Questions for a team start-up

What are your strengths?
How would you like to use your strengths in this experience?
What do you need to do your best?
How can we support you in bringing your best?
What do you want from this experience?
What do you know about yourself in work groups?
How do you best show up?
What concerns do you have about this experience?
What would you like to explore or try?
What are you passionate about?

Changing the world of non-profits

Tom Suddes tackles the increasing dissonance between the archaic goals of typical not-for-profits and the realities of business. Suddes challenges us to think differently about these organizations.

Suddes sights Tim Kight’s “Every organization is perfectly designed to get the results they are getting,” and Einstein's definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” as inspiration for change.

Stop defining in the negative (not- non-); focus on impact.

Let impact drive the income. Change the goal of the organization from fundraising to increasing size and scope of impact.

Ask for whatever it is that you want to accomplish. Just ask for help. Just ask for involvement. Just ask for feedback. Just ask questions.

Suddes' 9 guiding principles are outlined in a ChangeThis manifesto.

Tough love

Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman B-school, looks at the tension between business-as-usual and business-by-design.

By focusing on the intuitive and experiential, organizations explore new sources of competitive advantage. By looking to the provable and replicable, organizations better exploit the innovations they've brought to market.

To prosper over the long run, a company needs to succeed at both. It must mesh the classical workings of a traditional organization with the prototypical features of a design shop, especially in three key areas: reckoning the future, organizing work, and establishing status and rewards.

Read the FastCompany article.

Bootstrapper's Bible

Missed Seth Godin's manifesto, The Bootstrapper's Bible, the first time around? It's available again at ChangeThis.

There's never been a better time to start a business with no money. This manifesto will show you how.

Download the pdf document.

The hunt for innovation

Desperate to innovate, companies are turning to design schools for nimble, creative thinkers. Instead of asking a business school for help, Mozilla turned to Stanford's "D-school," as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design is termed on campus.

A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them.

Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers.

B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

Read the Business Week article.

What business are you in?

In the October 2006 issue of Harvard Business Review comes classic advice from Theodore Levitt.

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.

People actually do not buy gasoline. They cannot see it, taste it, feel it, appreciate it, or really test it. What they buy is the right to continue driving their cars. The gas station is like a tax collector to whom people are compelled to pay a periodic toll as the price of using their cars. This makes the gas station a basically unpopular institution. It can never be made popular or pleasant, only less unpopular, less unpleasant.

Reducing its unpopularity completely means eliminating it. Nobody likes a tax collector, not even a pleasantly cheerful one. Nobody likes to interrupt a trip to buy a phantom product, not even from a handsome Adonis or a seductive Venus. Hence, companies that are working on exotic fuel substitutes that will eliminate the need for frequent refueling are heading directly into the outstretched arms of the irritated motorist.

In order to produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization. It has to do this continuously and with the kind of flair that excites and stimulates the people in it. Otherwise, the company will be merely a series of pigeonholed parts, with no consolidating sense of purpose or direction.

What business are you in?

Read more from Theodore Levitt.

Harvesting employee-generated innovation

Innovation is a hot topic in today's management circles as businesses are organizing around the creation and implementation of new ideas. At Whirlpool, executives are held accountable not only for the development of new products and services, but also for the creation of processes and systems that foster innovation.

One tactic for engaging employees in the innovation process is something Carlson Marketing's Director of Performance Improvement Jennifer Rosenzweig, calls "appreciative inquiry." This is a technique for emphasizing a company's unique strengths (appreciative) while at the same time developing a meaningful and robust dialogue with employees (inquiry) that seeks to help management understand when the company is moving in the right direction or not.

Carlson Marketing's research shows that given the opportunity, nearly 50 percent of employees will engage in identifying and implementing ideas. But "squandered" or untapped ideas are a major source of employee frustration and disengagement. A recent Gallup report shows that 17 percent of all the employees it surveyed consider themselves "disengaged" at work.

Read how Whirlpool and Toyota are harvesting employee-generated innovation.

Designing a business, not just a product

In Armchair M.B.A, William J. Holstein showcases companies that build innovative technology and products and design the business model for the product.

If you look at the natural history of great new product failures, it's often because they went with the standard business model, or the first feasible business model, instead of doing what good companies do, which is challenge themselves and ask, "What are three very different business designs that we can use to take this product to market?”

Holstein notes Toyota and Honda business  strategy for hybrids, Apple's iPod, and General Motors' OnStar.

Read the NY Times column, Sun Jul 30.

Culture shifts to collaboration at American Airlines

For his part, Gerard J. Arpey, American’s 47-year-old chief executive, has traded away the bankruptcy card used by most of his competitors — which gave them shelter to prune debt while also tossing out labor contracts and pensions — for the hope of trying to motivate workers. “Our fundamental objective is to make organized labor and our front-line employees our business partners,” he said, asserting that the world’s largest airline cannot become more efficient without such collaboration. “If they don’t want to do it, it ain’t going to happen. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are.”

Read the NY Times story from Sun, Jul 23.

Innovation, the latest mantra

"Innovation is the latest management mantra for a growing list of CEOs, especially at big, established companies who for years have fixated on reducing budgets," reports Carol Hymowitz in The Wall Street Journal.

Cool News of the Day summarizes the WSJ article.

Read the Wall Street Journal article from Mon, Jul 17.