Every now and then, I get in over my head. When you get into that situation, you’re then looking at ‘What do I do now? Where does my help come from?’ that’s a question that comes from somebody who wrote that down saying, “Where does my help come from when I’m down and out, when I don’t have any ideas, when I’m in a hole? Where do I turn for help?” I want you to stay with that question as I move.
I saw a blog in Harvard Business Review by Bill Taylor entitled “Don’t let what you know limit what you imagine.” He goes on to ask, “Why are so many smart executives so ineffective?” why are smart people, people who have knowledge, why do they get to the point where they get immobilized by that knowledge. Sometimes you have so much knowledge but it doesn’t help you to move forward. You just get mired in that knowledge.
If you think about that for a second, as I did, you’ll realize that it is so easy to get bogged down in knowledge; to have mined the depths of books and articles. You have all this knowledge and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s like having to come up for air, take a deep breath and say, “Now, what’s the big picture?”
My dad was an artist who used to do wall murals. He had this wonderful ability to create three-dimensional murals that looked like it was standing out in relief but when you went close and touched it, it was flat. I would hear my dad tell people who would go close and look minutely at the small brush strokes, “The beauty of the mural is to stand 10 feet from it. That’s when you get the whole picture. You’ll never get the whole picture by standing with your face up close to the mural.”
So often in life we get to the point where we have all this knowledge, we go and study, we read, do experiments, research and then suddenly we find that it’s not helping us. It weighs upon us as ‘just knowledge’.
That’s the question Bill Taylor asks, “Why are so many smart executives so ineffective?” he goes on to quote Cynthia Barton Rabe in a book called, ‘The Innovation Killer’. She is a former innovation strategist at Intel and she explains how ‘what we know limits what we can imagine’. She says, “When it comes to innovation, the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.”
All the wonderful things that we have done, the experience that we have, the best practice, the processes – all that have been cornerstones of success, can somehow become like millstones, huge weights around our neck, that threaten to sink us and the corporations that we are in.
Bill Taylor goes on to say, “How do we get away from this? How do we take knowledge and make it something that we can use rather than something that immobilizes us? The thing to do is to think differently. All of you have heard the word déjà vu. It’s looking at an unfamiliar situation or being in a different situation and suddenly saying, ‘I feel like that I’ve been here before. It’s a completely unfamiliar situation but it’s actually a déjà vu that I feel like I’ve been or seen it before.’”
Taylor says that “What you need is to be able to have a via de experience which is looking at a familiar situation (a field you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years, best practices that you’ve had, processes) and look at them as if you’ve never seen it before. With that fresh line of sight, develop a distinctive point of view on the future.”
How do you look at your organization and your field as if you are seeing them for the first time? that’s what we get mired in. everything around us is working smoothly and yet nothing creative, nothing fresh, nothing new is coming out, though everything is going fine. Innovation has to be at the centre of all we do, because something that doesn’t innovate will die.
It has been said of the English language that the reason it has stood the test of time, the reason it has continued to be the foremost language in the world, is because it has continued to innovate. People have continued to add words to the English language unlike Latin, which died out because no new words were added to it; even our very own Sanskrit. Without innovation, things will begin to die and disappear.
I don’t know how many of you have heard of Commerce Bank. Now it’s under the umbrella of TD Bank in the US. When they started out in late 90’s their entire thought was ‘how do we change banking?’ how do we give a personality to something that is so de-personal as finances and money? Ten years later, after a period of massive growth, Commerce Bank was sold to TD Bank for $8.5 billion. That’s what their stock was worth a decade later. Today, operating under the TD Bank umbrella, the outfit has more than 1000 branches up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Florida, and a well-earned reputation as ‘America’s most convenient bank’.
Bill Taylor looks at Commerce Bank and says, “Here are the things that they put in. they began to think differently from other banks and they brought in unheard-of innovation. They brought in a seven-days-a-week service, free coin-counting machines for customers, ‘Red Fridays’ in which employees wore special outfits to work. And the term they used to describe this strategy was ‘retailtainment’ – making it fun for customers to do business in an industry that was devoid of personality.
Then he says, “When you talked to the leadership, they said that they never looked at other banks as their competition. Nor did they look at traditional approaches of benchmarking the competition from traditional banks. They didn’t use them to benchmark how they were. They looked at companies like Starbucks, Target and Best Buy. These were all power retailers. They found what it was that made them the kind of outfits that they were. Then they began to use those processes in their businesses. In fact, they would look at their competitors only to find out what wasn’t working and they called it ‘Competitor Rules and Practices’ and with a bit of humor, the internal acronym for that was CRAP.
They looked around at powerful retailers who were doing very well. So they began to have branches that would have 70-80 hours a week services including Saturday and Sunday. It was the simplest idea in the world. When people asked them, “How do you staff a bank on Sunday?” he would tell them, “Wal-Mart stays open on Sunday. The malls stay open on Sundays. How hard can it be?”
Innovate: to be able to think differently.
In that same article, Taylor talks about London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. It was renowned for its cardiac care and yet it was struggling with poorly designed ‘handoffs’ between birth and the pediatricians that would take over after birth. The handoffs seemed to cause a lot of complications. Do you know where they went to solve it? Dr. Martin Elliot, Head of cardiac surgery and Dr. Allan Goldman, head of pediatric intensive care, both realized that the handoffs between them were causing problems, even death. They went to the pit crew of Ferrari’s Formula One racing team. If anybody knows handoffs, it’s a racing car unit. So they worked together at the team’s home base in Modena, Italy, in the pits of the British Grand Prix and then in the intensive care unit of the hospital. They came up with an amazing solution that has sharply reduced medical error.
You can’t let what you know limit what you can imagine. You have to be able to innovate. Make sure that you are taking all the ideas, the knowledge, the experience, the best practice, the processes and use them to help you create new awareness, a new way of thinking. Be innovative; think out of the box; go against the grain.
I have a book in my library called ‘The Circle of Innovation’ by Tom Peters. In the foreword written by Dean LeBaron who says of Tom Peters, “He moves when he sees opportunity; he hurts when he sees mediocrity; he exults when he sees innovation.”
That should be inside of us as well, that when we see opportunity, we move; when we see mediocrity it must hurt us; but when we see innovation we must exult because new and diverse and creative things are coming forth.
Where does my help come from? I started out with that question. The Bible says as an answer: (Psalms 121:2) “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” That’s a wonderful place to get help. We look around and we see creativity that is brought forth because He made it. It is good for us to rely on Him for help to know how to innovate in our offices, in our areas of work.
I pray that today, you would think differently; you would not let experience and knowledge in any way debilitate you; that you would allow yourself to find creative ways to do what you need to do.
God Bless Us All.
I saw a blog in Harvard Business Review by Bill Taylor entitled “Don’t let what you know limit what you imagine.” He goes on to ask, “Why are so many smart executives so ineffective?” why are smart people, people who have knowledge, why do they get to the point where they get immobilized by that knowledge. Sometimes you have so much knowledge but it doesn’t help you to move forward. You just get mired in that knowledge.
If you think about that for a second, as I did, you’ll realize that it is so easy to get bogged down in knowledge; to have mined the depths of books and articles. You have all this knowledge and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s like having to come up for air, take a deep breath and say, “Now, what’s the big picture?”
My dad was an artist who used to do wall murals. He had this wonderful ability to create three-dimensional murals that looked like it was standing out in relief but when you went close and touched it, it was flat. I would hear my dad tell people who would go close and look minutely at the small brush strokes, “The beauty of the mural is to stand 10 feet from it. That’s when you get the whole picture. You’ll never get the whole picture by standing with your face up close to the mural.”
So often in life we get to the point where we have all this knowledge, we go and study, we read, do experiments, research and then suddenly we find that it’s not helping us. It weighs upon us as ‘just knowledge’.
That’s the question Bill Taylor asks, “Why are so many smart executives so ineffective?” he goes on to quote Cynthia Barton Rabe in a book called, ‘The Innovation Killer’. She is a former innovation strategist at Intel and she explains how ‘what we know limits what we can imagine’. She says, “When it comes to innovation, the same hard-won experience, best practice, and processes that are the cornerstones of an organization’s success may be more like millstones that threaten to sink it.”
All the wonderful things that we have done, the experience that we have, the best practice, the processes – all that have been cornerstones of success, can somehow become like millstones, huge weights around our neck, that threaten to sink us and the corporations that we are in.
Bill Taylor goes on to say, “How do we get away from this? How do we take knowledge and make it something that we can use rather than something that immobilizes us? The thing to do is to think differently. All of you have heard the word déjà vu. It’s looking at an unfamiliar situation or being in a different situation and suddenly saying, ‘I feel like that I’ve been here before. It’s a completely unfamiliar situation but it’s actually a déjà vu that I feel like I’ve been or seen it before.’”
Taylor says that “What you need is to be able to have a via de experience which is looking at a familiar situation (a field you’ve worked in for decades, products you’ve worked on for years, best practices that you’ve had, processes) and look at them as if you’ve never seen it before. With that fresh line of sight, develop a distinctive point of view on the future.”
How do you look at your organization and your field as if you are seeing them for the first time? that’s what we get mired in. everything around us is working smoothly and yet nothing creative, nothing fresh, nothing new is coming out, though everything is going fine. Innovation has to be at the centre of all we do, because something that doesn’t innovate will die.
It has been said of the English language that the reason it has stood the test of time, the reason it has continued to be the foremost language in the world, is because it has continued to innovate. People have continued to add words to the English language unlike Latin, which died out because no new words were added to it; even our very own Sanskrit. Without innovation, things will begin to die and disappear.
I don’t know how many of you have heard of Commerce Bank. Now it’s under the umbrella of TD Bank in the US. When they started out in late 90’s their entire thought was ‘how do we change banking?’ how do we give a personality to something that is so de-personal as finances and money? Ten years later, after a period of massive growth, Commerce Bank was sold to TD Bank for $8.5 billion. That’s what their stock was worth a decade later. Today, operating under the TD Bank umbrella, the outfit has more than 1000 branches up and down the East Coast, from Maine to Florida, and a well-earned reputation as ‘America’s most convenient bank’.
Bill Taylor looks at Commerce Bank and says, “Here are the things that they put in. they began to think differently from other banks and they brought in unheard-of innovation. They brought in a seven-days-a-week service, free coin-counting machines for customers, ‘Red Fridays’ in which employees wore special outfits to work. And the term they used to describe this strategy was ‘retailtainment’ – making it fun for customers to do business in an industry that was devoid of personality.
Then he says, “When you talked to the leadership, they said that they never looked at other banks as their competition. Nor did they look at traditional approaches of benchmarking the competition from traditional banks. They didn’t use them to benchmark how they were. They looked at companies like Starbucks, Target and Best Buy. These were all power retailers. They found what it was that made them the kind of outfits that they were. Then they began to use those processes in their businesses. In fact, they would look at their competitors only to find out what wasn’t working and they called it ‘Competitor Rules and Practices’ and with a bit of humor, the internal acronym for that was CRAP.
They looked around at powerful retailers who were doing very well. So they began to have branches that would have 70-80 hours a week services including Saturday and Sunday. It was the simplest idea in the world. When people asked them, “How do you staff a bank on Sunday?” he would tell them, “Wal-Mart stays open on Sunday. The malls stay open on Sundays. How hard can it be?”
Innovate: to be able to think differently.
In that same article, Taylor talks about London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. It was renowned for its cardiac care and yet it was struggling with poorly designed ‘handoffs’ between birth and the pediatricians that would take over after birth. The handoffs seemed to cause a lot of complications. Do you know where they went to solve it? Dr. Martin Elliot, Head of cardiac surgery and Dr. Allan Goldman, head of pediatric intensive care, both realized that the handoffs between them were causing problems, even death. They went to the pit crew of Ferrari’s Formula One racing team. If anybody knows handoffs, it’s a racing car unit. So they worked together at the team’s home base in Modena, Italy, in the pits of the British Grand Prix and then in the intensive care unit of the hospital. They came up with an amazing solution that has sharply reduced medical error.
You can’t let what you know limit what you can imagine. You have to be able to innovate. Make sure that you are taking all the ideas, the knowledge, the experience, the best practice, the processes and use them to help you create new awareness, a new way of thinking. Be innovative; think out of the box; go against the grain.
I have a book in my library called ‘The Circle of Innovation’ by Tom Peters. In the foreword written by Dean LeBaron who says of Tom Peters, “He moves when he sees opportunity; he hurts when he sees mediocrity; he exults when he sees innovation.”
That should be inside of us as well, that when we see opportunity, we move; when we see mediocrity it must hurt us; but when we see innovation we must exult because new and diverse and creative things are coming forth.
Where does my help come from? I started out with that question. The Bible says as an answer: (Psalms 121:2) “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” That’s a wonderful place to get help. We look around and we see creativity that is brought forth because He made it. It is good for us to rely on Him for help to know how to innovate in our offices, in our areas of work.
I pray that today, you would think differently; you would not let experience and knowledge in any way debilitate you; that you would allow yourself to find creative ways to do what you need to do.
God Bless Us All.
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