Year arrives, and as the days of sunlight wane, some battle advice seems apt: Raise a flaming sword against the cold and dark. Attack with warm, well-lit sallies the coming days of gray and ice. Whistle tunes of rebellion to the angry winds that sweep the sidewalks. Read books deep into the icy nights, taming the cold with tales of sun and fire.

Enlist the children and sign up the pets. The party must go on right through May. The dancers must persist until spring arrives. The music has to play well into March to twirl the days into a glowing light.

Let out a cheer for old and cold New England, New York, Chicago, where ever you live in cold and darkness. It will be a brighter place, come – maybe June 2007.

Happy New Year

Freshman

Boston, Massachusetts is no stranger to college freshman. Each September, more than a few million students descend upon streets and classrooms of this moderately small American city by the ocean. This year, however, the freshman class hitting college campuses deserve a second look, and giving them that look is what I want to do today.

Those who study generational issues, call this class of freshman the Hero generation. They are a distant echo of their WWII grandparents. These young men and woman born after 1981 are dubbed Millennials by marketers and market research analysts and they are hailed as the next “promise” generation who will define and make the next century.

If all of this seems a bit comfy to you, it seems that way to me as well. Presently, this generation, for all its prodigious potential, is a generation that still lacks the common sense to stay off deadly train tracks and icy rivers in the winter – more about this in a minute. It’s a generation that can’t seem to make a decision without instant text messaging someone at home, and a generation who hovering parents have begun not only helping their kids get jobs, but negotiating salaries with recruiters on their kids behalf.

They are the most-chaperoned, play-dated generation in memory, and to compliment their dependant ways, colleges and universities are rolling out increasingly elaborate orientation programs. Like a McDonald’s, Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks coffee cups that seriously remind customers that the contents may be hot, colleges no longer take for granted basic life skills. They are spelling out such dos and don’ts as Boston University has done in its orientation package: Don’t try to cross the icy Charles River in the winter.

Answering to the new college freshman also means answering to their parents. In one case a young freshman asked if her mother’s picture can appear on the student ID with her. Her reason: “If I get into trouble, she’s the one you should call.”

Not all of this protection is bad. From a child safety and parental nurturing perspective, the statistics on smoking, suicide, teen pregnancy and abortion are all down. In their overall experience in culture, college freshmen are law-abiding citizens who believe in institutions, whether they are family, state or corporate.

They are relentless upbeat, but then, who wouldn’t be upbeat and optimistic if you’ve never been allowed to fail, when every sporting event allows everyone to win something, and making children feel good is as important as ensuring they do well. It’s easy to be optimistic when the ordinary risks of childhood have been programmed out of the system. It’s bit harder when you wander into the empty backyard or playground and have to think of things to play with.

The issue as I see it is life is not a supervised activity. If this group of college freshmen is to live up to their marketing expectations and fill the shoes of their grandparents, they can’t continue to be coddled. Parents, colleges and marketers to this generation would do well to do less catering and let these kids finally become adults.

Encouraging Words

Remember the old joke about the drunk searching for his keys under a lamppost? Someone, presumably a friend, says “Is that where you dropped your keys?” The drunk answers, “No, but this is where the lamppost is.”

Now, unfortunately that is the way we want to innovate in 2006 – where the light is. Not in the dark or someplace unknown.

What is the light?

It can be any process or state we’re attached to – whatever we’ve decided “good” feels like. It might be known process, a familiar definition, or a focused activity. It might be anything, actually. And once we’ve put our attachments in place for a while, innovation subtly becomes a practice of getting into that special place and staying there as long as we can.

There’s nothing wrong with such practices or processes, of course, but once you begin to innovate this way, what I think of as real innovation simply stops, and it is this topic I would like to talk about today.

When I ask business innovators, often a combination of people serving the corporate needs of market research, product development, sales, business creativity and marketing and R&D to describe their innovation practices, they say things like, “we label consumer behavior or thoughts and drive them through products and programs that promise and deliver value and profit to our customers and shareholders.”

On the surface, it sounds like everyone is practicing this way with proven, effective methods. All you have to do is follow the path. But when I get to know my corporate counterparts individually, it usually turns out that they have a secret practice they don’t want to talk about, a secret agenda for what they are trying to do or discover while sitting behind one-way mirrors, or following customers into their homes, or trying to create and sell products based on their insights. They don’t want me to get wind of that process, because they want to be left alone under their particular lamppost and not be pushed out into the dark.

Now there are a lot of business innovation discovery processes, particularly ethnographies, customer immersion type focus groups, online focus groups, MRI-based cognitive studies, mall intercepts, conjoint quantitative studies specifically designed to “crack the code” of human experience and bring us some experience of that “light.” And the danger is that we become innovation moths, endlessly circling the lamppost, fatally addicted to the brightness. Actually business innovators can be even worse than moths or drunks; they will sit around the lamp that once was lit months or even years ago, endlessly waiting for it to light up again. They sit waiting for a light they once saw, their whole innovation effort devoted to trying to get that moment back, or even worse, remembering and savoring that moment over and over.

But real innovation always takes place out at the edge of darkness. That’s where we have to work. What are the edges? It’s the boundary of where we feel comfortable and where the difficulties start. And the boundary is always clearly marked by anxiety, or conflict, or fear; whatever you don’t want to face. That’s where business innovation needs to sit.

We all have the basic difficulties. One client will come to us for an innovation project and say, “Our company needs to grow, our business and our customers need to understand and find each other, our investors want value and they are impatient, and deep down in our organization there’s a restlessness that just won’t go away…we’re having a terrible time of it.” And then the next client will come to us and says, “Our company need to grow, our business and our customers need to understand and find each other, our investors want value and they are impatient, and deep down in our organization there’s a terrible tightness. I know this is exactly the things we need to face!”

That’s the difference between looking for the light, and trying to make all the difficulties go away, and knowing how to innovate in the darkness. We can find it anywhere if we’re willing to look for it everywhere.