The Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur

Self-Reinvention: Becoming Your Own Disruption

After seven years of blogging here at The Ultimate Corporate Entrepreneur it seems like the right time to move on.

I launched my first business blog out of curiosity, registering to attend the BlogHer Conference and hoping that it would jumpstart my blogging efforts. It did.

Over the years I've shared business tips, career advice, and views on creativity, risktaking and innovation and pretty much everything in between. I've blogged at conferences and local (and not so local) events.

My book was published last fall, which drew from early ideas, concepts, and comments from this blog. Innovation in a Reinvented World reminds me that there's no such thing as a wasted experience!

My blog's vision has been to shine light on the importance of embracing entrepreneurial thinking inside the workplace. My mission has been motivating professionals to trust their risktaking instincts, and for providing the building blocks of success via practical tips and process how-to's, while offering advice on designing resilience and support nets for rebounding from setbacks.

I believe that entrepreneurship--formal programs and grassroots efforts--benefits businesses for the long haul through creativity and disciplined disruption. Employees who innovate not out of fear but because they have the right stuff become motivated contributors and collaborators. They adapt to the twists and turns of business and possess "sweet spot" capabilities for reinventing themselves and the organization.

Even disruptions associated with job transitions--voluntary or involuntary--become less onerous and more manageable for people with entrepreneurial capabilities as part of their DNA.

 

Reinvent Before You Must

Today, we find ourselves living in a new reality where the old world of business no longer defines success in how companies operate and how careers play out.

Leaders and professionals who recognize the optimum time to reinvent their organizational units and who possess the courage and discipline to innovate earlier in the cycle, will discover a demand for their skills along with more interesting, creative choices to consider.

We must embrace the entrepreneurial mindset, think like project strategists, and redefine career success as not how long we remain in the same role, but what we contribute during each transition cycle (we're always in transition, even when we're stationary).

It's the aggregate value of your contributions--your folio of expertise--a mix of portable knowledge and transferrable skills that differentiates you in the new world of business.

Designing flexibility into your career strategy, knowing when and how to dismantle and rebuild before you need to, and recognizing when to invent solo and when collaborative partners play a role in your success, will keep you limber for thriving in this new reality. 

 

Shedding a Skin

I truly want to thank my many readers for engaging with me during these seven years. I've met fascinating people here in the U.S. and around the world from Europe, South Africa, Armenia, Egypt, Australia, China and Japan and I've enjoyed and have appreciated your stories and comments (even the tough love ones!).

But in order to make way for the new we need to let go of the old; and although one door is closing for me as I retire my flagship blog, a number of exciting doors are opening to keep me on point with my vision and mission.

You can find out what I'm up to at my Facebook fan page at Facebook.com/TheReinventedWorld and the blog posts at my book's website InnovationInAReinventedWorld.com. You can also stay connected with me via Twitter @DeeMcCrorey.

Of course, I'll catch you online if you've purchased my book and signed up for 1 or all 10 of my complimentary webinars in 2012!

 

P.S. I'll retire my blog; however, I don't have plans at this time to let it go dark. So, if you're visiting for the first time there are still plenty of practical tips, career advice and business recommendations to keep you engaged!

Navigating Business Disruptions: Build A Surplus of Customer Trust

Waiting for my flight in the lounge area of San Francisco airport, I wondered how American Airlines will fare with the disruption of operations following their Chapter 11 announcement and the loss of their CEO who quit for moral reasons following the board's action.

In Innovation in a Reinvented World I compare four industries operating in the old world of business versus the new world of business--transportation being one of them--and how the U.S. has slipped behind the innovation curve. Ironically, I list American Airlines as the only major U.S. carrier to avoid bankruptcy proceedings while still performing its maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) work in the U.S.; unfortunately, another potential disruption to operations in a Chapter 11 world.

Although quick to appease skittish customers that it would be business as usual, American Airlines must keep in mind that two types of customers exist: the external customer--the buying public--and the internal customer--the innovating workforce.  

Not only is it going to be tough managing day-to-day disruptions associated with shifts in business, AA will need to parallel-manage disruptive innovations within the company. The only way to do this successfully is with a surplus of trust with both customers.

 

Trust Deficit vs. Trust Surplus 

Much of my 25-year career and business has focused on two sides of the same coin: disrupting the status quo via innovations and helping others navigate their way through organizational disruptions.

Innovation catalysts can weaken customer confidence when they disrupt daily operations, and if they fail to account for this ahead of time they risk creating a trust deficit. You'll want to bank enough customer credibility to tie you over a self-induced business disruption. Your goal is to approach a disruptive situation with your customer accounts in good standing, thus creating a surplus of trust. 

A bigger challenge--and one that many businesses find themselves in today--is successfully managing market driven disruptions, customers' demands, and an organization's needs to fast-track internal innovations. Businesses that didn't pace themselves throughout the Great Recession are scrambling coming out of this economic slump. 

This is where alignment of your internal customer base, i.e., your employees, along with your external customers, partners, and suppliers becomes critical. Product, service and process innovations don't happen by accident.

 

Assessing Your Trust Quotient

Let's begin with your internal customers and business partners. How loyal are your employees? How engaged in the company's reinvention strategies have they been during the last three years? Did they channel their energy into fear-based activities, e.g., fear of layoffs, instead of creative endeavors plus personal risktaking that fully engages them in the innovation process?

According to the Q4 2011 Randstad Employee Attachment Index, employees have mixed emotions about 2012:

• 56 percent of surveyed workers think they would not be able to find a job they would accept 
• 47 percent plan to explore other opportunities as soon as the job market picks up
• 74 percent feel optimistic about their organization’s future
• 73 percent feel secure in their current jobs

How loyal are your customers? Continuing to nurture the customer relationship through economic ups and downs--whether they've placed recent orders with you or not--is key to retaining trust. 

What about your strategic partners and suppliers? How engaged have they been in aligning themselves with your economic recovery strategies? Have you ignored them or did you use the anemic economy to renegotiate existing agreements that squeezed more out of them at less cost (win-lose)? Do you know whether they're using this down time to build new partnerships that could potentially impact your business in the next three years?

 

Call to Action: Reinvention Readiness

Do you know your organization's reinvention sweet spot?

As a business leader, you'll want to know whether you're facing 2012 with a trust deficit or trust surplus with employees, external customers, strategic partners, and suppliers.

Keep your surprises for the holidays. 

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 ∆).

Change Happens When (and Where) You Least Expect It

A few weeks back I received an email message that sounded a bit spammy to me. But fortunately my intuition trumped first instincts and I responded to the request for help from someone who believed he could innovate, but was having trouble "figuring out the path to get me there."  

Thus began my connection and conversation with a 5-year medical student in Cairo who found me via a search on 'how to innovate'. After reading a reprinted article that I had written on innovation, he decided to reach out to me via the resource box I included at the end of the article.

Since then, we've exchanged a few emails and had a Skype conversation about his studies and soon-to-be-graduation. I provided him with a link to a colleague's upcoming book on innovation. I also suggested some creative exercises to get him started.

During our Skype conversation we explored:

• Why had he decided to pursue medicine as a career?
• What challenges exist in the field of medicine in Egypt?
• Does he like to take what already exists and figure out new ways of doing it better or does he prefer to build new things from scratch?
• What is his optimum cycle for personal change, in other words, when does the boredom start to set in?

These questions helped to jump start his creative thinking, since we all have a tendency to get too close to what we focus on day in and day out (in this case, his medical studies). This can make it difficult, at times, to step back and see our value, appreciate our area(s) of expertise, and define what makes us unique. 

Technology can help us build bridges in understanding one another. Our Skype call was also a great reminder that innovation and mentoring truly have no boundaries.

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!

The Innovation Challenge - Learning from Darwin's Dilemma

Charles Darwin was successful despite his cautious nature. But the outcome might have been different had not a 22-year-old's correspondence lit a fire under him to take the first step towards publicly sharing his evolutionary theory some twenty years in the writing. 

Yes, fear can be a powerful motivator.

Alfred Russel Wallace received credit, as did a host of others, in Darwin's great work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection published November 22, 1859. 

Darwin's differentiator? He supplied the how of evolution. It was his discipline and painstaking work with barnacles (not sexy, but useful research in the end), which made his ideas on evolution credible during a time when skepticism reigned in England.

[Richard Conniff's Smithsonian article On the Origin of a Theory <<< great read]

Innovation is essential to business and, increasingly, the company you keep will play a critical role in your own career success. But despite its importance, persistent shortcomings exist in creating it in the workplace.

What can we learn from Darwin's dilemma? 

We can't afford to be too cautious and wait for innovation to evolve. The current economic meltdown and global problems have raised the bar for companies to transform their organizations and create innovation at a faster clip.

Innovation is Just Play!

Since innovation and discovery are play behavior, you'll get a chance to see it action during this week's Coach for Innovation show that airs Sunday, August 16 from 6-7pm Pacific on BlogTalkRadio. My guest, Mike Alvarado, social anthropologist, innovator, and president of Going Evergreen will walk us through his five actionable steps for fast tracking you and your teams in creating better and more useful innovation.

We'll be taking your questions on Sunday and I'll have the chat room fired up, so crab your favorite beverage and join us live. (If you do miss our live show, you can always catch the replay).