Category / Fringe scanning / peripheral vision

by Roger Dennis

Cisco and innovation cycles

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco.  Several paragraphs of note including:

Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.

Full article here.

by Roger Dennis

GE and “white spaces”

Over the holiday break I caught up on some very long overdue reading.  Quite a bit of it in fact.

One issue of FastCompany magazine had a fascinating article about GE and how the company uncovers new opportunities. It appears to be very much in the vein of the work that we do at Innovaro:

Immelt and other top GE strategists love to talk about the opportunities presented by “white spaces” and “adjacencies” — corporate-speak for untapped markets that the company wants to develop, and for expansion opportunities that one GE business unit can pass along to another.

Given the article was written in the middle of 2008, in the current economic climate it would be very revealing to see if this type of strategic foresight is still going ahead at GE, or if it has been cut back.

by Roger Dennis

Disruption from the edges

Catching up on some long overdue reading, I came across this quote in a FastCompany article about Joss Whedon, creator of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  He makes reference to the fact the next next disruption to his industry is not going to be from within:

“There’s someone out there who will figure out how to relate the Internet and narrative beyond my old-fashioned notions,” Whedon says. “But I think whoever cracks that is not going to be someone who’s made it huge in television. It’s going to be some guy we just don’t know about yet.”

by Roger Dennis

McKinsey on strategy in uncertain times

The recent issue of the McKinsey update had a couple of articles that weighed in on strategic planning in uncertain times.  A couple of these were worth sharing:

Remember that the most important decisions for most companies will truly be […the ones where there is little level of certainty.]  Our standard strategic-planning tool kits—the ones that we are most comfortable with and that we learn in MBA programs—don’t do a really good job for that.

So we ought to pay attention to this wake-up call. Embrace uncertainty. Get to know it. In uncertainty lies great opportunity. If you don’t try to understand what’s separating the known from the unknown from the unknowable, you’re really missing out.

(from an interview with Hugh Courtney, author of 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World)

The second article starts with this:

There is nothing like a crisis to clarify the mind. In suddenly volatile and different times, you must have a strategy. I don’t mean most of the things people call strategy—mission statements, audacious goals, three- to five-year budget plans. I mean a real strategy.

For many managers, the word has become a verbal tic. Business lingo has transformed marketing into marketing strategy, data processing into IT strategy, acquisitions into growth strategy. Cut prices and you have a low-price strategy. Equating strategy with success, audacity, or ambition creates still more confusion. A lot of people label anything that bears the CEO’s signature as strategic—a definition based on the decider’s pay grade, not the decision.

By strategy, I mean a cohesive response to a challenge. A real strategy is neither a document nor a forecast but rather an overall approach based on a diagnosis of a challenge. The most important element of a strategy is a coherent viewpoint about the forces at work, not a plan.

(From the article “Strategy in a Structural Break“)

Both extracts provide good food for thought with regards to the strategy process – whether in a crisis or not.

(Note – just finished an intensive three day workshop that involved weeks of planning, so apologies for the break regular transmission.  Service will now return to normal…)

by Roger Dennis

Reporting from the Future – Fake NY Times site

For various clients  – on various projects – I’ve worked up fake front page newspapers from the future.  It’s an excellent way of getting people to think about the future in a more tangible manner.

However this site is in a whole new league, and is unbelievably good. Check out the date of the site. What’s more staggering is that the paper also went out in print.

The adverts are as good as the content  – one of my favourites is below:

 Hats off to The Yes Men.

(via IFTF)

by Roger Dennis

Science fiction as an influence

A recent issue of Wired highlighted yet another instance where science fiction is an influencer – especially on those that have the money to fulfill their childhood dreams.

Sonny Astani, a 55-year-old real estate mogul is planning to bring 2019 Los Angeles to life in the form of two 14-story animated billboards modeled on Ridley Scott’s opening sequence. “I saw Blade Runner at least five times”, says Astani, whose empire encompasses thousands of Southern California apartment units. “The billboards always struck me.”

copyright Wired

by Roger Dennis

Excellent summary of discontinous innovation approaches

If you are after a good overview of disruptive/discontinuous approaches to innovation, then look no further than the UK organisation Advanced Institute of Management.  It has compiled an Executive Briefing that is comprehensive in its coverage of the field. The blurb reads:

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI).  This briefing document  focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

The Futures approach we use at Innovaro with clients such as Shell and GM (Europe) is referenced, although not quite in the full context.

Direct download of the PDF is also available.

by Roger Dennis

A question with William Gibson

I’m really interested in science fiction as a predictor of technologies. As Paul Saffo remarked in his (highly recommended) Long Now speech, science fiction starts “meme bombs” in the minds of teenagers. These bombs detonate when they’re in a position to do something about them – usually when they are going through a midlife crisis soon after they reach 40.

If you Google on the term “science faction” you’ll find a rich sampling of material that refers to this (meme bombs that is, not midlife crises).

So when the opportunity came to put a question to William Gibson – the originator of a science fiction genre called ‘cyber-punk’ – I was interested to know his views on the extent to which science fiction is an indicator of the future. His response (in part) was as follows:


“I don’t actually see science fiction influencing the future much now […] Science fiction was a big part of the culture of our future in the previous century but the previous century was a century where we actually believed we had a future. We took it for granted that we had a future and in the 21st century we can’t take it for granted in the same way that we have a future.”

Gibson then goes on to talk about how if he went into a publishers office in 1981 – the year he started writing – and proposed a novel based on the destabilisation of Earths weather systems, AIDs, terrorists flying planes into buildings in New York and the USA invading the wrong country – they would have said “too much!”

He makes the point that actually the world is much more complex than this, and

“…we don’t have the luxury of dreaming of a Star Trek future because we have too much ‘how do we get there from here’ going on to make that realistically possible. You can still do that kind of science fiction but it require far too much wishful thinking to convince me.”

You can download the entire William Gibson interview here.

(As an aside he says a similar comment in this Rolling Stone interview)

by Roger Dennis

Gladwell on Insight (The New Yorker)

Over at the New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell has written as essay on insight – more specifically – how to cultivate it artificially. Besides being a damn fine read, there’s some great sections on cross-sector discovery.

Surgeons had all kinds of problems that they didn’t realize had solutions, and physicists had all kinds of solutions to things that they didn’t realize were problems. At one point, Myhrvold asked the surgeons what, in a perfect world, would make their lives easier, and they said that they wanted an X-ray that went only skin deep. They wanted to know, before they made their first incision, what was just below the surface. When the Intellectual Ventures crew heard that, their response was amazement. “That’s your dream? A subcutaneous X-ray? We can do that.”

Insight could be orchestrated: that was the lesson.

For many people the concept that they can look across industries and learn from others is an amazing discovery. I’ve used it to great effect in learning workshops where I’ve had C-level executives looking at a massively diverse set of industries. The results are always incredibly rich in all sense of the word.

by Roger Dennis

The importance of Edges

A quick pointer to a highly recommended post (and article) from John Hagel (and John Seely Brown) about how changes on the edges impact the core. John Hagel writes:

Instinctively, I have been drawn to various edges because of the opportunity and challenge they represent. Over time, I have focused more sharply and explicitly on the importance of the edge as a source of value creation and strategic advantage.

On a different and slightly facetious note when people – including myself – talk about edges it always reminds me of the term “cutting edge”. This is the sort of phrase that got rolled out during the dot com bubble – as in “We’re on the cutting edge of ………….. (insert industry name). Except companies like boo.com who weren’t so much on the cutting edge, but more on the Bleeding Edge…