Posts Tagged: education

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29
Nov 09

Make More Mistakes

Pillar on Are You Building a Learning Suppression System?:

“You can’t learn anything from doing something right. If you did it right, you merely confirmed that what you already knew or believed was correct. Nothing learned. But if you make a mistake, you can identify it and correct it.”

And then identifies to types of mistakes: commission (doing what you shouldn’t have) and omission (not doing what you should have).

“Errors of omission signify a lack of innovation in your team. Maybe someone thought of a better way but was afraid to say anything. Or maybe nobody even thought about it.”

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3
Sep 09

Create a Vision and Reward Failures #agile2009

Jared Spool, a Researcher for User Interface Engineering, gave the closing keynote to the Agile 2009 conference. He had an informative and entertaining talk about what UIE has found with their research.

He used this video from Apple on the “Apple Computer Knowledge Navigator” as an example of a good experience vision and discussed how it directs the actions of the company. Here is a short write-up from Forrester on the talk. Of about 200 different company attributes, the UIE research found that the following three were the most useful in predicting long term success:

VISION – Can everyone on your team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?

FEEDBACK – In the last six weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your or a competitors design?

CULTURE – In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

The first two are (I think) rather self explanatory, however the 3rd has gotten double-takes for everyone I’ve discussed with. The theory is really pretty straight forward: discovering a major design failure is to be celebrated because it is informative. If the culture of an organization celebrates learning, then you will find learning occurs both with successes and with failures. Wonderful point of view.

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7
Jan 09

Five Traits of Innovative Companies

BusinessWeek recently interviewed Rajesh Chandy, Professor of Marketing at the U of M. Chandy identified five common traits of innovative companies in his recent paper, ”Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Pre-eminence of Corporate Culture.” Perhaps somewhat surprising, he found that corporate culture was the driving influence on wether your company was innovative or not.

Those five traits are:

  • Future Market Orientation – how much your managers and execs talk about what will be vs what is. Think about “the extent to which a firm emphasizes, in its market research activities, customers and competitors who are not currently in the markets it serves.”
  • Willingness to Cannibalize – how willing you are to destroy something you fought for (or created) in order to create something new. In paper format, this “is an attitude that puts up for review and sacrifice current profit-generating assets, including current profitable and successful innovations, so that the firm can get ahead with the next generation of innovations”
  • Tolerance for Risk – The more you are willing to take calculated risk, the more innovative you will be. 
  • Incentives for Enterprise – Innovative companies reward employee’s success in a significant way, and failure comes with only a mild reprimand. “By this practice, the firm refrains from rewarding only or primarily seniority or management of current products. Rather, it ensures that adequate if not large incentives are reserved for employees who venture to explore or build new enterprises for the firm.”
  • Empowering Product Champions – “By this practice, a firm empowers an individual with resources to explore, research, and build on promising but uncertain, future technologies. In effect, it embeds within the firm the enterprising spirit that enabled it to initiate the original innovation that brought it success.”

These rung rather true for me. 

Chandy ended the interview with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina line: Just like “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” innovative companies are all alike and un-innovative companies lack innovative in their own special way.

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16
May 08

Tom Friedman on Education in the ‘Flat World’

The School Administrator published a discussion with Tom Friedman, author of The World is Flat, in regards to education. Since I just recently linked to him, I thought why not do it again? I read his book last year and have been amazed at how many times I find reason to reference his thoughts and insights in conversation.

Here is a snip from the interview:

Daniel Pink: Tom, in the newest editions of The World Is Flat, most of the additions have to do with education. Why is that? [...]

Friedman: It’s really several things. In the latest edition, I added a whole section on why liberal arts are more important than ever. It’s not that I don’t think math and science are important. They still are. But more than ever our secret sauce comes from our ability to integrate art, science, music and literature with the hard sciences. That’s what produces an iPod revolution or a Google.

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Pink: [...] Are we asking too much of schools?

Friedman: Absolutely. My wife and I talk about this a lot. Someone asked her the other day if she were to write a book on education what would it be about? And she said: It would be a book on parenting.