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Innovation Blog

Why Did Motorola Drop the Cell Phone Ball?

By Shlomo Maital

Marty Cooper

A fascinating segment on the CBS program 60 Minutes features Morley Safer’s interview with Marty Cooper, whose Motorola team built and demonstrated the first cell phone, in 1973.     There is no question that cell  phones have changed the world, and that their influence is just in its infancy.  With over 5 billion cell phones now operating worldwide, this appliance has had more powerful impact on society than even, perhaps, computers. And of course, cell phones are now becoming computers.

What is Cooper’s take on cell phones today?   It is worth hearing:

“Technology has to be invisible. Transparent. Just simple. A modern cell phone in general has an instruction book that’s bigger and heavier than the cell phone. That’s not right,” Cooper said.   Call it the complexity or confusion factor.   Cooper argues that cell phones designed to do everything – take pictures, play music and videos, surf the Web – don’t do any of them really well. He thinks the buyers should be dictating exactly what they want.
“The consumer is king. The consumer ought to make the decisions. And not, certainly not the engineer,” Cooper said. “Engineers tend to get enchanted by the technology itself.”

I wish Morley Safer had asked Cooper the $640 b. question.  Why did Motorola drop the ball?  Why did Motorola pioneer the cell phone, prosper because of it for a time (remember RazR ?), then almost disappear?  I don’t know the answer.  I wonder if Motorola does.  But, how often do we see a brilliant entrepreneur lead a small team to world-changing innovations, only to have the surrounding bureaucratic organization fail to realize its full potential?

I believe Marty Cooper is one of those few individuals who are super-creative — their creativity machine is permanently turned on, they ‘get it’, and produce an endless stream of wonderful, simple practical world-changing ideas.

What is Marty working on now?

So it seems only natural that the latest gadget developed by Cooper and his wife is a retro cell phone called the “Jitterbug.” It’s a basic phone – there’s no camera, no music. Any idiot can operate it.  It sounds simple enough: if you can hear a dial tone on the Jitterbug, you can make a call. “If there’s no dial tone you can’t,” Cooper explained. CBS) His next target are lost calls, also known as drop outs. Atop his office building, ugly conventional cell phone antennas are disguised as flagpoles.   He’s developing so-called smart antennas that can cut through all the competing noise in the radio environment to get your call through.
“And what they do is when we transmit, we send the information only to your phone,” Cooper explained.

Innovation Blog

Tiny Slovenia: Small is Beautiful

By Shlomo Maital

I write this as I watch Slovenia’s football (soccer) team play Algeria in the World Cup.  So far, they seem to be controlling play.  (Slovenia just scored:  1-0, in the final moments of play….  3 great points, meaning Slovenia may advance to the next round!).

Slovenia is by far the smallest country to qualify.  Its population is exactly 2 million — less than the rounding error of a small Chinese city.  Once a part of Yugoslavia, it gained independence in around 1990, when it saw that the countries comprising Yugoslavia were heading for bloody bitter ethnic war — and declared it was seceding.  Yugoslavia sent troops to Slovenia’s border, but realized there would be a hard fight and decided it wasn’t worth it.  As a result, Slovenia’s citizens were spared the terrible war crimes that plagued Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Croatia and the entire Balkans.

Slovenia has GDP per capita of about $27,000 (ranking 25^th in the world), and has attracted over $10 b. in inward direct foreign investment (FDI), or about $5,000 per capita.  In 2008, not a great year for FDI, Slovenia pulled in $3 b.  It has low unemployment (about 6 %) and strong political leadership.     Its secret?  Superb human capital.  As a former socialist country, Slovenia has an excellent educational system.    Its capital is Ljubljana.  Slovenia attracts many tourists and is physically beautiful.  It leverages its borders with Italy, Austria and Switzerland to good advantage.   Its full membership of the European Union freed it from a weak local currency, and the cheap euro gives it competitive advantage for exports.

In qualifying for the World Cup, Slovenia defeated Russia, a country with a population 70 times larger!  The score was 2-1, and the defeat was a huge surprise, and shock, for the Russians.

If I were running a small country (like, say, Israel, whose land area is exactly the same as Slovenia’s, 20,000  sq. km.), I would spend a lot of time in Slovenia, learning its secrets.  For Slovenia, small is indeed beautiful.   Had its neighbors, like Croatia and Bosnia, done so, perhaps they could have avoided the disastrous internal wars.   Slovenians have boundless self-confidence, and are certain they will advance to the next round of the World Cup.  I would not bet against them.

Innovation Blog

Nickel Pig Iron (NPI):  Here come the Chinese, We told you so!

By Shlomo Maital

I hate people who say, “I told you so!”.  So do we all.

But, hate to say it,   we told you so.    We told you the Chinese were hell-bent on moving up the industrial food chain, to higher-value-added innovative products.

Here is an example.

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail  (B1, B4,  Report on Business Weekend, June 12/2010),   Chinese iron producers have found a way to capture the $21 b. nickel pig iron business, taking business away rapidly from large producers like those in Canada’s Sudbury region.

The Chinese use electric furnaces, rather than blast furnaces, and cheap ore,  to produce pig iron with 10-12 per cent nickel content.  This is vital for making high-qualty stainless steel.  Normally  the product is sold for its nickel content, and stainless-steel producers add their own pig iron to it.  But the innovative Chinese process provides the nickel, and throws in high iron content for free.  It’s a winning value formula, one that is hard to compete against.   China’s thousands of stainless-steel producers now buy their nickel pig iron at home, rather than import it.    Chinese producers’ production costs are now as low as $7 – $8 per pound, and there are now 70 firms producing the innovative nickel pig iron.

Why did not the large nickel iron producers abroad innovate, when supposedly, China is traditionally a low-cost commodity producer?

What we see in nickel pig iron will replicate itself across a great many industrial products in the near future.   Those Western producers who are sound asleep will get a rude awakening, and soon.   China is not just about low cost.  It is now about value-added innovation.

Innovation Blog

Creating Experiences in the Digital Age:

From Agrarian to Industrial to Experiences … to VIRTUAL

By Shlomo Maital

B. Joseph Pine II is the prophet of “mass customization” — creating markets of one, by customizing  products for each customer, while maintaining efficiency and low costs.  He is also the visionary who brought us The Experience Economy, which shows how creating new experiences (memorable ones are known as ‘transformations’, changing who we are) are crucial to the innovation process.  Now Pine, co-founder of a consulting firm known as Strategic Horizons, has written    Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier,  a forthcoming book due out soon about using digital technology to create memorable virtual experiences.   Joe has given me a preview of his book, in the form of a lengthy white paper.

Pine notes, in this white paper:

“That is what we desperately need in business today: experience innovation. Why? Because we are now in an Experience Economy, where experiences –        memorable events that engage people in inherently personal ways – are becoming the predominant economic offering. It eclipsed the Service Economy          that flowered in the latter half of the twentieth century, which in turn superceded the Industrial Economy, which itself supplanted the Agrarian    Economy.      As goods and services increasingly become commoditized, companies must step up this progression to stage the experiences that create             customer value.”

Note that even if you are an inventor and innovator of goods, you can greatly enhance the attractiveness of your product offering by accompanying it with powerful customer experiences, some of them digital and virtual in nature.  Some companies discover that to grow and to survive, they must transform themselves from product companies into solutions companies, whose offering is an overall package that has at its core an experience:  the key experience of gaining peace of mind by having the offering solve a problem, continually and persistently.

Case study:  NICE is an Israeli company that sold small video cameras for surveillance purposes, a product that is now ubiquitous, with many many thousands now blanketing, for instance, New York City and London.  NICE transformed itself from a surveillance camera firm into a solutions firm, by adding software that will help clients analyze the data from its video cameras, and provide a clear crisp concise report.  NICE realized that what clients wanted was not surveillance cameras, but the ephemeral experience of “feeling secure”.  It has since greatly prospered.  Its business model is summed up as “more to same” — selling higher value-added services to clients, rather than selling “same to more” — more conventional products to different clients.

Innovation Blog

Build Your Supercreativity Machine

By Shlomo Maital

(This is a shortened version of a talk I will give tomorrow, Monday June 7, at the Rotman School of Business, Univ. of Toronto, in the Design Expert Thinkers series,  on “Unchain your Supercreativity – Build Your Supercreativity Machine”).

———–

In the past year, I’ve been in North and South America, Europe and Asia.  And in 2008 I was in Africa.     Wherever I go, I encounter a mass epidemic.  It is not AIDS.  Nor avian flu, or H1N1, malaria, or any other illness.  It is unrecognized and largely untreated.

The epidemic is that of boredom.

I find that masses of people are doing jobs that are routine, uninteresting and deadly boring.  As a result, the flame of their creativity has gone out.  Many people, especially managers, believe that it has gone out forever.  Unlike Prometheus, who brought fire to the world, they feel their creativity fire has been doused by routine and cannot be relit.

So, as a personal mission, I am declaring war on boredom.  Not by fighting something negative, but by trying to foster something positive:   Creativity.  Creativity is the process of building useful novel ideas.  Innovation is the process of implementing those ideas, making them happen, and changing the world with them.   Every person must have a supercreativity machine.  Supercreativity is the quality of being able to produce creative ideas endlessly, as a mighty river, from morning to time, through days, weeks and years.   A machine is the systematic process that makes this happen.  Everyone needs one.  It has to be built.  And it CAN be built.  I would like to try to provide you with some of the parts.

Warren Buffett once said,  “the chains of habit are too light to be felt — until they are too heavy to be broken.”   Supercreativity begins with breaking the chains of habit, by trying new things that may be strange or uncomfortable, in all walks of life — food, dress, acquaintances, travel, etc.

A key question to begin:  Do you design your life? We are all designers, and our most important design project is our own lives.  Yet most of us allow our lives to proceed almost randomly.  Randomness is a design idea — but it rarely yields works of beauty.  Take control. Design creativity into your life.

Here are some parts for your creativity machine:  Curiosity (incessant); Laser-sharp questions; Strong Allergy to Habit; Passion;  Empathy;  Tunnel Vision (sharp focus on a key question); Wide Angle Vision (zooming out to explore the world and how others deal with the key question).

Here is an example of the ZIZO zoom out / zoom in process that can yield a supercreativity tsunami.

Begin with a simple sentence: A definition of the thing you wish to innovate.  Automobile:  a car is a vehicle that provides transportation, and is assembled from parts.   Challenge each part, each word, in the sentence. (Zoom in).  Henry Ford asked:  Why should a car, in 1909, be produced by a team of workers from a pile of parts dumped onto a shop floor, and assembled randomly, until there are no parts left.  How could it be done otherwise? (Zoom out).  Ford visited a Chicago meatpacking plant and watched how carcasses are placed on pulleys, and at each station, processed by a worker, cutting a different cut of meat, until at the end nothing was left.  Why not do the same for making cars? Ford asked.  Why not pull the chassis with a winch, and have workers at each station add different parts?  The result was to create the modern Industrial Revolution.

Here are 11 things you can do, to start your supercreativity machine and put it into action.

* Believe that ideas are only the first step, NOT the last; * Do one scary thing every day   * Learn to persist.  * Seek new experiences always.  * Ask questions, in long series, including follow-ups.  * Learn to love the journey, not just the destination (creativity itself is enjoyable, and generates ‘light’, apart from what the fruit it produces);  * Think wild, then — back off to reality;  * Declare war on boredom   * Have fun, and seek fun!  Creativity thrives in an environment of fun   * Find your passion — then pursuit it.  Passion is the rocket fuel for the supercreativity machine.  * Seek out your DIScomfort zone.  Creativity operates in the geography of discomfort,  not comfort.

Innovation Blog

What Business Are You In? BP’s Tony Hayward Under Fire

The disastrous oil spill that has dumped thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the past 47 days has focused attention of British Petroleum’s CEO Anthony (Tony) Hayward and on his handling of the crisis.  He has not been given high marks.  Press reports note that “a series of Hayward misstatements since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 people haven’t helped his case with the general public — and investors have been fleeing BP’s stock.”   Since many  British institutional investors (pension funds, etc., ‘widows and orphans’) hold BP stock, the damage has been enormous, and not just to the environment.

In Sept. 2009 we brought a group of Israeli managers on a benchmarking visit to London, and heard from senior BP officials.  They were astonishingly frank.  They noted that BP’s legendary leader John Browne focused on mergers and acquisitions, including the huge one of ARCO, and had neglected operations — the fact that BP is an oil company and is in the business of producing and discovering oil, not just rearranging deck chairs on the deck of Wall St.   The result:  Operational decline, and an explosion and fire at a Texas refinery that killed a number of workers.  The aftermath was to fire Browne, despite his achievements, and appoint an internal engineer, Tony Hayward, with long experience in the field in operations.

Now comes the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Hayward has been on the scene.  But like many engineers, he has not been trained for situations like this.  He has clearly been counseled by lawyers, not to admit liability, at a time when what ordinary people wanted to hear was: We screwed up, here is how, and here is what we’re doing to fix it. (A ‘screw up’ confession, of course, is the last thing lawyers want CEO’s to say).

BP’s future is in doubt.  It will become a widely-taught case study of what happens when a company neglects its core business, lets the pieces of paper and finance people gain control,  lets its operational excellence decline — and pays a heavy price when disaster strikes.

Let BP remind itself.  We discover and produce oil.  We must do this with superb excellence and with zero mistakes.  Let every one of BP’s nearly 100,000 employees refocus on this fact. Let Tony Hayward, as long as he is CEO, refocus the company on this.    And let us all remember that operational excellence is one value discipline no company can ever neglect.

Recall what Harvard Business School Professor Ted Levitt taught us:  Every day, ask, ‘what business am I in?’.  Remind yourself — and then do it.  BP forgot.

Innovation Blog

Wanted: Creativity in Creativity Depts.

By Shlomo Maital

A Wall Street Journal report by Suzanne Vranica (“Help wanted: creative executives”),  WSJ Friday-Sunday June 4-6,  p. 20,  reveals a remarkable paradox:  There is a shortage of creativity precisely in the place known as “creative departments”  in advertising agencies.

According to Vranica,  as the recession eases and advertising spending slowly recovers, big advertising agencies are struggling to fill a crucial position: Head of creative departments.  These are the departments that come up with the big ideas for campaigns, which are then transferred to the production departments for implementation.

These jobs get salaries of $1 m. yearly and more. Top agencies like WPP and Interpublic are searching for talent.

According to Nick Brien, CEO of Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup,  “Creativity is now far broader and far more complicated than it used to be.  This is where art and science are meeting and it can be either a beautiful thing or a painful one.”

Painful?  Why painful?

Because what is needed today is not just creative ideas for campaigns (like the masterful campaign for Mastercard,  “XXX, $4.95,  real conversation, priceless”), but indeed, a new creative idea for an innovative business model for advertising, to combat Google and Yahoo.

And this is where even highly creative people, whose job definition is ‘creative’, stumble. Because many ad agencies are stuck in the past, unable to escape from the constraints of how advertising was in pre-history, and how it must transform itself in the age of Web 3.0.

Such transformations have occurred before in the advertising business.  A group of talented people transformed advertising in the ’80s, from “better, sweeter, stronger, nicer”,  to emotional branding  (“I Love NY”).   But this new transformation must be even more sweeping, and there are few signs that anyone has come forward with strong creative ideas on how to transform conventional print and media ads.  It must innovate advertising’s business model, not just its content.  This is always tough to do.

If you have some good ideas — try applying. These are fascinating, highly paid, highly stressful positions, and success is quickly measurable and well compensated.

Innovation Blog

Trivial Pursuits Is Anything But Trivial —

In Memory of Chris Haney  1951 – 2010

A Canadian high school dropout had an idea.  He joined with a fellow apprentice journalist named Scott Abbott — and in 1981 created a huge fad:  a board game that tests whether you can answer the most trivial unimportant questions.  The game was perfectly  named: Trivial Pursuit.  It comprised some 6,000 questions, none of which was about anything of importance.  E.g.,   Who was Howdy Doody’s twin brother?  (Double Doody).  [Who has Howdy Doody?  Star of a kid’s TV program in the 1950’s….].

According to the Global New York Times,    Trivial Pursuit has sold more than 100 million copies in over 26 countries and in 17 languages.  Haney, who struggled to implement his dream, died a millionaire, owner of gol courses, vineyards and race horses.

In 2008 the global game company Hasbro bought Trivial Pursuit for $80 m.

Haney died Monday, at a relatively young age, after a long illness.

I wonder how many people have thought about making a game out of trivia.  Why then was it Haney, and his partner, who made it a success?

The key is the Nike mantra:  Just Do It!    Creative people who change the world have a passion to see their inventions come to life and find use.  Creative people who fail to  change the world get great mental satisfaction out of coming up with ideas, without the need or passion to actually bring them to the marketplace.  It’s great to have ideas. It’s even better to make at least a few of them a worldwide hit — definitely,  non-Trivial.