Reading the signs of times: too many bricks not enough mortar

by Andrew Grant
History has shown us that most people only behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. Be warned.
As a new economic era begins, many people are looking back at what went wrong and trying to identify what led to the latest financial meltdown. But did we not see it coming? Although everyone seems to have had an opinion on the potential foreboding gloom and doom, many were caught out when the tide turned. No one could have picked the day the stock market would start its dramatic decline, but all the signs were there, pointing to some sort of looming disaster. The result is that many people are no longer going to be able to enjoy the wealth they thought they had carefully accumulated.
Everything in life has its natural cycles, and people that know their history should be able to see crisis coming well in advance. The factors that lead to a meltdown are always present. A few years ago Jared Diamond released a book titled ‘Collapse’, in which he studied historical meltdowns and predicted future trends, looking for clear tell-tale signs of potential disaster.
Although many business leaders would have Jim Collins books about building great organizations high on their reading list, how many focus on the other side of the coin – on how organizations and societies fumble and fall and what the predictive signs are? These signs are there every time, but does our blind optimism prevent us from seeing the inevitable and putting measures in place to avoid the pot holes? Do we look at these signs as if they are from another time and place, or can we recognize them easily in our own circumstances, even in our own organizations.
Machiavelli has said that, “Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.” So what passions are now in play that may have led to similar crises in the past?
Let’s explore two interesting accounts of crumbling civilizations of the past to discover what may have led to the crisis today:

1) The Bricks of Babel: Thousands of years ago….
The July 2008 issue of the Economist magazine had an image of the Tower of Babel on its front cover, the lead in to an article which used a significant story from the past (an old testament story from the Christian bible) to reveal the passions that can lead to a meltdown. It cleverly outlines the individual desires which can hamper collaborative achievement. Was the tower of Babel the first recorded societal meltdown? Where the same signs present then as they are now? If so, what can we learn from this snapshot of the past to ensure prevention for the future, or will we be doomed in a cycle of repeated meltdowns, caused a lack of collaboration due to a strong self-focus.
Professor Charles Birch** has written a very compelling article (with an excerpt below) to help us understand what may have caused this first crisis. He describes how the society, according to the story in the book of Genesis, was well on the way to getting a mighty tower built, before disaster struck:
“There seemed nothing too hard for them to do. The sorry end of the story is well known. They no longer spoke one language and so could no longer understand one another. They stopped building the town which was called Babel and the great tower they had planned at its center. The magnitude and complexity of the offending tower involved specialists of all sorts, each with a special terminology and set of beliefs. So it was quite impossible for the engineers to understand what the priests were talking about, for the brick makers to share the architects’ vision, for the philosophers to agree on the function of the tower and for the conservationists and poets to overcome their revulsion against such a monstrous desecration. The higher the tower grew the more violent the disputes between the builders became. Eventually all communication broke down. Whatever purpose they may have started with vanished into thin air.”
The parable of the tower represents the human intellectual predicament we apparently find ourselves in today. ‘We seem to be compelled to shape facts and data, as we know them, into hard bricks, and stick them together with the slime of our theories and beliefs. And thus we continue to carry bricks to Babel.’ (Koestler). Today’s ‘experts’ appear to be confined to their standard approaches and responses, and it is becoming clear that only broad innovative ‘thinkers’ will be able to extract us from this mess.
“We build a tower of Babel when we suppose that knowledge is like a jigsaw puzzle. The bits and pieces are the bits of knowledge that the disciplines give us. When we try to fit them together they don’t fit. They don’t form a complete picture at all. That’s what happens when we opt for the substantialist (substance) prejudice in the field of knowledge. Knowledge is not a substance. It cannot be treated as such without great distortion. This is precisely the intellectual dilemma so powerfully symbolized in the parable of the tower. There is a difference between an expert and a thinker. An expert confines his thinking within arbitrary boundaries. A thinker sets no boundaries to his thinking. The expert can’t think across boundaries.” (Birch)

2) What happened to WAT?: Hundreds of years ago…..
Hundreds of years ago, there was a society that believed themselves to be invincible. They had developed a complex and elaborate civilization. Nothing could go wrong… or so they thought. Angkor WAT, the symbol of one of the greatest civilizations of all time – the Khmer civilization – fell into ruin and became derelict almost overnight. There is great debate about the exact cause of its downfall, but one of the main theories is that the rulers of the time got too greedy. They spent more time building the grand temple than caring for their society. They stopped putting money and resources into developing the aqueducts and farming the land and diverted it to the central temples instead. In the end the city destroyed itself from the outside in, but by the time the crisis caught up with those at the top it was too late.
In the last decade, with our race to build wealth, history may have repeated itself. Individuals have again started to try to build their own holy temples as symbols of personal power at the expense of communal well-being, oblivious to the danger signs and ignoring the lessons from the past. Compelled by ‘experts’ to ‘borrow, borrow, borrow’ and disregarding warnings about over-borrowing, in this process many people have focused on amassing bricks without a having strong mortar to build with.
Experts have all had their theories about how to make money fast, but few were willing or able to see the big picture. Not wanting to be left behind, banks have borrowed from each other (not even adequately checking credit ratings) in a bid to ‘lend, lend, lend’ to those wanting to ‘borrow, borrow, borrow’. All were hoping to cash in on the new temple, and the building of a civilization based on elaborate facades rather than solid foundations. Ironically the higher the experts have gone, the less anyone has seemed to care about the foundations.

In October 2008 the capitalist foundations we have based our civilization on crumbled, just as the tower of Babel and Angkor WAT had crumbled many years before. Did we really think we were invincible?
“Experts provide us with a wealth of information. They load the table with countless pieces of the jig-saw puzzle. How to put them together when they don’t fit? That’s our problem. Hence T. S. Eliot’s questioning in Choruses from ‘The Rock’:
Where is the life we have lost in the living, Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (Birch)

Jared Diamond says that a society is at its most vulnerable when it least realizes it, when it thinks it is invincible. By focusing on the pinnacle of achievements while ignoring the foundations, our society may have become vulnerable in ways we never expected.
Bill Clinton has been quoted as saying, “The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions.” It seems our best choice is to learn to consider collaborative solutions. It’s a shame it often takes a crisis to remind us of our need for interdependence. The worldwide ramifications of the sub prime crisis have reminded us again that ‘no one is an island’.
Through the ages philosophers have wondered: Do we only learn from history that we never learn anything from history, and are those who cannot learn from history doomed to repeat it? We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future if we are wrong about the past. As the cycle continues, may the wise have the courage to find solutions with better foundations before the next crisis hits....
©2009 by Andrew Grant

T-Thoughts: Vision's Virtuosity

A relection on the power of a vision for the individual

In order for someone to live at the speed of life, there is a demand for vision to be an integral part that life.
At times this vision often appears as a fragment of the imagination, but as you courageously lasso those thoughts and corral them by capturing those thoughts onto paper, there is a 99% greater chance of you seeing the vision turn into a reality in your life’s experience.
For that is where the momentum kicks in and where all the ducks line up in a row, where the divine appointments and the favorable situations appear, as if magically in your life.
A vision emits a magnetic force. Money is drawn to a dynamic vision. All sorts of resources avail themselves to the man or woman of vision. The red carpet is rolled out for the one who has vision. Oh certainly, that red carpet is not entirely smooth, and many fulfilled visions require the traversing of many mountains and many valleys along the way.
But vision causes the owner of that vision to not dwell on the current valley experience, but rather to have their eyes firmly fixed on the next mountain peak that stands waiting patiently and expectantly on life’s horizon - beckoning the visionary to scale its heights.
Vision is the compass that guides in the light and encourages in the dark. For without a vision lives are swallowed up by the shadow of the valley of death. They fail to pass through to the other side and are the skeletons that lay each side of life’s road.
Vision inspires faith and dispels fear. It comforts the uncomfortable, feeds the hungry, fills the thirsty and sustains the weary until the vision is not only lived in the mind, but in fact lived.
And when vision’s destination is arrived at there is a sense that the visionary has already lived there years before – for it is a common place – a place that has become their friend, their companion along the way – full of virtue and full of vigor.
For therein lies the reward of a visionary – a sense of destiny fulfilled.
"Visionary people and companies do not see there is a choice between living according to their values or being pragmatic; they see it as a challenge to find pragmatic solutions that are consistent with their core values and vision." Jim Colins
T-Thougts article By Peter Sinclair (Associate guest writer www.motivationalmemo.com .)

Innovating Down Rhe Right Path

by Andrew Grant
Innovation for the sake of innovation
There has been an ongoing battle between Microsoft, Apple, and Google – for quite some time now. Each is trying to win consumers over to their particular systems, and reports on the battle will often appear in the media as a hot topic.
A year has now passed since the release of the first new PCs with Microsoft’s latest product offering installed, the revolutionary new Windows system, Vista. But despite the fanfare and the promises of the latest greatest system to beat all the rest, sadly Windows Vista received only lukewarm reviews at best. There were in fact so many problems with the product that, soon after its release, a service centre for one of the world’s largest computer companies was advising its customers to go back to Vista’s predecessor, Windows XP.
The head of Taiwan-based personal computer maker Acer, Gianfranco Lanci, hit out at Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, saying that the ‘entire industry’ was disappointed by it. Dell was also reported to have started reselling the more dated XP product with many of their computers. Complaints ranged from: the lack of user friendly options and incompatible programs (including older versions of Microsoft’s Office applications) to limited networking abilities. The initial UAC (User Account Control) settings, that were supposed to help with security, blocked nearly everything, including installing programs and websites; customer service centers were simply telling people to ‘turn it off’, rendering it ineffective. One year later, secret emails leaked to the media revealed that even some senior people at Microsoft were very unhappy with Vista. It makes you wonder if perhaps Microsoft was, in a competitive bid, too hasty in bringing out its (potentially) new innovation.
Breathing innovation into the organization
Behind all products lie philosophies, beliefs and values that permeate the organizations which create them, and which eventually manifest themselves in the final product. The question needing to be asked is: what relationship is there between the beliefs of a company and their products and services?
Recently Microsoft got caught up in a war of words with Google on the subject of innovation. Ballmer from Microsoft was quoted saying that ‘The burden of creative genius needs to be shared across the group's senior management through 'systematizing innovation,’ while Noble from Google countered this assumption, stating that Google’s success could be attributed to ‘Innovation being just there… it's like the air we breathe - we innovate to survive, there's nothing to systematize, it's just what we do.’
So what happens when organizations try to systemize innovation? Or, to take the other perspective, is it necessary to breathe innovation into organizations? Should creativity be seen as a belief or a burden? The answers to these fundamental questions will determine, to a great degree, the direction an organization will take and final outcomes. To not address these questions means the team will not know in which direction they are to be heading while innovating, and they will be creating their own paths and coming to their own conclusions. It will be difficult to bring real alignment into any organization if innovation is simply a free flowing and freewheeling process. Determining how teams can innovate will be critical to the success of the end product.
Some of the pitfalls to consider when developing innovation in the organizations:

1. Thinking too far outside the box
Many people use the now clichéd phrase ‘thinking outside the box’, but taking this concept too far can in fact be dangerous. Some companies have not only thought outside the box, but also outside the realm of what their customers are looking for, and this has serious consequences. When innovating, it’s most important to identify where and how a new product or service will change the life of the end user. How a product is developed should become less a function of its technical possibilities and more of a function of its utility for the customer.

2. Thriving on complexity
Complexity for the sake of complexity can have serious consequences. Ten years ago Motorola rolled out a new product that was supposed to redefine the world of mobile phones. The Iridium was slated to be the first phone to give uninterrupted wireless communication anywhere in the world. In its rush to embrace new technology, however, Motorola overlooked what the customer really wanted in a phone. The customers complained of the following:
It was heavy
It came with too many attachments
It could not be used in buildings (enclosed spaces)
Its $3000 price tag did not justify the extra spending when compared to the $100 phones
The user’s manual for these phones was 228 pages long
Motorola’s mistake was to focus on the bells and whistles while ignoring the product’s utility and practicality.

3. Blinded by the opaque
Tech writer, Jeremy Wagstaff, identifies an element of the problem in his comment that, ‘Most people in business are busy doing their jobs (distribution, promotion, pricing, etc.), not busy making products that people actually want to buy -- and talk about. Too often design engineers thrive on complexity, not usability. For them creating and mastering the opaque is an achievement, not a symptom of failure.’ Many companies are compartmentalized into responsibilities and, as a result, it is a complex task to cross between departments and learn from each other. Therefore many organizations will produce new products designed by technical people who do not have a great connection with the customer.
Are smart products too smart for the average user?
The key to successful innovation is to follow Apple’s initiative. In stark contrast to what people have reported about Microsoft Vista, Apple illustrates the importance of designing new products around the needs of the user, not the demands of the technology. Just because a company has the technology doesn’t mean it is necessary to innovate around it. The real key to success is to let the customer guide the direction of innovation.
For example, the iPod was not the first digital-music player, but it was the first to make transferring and organizing music and buying it online easy enough for almost anyone to have a go. Similarly, the iPhone was not the first mobile phone to incorporate a music-player, web browser or e-mail software, but it was one of the easiest to use. Most existing ‘smartphones’ require you to be pretty smart to use them, which begs the question, “Are they simply too smart in the sense of feature density, but too stupid in the interface that lets us use those features?”.
Successful innovation is focussed innovation
An innovation revival has lifted Xerox's profits to $1.2 billion. Inventor-in-chief Vandebroek says that ultimately innovation is about delighting the customer, but if you innovate and it doesn't end up as something that the customer benefits from, then it's not real innovation.
So how do successful companies make creative connections with their customers? eBay’s pioneering CEO Meg Whitman believes their success came from working closely with their customers, allowing their customers to give eBay the direction on where they needed to innovate. As Whitman explains, “We watch what our customers do and then try to make them successful at doing it.”
Amazon’s CEO initially came under great criticism for being one of the first companies to allow people to post negative reviews on the internet, but his initiative clearly shows the desire to innovate down the path of what the customers want, with an approach that connects with the heart of what they believe in. “We don’t make money when we sell things, we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” Although many people would have seen Amazon’s unique edge as being due to the fact that they were the first to sell online books, there was a much deeper belief that brought this company success – focused innovation.
Become your own brand experience
Seybold, the author of Outside Innovation, believes that when you take the customer innovation approach to business you start by developing a deep understanding of customers: the particular audience you are serving. While it is certainly true that most companies have deep subject-matter expertise in a certain domain, it’s also true that their customers are subject-matter experts in their own right. Traditional Innovation often works on the assumption that, ‘Our experts are smarter than our customers.’ Traditional approaches to innovation assume that subject-matter experts (individuals) invent and design innovative new products to meet needs that customers may not realize they have. At the core of customer-centric innovation there is an understanding and appreciation of what customers want and need to accomplish –– their ideal scenarios. The ideal experience that customers want to have during their scenarios becomes the brand experience.
Rather than innovating for the sake of innovating in a mad rush to stay ahead of the pack, we should stop and think of what we really want to achieve through innovation. Once we let the engine of customer-driven innovation power our businesses, we will generate an organic growth that will transform the organization in positive ways.

To consider:
Are you consciously aware of the path you and your team are taking when innovating?
Have you considered the costs of innovation for the sake of innovation?
How empowered does your team feel when it comes to innovation?
What direction have you given them?
Do you try to systematize innovation, or breathe it into your organization? Is creativity seen as a burden or a passion?
How do you allow customers to drive innovation?
How do you enable employees to capture the innovative ideas of customers? Are your employees aware of possible ways to innovate around the customer’s needs