blog de notas de juan freire

Resumen ejecutivo

¿Cómo están respondiendo los primeros ejecutivos (CEO) a la complejidad que supone que las organizaciones, los mercados, la sociedad y los gobiernos estén cada vez más interconectados? ¿Cómo están respondiendo a lo que llamamos economía conectada?

Para averiguarlo, mantuvimos entrevistas personales con más de 1.700 CEO, directores generales y altos directivos del sector público en todo el mundo. Desde hace algunos años, las empresas han estado trabajando en adaptar y optimizar sus redes de proveedores y de socios comerciales. Las cadenas de suministro son más ágiles y sofisticadas. Se han creado grandes eficiencias en el back-office, perfeccionando el modelo al pasar de una situación en la que se conoce el inventario al momento a otra en la que se puede predecir lo que se va a comercializar. Igualmente importante, en el mercado se está dando otra situación: la repentina convergencia de las esferas digital, social y móvil, que conecta a empresas, clientes, empleados y socios comerciales de nuevas formas y entre sí. Esta nueva coyuntura está ejerciendo una gran presión para que el front office de las empresas se adapte y digitalice pero también representa una oportunidad para que las organizaciones innoven y lideren.

Los directivos reconocen que esta nueva era, la era hiperconectada, está cambiando profundamente la forma en la que las personas interactúan. Este cambio es uno de los motivos que ha hecho que la tecnología se sitúe hoy en primera posición en la lista de factores externos que afectan a las organizaciones. Desde que IBM iniciase, en 2004, la serie de estudios con CEO es la primera vez que la tecnología ocupa este lugar en el ránking. Por encima de cualquier otro factor externo – incluso la economía – los CEO creen que la tecnología impulsará la mayoría de los cambios que tendrán lugar en sus organizaciones en los próximos 3 a 5 años.

Principales conclusiones

Los CEO entrevistados dicen contar con una nueva estrategia para la eterna guerra por el talento. Están promoviendo culturas más abiertas y colaborativas que animen a los empleados a conectarse, a aprender uno del otro y a prosperar en un mundo sujeto a continuos y rápidos cambios. La colaboración es hoy el primer rasgo que los CEO valoran en sus empleados; un 75% de ellos lo considera crítico.

El énfasis en una empresa más abierta y colaborativa es aún mayor en aquellas organizaciones que denominamos con mejor rendimiento, y que además disponen de las capacidades de gestión del cambio necesarias para llevarlo a cabo. Aunque los CEO se muestren más favorables a abrir las puertas de sus organizaciones, no significa que las estén invitando al caos. La necesidad de control sigue existiendo, pero evoluciona hacia una nueva forma que se adapte mejor a la complejidad y al ritmo a los que se enfrentan las empresas en la actualidad.

Con el fin de atender y gestionar a los clientes de forma más personalizada, los CEO están fomentando que sus organizaciones adopten un músculo analítico que les ayude a responder con mayor relevancia. Como grupo, los CEO entrevistados manifiestan invertir en información relativa a sus clientes más que en cualquier otra área funcional; muy por encima de las inversiones en operaciones, análisis competitivo, financiero e incluso en gestión del riesgo. Más del 70% de los ejecutivos busca tener un mejor conocimiento individualizado de las necesidades de los clientes y una mayor capacidad de respuesta. Dada esa necesidad de tener una información completa del cliente, las empresas con mejor rendimiento cuentan con una gran ventaja. Son mucho más hábiles a la hora de convertir datos en conocimiento y conocimiento en acción. Aunque reconocen que la forma preferida interacción con el cliente seguirá siendo la presencial, los CEO esperan un aumento significativo en el uso de redes sociales. Más de la mitad cree que los canales sociales se convertirán en el principal medio de interacción con los clientes de aquí a cinco años.

Colaborar de manera más intensa proporciona la ventaja que los CEO necesitan para innovar radicalmente. Ante una presión por innovar que no cede, las empresas están respondiendo a este reto con modelos colaborativos. Más de la mitad de los entrevistados colaboran de manera intensiva para impulsar la innovación. En comparación con aquellas empresas catalogadas como menos exitosas, las que tienen un mejor rendimiento colaboran con el fin de innovar de forma más agresiva, lo cual no está exento de retos. En lugar de

limitarse a crear nuevos productos o a implementar operaciones más eficientes, las empresas con mejor rendimiento tienen mayor propensión a cambiar de sector industrial o incluso a crear sectores o mercados totalmente nuevos.

Principales recomendaciones

- Potenciar al empleado a través de los valores

- Gestionar la relación con el cliente de forma individualizada

- Fomentar la innovación colaborativa

…  three types of work: “I work,” which requires expertise, concentration and focus; “You & I work,” which involves relatively simple collaboration among two people; and “We work,” which embodies the highest level of content and context complexity, from multi-disciplinary expertise to multi-location and multi-technology platforms.

… Organizations can address this problem by redesigning their workspaces around the following principles:

1. Focus on four main activities. Employees need to have areas for concentrated work (such as unassigned individual workstations), emergent social exchange (free-flowing hallways), learning (rooms equipped with technology and tools), and collaboration (group spaces for co-creation). The key is to make sure the different types of spaces are integrated with each other and open to all, so people can freely choose where to be based on what they’re doing.
2. Vary the size of workspaces, and the technology with which they’re equipped. Collaborative work happens best in spaces that accommodate a group of four to eight people physically or virtually or in a larger team space with multiple small pods where people can still see each other. It’s also important to give everyone equal access to on-line and on-site information.
3. Provide collaborative tools. Effective collaboration involves knowledge exchange, brainstorming, the inclusion of diverse perspectives, and scenario building. Companies must therefore provide tools like whiteboards that allow employees to record ideas and create a visual, side-by-side review of alternative solutions. Such tools are key enablers helping groups reach a shared understanding faster and more effectively.
4. Give project teams a dedicated space. The concept of ‘distributed cognition’ suggests that thinking processes are embedded in the physical work environment. A team room can provide “cognitive space” to hold ideas and experiences. Returning to the same workspace each day, keeping meeting notes on the board, and leaving work samples and half-finished prototypes on tables between meetings can help teammates maintain a shared project mindset, sharpening their focus and speeding up the collaborative process.

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types of unintentional innovation assassins.

1. The Cowboy. Itching to create a corporate culture tolerant of creativity and innovation, the Cowboy says something along the lines of, “No boundaries! Just great ideas!” Of course, companies should continually evaluate and push their boundaries. But every company has a set of things it simply will not do. Saying innovation has no bounds when it does just leads people to waste time working on ideas that — honestly — have no hope of ever being commercialized.

Instead, consider issuing highly-focused challenges. For example, a few years ago Netflix offered a $1 million prize to any team that could improve the performance of the algorithms that determine which movies it should suggest to consumers by at least 10%. More than 250 teams rose to the challenge, and two actually exceeded the target. Focus is one of innovation’s best friends.

2. The Googlephile. Inspired by stories of how Google and 3M ask engineers to spend 15% of their time dreaming of new ideas, this executive asks everybody to spend a bit of time on innovation. Maybe carve off a half-day during the third Friday of the month for everyone to focus on innovation.This approach feels participatory and inclusive. But it rarely works, unless the company has sophisticated systems to select and nurture ideas. Too frequently these efforts lead to a long list of suggestions that never get implemented. Cynicism takes hold quickly, and more and more employees find excuses to miss Innovation Friday.

As an alternative, executives should ask a small number of people to spend a significant amount of time on innovation. Remember, most start-ups fail — even with entrepreneurs spending every minute of every day obsessively focusing on their business. One person spending all of his or her time on innovation often trumps 1,000 spending 10% of their time on it. The math doesn’t work — except for when it does.

3. The Astronaut. This executive invokes the United States’ ultimately successful effort to put a man on the moon by urging, “We need something big, people! What is our moon shot?” It’s great to think big, of course, but pushing for big ideas often leads to proposals with sink-the-company risk (remember Motorola’s Iridium?). That risk means that the idea must be carefully studied, and since it hasn’t been done before, it probably won’t withstand analytical scrutiny. The push-for-moon shots too often mean innovation efforts never even get to the launch pad.

Instead of shooting for the moon, executives should encourage what author Peter Sims calls “little bets.” Academics and entrepreneurs agree that the very best ideas emerge out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation. Hang up posters of Thomas Edison with his famous line, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Start sweating.

4. The Pirate. This swashbuckler says, “We don’t have a fixed budget for innovation — but we don’t need one. We find the money when we need it.” While that statement sounds entrepreneurial, it can make the innovator’s life a nightmare because it signals a lack of clear rules for obtaining resources.This often means endless meetings with a varying cast of stakeholders. No one quite says yes, and no one quite says no, either.

The best companies manage innovation in a disciplined manner. They have dedicated budgets for it, with clear rules for how to obtain funding. While many leaders think this kind of disciplined approach is anathema to innovation, it actually enables it…

Ernest J. Wilson III. How to Make a Region Innovative. strategy+business, issue 66 Spring 2012.

To foster economic growth, innovation clusters need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

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… Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business—which is defined by a culture of process efficiency—a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.

CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes …

By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society …

So what is Creative Intelligence, or CQ? Let me start by saying it is a concept in formation and I hope our conversation over the next months will give it a true, deep meaning. Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space—our lives today.

At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius …

El ajustado precio de su suelo lo ha convertido en un lugar idóneo para restaurantes, bares y galerías de arte. Desde hace poco más de un año, Londres ha decidido que se necesitan más inmigrantes en la zona, pero no de perfil industrial, sino tecnológico. La apuesta va acompañada de una inversión de 10.000 millones de euros por parte del Gobierno local.

El East End era, hasta hace poco, uno de los barrios de Londres en los que convivía una clase media con un alto índice de inmigrantes. En su mayoría se dedicaban a trabajar en los muelles, cerca de la Torre de Londres.

Eric Van Der Kleij es consejero delegado de la empresa estatal creada al efecto, Tech City. Su meta es atraer talento, hacer que antes de pensar en ningún otro lugar, se tenga Londres en cuenta. Ofrece ventajas fiscales y consultoría gratuita por parte de su equipo …

De entre las múltiples revoluciones que Internet trae consigo, el e-commerce, el comercio a través de la Red, es una de las más importantes económica y socialmente. Aunque nuestro país no esté a la cabeza en esta faceta -como no lo está prácticamente en ninguna que tenga que ver con el entorno digital-, se estima que este año los españoles habremos gastado 9.400 millones de euros (el 3,5% del total del gasto comercial) en compras online. Estamos lejos, por supuesto, de EE UU (en volumen, 15 veces el de España), pero también lo estamos de países del entorno de la UE como Reino Unido (seis veces más en volumen y un peso relativo más de tres veces superior), Francia, Suecia o Alemania. Solo Italia, entre las grandes economías europeas, tiene un peso relativo del comercio online similar (aunque ligeramente superior) al de España (Online Trends 2011, www.retailresearch.org).

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… el comercio es un elemento de estructuración del espacio social de importancia difícil de exagerar. Cerremos un momento los ojos y despojemos al paisaje urbano que nos resulte más familiar del ingrediente comercial. Una ciudad sin tiendas, sin escaparates, sin más luces al anochecer que las del alumbrado público y las de los bares… Lo que queda es una película de ciencia-ficción, una de esas distopías al estilo de Blade Runner o Fahrenheit 451 con empleados de logística en lugar de replicantes o quemadores de libros. Repuestos del horror, imaginémonos a nosotros mismos reducidos a una experiencia de consumidor que no tiene más interlocutor que la pantalla del ordenador, la tableta o el smartphone. Da un poquito de escalofrío ¿no? …

[This post is part of the HBR Forum, The Future of Retail]

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we’ve seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What’s happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we’re being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We’re being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.

Launching the Innovation Renaissance (Amzn link, B&N for Nook, also iTunes) my new e-book from TED books is now available!  How can we increase innovation? I look at patents, prizes, education, immigration, regulation, trade and other levers of innovation policy. Here’s a brief description:

Unemployment, fear, and fitful growth tell us that the economy is stagnating. The recession, however, is just the tip of iceberg. We have deeper problems. Most importantly, the rate of innovation is down. Patents, which were designed to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, have instead become weapons in a war for competitive advantage with innovation as collateral damage. College, once a foundation for innovation, has been oversold. We have more students in college than ever before, for example, but fewer science majors. Regulations, passed with the best of intentions, have spread like kudzu and now impede progress to everyone’s detriment. Launching the Innovation Renaissance isa fast-paced look at the levers of innovation policy that explains why innovation has slowed and how we can accelerate innovation and build a 21st century economy.

… The Internet, on the other hand, was designed and deployed by small groups of researchers following the credo of one of its chief architects, David Clark: “rough consensus and running code.” Its early standards — uncomplicated, consensual — were stewarded by small organizations that resisted permission or authority. And they won: The Internet Protocol on which every connected device relies was a triumph of distributed innovation over centralized expertise.

The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”

This technical strategy has led to the creation of a gigantic network of far-flung innovators who develop standards with one another and share the products of their work in the form of free and open-source software. The architecture of the Internet and its abundance of free software and components has driven down the cost of manufacturing, distribution and collaboration — of innovation. It used to cost millions of dollars to start a software company. Today, for little or no money, entrepreneurs are able to develop and release a “minimum viable product” and test it with real users on the Internet before they have to raise any money from investors. 

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I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.

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Álvaro Vicente Ramírez-Alujas. Sobre la aplicación y desarrollo del concepto de innovación en el sector público: Estado del arte, alcances y perspectivas. Circunstancia. Año IX - Nº 26 - Septiembre 2011 (Fundación Ortega-Marañón)

Resumen. Una frecuente y peligrosa confusión respecto a la innovación es la creencia de que se trata de una nueva moda propiciada por los expertos del management. Ello definitivamente no es así. La innovación es un principio fundamental y universal de supervivencia de cualquier sistema. La innovación no es más que el proceso a través del cual los sistemas –ya sean biológicos, productivos, sociales, políticos u otros- mantienen la congruencia con el entorno que los hace posibles (Vignolo, Ramírez y Vergara, 2010). Lo anterior, en la práctica, se ve reflejado de distintas formas y adquiere modalidades diversas en las organizaciones: mejoras incrementales en la prestación de servicios; nuevas formas de organización y/o nuevas formas de incentivar o recompensar a los actores; rediseño de procesos y “reinvención”; nuevas formas de gestión y comunicación; cambios radicales en los modelos de negocio y en la incorporación de tecnología; etc. (Mulgan, 2007). Es por todo ello necesario indagar sobre los niveles de avance que la innovación ha presentado en el sector público en los últimos años y si es factible lograr acuñar una nomenclatura y marco de referencia propio que potencie el mejoramiento de nuestras instituciones públicas.

All companies die. All cities are nearly immortal.

Both are type of networks, with different destinies. There are two basic network forms: organisms or ecosystems. Companies are like organisms, while cities are like ecosystems.

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Geoff West from the Santa Fe Institute has piles of data to prove these universal and predictive laws of life. For instance, organisms scale in a 3/4 law. For every doubling in size, they increase in other factors by less than one, or .75. The bigger the organism, the slower it goes. Both elephants and mice have the same number of heartbeats per lifespan, but he elephant beats slower.

Ecosystems and cities, on the other hand, scale by greater than one, or 1.15. Every year cities increase in wealth, crime, traffic, patents, pollution, disease, infrastructure, and per capita by 15%. The bigger the city, the faster it goes.

A less than one rate of exponential growth inevitably leads to an s-curve of stagnation. All organisms and companies eventually stagnate and die. A greater than one rate of exponential leads to a hockey stick upshot of seemingly unlimited growth. All cities keep growing. As West remarked: We can drop an atom bomb on a city and 30 years later it will be thriving.

The question Geoff West could not answer at tonight’s Long Now talk was:

Is the internet more like a company or more like a city?

I’d bet it is more like a city.

I think the difference between the development of an organism and a ecosystem, or a company and a city, is that the later in each case evolves rather than grows. Growth is always self-limiting, while evolution is unlimited. Evolution is the infinite game; it remakes itself again and again from within so that its growth cannot catch up or stagnate…