Making Change Happen, Starting Monday

We recently put together a panel for Advertising Week that discussed the challenges of making ideas come to life.

We focused on creating practical steps that people could start to take immediately.

So much content came from the conversation that we decided to capture it and put in in a White Paper.

We've included the Introduction to the White Paper here.

You can download the entire White Paper Here.

Introduction

We’ve been involved in change from a lot of angles. 

Multi-national networks, entrepreneurial partnerships, guiding the early years of Oprah, and taking our own international business through the entire business cycle. In the process we’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

This paper combines some of our experiences with those of four business leaders who recently joined us to discuss how they make change happen in their company.

From Graham Barkus of Cathay Pacific comes the challenge of bringing about change in a 25,000 person airline and the need to take into account the human factor.

From Lori Senecal of kbs+, the insights of how a change agent has quickly and successfully shaken up an established business, by doing things that matter.

From Toni Hess of Rosetta, the ability of a creative leader to add art to her company’s’ pragmatic foundations by helping to purpose the passion of her staff.

And from Johnny Vulkan of Anomaly, the willingness to throw away the model and start again by answering the real questions.

To these we’ve added some additional insights based on our own work as consultants, coaches, organizational architects and entrepreneurs.

Change is hard. 

Change is risky. 

Change in inevitable.

Making it happen on your terms is the key to success for any business.

You can download the entire White Paper Here.

9 Steps To Attracting and Retaining Creative Talent

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Research recently conducted by the Association of American Advertising Agencies (AAAA), suggests that one third of the industry’s talent will either have left their job or left the industry by this time next year. 

And according to Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, the advertising industry is also guilty of ‘criminal neglect’ in its approach to recruiting talent.

For an industry that sells original thinking, this is unassisted suicide. 

The good news is that no matter the size of the company, attracting and retaining talent has more to do with your commitment to building a sustainable business, than how much you pay. 

The species to which we belong being compelled at a cellular level towards achievement and progress.

Which means that we only accept the substitute of more money as compensation not for our labor, but for what we sacrifice. Namely, the opportunity to make a difference.

Financial rewards come to those who make a difference. Which, ironically tends to be those companies who put the difference part ahead of the money part when it comes to attracting talent. 

And who know that to retain that talent, money is but one part of a nine part equation.

1. Pay Fairly. It’s true that it takes more than just money. But it does take money. Beating the market being neither an attractive nor sustainable practice when it comes to compensation. Many companies ignore this truth and apply a famine and feast mentality to paying talent. Under-paying early when the company has the leverage. Then over-paying later, in order to attract or keep talent from the competition. This builds suspicion and destroys loyalty. Instead be relentlessly pro-active in maintaining market parity at every position, with bonuses for extraordinary results. This creates an environment in which financial resentment is not a motivation for your talent to look for new opportunities. Desperate competitors may still over-pay. But when talent feels valued, the premium required to convince them to leave gives you an immediate competitive advantage.
2. Understand The Deflationary Value of Money. In Dan Pink’s excellent book, Drive, the author describes research that shows that many original thinkers are not only un-motivated by incentive based rewards, they actually perform worse. In part this is because when a task becomes ‘work’, talented people tend to feel more constrained. Organizations that tie creativity to money usually have less financial success than those that focus first on defining the intrinsic benefits of solving a client’s problem and frame the challenge in more valuable ways. When you are doing it just for the money - an economic reality in virtually every business - be clear about the impact that has on your most talented people’s satisfaction, and balance how often that is their only reward.
3. Build An Evangelical Business. As a species we are united by our instinct to create. We want to make things. Especially a difference. Google’s success is driven by a simple premise. They want to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A  goal that has attracted, informed and unified some of the most original thinking of the last ten years. Define the change your company wants to make in the world. No matter how local. Nothing attracts like a clearly defined vision of a better future. And the opportunity to be part of making it come true.
4. Measure Progress. Measuring progress is one of the keys to harnessing creativity. A study in the Harvard Business Review showed that a sense of progress is the attribute which people value most in their day. Progress can only be measured on a continuum that has a beginning and an end. Defining the difference you want your business to make provides the latter. The former comes from individual reviews  - a subject worthy of its own post. And annual reminders of how far the organization has come. Celebrating the company’s anniversary with a retrospective comparison of where you were a year ago is simple and powerful. And offers the chance to re-present the vision as a reminder of where the future lies.
5. Engineer Engagement. Gallup Organization research has shown that most people become less engaged with an organization over time. Maintaining inititial levels of enthusiasm is a two part process. The first is staying engaged with your best thinkers. Easier said than done given the temptation to focus energy on solving problems rather than building on successes. The second is being willing to clear the dead wood from the organization. Nothing de-motivates people more than an organization’s willingness to support under-performers. Be relentless about raising standards and expectations. It attracts and provokes greatness. 
6. Invest in Individuality. Google's success is driven by the fact that the discipline required to create some of the most sophisticated software code ever written, has been balanced by a commitment to allow those same engineers to express themselves individually. Organizationally this means that eighty percent of their time is devoted to meeting the demands of keeping Google running. The other twenty percent must be used for solving problems of the engineers own choosing. An investment in individuality that Google attributes for all of their major innovations. Creative companies that charge by the hour have a systemic inability to match this level of investment. But deciding to invest not at all in your talent’s ability to create new forms of value suggests you think either they are not capable of that kind of original thinking, or your organization is not capable of taking advantage of it.
7. Provide Boundaries.  Original thinking requires room to explore new possibilities. It also requires boundaries that focus its capacity to solve relevant problems. In the 1990s, Whirlpool’s CEO, Jeff Fettig, took the company's 25 most revered thinkers and assigned them to a dedicated innovation think-tank in Switzerland. 12 months later they came back with a single idea. A web-based game that linked stationary exercise bikes around the world in virtual races. Exactly. Since then, Whirlpool has invested significantly in training key talent to build and manage a defined and measurable innovation pipeline. Over the last ten years, the revenue generated by products the company defines as innovative has risen from $10 million to over $3 billion, funding further its investment in training, teaching and mentoring its employees. And Whirlpool’s ability to turn original thinking into practical differences has earned it Fast Company’s ranking as the 5th most innovative consumer goods company in the world. And put it on BusinessWeek’s list of, “Best places to start a career.” 
8. Be Open. Be Honest. Transparency is the most over-worked word in the English language at the moment. Which does not make it less essential to attracting and retaining great people. Usually, it’s more effective to think of transparency as a commitment to open honesty, which we have had success applying as: telling what you can, and explaining what you can’t. You can draw the line between them wherever you are comfortable - with the caveat being that comfort is usually a poor measurement of what is in your best interest. Sharing more encourages others to do the same. And to give you the benefit of the doubt. Valuable assets in building loyalty.
9. Say Thank You. The artist in all of us needs to be recognized. So does the human being. And yet most companies are slow to praise. Or even to thank. Which is strange since each of us make a choice where we work every day. It need not, after all, be here. Saying thank you at the end of every day has always seemed to me to be a small acknowledgement that you take neither their talent nor their choice for granted

These steps require investment. Of time. And a little money. The ROI on which will exceed any scale you care to choose today.

Each will make an organization more compelling.

Collectively they will make your company irresistible. And invaluable.

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11 Ways To Harness The Creativity in Your Business

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At its simplest level a business has only two states of being.

Those trying to become relevant to potential customers.

And those trying to take advantage of the fact that, for now, they are.

Whether you are the former or the latter, the capacity to innovate is essential.

Innovation is fueled by creativity. A renewable resource that sits, largely untapped, within every organization. Even those, ironically, that sell it.

Here are eleven keys to harnessing the latent creativity within your company and institutionalizing the capacity for innovation within your organizational DNA.

Separately they will make a measurable difference. 

Collectively, they will allow you to change the world.

1. Understand your true value to your customer or client. Apple has evolved from a computer company into the largest manufacturer of portable electronic devices in the world. Their capacity to innovate is founded on their endless search for un-met - and often unrecognized - consumer needs, supported by a supply chain that is rated as the best in the world. Understanding your value, which is often not what you are selling, means looking at your business through the eyes of the customer. And doing so with determination to see the truth.
2. Provide support at three levels. Organizations are built on three rings. The individual. The group. And the whole. Any practice that does not account for the impact on each ring will fail. Either for lack of front-line support or for lack of resources.
3. Create flexible structures. The tallest buildings in the world sway in the wind. Their architects having long since learned that rigidity brings literal disaster. If you stick rigidly to an organizational flow-chart without taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of individuals you will produce one of two results. A shallow business model capable only of predictability. Or a tall, fragile one in which management’s most pressing concern is papering over the cracks that keep appearing without warning. Build on people’s strengths and provide support for manageable weaknesses. 
4. Cultivate collaboration. Large organizations work more comfortably vertically than horizontally. Specialization and protection of turf being two keys to traditional success. But creativity is maximized when stimulated, challenged and encouraged. And horizontal perspectives are both fresher and more honest than hierarchical views. This requires hiring ‘T’ shaped collaborators - who possess both vertical expertise and horizontal empathy - and opening up internal communication channels, both electronically and inter-personally.
5. Trust in transparency. Creativity is fueled by confidence. In the goals of the company, and the process by which it works to achieve them. Providing your staff with an open and consistent view of what is happening and why, even when being transparent about what you can’t tell them, is both reassuring and liberating.
6. Give your people access to more information than makes you comfortable. Most companies protect their information at all costs, including from their own people. Which suggests two things. You don’t trust them. And they can’t use it to offer you their insight into what it means. Which raises two questions. If you don’t trust them, why do you employ them? And if you don’t value their expertise, why should your customers? This change usually requires re-engineering your systems so that information flows from the front of the organization to the back. Too often we see businesses whose systems feed information into the finance department who then filter it and pass it back to the people on the front line. By which time, its too late to be valuable and too processed to be nutritional.
7. Give people regular feedback. A recent study in the Harvard Business Review revealed that the attribute which people value most in their day is a belief that they have made one thing. Progress. Knowing they made a difference rewards and motivates them to invest more of themselves. But the proof of progress is one that only their managers can provide, since without goals and measurements we can not determine whether something is better. Only different. And innovation is not simply about change. But improvement.
8. Hold accountable. Only by tasking creativity can you hope to innovate. For creativity is unlocked not by limitless freedom as many people think, but by being challenged to solve specific problems. This requires room to think and explore. And a limit to both.
9. Fire sooner rather than later. Not all weaknesses are manageable. Or worth the benefits of the upside. In which case you undermine the confidence and the enthusiasm of those that are performing by enabling the employment of those that are not. 
10. Publicize success. The recognition of achievement is one of the business world’s most mis-understood currencies, the value of which is both ignored and diminished in equal measure. Publicize success often enough that it is habitual. But not so often that it is no longer aspirational.
11. Try. It is an old saw that innovation requires the willingness to fail. But encouraging people to fail has never been a recipe for success. The key instead is to encourage people to try, and to focus on the process rather than the outcome. One of the best ways to do this is to empower small Pilot Programs initiated by a select few, and then publicize them quietly but widely. This creates gravitational interest and exploration, without fear of risk or expectation of reward.

Taken together, these steps will dramatically increase the output of original thought in your business, and create a structure in which the most valuable of it can be focused, refined and applied. 

It will take three months to begin to feel their impact. Six months before you can see the results. A year before you can measure them in the bottom line.

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