The Innovator's Path

How Individuals, Teams, and Organizations Can Make Innovation Business-as-Usual

Madge M. Meyer

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118569856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

A guide to creating and sustaining a culture of innovation focused on business value

The Innovator's Path introduces business readers to thought leader Madge M. Meyer's unique, cross-cultural perspective on corporate innovation. The book presents eight essential disciplines (Listen, Lead, Position, Promote, Connect, Commit, Execute, and Evolve) that pave the way for individuals, teams, and organizations to continually innovate in ways that create new business value. The author overturns existing assumptions about inspiring and managing innovation, while offering new insights and practical advice for aspiring innovators and corporate leaders. Meyer demonstrates her points by telling the stories behind many of her award-winning results and adds engaging personal anecdotes to illustrate many of her points. The book also contains contributions from an extraordinary and diverse set of industry innovators.

Offers new ways for cultivating a mindset and culture of results-focused innovation and business value creation

• Equips CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, COOs, CTOs and aspiring innovators with proven principles and practices for leading innovation
• Focuses her readers' attention on the eight essential disciplines that help individuals, teams, and organizations innovate more successfully

Whether your focus is on your career, your team's success, or your organization's future, The Innovator's Path provides you with the insights, strategies, techniques, and inspiration you need to accelerate your innovation progress.

聽

Chapter 1

Listen

When people ask me to describe the first step on the path to innovation, I say, “Listen! It's all about the Art of Listening. It's listening to learn!”

Most of us assume that we know how to listen, whether it is music playing, birds singing, or people talking, but in my view, all we're really doing is just hearing. Listening is something much deeper.

Several years ago, I saw a PBS public service announcement that opened with a composer sitting alone at his piano. We could see his frustration and despair as he struggled, without success, to craft his melody. Suddenly, his efforts were interrupted by the sound of flapping wings outside of his open window. He turned to watch as a flock of birds arranged themselves on telephone lines, as if they were notes on a bar of music. He tapped out the notes on his piano that the birds had formed and listened to the melody. Quickly, he turned that melody into an elegant symphony, and the message “be more inspired” appeared on the TV screen. To me, this is the essence of listening and the heart of innovation. When we listen to the world around us, we will often find inspiration—or even just important information—from the most unexpected sources.

Since the time we were children, our parents and our schools helped us to become better readers and better writers and better speakers. But if we think about it, how often did we have lessons in listening? The education system doesn't even recognize listening as a discipline. That's too bad, because I believe it is critical to so many things we try to accomplish in life, including innovation.

As we carry on in our careers and social lives, most of us do become accomplished hearers—instead of listening to exactly what someone else is trying to tell us, we're often thinking about what we're going to say in response. Certainly that can serve us well, but hearing and listening are as different as noise and music. If innovation is to happen in our businesses, we must become—and our team members must become—an organization of listeners.

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Listen 聽 Ting

聽 ting, pronounced in a level tone and Romanized in the Pinyin system currently in use in China, belongs to a word group for “ear,” represented by the pictograph 耳 er, at the upper left corner of the character. One listens with one's ears. On the upper right side is the character 直 zhi, meaning “upright,” “straight,” or “direct,” which itself is made up of the ideograph 十 shi for “ten” and the pictograph 目 mu, rotated 90 degrees, meaning “eye/eyes.” To listen includes seeing whatever is not heard. On the bottom right of 聽 ting is the pictograph for 心 xin, which represents the heart. Before the advent of anatomy and modern science, traditional Chinese culture viewed the heart as the organ for thinking as well as for feeling, demonstrating the interrelation between thought and intuition. Even today, most Chinese people would refer to the heart as the organ for thoughts as well as feelings.

In use for thousands of years, and to a great extent to the present day, 聽 ting, the character for the act of listening, implies that to listen fully one must have one's ears ready, one's eyes open, and one's mind clear, giving the speaker total, undivided attention.

Footnote: In Modern Chinese spoken in the north, on which the national tongue is based, there are 4 full tones: level, rising, dipping, and falling, as well as a half-tone or neutral tone. A pictograph refers to a Chinese character derived from Ancient Chinese Oracle bone carvings. They are visually close to an actual picture of an object. The term for the sun, 日 ri, was originally a circle with a dot in the middle, clearly a picture for the sun. An ideograph such as 十 shi for “ten” is not exactly a picture. It may be a symbol to stand for ten. Someone would have to explain to a child that 十 stands for ten.

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I began learning about listening at a very young age. When I was growing up in China, parents taught their children that when adults are talking they should stay quiet, listen, and learn.

This was my father's practice as well. He always let his guests do all the talking, and he was a perfect listener remembering everything they said. I can still picture him sitting in his chair, with a slowly burning cigarette resting between his lips, and one eye slightly closed to avoid the smoke, hardly ever saying a word. Occasionally, he would ask a question.

Interestingly, my parents always put these two words together: listen and learn. They believed the best way to learn is by listening, and the Chinese character for “listen” illustrates the proper technique of listening.

Patience, Humility, Respect

It's hard to listen. Listening requires patience, humility, and respect for others.

Most of us in the business world are under a great deal of pressure. We are asked, ask ourselves, and ask others to do a great deal in very little time. As a result, we often cut others short either by ending the conversation or by shutting our ears before we fully understand what they're trying to tell us. Listening wholeheartedly requires patience.

Humility, and in particular acknowledging to ourselves that we know very little—and that often we don't even know what we don't know—also makes better listeners of us. By acknowledging the limits of our personal knowledge, we admit that we have much to learn, and so better prepare ourselves to listen to those who might teach us something.

Listening also requires respect. In fact, there is no better way to demonstrate respect for others than by paying close attention to what they have to say. By doing so, we highlight every speaker's importance and our own opportunity in being able to benefit from their knowledge and wisdom.

Successful innovators need to be in constant communication with a broad group of people from diverse backgrounds, industries, geography, and generations, including our customers, employees, senior management, colleagues, partners, and vendors—all the key stakeholders. What we learn from committed stakeholders allows us to be more responsive to changing business requirements, client expectations, and advances in technology—all within the context of our organization's unique objectives and constraints. Also, listening and learning about the market and our competitors helps us better position our company for innovation and success. It also allows us to identify and resolve potential issues early in the process.

As my father always said, “You can't learn while you're talking.” (My mother would always nod and smile, and say, “That's right. Really smart people don't talk very much.”)

We also need to listen to the younger generations. Many of us grew up in a time when we accumulated useful knowledge and informed perspective only as we aged. It is still true that many important lessons are leaned only through time and experience. However, there are so many new phenomena and experiences—social media is a great example—that only the young people among us have grown up with and truly know and understand. Different age groups can bring very different perspectives, each with unique values.

My teams always leveraged intern programs and consistently benefited from the contributions and perspectives of the young students who worked with us. For example, Anna, a recent intern, was an expert in social media. She reverse-mentored many of us and played a key role in the development and rollout of our corporate Innovation Community, one of State Street's most popular collaboration sites, with thousands of followers from all over the globe.

Listen: Levels of Effectiveness

Listening occurs at three basic levels. The more effectively we listen, the more we learn and the more productive we can be as we set out to accomplish new goals.

Level One: Selective Listening

At Level One we listen only to information that meets our immediate agenda. Often, under the guise of listening, this level can take the form of frequent interruptions and narrowly focused questions designed only to elicit answers consistent with our interests, not to enlarge our knowledge. At this level, we listen only for what we want to hear, and interpret what is said from our viewpoint alone.

Level Two: Engaged Listening

We reach Level Two when we engage in productive back-and-forth discussions, listening to the viewpoints of others and often expanding our own understanding as a result. At this level, respectful give-and-take dialogue results in acquiring knowledge and producing creative outcomes and helps build long-term relationships.

Level Three: Deep Listening

At Level Three we go beyond what is being said to why it is being said. We probe deeper, uncover individual assumptions, and seek fresh approaches and new information. We also read body language and may notice patterns that not even the speaker is aware of, which help us gain more insight into his or her true message and motivations. At this level, we are also listening to what is not being said.

Preparing Ourselves to Listen

To listen wisely, we must have an open mind and no agenda. We should prepare ourselves to hear something new. In fact, we should be prepared to hear anything that is said to us, and, at least for the moment, reject nothing.

That means having conversations to which we bring no preconceptions that could distort our understanding. It means listening to what others are saying, especially when what they are saying is not what we expected to hear, or what we wanted to hear. And it also means listening to what people are not saying.

We must also momentarily suspend disbelief and come to the conversation willing to listen to what others have to say—without judging the rightness or wrongness of it until they have had a chance to fully explain themselves. The psychologist George Miller puts it this way: “In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to find out what it could be true of.” We can also think of it as an attempt to enter the speaker's reality as fully as possible, but without closing the door on your own.

Hard as it may be for some of us, we should be prepared to hear our ideas challenged if we make it clear from the start that we want to hear the truth.

Let's approach it another way: Listening is about creating an atmosphere of trust. That can be rare and difficult to establish in organizations. In many corporate cultures, the bearers of bad or controversial news is treated as if they were to blame. It is common to hear managers say, “Don't come to me with a problem, come to me with a solution.” After hearing that, how many employees do you think will bring up issues that need to be addressed? Too often it can lead people to hide problems they can't solve on their own, instead of seeking help. It's important that team members have the freedom to find solutions without having to bring the problems to management first. However, they must also feel comfortable escalating problems that they don't know how to solve. Leaders who keep listening will know the difference, offering support where it's needed, and inspiring others to act without fear.

Sam Palmisano, the highly regarded and recently retired chairman of IBM, knows the importance of listening. Sam had been at IBM for a long time, joining the company in 1973. After a successful start in sales, he caught the attention of upper level management, and he rose rapidly through the company's ranks. He became president of the company in 2000, CEO in 2002, and chairman in 2003. You would think that an accomplished executive who had been around IBM for so many years would know everything there was to know about the company. Sam didn't think so. As he told me,

It was no accident that the major work effort I launched at my first senior leadership meeting as IBM chairman was a collective online “jam” on who we are and why we exist. It included tens of thousands of employees re-examining the company's core values. Some of it was contentious and brought up feelings not typically aired in corporate forums. But the result was a credible definition of values, shaped and endorsed by IBMers themselves.

As I will discuss further in the next chapter, I was fortunate enough to have had Sam Palmisano as a mentor while he was president of our business unit at IBM.

How I Go about Listening

When I arrived at State Street in 2001, I made the usual rounds, introducing myself to the company's upper level management and the heads of all the major business units. I wanted to listen to what each of them had to say about service quality. I also wanted to listen to any other issues that touched on technology infrastructure. Finally, I wanted to listen to their business challenges. I came out of these meetings with a strong sense of the needs and issues that these executives wanted to see addressed. One, in particular, rose to the very top of my to-do list. It was a vendor pricing issue mentioned by Ron Logue, who then headed up our biggest business unit. I had been quite surprised when he brought it up, since IT vendor issues don't typically require the attention of the company's business executives. I could tell from the tone of Ron's voice and the expression on his face, though, that this bothered him greatly. I knew that if I could solve this problem for him, I would gain his trust and confidence in my ability to solve the rest as well.

First, I did my homework, collecting data and facts. I spoke to everyone who had anything to do with this contract and vendor. I got copies of the old contract and the new one, and sat down to read each one in detail. I could hardly believe it when I saw that the old contract had terms and conditions that gave the vendor clear rights to increase the price up to double the amount of the current payment. Evidently, the details of the pricing agreement had either been missed or lost in the five years since the contract was signed. The vendor had done nothing wrong—other than not “listening” well to an unhappy client. I knew their CEO and sent him a note. I explained that I had just joined State Street and I was looking forwar...