Innovators Guide

Attending to What Matters--Everywhere

Below is an excerpt from a story about Navy Federal Credit Union, which claims that it's green initiatives have led to a reduction in employee turnover from 60% to 17%. Now, I don't think that's true. I think the organization's common-sense based corporate culture, which says that green is smart, also says that people are special (after all, they consume 95% of its costs, it says below). Some companies just pay attention to things that matter.

Metropolis The Accidental Environmentalists. 2008-Jan-16, by Andrew Blum

“You’ve been asking for data,” Ebbesen says to me. “Well, we definitely have energy savings: we’ve had one study that said 25 percent and another that said 40 percent. We pay a lot of attention to the energy model because we want to be efficient, because that leads to less pollution. But that’s not where the savings are. The savings are all related to productivity.” Navy Federal’s wealth (they don’t exactly have trouble getting long-term financing) means that Ebbesen could swallow higher up-front costs if it means a longer life span—and indeed this building is designed for a 40-year cycle (generous for its type). But to be conservative he sticks to 30 years for the following calculation: over that time 92 percent of the ­organization’s costs goes to employees, 6 percent go to maintenance and operation, and a mere 2  percent are represented by the initial construction investment. “When I show that on a slide,” Ebbesen says, “it’s kind of like, ‘Duh, now are you paying attention?’”

Managing Optimism

If you've ever tried to manage a project with someone who was pessimistic, you quickly realize how difficult it is to snap them out of their negativity. Now here's a clue from Christophe Andre...people learn to be optimistic when they try it and it works. (There's a shocker--isn't that they way we learn everything?)

So here's my suggestion. To become optimistic, you should focus on safe bets at first. Look at situations which are under control, probable events, well-known and effective practices.  Once you learn to be optimistic about likely good outcomes, then you can work your way up to the long shots!

Ode: Professor of happiness, 2008-Mar, Interview of Christophe Andre by Peter Van Dijk:

"Optimism is an ingredient for happiness. It's not the same thing as happiness. There are pessimists who are happy and unhappy people who are optimists. Optimism is the human capacity to anticipate, and it's stored somewhere in the brain. Spontaneously, I'm a pessimist. If you ask me what the future holds for Africa, I'll start talking about famine, violence and misery. But if I concentrate, I think, What were things like in Europe 100 years ago? War, unemployment, illness, poverty. Things have changed here now, so why not there?

"Optimism gives you the power to try for happiness, and then when you get a little, you understand that trying to be optimistic was worth the trouble. In the end, it's about making an investment in yourself. The Italian writer Primo Levi survived a concentration camp in spite of his despair, because he believed in life, saw something positive in it, and he held onto that."

Mixing an Innovation Culture

Fabulous article about an entrepreneur who had to innovate because his service was new. He has a marvelous instinct for what can be managed and measured and what just has to evolve over time.

Smart Business: How George DeVries manages risk without stifling innovation at American Specialty Health, 2008-Mar, by Leslie Stevens-Huffman

While the culture has remained the same, the structure that supports innovation has changed and evolved over time and that evolution has been the secret to achieving growth and success for DeVries.

“We have continued to innovate, but now we handle the process of innovation in a very structured way,” DeVries says. “We’ve continued to evolve and create new products, but we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish any of it without a structured process for implementing new ideas.”