連
Chapter 5
Connect
The discipline of Connect has two dimensions: one is about relationships and the human connections we make with the people we work with and live with. The other relates to connecting to the larger realities of our businesses: vision, strategy, processes, market trends, and more—and also connecting across industries and across disciplines—as we move down our innovator's path.
Connection in the interpersonal sense is one of the first things we experience as soon as we are born as our parents reach out to us and hold us in their arms. In those earliest moments of infant life, we form a connection to our parents. This connection and the nurturing that goes along with it is the major source of our mental and physical growth. As we begin to grow up, our connections broaden to include other children, friends, relatives, and other people around us. There is little doubt that, from the beginning, we all have basic instincts and skills needed for connecting with others. At the same time, and to varying degrees, as we learn how to connect, we also learn how to treat people the way we would like to be treated.
In our businesses, as in our personal lives, connections and relationships are vitally important. Connections we make internally as well as externally are critical to our success as individuals as well as the success of teams, and of organizations as a whole.
John Swainson, the president of Dell Software, concurs:
Most innovations are not the creations of one person. There are some exceptions obviously, but most innovations are collective accomplishments, where a lot of people put a lot of things together. Yes, certainly, a design genius like Steve Jobs brought insight into how Apple products ought to be positioned and packaged, but it took many, many, many people to get those products to the point where Steve's insight could be translated into reality.
It's easy to see why connections are important. People do business with those they know and trust. With modern globalization, the benefits from collaboration are greater today than ever before, making our connections even more important. Using them, we can leverage everyone else's good ideas and experiences to make our ideas even better. And others can do the same, leveraging ours.
We all gain greater momentum in innovation by leveraging relationships and connections with customers, partners, vendors, professional colleagues and friends, acquaintances, internal teams, and individuals. Now, we can challenge each other and learn from each other—and the result from collaboration in most cases will be a win-win-win solution to any problem we encounter. Each party wins, and together, we all win.
The character for lian is composed of two elements that represent forms of transportation—車 che, meaning “a cart,” or “car,” on the right, and “a boat” underneath and to the left. Thus, in traditional Chinese, the term connotes speed, by all means possible, for connecting with people, communicating outward, making connections, and putting two and two together quickly.
The character can also imply “catch,” or “fit,” and also conveys 同心同意 tongxin tongyi, a modern Chinese term, literally meaning “same mind, same intention.” People connect first, and then they may begin to see things the same way, or develop the same intentions. It does not always happen right away, and that's where leadership comes in. Effective leadership makes it possible for people to connect (on a high level), but also to connect with many persons (across a broad plain), which also expands one's personal horizon.
連結 lianjie, 連接 lianjie are both extensions of the idea of connecting. Finally, using the characters 感同身受, or said to have a common bond, in the sense of two persons feeling the same resonance. In the corporate world, this sense of two or more persons “in tune” with the same vibrations can be extrapolated to include other sensitivities—such as becoming one with corporate strategy, your customers' needs, and the industry as a whole.
Dr. Tenley Albright, director of MIT Collaborative Initiatives, is an iconic innovation leader who has mastered the art of connecting people from many different industries, institutions, organizations, professions, generations, countries, and so on to solve common issues. When she first started her MIT Collaborative Initiative—Module 5—she invited seventy people to convene for a brainstorming session. These people were from our military services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines), financial services, technology companies, consumer goods, manufacturing, health care, universities, entrepreneurs, publishing, and more. Her experience told her that people from different backgrounds would take a fresh look at problems and would be able to provide many more new and innovative ways of resolving them. Tenley recognized this need early on, while still a student:
I was always concerned at Harvard Medical School about how hard it was to know all the things that were going on. There was so much wonderful work going on, but I found that the people in labs next to each other, or in buildings next to each other, didn't know what their colleagues were doing. And that made me feel that we had to do something about connecting. There was so much good, individual research being done, but it was not being brought together. I thought all work would benefit if we could bring people together. I knew all their efforts could become quite a bit stronger if they join hands or arms or minds. And based on my feelings about that and my feelings that if you get people together from very different perspectives—people who wouldn't ordinarily meet each other—but are at the very top of their own field, then you might be able to improve something or break a logjam. Although we need experts in every field, very often they reach a plateau of sorts and stop moving upwards. Maybe they can't move ahead on their own anymore and need an infusion of new ideas from a different field? To me it's a little bit like a plant. You can give it water, and it will only grow so much. But if you give it other nutrients, like ideas from different sources, it will grow in ways no one could have imagined.
As Tenley knew, the list of people, organizations, and entities with whom we need to connect is a full one. We have to stay connected to people with whom we work: our team members, our colleagues, our bosses. We need to connect with other teams in the company so we'll know about any initiatives they might have underway. We need to stay closely connected to our business partners and our vendors so that we'll be the first to hear about their new offerings, and they'll be the first to hear about our coming needs. We have to stay connected to our competitors, so we know how to position ourselves competitively. In addition, we need to connect globally with other industries and sectors to leverage other ideas and expertise. The list of connections goes on and on.
As I said earlier, people prefer to do business with people they know and trust. We all are more likely to go the extra mile for people with whom we have positive relationships and mutual respect. In Chapter 1, Listen, I mentioned that I had worked with the CEO of one of State Street's largest vendors to dramatically improve the terms of a very problematic contract. There are many stories like that about vendors coming through when the chips were down! When we treat vendors fairly and honorably, they can truly become our strategic partners. And under the right circumstance, such as the one Tarkan Maner, previous CEO of Wyse Technology, serial entrepreneur, and investor, describes, they can even be our “Santa Claus”:
My mother always told me, “Love life and love people.” My sister and I grew up believing that. I like to give everybody a chance with trust. Sometimes you might get hurt, but what is the point of living otherwise? I've learned that you have to be prudent in relationships, but you should still give everyone a chance. Do we get betrayed, and do we sometimes get let down? Yes, of course. But for every person who let me down, I have many, many more amazing relationships to show for my taking a chance.
How does this work in business? I'll tell you. I went to a meeting with a customer today—a really great, really charming person. But his company is having a lot of problems, many problems. Their revenue is way down and they just let go of 11,000 people. I know they have no money. But at the same time, I know they need to change their technology if they are going to survive. So I said to this customer, “I will give you the products you need for free. Keep using them, upgrade them, and when you have money, and the budget is back in shape, then you'll pay me. I'll be here—I am not going away. You are not going away.”
We are doing great—we're very profitable. So I said, “I'll share this success with you.” My customer said, “I'm so touched that you're doing this. You're like Santa Claus! You are never going to go away, and we will be here with you.” This is how a relationship of trust works.
Not many of us are so fortunate to have Santa Claus as a vendor. But all of us can develop mutually supportive relationships. The best of these, naturally, take time, as both parties establish positive track records, a body of common experience, and trust.
These are the kinds of connections we should value greatly, especially as they grow from beginnings as ordinary business relationships into lasting connections, and as trust grows stronger with every interaction. It is often said that we live in a far more connected world than ever before, but having 500+ friends on Facebook is not the same as knowing we can count on someone with whom we've had positive work experiences in the past. It's especially gratifying when such connections continue to grow stronger over time and in spite of geography. As we all know, our business partners now can be sitting on the other side of the world. Our customers may be in towns or cities we never heard of before and need help learning to pronounce correctly!
Tom Mendoza of NetApp gives a great example of the benefit of connection when it comes to customers—how a strong, trusting connection, in this case based on service, can keep the business relationship strong and help it endure.
You can never lead in every area of a product. But if your customers believe in you as a company, if they trust you because you were there when they had a problem and you made that problem go away, and they know that you'll work with them, well . . . the next person to come up with a better product feature, say, doesn't always get the next deal because your customer is thinking, “Yeah, I hear you, but I don't know you. I'm not sure how you are going to react when I have a problem. But I know how they react.” So, it is so important to gain, keep, and not lose the trust of the customer, and it's something that requires a total company focus.
It's probably obvious by now that the discipline of Promote, which I discussed in Chapter 4, can be put into practice and even made more effective through the discipline of Connect. For innovators, the success of any major initiative will depend on our ability to connect with stakeholders and internal teams within the organization, and customers, vendors, and business partners outside. Those connections will inspire individuals and groups to buy in, and encourage them to challenge each other to do even better at their next opportunity. We also need to connect with each other's experience, keeping our eyes and our minds open to what we have learned and how each experience might relate to another. In a fascinating interview with Wired in 1996, Steve Jobs said,
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.1
This observation applies to innovative teams and organizations as well as to creative individuals. Focusing only on what is happening within our own walls is a mistake on many levels, and certainly not conducive to innovation. The more we connect—and the more broadly we connect—the more perspective we bring to our thinking and solutions.
Deborah Ancona, professor of management and director of the MIT Leadership Center, describes the concept of X-Teams, where the X stands for external:
If you look at most of the books on what makes for high-performing teams, the typical answer includes things like clear goals, clear roles, commitment, trust among members, good communication, and effective group processes. All of that is absolutely important. But it can also build impermeable boundaries and a kind of hubris.
You can't just connect inside the team, you really have to create large networks outside the team, across teams, within the organization, up the organization, and outside the organization with partners, with stakeholders, with people along the supply chain. You need people with connectivity—or an ability to just go out and talk to others in your core customer group, in the marketplace, in organizations that are doing things better than you are.
That ability to go outside, to go across the boundaries, to engage in external sense-making and ambassadorship—that's critical. All of that requires a very open system, a very externally oriented kind of team.
Our global teams and strategic partners can offer significant assistance and insight as we're planning for a change or innovation—or should be planning and just don't realize it yet. They can provide us with a more complete perspective and share lessons learned from similar experiences. I always connected widely with others in my work at State Street, and it helped us resolve our issues, improve the quality of our services, and reduce costs. This approach also established a higher level of trust between different companies, which led to better partnerships. Also, by treating strategic partners as members of our extended staff, we fostered teamwork and collaboration among all team members, leading to renewed effort on the part of everyone, since we were now striving for a common goal.
Deborah continues:
There's a lot of potential for competitive advantage in managing the supply chain. And you can't manage it if you don't really understand it or know who is doing what and the value each piece provides. So, this notion of going outside, connecting outside, is resulting in executives taking themselves out of their comfort zone. For instance, there are top executives at Costco going into the villages in Central America. Why? Because they now have an interest in farming sustainability, because they are interested in safety of supply. If all of those farms go out of business, their supply of fruits and vegetables could disappear. Similarly, Coke is partnering with the World Wildlife Foundation, to deal with water. Companies are forging very different kinds of partnerships, thinking in an expanded view about different stakeholders along the supply chain, and networking with others who often see the world very differently.
Another interesting approach is Dean Kamen's notion of coopertition, a term coined to represent the ideals of cooperation and competition. Interacting positively when interests mesh, teams help each other, pool knowledge, and work together to some degree, even though they are at the same time in competition. In one famous example, a robotics competition sponsored by Dean required teams to help one another rebuild robots damaged in the event in order to get them ready for the next round of competition.
Although he doesn't use the word coopertition, Sam Palmisano takes the concept even further, seeing a future in which major organizations, in order to be successful, will cooperate with each other as much as they compete. Old boundaries that have existed between organizations, disciplines, governments, and even between leaders are already falling, and new and productive connections are being established everywhere.
Successful global leaders are taking advantage of the powerful new capabilities we have available. Seizing upon an instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent world enables any organization to take waste out, to give customers and communities what they want, to organize work differently. These leaders see themselves as collaborators. Competition is essential as a spur to innovation. But in a world of interdependent systems, competition needs to be complemented and tempered by collaboration across old boundaries: across academic disciplines, industries, and nations—and even among competitors. This applies to individual leadership styles, too. The most active and successful leaders today see themselves as part of global communities and peer groups. They listen as much as they speak. They are hungry to learn from other people, from colleagues and communities, even people they will never meet in person.
The ability to connect with others is one of the most essential “soft skills” a person can have. As I mentioned earlier, we all have that ability when we are infants and very young children. But often it doesn't last; many of us lose the skill as we grow older, especially as we enter the competitive world of business. Many of us also lose our appreciation of the impact connections can have on our lives, careers, and the ability to achieve our ultimate goals. We can be very task-focused in our jobs and miss important opportunities to reach out to others. Worse, in the course of our work, the intensity it often requires, and the pressure of deadlines, we may even unintentionally alienate the very people on whom we will someday need to rely. No matter how skilled and dedicated we are at our jobs, a great deal of our success is determined by the quality of our relationships with others. This, in turn, is a matter of the respect we show others, and the extent to which we practice emotional intelligence. As we discussed in Chapter 2, Lead, emotional intelligence allows us to empathize with others, to understand their needs, objectives, and concerns. Admiral Mullen provides a great example of the role that emotional intelligence and connection plays in our personal and professional success:
As Congress is often pointing out, they really are the ones that decide where the money goes. We in the military are just giving them ideas about resourcing certain technologies or approaches. In my own . . . almost 20 years of experience with Congress, I have found—despite what might be portrayed in the press—that the vast majority of Congressmen and -women are very open to new ideas.
I've found that it's important to stay engaged with the Congressmen and -women and work with them. When we do that, they usually are very supportive. You have to stay connected on a frequent basis with both Members as well as their staffers. When I was a more junior admiral, I would deal more with the staffers than I did the principals, but as I became more senior, it was the opposite. One of the things I really tried to make sure I never did was forget the principals' staff. Like all of us, Congressmen and -women have an awful lot on their plate. I always stay in touch with the staffers because they are the ones that study the issue in detail and they are the ones that set the tables for their bosses.
Connect: Levels of Effectiveness
As I've done with the other disciplines, I'd like to share my observations on the different levels of Connect I have experienced and observed in my years in business. We connect with those around us at one of three basic levels. As in other chapters, we should make a go of determining what level we are operating at and what we need to do to get to the next one.
Level One: Stand-Alone
At Level One we exhibit a silo-type mentality. We remain isolated in our thinking, approach, and solutions. We may go through the motions of collaboration, but often with the intent of just getting it over with. (We call that clobberation; more about this phenomenon later.) This leader is purely transaction-focused and has not understood the importance of relationship building.
Level Two: Integrated
At Level Two we are well connected, and before making decisions, we weigh a wide range of input from a diverse group of stakeholders. We align ourselves and our initiatives with corporate strategy, or with existing or planned solutions. We seek and unify stakeholder perspectives to ensure alliances and create effective solutions. This leader makes sure to invest in long-term relationships.
Level Three: Intersected
At Level Three we consistently reach outside of our usual “circle of connectivity” to find and leverage innovative ideas and new ways of creating business value. We actively seek out diverse and seemingly unconnected industries, age groups, technologies, and more. We enjoy helping others to succeed. This leader establishes enduring partnerships through integrity, trust, and generosity.
The Connect Culture
In Asian culture, connections can be the most critical factor in a business's success. In China, where I grew up, a connection is more than a simple, transactional relationship. Connections can take years to cultivate and establish, and individuals and businesses need them to succeed. This manner of doing business has played a vital role in Asian commerce for thousands of years, overshadowing the practices of the modern business world, which is a relatively recent phenomenon. The culture still exists today, just as in centuries past, and merchants acquire new business by being properly connected and recommended by friends or relatives.
My brother and sisters and I observed the value of connections from the time we were very young. My parents always had many friends and relatives stopping by to visit us—almost every day. I don't remember very many times when we had dinner just by ourselves. The good thing was that we got to know many other people really well and enjoyed their company. Then, these people would bring their own friends, and also invite us to their homes. Connections were always being made. If we ate alone, my father would ask me and my siblings to tell him what happened to us during that day. We each tried to construct an interesting story about our friends and their parents and our activities for that day. It was his way of being connected with us and learning about the connections we were making ourselves.
By this time, my father had become the master of all captains and crews for a shipping company, and also for Shanghai harbor. Through his work, my parents got to know many people. In those years, workers in China didn't have vacation days. If they wanted to take time off, they had to resign from their company, and then find another job after their vacation!
My mother had a golden heart and was very generous and passionate about helping people in need. Even though she was a housewife, she became the equivalent of a “placement officer” for her vast number of acquaintances. When someone came to her for help, I often heard her say, “I know Mr. So and So, and Mr. So and So knows Mrs. Such and Such, and she needs a worker. . . .” In this way, she was usually able to find people jobs.
Sometimes, we children also got involved. I remember a friend of my parents once sought my mother's help for a business transaction with a company she had never dealt with before. We discovered that the father of one of my classmates was the head of the business that they wanted to connect with. So my classmate was able to introduce my parents to her parents, who in turn introduced them to the family seeking to do business. The outcome of all this connectedness was a successful business transaction that made everyone happy.
So we grew up understanding the critical nature of connections in our lives and our work. It comes naturally to me to treat customers as “honored guests” and vendors and suppliers as “strategic partners.”
My parents always said that we must treat people as they personally liked to be treated. They also told us that we should not connect with people when we needed a favor for ourselves—that would be using people inappropriately. We should always make connections with the people we meet when we don't need anything from them, and we should always help them whenever we can. Then, when we need help, grateful people would reciprocate the favors.
With the culture and training I experienced while growing up, it became very natural for me to connect with the people I meet and always seek out the positive side of relationships, even if some of the people I am dealing with are not so nice or sincere.
Connect and Cooperate
As Dr. Tenley Albright and her work have shown us, connections have the effect of bringing us into a larger community where we are exposed to ideas and points of view that will probably be different from ours and new sources of information, all of which will help us find better ways of identifying solutions.
Remember that old story about the blind men and the elephant? Trying to identify the thing in front of them, each man touched a different part of the animal and so believed it to be something different: the man touching the trunk thought it was a snake; the leg became a pillar; the tail a rope, and so on. Imagine how quickly they could have figured it out if they had connected before trying to answer the question!
Related to the story about those poor men trying so ineffectively to solve the elephant problem is the unfortunate tendency for some of us to stay disconnected from those around us to the point of isolation. This can be seen in the case of individuals, teams, and business divisions and can give rise to “silo solutions.” Many people become overwhelmed by the pressure of addressing multiple and often conflicting opinions. Rather than deal with the challenge, trying to avoid difficult interactions with others, they isolate themselves and their teams from others. This tendency usually ends up greatly oversimplifying the problem or the opportunity they are facing. And while this approach simplifies decision-making and action-taking, it eliminates all the advantages of collaboration. The result is that their solution becomes a “point solution” that perhaps deals with the immediate problem inside the silo, but doesn't help the organization as a whole and ends up adding complexity and cost. Connections, of course, mitigate the tendency toward silo solutions.
There is another form of unconnectedness that I need to talk about. I mentioned it earlier and it's called clobberation—a term coined by my chief of staff, Marcy Wintrub, that combines the words “clobber” and “collaboration.” Clobberation occurs when a team leader goes through all the motions of collaboration—inviting us to all the right meetings, copying us on all the memos, adding our names to every document. But, in truth, they are not listening to our input—they really don't care about our ideas or concerns or proposed solutions. We leave their meetings feeling clobbered by their predefined and aggressively defended solution, not collaborated with to develop something we can all believe in. What makes this behavior even worse is that our names have been added to their documentation, making it appear that we have bought in to their silo solution.
Another common mistake is going to the opposite extreme—trying to address the needs and concerns of all stakeholders right away. That doesn't work either. Many people think that collaboration requires consensus. I don't believe that. I think successful collaboration requires leadership. A good leader listens to the requirements, suggestions, and concerns of team members and then synthesizes that input into the best possible solution, given the circumstances. Any open issues are recognized and a plan is put into place for addressing them going forward. Rather than working toward complete consensus, the leader finds a path forward that everyone can support.
Yes, connecting is about preserving relationships, increasing buy-in, and generating enthusiasm—and still being able to get a good solution out the door, on time and on budget.
Inventor and former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Myhrvold, addresses these issues directly—how the lack of connection can hamper innovation:
Probably more start-ups and projects fail because of human issues than technology issues. People disagree. They can't communicate. They can't manage. So you have to understand the human side as well as the technological side. The ideal team is something that combines both. It's got some great ideas and great idea makers—brilliant people who can come up with ideas. And they have the right structure and management and the right human qualities so they're able to communicate with each other, manage the thing, and communicate with others as well. All those qualities are what really make us successful.
Connecting Strategy, Processes, and Systems
There are other layers of meaning in Connect we need to be aware of as we work, plan, and innovate: We need to make sure we are connected to larger realities, like the company's vision, or its mission, or its goals and long-term strategies. And while maintaining those connections, we have to stay connected to the requirements of day-to-day production as well. We also have to connect to the marketplace as a whole, so we can keep up with advances and trends in our industry.
When he was CEO of Symantec, John Thompson was very open to new ideas, as long as they were closely connected to the business's strategy:
I think it's important in any organization, particularly in a tech organization, that innovation be allowed to bubble up from the bottom. And so the mantra at Symantec was that innovation would be driven from the smart people across the company. Whatever job you had, if you had a great idea, I would be open to listening to that great idea. And people knew that, so they were not bashful about sharing their point of view, and I was also equally unabashed with them if I had to say, “That one doesn't quite strike the hot button for us.” Eventually they caught the drift that I was very much focused on being the leader in security, and therefore if they didn't have ideas around that, they might as well stay out of my office.
It's significant that John mentions innovation bubbling up from the bottom. There is an emerging trend in the use of processes and tools that solicit and welcome new ideas from all kinds of sources. Companies are increasingly inviting innovation ideas from employees at all levels, customers, and vendors, and not limiting themselves to what their “idea people” have to say.
Connecting with strategy applies to internal process and systems innovation as much as it does to product innovation. Most of us are very familiar with the ways in which silo-thinking can create inefficient and ineffective solutions. As customers, we have experienced being transferred from department to department with little continuity or progress on our problem or request. Sometimes the several customer reps we speak with on a single call almost seem to be working for different companies. Within an organization, we often see how point solutions can create problems for other functions, or at best do not help solve problems systemwide. For example, we've probably all seen situations where multiple solutions require similar data, yet each group organizes and formats their data in such starkly different ways that any connection is lost. The role of translating and synchronizing data across systems often falls to the unfortunate end-user that these systems have in common, subverting the whole intent of automation!
In addition to being inefficient, these practices can lead to unreliable data and certainly prevent real-time insight or consolidated reporting. Although they may appear to solve departmental problems in the very short term, they're often just shifting problems to other parts of the organization, and even compounding them. Solutions like these are much more likely to create complexity and cost than business value and competitive advantage. Innovators can solve immediate problems too, yet at their best they do so in a way that integrates rather than isolates solutions.
Dell Software's President John Swainson's remark earlier in the book remains relevant here. He said that the future of innovation will be about ways in which technologies get integrated together. “A lot of innovation happens because of the ability to connect different technologies together and the new capabilities that they enable.”
Here's another example of skillful connection in innovation when discoveries and processes in one industry are applied to another. Who would have imagined that automobile manufacturing had relevance to surgical procedures? As Nathan Myhrvold points out:
Car companies build cars with robots. Welding robots, in particular, weld the various pieces of steel together. That's pretty routine. Surgeons, on the other hand, haven't used robots until very recently. But there is an increasing use of specialized robots to do certain kinds of surgeries, particularly laparoscopic surgeries where you can use these little robot arms to fit inside a patient, making a smaller hole. So, you are applying an idea that was used in car factories, used for lots of other things, and all of a sudden you are applying that in a brand-new area—surgery.
Ways to Connect
One of the most effective ways to begin making connections is to reach out to people in a way that makes them feel comfortable. Even creating a comfortable environment helps. If we can make people feel at home (relatively speaking of course) in the office, we are moving in the right direction.
Let's take a tip from Chef Ming Tsai and his restaurant business, where nurturing connections with both customers and employees is a critical part of success.
Customers look at price, and they'll only come back if they think they are getting good value. Otherwise you'll just see them once a year for a birthday, and you can't survive on birthday and anniversary celebrations. You have to make sure that when they leave they're happy, and they're full, and they're feeling that they also received great value. That's when they come back. When they do, and you see them, and you welcome them, you feel like they're family and they feel like they're home. And this is true for your employees too. Feeling like a part of the family is a lot better than feeling like a worker. Here at Blue Ginger, we've produced nine marriages and ten kids. That's serious family!
Our offices are not like our homes, but what can we personally do in the workplace that creates a comfortable atmosphere where good business relationships and connections can be nurtured? Leaders have to like people, show that they care about them, and operate an open, friendly, and inspirational environment. People are most productive and creative when they are in an environment where there is no fear but instead inspiration and trust. The team would be most productive when they can share their ideas and collaborate with each other. Connections between team members can occur somewhat naturally, especially if the right people are recruited and the right kind of chemistry exists.
A diverse team can deliver a more comprehensive solution. Young people, not weighed down or prejudiced by experience, can offer fresh and interesting perspectives. They tend to see all the possibilities and opportunities instead of obstacles. They can be powerful drivers of innovation, as Admiral Mullen expresses it—
I think the young in particular are almost naturally more innovative. They are not inhibited or restrained by life experiences, which with rare exception adults almost always are and more experienced people almost always are. (Of course, there are exceptions.) So if youth is just so much more unconstrained, how do we cultivate their spirit and their ideas and make them work with experience? A good leader is there for both the youthful and older team members to connect to. If the connection is not made, the young are going to go somewhere else to innovate, someplace where they are welcomed and their ideas and opinions sought.
Connecting with My Team
Although I was hired to oversee State Street's corporate technology infrastructure, it was several years before infrastructure functions in the company's global sites began reporting in to me. That was a very dramatic change for the organization, which was highly decentralized at the time. People who worked at site locations did not always view corporate functions with high regard. Besides being thought of as very United States–centric, corporate functions were sometimes considered slower, behind the times, and not as in touch with customer needs. With those kinds of prevailing attitudes, no sense of camaraderie could develop across geographical locations. When interactions did occur, especially between corporate and personnel at the site locations, it was usually because an issue of some sort had arisen and needed to be dealt with. As a result, relations were tense and people were wary about the new global model.
As soon as I could, I arranged a large-scale team meeting to bring together two layers of infrastructure managers reporting to me. I also invited several key partners from related functions, such as finance and procurement. All in all, we had about sixty people come together for two days. We knew this was our chance to change how people thought and felt about each other, so my support team spent hours just planning the table seating, as if this event were a wedding! We strategically mixed and matched, populating each table with people from very different functions and locations.
We put together our agenda with a light touch. Day ONE was about Ownership, Navigation, Escalation, the essential practices allowing individuals to deliver customer-focused service in a global organization. Day TWO was about Teamwork, World-Class Quality, and One Global Process, the commitments that bind people and teams together. We took great care to avoid making the event a corporate orientation session that told our global partners “this is how we do things here.” In fact, we wanted the session to provide a unified global perspective, a first for all attendees. We filled each day with speakers, exercises, and plenty of time for people to get to know each other. They did. Preconceived assumptions and long-held resentments began melting away as people got to see that their counterparts were not so very different from them after all. It was a great, productive session that set the stage for a truly global organization.
At three in the afternoon on the final day, our CIO, Joe Antonellis, was scheduled to stop by. We decided to line up for a photograph so that he could join us when he arrived. One of the building staff offered to take the picture, and I busied myself organizing this large group into four neat rows. I had just finished when Joe walked in. “Come on over, Joe!” I called, motioning him to join us. As we stood by the group, I realized I had organized the rows so well that it was not at all clear where Joe and I would fit. He's as tall as I am small, so we stood there for a moment. Suddenly, Masood, our command center's shift manager, shouted out a suggestion, “Madge, why don't you and Joe get down on the floor?” There was a very uncomfortable silence for a moment as people thought about what he had just said. Without missing a beat, Steve, our availability management lead, called out with faux pity, “Well, it was nice working with you, Masood!” The room erupted in laughter just as Joe and I stepped into place and the camera clicked. Every person's face in the picture is filled with joy and laughter, none more so than Masood and Joe. It's the best picture ever and a powerful representation of connection. The team got hold of the digital file and made me a framed poster-sized copy that has hung on my wall ever since.
MIT Collaborative Initiatives and the Albright Challenge
I'd like to end the chapter with an examination of the MIT Collaborative Initiatives, an initiative cofounded by Dr. Tenley Albright, whom we met earlier in the chapter. She is, in my opinion, the master of getting together people from different industries, different backgrounds, and different age groups to find innovative ways to solve the world's most pressing problems.
We need to change the way things are done—this statement is resonating around the globe. Our problems are more complex; our resources are fewer. Since its inception, MIT Collaborative Initiatives has been working quietly to support a change in the way we approach problems and manage complex, multidisciplinary, large-scale challenges.
No longer can we be content keeping pockets of deep knowledge isolated from each other. We must reach across, connect, and create a larger body of shared experience to draw on. This type of collaboration, coupled with a systems-based approach and tools designed specifically to manage complex conceptual problems, can lead us to innovation.
Based on this belief and a conviction that progress can move much faster if experts and organizations both within and outside of a given problem area work together, we cofounded MIT Collaborative Initiatives (MIT-CI).
We are interested in speeding up the pace of innovation and change in all areas of societal concern, including health-medical issues. The mission of MIT-CI comes from an understanding that there is power in acknowledging and learning from any successful transformation, whether in our own silo of expertise or someone else's.
Over the past seven years, MIT-CI has brought leaders from multiple areas of expertise together for highly interactive meetings focused on knowledge sharing and idea creation. Attendees at these meetings have ranged from the Secretary for Veterans Affairs and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to the CEOs of Stonyfield Farms, Coca-Cola, and the Mayo Clinic, the president of Doctors Without Borders, MIT institute professors, and other leaders in healthcare, research, business, academia, NGOs, and the military.
From these meetings we have developed projects that apply the same interdisciplinary approach combined with systems thinking to significant, intractable problems that resist easy fixes: stroke, childhood obesity, and posttraumatic stress in the active military. On each of these projects MIT-CI has worked with an academic research partner with expertise in systems thinking and design.
The potential value of our approach, which considers a broad range of factors affecting an issue and then determines where the pivotal intersections occur, is great.
MIT-CI has partnered with principal investigators from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Urban Design Lab in the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and has built multidisciplinary advisory boards to guide, inform, and promote these research efforts.
Each of these efforts has led to innovative solutions:
- In Stroke, an area that was generally seen to be working well by the medical community at the time, the project challenged the standard protocol and demonstrated key areas where changes in the system could save money and improve outcomes.
- The Childhood Obesity project determined that lots of good work was being done to fight this epidemic but that unless there was a change in the food system—the way food is produced, processed, and distributed—these efforts were fighting an uphill battle. The project is now working on developing a tool that will demonstrate the health impact of every dollar spent on infrastructure to support regional food systems.
- As of this date, the Posttraumatic Stress project is still underway.
In 2011, facing the reality that many of the societal issues that were seen to have reached an impasse when MIT Collaborative Initiatives was formed were still challenging leadership and the economy, we held two meetings focused on log jams. The meetings provided a forum for discussion and debate on the value of systems thinking and collaboration in breaking through log jams of ideology and conflicting incentives to effective action. They highlighted MIT-CI's experience as well as models of successful application and difficulties of this approach in business, government, the U.S. military, and healthcare.
A fundamental outcome of these meetings was the realization that to break a log jam you need innovative leadership, cross-specialty collaboration, a way to measure success, and an acceptance of the possibility of failure. Also clear was consensus that rising leaders must be included in the conversation if we expect future innovation and a shift in the paradigm of solution building.
In response to these findings, MIT-CI is currently launching the Albright Challenge, using what we have learned in the past seven years to challenge rising leaders to come together around an issue of societal concern. The focus of the Challenge will be an intense five-day working session based at MIT. In that session our leaders will be put into teams of ten to twelve people and given a specific challenge to work through. The sessions will be facilitated using design methodology uniquely suited to managing complex problems and promoting idea generation. The teams will also be given an opportunity to work with some of the most powerful leaders of our time in small group or lecture settings.
Based on the Helsinki Design Lab's Studio Model for driving systemic change, the goals of the Albright Challenge are to generate creative solutions to seemingly intractable problems; spark action and build momentum towards real change; develop a pool of leaders open to cross-disciplinary collaboration, design methodology, and fostering innovation; provide a dynamic environment for rising leaders and current leaders to interact and learn from each other; and create a community where our participants can “act their way into new thinking.”
Connect—Concrete Steps for Putting This Discipline into Action
Individual
Establishing relationships and connections should be a part of everyone's everyday habit. It's as important as everything else we do on the job. They should never be sacrificed in the effort to make some particular task happen—by ignoring people in our haste, or humiliating them when we catch them in a mistake, or the hundred other ways we can hurt people as we try to get a job done. In the end, those relationships and those people are what matter for the bigger picture, the big results we are looking for from our team—not to mention the positive effect on our lives and health when we work in harmony with others.
When focusing too narrowly on getting the task at hand completed—an issue of the moment—endangers a long-term relationship, we have to step back and restore our priorities. And while connections will occasionally be weakened by the stress associated with projects of great importance and the natural pressures of change, we should always take the high road of maintaining strong connection, rather than the low road of conflict.
Team and Organization
In addition to making personal connections, an innovation leader has to make sure that team members connect with one another, with the company at large, and with the world outside. The team leader can help develop internal connections by ensuring that team members understand the requirements of each corporate stakeholder, so that everyone can work together to reach the overall objectives, not just their individual pieces of the puzzle. Team and organizational leaders can help forge external connections by encouraging participation in industry events; ensuring close customer contact; and bringing in speakers, industry experts, partners, vendors, and others who can widen staff horizons.
We can also reexamine the prevailing system of rewards. Do incentives exist for team leaders to form working relationships with other teams? How about between business units? Can bonus systems be set up that reward, for example, sales growth throughout the organization rather than just in our own small groups? Finally we must encourage an evaluation of values and character in the criteria for recruiting new employees. Many companies are already doing this.
Note
1 Gary Wolf, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” Wired 04.02, 1996, www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html.