TheThreePercent

When I think that all the email and phone messages are just getting to be too much, and my mouse starts to creep toward the ‘delete all’ button on my inbox, I remember Nick Donofrio.

Nick, who retired last month as Executive Vice President at IBM – and one of the last of the old-guard protectors of young innovators at the company – was one of the busiest people on earth.  A huge part of 400 thousand people at an $80 Billion company relied on his leadership every day.

And yet, never in all the time I’ve known him has he failed to reply within 24 hours to my email or phone call PERSONALLY (not via admin, though Barbara Storck was a genius in her own right).  I did a straw poll of others, and they all reported the same thing.  If everyone has a super power, Nick’s was magical responsiveness.  (It probably helped that he could compress the full content of a 2 hour meeting into 15 minutes most of the time…so maybe he actually had more bandwidth than most of us slogging through inane, endless, back-to-back meetings.)

And it occurs to me that of all the complaints people have about dealing with big companies, responsiveness is at the heart of it.  Big companies are full of well-meaning people who want so badly to be of use that they promise to do things, to call you back right away, or at least to send you an email, but in the end there is silence, non-responsiveness.  These are people of high personal integrity forced by the system and inefficiency into low professional integrity.  (Professional integrity is all about being responsive and doing what you promise – or at least saying you can’t do what you promised before the deadline.)  Most of the time, people are so harried, they don’t even remember all those small daily promises made, and email inboxes become so crammed that even one’s admin can’t parse through it all.

So put a stop to those endless meetings.  Refuse to attend 90% of them unless they are under 20 minutes.  And answer that email…even if it is just a one line note that says, “Super busy right now…can you ping me again on Friday?”

Hey, if Nick could do it, so can we.

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Nick Donofrio, Executive Vice President, Innovation and Technology, will retire on October 1, 2008, after an IBM career of 44 years. Nick joined the company in 1964 as a co-op, and proceeded to build a rich career of technology leadership. His broad portfolio of responsibilities and his strong personal relationships with leaders in business, government and academia all over the world are testament to the breadth of his impact. Nick has truly been IBM’s Mr. Innovation–not only as the leader of our global technology strategy, but also as the conscience for much of our societal and policy-related efforts, especially in the area of career opportunities for minorities and women. He has inspired tens of thousands of IBMers with his boundless energy, bottomless curiosity, and unfailing optimism.

As regular readers know, I’m fascinated with the problem in open innovation of sharing intentions.  Inventions – those we can share.  Patents, NDAs – all about sharing ‘intellectual property’ mainly in the form of inventions.

But believing that sharing inventions is sufficient for innovation is like thinking that you can make proper sentences using only nouns.

The trouble with sharing intentions is that they are slippery, and you can’t protect them. Once people know what you intend to do, they can capture the opportunity for themselves or thwart your plans with impunity.

Recently, I was reading David Ignatius’s Body of Lies, and he quotes Lord Ismay (1953):

To mystify and mislead the enemy has always been one of the cardinal principles of war.  Consequently, ruses de guerre have played a part in almost every campaign since the Trojan Horse.  The game has been played for so long that it is not easy to think out new methods of disguising one’s strengths or one’s intentions.

Business-as-warfare is such a dominant notion that perhaps it is no wonder we have many ways to conceal our intentions but few ways to share them; many ways to mislead others, but few mature ways to work together across company lines.

In “ It’s Alive,” authors Chris Meyer of Monitor Networks and Stan Davis of Monitor Talent make the argument:

 Business leaders face an imperative to create organizations that can adapt continually and rapidly, to keep pace with shifts in their markets, technologies, and society itself.          

Now first of all, any company that has dedicated units devoted to networks and talent has my vote.  

And it seems to me that organizations which can continuously adapt to change over the long-haul, especially mid-size companies, must know how to find entrepreneurial talent, empower them, and then NOT spend too much time or money giving them opportunities to prove new directions.  

This is essentially the philosophy of Team upStart:  1) Focus on talent; 2) Never give a team more than 10 weeks to prove a new business; 3) Form teams as proto-companies, mentor them, but let them run themselves.

This is the seventeenth in the series on collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series 

With collaborative business innovation accelerating, automation tools, formal standards and innovative sharing regimes are springing up everywhere.  Informal communities of trust continue to serve us well, but if there is a way to increase efficiency and reduce the occurrence of inappropriate leaks and missed opportunities – ‘ships passing in the fog’ – then it is worth the effort in this economic environment to try them.

To date, formalizing knowledge management and innovation practices has a dubious history.  As one observer put it, “Innovation tends to disappear when you look straight at it.”  The level of complexity involved in trying to manage innovation even in a single firm can be overwhelming.  Trying to collaborate across companies on top of this is so insurmountably difficult that it is amazing it happens at all.  While stories of open innovation are few, stories of failed collaborations are many.  Consequently, the market for collaboration tools has focused heavily on the low hanging fruit: 

a) Solutions deployed strictly inside a single company;

b) Public crowdsourcing solutions. 

The necessary next step is an integrated solution that allows the management and tracking of all nine sharing options through a single portal.  Companies like Palo Alto-based Tacit, which have already deployed knowledge management solutions inside many companies and are now deploying public solutions like Illumio, are in a good position to bridge the gap and cover the middle ground of external-but-private sharing. 

Illumio, in particular, deserves mentioning, because it addresses at least one of the unsolvable problems of collaborative innovation – knowing whether someone else has useful knowledge before you reveal yourself to them.  The Illumio idea is to create a community of free agents who have willingly indexed their personal hard drives and made the information searchable to anyone else who also has the Illumio software.  Users type questions into a Google-like field, and Illumio, via the internet, uses its index from everyone else’s computers to determine who might have relevant information.  It then ranks candidates and sends a private message to each asking if they would like to answer the question.  Only those who say yes are then revealed to the person asking the question.  Illumio says that participants’ hard drive information is only used to point someone with a question to someone who might have the answer, and that the actual information is never directly exposed to anyone else.  

This can work well in a world of free-agents, particularly among the privacy-deprived generation who are growing up using community sites like MySpace.com and peer-to-peer systems like Skype.  However, employees of most companies will not likely be allowed to put Illumio on their corporate computers any time soon.  This is a notable gap, because many of the experts one would hope to connect with already work for someone else who would not allow participation in such a public system.  Tacit’s corporate solution does much the same thing Illumio does, only within single companies.  Finding a way to bridge Tacit’s internal corporate systems to Illumio’s crowdsourcing public system could lead to greater collaborative business opportunities for companies.

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Tune in tomorrow for more Shared Secrets.]