Why do a few entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, seem to come up with all the real innovations, while the majority of business leaders seem stuck in the rut of linear thinking? I have always wondered if innovation required some rare gene mutation, or whether I might be missing a simple formula for unlocking the ability in any intelligent business person to innovate.
While searching for an answer, I was excited by a recent book, “The 4 Lenses of Innovation,” from Rowan Gibson, one of the most recognized thought leaders in business innovation. According to Gibson, you don’t have to be born with magic insights to be innovative. He connects breakthrough thinking to four initiatives, which I believe every entrepreneur should practice:
Questioning deeply-held beliefs and assumptions. The willingness to challenge accepted approaches and propose non-obvious alternatives is one of the fundamental driving forces for innovation. This is a thinking pattern and a culture which all entrepreneurs needs to instill and nurture in every startup team member.
Spotting and exploiting emerging trends. Innovative entrepreneurs have to start with a mindset of welcoming change, rather than trying to resist it. They don’t have to be futurists, they just have to be in the current time, not behind the times. Then they have to look for change, and continually hone their skills to turn discontinuity into opportunity.
Redeploying skills and assets in new ways. Innovators leverage existing skills and assets in new ways, new contexts, and new combinations, rather than assuming that new resources are needed for new opportunities. Strategic partnerships with other companies are a good way to extend the boundaries of your business and recombine resources.
Paying attention to unmet needs and frustrations. It all starts with a customer perspective to uncover problems and frustrations, and then design solutions from the customer backward. But customers also tend to think linearly, so they don’t always know what they want. It’s up to you to match what is possible with what is needed.
The next step to breakthroughs for entrepreneurs is to take advantage of the powerful digital tools available to foster innovation and ideas, like Innocentive and BrightIdea. There is also the wealth of social media digital tools, like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, which allow feedback, engagement, and collaboration with customers like never before.
Other smart entrepreneurs are building digital feedback loops directly into their products to understand exactly how customers use the products, as well as solicit real-time improvement feedback. Today entrepreneurs are already implementing the Internet of Things (IoT), where every device can be connected to the Internet, to provide insight and feedback to your company.
Finally, even with the right mindset and digital tools, creative ideas for entrepreneurs still don’t usually occur spontaneously, or come in a flash of inspiration. Every entrepreneur needs to adopt a more rigorous process, like this eight-step one developed and tested by Thomas Edison and many others to accelerate the production of big breakthrough ideas:
Select a specific challenge and focus on solving it.
Research the subject to learn from the work of others.
Immerse yourself in the problem, to explore possible solutions.
Recognize when you reach a deadlock, and capitalize on the creative frustration.
Back away for a while to let the problem incubate in the unconscious mind.
Be sensitive to any insights which might shift your perspective.
Extrapolate the insight into a new idea or solution.
Test and validate the new solution to make it work.
With the right mindset, tools, process, and a little practice, any entrepreneur can lead their startup to new levels of innovation, competitiveness, and success. So don’t wait for the next Einstein, or a magic Eureka moment, to get you into the game. You too can make business innovation look easy.
Marty Zwilling
Every startup begins with an idea, but from that point forward, it’s all about execution. Founders soon learn that customers only spend real money for solutions rather than ideas. Investors have also learned not to invest in ideas but only in entrepreneurs and teams who can deliver solutions. Success requires moving your passion quickly from the idea to the business implementation.
A good execution requires a plan and the right people, combined to create operational excellence and exceptional customer value. Companies that do this best become market leaders. Google, for example, was not the first Internet search provider (think Yahoo!, AltaVista, InfoSeek and others), but according to Investopedia, Google was the first to really monetize search.
As a result, Google has become a verb, and the company is a tech giant with record growth rates and a revenue of $74.5 billion in 2015. But Google is not unique. Many other companies have followed a similar set of execution principles which I believe are required for business success, no matter how great the idea:
Tune the business model to optimize value for all constituents. Smart entrepreneurs architect a value chain that includes customers, partners and vendors, based on market dynamics. They then drive innovations and solutions to feed that value chain. A growth model without monetization for key players is not a long-term success strategy.
Plan for pivots as improvements based on results. If every plan adjustment is a reaction to a crisis, you won’t take corrective action quickly enough and will never find new opportunities. Continuous improvement applies to the business model as well as the product. Set business goals and milestones, and use metrics to track performance.
Enable team members to run the business as their own. Every team member needs the motivation, training and authority to make day-to-day decisions without review and approval. That means milestones have to be documented, measured and desired results rewarded. The whole team is required to deliver a winning customer experience.
Two-way communication at all levels is always top priority. People who don’t know what is expected of them can’t do the job. Customers won’t be happy if you and your team don’t listen to feedback and expectations. Strong leaders realize that effective communication becomes exponentially more difficult as the number of players increases.
It’s hard to improve results that you don’t measure. In operationally excellent businesses, productivity and results are measured at every step in the value chain, not just at the end. Targets are benchmarked against competitors, customer reviews and industry expert expectations. Merely keeping up with previous results is falling behind.
Define at least one worst-case scenario and recovery plan. Proactively engaging the team in building a plan-B is the only way to assure a timely response to key challenges. A passionate commitment to an idea alone will not carry the business over downturns in the economy, market evolution or customer trend changes. A great business must be agile.
Optimize team efforts with the latest technology and tools. In this era of rapid technology advancement, an open mind must be the norm in leveraging the latest tools and process architectures. This means regular team training and update sessions, bringing in outside experts, and working with partners and vendors on win-win deals.
Business excellence is a convergence of technology and business elements to maximize customer value as well as company and partner returns. This convergence is not a one-time effort, but an iterative review and improvement mentality that has to be drilled into the team and built into every process and measurement. It has to start with the entrepreneurs at the top.
Google, with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin leading the charge, demonstrated a technical leadership combined with the foresight to bring in business help, including Eric Schmidt and others, to optimize the business execution focus. Are you sure your startup is moving beyond the idea stage, with the execution principles outline here, to assure long-term business success?
Marty Zwilling
*** First published on Entrepreneur.com on 02/26/2016 ***
Every business wants and needs top performers, but most entrepreneurs and executives assume that if they hire and train the smartest and most experienced people, they will get exceptional performance. They forget that top performance is a two-way street, requiring comparable initiative and responsiveness on the part of the leader, as well as contribution from each team member.
In other words, under-performing employees can be just as much a function of leaders not doing their job as employees not doing their job. In fact, there are initiatives that leaders can and must do to even enable high performance on their team. I saw the key ones outlined well in a recent book, “Creating High Performers,” by William Dann, a leading coach to experienced CEOs.
In my own role as advisor and mentor to many entrepreneurs and startups, I was struck by how relevant and critical these same initiatives are to even the earliest stage businesses. Thus, I have converted here Dann’s seven questions for direct reports, to responsibilities that every aspiring entrepreneur should keep high on their own personal priority list:
Constantly communicate what is expected of the team as a whole. Only a few team members will ever be able to figure out what is expected of them on a regular basis. As the team grows, and the business pivots, communication of expectations becomes more and more critical. Your startup’s survival, as well as people performance, is at stake.
Set the standards for good performance in each role. New team members in a new startup, coming from different backgrounds, may have quite different benchmarks of excellent performance. Your standards for product quality, sales growth, and customer satisfaction must be documented and reviewed prior to results and performance reviews.
Provide regular feedback on results seen and measured. Inadequate feedback, good or bad, will result in lowered motivation and a decline in performance, even with the best people. Informal feedback should be provided weekly or daily, with more formal sessions scheduled at least semi-annually. Surprises are expensive for employees and leaders,
Top performers need authority to carry out their responsibilities. Team members who lack sufficient authority tend to avoid responsibility rather than rising up to meet it, primarily due to fear of failure. Giving authority also implies patient coaching on early mistakes, letting go of control, and positive recognition of team member initiatives.
Provide timely decisions in areas where they don’t have authority. People measure your responsiveness as a leader, just as you measure theirs. Top performers expect to be surrounded by top leaders, who monitor and supportively respond to situations that go beyond their domain. The goal is to have no employee action impeded by leader inaction.
Make sure required data, resources, and tools are provided early. Top performance is more than skills and effort. It requires the right tools and information to get the job done. The leader’s responsibility is to anticipate these requirements, listen carefully to the needs of their team, and be responsive in providing these needs.
Acknowledge and reward the results that you desire. Showing your appreciation on a person-to-person basis and in front of peer team members is usually more valuable than financial awards. Yet in the long run, you get what you pay for. Thus paying only for sales volume, when you desire high customer satisfaction, is not productive.
It’s only when leaders live up to their responsibilities outlined here, that entrepreneurs can separate the “can’t do” from the “won’t do” of team member performers. These initiatives on goal setting, coaching, providing resources, and supporting good results should eliminate the “can’t do.” The rest have to be dealt with more directly and moved out before they drag down everyone.
Don’t assume that traditional techniques for assessing performance, including the annual performance evaluation, will create top performers. They can actually do damage, primarily because they are tied to changes in compensation rather than changes in performance. Thus the major burden of your team’s performance is on you, the leader. Are you being the top performer you expect of everyone else?
Marty Zwilling
Almost every entrepreneur starts their journey by developing a solution, based on their knowledge of a new technology or required service. Developer skills are necessary, but not sufficient, to build a business. A real business requires leadership – thought leadership to attract customers and mind share, as well as people leadership around a team, partners, and investors.
One answer is for the developer to find a partner who is a leader to build and run the business, and two heads in a startup are almost always better than one. But in my experience as a startup mentor, I find that the happiest and most successful entrepreneurs in the long-term are those that continually stretch themselves to get comfortable in the leadership role.
In fact, being a leader is often outside the experience and training domains of both experienced developers and experienced business professionals. As pointed out in a recent book by leadership expert Herminia Ibarra, very few people are born knowing how to “Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader.” But we can all learn and step up if we get the right guidance.
I really related to Ibarra’s direction on how to build your leadership skills by learning to complement your insights with outsights, defined as the valuable perspectives you gain from external experiences and experimentation. Every entrepreneur already knows that building a startup is all about experimentation, new experiences, and problem solving.
To get you started, here is my summary of a half dozen of her key tips, re-focused to the leadership success elements for entrepreneurs, even though the same principles apply to large business professionals and even non-business domains:
Don’t be afraid to challenge your own identity. Because doing things that don’t come naturally can make you feel like an imposter, authenticity becomes an excuse for staying in your comfort zone. The trick is to work toward a future version of your authentic self by doing just the opposite, stretching way outside the boundaries of who you are today. Emulate the leadership attributes of entrepreneurs you admire, such as Richard Branson.
Let go of performance goals that limit new learning. We all like to do what we already do well, so it’s easy to focus on achieving higher performance in that domain. Take the risk of setting goals in the leadership domain that will force non-linear learning. This is called avoiding the competency trap, and lets you bridge to new competencies.
Manage the stepping up process. Let the gap between where you are and what you want to achieve be the spark that motivates you to action. Stepping up to play a bigger leadership role is not an event; it’s a process that takes time before it pays off. It is a transition built from small changes. Map out the steps, and celebrate each success.
Practice your new learning in extracurricular activities. Professional roles outside your startup can be invaluable and less risky for learning, practicing new ways of operating, raising your profile, revising your limited view of yourself, and improving your leadership capabilities. It can then be exhilarating to bring these outsights back home.
Create and use new networks to tap new ideas. When you connect to people in different worlds, you will access different perspectives to broaden your own. Avoid the network trap of sticking to the same old players for insight, motivation, and advice. Leaders need at least three different networks – operational, strategic, and personal.
Start acting and thinking like a leader now. Stretch yourself to take action now, and recognize that you may not see at first how all the dots connect as you start branching out beyond your comfort work zone, habitual networks, and historical ways of defining yourself. Slowly but surely a more central and enduring leader identity will take root.
Thus if you have mastered the art of developing solutions, but struggle with building a business, it’s time to focus on your critically important leadership skills. Stop hiding in your comfort zone, and branch out for some new outsights. You too can find an entrepreneur identity in yourself that you never thought possible, and business success that you once only dreamed about.
Marty Zwilling
The good news is that everyone expects entrepreneurs to make mistakes, since founders explore uncharted territory. In fact, investors recognize that founders usually learn more from mistakes than from success, so a well-explained startup failure can improve their odds of funding the next time around. However, investors do expect you know the common pitfalls — and not repeat them.
As an active angel investor and startup advisor, I’ve seen many of the same stumbling blocks repeated all too many times. As a result, repeating any of the following 10 mistakes outlined here won’t get you any credit for intelligence and learning and will cost you dearly in your funding credibility and real cash.
Assume you already know what your customers need and want. Just because you love a new solution doesn’t mean your customers will love it. Before spending any money, make sure you interact directly with potential customers, industry experts and investors. Be prepared to pivot at least once before you get it right, even with this input.
Confidently believe that you have no real competitors. Usually, no competitors means no market — or it means you haven’t looked. If the market is new and competition is minimal, then the time and costs of educating potential customers probably exceeds your survival time and budget. Innovation in the face of a few competitors is much less risky.
Try to solve all the world’s problems with a first solution. A startup needs focus to do one job well or risk the alternative of solving many problems poorly. It’s tempting to tell everyone about all the future potential uses of your new technology and risk confusing them, having them wait for your future or disappoint them with several poor solutions.
Forecast revenue growth that defies business principles. Every business takes time to scale and penetrate a market due to organizational growth, hiring, training, brand building and customer adoption. Forecasts that exceed 10 percent of a large opportunity in the first five years rarely happen and will likely disappoint you and your investors.
Dismiss the need to register any intellectual property. Some entrepreneurs believe that being first to market will keep them ahead of competitors. They forget that big companies with many more resources do wake up when they see your traction and can easily overrun your efforts. You need patents and trademarks as a barrier to entry.
Count totally on friends and family to run the business. Every startup business is a new challenge and needs real dedication, experience and skills to survive. Friends and family may tell you what you want to hear rather than what you need to hear. Personal relationships and emotions have broken many businesses — so be careful.
Delegate cash-flow projections and transactions. Entrepreneurs who under-estimate cash requirements or focus on product development while someone else pays the bills are doomed to fail over and over again. Smart founders always build a buffer into their estimates, find a strong financial advisor and personally sign every check.
Hire helpers in lieu of people who are smarter than you. When you need help as your startup grows, many entrepreneurs are quick to hire less expensive and more available helpers rather than finding the real skills and experience to complement their weakness. Hire people who can train you rather than ones you need to train. Hire slow and fire fast.
Build the company at the expense of employees. Being too aloof or busy to lead and communicate goals and status to the team is a sure way to reduce motivation, morale and productivity and set the wrong culture. A startup with happy and highly motivated employees will provide a better customer experience resulting in viral customer growth.
Try to build a business without specific milestones or a plan. Building a business is much more complex than building a house, and I don’t see any houses winning awards that were built without a documented design and plan. The plan should not be put together for investors but to map the workload and desired results to you and your team.
So, as you contemplate your next startup, it will be worth your effort to go the extra mile to avoid these 10 mistakes. Doing so may well save you the time and cost of a startup failure and also will save you from the embarrassing admission the next time around that you don’t pay attention to the advice and counsel of people who have been there before you. That doesn’t bode well for your ability to manage funding or your likelihood of success the second time around.
Marty Zwilling
*** First published on Entrepreneur.com on 02/24/2016 ***
To build a startup, entrepreneurs need a laser focus on providing an innovative solution to a real problem. Once they achieve that initial traction, the focus needs to change for quicker growth. Most entrepreneurs dream of achieving the exponential expansion of a Google or Amazon, but few investor pitches I see outline any strategy beyond simple marketing to make this happen.
Investors are looking for innovation in the growth strategy, to match or exceed the innovation in the technology and solution. Conventional marketing may be adequate for linear growth, but it probably won’t take your startup to the exponential growth of a large-scale movement.
While searching recently for the most effective strategies of companies that have achieved exponential growth, I came across the book “Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World,” by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. These visionary thinkers outlined in their book a set of modern accelerated growth strategies that I believe every entrepreneur should adopt:
Build a community of evangelists. Become a conduit for people to talk to each other, and feel like part of a special community. According to Seth Godin, it’s also necessary to engage them with the message from you, the leader, about where you want to go, and the change you want to take place in your world. This incents word-of-mouth on steroids.
Nurture partnerships with many other organizations. Playing well with other organizations in cyberspace and in the real world is more effective than trying to move the mountain alone. Build a list of specific organizations that can help you, and how to engage them. Organizations bring their own communities to exponentially grow yours.
Incent friendly competition with prizes. People love to compete. Give community members incentives, rewards, and challenges as a way to square off against one another, and they will show up. Diamandis created the XPRIZE and Singularity University which created huge movements, and exponential growth for related businesses.
Go into battle against a common rival. One of the best ways to strengthen a community is to take a stand, and find a common enemy. Attacking an issue that affects many potential customers allows you to focus on providing solutions, and lets your community do the selling. Refrain from ranting and raving or bashing the enemy.
Deliver edgy product demonstrations. New products being used in innovative and unusual ways spark buzz and attract followers. The opportunities are endless, with the Internet of Things, wearable technology, driver-less cars, and new fashion trends. Get your community involved in both the idea and the delivery.
Host events to bring your community together. Events can also be in cyberspace, or anywhere in the real world. These encourage members to band together and share experiences based on common interests, and strengthen ties to your brand. Don’t forget that when planning an event, your ultimate goal is incite people to advocacy and action.
Maximize your online brand and media presence. Don’t forget the basics of search engine optimization, social media engagement, video marketing, and courting influential bloggers. Your online brand is what your community thinks of you when you are not available. Creating and updating quality content is required to maintain visibility online.
These strategies are exceedingly effective when applied to solutions that are derived from one of the accelerating new technologies, including networks of sensors, infinite computing, robotics, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing. They also work well in building movements based on social causes, environmental change, and health initiatives.
Another modern name for business community building strategies is crowdsourcing. With crowdfunding early, and crowdsourcing to build a community throughout, entrepreneurs can massively increase the speed of business evolution in today’s hyper-connected world. Why not make your idea an unstoppable movement, and not just a business?
Marty Zwilling
As Clint Eastwood once said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.” Every new entrepreneur soon realizes he or she has some big ones, but very few figure out how to use these them to their advantage. I believe that the resourcefulness to turn constraints into competitive differentiators and new opportunities is a trait that separates the great entrepreneurs from the “wannabes.”
For example, the Facebook business model of offering a product free to customers while gaining revenue from advertising was born out of the need to survive as a business while offering a fun service. By contrast, as a startup investor, I still see too many entrepreneurs looking for another check to keep them going — without any convincing plan to ever be self-sustaining.
Smart entrepreneurs understand that more funding often comes with onerous constraints on who is in control, what can be done by whom, and who gets to share in the returns. These founders follow alternative strategies, including the following, to push themselves and their team harder for innovative and less expensive approaches to a complete product, advertising and new markets.
Do it yourself with new tools rather than hire outside help. They look for creative solutions to problems that are inhibiting progress, rather than the conventional solution of outsourcing or hiring people. For example, many founders now use makerspaces such as TechShop to build prototypes without the costs and long lead times of manufacturers.
Focus on a top productivity bottleneck each week. Startups funded by large venture-capital investments rarely think about productivity. I can think of cases where executives actually created make-work activities to keep idle people on the payroll in case they might be needed later. It’s better to use creativity and tools to find better ways of doing things.
Use big constraints to drive innovation. Doing things the way they have always been done only works with unlimited resources. Constraints are great motivators to finding a better way, or maybe even deciding that something doesn’t really need to be done at all. Sometimes the quality of a result is inversely proportional to the amount of money spent.
Strategically reduce the budget on your most expensive projects. It always amazes me how work expands to exceed any deadline or budget, and, conversely, how the important work still gets done when budgets and staffing are cut. Apply the 80 to 20 rule for maximum value, and urge people to work more efficiently rather than longer hours.
Find partners to complement your strengths. If you have a great product and need customers, find a partner with many customers who needs a new product. If your strength is building businesses, find a partner who is a technologist. These are win-win situations requiring less resources and time for each side.
Look for disruptive solutions rather than linear innovations. Without constraints on pricing and size, computers would still look like mainframes rather than fit in your wristwatch. The most successful and innovative solutions come from understanding and honoring constraints — rather than feeling like the victim of limitations.
Create new business models and new ways to measure value. Focus in recent years on social issues and saving the environment has created whole new industries, including solar power and the electric automobile. On the business side, we now have the subscription model, the freemium model and others. There is still room for many more.
Entrepreneurs need to celebrate the fact that constraints and limitations are sources of opportunity in the marketplace, and sources of profit and competitive advantage inside the business. Get past the victim mentality — where every limitation is seen as an inhibitor to the realization of the vision.
The challenge of being an entrepreneur is in being able to turn constraints into advantages for fun and profit, and enjoy the journey as well as the destination. Are you having fun yet in your new venture, despite the limitations?
Marty Zwilling
*** First published on Entrepreneur.com on 02/19/2016 ***