The Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur

Grace Hopper 2010 Wrap-up: Show Up Like You Mean It

The Anita Borg Institute does a lot of things right. They sold out this year's Grace Hopper Conference during one of the worst recessions since WWII and attracted 2147 attendees--undergraduate and graduate students, industry professionals, sponsors who also participated in panels and workshops, along with 436 speakers over a four-day period of which I was fortunate to have been one of them. 

When you have these many people showing up like they mean it, e.g. ready to engage, contribute and learn, the amount of creative energy generated has the potential to shift perspectives, open minds to new possibilities, and encourage personal risktaking.

Of course, things didn't always run perfectly (including my own workshop) and, yes, there were a few logistical glitches here and there, but I like to stand back and view the bigger picture and assess the total value which, in this case, was well worth the investment.

Now that I've had a chance to digest things a bit, below are my key takeaways / learning from this year's Grace Hopper Conference (+ and ∆).

Killing Innovation: How Passive-Aggressive Organizations Get It Wrong

The odds are pretty good that you'll work in a passive-aggressive culture at some point in your career. In 2004 the landmark study (PDF) conducted by Booz & Co. indicated that 30 percent of the managers, employees and executives surveyed believed they worked in unhealthy, passive-aggressive organizations.

Would it surprise anyone if these numbers weren't substantially higher given the Great Recession and workplace dynamics now associated with it?

I've experienced passive-aggressive behavior in corporate settings, but it's an entirely different experience depending on your view of the playing field: employee, supply partner or consultant.

One of my first consulting engagements over a decade ago was leading an "orphaned" team whose leader had bailed four months previously, delaying the launch of their product. 

At first blush, team members looked to be one big, happy family. No one disagreed during meetings and members never directly discussed concerns or asserted their needs. Instead, they would come at you from behind or attack in pairs like nimble Velociraptors. If I asked the right question in just the right way (and the stars were aligned), I would get the needed answer, but never from the person who I had asked the question!

One team member divulged the family secret: members were betting how long I would last (I was the third "turnaround consultant" in less than two months.)

Although we successfully launched the product, I'll always remember what the company was leaving on the table by embedding this passive-aggressive behavior into its culture. It doesn't take a math wizard to see how this experience multiplied hundreds of times could negatively impact the business.   

Got Innovation?

Robert Brands and I were discussing his soon-to-be-released book Robert's Rules of Innovation (Wiley, March 2010) and got to chatting about how exponential growth for companies must come from introducing innovative products and services, not cutting spending to the bone or acquiring start-ups as the sole source of innovation.  

Corporations need their entire workforce to innovate and not only their R&D, New Product Development teams, or special assignment "innovation pods".

The elephant in the room? Innovation and passive-aggressive behavior don't mesh.

Of course, the process for changing a culture begins by knowing where your organization is in its stage of evolution. Booz & Co. offers a simple online DNA Profiler to get you started.

The Musical Chairs Dilemma

Thousands upon thousands of unemployed people in the U.S. alone include those who learned how to survive and thrive in passive-aggressive environments. Government, academia and private industry need to partner in retraining people to innovate in healthy environments, otherwise we're just changing the sheet music and slapping a coat of paint on the chairs.

We need gutsy leaders who "get it" and who know how to build effective partnerships both within their organizations and beyond its walls in order to drive deep cultural shifts. 

[Are you a leader who's raising the bar in changing your organizational culture? Contact me if you're interested in a guest slot for an upcoming radio segment here.]

The ability to innovate is a career differentiator. Professionals have a chance to rebuild and reinvent on a more solid foundation. Step back and assess your own behavior for signs of "PA creep" and take proactive steps to learn new ways of doing business. 

Let's make healthy workplace behavior a required "soft" skill for the new world of work!

Are You Risking Your Team's Success in 2010?

I was asked to "shadow coach" a junior program manager in his new role. His first big challenge was assessing the skills of a team who had been together for months, but who were behind schedule in launching their product.

This new PM was now responsible for figuring out who would remain with the team and who would be replaced. My role was to walk him through the process of asking the required questions and reviewing the results with him. Ultimately his job would be to select the right team for turning this situation around and launching the product in six months. 

What made the situation more difficult for the PM was that he came from this talent pool and felt he had a handle on their strengths and weak areas. I sensed early on that some of the members were his friends outside of work.

My "informal" role was to guide him through the process of making a tough decision as fairly as he could without losing his heart in the process.

Focusing on the Right Things

Given our turnaround challenge we had two weeks to assemble the team:

• Identify the required skills and knowledge for this "new" project
• Interview and select team members who would remain with the group
• Complete a resource gap analysis of missing expertise
• Negotiate with managers for shared resource expertise

Three questions we asked each of the current team members included:

"What do you consider to be your expertise?"

"Do you feel that you're in the right role with the right responsibilities?"

"How do you feel that you contributed to the team's current situation?"

We were listening for a sense of responsibility for the team and personal accountability for their area(s) of expertise. In other words, how much "skin in the game" did they have with this team and the product? We also wanted to find out if their current role and responsibilities weren't playing to their strengths.

A sense of urgency combined with the right attitude and approach to problem solving was critical. Although not optimum, we could always create a patchwork quilt of expertise with shared resources.

Moving Forward, Holding Back

When was the last time you assessed your contributions at work, in general, and to your team, in particular? 

Are you moving your team forward or holding them back?

Can you identify your skill gaps? Would you know what steps to take to raise your performance level, adjust your relationship cache, and adapt to shifting conditions before someone asked you to do so? Do you trust team members to tell you--do they "have your back"?

But let's also reverse the situation. Is your team holding you back?

Now, would you say that your current behavior and performance is consistent with your past peak performance? Is this the "true you" or an outer skin you're wearing because of the environment you're in today?

This "Great Recession" continues to play havoc in the workplace. You might be camouflaging yourself to survive in your current environment. It's not unusual for people to shift their performance and expectations downwards in order to accommodate the lowest common denominator of fearful behavior on the team.

You might consider asking the same three questions above that this PM asked his team members. We were able to select the right team for the right reasons at the right time.

46th DAC - Endings Bring New Beginnings

Preliminary attendance numbers for 46th DAC have come in 12 percent over last year's conference--good news given the overall state of conference attendance in this economic meltdown.

Although never a shortage of smart people at DAC, even the smartest folks in the room see an uphill battle on innovating their way out of the challenges facing the EDA industry.

Pressure to reduce chip design costs, meet government emissions and energy regulations, and improve overall ROI will drive some of the more established EDA companies to adopt disruptive technologies sooner rather than later. Start-ups altering the landscape, such as Xuropa, look to reinvent software sales processes for the 21st century with its Cloud-Computing application that SaaS-enables existing software applications.

Dealing with technology disruptions and discontinuities is challenging enough, but equally challenging is how EDA companies are transforming their workplace environments and reinventing workforces into nimble innovators capable of meeting these industry challenges head on.[In a future series of blog articles I'll highlight how EDA leaders and teams are tackling these challenges and raising the bar at the same time.]

Seizing an Opportunity

The final day of a conference typically offers one-off opportunities, with exhibitors more relaxed and willing to chat about the event and provide their own industry perspective. 

Which is how I got a chance to sit down with Rich Goldman, Synopsys Vice President Corporate Marketing & Strategic Alliances and CEO Synopsys Armenia.

Moving into the industry leader's position with Cadence dropping to second place, Rich and his team assumed ownership for designing this year's DAC exhibits and interactive events for Synopsys (their first crack at it).   

"I felt that Synopsys needed to step up and support DAC with a strong presence."

Social Media - Synopsys Raises the Bar

The Synopsys challenge was figuring out how to speak with their customers in new ways. One thing Rich knew from the outset was that social media would play a big part for them at DAC. He just didn't know what it would look like.

"Given that our focus is geek-to-geek (G2G) we know that our customers don't respond well to marketing b.s. Building the engineering relationship is about providing them with the right tools and the right answers at the right time to solve their problems - this is what builds our credibility in the tech space. It also makes it easier to build trust and credibility in the marketing space--something that social media is allowing us to do."

Rich challenged team member, Karen Bartleson, a standards guru and Synopsys blogger to own the learning and understanding of how people were using social media. One of her ideas? The popular Twitter Tower at DAC. 

Armenia - A Differentiating Factor for Synopsys

There are those who think that Synopsys took a big risk in establishing a strong presence in Armenia.

"It's definitely not for the faint of heart," Rich laughs as he recounts the country's infrastructure challenges, "it requires a strong commitment."

Blended Innovation: The New Talent Mashup

A few weeks back, I attended a Human Capital Institute breakfast workshop in San Francisco that was titled Unite or Ignite? Creating a Dynamic, Blended Workforce that Works.

The blended workforce was a term coined years ago about the mix of fixed and variable talent. Within this mix of full-time, part-time, and independent contractors employed by a company, you would also find assignment employees and on-site workers employed by a third party.

HCI's innovation tour focused on getting real about the multi-generational workplace of today and the increasing quest for talent in the oh-so-immediate future.

Competing for talent in a shrinking labor pool provides companies with oftentimes overlooked ways of leveraging their existing pool of talent. This is more along the lines of it costs less to invest in, grow, and retain talent than scale-up new talent.

Investing in Global Women Leaders

I decided to put some money where my mouth is and had to look no further than my own backyard.

On July 26, Silicon Valley's Santa Clara University is hosting the Voices of Global Leadership 2008 Conference where some of the most innovative, thought leaders from around the world will participate in GWLN's Whole Woman, Whole Leader, Whole World vision.    

Sponsors are still needed for these women leaders coming from Armenia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, India, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Turkey, Uganda, and the United States.

You can read their amazing stories, profiles, and whether or not they've been funded at www.gwln.org by clicking on WLW profiles 2008 on the left side.