Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

For the second time this week (following from Scott Ginsberg’s session), Adam and I were entertained, and intellectually stimulated, by a seminar focused on helping business do better.

This event was titled “Leading and Enabling Innovation through ICT” and was  presented by Zernike Australia in conjunction with Australian Institute of Commercialisation (AIC), Brisbane Technology Park, and QUT.

The event was part of the “Innovation Series”.

1)  Some great content

After having the session kicked off by Rowan Gilmore (CEO of the AIC), we were then treated to some great ideas from three top speakers:

(a)  Learning from the distant past

Our first speaker (Dr Richard Jefferson from QUT) asked the audience to learn from the experiences of global trade 500 years ago (back in Magellan’s day) – when the seas were still feared to contain mythical beasts that devoured whole ships.

Back in those days, Richard explained, the greatest value intellectual property that existed was the maps prepared by cartographers, who had (including by trial and error – which meant in reality by sinking a few ships) begun to chart safe passages on the oceans of the world.

Richard explained that it was because these maps were protected by the dominant countries that several consequences occurred:
1)  The risk inherent in any transport operations increased astronomically;
2)  Which meant that fewer ventures were funded;
3)  Which meant that the cost of goods delivered back to Europe was much higher than it needed to be;
4)  Which also meant that piracy (and inter-country rivalry) escalated.

It was only when the IP represented in the maps became widely available that these issues were alleviated.

Richard’s telling point was that the experiences of the past seem to be repeating themselves today, in the area of ICT – specifically with respect to obsessive patent protection and the like, which is having the effects of:
1)  Excluding the small companies from innovation
2)  Making the big multinationals place big bets on a small number of good ideas
3)  Forcing up the price of what’s produced as a result.

This line of argument, Richard did not sound too dissimilar to the argument Shane & I had heard only a couple weeks previously from Glenn Wightwick of IBM.

In particular, Richard spoke about the recent launch of a global Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI) which has been established with the help of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.

QUT is involved in some central way, but I did not clearly understand that bit…

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(b)  Forget the business case, just do it!

Peter Williams (CEO of Deloitte Digital) was next to the stage, and gave a great presentation of many advantages of Web 2.0 (and in particular using mash-ups to short-cut the time-to-market for potentially great ideas).

Some points I picked up:

1)  Innovation is a buzz word (we all know that).  Companies should stop using the buzzword unless that have a clear answer to the following question:

An employee has a brain-wave idea (for a great new product) over the weekend and turns up on Monday to tell you about it.  What do you do?

2)  You need to include as much diversity as possible in your regular “Innovation Council” meetings – geographical, age, expertise, etc…

3)  Need to let go of control (Peter mentioned the case of the iPhone app, and it brought to mind Lars’ story of outsourced development of Maps for Google Maps).

4)  It may be necessary to forget the business case – as you can get direct response from the customer much quicker than you could even finish the business case in the first place…

5)  In the particular case he recounted of the way Web2.0 had assisted following the Victorian bushfires (which incidentally impacted on the electricity market as well) Peter noted that the key to getting their response up and running so quickly was the mantra:

Regroup, Learn, Regroup, Learn, …

6)  Peter also recommended a couple of books, including Bob Sutton’s “Weird Ideas that Work:  11.5 practices…”, which we will read and review in due course..

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(c)  The people under you know more than you

Steve Vamos has had a very colourful career.  Particularly relevant to his presentation today was that he was formerly CEO of Ninemsn, and now President of the Society of Knowledge Economics SKE (Steve noted the name was a mouthful – and we empathise, as we’ve also experienced naming issues!)

Steve spoke of his own lightbulb moment, when he realised that the people under him knew more about the business than he did.  He noted that this is a relatively new phenomenon that has been accentuated by the rise of the internet, and particularly Web 2.0

Steve lamented that there are not enough leaders/managers having their own lightbulb moments.

He recounted his own horror story from the early days of Ninemsn when the company was burning through a load of cash and employee engagement was at a low level (I think a figure of 40% was mentioned).  Steve noted that he was able to speak directly to all staff (I think 100 at the time) and came out with the message that they were saying:

We don’t know where we are going and we don’t know where we fit as individuals

As a result of acting on this message, Steve noted that employee engagement had doubled after only 12 months, and the company was starting to deliver results for shareholders.  Sounds a little like our own process of business autopsy, in a way.

Steve’s parting thought was that a Leader/Managers core role is really just to help others within the company to deliver (a bit like Richardo Semler’s philosophy).  Steve noted that the key way to do this was to ensure alignment – and he spoke of establishing 5 Shared Values within Ninemsn (one of which was “We Share Knowledge”).

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2)  Great questions

Unlike other seminars that I have been to, there were a number of people that asked some good questions today, prompting the speakers to share some other pearls of wisdom.

1)  I think it was Peter who dropped the term “CIO Bypass” to explain his approach to getting things up and running.

2)  He mentioned a number of services that could be used (including Atlassian, from whom we use the JIRA bug-tracking software).  Adam and I have made notes and will chase up the others.

As a bit of an aside, here, Steve chimed in to say that he had noted that Atlassian had listed their values explicitly on their website – which aligns with what had been suggested on Wednesday by Scott Ginsberg.

3)  Steve mentioned the concept of small companies (like ours) finding that particular customer (which he called “big daddy”) who will like your product enough to effectively scale it up.  Sounds a lot like the concepts espoused in “Crossing the Chasm”.

4)  Steve (calling on his sales background) also suggested that you adopt the approach of naming the customer’s most likely objections up-front, and then addressing each of them in turn (or, better still, having the customer cross them off the listing).

5)  The final point we’ll make is that Steve noted, in the Web2.0 era, a core challenge for companies is:

Can you create a compelling customer experience?

This is a distinctly different environment compared to the old industrial-age model, where the company dictated what would be available for purchase.

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3)  And we made some good contacts

Not much I can say here – will be in touch with those we met.

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4)  … but where were the Geeks?

After Adam, PaulK and myself felt the ignominy of being the least-dressed people in the room at the recent Warren Centre “2009 Innovation Lecture”, we made sure to dress up a little more this time (which meant a last-minute dash to the shops for Adam).  I even wore a tie.

Having seen Peter Williams speak before, I was pretty sure there would be at least another dag in the room, but we still felt we had to make an effort (as the organisers could hardly boot Peter out, could they?).

Despite our efforts, it did feel a little odd in the room, given that there did not really seem to be too many geeks there (as I also noted was also the case at the Warren Centre lecture).

What also seemed to be lacking was a strong showing of Gen Y.

For a session focused on change (and specifically, change through ICT) it did seem to us that the event had too many suits, and not enough young geeks.

Why is this the case, we wonder?

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5)  Oh yeah, and we won again!

Amazing as it would seem, for the second time this week, we walked away with the lucky door prize.

Here’s me with a prize put together by the guys at the convention centre – sporting an even worse grin than Adam’s.

The chocolates are half-gone already, used to feed the bunch of starving animals developers back in the zoo office this afternoon.

My wife insists I buy a lottery ticket tomorrow…

Tags: business growth, entrepreneur, Google, innovation, management of software company, strategic planning

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 11:56 pm and is filed under 01 - Leadership & Management, 02 - People & Culture, Event Review, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.