The Person You Like the Least is the Person You Need the Most
This is the second in a series of videos about Personality Poker. Today I discuss the myth that opposites attract.
You can pre-order the book now. Each book comes with a deck of the specially designed poker cards.
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The Four Principles of Personality Poker
We will be releasing a series of videos about Personality Poker over the coming weeks. Each will talk about a specific concept or insight from the book. You can pre-order the book now. Each book comes with a deck of the specially designed poker cards which will be demonstrated in the next video. Enjoy!
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Open Innovation @NASA
I am speaking at TRIZCON tomorrow. The opening speaker today was Jeffrey Davis, MD, Director of Space Life Sciences at NASA Johnson Space Center. His excellent presentation focused primarily on the open innovation efforts of NASA.
Here are some of the key soundbites I heard…
- They wanted to avoid the “serendipity” associated with many innovation efforts, and to create something more predictable.
- Alliances are THE key to open innovation. Another one is to use the platforms as a way of “managing a network of networks.”
- He quoted Karim Lakhani from Harvard who once said, “No matter who you are, the smartest people work for someone else.”
- He said that “putting a call for solutions to the open innovation channels was easy.” But there was a psychological barrier to admitting they couldn’t find the answers themselves.
- Part of the reason why their efforts were so successful is that they did their homework. They determined which open innovation venue was most appropriate for each challenge. He referred to an article written by Gary Pisano in HBR (you can read an excerpt here).
- NASA is using three organizations for their open innovation efforts: InnoCentive, Yet2, and Topcoder.
InnoCentive Challenges
Davis spent a large part of his hour talking about InnoCentive. He described them as a “turnkey solution” because challenge writing, vetting and other activities are done by them, reducing the amount of work to be done by NASA. Their InnoCentive challenges yielded responses from people in 65 countries and had a solve rate of about 50%. He described a few InnoCentive challenges that they ran. Here are three where he had some interesting commentary:
Solar activity cause problems for space travel. If an astronaut is doing a walk during a flare, it can be incredibly dangerous. Therefore they ran a challenge to predict such activity. But instead of posting it as a solar activity challenge, they posed it as a mathematical modeling issue. This broadened the possible sphere of solutions and solution providers. The success criteria for the solution was that the model would need to provide prediction within 24 hours of the solar activity, it needed to be 50% accurate, and within 2 sigma (a quality measure where the higher the number the better). The solution was provided by a retired engineer whose model predicted within 8 hours, was 70% accurate and within 3 sigma. This was a huge improvement over their initial expectations.
Because space travel can last for years, they have a problem with food spoilage. Therefore they ran a challenge to find a food packaging materials that could keep food fresh for 3 years. They found a solution from someone without food experience in Russia who developed a graphite-based material that appears to keep food fresher than regular materials.
Davis indicated that their “micro gravity laundry system” challenge was the least successful. There were two lessons from this. 1) Asking a “system” question was too complex and it should have been deconstructed into smaller challenges (e.g., a valve challenge). 2) Maybe a “higher level” question should be asked. For example, how do we eliminate the need for clothes laundering altogether?
His comments confirmed a few things for me:
- The laundry challenge highlights two keep points: asking a question that is too abstract leads to fluffy solutions, and asking the wrong question leads to irrelevant solutions.
- The food packaging and solar flare challenges show that solutions often come from disciplines than are different than where you would traditionally look.
- There is no one size fits all solution for open innovation. Different challenges require different approaches.
If you want to see my presentation to NASA last year, you can watch it here.
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Read our Change This Manifesto
Today, the good folks at ChangeThis.com published my Personality Poker manifesto. It is a quick read that will provide you some of my thoughts on why organizations struggle to become innovative…and what can be done about it.
Here’s the excerpt that Change This included on their website…
Issue 75 – 01 | Personality Poker: How to Create High-Performing Innovation Teams
By Stephen M. Shapiro Published Oct. 6, 2010 12:00 a.m.
“The desire for equality permeates everything we do and always has, as can be seen in many of our age-old philosophies. For example, we see it in the Golden Rule, which is often interpreted as ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.’ However, who really cares what you want? After all, treating people as you want to be treated doesn’t address the needs and desires of others.
Buying into these doctrines, myths, and lies leads to pasteurizing, homogenizing, and sanitizing everyone in order to fit people into one mold and think the same way so they can then gather together in like-minded harmony. There’s a good reason why they call it a company culture, since organizations are, in actuality, mini-cults. Instead, we should consider living by the doctrine:
The person you like the least may be the person you need the most.”
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Don’t Do The Wrong Things When Things Go Wrong
No company is perfect. Something will eventually go wrong, even if you have the greatest Six Sigma or quality program on the planet.
And it is how you handle these problems that can determine your relationship with your customers.
For example, I needed a taxi from my hotel in Paris to the airport. According to the front desk, it was supposed to take only 7 minutes. After 10 minutes, the woman apologized and walked outside to see what was going on. The police had blocked the road and no cars could get down the street. She walked with me to the corner to see if my taxi was waiting there. It was not. She had me wait at the corner while she ran back to the hotel to call for another taxi. Given the road problems, they would not send another car. Instead of giving up, she walked me several streets away to a taxi stand where she made sure I was off safely.
That is customer service! That goes beyond what I suspect any manual told her to do. And it left me with only positive thoughts of my experience with that hotel.
To me, this is the true essence of innovation. It is about improvising in the moment to do what makes sense right then and there.
Or, after checking into my hotel in the suburbs of Chicago, I went up to my room to discover that the key did not work. I went all the way back down to the front desk. The gentleman there apologized, fixed the keys, and without hesitation handed me some chocolate chip cookies. No, I wasn’t staying in a Doubletree where all guests get cookies. I was in a Hampton Inn. I doubt this was standard protocol.
That one small gesture removed any annoyance and made me happy…sort of. Since I am trying to lose a few pounds, I did silently curse the front desk clerk as a devoured the delicious cookies.
But sometimes companies do the wrong things when things go wrong…
I have had service with a mobile phone company for a long time, spending $2,000 a year on service. A year ago I decided to get their VoIP home phone service which was one third the cost of a traditional copper wire line.
From the beginning, I had problems with the VoIP phone with poor call quality and dropped calls. I called the phone company’s technical support repeatedly to see if they could fix the problem, but they could not. Finally, I called customer service to tell them about my problems and that I wanted to cancel my account. The man I spoke with informed me that I was under contract and that I would be charged $200 for canceling. I explained that I have had issues from the beginning and have spent nearly $10,000 dollars with them over the years. Did he really want to risk losing my $2,000 a year mobile service by forcing to adhere to a contract for a substandard home product? After 20 minutes of pleading my case, he did not waver.
I hung up and decided to call customer service again. I explained the situation to the new person on the line. Within 2 minutes, he canceled my home contract without penalty. Clearly it was not that difficult to do. Why didn’t they do that in the first place?
You can make or break a relationship with a customer through a single interaction. And what is most telling is how you respond to a customer when something goes wrong.
I know someone who worked for Bose. She once told me: “When a customer buys Bose speakers, they become a fan of the product. But when they buy Bose speakers and something goes wrong, they become a fan of the company for life.“ Their customer service is second to none.
What do you do when things go wrong? Do you follow the “instruction” manual? Or do you color outside of the lines and do what is right? One interaction can change your relationship with your customers.
Whatever you do, don’t do the wrong things when things go wrong.
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