July 2007

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This Month's Headlines

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This is our personal note welcoming you to the July 2007 issue of Future of Work Agenda and setting our theme for the month. This time we're offering a sneak preview of our forthcoming book, Corporate Agility; our feature article was inspired by the book's Introduction. And our editorial takes a new - and slightly irreverent - look at innovation.

We bring you news from Diane Coles of SCAN Health and Jen McClure of the Society for New Communications Research, as well as some wonderful advance praise for Corporate Agility, our forthcoming book. In addition we report on our own future public appearances and, as always, encourage you to consider becoming a member of Future of Work.

This article is inspired by, and adapted from, our new book, Corporate Agility, which will be published by the American Management Association in August. We started with the Introduction to the book but have embellished it significantly to create this call for a new way of thinking about the management and organization of large organizations.

Our "rant" in June, titled "In Our Humble Opinion: Our Favorite Color is Green," reflected some of our latest thinking on the idiocy of commuting patterns in the United States (and much of the rest of the world as well), in which millions of workers get in their cars (or, sometimes, a bus or train) to travel to their places of work. After reading our comments, Jeffrey Denecke sent us the following letter, which we are pleased to reproduce here in full.

This section provides you with brief summaries of several recent notes we've already posted on the Future of Work weblog. In each case we also include a live link to the original post on the blog. And we encourage you to become a regular reader of the blog, where we are posting notes, case studies, and links to other important websites on a regular basis.

We end each issue of Future of Work Agenda with a personal perspective - our chance to comment on issues and developments in the world of work that we find important and interesting. This is our "editorial" page, where we enjoy offering our opinions and predictions about what's happening (or should be happening) in the world of work and beyond.

From Jim and Charlie

You'll notice that both our feature article and our "rant" this month were inspired by our new book, Corporate Agility, which will be published in August by the American Management Association (you can read AMA's pre-publication description on the AMA site, or you can see it on Amazon.com, or here on Barnes and Noble.com).

We're obviously doing a bit of shameless self-promotion; but, frankly, we're very excited about what we've produced and eager to share it with the world.

With all due respect to all the women in the world, we think we now have a slight inkling of what it's like to give birth (okay, okay, we know darn well we don't really have a clue about birthing, but the book has had a long gestation period - almost four years if our memory is any good any more).

It's an exciting event, and we're looking forward to being able to share more of the book's stories and messages with you here in the newsletter, on the blog, and on a soon-to-be public new website dedicated to promoting the need for corporate agility and our approach to creating it: Collaborative Strategic Management (we'll tell you more about that once the book is on the street).

Meanwhile, please do read "Corporate Agility - Thriving in a Flat World," our feature article this month. It's a brief summary of how and why we wrote the book, along with an overview of the book's core themes.

Our premise is actually very simple: to survive in today's global, information- and innovation-based economy, organizations of all sizes, shapes, and colors have got to become far more agile in the way they compete for both customers and workers. And they've got to drive their fixed-cost base as close to zero as possible. And if that's not enough to curl your hair, they also have to bake innovation as deeply into their corporate DNA as they possibly can.

And of course (where have you heard this before?) the only way they can do all that is by achieving deep, meaningful integration of their Human Resources, Information Technology, and Real Estate/Facilities strategies, to say nothing of integrating their day-to-day management.

It's a tall order, but we hope you'll find our suggestions and many stories of what the world's leading practitioners are doing to become more agile both insightful and meaningful.

As if that isn't enough, we've also honed in on innovation in our rant for the month ("In Our Humble Opinion: What's New?"). Here we actually offer some more recent thoughts and perspectives that actually go beyond the stories in Corporate Agility (but were definitely stimulated by the stories in the book). We've even listed our six dimensions of innovation and offered a brief "How To Do It" guide for those of you who aren't comfortable creating your own means of innovating.

This issue also includes a couple of Reader Responses that were triggered by our June rant, "In Our Humble Opinion: Our Favorite Color is Green." We were relieved to find that our "critics" weren't disagreeing with us; they just felt we hadn't gone far enough.

And as always, of course, we're also pleased to bring you the Best of the Blog section summarizing our most recent posts on the Future of Work blog. We continue to believe that you'll find ideas and information here that you just can't get anywhere else.

But don't forget that we don't publish in August - there are too many of you (including the two of us) who desperately want slow down and smell the flowers during the dog days of summer (with apologies to our friends Down Under and thereabouts). So find a good trashy novel, head for the beach or the mountains, and catch some R&R. But please come back in September tanned, rested, and raring to go. That's our plan - and we're sticking to it.

So, on to the rest of the newsletter. Enjoy! And please let us know what you think.

Announcements and News from the World of Work

Future of Work Member News

Please join us in congratulating Diane Coles of Scan Health. She will be serving as President of the Orange County (California) Chapter of IFMA starting July 1. And she just recently won the IFMA Orange County "Professional Member of the Year" award for 2006-2007.

Jen McClure, Executive Director of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), reports that the Spring/Summer Journal of New Communications Research is now available. In addition the Journal is issuing a call for papers for the next issue with a deadline of August 31.

SNCR is also preparing for its 2007 Research Symposium. Jen invites Future of Work members to attend and will be happy to consider offering a special discount on the registration fee. Contact Jen directly for more information.

Advance Praise for Corporate Agility

As authors and publishers always do, we've offered sneak previews of our new book to a few good friends from both the business world and academia. And we're very pleased at the reactions we're getting. Here's just a few of the comments we've already received.

From Brian Walker, Chief Executive Officer and President of Herman Miller:

Corporate Agility is a thoughtful introduction to a systemic, integrated approach to equipping people with the places, tools, and practices they need, not only aligning with but enabling their organizations' strategies. The research results and case studies make a compelling case for thinking differently about the workplace of the future.

From Colin Dyer, Chief Executive Officer and President of Jones Lang LaSalle:

In Corporate Agility two acknowledged experts in the field of Workplace Solutions offer an authoritative and well-researched approach to restructuring the work environment to reduce operating expenses, take advantage of emerging technology, and, perhaps most importantly, address the key priority of attracting and retaining talented people.

From John Igoe, Vice President, Commercial Development, REGIS Group of Northern California, L.P. (former Vice President of Facilities and Real Estate Services, Palm Computing, and former member of the Board of Directors at CoreNet Global):

The authors have achieved their primary goal in focusing on the workforce as the key element in achieving corporate agility. Assuring the entire environment for the workforce is coordinated with the goals of the company and executed in a cost-effective manner is the role of the IT, CRE and HR departments with the leadership and support of the C Suite. The authors have captured the "genie in the bottle" and have displayed great examples of leadership from some of the best and brightest companies in the world. Very easily readable and yet a textbook to be kept within easy reach for very valuable data as well as templates and processes that we can use every day.

Corporate Agility: A Revolutionary New Model for Competing in a Flat World will be published by the American Management Association in late August. You can read about it and even place a pre-order at either Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com. And look for lots more information about the book in the September issue of this newsletter.

WDC and Future of Work Activities

Jim and Charlie will be featured in a webinar titled "Remote Work and Productivity" on September 12, 2007, at 9 AM Pacific Daylight time. The webinar, sponsored by Success Factors and hosted by Research Director Erik Berggren, is free. For more information visit the Success Factors website.

Jill Duncan and Herman Miller have invited Charlie and Jim to present the core ideas in Corporate Agility at the HMI Design Center in Dallas on September 20. Details to follow.

We are also pleased to announce that Jim and Charlie will be featured speakers at the IFMA World Workplace Conference in New Orleans, October 24-26.

Future of Work Continues to Seek New Members

Future of Work offers several levels of membership that depend on your status and needs: Individual and Small Business, Corporate, and Implementation Partners. We also offer special discounts to nonprofit, educational, and public sector organizations.

These membership programs are described in more detail on the Future of Work website, or feel free to contact us directly for more information about fees and benefits.

All Future of Work members are now listed on the Future of Work website, in the About Us/Members section. We encourage all our readers to consider joining the community.

Please visit our website and apply for membership today.

Feature Article: Corporate Agility - Thriving in a Flat World

by Charlie Grantham, Jim Ware, and Cory Williamson

This article is inspired by, and adapted from, our new book, Corporate Agility, which will be published by the American Management Association in August. We started with the Introduction to the book but have embellished it significantly to create this call for a new way of thinking about the management and organization of large organizations.

Early in 2002, as part of our continuing efforts at the Work Design Collaborative, we began a modest research project we called the "Future of Work." As business consultants with backgrounds in academia - Jim at the Harvard Business School, and Charlie at the University of San Francisco - we saw the need for a new set of analytical tools that businesses could use to rationalize their real estate needs, their information technology deployment, and their human resources planning.

As a result, we gathered a small group of corporate thought leaders - among them Agilent Technologies, Cisco Systems, Intel, PeopleSoft, Capital One, and Herman Miller - and we began to survey both individual workers and senior executives in an attempt to discover how new technologies, the changing workforce, and economic globalization were changing both how and where people worked, and what those changes meant to the future of work in the so-called "Information Economy."

We began with a presumption that, as population growth slowed and the baby boomers moved towards retirement, the workplace would become an increasingly important means of attracting and retaining talented workers. We knew from personal experience and our own previous research that talented people wanted - no, demanded - a great deal of personal control over their work, and that traditional, top-down, one-size-fits-all management and cube farms don't exactly produce any meaningful sense of self-control.

In essence we set out to understand the current state of individual-organizational relationships and what employees were looking for in a job - with a particular focus on the workplace, or as we have always preferred to call it, the "work environment," mindful of the fact that the physical place is only one dimension of the context in which work gets done. And as important as place is in defining work, we were convinced that the tools companies provide to their staff and the human resource management practices they put in place are equally important factors in workforce productivity, to say nothing of how people feel about their work and their employers.

Our initial findings confirmed what our experiences as academics, consultants, and corporate managers had long led us to suspect: although the global economy had undergone a series of rapid, model-shattering changes, most businesses had been unable, or unwilling, to adapt their traditional management styles to the new conditions.

Prisoners of their outdated business practices and their assumptions about how work gets done, most organizations found themselves losing ground to competitors who had not even been on the map a decade before. They became victims, rather than beneficiaries, of advances in information technology. And at a time when the attraction and retention of qualified, engaged employees had become an even more critical factor in a business's success or failure, they found themselves out of touch with a workforce that had undergone a dizzying transformation in attitudes, abilities, and ambitions.

Together, these factors resulted in a crippling loss of corporate agility. In an economy characterized by rapid, unpredictable change, traditionally managed companies felt as though they were standing still while the new global order spun past them. The weights on those corporate ankles were easy to identify: high fixed operational costs, or in other words, long-term commitments to buildings, people, and technologies that robbed them of the flexibility and the agility required to compete and succeed in a period of unprecedented and very short-term change in the business world.

Traditionally managed companies were paying too much for real estate and facilities, and had labor forces that were costly, inflexible, locked in to long-term contracts, and plagued by high rates of turnover. Worse, these same companies had product development cycles so lengthy and complicated that the markets themselves often changed before the "new" products ever reached them.

These industrial-age behemoths are often referred to as "corporate dinosaurs" in an effort to describe just how slow and unwieldy they really are - to say nothing of being nearly extinct - and there may be even more truth and insight contained in that image than anyone ever intended.

While dinosaurs inhabited the earth for something like 150 million years, the general belief today is that they disappeared following a cataclysmic climate change caused by the impact of an enormous meteorite. The dinosaurs had become so physically large and complex, with nervous systems focused almost completely on their own internal needs (i.e., breathing, digesting food, circulation, and so on) that they were unable to adapt to the new conditions. Only smaller, fleet-footed mammals were able to survive, by reacting to the changing climate, plant life, and the other remaining inhabitants of the radically changed ecosystem.

We find that a compelling metaphor for what is happening in the business world today. Those that survive will be the fleet of foot and the nimble, or those organizations that create not only new products but also new markets, and do so faster than their competitors ever imagined possible.

And in addition to being able to advance quickly, they will also be capable of pulling back in response to unexpected changes in customer demand or interest. It's not enough to be first to market, or to double your revenue overnight; it's also important to be able to reduce your presence in one part of the globe at the same time you establish it in another. In today's business climate, only the agile survive.

That perspective has solid backing from academic theory as well as the real-world school of hard knocks. In a classic study of organizational structure and management style first published almost 50 years ago Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch of the Harvard Business School (Organization and Environment - link is to a 1986 paperback edition, but the original research was conducted in the 1960's) showed conclusively that in dynamic and uncertain business environments more decentralized organizational decision-making and flatter organizational structures were essential for survival.

In contrast, organizations in stable, predictable environments where efficiency still mattered actually performed far better with top-down, bureaucratic, command-and-control management style. To be specific, the two industries that Lawrence and Lorsch studied were plastics (high tech, rapid rates of change) and glass bottle manufacturing (a very mature, stable technology where fractions of a cent in manufacturing cost made the difference between profitability and going under).

Today it's hard to think of an industry that isn't driven by fast-paced innovation, where being first to market with new products and technologies is just about the only way to survive. And in those kinds of environments the only way an organization can succeed is to be fleet of foot, nimble, and ready to shift into or out of products, technologies, customers, and markets in a nanosecond. To mix metaphors shamelessly, you can't turn a tanker on a dime, yet the worldwide business environment is nothing but churning, unpredictable whitewater rapids. You need a kayak, not a 200-ton tanker, to survive the journey today.

How, then, does a business evolve from the dinosaur to the jaguar (yet another metaphor, but a compelling one), and in the space of months, not millennia? After decades of research, both on our own and in conjunction with various members of the Future of Work community, we believe the answer is a collaborative, strategic approach to management that acknowledges and leverages the growing interdependence of Human Resources (HR), Corporate Real Estate (CRE), and Information Technology (IT), a process we call Collaborative Strategic Management.

People, place, and technology, after all, are what come together to define the workplace, and it is there that businesses thrive or fail. Yet despite that simple, unassailable truth, in most businesses operating today the management of HR, CRE, and IT remains disconnected, and therefore largely dysfunctional.

At first glance, given their dissimilarities, this is not surprising. Just think about it for a moment: are there any two professional areas more dissimilar than IT and HR? IT is all about reliably delivering data on demand, and at the lowest possible cost. IT is about machines, software codes, and electricity. It is about being 100% correct all the time, since one little bug, or virus, can destroy a multimillion-dollar enterprise. HR, in contrast, is about understanding and motivating human beings - i.e., highly unpredictable, emotional creatures, who often have contradictory opinions.

And the corporate real estate profession? Suffice it to say that the CRE manager lives in a world as far from IT and HR as the earth is from Saturn and Jupiter. Real estate professionals are charged with providing safe, productive, low-cost workplaces in strategically desirable locations. And they must provide that space at just the right time, anticipating the company's needs so that it's available just before it's needed, and yet can be disposed of just as soon as it isn't, and at minimal cost to the company.

Thus, each of these three functional areas has its own disciplines, its own values, and its own challenges. Yet no business can operate effectively unless HR, CRE, and IT are "in sync," aligned both with one another, and with the organization's broader strategic goals.

For all these reasons, businesses today desperately need a clearly defined methodology that allows them to align their HR, IT, and CRE strategies, and thus achieve that all-too-elusive corporate agility. Three years ago, recognizing this need, all of us at Future of Work redefined our community, reshaping it into a collaborative network of thought leaders, research specialists, and business consultants committed to learning how to define, develop, and implement Collaborative Strategic Management, and thus achieve that desperately needed corporate agility.

We're convinced that agility is the central and essential capability that organizations need to compete in the "flat world" of today. Being able to grow rapidly in one location at the same you are shrinking in another; being able to reach out and engage the talent you need, no matter where in the world it's located; continuously inventing new products and processes; being able to shed old products, unprofitable customers, and even unproductive staff on a moment's notice - that's what corporate agility means to us.

The forthcoming book is a compendium of corporate agility success stories - with a few failures mixed in for good measure. And it reflects our initial efforts to codify what we've learned into an emergent methodology that we hope will help you benefit from the experiences of the pioneers whose stories we've been privileged to hear and retell. We're excited that the book will finally be on bookshelves everywhere in August, and we hope you'll pick up a copy and let us know what you like - and don't.

As usual, your comments and reactions are more than welcome. And as always, please send your thoughts to us at comments@thefutureofwork.net.

Reader Response: A Comment on the "Green Rant"

Our "rant" in June, titled "In Our Humble Opinion: Our Favorite Color is Green," reflected some of our latest thinking on the idiocy of commuting patterns in the United States (and much of the rest of the world as well), in which millions of workers get in their cars (or, sometimes, a bus or train) to travel to their places of work.

After reading our comments, Jeff Denecke sent us the following letter, which we are pleased to reproduce here in full. It's one of the most thoughtful and insightful commentaries on a rant we've ever received. Thanks, Jeff, for broadening and extending our thinking. We'll do our best to keep your suggestions in mind in our future work.

By Jeffrey Denecke

Dear Jim and Charlie,

Great rant. However, the good old USA is a country and culture built upon capitalism, not conservation.

You guys are calculating what Green would save and conserve, not what businesses could add to the bottom line by going green and distributing the workforce.

You need to calculate the cost to a company for each employee working at home or at a Business Community Center versus what they will save and can add to their bottom line or reduced consumer pricing for competitive value.

Finally, what are the replacement industries for Big Auto, Big Oil, Big Energy ?

The USA government is responsible for policy and should be putting into place responsible policies that the business marketplace must react to.

How About:

• Minimum mileage for a motor vehicle @ 100+ mpg by 2015 (get Big Auto innovating again);
• Maximum pounds of carbon output per vehicle/per building/energy plant per day (get carbon sequestration technologies like Algae breeders going);
• Legislate some type of roadway taxation on commuter vehicles based upon occupancy (big cities create the biggest problems);
• Legislate replacing our highway systems - with high-speed mag lev, etc. - commuter railways and local trolleys by 2030;
• Provide decent right of way legislation that encourages bringing back local trolleys and getting rid of buses and cars;
• Incent corporations, telcos, cable companies to work together to deliver broadband, data-voice-video to each home at a reasonable cost; and
• Create a ten-year "race to green" program for all government facilities that will kick-start a new set of industries that can export conservation and green technologies, at a profit to the USA and the world.

Finally, back to the workplace of the future.

You can only replace centralization with location virtualization. Three-dimensional social web spaces like "second life" are a prototype of future capabilities that will be able to enable face-to-face meetings which can accommodate both one-one and many-many without the limitations of the video conferencing interfaces such as cameras, rooms, perspective etc..

People are social creatures and will continue to commute to a central place to fill this need for face to face communications and validation of their position within a hierarchy.

:) jeff

And we also received this short but compelling note from David Fleming:

[The reference to how stupid it is to move millions of commuters from suburbs to center cities and back again every day] was in Toffler's Third Wave, not Future Shock. Cooter could've told you that! I'm beginning to sound like Cooter. Must be in my Memphis genes.

[Guilty Parties' Note: we stand humbly corrected, and highly embarrassed - won't happen again, we promise]

"Purple Jesus Juice": My frat bruds (circa 1956-60) in the Bible Belt called it Purple Passion at University of Tennessee - the Volunteer State (Cooter-type country).

Third places to work: Neighborhood telecenters (Caltrans-University of California/Davis circa 1992-95) could've lasted had the Caltrans know-it-all's allowed us first to pursue partnerships with employers before supplying the telecenters (facilities, computers, etc.); it was a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality, a supply-side vs. demand approach [that] failed! Supplying the product before there is a conscious demand is dumb and dumber! Marketing folks never like to admit that they are consciously creating demand. Witness the demand to attack Iraq... argh!

Ethanol: You've got it! So, why don't others get it? Sustainable and Ethanol reminds me of an oxymoron. Did we forget the dust bowl, the buffalo, etc.?

We welcome additional comments on this topic. Please send your thoughts to us at comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'll certainly consider publishing them in a future newsletter, and we'll pass on to Jeff any direct reactions to his ideas as well.

Best of the Blog

Here's a small sampling of excerpts/lead-ins from our recent weblog posts. Please get in the habit of reading the Future of Work weblog regularly - bookmark it, or if you have an RSS news reader, subscribe to it. And please contribute as well. We're more than happy to reprint your stories, or to consider featuring you as a Guest Writer. We believe we're creating a unique knowledge base of what's going on out there today, and what's going to be going on tomorrow. If you want to learn about the future of work, our blog is the place to go (along with this very newsletter, of course). Just click on each headline below to visit the full original blog post.

Birth of a Free agent (June 11)

Our friend Amy Zuckerman, who founded Hidden-Tech in Western Massachusetts, is on to her next gig, and she's started up a new blog to chronicle her adventures and experiences ("Living The Virtual American Dream"). I heartily recommend that you read Amy's opening posts - her second one, "Let's Begin at the Beginning," describes her transition into becoming an independent entrepreneur. We all hear the statistics about how many people are abandoning corporate life and striking out on the their own, but somehow the up close and personal stories bring home the reality so much better. . . .

The Changing Role of the Workplace (June 14)

I'm just back from NeoCon 2007, that annual office furniture extravaganza held every June at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. As usual it was hot, crowded, and hopping. . . [and] this year I was pleased and privileged to be invited by Future of Work member Jill Duncan of Herman Miller to join her in leading a workshop we called "The Art of the Discovery: The Changing Role of the Workplace." . . . our opening question was, "Why don't office designs change as rapidly as technology has changed in the last decade?" . . .

Wellness Pays Off (June 15)

There's a nice article in today's San Francisco Chronicle about wellness at work ("Workplace Wellness"). The story, by staff writer Victoria Colliver, describes how several companies are (finally!) beginning to encourage and actually reward employees for taking care of themselves. It's really a win-win-win because healthy employees are not only better off physically (and mentally) but they're also getting meaningful discounts on their health insurance premiums. And of course their employers benefit too, both in terms of lower insurance costs and higher productivity and attendance. . . .

Distributed Work: HSBC Gets It (June 22)

Brian Sherwood Jones called my attention to a recent article in the London Times Online about HSBC's plans to move at least 50 percent of their London office staff into a home-based and mobile work environment within seven years ("Work-from-home drive as HSBC aims to sublet HQ"). It's a powerful example of reality-based leadership. . . .

In Our Humble Opinion: What's New?

Commentary by Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

"What if there were no hypothetical questions?"

Our thanks to George Carlin for the lead-in line. After all, he's the one (at least we think so) who once said that if you take two things that have never been stuck together before, and stick 'em together, someone will buy it.

God help us, Maynard is out back in the chicken coop usin' the power washer to clean up the chicken (uh, well, you get the idea; maybe he'll invent something that could be sprinkled over management consultants to identify them clearly from a distance).

So, once again, in the interests of shameless self promotion we dare to go where others have not gone, or maybe they just simply got lost. Drum roll, Buford. . . .

There are three things we really and truly believe:

1. you have to control your costs;
2. you need to have really good people to help you realize your vision; and
3. you need to create new stuff faster than the next guy.

That's why we wrote Corporate Agility, which will be unveiled in a month or so (click here for an advance description on Amazon.com). But we figured, gee, you ought to get a peak at some of our thinking before the bloggers and wiki-addicts get it (see also our lead article back above, "Corporate Agility - Thriving in a Flat World" for a slightly more serious discussion of the ideas in the book and how we came to write it).

We're going to focus here on doing new, neat, stuff faster.

So, to begin at the beginning (usually a really good place to start), please note that innovation has been around a long time. We guess that means it isn't new. (hello, that was a laugh line).

Why is innovation so important? Three quickies. It's the only way to stay ahead of the interaction curve. Things are happening faster all the time. "Innovate or die" (more on that in the closing paragraph). And a bonus: Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once (not relevant, but we get a kick out of it).

Innovation is also the current boundary limit to adding value. More money won't add value, cheaper production has decreasing returns, and we haven't yet figured out how to change the laws of physics. So we innovate with what we've got. And it's important because we don't totally understand it yet. Gotta keep learnin'. That even applies to you, Maynard.

So, what is innovation?

Come on, people. You know the answer to that one. It's anything Apple does, right? Even The Economist thinks so ("What other companies can learn from California's master of innovation").

Well, we got the boys together down at the store, plied them with a few cans of suds, and did a little 'brainstormin'. Didn't have one of those fancy white boards or a room full paper and tape so we used a spray paint can and the right side of the pick 'em up truck to "capture our ideas." (Hopefully you detect a message within the message here. Maybe that's another rant on how not to do innovative things). Once again, we digest, er, digress.

First, this idea is as obvious as the spots on poor ol' Cooter. Innovation is creating something new. But what ain't so obvious is that innovation can include lots of things that aren't things. Whoa, a little brain fade there, huh? Innovation can also be new ways of doing old things (e.g., the iPod versus the Sony Walkman) and it can be organizing a group of people differently (feudalism versus democracy, although some would say it ain't changed much: same circus, different clowns).

Innovation can also be seeing the old problem in a new way. This guy walks into a bar and orders a drink (no, we aren't doing the frog joke). Barkeep asks him what line of work he's in. He says, "I make window shades." Barkeep says, "No you don't, you're in the light control business." Duh, a whole new way of seeing things. The guy has a flash of green (pun intended) insight and goes on to become a gazillionaire selling environmental solutions to solar pollution.

Get it yet? Just keep reading.

And In Our Humble Opinion (enter great idea, stage left), making visions real is the most powerful kind of innovation. We all get so blasted hung up on making things we forget that other stuff can also be important.

Forgive us, or don't, but we humbly suggest that the kind of innovations Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and JFK brought humanity in the last 75 years just might have added a little value. Now if we can just get the bean counters clued in on to how "measure" that kind of value we might be getting somewhere.

Don't believe Maynard could be that smart? Check this out: The Stanford Social Innovation Review. So we'll say it one more time: Innovation and a company's future are increasingly intertwined with the needs and demands of society. Get a clue: that's where you should be digging for gold.

Okay, so just what does it look like when it's workin'? We know you won't be happy 'til we give you the checklist and a little matrix so you can do your Dilbert thing and check off items to see if the project that good ol' Big Bob (your fearless if clueless leader) just gave you is an actual innovation breakthrough.

Innovation is essentially about the act of realization (come on, one of us is from California). So once again, In Our Humble Opinion, meaningful innovations do six things at the same time:

1. Allow people to do more of what's important to them. If it's not important why are you doin' it anyway? Solve a problem-and think deeply about what the problem is.
2. Do it with less energy and effort. If this is some Rube Goldberg contraption that takes a month of Sundays to put together we not sure if it's genius or obsessive-compulsive stuff goin' on.
3. Do it in an orderly and understandable way. This is why we still don't think VCR's were innovative. One of us still can't program his (we'll never tell which one). But TiVo? Now you're gettin' close.
4. Provide a way to do it differently. Just how many ways are there to scratch your a** (oops) armpit? An airplane is a different way to get to Lower Slovobia than a tricycle. And it's a wee bit faster. So it's innovative.
5. Promote interaction between people, or between people and things. So what? This idea means that it's a dynamic process, which by definition means one innovation will lead to another; it just keeps a-rollin' along feedin' on itself.
6. Provide a foundation for a new identity. Innovation gives people a new way to express their uniqueness. Don't want to get too heavy here, but this is the "gots to have it" syndrome when you know you have absolutely greased it (case in point: the huge backlog of orders for the iPhone by people that hadn't even touched one before June 29).

And don't forget: all these things have to happen at once. Doin' just one or two won't cut it. Maybe your relatives will think it's cute but we'd throw you off the idea island for pushin' a half-baked idea.

We can't make it any simpler than that, Horace. Next, some smarty pants out there is gonna start whining. "Well, how do you do it? Tell me, tell me."

Sorry, we're not goin' to. That's why we wrote the book. Surprise, surprise. But before we go off lookin' for hot dogs and firecrackers and a parade or two, we will mention a few things that seem to get in the way of useful innovation.

People take much comfort in doing things the same old way because (unfortunately) thinking isn't a required survival skill. Ever seen a good cook who did the recipe the same way twice? A potter whose every pot looked the same? Don't think so. You could heat up ravioli from a can every night or buy bowls made by a robot, but it wouldn't be creative or innovative. So take a flyer and embrace variety and, yes, risk a little chaos and discomfort. You might be better for it..

Now, there is also the law of social inertia. Sorry, Sir Isaac didn't come up with this one. This law states that until it really, really hurts you won't do anything differently (can you believe that something like 80 percent of lung cancer patients don't quit smoking? That's how hard it is to get out of your "comfort zone.").

You can't be innovative in a culture that's content and comfortable. That's a rule.

And the last gotcha is the other law that says risk can get you killed (gonna have to be quick here 'cause the editor guy has started countin' our words). If you (or your company) is risk-averse, dollar to a donut it won't, no can't, be innovative. You see, not taking risk is even more dangerous than taking risk (that's what we call a good old-fashioned conundrum). No risk, no change, and the next thing you know the world is different and you are, how do we say it? Dead, Kaput, Gone, Done, Stick a fork in it. You're outta here.

Okay, so now what?

We've got a few final hints for you. Think about this way. You've just been strollin' down "Font of Wisdom" street and read our menu in the window. Now you've got to come in and order dinner (insert smiley faces here). A good innovation stew requires good people of all stripes and types, the right place to mix 'em all up, and the creative magic of a good chef (that's the project leader or facilitator, if you don't get our drift). Not every dish will turn out to be a winner but that recipe will give you more success and less corporate indigestion than anything else. Wanna talk, sailor? Call us, we're in the book.

One final reminder: we're takin' the month of August off as we do every year (not really, but we always take two months to concoct the September rant - so watch out, it'll be a doozy).

Please direct your comments to comments@thefutureofwork.net. We'd love to publish your reactions and suggestions. And thanks for listening.

This issue of Future of Work Agenda was produced by Jim Ware and Charlie Grantham of the Work Design Collaborative. We encourage your comments, suggestions, and submission of materials for possible future publication. Please contact us at:

Charlie Grantham, charlie@thefutureofwork.net, +1 928 771 9138
Jim Ware, jim@thefutureofwork.net, +1 510 558 1434

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