TIMnovate

Innovation Blog

 Bipolar Issues: Is Self-Confidence or Humility A Better Motivator?

By Shlomo Maital

  If you are an innovator,  is it better to be supremely confident, even arrogant? Or is it better to be humble, self-effacing, modest?

   The answer is: Yes.  There appears to be a bipolar aspect to the underlying psychological attitudes that drive innovation.  This emerges from research on self-esteem, noted in David Brooks’ recent NYT column, and led by psychologist David Schmidt, of Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois.  This research measures national self-esteem:   Confidence in our ability to think, to cope with the basic challenges of life and confidence in our right to be successful and happy.   His team measured self-esteem in a large number of countries.

   The top six are:   

 •          Serbia: 33.59

•           Chile: 33.12

•           Israel: 33.03

•           Peru: 33.01

•           Estonia: 32.63

•           United States:  32.21

 Note that among these, Israel, Estonia and the U.S. are highly innovative nations, whose entrepreneurs are endowed with great self-confidence and willingness to undertake risk.  One might assume that innovation and entrepreneurship correlates strongly and positively with self-esteem.

   However, consider also the bottom-ranked nations, with Japan the lowest of all:

•           Taiwan: 28.77

•           Czech Republic: 28.47

•           Bangladesh: 27.80

•           Hong Kong: 27.54

•           Japan: 25.50

Among these nations, Taiwan and Hong Kong are highly entrepreneurial and innovative.  But Japan is not.   Taiwan and Hong Kong appear to have entrepreneurial drive arising from ‘worst-case scenarios’ – bad things may happen, if they do you will have only yourself and your own wealth and savings to rely on.  Japan’s self-effacing culture of modesty and understatement does not seem to boost innovation.

   In general, I believe that innovation is highly dependent on national culture, but each nation that excels in innovation does so, in its own way, unique and distinctive.  This is why nations that have tried to emulate other nations’ innovation ecosystems have generally failed.  The message for nations that seek to become more innovate is:  You can do it, either through supreme self-confidence, or utter lack of self-confidence and self-esteem – but you can do it.   

   * Who’s No. 1 in Self-Esteem? Serbia Is Tops, Japan Ranks Lowest, U.S. Is No. 6 in Global Survey, by Miranda Hitti, WebMD Health News,  Sept. 27, 2005

 Innovation Blog

The Greatest Innovation Of All:  Your Life — We Can All Be Bill Gates

By Shlomo Maital

 Bill & Melinda Gates (Foundation) 

 In an amusing Op-Ed piece this morning (March 15)  in NYT, Zick Rubin writes about how a psychology website wikia.com reported his death (“Zick Rubin, 1944-1997”) – prematurely, recalling Mark Twain’s famous comment to a journalist “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” (usually misstated as “..reports of my death are premature”).  Rubin had to struggle to correct this.  But what is most interesting is that Rubin writes of how he ended a great career as Harvard psychology professor and in midlife became a media lawyer!  He was literally reborn.

    The greatest innovation many of us will face is within our own lives. We will need to reinvent ourselves in midlife, at least once.  But how?    According to Strenger and Ruttenberg *:  Avoid two extremes.  Myth One: “the myth that midlife marks the onset of decline”. It doesn’t. Your cumulative wisdom will far outweigh your physical decline.  Myth Two: “the myth of magical transformation through vision and willpower”.  You probably cannot become a concert pianist, even if you do practice 20,000 hours.  

   Use the ‘adjacent possible’.  What do I know now that could be useful in a new but related activity (adjacent to what I do now, but far enough to be interesting and challenging)?  And what am I passionate about, to drive the energy I need for this transformation?

   I know a great many successful managers and entrepreneurs who find new meaning in their second lives, through social activities – using their skills and wisdom to tackle social ills and problems, after building global companies and shaping world-changing innovations.  Social entrepreneurship is ‘adjacent’,  it is ‘possible’, but also new and challenging enough to energize.   Bill Gates is an example. He is using his wealth and his Foundation, along with organizational and innovative skills,  to tackle such problems as malaria, child immunization and developing a TB vaccine. 

* Carlo Strenger & Arie Ruttenberg, “The Existential Necessity of Midlife Change”, Harvard Business Review,  Feb. 2008

Innovation Blog

Innovator: Think With Your Gut!

Why Sherlock Holmes Failed to Solve the Greatest Mystery of All

By Shlomo Maital

 Sherlock Holmes: all head, no heart!

Here is how Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, describes his hero in “A scandal in Bohemia”:

 “All emotions…were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen…he never spoke of softer passions…admirable things for the observer, but for the trained reason to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results…grit in a sensitive instrument”.

I’m pretty sure most of us agree, believing that emotions cloud decision-making.  Good thinking, we believe, is left brain (logic), messed up by right brain feelings and passion.

   Fortunately, New York Times columnist David Brooks has written a brilliant new book The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement (Random House, 2010), which cleverly reviews neuro-science research through two fictional characters’ lives, and which shows that emotion, and our inner voices, actually strengthen reasoning, rather than weaken it.  Much of this research is based on FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), which maps the areas of the brain that control reason and emotion. 

   Here is a great passage from the book: “The unconscious mind is like a million little scouts [that] careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals…they maintain no distance from the environment around them but are immersed in it.  These scouts coat things with emotional significance. …they guide us like a spiritual GPS, as we chart our courses.”

    I believe Brooks’ book powerfully shows that great innovators must harness, and carefully listen to, their intuition and their deepest passion.  It is why I always counsel my students to look deep into themselves and find what they truly care about – and why I believe there is no such thing as ‘left’ brain and ‘right’ brain, but simply brain, a whole brain, linking emotion tightly with reasoning.

   Sherlock – get with it, man!  You may be the world’s greatest detective.  But if Conan Doyle had let you use your gut, as well as your deductive powers, well, maybe you could have done more than just solve murders.  Maybe you could have figured out what the true source of creativity is!

    Here, by the way, is David Brooks’ tip, a practical way to improve your decision-making. Suppose you are torn between two choices.  Say, Cherry Garcia and Chunky Monkey ice cream.  Can’t decide?  So, flip a coin. Heads, Cherry, tails, Monkey.  Now, after you flip the coin, ask yourself, how do I feel about this?  If you feel sorry, pick what you wanted in the first place. If you feel happy, well, the coin toss validated your choice. 

Innovation Blog

Lobsters Are Not Stupid, But Maybe We Humans Are!

By Shlomo Maital

  A Lobster Trap

The widespread practice of boiling lobsters alive has always seemed to me barbaric.   Who cares? People say, lobsters don’t have consciousness or intelligence anyway.

  Now comes evidence that lobsters are smart, intelligent, clever, and even cute.  They deserve far better than boiling alive.

   Lobsters are caught in lobster traps, which are mesh boxes with ‘one way’ entrances and bait.  Once in the trap, lobsters have their final meal before execution, are too dumb to know how to escape, and are pulled up into boats by lobster fishermen.

   Or, so we thought for a century.

   Researchers and students at University of New Hampshire decided to test this well-worn assumption noted above and lower video cameras into lobster traps, to see precisely what happens inside one.  And here is their surprising finding, based on 24-28 continuous hours of time-lapse shooting:

• A large number of lobsters approach and enter a trap, but only 1-3 are caught, because THE VAST MAJORITY ESCAPE!  Only 10 per cent of lobsters that approach a trap actually enter, despite the tempting bait inside, and of those, only 6 per cent are caught.  Over three-fourths of the lobsters who escape do so through the entrance.

  It is interesting that the huge (and so far, misunderstood) inefficiency of lobster traps have inadvertently kept the lobster population from being overfished.  If we could, we would have trapped every possible big lobster, thus endangering them. 

   So who is the dumb one here, lobsters? Or us humans?  And who, if any, deserves to be boiled alive? 

  Innovators:  Any time you encounter something EVERYbody believes implicitly, it’s true because it’s always been true, we all know it’s true,  question it!  Check it out!  You may get a lobster-like  surprise. 

    Source:  http://www.lobsters.unh.edu/lobster_tv/lobster_tv.html

Innovation Blog

Diseases in a Dish: George Bush, Hero of Stem Cell Breakthrough, or

How Reframing Spurs Creativity  

By Shlomo Maital

 induced pluripotent stem cells

In August 2001 President George Bush, then in office for about six months, announced that the National Institutes of Health would no longer fund creation of additional embryonic stem cell lines.  This effectively blocked research, because existing lines were insufficient. 

   This was perhaps one of ex-President Bush’s greatest decisions.  Sometimes, you create breakthroughs by making life harder (rather than easier) for creative people. 

   A fascinating article in Scientific American * recounts how James Thompson, a dozen years ago, created stem cells in a dish at Univ. of Wisconsin.  After Bush’s decree, and despite Obama’s relaxation of it, and because of a Federal judge’s reaffirmation banning NIH funding of embryonic stem cell research in 2010, researchers redoubled efforts to create stem cells rather than harvest them from embryos.

    In 2002, three Columbia U. scholars published a paper showing how to transform embryonic stem cells into motor neurons (nerve cells).   Lee Rubin, a biotech veteran who then headed Harvard’s stem cell research institute,  then had a great idea, a transformative idea.  Others want to use stem cells to cure disease.  Hey, why not use them to CREATE disease?  If you can create an illness, maybe you can find faster ways to cure it.  Why not CREATE stem cells, then use them to produce diseased cells, then see how to treat them?  This REFRAMING  approach originally led to the multiple sclerosis (MS) drug Copaxone, when Weizman Institute researcher Ruth Arnon sought ways to induce MS and came up with a co-polymer molecule that was successful in treating it.

   Result?  Columbia U. researcher Wendy Chung took skin cell samples from two Croatian sisters suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease).  Those cells were transformed into stem cells, or what was called induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC), using a technique developed in japan.  Those stem cells were persuaded to become nerve cells, and as such, they had the genetic predisposition to ALS.  Now, researchers are using the test-tube ALS nerve cells to see whether existing FDA-approved drugs can cure ALS.  Trays of dishes with the ALS cells are used to test thousands of drugs for anti-ALS potency.  This is far far faster, than other methods for developing drugs that require three-phase clinical trials that take forever. 

    Rubin, Chung, Thompson may get Nobel Prizes. I hope they acknowledge George Bush’s assistance.  By making stem cell research harder, he probably speeded it up by light years.  Versatile stem cells made from adult cells and with induced diseases may now serve as disease simulators, in Petri dishes, for drug trials.  This comes at the perfect moment, when Big Pharma is abandoning earlier attempts to use the ‘target molecule’ approach (find good proteins that shut down bad proteins turned on by genes, that cause illness).  

   When you seek a solution to a problem, try reframing the question. Ask it in different ways. Turn it on its head.  Reverse it.  Hold it up to the light, and turn it around and view different angles. Sometimes, it is CREATIVE QUESTIONS that generate breakthroughs, rather than the answers. 

* Stephen Hall, “Diseases in a dish”, Scientific American March 2011.