Outsourcing News

Here’s one of the dirty little secrets of corporate brainstorm sessions: When they are led by upper management, department heads, or project leaders, they usually get manipulated. Because honchos and honchettes are heavily invested in the topic being brainstormed, it is quite common for them to bend the collective genius of the group to their own particular point of view. Not a good idea. Participants — out of respect for the expertise (or position or parking space) of the facilitator — will invariably moderate their input. And while this can sometimes lead to good results, the results are usually disappointing.

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If You Want to Spark Bold New Ideas, Facilitate (Don’t Lead)

If your company runs brainstorming sessions, know this: too many of them have become veiled opportunities for people to trot out their pet ideas and show them off to others. Because everyone is so busy these days and real listening is in short supply, people use brainstorming sessions as a way to foist their pre-existing ideas on others. And while this sometimes leads to results, it doesn’t make optimal use of the “two heads are better than one” chance a brainstorm session provides. The way around this phenomenon? Give people a chance to express their pre-existing ideas at the beginning

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Go Beyond Your Pet Ideas

Most people think brainstorming sessions are all about ideas — much in the same way that Wall Street bankers think life is all about money. While ideas are certainly a big part of brainstorming, they are only a part. People who rush into a brainstorming session starving for new ideas will miss the boat (and the train, car, and unicycle) completely unless they tune into the some other mighty important dynamics: 1. INVESTIGATION: If you want your brainstorming sessions to be effective, you’ll need to do some investigating before hand. Get curious. Ask questions. Dig deeper. The more you find out what the real issues are, the greater your chances of framing powerful questions to brainstorm and choosing the best techniques to use. 2.

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Brainstorming Is More Than Ideation

Here’s a very lucid and well-written article by Rowan Gibson on the importance of getting your company’s back end of innovation together. Rowan’s rant is consistent with my own experience. It also provokes you to consider one of the ultimate paradoxes of organizational innovation. On one hand, forward thinking companies need to take care of the unglorious back end of innovation — all that behind-the-scene stuff that increases the odds of good ideas actually manifesting. On the other hand, most organizations’ attempts to establish a robust back end usually devolves to stultifying, over-engineered, inhumane “processes.” What’s needed is balance — the artful blend of ideation, integration, and implementation. Anyway, read Rowan’s article .

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The Back End of Innovation

“Companies are actually living organisms, not machines. We keep bringing in mechanics, when what we need are gardeners.” ~ Peter Senge Sustainable innovation, the endless effort to find a better way, cannot be achieved by robotically lining up best practices and imitating them. The real catalyzing agent for renewable innovation is the ground from which these best practices spring — the confluence of purpose, people, and processes better known as culture . From where will the next wave of groundbreaking innovation come? Not from organizations mechanically mimicking each other’s best practices, but from organizations with the authentic commitment to take their stand on ground that has been cultivated for breakthrough.

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Create a Garden of Innovation!

Since the beginning of time, pundits, psychologists, and philosophers have been waxing poetic about the differences between men and women. Many well-researched theories and observations have been postulated — everything from variations of XY chromosomes to moon cycles to shopping habits. Though I am not a pundit, psychologist, or philosopher, I would like to take this moment to propose yet another difference between the sexes — something I’ve been noticing for years, but never completely understood until this morning’s opening of Christmas presents:

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One More Difference Between Men and Women

OK. Go get a cup of tea, coffee, wine, goat milk, brandy, or whatever your favorite libation is and watch this 5-minute video shown at Sony’s Rome conference last year. It’s a very mind-opening peek into the present… and the future. The implications? Something for you to noodle on… Thanks to Alan Roettinger for the link.

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A Peek Into the Future

I know something about you. Like the fact you enjoy giving holiday gifts, but don’t like shopping. Which is why it’s so cool you can now do ALL your holiday shopping right on this here blog. Yup. All ya gotta do is point, click, pay, then wait for your gifts to arrive in the mail. Pretty simple, eh? Choose from any of the following innovation-sparking goodies. Free the Genie . Awake at the Wheel . Innovation Kit

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One Stop Shopping

The most successful companies in the tech industry learned long ago that they would be far stronger if they created an ecosystem of allies who build businesses on top of theirs. They designed their technology as platforms, or foundations, for others to build upon. (Think Microsoft’s Windows and the hundreds of thousands of applications created to run on top of it.) Now governments are following the same path–most notably the Obama administration. It’s attempting to create an innovation platform that organizations and businesses can use to make themselves stronger and/or help improve the performance of government. Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media and promoter of the Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0 phenomena, calls this the Obama administration’s most important technology initiative

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The Power of Government-as-Platform

The Obama administration has mapped out an incredibly ambitious set of objectives: stimulate the economy; reform the health care system; save the planet; and combat terrorists. But all of this saving, stimulating, reforming, and combating is making government ever larger and more expensive. So another task looms large: Obama has to make government run better–meaning more efficiently and effectively. If he fails to do so, he’ll lose the support of the people and will have no chance of completing his agenda. I spent the last few weeks working on a story about this effort. My conclusion: Despite the immense difficulty of the job, Obama’s team has the potential for making real progress. However, given the hysterical tone of the national debate, I fear that it’s unlikely that improvements in government operations will register and will sway public opinion. In scoundrel times like these, fear and loathing trump rationality and earnest hard work. The government efficiency team is captained by Jeff Zients, a private sector efficiency expert.

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Can Obama Make Big Government Run Better?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has been in existence since 1901–responsible for promoting economic development via standards setting and measuring. Vital work, to be sure, but seemingly dull, at least to the non-measurement scientists among us. But now something really intriguing his happening. The onrush of the smart grid, cloud computing, green energy, sustainable manufacturing, e-health, and a new wave of cybersecurity threats has suddenly placed NIST in the middle of some of the most crucial technology advances of our era. One result: it’s a great time to be Pat Gallagher, the newly appointed NIST director. “NIST has never been asked to perform such significant, high-visibility roles as it is now

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Who Knew NIST Could Be So Sexy?

One of the inevitable things you will hear at a brainstorming session is “there are no bad ideas.” Well, guess what? There are plenty of bad ideas. Nazism, for instance. Arena football. Bow ties. What well-meaning “keep hope alive” brainstorming aficionados really mean is this: Even bad ideas can lead to good ideas if the idea originators are committed enough to extract the meaning from the “bad.” Do you think that War and Peace was written in one sitting? No way. There were plenty of earlier drafts that were horrid, but eventually led to the final outcome. The key for aspiring innovators? To find the value in what seems to be a “bad idea” and then use that extracted value as a catalyst for further exploration

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The Good Thing About Bad Ideas

I was pleased to get an e-mail message today from Online Colleges.Net telling me that Globespotting ranked in the top 10, overall, among blogs that appeal to international business students. Here’s the list: “100 Best Blogs for International Business Students ” A lot of the people who post comments on Globespotting are angry about one thing or another, which, of course, disappoints me. I hope my blog can build bridges across cultures and continents.

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Globespotting and International Students

Kiva.org has been one of my favorite social enterprises even since I started lending small amounts of money to poor entrepreneurs in developing nations a couple of years ago. To me, what was so compelling about it was you could read little stories about entrepreneurs then choose the one you want to back. At least that’s what Kiva said was happening. Turns out, that was a fiction–in most cases. Instead, Kiva channels money to micro-finance organizations that have already made the loans. I read about this outrage today in a story in the New York Times. The person who exposed the fiction, David Roodman, laid out his findings in a blog posting .

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Kiva Plays Loose With the Facts

One of my favorite clients of all time was a key manager in a very prominent Fortune 500 company. She was smart. She was funny. She was creative. And she was kind. Then her company adopted Six Sigma. I couldn’t help but notice that soon after this she started becoming uncharacteristically cranky, not unlike the way an artist gets upon filling out a tax form. When I asked her how the Six Sigma initiative was going, she rolled her eyes and mumbled something about “going through the motions.” In a recent online Business Week posting , Brian Hindo lucidly deconstructs some of the flawed assumptions of the Six Sigma approach…

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SIX SIGMA UNRAVELLED: The Gotta Have a Process Blues

One of the tough things about being a social entrepreneur, I’m told, is that it’s lonely out there. Unlike regular entrepreneurs who can readily find other people in their geographic proximity and share ideas and experiences with them, social entrepreneurs tend to be widely scattered. They commune via social networks or at infrequent and typically short gatherings of the clan. A group of four friends in Boulder, Colorado, has come up with an inventive way to address the loneliness of the social entrepreneur. These folks, founders of The Unreasonable Institute, have created a 10-week mini-MBA for promoters of social change. No, check that. The metaphor isn’t quite right. That’s because the 25 or so young entrepreneurs who participate in the program next summer won’t just be learning the skills of social business; they’ll be putting them to work, too. The idea is to come up with ideas, develop them into business plans, vet them, divide up a small pool of venture capital, and connect with a support network–all in the span of an intense 10 weeks. It’s like packaging Silicon Valley in a box

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A Mini-MBA Program for Social Entrepreneurs

This is a relief. Alec Ross, one of the key architects of Barack Obama’s technology policy during last year’s campaign, isn’t pushing ultra-high-tech solutions as a cure-all for the world’s diplomatic and social problems now that he’s senior adviser on innovation for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. He’s practicing the art of the practical. Ross’ job at State is to figure out how to use the global communications network to address poverty, health pandemics, human rights violations and the like.

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Hillary Clinton’s Tech Guru on 21st Century Statecraft

I’m working on a story about the Obama Administration’s efforts to make the federal government more effective and efficient. Over the past few months, the USCIS has made a series of modifications to its Web site to make it easier for applicants for green cards and citizenship to find out the status of their applications and understand what is required of them. I’d like to speak to one or two people who have had extremely frustrating experiences in the past with the case-tracking system—to speak to them about those experiences and find out if the new system is any better. Please e-mail me at steve_hamm@businessweek.com. Also, feel free to comment on this blog posting.

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Help with Story About Government Effectiveness

When the tech industry and Wall Street intersect, often, bad things happen. First came the shenanigans around the dot-com boom and bust, then the skullduggery at CA and Peregrine, then the stock option backdating scandal, and now the Galleon insider trading blowup. For the tech industry, it has been a decade of infamy. I guess this dismal track record is no surprise for a dynamic industry where stock prices are volatile and fabulous fortunes have been gained by so many.

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Galleon: Another Black Mark for the Tech Industry

Over the past decade, India’s top tech outsourcing firms have transformed the global IT services industry. Giants such as IBM, EDS, and Accenture had to adapt or face extreme consequences. One of the keys to the Indians’ success was their low-cost labor, of course. But another advantage is that they’re frugal in most everything they do. That includes marketing. Unable to match the global brands in advertising clout, they came up with creative ways of getting the word out about their capabilities on a tight budget. Now one of the leading practitioners of this art, Jessie Paul, chief marketing officer for Wipro Technologies, has come out with a book, No Money Marketing , that tells how it’s done. Her book is a great primer for upstart companies in emerging markets, but also provides useful ideas for people in large, established companies at a time when the Internet and globalization are putting big cracks in traditional marketing orthodoxy

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No Money Marketing