Start-Ups, Scale-Ups & Schizophrenia: CEO Of Slingshot On Disruption

 Corporate lifespans are getting shorter. In ten years almost 50 per cent of companies on today’s s&p500 index will not be here. “They’ll be oblierated. We’re losing one company every two weeks,” that’s the doomsday scenario facing incombuents according to Karen Lawson CEO of Slingshot.

Posted byERIN MARY DOYLE

 

Speaking at the Daze of Disruption conference at the Art Gallery of NSW, Lawson helped delegates understand the innovators dilemmma and how partnering with start-ups can help a company survive into the future.

Lawson name checked several past incumbents that had opportunities to disrupt and evolve but didn’t; including Yahoo, Monster and Nokia. 

“There’s a famous quote from Stephen Elop (Nokia CEO in 2013) about the burning platform which he shared with all of his staff. It’s famous because he talked about feeling like he’s on an oil rig and the flames are taking over; he had two choices to stay on the rig and burn or jump overboard into the darkness below.”

Part of the memo Elop sent to all Nokia staff:

“We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.” 

The problem is companies can jump into the unknown, but 85 per cent of new products fail. “How do you survive and innovate as a corporate when you know it’s really challenging?

“I recommend that people should work for that rare CEO, a CEO that has schizophrenia. What I mean is they need to be able to manage and sustain the business as it is today, but also be working on disrupting technologies that effectively make your business today redundant.”

Step one: Partner with start-ups.

Slingshot’s recommendation is you start devloping relationships and experiments with hundreds of start-ups. “The fact is corporates don’t have infinite resources, so you have to make sure you partnering with different start-ups so you run hundreds of expeiments at one time.

“Then like the X-Factor elminiation process, you take it down to 10 serious engagements with a number of start-ups and scale-ups. Then move down again to three to six investments, and one or two major acquistions. All of the companies that we work with from NRMA to ING have used this process.”

Once companies have gone through this process, which Lawson describes as ‘not an easy process’, a number of things start to happen within the company.

“First of all your employer brand starts to change, people see you as a brand that’s doing really cool things with start-ups and all of a sudden you start to attract new talent into the organisation. Second, the processes and agility inside the organisation changing. Lastly, you have more fun.”

Step two: invest in scale-ups

Scale-ups are high growth start-ups. “The terminology of scale-ups is consistent, it happens when a start-up has been growing 20 per cent year on year growth- revenue or people.

If you look across the globe, the companies that have been responsible for more jobs and job growth are actually scale-ups. Here in Australia 3.2 per cent of high growth start-up businesses are responsible for 73 per cent of all new job creation.

Not only do these scale-up businesses already have products to go in market, but they have a higher success rate. According to Lawson and Slingshot: “Normally start-ups have a failure rate of around 90 per cent, but scale-ups that have gone through programs and partnered with businesses have a succes rate of 81 per cent.”

The lesson here is partnering with start-ups will help put out the flame of your company’s burning platform.

10 Essential Attributes of an Effective Networker

"It isn’t what you know, but rather who you know." 

Your database, email list, mobile contact list  and relationships you have made,  are the most valuable assets you have. 

Networking may be the most valuable skill set you can develop. It can help you throughout any point in your personal life and career. 

Building relationships is more than handing out business cards at a trade show. 

It is the genuine connections you make every day with a wide variety of people that involve a win-win-win. It is the way you develop relationships in your personal life and in the workplace that will determine  your success.

Author of 2 linked in books and business coach, Lewis Howes has identified 10 requirements needed to become an effective networker. 

1. Get involved. 

You can't network sitting in your office chair. It takes getting up and getting out. 
Circulate. Engage. Look people in the eyes. Involve yourself in the lives of others and allow them to become involved in yours. Be vulnerable and open and share your life as well as learning about others'. 

2. Know who you are.  

For others to have an interest in you, they need to have a reasonable understanding of who you are and what you do. 

Present yourself well. Be ready to share your vision with the world at any moment. This means you have to get clear on exactly what your vision is. Get tour elevator pitch nailed and have your presentation pack ready! 

3. Listen. 

Effective listening is one of the most important things you can learn in life. Be present and take it in.

4. Discover common ground. 

Much of networking success lies in discovering mutual personal and professional attributes.  Find out what's relevant and important to the person you are talking to. What is going on in the person's business? What is he or she passionate about?

5. Add value. 

Once you know what people are looking for, find a way to add value to their life or business if you can. If you can’t immediately, keep on the lookout for ways to add value to whatever they are about. 

It’s extra impressive when you follow up much later with an unexpected value-add. 

Providing a warm referral is awesome!

6. Remember. 

The basis for a solid networking relationship is knowing, liking and trusting. Remember the things you learn and discover about those in your network. It is this memorization that signifies their importance to you. 

Without a good memory (especially remember someone’s name) every meeting becomes a first meeting.

7. Follow up. 

People have contact with many individuals every day for a variety of reasons, including you. You set yourself apart by following up. This shows them they are important to you. It is always a good idea to follow up with an email, and then a one on one coffee meeting.

8. Contribute. 

You are an effective networker when you contribute to others by giving. Give information, time, energy, contacts and encouragement. Always keep your eyes open for people you can connect. 

Everyone in your network brings a unique set of talents, temperaments and convictions to the world. 

 Pick the people who are experts at what they do and refer their business to others.  

  

9. Ask for help. 

You cannot help others unless you have helped yourself. To get help, be sure to ask for it, and be appropriate and specific. 

I have had some great mentors in my life who taught me a lot about reaching out for help 

10. Show appreciation. 

Say “thank you” for everything. Even thank someone for thanking you (“I so appreciate that you took the time to acknowledge my effort”). Whenever you take the time to thank someone, you create an opportunity to further connect with them.

The more confident you are in your ability to network, the faster you grow relationships. And as we all know, relationships are everything.

Thriving in a changing digital landscape - lessons from Telstra

• BY STEPHEN ELOP • RESEARCH, NEWS For Stephen Elop, Group Executive, Technology, Innovation and Strategy at Telstra, his time as CEO at Nokia taught him a number of lessons about change. Here he looks at what the Aussie ICT sector can do to thrive.

If you go back to 1955, the life expectancy of a business was 75 years. Today, a large business is expected to exist for about 15 years. Of the Fortune 500 in 1955, 88 per cent of businesses no longer exist.

There’s plenty that has changed in that time, but it’s us – the technology industry – that has driven the pace of change more than any other. Despite this, recent research from Telstra Wholesale, Powering your business through relentless change, shows that we’re still shying away from the pain that comes from being agile and managing disruption ourselves.

In the years I’ve worked with Australian companies, I’ve seen them deal with the same challenges that companies across the world face. But because Australia, in some ways, is an island both literally and figuratively, there may be some circumstances where it takes a bit longer for some disruption from afar to come to Australia. This gives us a huge opportunity to get ahead of those changes, but many businesses still aren’t reacting.

So how do we change the behaviour that’s holding us back?

Change the mindset

A fresh perspective is a powerful thing, but the senior leaders we spoke to in Powering your business through relentless changeshow that we’re being held back by tradition – the way things have always been done.

Conversely, disrupters have a mindset that they’re going to deliver a much better customer experience using a very different business model. They have that mindset and they believe in it and they’re passionate about it, and so they drive hard on it. With that mindset, an amazing amount of work is possible.

Make the most of partners

In Australia, perhaps more than in a much larger country, partnerships are fundamental. It’s a relatively small market given the population size and it has some unique challenges like the breadth of geography and its distance from other major centres.

Because of those factors, I believe that the Australian businesses that succeed are those that become very good at curating capabilities into the country. These companies see the importance of getting the balance between the need to create technology versus curating technology right for the future.  An example is Telstra’s multi-cloud strategy where we are partnering with companies like Amazon and Microsoft to present to our customers a variety of cloud-based capabilities rather than building it ourselves. Each of *Amazon, *Microsoft, *Google and a number of other companies are investing heavily in this technology. What we are doing is working closely with these partners to bring the best that the world has to offer to our customers both locally and globally.

Keep pushing the boundaries

It’s essential to constantly reinvent yourself. A decade or so ago, Telstra’s fixed line business was the cornerstone of our business. In the next five years, nbn will change the state of play dramatically. We have a strong market position and good financial resources, but it’s time we start asking how we take it to the next level. How do we change and lead the market?

So while the current business model is very good, we’re going to place some big bets on technologies that we believe in and disrupt our own model.

Because if we don’t, someone will. And they’ll succeed as a result.

 

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• As former CEO of Nokia, Stephen Elop has experienced extreme business change, and recognises behaviours which hold companies back. In this article he advocates:
  
• Don’t be held back by tradition
  
• Deliver a great customer experience
  
• Make the most of your partners
  
• Keep reinventing yourself

 

Robotic stock takes with Cosy

Jonas Cleveland

Co-founder, CEO and CTO, COSY

One  of the critical tasks in retail is use of floor space within every store. In a huge chain like Walgreens, for instance, with more than 8,000 stores, this knowledge is difficult and expensive to obtain.

 With the help of Cleveland, 29, Walgreens is using artificial intelligence to reduce the kind of out-of-stocks that cost retailers almost $400 billion annually, creating a fully automated robot inventory labeling system. In 2012, Cleveland co-founded COSY, a firm that uses advanced computer vision to allow mobile devices to accurately position themselves indoors. Think of how GPS and Google Maps have transformed so much of our world. Cleveland’s app wants to solve the same navigation challenges for places like supermarkets, houses, movie theaters or even your doctor’s office. “We are giving power through data that's never existed before,” says Cleveland.

Watch now: Cleveland explains how artificial intelligence is going to transform the future of retail.

Ivan Kayes note - Imagine if you had an rfid chip built in to every product... you could do an immediate Arocha check at the press of a button. When you check out, it automatically registers all your purchases.

Just saying!!!

What do you think? 

What is the ACD summit and why is it important to Asia?

LEADERS AT the Asia Cooperation Dialogue summit yesterday adopted a vision and action plan for cooperation to build the Asian Community in the next 14 years, "to try to achieve a community for the countries across the continent. " said Prime Minister of Thailand, Prayut.

"This would make Asia as a continent of inclusive and sustainable growth with seamless connectivity, people-centred stability and peace, dynamic innovation, research and development, as well as qualified and capable people."

To do that, he said, they needed to drive six pillars of cooperation, namely 

1. inter-linked dealings on food, water, and energy security; 
2. connectivity;
3.  science, technology and innovation;
4.  education and human resource development; 
5. culture and tourism, and 
6. promoting inclusive and sustainable development.

These pillars could be absorbed in the public, private and people sectors and promoted together to create inclusiveness that will help formulate policy towards sustainable growth in Asia, he said.

There was a call urge for the region 

•  to become a global human resources hub, 
• enhance engagement with private sector,
•  in-depth expansion in investment and business activities, 
• support toward academia and 
• expand collaboration with other global partners. 

Alibaba Group's chairman Jack Ma, who represented the ACD private sector told leaders at the summit during an interactive session that governments should use technology, notably financial technology, and have policies to help support the younger generation and small business.

"We believe that small is beautiful, powerful and wonderful," he told the ACD delegation. Ma said Asia was not only the fastest growing continent but also the best continent to solve poverty and inequality. 

Technology would help create jobs, rather than killing jobs, as widely feared, he said. 

 Thailand's Special Economic Zones, will help boost local infrastructure development and economic activity.

His Majesty the King's Sufficiency Economy philosophy would also help member states achieve unity in economic, social, environmental dimensions including quality of balance and happiness of the people, he said. 

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also sent a note of greeting - a recorded clip shown at the beginning of the ceremony - and voiced support for the ACD Vision, and bringing about inclusive and sustainable development.

The ACD ministerial meeting is held annually as a sideline meeting to the UN General Assembly every September.

Starting in 2002 with 18 founding members, the Dialogue now has 34 member states across Asia including major economic powers such as China and Japan and top oil dealing countries in the Middle East. Though called a summit, the event this time drew only seven heads of government including Prayut - the Sultan of Brunei Darussalam, the Amir of Kuwait, and two presidents from Iran and Sri Lanka. Other attendees included two vice presidents, two deputy prime ministers, 13 ministers or officials in equivalent positions, a premier's adviser, a Sultan's adviser and four ambassadors. 

Is Blockchain going to have a larger impact than the Internet?

Bob Pritchard writes about a Great question posed by Lloyd Marino CEO of Avetta Global.

 

Before blockchain, buying and selling usually required an intermediary, a bank or broker who housed your financial data. When you transfer funds or make a purchase, a banker connects to the bank’s system to record the change.

 

No more. Blockchain replaces this central system with a decentralized ledger of chained records. Each record is connected to the one before and the one after it, yielding a traceable history of every transaction. No record can be deleted and no existing records can be altered.  For instance, when a purchase is made, the seller’s computer consults the blockchain ledger stored on thousands of other computers to see if the purchaser has the required funds. If there is distributed consensus among the computers, a new data entry is added to the chain, showing the transfer.

 

The blockchain infrastructure will soon manage many other types of information transfers, providing more services faster for consumers with a significant decrease in potential errors.

 

Blockchains have enormous implications for financial institutions. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved a plan by Overstock, to issue stock through blockchain. Michael Bodson, CEO of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation said that through blockchain, “The industry has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine and modernize its infrastructure to resolve long-standing operational challenges.”

 

Blockchain can soon reinvent banking, replacing “Too Big To Fail” institutions with computerized systems that are more efficient and more honest. Since every blockchain transaction preserves its own record, bank losses (and tax write-offs) could be much less. Banks would need fewer offices, freeing real-estate and lowering costs.

 

IBM and the Linux foundation are working on a Hyperledger project that would create private blockchains to manage supply chains, oversee contracts, and run other business applications requiring confidential data.  Already Intel, Cisco, JP Morgan, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Wells Fargo, and others have announced support.

 

Banking is only the beginning. In the future, blockchain’s ability to remove the middleman means it could support “smart contracts” with conditional clauses programmed into the blockchain. This makes the contract self-enforcing, by transferring funds only when the conditions are met. Ethereum has developed a decentralized platform to run such smart contracts for crowdsourcing, voting, and even new forms of currency.

 

Smart contracts could change entire fields of law. Blockchain wills could automatically take effect when a person dies, transferring inheritances without needing an executor. Replacing legal jargon with blockchain logic would require a different type of corporate lawyer with skills akin to a computer programmer. Imagine the implications for law schools!

 

The blockchain could soon revolutionize music and the other arts. Currently, most musicians and authors make little money from their work as most of the sales price is consumed by the publisher and retail store. This could change through blockchain agreements.

 

For instance, Mycelia, started by English singer-songwriter Imogen Heap, is developing a way to encode a blockchain contract into songs, so fans would pay the artist directly, without going through a record company. A blockchain e-reader could download ebooks directly from the authors, bypassing both publisher and bookstore, or even Amazon. And when more people have 3D printers, blockchain-locked templates could enable artists to earn greater profits from their designs for toys, figurines, and other art objects.

 

Of course blockchain is not perfect. Because nothing can be removed from the chain, the blockchain ledger quickly swells to humongous size.  Blockchain has enormous potential as a way to link, store, and track data. In the next few years, blockchains will offer consumers an alternative way to make purchases without bank and credit card fees. Soon after that blockchains will revolutionize all forms of data transfer–including music and video streaming and data backups. Traditional banks and retailers will need to adapt to blockchains or be themselves blocked out.

 

10 Habits of the Most Innovative People

Anthony J James [AJ] Innovation, Digital TransformationGlobal Head of Digital & Innovation, Growth Strategist, Global CMO, LinkedIn Agency Publisher of the Year - Asia Pacific

Success in any industry goes hand-in-hand with innovation — the ability to produce new ideas, build better solutions, and launch new products. The most successful people are not simply the hardest working, they are often the most innovative.

From Edison, to Branson and Musk, here are 10 habits of some of the most innovative, high profile people around (at the moment). What would you add to this list?

1. They constantly look for patterns - do you know what Apopheniais?
2. They are brilliantly lazy - it comes down to efficiency
3. They are obsessive note-takers
4. They preach perfection, yet live for the reality of progress
5. They have a relationship with their fears
6. They don't wait for things to break, they are constantly fixing and iterating
7. They find novel ways to nurture the creative process - mines long showers!
8. They pursue multiple projects, interests and ventures, not just one
9. They possess a healthy arrogance
10. They embrace paradoxical thinking and overlook conventional boundaries

A key part of innovation is implementation and commercialisation — it is not being the first to come up with the idea, but having the boldness to be the first to produce it and bring it to market. When others see risk innovators see opportunity, where others see roadblocks they see potential and outcomes.

How many on this list can you see reflected in yourself? What would you add to the list?

Read more detail on this subject at Huffingtonpost.com