New year's resolution

Don't trivialize your life. Think of how you can add value to you by thinking about how you can change to add value to those around you. Give meaning to your life by creating value for those you love. With sincerity, integrity and a lot of fun.

Value management

We were at a meeting recently where somebody confidently proclaimed that time management no longer exists. Time, according to Einstein is just as reality an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. But that’s not an answer, to our mind time is real, and so is the ability to manage it. What he meant was this: today’s work processes involve so many different (micro) tasks as well as constant interruptions, that on any given day or week you will not be able to finish your To Do list. You can no longer expect to neatly work your way through the set of tasks you, your boss or your family have defined for you. You are unable to finish every single task at the end of the workday or week.

Our work has become more intense, non-linear, unpredictable and sadly, frantic. Information technology has increased productivity, yet it has not given us more time. We still end up with less of it; one of the cold ironies of modern life. We answer our remaining e-mails in the evening, listen to our voicemail driving to work or a customer, our meetings are interrupted by mobile phone calls, there is the morning newspaper to read, but also the newsletters you receive through e-mail subscriptions, RSS feeds and what have you. Your computer contains all the information you use to get by in a day and helps you produce whatever your boss is willing to pay you a salary for. God forbid your computer breaks down, it will freeze up all your productive possibilities! But that might just be a blessing in disguise for many of us; finally some time to reflect and something to blame for not being productive! If that’s the only way to get some peace of mind; forget about managing time, you will never succeed.

There is a way out of this. Stephen Covey has described it in his comprehensive book on 'The Seven habits of highly effective people’, Peter Senge tells about it in ‘The fifth discipline’. The challenge is no longer organizing your agenda, it is prioritizing your tasks and working together with others to learn how to deal with everything that comes your way. The leading consideration is no longer time, it’s value. There are too many tasks to do, so do the ones that add most value. Value involving (at least) four dimensions: personal, social, creative and financial, which we coincidently capture in our assessment of network value.

So, Time management becomes Value management. This requires us to address an entirely different set of questions. Task lists are easily filled, if not by ourselves, others will gladly oblige us by defining tasks they would like us to execute. Value management requires an internal mechanism for determining what is important, an inner sense of direction, an awareness of what pursuits are meaningful and an awareness of the consequences of choosing those pursuits for yourself and others. Value management therefore requires personal leadership.

Personal leadership emphasizes a vision and an understanding of what you want to achieve and what you need to do to achieve it. What most people tend to forget is that it is also very important to know how far you are willing to go, what you are willing to sacrifice in order to achieve your goals. We can have great ambitions, but often prefer to achieve them the easy way. How far are YOU really willing to go if push comes to shove! The same goes for the people you work and share your vision of the future with.

Making the switch from Time management to Value management implies that profound considerations need to be integrated into your daily routine; your shared Vision and resulting goals drive the choices you make and are a constant presence in everything you do. Discovering your own values and how they influence others is an arduous process, determining and sticking to what you really believe in is challenging. It becomes a lot easier if shared with others!

The benefits are substantial. When we master Value management, decisions really tend to become simple and straightforward. This is what Stephen Covey calls a principle centred lifestyle. Some might even say that the satisfaction you feel as a result of an achievement is proportional to the amount of suffering and sacrifice that was required. No pain no gain.

Making it simple

We get a lot of interest and enthusiasm when we explain what it is we are doing. When we ask people to commit and together start solving an issue they have, we often get the objection that what we do is too difficult. “Why don’t you make it simple?”

Define simple. Easy, clear, elegant, clean? Stupid, dumb, slow? Where one man finds his paradise, another comes to harm! Even defining the word simple is not ‘simple’ and at the very least context dependent. Yet we all strive for our lives to be simple, always in relation to elegant and clean, but most of all easy; live the good life! People confuse simple with easy.

People always say that things where better in the old days. Life was simple when you just had to tend your land and live from the produce! Sure peasants who had to work 18/7, 365 days a year and give half of their proceeds to the robber baron who owned their land had a simple life, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. It was especially hard during winter, disease ridden and they had a very short lifespan. Nothing romantic about it! Only a very limited number in the upper classes had it easy, the rest stole and plundered and even that isn’t as easy as it sounds.

In my experience, simple (easy) answers are always based on either 20-20 hindsight or blind faith. Whatever you think of these options, they are a clear indication that finding simple answers is not easy. Let’s take an example. Philips and Douwe Egberts (Sara Lee) put the very successful Senseo coffee machine on the market a couple of years ago. Elegant machine that provides a clean way to produce a cup of coffee that can be tailored to your taste with easy to use sachets. It’s a bit of a bother that you can produce only two cups at a time, but since we live in smaller family units, that’s not an issue in daily life; for parties we just use something else. This answer to making the coffee we like individually is simple, but do we really think it was easy to get there? Both parties had to build trust, a working relationship and contracts to start working together; can’t have been easy. They had to segment the market, come up with the right target group and they had to come up with a business model that would provide both with a healthy profit margin; can’t have been easy. They had to decide on spending millions on setting up production facilities, marketing campaigns, etc., on a product that still had to prove itself; can’t have been easy. Then they had to roll out, train and negotiate their sales channels, prepare to diversify the different taste options and keep their fingers crossed; can’t have been easy. They only succeeded in combining the resources of two companies and go through a difficult collaborative effort because they had faith in the success of their new product. Now, with 20-20 hindsight it’s a simple no-brainer, but if it was that easy, why did the other efforts Philips set up (with e.g. Nike) not work out?

Because collaboration and innovation are basically simple processes but aren’t as easy to do as we hope they are. When we need to invent something new, or solve a problem, we first need to define exactly what it is we need. Finding the exact need and solving the resulting contradictions to everybody’s satisfaction is the most difficult part of innovation; it takes collaboration. Why? Because there is no room for compromise when solving contradictions, all the while need is a perception which differs depending on context. The more people you aim to help, the more contexts your solution needs to be tailored to. That is not easy! It is best done with a multidisciplinary team, since they provide a multi context base to work from, align people and get them committed. Working with people is fun especially when it leads to something simple, but again it is not easy.

Wasn't it Einstein who said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I am affraid most people cross this line to make things easy. What is simple about what we do, is that we provide a path to follow. What is simple about how we do it, is that we do it together. What is simple about why we do it, is that we address a need in all of us; to want to learn and improve. The fact that it’s not always easy, is icing on the cake!

Coming back to the initial question. The question that should be asked is: “Why don’t you package the result of what you do in a simple way?” Good question! To us, what we do is simple while we know that what we want to do is not going to be easy. I think that is where the miscommunication occurs. We separate easy and simple on a conscious level, whereas most of the people we talk to do not. Simple things to us are never easy and we love a challenge. So when we talk about simple, we just don’t connect and when we talk about it not being easy we feed the resulting insecurity. This then is our biggest short term challenge. We’ll keep you posted.

Individualism doesn't exist

Individualism doesn’t exist! I have said it before and I will say it again. Egoism yes, egotism sure! The strongest reason to stay in line? Peer pressure! When you are part of a group you conform to the rules of that group or you are out. When you are part of no group, you die! Literally!

I have stated before that the reason why our European governments are concerned over growing individualism is that they are afraid it will split our society, at least their version of it. The current US government has a different point of view, they create their own society/reality and do so through the conviction of faith, a dynamic enforced by the large group of born again Christians who have the firm believe that ‘God’ is in the White House through George W. Bush. They are using the very strong bonds that people form when they agree on principle and see their leader act on that principle without any doubt, and sadly: reflection. Easy certainty. Truth is less important than truthfulness. If enough people have faith in you, however wrong you are, you’re right! We see some changes now, apparently you can’t fool all the people, all the time. Wonder where it will end.

The European reaction to ‘individualism’ is more rules to keep people in line with the prevalent socialistic credo. Our governments limit our choices and how to realize our dreams in the name of efficiency and equality, and now with the web (and other sources of information) giving us more freedom to make our own choices instead of theirs, we have become individualists and don’t care about each other anymore.

This is an understandable reaction from people who have completely lost touch with their voting base and are caught up in ideals that are not prevalent anymore. They hang on to their ideals and make more rules to trap people in their idealistic nets. Their problem is that it has not been working for the last three to five years and will only exacerbate their and our alienation and so-called individualism. People don’t recognize themselves anymore in their so-called leaders, because they only see their leaders limiting their lives instead of providing paths and opportunities to improve them. That is not individualism, that is giving individuals the means to join other original thinkers and come up with new ways of improving our lives, creating new products, services and cultures that benefit the groups they are part of or create new ones that see the potential of doing fun things together. Those individuals that create stuff that has no value will stay individuals and connect to others or drop out of our society, so if there is such a thing as individualism, just use the perspective of the egg and not always the chicken and stop over regulating; whatever individualism there is will become extinct in no time. Communities will be the driving factor of our society. The ‘White House’ seams to be on to this and with the way they have done it, will sadly scare Europe into holding on to old school believes a little longer. See what is happening in the US; we don’t want that to happen here now do we! An argument we hear over and over again. What is happening is the ‘disruptive technology’ version for political institutions; the most discerning aspect of a disruptive force is that the ruling class doesn’t have a clue and in the aftermath is left wondering what happened.

All this may sound idealistic, and in a sense it is. I have an optimistic view of what people are capable of together and for those who think it will result in anarchy, they are just scared of loosing power. We still have such a thing as a legal system that has been set up to deal with crimes and excesses and we should be very careful about keeping it strong and functioning. Rules and regulations that limit our lives though should be a thing of the past. I sincerely hope that we renew our search for excellence and give people the means to connect and work together in ways they think best and create fun new stuff. That will certainly not be done through individualism, but by individuals who together form communities that benefit their members.

Let the buyer beware!

We are working with the University of Twente to come up with a tool to measure the value systems of collaborative networks and their impact on the performance of networks. Whenever I talk to people with a scientific background they invariably ask me about the research protocols and how the research is done in a controlled environment that ensures the research can be reproduced. These are not wrong questions to ask, but they are not really applicable to what we are trying to achieve in the short run. We aim to use the results to drive innovation, improve people’s lives and - not unimportantly - provide us with a living. Considering the latter it is important for us not to be bogged down in a discussion on scientific methodology. Since our approach seems to be ‘working’, we are at this point in time less interested in why. We will put a research module, to measure results in the different value domains, into everything we do. It will provide us with an essential feedback loop, but will also ensure that we can provide a scientific basis to what we do in the long run. The research is important, but we have to apply it at the same time.

This is a trend the internet is fuelling. More and more research is being published on sites that are set up specifically for the purpose of spreading research (or is simply done through blogs) without the much praised and, according to many scientists, essential peer review. The upside is clear, the insights can be used right away (Barry Marshal admitted that their find of helicobacter pilori and it’s consequences for the treatment of peptic ulcers would not have been accepted by science any sooner, but would probably have saved hundreds of lives if the internet had been there when they made the discovery), it can be critically reviewed right away, improved by others outside the specific discipline, etc.. The down side is that there is no way of testing the validity of the research done and the information used to produce a new theory or solution.

Apart from the fact that this down side can be remedied by peer review, that is not without it’s problems either. Just look at what is happening around the cloning controversy in South Korea, the paper is still not retracted, since all authors of a paper have to agree to retract it. Another issue with peer review is the selection of peers. As in other contexts, science is put under more and more strain to produce, that means it is easier and easier to find peers who are willing to take a risk in co-authoring a new find so they can make a name for themselves. It is not that such eager scientists are deliberately being fraudulent, but cognitive dissonance does play a larger role in deciding to support certain research. It is like preaching to the choir and clearly not as transparent as throwing it on the internet, but at least there is a validation process. A process that is not in place on the internet.

Neither of these approaches to the development of knowledge is perfect, certainly not in today’s information society. Primarily because neither solves the most important issue that everybody has to face; how to make sense of the incredible amount of information the internet is offering us. Whether you are a scientist looking for new ideas or feedback on your theory, or a sales man looking for new products to sell, you get so much information on a daily basis that it has become impossible to digest. We try to do what we always do and that is filter this information. On the internet it is called search! Sure there is the emergence of tagging, but that is still in its infancy and for most internet users still unknown and in my opinion useful from an individual perspective only, not from a group perspective.

On the internet there is no certainty of having seen it with your own eyes (even in the real world there never was, but at least we ‘saw’ it with our own eyes), so we have to rely on search engines to filter the information we are looking for. I always had this problem that I couldn’t do a search on a concept itself. You always have to make a difficult formula of words, using AND, OR, etc., to get what you are looking for without too much noise.

Google has found a way out of the noise thing, it made a deal with AOL so that the top results of any search show those links that AOL will benefit from and Google will share the profits. There goes transparancy and independence in one stroke? Looks like Microsoft isn't so bad after all, they said no to this AOL proposal because they found it unethical!

How are we going to make sure we get the information we are looking for from sources we can trust? I sure hope someone will come up with a business model that excludes the kind of deals Google is making and provides us with a transparent means of finding stuff that supports our explorations and get's rid of most of the noise. The only thing left for me to say to all of you looking for information of your interest: “Let the buyer beware!”

Challenging Orthodoxy

Why can’t a hen be an egg’s way of getting more eggs? What makes it so difficult for us to look at things from a different perspective then what we have been taught, or have gotten used to? We like things to be as crisp as a winter morning, so when something makes that much sense, why think about it further? It becomes an orthodoxy and is stated fact! I think there is no absolute prove for any theory out there. In history, every theory has been proven wrong, completely or partially. Complete new theories are rare, extremely rare, especially today. What we are doing is make incremental progress and build on existing theories. The funny thing is that most real breakthroughs where created through challenging orthodoxy. The earth is flat!

The last real breakthrough in physics was quantum mechanics. Einstein, having been a revolutionary in promoting his own theory of General Relativity, opposed the thought of infinite possibility; “God doesn’t play with dice”. With all his brilliance he couldn’t accept a universe built on chance and while having contributed to it in the early stages, became a counter revolutionary to the theory of Quantum Mechanics as stated by Bohr and others. Einstein’s orthodoxy was a mechanistic view of the universe, cause and effect! In his mind, there was no room for a context where the observer was the deciding factor/influence regarding the state of the observed. The results of the observation are relative to the position of the observer, absolutely, but created by the observation? That was just a bridge too far, chance had nothing to do with it. At this moment everybody in physics is trying to produce the great unifying theory, combining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with Bohr’s Quantum Mechanics; the main issue being Gravity. Einstein’s objections have still not all been fully countered, but through them, Quantum Mechanics has made quantum leaps in providing us with many applications, from lasers to transistors and even new religions.

The point I am trying to make is that by creating new theories, we are creating new opportunities and new orthodoxies that limit other opportunities ergo they will be challenged. The question; shouldn’t we challenge the challenge to orthodoxy is like the opening sentence; a semantic joke to cover up our confusion. It is human nature to create contexts we are comfortable with. If we don’t like what a theory can potentially do to our comfort zone, we challenge it and try to come up with something that either sustains the status quo, or creates a new one we are comfortable with.

Why write about it here? Well, we are on the brink of a breakthrough regarding our thinking in setting up successful organizations and even defining success. Our theory - by no means new, but certainly not an orthodoxy yet - is based on a networked model of organizing and a different approach to value systems. The network members are motivated not only by financial gains, but by the relationships they have and make, the new knowledge they gain and produce and by the personal growth they experience. According to current believes, the hen - the financial value - is the essential ingredient, because it provides a basis to invest in the other three values. What we are trying to promote is the perspective of the egg; by building the other three values, we provide the basis for optimizing financial growth.

added Value creation

Why only Value with a capital? Because that is the central word here. The fact that we want to add value means we have to create more then there already is and sometimes need to create it from scratch. This is always a joined effort and to make value creation sustainable, sustainability needs to be part of the process of value creation.

Why now? Because we have just had an enjoyable round table and I want the next one to be fantastic. We talked about valuable concepts, shared valuable experiences, engaged in the proces of innovation and interacted as a diverse group of people genuinely interested in each other. In a sense priceless, but we are all still searching for answers when it comes to how to innovate and work together. That's why I used the word enjoyable.

Where we succeeded was in creating an atmosphere of trust and sharing ideas, where we failed was in the combination of focus and engagement and therefore sustainability. We talked about high level concepts that did not paint a rosy future and are not easy to connect to daily life, depending on concept, part of the audience reacted and part took a leave of mental absence. Then we went into a session that explained all about innovation and only when we started putting it into practice did people really engage and it almost became a chicken run. Fun to see, and we should have started doing that sooner.

Were we failed, was not in our setting of the stage, not in our thinking, it was not in our sincerity or in the selection of people present, actually, that is what made the day fun. What we should have done better is engage people in telling stories and add value to each others story that each of us can take home and use to improve our lives. Storytelling is a powerful means of creating value. It touches things we recognize and engage with, it makes it easier to learn things and it makes you want to add your own experiences to the story. In the end it will not be his story or her story, it will be ours. Then and only then will we all start to actively spread the message by retelling the story and engaging other people.

We have three to four months to prepare for the next one, so we'll do our best to put what I just said into practice and have a fantastic third round table! If you have any suggestions, don't hesitate to leave a comment.

The second installment of our round table!

We held the second installment of our round table yesterday. Some could make it again, others were new to what we try to accomplish. As before, a very diverse group of people. This time we wanted to test our progress from social networking, to innovation through collaborative networks and have fun at the same time.

Mathijs started by welcoming everyone to our own collaborative network and explained what is happening in our businesses and why innovation is desperately needed. He discussed the reality of business not sticking to their ‘allotted’ function in the value chain. Your competitor today, may be your supplier tomorrow and your customer may become your competitor. He skipped through the global equilibrium shift and resulting Asian threat to our welfare, since we are bombarded with that on a daily basis and went on explaining the ‘efficiency trap’ we in the western world are in. A double bind where cost cutting and efficiency to the point of anorexia are rewarded by shareholders and driven by fear of loosing what we have. Combined with the ‘Red queen syndrome’, a slow but sure path to an early grave and almost impossible to escape without changing your value system and thereby who you are, as a company and as a manager/employee. Kudo’s to IBM!

Most where engaged by the picture that Mathijs was painting, but I saw some people starting to wonder: “What did I get myself into here?” First, it’s no fun when your value system is brought into question like this. Second, our cups are brimming with concepts and ways to improve things that we see as going in the wrong direction. Yesterday that cup spilled a little and I am really thankful to our network for sticking with us and instead of mentally leaving the room giving us new insights through asking the questions that needed to be asked. Mathijs finished of by stating that the only way we could counter the processes he described was by re-inventing ourselves and innovate.

Valeri Souchkov took over at this point and with a skill honed by years of experience started to explain his concept of structured innovation. Building on TRIZ – a Russian acronym for A Theory of Solving Inventive Problems – he trains engineers and business people in using a structured approach to innovation and solve contradictions. TRIZ is the result of 40 years of research of more than 300 people (and still evolving). His version of Systematic Innovation further expands TRIZ by adding new tools (e.g. root cause analyses) and organizes the process of innovation. Providing a path to follow and have a fun experience exploring new knowledge, be creative and get results. Since TRIZ has been brought outside of the ex-USSR in 1990, it is today recognized by several world-leading organizations such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Mitsubishi as the best practice of innovation. Check his site for more details.

We ended the session by taking a challenge from the audience and pull it through the initial TRIZ stage of problem solving. First we defined the problem in the form of a contradiction; the positive effect we are looking for and the negative effect we get as a result. We then used a matrix where we could look up the inventive principles that have always been used to come up with an ideal solution. These we had to translate to the context of the challenge at hand and see which one came up with a satisfactory direction for solving the issue. We didn’t have enough time to really finish the process, but it did give the owner of the challenge some fun new insights into what he is facing.

During drinks and diner some very lively discussions where going on. On topic, but also about other things that touch our lives. We ended the day with high spirits and I sincerely believe we have the opportunity to create value together as a network of multidisciplinary people.

Thanks everybody for providing an enjoyable afternoon!

What do you want to become when you grow up?

I was asked this question via SMS yesterday. Fifteen minutes after an exciting discussion with an unconventional thinker who feels trapped and is getting a lot of energy from talking to someone who has been where she is, literally! She feels trapped because she works for a company with a very conventional culture and though being appreciated on an individual level by her co-workers, there is no room for her to play and act on her unconventional thoughts and ideas. The culture won’t let her, even though it is being asked of her to play the role of an unconventional thinker. Interesting contradiction!

For the last ten years, I have always given the same answer: ‘I really hope never to find out!’. My fear being that as soon as I know and in a worst case scenario, become what I ‘want’ to be, I am over the hill. I reckon Roger Federer had a dream of becoming the number one tennis player in the world, now that he is, he wants to stay there and become the best player ever (he already is, but let’s not tell him yet). It is in his character to even after his tennis career look for something else to excel in, in his own quiet way. Johnny Mac in his not so quite way, thought to find it in music and though it probably still is his favorite past time, he has devoted himself to tennis again and through hard work and dedication is soundly beating players ten to fifteen years younger on the senior tour. In the process providing all tennis lovers with some serious fun watching him be the genius he still is. Imagine him sitting on a porch enjoying life with his friends. Well let’s put that doom scenario behind us quickly!

Putting the discussion in perspective, I find that the questions she should be asking are: “What creates meaning in your life?” and “What value do you add by what you do?”. These are far more interesting, or as she says sexier questions. They free up your thinking, they open up new possibilities, and they provide a basis for lifelong growth and renewed purpose. They lay the foundation for new experiences and discovery, in your own life and in those of others. That’s what life is about!