Can generation X innovate in virtual world?

Yesterday I was in a conference where people told about their innovative ideas, how they built their company and their success stories. I will not talk about the ideas but something different that I caught there.
There were 2 types of ideas there. Type-A the ones that exist on the virtual world and Type-B the ones that exist in real world but has access from virtual world.
Type-A ideas came from people in the age between 15 to 28 ( yes it was really down to 15 ). These guys can create a whole new world in the internet. These ideas don’t need a lot of capital and they are easy to implement but the innovation behind is tremendous. They are creating a new market and new demand from zero point.
Type-B ideas came from people older than 28. I will give a simple stupid example but it suits very well. The ideas were like saying “ooh let’s take buy a hotel and take online reservation from our web site”. They just add new capabilities to existing markets. They do not create a new market but they optimize the existing one and benefit from this optimization.

I am not saying Type-A is better than the other or vice versa. They both have pros and cons. For example Type-B ideas need big capital but on the other hand, end user adaptation is easier in such ideas. I don’t like long posts so I will not write about pros and cons, let’s stick to the main topic. I think the main reason of such a difference between the 2 generations is that the new generation can start thinking on non existing things easily but the old generation has to start its innovation path from physical objects and end with a virtual bridge. So what will happen when we all forget about the physical real world, are we going to think virtually and forget about the rest?

All-Female Groups Boost Girls’ Willingness to Compete

All-Female Groups Boost Girls’ Willingness to Compete

Adolescent girls were 16 percentage points more likely to enter a maze-solving tournament if they were in an all-female group, according to an experiment by Alison Booth and Patrick Nolen of the University of Essex in the UK and Australian National University…

Idea or Execution

Just a few moments ago I was in a brainstorming session. While the ideas were flying over the air I realized that most of the ideas were spoken a year ago and they are still considered as nice ideas. First of all they are really good ideas that I liked too, one year ago and now again. And I also saw that people like producing ideas and they are good at it. The reason for having so many innovative people around is because the company cares a lot about innovation and promotes idea generation to its employees.
However the reason behind talking about the same things even after a year shows that the company lacks the execution part. Innovation starts with idea generation but ends with income. In order to have a full innovation cycle a company not only should promote idea generation but also create an environment where these ideas come alive. They may or may not be successful but not having a suitable environment to for execution would mean %0 success rate for sure. Idea generation depends on innovative employees but full cycle of innovation depends on the organization.

Local or international branding?

This is one of the most difficult questions when a new product is launched in only one country but has a target to evolve into an international service.Starting from the name of the brand to positioning, these decisions may vary considering the best options for the local market, where the launch will take place,compared to international markets, which indeed the mid term target is. Let’s consider a country where English knowledge is not very common. should brand sound similar to English phonetics for international usage or local phonetics to touch the mass market in local. This is a question I could not answer yet. So I’d welcome any comments you have on this topic.

Nokia and Microsoft, wrong strategy

From an internal source I learned that Nokia is preparing new functional units to support the Nokia ecosystem to provide more application for Nokia phones. They are opening new offices in countries they have operations, they planned a budget to fund these companies as well. Which means Nokia is trying to build a team of people like the evangelists of Microsoft. As most of you know, Microsoft has evangelists all around the world, supporting the usage of Microsoft products and tools. They promote companies to develop applications with .NET platform and so on. If we consider that the new phones of Nokia will be equipped with Microsoft OS, this type of an approach from Nokia is irrational, or may be I am not smart enough to understand their smart strategy. Microsoft is spending so much on supporting application development and they are successful. Some people will question their success about this but just consider how strong they stand in corporate business against all other OSs. The reason behind their corporate success is their strategy of support. So why Nokia is investing on something where their OS provider is already strong and structured. If they only support Microsoft teams from their HQ’s it would still be enough. If they think that they would keep their castle in mobile application development and still control the Nokia ecosystem, this is way too far from reality. They can not compete with the OS provider of their phones. Sooner or later Microsoft will control the Nokia ecosystem, actually there will not be a Nokia ecosystem at all.

Or they have a secret and smart plan that we all don’t know yet.

Strategic consultancy

Analytical frameworks like Porter’s are used widely by corporate strategists and strategic consultants alike. The problem is, they result in shared mental representations that lead companies to the same places, industry players identify and act on the same opportunities. This is what I read recently in an article on HBR. Companies are now outsourcing the key strategic decisions to international consultancy companies. CEOs hire these companies to create the right organizational structure, identify the right focus areas for the next couple of years, get briefs about the international market situation and so on… These consultancy companies are working with many other international companies as well which bring them a great power of knowledge but I’d still question if it is right to follow this path. The consultants give the same information to clients which would cause that the goals of the industry will be similar which means higher competition and less innovation. If a company is told what to be achieved this company can not find extraordinary ideas to make the company step forward.
In my opinion managers should get consultancies but trust on themselves more than the consultants. They should get the information but make the decision within the company, find the best approach within their teams. The critical decisions should not be outsourced.

history of governments & tax

Once there was a village, they were farmers and that was the way they were sustaining their lives. However once a year a group of people started to come and take some of their supplies. It was a monthly work of the village to raise this supply again. This was not a big deal because they could live with that too but as years passed they started to be pissed off. They told the strong men of the village to defend their supplies. These brave men accepted the mission. Next year they defended the supply and didn’t give anything to the gang. After a few years the brave men of the village started to think that they should get something to defend the supply and asked for 2 weeks of the supply. The villagers thought this was better than 1 month of work, so they accepted. Years passed like that and there was no gang stealing the food anymore but the brave group of the village remained. Indeed they also started taking 1 month supply because they told that they need to eat more and stay strong for threats. After several years these brave men group was getting nearly 6 months of village’s work. The reason was that they became so crowded because they needed not only defenders but also supply collectors, writers, messengers, reporters… so the villagers needed some other way to sustain their lives. So, they asked the brave group to get some supply from other villages and that’s they did. So other villages also created brave groups to defend their supply.
At the end all the citizens were working as much as they can to pay their defenders and these defenders became the most important people of the villages. That’s how the first governments were created.

mastery autonomy purpose

People usually get stuck with an idea or principles and see them as the right way of achieving everything. After Dan Pink talked about managing and motivating tasks which need innovation, people regarded his set of principles as the only way to success. Even if he mentioned that this is the way to use for innovation tasks people took the principles as the way to every task. Where ever you work, which ever tasks your team achieves you should give mastery, autonomy & purpose to the participants of the project. I agree the principles and it is very right to manage in such a way to produce innovative solutions. However, do we always need innovation from everyone in the team? I have seen employees who gets stressed when you give him autonomy, such people want clear directives and no decision stress. I think it is not right to apply the same rule to each individual. Better way is to personalize the type of management skills for individuals.

2011 expected crisis

Nowadays the hot topic in finance world is the expected global crisis because of the situation in EU and US. There has been a similar crisis in 2008-2009 starting with the crash of the mortgage system in US. When we analyze these two crisis we can see that the first one came suddenly, so sudden that not even the old wolves of this system could see it coming. It was a natural crash came with the inadequate approach in trying to balance happiness with real assets. It was so certain for the last age that assuming that you can make people feel richer and happier with virtual,non-existing assets wouldn’t be enough when these people try to own real things, like luxury flats or cars with the virtual money they borrow. How can we forget the basic rule in physics;nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. If we analyze today’s headlines in the newspapers and the breaking news we can clearly see that the words came long before the real crisis. I am very good at making conspiracy theories so I am going to make one for this incoming crisis as well. In the last crisis companies did get great help from governments to survive but this time the governments are not that strong. So that the crisis will be longer and local powerful companies, cash barons will be breathless. In the last crisis there was an operation of absorption of cash to a different geography. At that time these “strong people” took some virtual assets which are valuable to get real assets. Again at that time they did not use their power to buy the weakened western companies but just waited to absorb the cash from the market. In this upcoming crisis there will the second phase of this operation which is to convert the virtual assets to real assets; companies, mines, land, real estates. We will see the change of the balance in the world in the upcoming years, let me throw the first gossip saying that the first buyouts will come from the telecommunication area and also valuable mines used for industry.

Organizational Change

People working in large corporate companies are very familiar with organizational changes. This change can differ in every company. In some of the companies like P&G it rarely changes but in companies like Turkcell it changes frequently. The main ideas behind these changes are usually learning lessons from previous experience or trying new things or adaption to a new strategy or adaption to market dynamics.

If the organization is being changed because some lessons are learned this means that things are going bad in the company and a serious change is needed to survive. This is easier than the others because things are already bad. If the planner of the change succeeds both the new actors in the organization and the planner becomes the heroes of the company.
If it is being made to try new things it usually means investing in a new business. Such a change brings a big burden because till that time everything was going right and continuous so that the company culture expects too much from very little investment.

So some changes change the work done by teams, however some does not change the duty of the team but only changes the reporting mid-manager of the team. If a company makes organizational changes that also change non-manager employees’ responsibilities and duty it would mean a great loss in efficiency. After some time things would balance and people would get used to their new responsibilities. However what if making such changes is in the DNA of the company? In that case this inefficiency becomes a continuous inefficiency because no one would feel attached to his/her job, they will not be able to have a career plan.