BankerVision

The stupid salesman

I hate to rant (again), but last week I met with a vendor who didn’t know anything about me other than my name and title, and who I work for. I put aside an hour or so to see him.

This, as far as I am concerned, is about as stupid as you get. Since I have gone to such lengths to put my thoughts on line and expose what I care about to everyone, surely you would want to have that advantage when you come to meet me? Is it so difficult to type “James Gardner DWP” into Google before you show up?

So I had the standard discussion about our strategy and goals, which is so generic as to be almost completely useless to anyone, and sent him on his way. He will not be meeting me again.

Of course, this goes to something I’ve been saying for a while, and that is that there’s this huge – and widening – gulf between those who are connected and those who aren’t. There is a visible performance gap between the two groups.

Apparently, though, there are all these people who are “too busy” to read blogs, keep up with Twitter, and participate online. I find, increasingly, they are missing the action.

Actually, as a side note, there are some people in my own teams who don’t bother to read this blog. I don’t even feel remotely worried that I’ll offend them by disclosing that, by the way, since they aren’t paying attention.

Anyway, so the sales guy didn’t get anything he wanted from me, which is a further opportunity to engage. Considering he’s a system integrator and wanting to sell services, what would I have expected him to know if he really wanted to talk?

1. He should have known that I think architecture should be firmly grounded in the business we’re trying to make go, and therefore, that' I’d care more about real things happening than models and theories.

2. He should have known that I care deeply about security, but I like a nice risk based assessment of things that lets us move forward rather than a process of shutting things down randomly the moment any potential threat comes up.

3. He should have known that I like strategies to have flexibility, and I hate ivory tower-ism. Strategists that won’t flex are as bad as security people who shut things for down for kicks or architects who are custodians of “the one true way”.

4. He should have known that I think you can build big and important results from innovation groups when you focus on many little things. And that doing a few very big things is the way to failure, since most innovations fail no matter what their size.

Anyway, a little research was apparently a bit too hard. Perhaps he “doesn’t have time” to read blogs and keep up with Twitter and participate in the conversation himself.

But never mind. That’s a sales guy that’s going to get fired, because there are any number of people who do their research before showing up.

As you’d expect, the conversation moves a lot faster once you get beyond “tell me about your role, your issues, and your goals”.

Getting clout

A number of people have written to me, almost all through private emails, to indicate that they have a “clout” problem, and wondering what I thought they should do about it. Since it is a great subject for a post, I decided I’d share here, summarising what I’ve said to many via email.

The first thing about “clout” – especially the kind needed for innovators – is that you either have it by virtue of your position (i.e. you are senior in your own right), or you have it because you are associated with someone who has clout.

This is, by the way, why so many studies suggest that successful innovators almost always have the ear of the CEO, or someone directly reporting to him or her.

Let us assume, therefore, that you don’t have clout because you aren’t senior yourself.  And whilst innovation is important, noone at the top really cares enough to prioritise it over other things. This means the question really boils down to one thing: how can you prove to someone with clout that you should be closely associated with him or her?

I cover this in detail in Futureproofing, in which I outline a five step model that innovators have to go through before they’re going to be able to do much that is really impactful.

Firstly, innovators have to prove they can do anything. It doesn’t matter what, even the smallest of deliverables that can be talked about make a difference. Avoid the temptation to take on big programmes! Without clout, they will go nowhere. Instead, take on a few, small, but talk-about-able things. Make them work, and you can move to the next stage.

The second stage for innovators is building a network of interested people that care about doing things differently. Taking the small things that were achieved previously, talk to everyone, anyone that will listen, in fact, about how innovation can make a difference. Find the people that will help in the mission to do things differently. Offer them opportunities to participate. Recognise that one person – even a small number of people – is never going to scale. You need to recruit believers.

Why doesn’t an innovation programme scale when you just add employees? The answer is simple. The cost of an innovation programme has to be less than the returns it generates. When you add people, your costs increase. On the other hand, most things that are genuinely new never give you any decent returns in the same year as you’re paying your wage bill. By the time they are giving you decent returns, someone else in the business will be taking the credit. Trust me on this: you need to keep your innovation team costs as low as possible. Recruiting believers is the only way to get avoid this trap.

The third stage, once you have all these people helping with the innovation problem is making sure that you can get predictable. You need to make sure you can make a return routinely on the money your enterprise gives you for investment. It needs to be predictable, so that senior people can trust that if they make a bet on you they won’t look stupid. And, of course, if you’re generating real returns, they’ll be interested in holding you close, simply because you’re something that has the potential to make them look good.

Guess what, you’ve just managed to get some clout.

The next stage is using the tools of innovation to start influencing strategy by helping senior leaders rehearse important future decisions. You’d be amazed at how powerful that can be, especially when they find they’re ready to deal with something unexpected in advance. Do that often enough, and you’ll be invited into top table discussions to help future planning.

The final stage is one where you have enough clout that in your own right you can disrupt major business lines and get away with it. Bare in mind that this is the ultimate point of being an innovator in the first place: the job is saving organisations from themselves. Any operation will be disrupted by someone given enough time: the real role of innovators, therefore, is to ensure that such disruptions come firmly from within, where they can be controlled and managed.

Of course, it is this kind of disruption that causes the worst innovation backlash in the first place. That’s why clout is important.

Now, on average, you have only 18 months to get from the first stage to third before you will either get cancelled, or you will be personally tarnished as not effective.  I hate to say this, but if you’re in role for longer and you still haven’t got the clout you need, you’ll probably not be able to turn things around. You’ll need to consider carefully your options.

There are some, but I won’t go into them here. The point is, there is an urgency about doing all this stuff which many people don’t recognise. You are in a constant race to prove the value of what you do against the value of everything that the organisation ordinarily does. Since business as usual has an overwhelming advantage most of the time, it is a race that very few people win without help.

Now, one last piece of advice if you don’t have clout: get a meeting with the most senior person you can. When you have the meeting, indicate you can’t be effective because you have no clout. Offer to shut down innovation altogether, since “our organisation is clearly not ready for it”. Since no-one senior will ever allow themselves to be seen as “not innovative” this is practically certain to at least give you a chance to do something.

In the meantime, if you’re still trying to get those first few things happening, and you can’t, I’d suggest you try something smaller, commensurate with the amount of clout you have right now. I promise you, clout will build over time and comes automatically with success.

The tools of innovation

A.M Mills, the author of Hell Bent on Success asks me to explain what I mean by the “tools of innovation”.

That is rather a lot for a single post, and in fact, I’ve written a 350 page book on the subject for any one who wants to have the exhaustive details of how to do corporate innovation at scale.

But it is possible to summarise, I think, because everything you need to know about doing innovation happens in four stages.

The first is futurecasting. This is the process of working out what is likely to happen in the future so you can guide subsequent iterations of your innovation process. In the book, for example, I explain a specific futurecasting process based loosely on a scenario planning methodology, but anything that gets structured consideration of the future on the table is a good thing. Why is this important? Well, firstly, you can never ask a senior person for support on something new, especially if that new thing impacts current business or revenue, without rehearsal. They need time to think over consequences, and making them think about the future helps them do that. The second reason is that random innovation without a guide won’t always result in new things that solve the strategic problems of the firm. Out of the box thinking is all very well, but if you are not only out of the box, but out of the ballpark, it is usually not helpful.

So futurecasting is the first stage. The second stage is ideation.

Ideation is the process of collecting ideas and deciding how good they are relative to all the other ideas that you might have. The thing is, if you’re running a programme, you’ll likely have far more ideas than resources to execute them. So you have to have a way of deciding what you’re going to work on. Of course, if you’re still thinking that the answer to your innovation challenge is getting the good ideas, then you have some work to do. Ideas are everywhere, and usually all you need to do is find a good way of collecting them. Anyway, you’ll have more ideas than you know what to do with, so one of the main tools of innovation is a decent way to prioritise. Usually, people create various scoring systems to do this, but crowd based methods, such as voting and prediction markets work just as well.

The third stage is what I call the “innovate” stage, which is really all about the tools and processes you use to work out – in detail – the stuff that has to happen before an idea is actually fundable. Just because an idea sounds like a good thing and fits in with the priorities of an organisation, it isn’t necessarily something you can actually do. I was banging on about quantum computing and its use in financial markets for months before I worked out how far away usable hardware was, for example. Anyway, to get to the crux of the matter here, you need to answer three questions. “Can we do this?”, which is technically, operationally, and environmentally, is the idea actually possible. “Should we do this?”, which is primarily economic, i.e. can we afford it, and if we can, will anyone want it?. And, finally, “When?”, which is mainly about the response of competitors or internal players. Answering all that means you have a case which is a candidate for funding and delivery. As you’d expect, there are lots of things you do for each of those questions to get to decent answers for as little investment as possible.

Once you have money, the final stage is execution, which is all about building the thing and getting it out in the market. Key tools here include all the things you need to do to win over users, prove you know what you’re doing from an operational perspective (remember, its innovation, so its new, so noone will have made it work before), and a ton of other things. But I think the most important thing is you don’t even get to the Execute stage until you’ve done a substantial amount of ground work first.

Actually failure to all four stages is why I often make the observation that innovation programmes with their own large budgets usually fail. They don’t have to go through the rigour before they get to spend money, so invariably they spend money on the wrong things. Consequently, they also fail to get predictable in their returns quickly enough. Usually, at least in banking, you have 18 months to do that before your programme is killed off.

So, that’s my lightning summary of innovation tools in a corporate innovation programme.

In the meantime, some of you will likely be interested to know that I’m well into writing my next book, which I’m tentatively titling “One Big Thing”. Its all about how to use the tools of innovation to de-risk the situation people like founders and project managers have – one idea which just has to work. These are people who don’t get to spread their risk across a portfolio. They are laser focussed on their “one big thing”, rather than a corporate innovation portfolio. The consequences of failure are usually quite significant.

I’m also writing it in a much less academic style, with more interesting stories and far less focus on theory, than i used with FutureProofing. It is also not just about banking.

No idea on a date yet, but will keep you posted. I expect the manuscript to be done in about 4 months.

Update: Stupidly, I forgot to note that the whole of the first chapter of my book is online here, and it contains many more details about this stuff than I've written here.

The task worker divide

I’m sitting here in London Heathrow airport, and scrolling through all last night’s Tweets on my Twitter client. I notice that, in addition to the Tweets I put up from #sdthinks, where I was speaking last night, there are lots of people I follow who were also at conferences doing live updates.

There are lots of people who are at airports in work time and clearly do their work mobile, whilst keeping in touch with everyone else.

They are lots who are arguing about Enterprise Architecture, or other professional stuff, in real-time.

There are lots who, in time-zones opposite mine, are working out whether they should, or should not, go out for Friday night cocktails with colleagues, or go home to families.

There are none at all who are process workers, or, the new term of today, task workers.

This makes me wonder: am I particularly discriminatory in who is in my list of people I follow? Or is something else at play here?

I then log into my newsreader, latch onto a presentation of technology trends, and come across the quote “In the next 10 years, everyone except task workers will be equipped with a notebook, which they will probably provide for themselves. Task workers will have fixed location PCs, stripped down to be optimised for the task at hand”.

It makes me realise something: practically everything we do today in tech is optimised for the knowledge worker. Task workers are getting shut out.

In the Department, we worry about Digital Inclusion a lot. There are many people who don’t have access to computers and the internet, so providing services to them online is difficult. The Digital Divide can be very real.

But what about the new divide? On the one hand, the whole tech industry is occupying itself in making knowledge workers more productive, more able to promote themselves, and more able to access the information and data that will make them successful. The best of them are self publishing constantly. They’re on twitter, and they have personal brands. Their future is their network.

On the other, though, there are the task workers. For task workers the normal approach is to take radical steps to make sure they can’t participate in the conversation by turning off their tools at work. Monitor their working patterns to get the maximum number of work units out of them in a given time, making sure the cost to serve are as low as possible! Deny them every opportunity to be digitally engaged, to build their own brands during the working week.

If they want to do that, they can do it on their own time, managers reason. Of course, that’s all very well when most of the influentials they might choose to connect with are at home or in bed.

Here is the problem I see. By making sure that task workers don’t have the same access to resources as knowledge workers, we ensure that they will stay task workers forever. It is a new class system that is only marginally more acceptable than the one we already worry about with the Digital Divide.

I mean, everyone knows that the best jobs go to those that know how to network into them, or have sufficient profiles they get noticed independently of their network.

The thing is, I’m not even sure how you would go about fixing this. Its not enough to say that our task workers need better training, when they aren’t allowed the the liberty to grow and flourish because of the press of work. And, on the other hand, I can’t see a solution which lets the cost of service rise all that dramatically either because of “declining productivity”.

I think there is indeed a new digital divide, and it is not one of the have-technology versus the have-nots. Its worse than that. Its the divide about those who are allowed to use it and those who aren’t.

Evidence of the chip

A week or so ago, I wrote about the “chip” that some Microsoft employees seem to have implanted in their brains.

A couple of people contacted me to tell me the days of the “chip” were long gone.

Apparently that’s not the case, however. And here is the evidence.

Profile Microsoft evangelist Don Dodge was laid off, recently, in the latest round of cuts. As he says on his blog:

Microsoft announced more layoffs today, and I was one of them. This was a total surprise to me, and management offered no explanation. This is pretty standard procedure, mostly for legal reasons, but none the less left me with a cold feeling...but only for a minute or two.

Nice of him to be so level headed about the fact that he was just fired. Obviously, the chip is still inserted tight at this point.

A few days later, he is hired to work as an evangelist for Google. Seconds later, the chip has fallen out, and you get these remarks on his blog:"

Last week started a new personal journey for me. One without Microsoft. So, why not move forward without Microsoft technology, and try the new alternatives? Old habits die hard, but these were actually pretty easy to break…

I made the switch to Gmail last week and it has been awesome! Outlook has been an old familiar friend for years, but it was getting kind of tired…

Hey, isn’t this November of 2009? Why Word 2007? One of the nice things about Google Docs, and all web based products, is that they can be updated continuously with no interruption to you…

OK, now that I am no longer with Microsoft, I can admit I had iPhone envy. My Windows Mobile “Smartphone” didn’t measure up….

Thanks Microsoft Internet Explorer, but I’m moving to Google Chrome. Chrome starts faster, loads pages faster, and is easier to use…

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.

Innovation backlash

One of the interesting things about the group I run at the DWP is that we’re accountable for both innovation and strategy.

This, you might imagine, ought to be a nirvana that anyone who cares about innovation would dream about. Practically speaking, however, it introduces a few issues that you don’t expect.

Consider this scenario. You use the tools of innovation to create a pile of new thinking that results in new prototypes or experiments getting built. Everyone is excited, and loves the new approach. New things start happening, so everyone declares the exercise a success.

In the meantime, however, the approved and mandated strategy that was previously being followed gets changed in subtle, but unexpected ways. For those whose responsibility it was to implement the strategy, this is annoying at best. At worst, it represents a threat to them that must be taken out as soon as possible.

Now, I know immediately that everyone will start screaming that strategies must be flexible to new thinking and new goals, and of course I agree with that.

But the situation is illustrative of something that you always see when you send an innovation team into the wild: the new ideas getting created threaten someone’s interests, no matter how well the innovation team influences those around it.

You get a backlash that is as inevitable as it is hard to manage.

In fact, I’m not certain it is possible to manage it. If you’re about changing the status quo and you don’t ruffle some feathers, it is surely inescapable that you’re not really changing anything at all.

My conclusion is that you have to invest your innovators with sufficient political clout that they can – in their own right – protect themselves from the backlash when it happens. If the clout is invested via proximity to a powerful senior figure, then so much the better

Talking with innovators across sectors, I’ve found there are some common signs that innovators haven’t got the clout they need to do stuff.

You know they have no clout when people around them say “the innovation team don’t do anything”. Clearly, what’s happened is that the innovators know they can’t withstand the backlash, so they do busy-busy little projects that don’t ruffle any feathers.

You know the innovators have no clout when things that are ordinarily business-as-usual start being called" “innovation”. I’ve talked to an innovation group that managed to get RSA tokens deployed for security purposes. Ramping up security using off-the-shelf-products is not innovation. But the innovators, fearing the backlash, go where things are safe, and the need for change is self-evident. Tokens are a good example of going where things are safe.

The innovators have no clout when their diaries don’t have meetings with senior people. They know they can’t “deliver” (they are scared the backlash will take out their projects) so they only commit to things which are small enough not to get noticed. Of course, being small, they are also not worthy of the attention of senior folk, so no meetings get set up.

But here is the number one thing that tells you your innovators have no clout: talk with them about innovation, and they’ll tell you how their organisations aren’t innovative. No matter that they are in place to make their organisations innovative. No matter that all their training and professional experience suggests the raw materials they need are all around them. They give you an excuse instead. They’ve been hit one too many times by a backlash for which they had no defence.

There is a downside to giving innovators clout, of course. The downside is they then have the ability to disrupt strategy and “get distracting”. My own view, though, is that a strategy that doesn’t know how to deal with the new stuff without falling apart isn’t very much use anyway. It’ll only be current in the short term.

Try this: give your innovators their head and protect them from harm. You’ll be surprised as the results you get.

A window into Microsoft

One of the most interesting things to read on the web these days is the comment stream on a blog from Microsoft insider Mini-Microsoft.

This is a blog based on the premise that Microsoft has grown too big, having hired too many people that don’t do very much except “play Microsoft”. Mini asserts this as the reason that many feel MS is unable to lead the market any more.

Naturally, one takes this insiders perspective with a grain of salt, and even more salt is needed when reading the comment stream: as you’d expect, it attracts the disaffected in the company, those with an axe to grind.

But I’ve noticed something so interesting in the years I’ve been reading it: there are far less people showing up with the “drink the cool-aid” mentality than before. I used to laugh, before, when MS people showed up that had so clearly been “chipped” by Redmond. Even when I worked there, it was a standing joke that we all had to go to Redmond to get our little chips inserted that would make us immune to any criticism of the company or its products.

I think the chip has stopped working.

In fact, when you read the comment stream, it is hard to stop yourself thinking that MS is imploding from within. Stories of terrible managers who are destroying the careers of their people. Product groups that are in permanent spin because they’re so lacking in vision. Management arrogance that fails to accept that the stuff going out the door isn’t really that good.

Most of all, the comment stream is a cry from the front line to save the company which so many have invested many years in.

Anyway, as I say, you have to read it with a grain or two of salt.

But if there’s one thing that I’ve always noticed about this comment stream over the years, it is an excellent barometer of Microsoft’s capability to execute, and it is counter cyclical to their success. Prior to the Vista bomb, lots of people with chips were around. Now, there are hardly any, so maybe it is reasonable to conclude that Windows 7 will be OK.

Prior to the release of iPhone, everyone in Windows Mobile had a chip. Now all you hear are stories in the comment stream of people who are switching to iPhone internally. Even though the new version of Windows Mobile is apparently terrible, perhaps it is a sign that the version coming next year will actually be decent.

Same with Live Search, which is now Bing. Mind you, there are chipped people starting to show up about that, so perhaps Bing is going downhill.

Pretty big lack of chip on the subject of Azure, the new Microsoft cloud service, so the first release of that might be OK. Or maybe noone knows enough about to have an opinion.

Everyone seems pretty chipped out on Office 10, so suspect that will be terrible.

Anyway, read the comment stream yourself and draw your own conclusion. Mine is that internally, there’s quite a bit of trouble at MS at the moment.

Hiring a walk-on-water chief architect

So, things are moving along here at the DWP. So many people have asked me why I moved across from the private sector to here, and I have a simple answer: there are few IT organisations around that match the scale of things we do here. Practically every citizen in the UK is in our databases. We’re 25% of the UK government’s IT bill. There are thousands of technology professionals working for us directly, and thousands more permanently assigned to us from the supplier community. And we’re running a portfolio of IT assets that go beyond the department, servicing a range of cross-government initiatives.

To join the board of that IT organisation is not something you pass up. Especially considering the rapid, major changes we’re going to have to deliver over the next few years.

So that’s why I joined. Now I have a question: what would make you join us?

You see, I’m currently hiring a Chief Architect. I’m looking for someone that can take the outputs of our strategy and innovation teams, and turn them into an actionable plan for the future. But I don’t just want any architect, I want one that can walk on water.

What does walking on water involve?

Someone who is inspirational, because architects need to be inspired to produce a design that’s both grounded enough in reality that its possible to build it, and sufficiently forward looking that it doesn’t close off future opportunities.

Someone who has the gravitas to convince people that they know what they’re talking about. Walking on water means you’re known for thought leadership, and maybe you’ve contributed to the current state of the art in some way. Certainly, your reputation will precede you.

And most importantly, you’ll walk on water if you know how to sell your design so others buy into it. We’re an organisation of more than a hundred thousand people. It takes great sales and influencing capability to get people to notice what you’re doing, and even more to get them to agree. An architecture that noone uses is a waste of time.

Are you a walk-on-water architect? If you are, Alex Richardson at Hudson is handling the search for us.

Here’s a the link to the online ad. Here is the link to apply. And here is the candidate information in proper detail.