Category Archives: innovation

The Case for Pessimism

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Worriers Can Be Winners

“Lincoln, Churchill, and Newton, to name just a few famous mopers, all accentuated the negative.”

I have been accused, a good part of my life, for only seeing the bad stuff.  Rightly so.  Some of this, probably, is genetics — my hardwiring — and other pieces could be learning: it got rewards from my father and others: being able to criticize or notice the imperfections is part of the Jewish culture: we are preternatural debaters.

Doom and gloom folks, like me though, seem to have skills that the optimists don’t: to see the future more clearly, the pitfalls, the dragons lurking in the dark that will breathe fire and…bite.

The pessimist’s skills and viewpoint could be very helpful right now: an Op-Ed piece in Business Week by Patricia Pearson, sheds light on the need for some balance.  (The optimists may have had their “run.”)  She reports that optimists have an “attentional bias” to notice opportunities and look for rewards.  They’re unlikely to pay much attention, though, to the gathering storm clouds on the horizon.  That’s the domain of the somber.  (How do you think we would characterize most of the folks in the “Occupy” movement?)

For the scientists out there, the analyticals, there appears to be a genetic link between mood disorders and “problem-solving creativity.”  A plus.  Those with irrational optimism are, by contrast, not the best at creating a “Plan B.” 

Businesses, especially during difficult times, are encouraged to tap “depressive realism:” the gift given to the melancholy to see “reality more accurately.”  While they won’t  be warmly welcomed at today’s relentlessly upbeat sales conferences, they are needed and should be listened to.  (Remember Sharon Watkins who told Ken Lay [Enron] about the impending “implosion of accounting scandals?”)

So, if you’re a curmudgeon like me, what’s your story?  What do you see?  Psst: you can use this Blog post to get more street cred: forward it to those [eternal] optimists: tell ‘em to give you some respect!

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Value of Collisions

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One Hunch Needs to “Bump Into” Another Hunch To Form an Idea: Artistry In Progress

The New Year is upon us: in a mystical way, many of us feel like it is a “clean slate,” a tabula rasa on which we can write our new lives: The World Of 2011.

I like this concept.  I like it so much that I would advocate for a monthly “clean slate” where we could, symbolically, “start fresh.”  This concept meshes with my burgeoning view that we are all engaged in the arts; we must all create, innovate — whether in business or in the arts — or we languish.  Wasting away, mental or creatively, has never been one of my options and I think we would be fooling ourselves if we thought otherwise: we are engines of creativity, innovation.

With that premise of continual invention, this might be a good time to visit “where good ideas come from.”  Steven Johnson, in his four (4) minute YouTube Video, provides some insights (from his studies on the subject) on how an environment that promotes the fanciful, new inklings can be helped along.

His most profound finding is that, often, we each have a piece of a great idea.  Through the bumping of one hunch into another hunch, a good idea is formed.  Rarely, he finds, is it just a one person event.

Going back in history, he cites the early English coffee houses of the 1650′s that created a place where ideas could brew, marinate.  Johnson calls it “The Liquid Network;” the stimulants of coffee and tea were quite radical to the previous consumption of large amounts of alcohol in the form of beer (breakfast), wine (lunch) and more spirits for dinner.

What the www. (World Wide Web) now provides is the kind of connectivity, for example, that allows for more bumping, more collisions of hunches, notions.  (We don’t give it enough credit.)

So, what would it take to create an ecosystem in your organization that mimics the alacrity of “The Liquid Network?”  Some ingredients Johnson thinks need to be present: fluidity; information spillover; diverse views, and; different fields of expertise.

In short: chaos.  Why not give it a try in 2011?

Eliminate Red Tape: Why?

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Policies Are Biggest Impediment to Throughput, Effectiveness

Are you interested in boosting performance, efficiency, throughput?  It might be time to revisit the lessons from Goldratt’s “Theory of Constraints” and look at your organization’s rules, procedures, methods.  


The simple conclusion from the book: policies, not necessarily bad ones, get in the way.  Not machines.  Not bad, unthinking people.  What’s the solution?  Think systemically.  

The 1984 Parable  



Policies, in my view, are often designed to deal with the exceptions…the customer who wants to ship to multiple locations with one billing address, let’s say.  So, we create a new policy to deal with the previous ineffective one.  (Look at what much of what comes out of Congress, too.)


In my experience with client organizations, I’ve seen policies — aimed at dealing with 10% of the employees, customers, whomever — take up 90% of the intellectual energy of the business, whether it’s a non- or for-profit organization.  There’s no energy or motivation left to really figure out how we leapfrog from where we are right now.


This kind of stance — to develop solutions for the exceptions — could have negative systemic impacts: many of your best folks could get the wrong message.  


That message might be seen as: “let’s spend a good part of our time and energy on insuring this mistake doesn’t happen again….oh, by the way, we didn’t really get damaged from that mistake…it was just a violation of  another policy…”  In the process, the 97% of the work that’s going well can be ignored, forgotten.  More unintended consequences.  Think whole-istically.  

Click to Enlarge

Theory of Constraints White Paper: Open PDF

Moskoff’s High Performance Organizations Blogpost: July 2010: Theory of Constraints.

Here’s Your Brain On…

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…The Internet: I Won’t Try to Argue the Point

Do you remember the TV advertisements back in the ’80′s where the topic was DRUGS?  Setting: a kitchen with some earth-toned appliances, a frying pan on top of a stove with a voice over that went something like: “This is your brain…”  Plop an egg into the hot pan: voice over: “This is your brain on drugs.”  


The message?  Drugs will fry your brain.  


The ad should be modified for current times: we should drop a hard drive or a motherboard into the frying pan: “This is your brain on the Internet.”


Nicholas Carr (His Blog) is the man of the hour with his new book: What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains: The Shallows.  He’s on NPR, reviewed in Bloomberg BusinessWeek (talk about branding…Bloomberg??).  And, of course, he’ll soon be on Oprah.  


I won’t try to debate the premise.  What I will do is ask us to look back, first, about 5,000 years.  That was the time that the Jews were thought to be writing texts.  (The Mayans could have had hieroglyphics by then, too.) 


I’m guessing that, at that time, there were those who thought that a book was a revelation of a demon deity.  I’ll bet there were even people who could have been quoted as saying something similar to neuroscientist Michael Merzenich: we are “training our brains to pay attention to the crap.”  


Excuse me?  May I beg your pardon: not my brain: my brain pays attention to both the good stuff and the crap.   (And, by the way, Mr. Merzenich, from an atmospheric perspective, isn’t it all crap?  What has getting to the moon done for me…lately?)


Gutenberg?  Some thought he was the devil.  Polio, may I remind you, was the result of a naturally occurring virus but we applied technology on that one, too.


The Point, with a capital “P,” that I’m trying to make — after four or five paragraphs, sorry — is that there are always detractors to the new technologies.  Technology will always advance ahead of society’s ability to understand how to use it (true for the stone axe? hmm).  Stem cell research is finally coming close to its potential after W’s moratoriums.  


And, finally, try not to pontificate while one is the middle of a tech revolution: the view is in the shallows.  Only time will allow a more balanced view.