Companies/Books mentioned (from what I can remember):
All Marketers are Liars - Sith Seth Godin
10 faces of Innovation - Tom Kelly
IDEO.com
The Cluetrain Manifesto
Bob Garfield - transcript - also updated version here

And apropos the conversation in the lecture around the Dept of Home Affairs as a brand, it could help a lot in re-imagining how that transform that organisational failure.

Anyway here's the presentation [pdf, 2MB - right-click and save as..].

Also, talking about the macro, systems view of the world, I found this book - Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers quite fascinating.

The most succinct quote to capture the essence of how to see differently, to be creative, is through collecting different thinking frameworks, is this one:

"What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And you hang your actual experience ... on this latticework of powerful models. And with that system, things gradually get to fit together in a way that enhances cognition...." - Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's partner)

I wrote this for a client recently, and was promoted to post it here after reading Dave's post about innovation.

Infectious Innovation

A brief discussion about creating a culture of innovation inside organizations.

Any talk about innovation has to first create an understanding of what the term means and how it fits into the organisational context.

Innovation is concerned about tomorrow's revenue. However, organisations are generally designed around today's revenue, and with that, the associated pressures and initiatives to reduce variance and increase efficiency.

So that is why it is extremely difficult for new ideas and creative thinking to take root and find a nurturing environment; the day-to-day operational focus creates a thinking style that is reactive and judgmental. If one had to think of a metaphor to describe this, the Emergency Room environment is a useful one.

So it's clear that for new ideas to emerge and flourish, an appropriate environment needs to be present, much like a Greenhouse.

A Greenhouse is preferably a physical space that stimulates participants into a headspace of fresh thinking, but more importantly, it's also a headspace where certain behaviours are encouraged, whilst others (typical in the operational/ER space) that are detrimental to the creative process are discouraged.

Innovation & Creativity

At this point a distinction between innovation and creativity needs to be made. Our take is that creativity is the raw material for the innovation process, the posing of questions, probing new lines of thinking, the generation of ideas, the discovery of new connections.

 It is a behaviour and thinking style that is needed to support the innovation process.

Innovation can be thought of as "ideas in action". For the ideas to have any relevance, they need to add value to the organisation with a range of options, from reinventing processes to creating new industries. Innovation needs the right mix of supporting structural elements and senior leadership worldviews. Hence the lens that innovation is about tomorrow's revenue.

It's also about action, and prototyping and experimenting, invention, with roughly formed concepts is a key part of the process - the mindset of getting something 100% right before engaging the customer or board derails the innovation process in many organisations.

Continuous improvement I would argue is less about innovation and more about applied learning, as the mindset is all about getting better answers to the same old questions. True innovation is coming up with new questions.

Creating A Culture Of Innovation

The interplay between the innovation and creativity can best be illustrated by viewing the organisation through a systems thinking lens. There are four cascading levels in which to see the organisation system:

 Worldview or Weltanschauung:  

This is the how the system architects see the world, what mental models they have employed in creating and unfolding their vision. Think of the different worldviews that Henry Ford and Steve Jobs had, the framework of ideas and beliefs through which they interpreted the world around them.

 Vision:
The above mental models inform the development of a vision of what the system architects want to achieve. Ford's vision centered on mass production, Job's was about building an "insanely great" design-led organisation.

 Structure:
Both the worldview and vision in turn inform the design of the organisation's systemic structure, and that includes the cultural, procedural, policy, and infrastructural elements.

- Behaviour:
Patterns of behaviour, in turn, are influenced by the structural elements, the interplay between the cultural hiring filters, prevailing expectations of desired behaviour, and reward systems (intrinsic and extrinsic).

The figure adjacent illustrates how these systemic levels relate to each other. Of course with any system, the interplay is not linear and the depiction below is a highly simplified version to help frame why innovation and creative thinking initiatives sometimes fail.

Organisational Change

To train and coach teams in creative thinking, grounded in challenges and problems they face in the organisation, without a parallel shift in the worldviews and structural design of the organisation may result in teams not realising the full potential of these new thinking behaviours.

Since behaviours are bounded by the limits of the structural design 'container', and that in turn is limited by the organisation's leadership worldview, the new creative actions by individuals run out of steam, killed by these well-used phrases: "We tried that last year", "Management won't buy that."

An example helps to illustrate this interplay.

Top leadership buys into the idea (ie. their worldview shifts) that for innovation to really change the game for their business, customers need to be actively recruited and integrated into the research and insight process from the beginning, and at all points of contact. (Traditional market research by contrast is generally used to answer preconceived questions that the firm has, and are mostly answered in artificial environments like the focus group.)

Teams are then coached in creative thinking, with a resultant shift in behaviour. However, the part in the middle, structural design, doesn't change as quickly. For example, structural elements may relate to a very restrictive warranty policy, where any adaptation of a product by a customer voids the warranty. Coupled with this is a performance management system that says sales reps may not spend more than 30 minutes on each client visit.

These two elements conspire against the new intentions and worldviews of senior leadership: a customer is not willing to show the rep clever and useful adaptations they have made to the product, and the rep is under time pressure not to stray from the sales-focused visit. The adaptation may be just the thing that more customers are calling for, but the organisation is too inwardly focused on it's own R&D and marketing idea pipeline as the source of innovation.

Infecting Innovation

One way out of this dilemma is to create teams that prototype the interplay between vision, structure and behaviour, without implementing wholesale realignment. With the prevailing worldview in place, certain multidisciplinary teams are formed and coached in creative behaviours, and these teams are applied to specific challenges, eg. specific customers, service issues, or product development challenges.

Over time, more and more of these teams are introduced into the organisation, and slowly 'infect' the rest of the organisation with their approach and results. While this is happening, structural impediments are identified and a new design is prototyped.

PS This thinking has been influenced by a host of articles and players in this space, not at hand at the moment...will post references soon.

This is the blurb I used to position it:

Outsourcing Marketing & Innovation

Innovation is a hairy, woolly thing. Difficult to define or plan for. Invisible. Google counts at least 91 million results for the word. It has become the new stock phrase in corporate reporting, the holy grail for new earnings growth. Spraying cash at R&D (a traditional proxy for innovation) as compared to advertising is increasing; US stats from Ad Age[1] support this. 50 years ago: Advertising:R&D ratio was $3:1; in 2006: $1.34 is spent on advertising for every $1 spent on R&D.

But has this proven effective? Traditional approaches to innovation strategy revolve around a steady flow of goodies from the tech centre, with marketing packaging these new ideas into flashy campaigns - a one-way pipeline. Little thought to the end user experience is sought - focus groups and market research rarely yield fresh new insight or uncover new connections.

So what are the secrets of Apple and co. in getting groundbreaking products and services out there, and in doing so leave in their wake completely reinvented industries (with very little ad spend)? Welcome to the world of design thinking and the new marketing. How can organisations co-opt their customers into helping with the innovation and marketing?

Join me on a jam session through these topics: understanding what innovation really is, framing this against the status quo; why designing one's organisation from the outside-in can help to create insight conduit; how to harness the internet in transforming user-led marketing; and why redirecting funding for traditional marketing into redesigning customer experiences is the new 'R&D function'.

[1] 1 May 2006 Ad Age

PDF of slides here [1.3 MB pdf]

This is cute: The 60 second elevator pitch version of Steve Job's 90 minute keynote speech at MacWorld last week, where he announced another game changing shift in digital business models: iTunes Movie Rentals. Not too mention the Macbook Air.

I wonder what Netflix is going to do now?

Here's Pink in Cape Town, on her last gig of a 2 year tour. A concert almost every 4 days for two years - wow.

Thanks to Shaun Bond (Vida e Caffe), Stefan Rabe (Axiz), Tanner Methvin (Spier) and Adrian Ristow (Coca Cola SABCO) for sharing with us their stories on customer experience, employee ownership, green business, and operating in multiple contexts. These created a great foundation to for the delegates to see their organisations in new ways.

What was really fantastic was the process of drawing up rich pictures of what we could expect in the next 5 years - 2012 SA turns 18 ie. "comes of age".

Essentially this was a process of getting the delegate goups to articulate visually what they think are the key factors facing organisations operating in Africa.

Luckily for them we got four artists/illustrators from Vega to act as graphic recorders, and collectively we got some awesome rich pictures. The sense of optimism that pervaded everyone about Africa was very inspiring - remember that the delegates at the indaba were from quite a few countries in the region, not just purely SA.

To the Vega guys - Jade, Philip, Katleho and Dennis, and to my co-facilitators (Elspeth Donavan, Christophe Gillet, James Gardner & Robert Poynton) thanks for sharing your deep experience and talents with me.

As promised, here are my creative thinking tools/rich picture slides of the event [800kb pdf].

Some references of the stuff I covered:

Allan D., Kingdon M., Murrin K., Rudkin D., How to Start a Creative Revolution at Work, Capstone, London, 2000
Kelly T., & Littman J., The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, HarperCollins Business, London, 2001
Sutton R.I., Weird Ideas that Work, Penguin, London, 2002

PS Christophe & Robert: This was the cellphone remote control I was using (Windows version).

Below some of the rich pictures - more to follow.

Of course I have strong views on this, such as reframing any crime that impacts tourism and other GDP-growth activities as treason. Mess with our GDP, you're messing with our country's national security as a emerging economy.

But to get practical again. The powers-that-be say they don't have enough resources to police the vast area.

So let's use technology to create a force multiplier. I'm talking about using UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) to help cover loads of ground, see thermally, and guide police on the ground to the hotspots. Pretty soon those thugs will have nowhere to hide. Of course that means they'll move onto somewhere else, but we can deal with that another time.

Using UAVs are way cheaper than using helicopters, much quieter, and a lot more effective.

Just a thought...

Links:
Interview with an SAAF officer about the role of their Seeker UAVs with SAPS in crime prevention.

Denel's Bateleur

Kentron Seeker II

Kentron UAV Systems has established the Umfuni concept ... When deployed in the joint operations/crime prevention role, Seeker II can be established as a permanent system, providing coverage of a large area or interlinked by means of mobile reception units (MRU), to provide national area coverage. Seeker can also be transferred to selected hotspots in high crime areas or to anticipated trouble areas.

Some interesting riffs coming through, and it was encouraging to hear from various speakers the importance of a systemic view of organisational knowledge.

Of course I continued with my mantra that context of knowledge is far more important than the knowledge itself (duh), but a lot of this initiatives miss out on acquiring key knowledge FROM the customers' context.

(As opposed to knowledge ABOUT the customer, which to me is just CRM.)

And maybe we should examine the language around knowledge management itself McLuhan style; how about creating "Wisdom Creation" roles, if that's the ultimate aim of gathering data. Or even "Chief Storyteller".

Because knowledge on it's own is of no value (assuming that it's being captured in the first place).

Some links and references as promised to the delegates:

KM and Web 2.0 - taxonomies vs folksonomies

"For organisations, harnessing the capabilities of Web 2.0 could involve replacing the traditional taxonomy with a user-defined folksonomy. “A taxonomy is where people analyse and prioritise ways for classifying information,” says Dawson. “A folksonomy is built by everyone, there is no architect and no designer. It’s created by the people who actually do the work."

Etienne Wenger - Communities of Practice

Blogging = Open-source knowledge management

Concept Mapping tools - CMAP

Some interesting views on Facebook and the Enterprise:
- Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 1
- Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management

One of the key points was the difficulty in capturing what's in peoples heads on to paper, as a lot of the nuances are lost, as we struggle to articulate concepts. So one route is to interview people, but then as the data becomes less structured, it becomes more difficult to find again.

Well, what happens if we could search video?

Check this out: The future of video search

The principle of Design Thinking articulates why I started Ideafarm - to help teams create innovation possibilities in their environment and to think beyond a constraints-driven world.

Full article in the extended entry, or available as a small pdf download.

Some excerpts:
Flow of work life

Traditional firms organize the flow of work life around permanent jobs and ongoing tasks ....
In design consultancies, the work flow differs radically. The world consists primarily of projects with defined terms. Designers are accustomed to being assigned to a given project with a specific deadline ... Designers get used to mixing and matching with other designers on ad-hoc teams created with a specific purpose in mind. They see their lives as an accumulation of projects...

Work style

...Because of this collaboration with clients, the work style also tends to be iterative -- the opposite of waiting until something is "right." This involves prototyping, honing, and refining through multiple iterations with the client.

Architect Frank Gehry is famous for this iterative style. The first design that goes public typically elicits a firestorm of protests for its inadequacies on a number of dimensions, making clients, users, and observers extremely nervous because they generally work in traditional organizations in which nothing sees the light of day until it is "right."

Constraints

The dominant attitude of traditional firms is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of decisions.

The budget -- arch enemy of the traditional firm manager -- simply makes it impossible to do any better.

By contrast, design shops' dominant mind-set is: "There's nothing that can't be done." If something can't be done yet, it is only because the thinking hasn't yet been creative and inspired enough. For Buckminster Fuller, the problem of buildings getting proportionally heavier, weaker, and more expensive as they got larger in scale did not qualify as intractable. It remained intractable only until he created the design of the geodesic dome, which gets proportionally lighter, stronger, and less expensive as it grows larger in scale.

For designers, constraints never constitute the enemy. On the contrary, they serve to increase the challenge and excitement level of the task at hand. In fact, given the source of status in these organizations, constraints actually increase the level of a problem's "wickedness," making its potential solution that much more rewarding. Hence designers would rarely say: "That simply can't be done" or "We don't have the budget for that." Rather, they'd proclaim: "Bring it on!"

Creativity That Goes Deep

Embracing design-shop approaches to problem solving means having to shed some key characteristics of how traditional companies work

The topic of design is as hot as a pistol these days. Everywhere you look, you see cover stories and conferences. If it's design-related, people are talking about it. Firms everywhere want to revolutionize themselves by turning design-oriented. They look wistfully at the stupendous growth that the iconic iPod has provided previously stagnating Apple Computer (AAPL ), and believe that design can help them create their own version of the iPod and restart their growth engines.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as hiring a chief design officer and declaring design as your top corporate priority. To generate meaningful benefits from design, corporations will have to change in fundamental ways before they can operate like the design consultancies who advise them on how to sharpen their design focus. To get the benefit of design, companies have to embed design into -- not append it onto-- their business.

Design organizations vary significantly from traditional firms along five key dimensions: flow of work life, style of work, mode of thinking, source of status, and dominant attitude. Left unchecked, the stark contrast between traditional firms and design consultancies will impede any attempt by traditional firms to become more design-oriented.

Flow of Work Life
Traditional firms organize the flow of work life around permanent jobs and ongoing tasks. "Vice-president of marketing" is a permanent position with a set of tasks considered ongoing, without finite duration: managing the annual advertising plan, setting marketing budgets, coordinating with sales, reporting quarterly on share trends to the CEO, etc. The marketing vice-president is rewarded primarily for fulfilling these ongoing responsibilities consistently and adroitly. By and large, colleagues mirror this flow of work life.

In design consultancies, the work flow differs radically. The world consists primarily of projects with defined terms. Designers are accustomed to being assigned to a given project with a specific deadline. When the deadline comes and the project is completed, it disappears from sight, and the designer moves on to other projects, each of which also has a fixed duration. Designers get used to mixing and matching with other designers on ad-hoc teams created with a specific purpose in mind. They see their lives as an accumulation of projects, rather than an accumulation of hierarchical job titles -- i.e., manager, director, AVP, VP, SVP, EVP, and CEO.

NOTHING PERMANENT.  Dropped into a traditional setting with a permanent job defined by the performance of an ongoing set of tasks, a designer will feel completely alienated from the "normal" way of operating, because design thinking and work require a different flow of work life.

Interestingly, one could argue that traditional firms actually
fool themselves in attempting to portray jobs and tasks as "ongoing"
and "permanent" when, in fact, most of work life is naturally a set of
projects, each of which has its ebbs and flows. Many managers complain
that, because of all the "fire-fighting" they have to do on things that
come up, they can't seem to get their "real job" done. I would argue
that they have a skewed sense of reality: The fire-fighting is probably
more real than the so-called real job.



Style of Work
Traditional firms have a style of work that
involves ongoing, permanent tasks. Roles tend to be carefully, if not
rigidly, defined with clear responsibilities for the individual laid
out and economic incentives linked tightly to those individual
responsibilities. People are typically much more adept at describing
"my responsibilities" than they are at describing "our
responsibilities."


They feel inclined to work away at these responsibilities,
refining and honing outputs before sharing a complete, final product
with others. For example, the SVP of marketing will work away on the
annual marketing plan, refining and adjusting it until it is "the
perfect plan" and only then take it to the CEO in the hopes of the boss
saying: "Perfect."



GEHRY'S BLUEPRINT.  In a design shop,
the style of work is much more collaborative. Even though some
hierarchy within teams likely exists, projects are typically assigned
to teams rather than to individuals. A design team is mandated to come
up with a design solution together -- not individually. And the team is
expected to interact throughout the process with the clients by
bringing them into the design collaboration.


Because of this collaboration with clients, the work style
also tends to be iterative -- the opposite of waiting until something
is "right." This involves prototyping, honing, and refining through
multiple iterations with the client.


Architect Frank Gehry is famous for this iterative style. The
first design that goes public typically elicits a firestorm of protests
for its inadequacies on a number of dimensions, making clients, users,
and observers extremely nervous because they generally work in
traditional organizations in which nothing sees the light of day until
it is "right."



JUDGED UNFAIRLY.  They can't imagine
that Gehry has only just begun, that even though he is the brilliant
expert, he wants to get valuable feedback for the next iteration, which
won't be final either, by the way. Indeed, "final" only emerges many
iterations into the future.


When traditional firms hire designers, their managers often
find them disappointing because, like Gehry, they produce prototypes
for feedback instead of final products. Unfortunately for the
designers, these firm managers think they are seeing a final product
and -- judged by that standard -- the product is deemed patently
substandard and the designer incompetent.

Mode of Thinking
Traditional firms utilize and reward the use
of two kinds of logic. The first, inductive, entails proving through
observation that something actually works. The second, deductive,
involves proving -- through reasoning from principles -- that something
must be.


A retailer may study the cost structure of all of its outlets,
for example, to determine which has the best cost position in order to
set, inductively, a cost target for the whole chain. Or a consumer
packaged-goods firm can use its engrained theory -- "build market share
and profits will follow" -- to deduce the appropriate action in a given
situation.


Any other form of reasoning or arguing outside these two is
discouraged and, at the extreme, exterminated. The challenge is always,
"Can you prove that?" And to prove something in a reliable fashion
means using rigorous inductive or deductive logic.


Designers also use and value inductive and deductive
reasoning. Designers induce patterns through the close study of users
and deduce answers through the application of design theories. However,
designers value highly a third type of logic: abductive reasoning.
Abductive reasoning, as described by Darden professor Jeanne Liedtka,
embraces the logic of what might be. Designers may not be able to prove
that something "is" or "must be," but they nevertheless reason that it "may be." This style of thinking is critical to the creative process.



REVOLUTIONARY CHAIR.  Design
consultancies value and encourage abductive reasoning alongside
deductive and inductive reasoning. Bill Stumpf, head of a
Minneapolis-based design shop, and Don Chadwick, head of a design
consultancy in Santa Monica, Calif., designed the award-winning Aeron
chair for Herman Miller.


Stumpf and Chadwick had lots of detailed consumer research
from which to apply inductive reasoning -- and robust sets of design
principles to consider deductively. But their reasoning processes went
well beyond the inductive and deductive: They imagined what a chair of
the future could look like and how that chair could change the way
users would think about office chairs forever.


Could they prove any of it in advance? No. In fact, when users
first saw the chair, they gave it a decidedly chilly reception -- but
only because it looked like no other chair they had ever seen.



WINNING SENSIBILITY.  In short order,
users warmed to the Aeron chair because Stumpf and Chadwick had indeed
created a product that no consumer could have described -- but that met
their unarticulated needs and sought to trump anything on the planet.
It turned into the best-selling office chair of all time and a
must-have for even the fanciest boardrooms, despite coming with a price
tag double the prevailing level of a high-end ergonomic office chair.
And it won, among other accolades, an award for the best design of its
entire decade.

None of this would have happened without the design-shop sensibilities that fostered Stumpf and Chadwick's abductive reasoning.



Source of Status
The primary source of status in traditional
firms is the management of big budgets and large staffs. When
executives have the occasion to boast about themselves, they tend to
refer to the number of people for whom they have direct responsibility
and/or the bottom line that they deliver each year -- for example, "I
run a 5,000 person organization, and our bottom line this year will be
$700 million." And of course, bigger is always better!


In a design consultancy, the source of status and pride
derives from solving "wicked problems" -- problems with no definitive
formulation or solution and that have definitions open to multiple
interpretations. This reality is confirmed by the appearance of the
office of any star designer: Desks, credenzas, and shelves are covered
with the "best" designs -- the ones that solve the most difficult
design challenges in the most elegant fashion.


Designers become known for their great solutions, whether the
Apple mouse, the Bilbao Guggenheim, or the Nike swoosh. These designers
enjoy the highest status inside their firms and across their
industries. As a consequence, everyone in the design field seeks to
earn status through tackling and solving wicked problems, not
administering the biggest budgets or the highest number of people.



Dominant Attitude
The dominant attitude of traditional firms
is to see constraints as the enemy and budgets as the drivers of
decisions. The common argument is, "We can only do what we have budget
to do." If only budget constraints could be relieved, these managers
seem to imply, so much more would be possible.


As a result, budget constraints are the reason why a product's
packaging is cheap-looking, or a product is late to market, or its
range is too narrow. The budget -- arch enemy of the traditional firm
manager -- simply makes it impossible to do any better.



LOVE THOSE CONSTRAINTS.  By contrast,
design shops' dominant mind-set is: "There's nothing that can't be
done." If something can't be done yet, it is only because the thinking
hasn't yet been creative and inspired enough. For Buckminster Fuller,
the problem of buildings getting proportionally heavier, weaker, and
more expensive as they got larger in scale did not qualify as
intractable. It remained intractable only until he created the design
of the geodesic dome, which gets proportionally lighter, stronger, and
less expensive as it grows larger in scale.


For designers, constraints never constitute the enemy. On the
contrary, they serve to increase the challenge and excitement level of
the task at hand. In fact, given the source of status in these
organizations, constraints actually increase the level of a problem's
"wickedness," making its potential solution that much more rewarding.
Hence designers would rarely say: "That simply can't be done" or "We
don't have the budget for that." Rather, they'd proclaim: "Bring it
on!"

The Journey from Appending to Embedding
It is both
unrealistic and unproductive to think that traditional companies will
ever transform their organizations entirely into those of design
consultancies However, given today's design-centric environment,
traditional firms can -- and should -- make subtle but important
changes in their values to deeply embed and exploit design, rather than
append it as nothing more than the latest management fad.


The linchpin of the required change lies in the wicked
problem. A traditional firm's values result in assuming away wicked
problems as the product of immutable constraints with which the firm
must live: Managers avoid working on wicked problems, because status
comes from elsewhere, and concentrating on ongoing tasks crowds out
working on, and thinking about, wicked problems. Even if a traditional
firm takes on a wicked problem, the lack of appreciation of both
abductive reasoning and iterative/collaborate work makes it less likely
that it will be productively tackled.



REWARDING WITH WICKEDNESS.  If
instead, traditional firms recognize that the wicked problems that
present themselves represent their biggest opportunities for value
creation, they will see that tackling them requires a project-based
approach and that the important role of projects in company life must
not be protected from the tyranny of ongoing tasks.


They will be more inclined to assign their best and brightest
to tackling wicked projects, which will signal that solving wicked
problems is a high-status activity. And by recognizing these issues
explicitly as wicked problems, the corporation will in greater
likelihood recognize that abductive logic as well as
iterative/collaborative process is needed.


Companies that truly want to embed design into their
fundamental operations need to wade into wicked problems. "Bring it on"
needs to replace "nothing can be done" as the response to these
problems. Wading into wicked problems using the approaches described
here will provide the catalyst for introducing key design
characteristics into an established company.


And as many of today's most successful corporations have
shown, infusing an organization with design principles can pay big
dividends in value creation.

Roger L. Martin has served as
dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of
Toronto since Sept. 1, 1998. He was previously a director of Monitor
Company, a global strategy consulting firm based in Cambridge, Mass.
During his 13 years there, he founded and chaired the firm's
educational arm, Monitor University, and served as co-head of the firm
for two years and founded its Canadian practice.


His research interests lie in the areas of integrative
thinking, business design, global competitiveness, and corporate
citizenship. He has penned numerous articles for Harvard Business Review and also written for Barron's, Time, Fast Company, Compass, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Australian Financial Review, Maclean's, The Globe and Mail, and Healthcare Quarterly.

Martin's first book, The Responsibility Virus, was
published by Basic Books (New York) in 2002. He is currently chair of
the Ontario Task Force on Competitiveness, Productivity, and Economic
Progress and director of the AIC Institute for Corporate Citizenship.


He received an AB from Harvard College, with a concentration
in economics, in 1979 and an MBA from the Harvard Business School in
1981. Martin also is the chair of Workbrain Inc. and serves on the
boards of Thomson Corp., Tennis Canada, and the Skoll Foundation. He is
a trustee of the Hospital for Sick Children. He lives in Toronto with
his wife Nancy and children Lloyd, Jennifer, and Daniel.

My mate is trying to fill in a web form. Wait, where's South Africa in the country list? Huh? This is what's listed instead:
(To some our geographically-challenged North American friends, South Africa is south of France :)

Here's more information on 'where' Transkei is, and what happened to SWA.

But it gets better. Where's Zimbabwe?

Digging around the list comes up with these hints:
.
And ladies and gentlemen, step into my time machine: .

Wtf is Nyasaland you ask. Good question.

Oh, by the way, the site sells iPod covers, great product. But really odd reg. forms.

Now I'm starting to get some great shots, like Karma last night at the Independent Armchair Theatre.

For more pics (still have to upload last night's gig), visit my Flickr page. Off to snap Dorp tonight later.

Having just come off the water for a mellow Tuesday series surf-ski race, I couldn't resist snapping the pic. I used my Nokia N80 - I'm helluf impressed by it's image quality (3mp camera). Cameraphone tip I found somewhere - set your white balance to cloudy all the time, results in much warmer colours. And I scored a feature in IOL's front page/gallery. Paddler in the foreground is Billy Harker.

I've written about surfskiing and innovation before here...

I just saw a piece in the NYT about Google and other online players (eBay, Yahoo) starting to take bytes bites out of the traditional ad agency space. I spoke of this in a lecture I gave a couple of months ago.

It's typical bits versus atoms game being played out, and the incumbants are too invested in the status quo to adapt quickly.

“The fox is in the henhouse and it’s going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they’re history,” said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.

Innovation is all about disrupting the status quo, and Machiavelli's quote about this is spot on all those centuries ago. And there are so many industries ripe for disruption still. The traditional advertising industry is just one.

The idea behind this new marketing shift is a move away from creating great communication campaigns (in which the agency makes most of its cash by media buying commissions rather than the creative input), but rather to focus on creating awesome experiences anywhere that a customer touches the brand. This extends beyond the product, and Apple exemplifies this design thinking approach.

"Good product design starts from the outside, and works its way inside." - David Carey

Brands that start to co-opt and engage their customers into a co-creation process will end up with i) better products ii) volunteer salesforces and iii) a reduced need to spend on advertising. If you're a brand owner, use that as a platform or conduit to gain insight, to create a space for you to enage customers in a cluetrain-style conversation. A classic example of how this can aid product development (without using expensive focus-group diluted insight) is to see how on Southwest Airlines blog, the CEO posed a simple question and received a ton of responses and followups.

Back to Google:

Google’s name in the ad community frequently brings up visions of doomsday. At an ad design and production conference last month, ad executives mused about how advertising would be different in 2010. Paul Lavoie, chief creative officer of Taxi, an ad and design agency, predicted that Google would be the largest advertising agency by then. The audience laughed, but Mr. Lavoie, reached later, said he was serious.

“Let’s look at the facts: They have the best data to understand consumer habits, they can track your search, they know how much time you spend on certain sites,” Mr. Lavoie said. “They’re doing much more powerful work than some of the work being done by some of the more traditional agencies.”

It doesn't hurt to develop scenarios that can help stress-test your business model against a shifting competitive landscape. One scenario (scarenario?) that's paints a very interesting bits vs atoms picture is Googlezon EPIC 2015

Full article after the jump.

*Google is the “frien-emy,” both the friend and the enemy, said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group...

November 21, 2006
Google Mapping an Offline Course
By LOUISE STORY

Major Internet sites are showing a strong and growing interest in the advertising business, and traditional ad firms are starting to get worried.

Google has been leading the way, building on its online ad strength by striking deals to sell advertising in traditional media like newspapers and radio. Meanwhile, eBay is developing an ad-buying system for TV spots for a group of large advertisers like Wal-Mart. And yesterday, Yahoo announced a deal with 176 newspapers that did not include offline ad sales, although newspaper executives did not rule that out.

Ad executives say it is hard to know where Google and the other Internet giants will stop.

“The fox is in the henhouse and it’s going to gobble a good part of this business up before anybody realizes they’re history,” said Gene DeWitt, president of DeWitt Media Solutions.

Traditional media companies are increasingly linking up with the online giants that have been stealing their customers and advertisers. The traditional companies — like newspapers, magazines and television and radio networks — are hoping they can reverse their fortunes and share in some of the Internet success.

The offline ad market, in the meantime, provides the kind of growth opportunity that Internet companies like Google are looking for, stock analysts said.

“What these enterprises clearly need is to identify new marketplaces to expand into to justify their valuations,” said Youssef Squali, the Internet analyst at Jefferies & Company. “And that’s exactly what Google and Yahoo are doing.”

Google executives have made no secret of their ambitions in traditional ad sales, saying they can save marketers money on print, radio and TV spots, while taking a commission in the process. Google is testing ad sales for more than 50 newspapers and plans to make newspaper ad sales a permanent offering sometime next year.

Next month, Google plans to sell radio ads through the online auction system it uses to sell Internet ads. And it has indicated to analysts that it is considering moving into TV and direct-mail ads.

Consumer brand companies have turned to advertising agencies for decades to design their ads and negotiate where and when those ads run. Media buyers at ad firms plan and negotiate ad placement with publications, TV and radio stations and, more recently, Web sites. Placing ads is big business for the media buyers at agencies, because their pay is often based partly on how much the ads cost.

Ad sales in traditional media totaled nearly $150 billion last year. The entire United States ad market, which also includes direct mail, outdoor ads, yellow pages ads and online ads, is worth about $286 billion, according to Robert J. Coen, chief forecaster for Universal McCann, part of the Interpublic Group.

Internet ad revenue have been growing by upward of 30 percent a year — this year about $16 billion will be spent online. But, as Google pointed out in its annual report last year, large advertisers would most likely continue to focus most of their ad budgets on traditional media.

To advertising executives, Google is the “frien-emy,” both the friend and the enemy, said Martin Sorrell, chief executive of the WPP Group, at a recent industry gathering. Agency executives said Google, the friend, could provide agencies and media companies with the technical systems they sorely need to modernize ad buying. Media buyers said better systems could allow them to spend more of their time planning how to better grab consumer attention.

But Google could end up automating so much of the ad-buying process that companies no longer see the need to pay much for media buyers.

Several big advertisers are looking for alternatives. Companies like Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Philips Electronics, Home Depot and Hewlett-Packard hired eBay in May to develop an online marketplace where they can buy offline ads.

The advertisers — who at one point considered working with Google instead — expect to spend about $50 billion on cable network ads to test eBay’s system early next year. They will test other media next.

Yesterday’s announcement from Yahoo that it will sell online ads with 176 newspapers opens the door to offline cooperation as well. Newspapers, in theory, could sell all of their ads through Yahoo’s automated system. In a conference call, one newspaper executive said such an arrangement was a “very real possibility.”

Newspaper executives emphasized that Yahoo was now the “partner of choice” for their companies, which they acknowledged could mean that the newspapers would change their existing relationships with companies like Google and MSN.

Ad executives are not sitting idly by while these tests proceed. Media buying agencies from each of the five largest ad companies have become partners with Hewlett-Packard and the other companies involved in eBay’s test. And agencies, through an industry group, are working to modernize their ad-buying systems, so they can purchase, track and bill clients for ads as efficiently as the large online companies.

Media companies, too, are working to streamline ad sales. The Newspaper Association of America, for example, is discussing providing advertisers a central place to buy ads in different newspapers by building a centralized buying system.

Some media buyers said they would welcome a comprehensive bidding system built by Google or eBay if it brought more transparency to ad-buying. TV networks and publications and networks “are the only ones who know what is going on,” said Steven Farella, chief executive of TargetCast TCM, a media agency.

Greater transparency in media buying, of course, is not desired by all. Some media buyers have long-term relationships with media companies, giving them a competitive advantage that they would rather not lose. Their clients presumably also like the advantage.

But many advertisers want more transparency, said Bob Liodice, chief executive of the Association of National Advertisers, which is supporting eBay’s auction system.

“The ability to get prices out in the open will allow companies to develop an automated process that cuts away the lack of transparency that exists in media buying today,” he said.

Large advertisers have approached Google and Yahoo several times asking that the company expand its systems to sell traditional advertising, said Martin Pyykkonen, senior analyst at Global Crown Capital. “As you look down the road, you can look at them as being advertising agencies of a sort, doing media buying,” Mr. Pyykkonen said.

EBay would not explain how its ad auction would work or say whether buyers and sellers would be able to know how much others were bidding. Hani A. Durzy, an eBay spokesman, said the company would build the auction site to fit its new clients’ specifications. “Media buys are a commodity,” Mr. Durzy said. “They felt that there’s some efficiencies that could be wrung out of the existing system.”

Just what Google or eBay’s systems will save advertisers is the question. Google hopes to one day provide a place where advertisers can buy ads in all types of media, said Tim Armstrong, Google’s vice president for ad sales.

But Google’s vision, he said, does not involve cutting agencies’ media buyers out of the system. Mr. Armstrong said the system Google envisions would enable advertisers to aim at consumers so specifically and in so many complicated forms that media buyers would be needed to navigate the process for advertisers.

Google, in fact, has been holding regular seminars all year to update media buyers on changes in the digital world. Google will work directly with any companies that want to use Google’s systems without an agency, but Mr. Armstrong said he doubted that would occur.

Publications and ad agencies are less afraid of Yahoo than Google, Mr. Squali said. Yahoo considers itself a media company, which gives traditional agencies and media companies a sense of ease, whereas Google has stated a more disruptive goal of making ad buying and selling more efficient, he said.

Google’s name in the ad community frequently brings up visions of doomsday. At an ad design and production conference last month, ad executives mused about how advertising would be different in 2010. Paul Lavoie, chief creative officer of Taxi, an ad and design agency, predicted that Google would be the largest advertising agency by then. The audience laughed, but Mr. Lavoie, reached later, said he was serious.

“Let’s look at the facts: They have the best data to understand consumer habits, they can track your search, they know how much time you spend on certain sites,” Mr. Lavoie said. “They’re doing much more powerful work than some of the work being done by some of the more traditional agencies.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

He is a guest lecturer at Vega Brand Communications School on branding, technology, and innovation, and has spoken and chaired numerous conferences on telecoms, customer service and innovation.

He also took Accounts 2 three times before passing, and tried CFA level 2 three times (didn't pass) before realising he wasn't long on balancing income statements (mantra: when in doubt, debit cash :).

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