On fois gras, CEOs and disruption
Ok, tell me if you’ve heard this one.
NewTool gets adopted at your company. Everyone grumbles. Problem is… NewTool tends to be bad at what OldTool was really good at (let’s say…meat and potatoes). And NewTool seems to excel at doing things that OldTool never did (let’s say…fois gras). NewTool gets a bad rap. Psh! Who wants goose liver when all we really need is meat/potatoes!? Time passes. And a few users brave the chasm and start sampling NewTool’s still-novel fois gras features while using OldTool meat and potatoes. Meanwhile, NewTool Inc. has been adding new additions to their previously meager meat/potato base. And those enjoying fois gras start realizing that meat/potatoes in NewTool is actually pretty tasty too. Word spreads and OldTool meat and potatoes eventually gets left behind.
Classic disruption story.
And I’ve seen it hundreds of times. As old as the story is, disruption never stops surprising us when it happens.
Disruption is ALWAYS surprising. Like tripping and falling is always surprising. You know it happens to people all the time but you weren’t expecting it to happen to you. Today.
Part of being alive and successful is being prone to disruption. As a person whose career is focused on helping companies achieve their Next Big Thing I am an avid student of disruption. Innovation and disruption are two faces of the same coin. It wouldn’t be an innovation if it didn’t disrupt something in the process. For every great new idea that takes hold, a series of other ideas get rearranged to accommodate. Fois gras.
For strong companies, the threat of disruption is a good, honing force. It keeps them nimble and self-appraising and, importantly, creating new ground. Much like strength training can improve a person’s physical resiliency. For weak companies, the threat of disruption makes them paranoid and locked in tragic and costly “innovation theatre.” (Faster, better, cheaper potatoes, maybe?)
My work with companies is about helping them assess their own innovation health and hit the ball where they intend, maybe not where they are aiming. Every company falls for innovation theatre at times (hitting the ball where they are aiming instead of where they meant to aim). Every company can be strong or weak…sometimes in the same year.
And that brings me to coaching. No one starts out thinking they need it (reference well-known stories from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt and scores of other leaders of innovation-forward companies who figured out, thanks to Bill Campbell and some bumps, that coaching is key for any high performing person). Just look to today’s newsfeed for several painful stories of prominent CEOs painfully lacking objectivity and doing damage in the process.
We simply cannot see ourselves objectively in the three dimensions of a fast moving company. I am no shade of Bill Campbell (no one is) but I know a heck of a lot about building great outcomes for customers and, even more importantly, getting hearts, minds and balance sheets to align. And that’s the job.
Innovation coaching. I help CEO’s and C-levels see the ground ahead from a “build it, don’t run from it” perspective.
In our work together, C-levels will:
Gain/ regain vital objectivity, seeing the true health of your company’s innovation culture (the ability your company has to both generate and ACT on your most important Big Ideas) and seeing how the work of you and the leadership of the company is helping or hindering your bottom line effectiveness and delivery of your mission.
Identify areas where your company’s hearts-minds-plans-results alignment is good and where it needs work across the company. For example:
Are the Big Ideas really coming from EVERY direction, not just from a few loud voices?
Is there an exceptionally trustworthy prioritization mechanism/person to determine which of the 500,000 GREAT ideas you actually execute?
Does the execution of that next Amazingly Great Idea actually work? Did doing it actually matter?
Are you incorporating enough of what you learn into your team and process to do it better next round?
These are the questions around which you are building your company’s future.
CEOs and leaders are human. And an inconvenient human truth: the closer to core something is, the harder it is to change it or even see it objectively. There is nothing more core to any company than the products or services that define you in the world.
When the stakes are high and we need to do our best work, that’s exactly when we need a coach.
