Emergent startups and concrete production

 I started working at the age of 14. I was bagging groceries and stocking shelves at the neighborhood grocer. The place was kinda gross. Weird things happened. The butcher stole steaks. The stock boys smoked cigarettes behind the building. People slept in the doorway overnight. Daily, I'd have to wander the neighborhood searching for shopping carts, folks had used to transport their groceries home. But we all knew who the boss was. Ken. Ken was a bulky man with a larger mustache. He was in charge. It was a messy franchise, but it was his messy franchise, and he let you know it. Paid only $4.15 per hour, I worked my heart out for him. 

As an adult, I've encountered many organizations including tightly coordinated military units, massive enterprise software providers, high tech cost centers, and horizontal startups.  The last one, the horizontal start up, is tough.

For a long time, I figured horizontal was everything. I tried to practice it too. But I learned through trial and error that many this approach is the result of uncertain leaders. Individuals who never had to lead diffuse their power through others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 

When it does work, it is because you have the best talent on hand. Those individuals know how to mobilize, coordinate, and get things done. It works well.

When it doesn't work, it is because the talent isn't there. People work in shadows. People talk too much or not at all. Projects never have a clean end, but sprawl and never get truly finished.

Either way, a company must have the ability to draw a line, to a diagram, end to end how the widgets get fabricated. Maybe Ken designs it. Maybe the team stumbles until they figure it out. Either way, the company is only getting started when there is  visible, universal alignment on the widget making.

If the process is only in your head, trust me, it is only in your head. Get drawing.

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Hire the Right Innovation Executive (CXO, CIO, CTO, CINO).

Executive recruitment is not easy. Hiring great people is always a challenge, but leadership recruitment is a high risk, and potentially costly endeavor.  If you bring on the wrong person for the job,  it can cost the company millions of dollars.

In recent years, corporations have sought to in inject innovation into their operations. Around 2012, companies like Target invested millions of dollars into creating model stores to test ideas, gas spectrometers to streamline produce supply chains, and hired a slew of people trained in design thinking. It also spun up "Project Goldfish," a secret effort to create the store of the future. By 2017 Target shut down many of these projects, as the abstract futuristic research conflicted with the reality poor revenue.

Today,  innovation is at the heart of growth for Target, but not the same 'version' of innovation that was pursued in 2013. The approach today is about solving real problems and making real impact on the bottom line. Today, target utilizes near term and long term methods, and has grown it's data science capabilities to coordinate with design-driven methods.

We can learn many things from this example, but the central narrative is that "research," is not the driver for corporate innovation. "Development" is the engine.  While all the development should be supported by a culture and sound methods in experimentation, exploration, and at the end of the day - you gotta make the thing, keep making the thing, and get results.

The most critical marker to identify the best hire is simple: How does this person drive results in the real world by introducing radical insights with effective action?

By and large, innovation executives focus on the things of technology, data, or the customer experience, or they focus on the how, agile development, user research, and experimentation methods. A good innovation executive will succeed in building these things and processes - yet a better one is far more focused on the what and the why, what will these things do in the world and why does it matter?

Innovation leadership demands the ability to create compelling visions of the future that are connected to existing evidence, but about 3 deviations removed into the realm of possibility. Leadership is the translation of that vision into processes and artifacts through others, to make that vision tangible. If this leader is truly great, then unexpected and unknown obstacles will become assets and new discoveries will further realize the vision, not undermine it. Sometimes this means the first steps are "less innovative," because a particular company weakness needs to be resolved, or because the workforce isn't mobilized.  Yet every every step of the way, this person can translate the profound into the ordinary.