The missing men of America

Inspired from 

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/the-missing-men/488858/

Around 7-8 million males in the USA have completely dropped out of the workforce over the past 59 years and don’t even want a job — 

Where are they? 

Prison? 

Disability? 

In school?

Stay at home dads ?

None of the above!!!

Research says they do nothing but hang around, socialise and watch TV. 

This is not a good thing!!!!

Where did the jobs go? 

Manufacturing and construction - In 1954, the highwater mark for male participation, the manufacturing and construction sectors accounted for nearly 40 percent of all jobs. Now, after the long decline of manufacturing and the end of the housing bubble, they account for just 13 percent. 

These are jobs that men without a college degree can count on, and they're much rarer than they used to be. The White House report notes that "when the share of state employment attributable to construction, mining and to a lesser extent manufacturing are higher, more prime-age men participate in the labor force.” In other words, men are more likely to work in areas where the state directly subsidizes employment in male-heavy occupations.

There are four occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade: personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists -( but these are more female dominated)

Perhaps the United States needs some sort of massive national building project to put these men back to work in jobs that they would be proud and willing to do

Several weeks ago, Conor Sen, a portfolio manager and a columnist at Bloomberg View, wrote a widely shared essay predicting that housing would become the dominant economic story of the next five years.

The problem - construction needs to be made in metro and high growth areas ..... And unemployed men are in Appalachia, the Rust Belt, and the Deep South, where the rate of non-working men often hovers around 40 percent.

The challenge - how to get these unemployed men to move to areas which need construction?  ....... 

And even more challenging .... How can we upskill these humans? Maybe through a programme of lifelong learning . If they are watching tv, how can we pique their interest and upskill them?

Defining Blockchain

 Hello i4j friends,

As state and federal legislation of or involving blockchain technologies becomes more common, the question is arising: what is the definition of blockchain for purposes of statute and regulation? 

There are multiple views and drafts of potential definitions being circulated.  In light of our recent innovation definition discussion, I thought that maybe some of you would be interested in joining an open public forum to share your ideas, questions and specific proposals for legislative language defining Blockchain as part of an online participatory process and an in-person discussion to be held at the US House of Representatives https://law.mit.edu/Blockchain-Legislative-Definition  

Fintech is being driven by two major innovations – blockchain and distributed ledgers. I do believe that this is part of the digital future for the financial sector and understanding how the industry is changing is of critical importance. It will transform how financial transactions are recorded, reconciled and reported. Accordingly, it is going to be important to understand the skills, infrastructure and vision needed for blockchain and virtual ledgers.

I’m helping organize a Blockchain event at the MIT Media Lab on Sept. 13th link: https://law.mit.edu/blog/the-great-blockchain-bakeoff-of-2016  If any of you are interested, please just let me know. The Blockchain piece is part of the Electronic Transaction Association’s larger event that day but I think the Blockchain piece is important because it is reflective of an understanding that this is a methodology that can facilitate new processes and architecture that will make digital settlement more efficient and be a part of the new economy we all strive for, and for which the definition of Blockchain will be important.

Blockchain Definition Links: Use THIS FORM to contribute to the process and you can follow the progress, as it develops, on GitHub in this public repository: https://github.com/LegalCode/Blockchain

Cheers,

Amy

-- 

How leadership affects innovation: Training employees to think innovatively from the top down

John MooneyCEO - If the map disagrees with the ground, the map is wrong

In an era where business success is often driven by the ability of an organisation to innovate – either with the products or services they provide, or in the way that they operate to gain competitive advantage – the role of a leader is harder than ever. Many CEOs and leaders frequently ponder the question of how to get their employees to be more innovative and, actually, the answer is most likely to be that it is a direct result of their leadership!

Daniel Goleman’s Leadership That Gets Results, a landmark 2000 Harvard Business Review study of over 3,000 middle-level managers in the US suggested that a manager’s leadership style was responsible for 30% of the company’s bottom-line profitability. It also identified six leadership styles:

• The pacesetting leader
• The authoritative leader
• The affiliative leader
• The coaching leader
• The coercive leader
• The democratic leader

While categorising leadership styles in this way can be useful to enable leaders to be more self-aware, the reality is that most leaders will, and should, employ most or all of these styles at a different time, situation or setting. Having said that, when looking at the impact of leadership on innovation in an organisation, it is interesting to broaden out the leadership styles to build a picture of how they can nurture, or indeed restrict innovation.

Looking at it simplistically, the three core leadership styles that garner very different results are: ‘laissez-faire’, autocratic and democratic, all of which will be defined and elaborated on further in the article. Firstly, in order to understand how these styles impact innovation, we need to define what is innovation.

Innovation could be described as creating new values, or capturing new values in a new way. It is the outcome of a creative and forward-thinking process or mind-set that subsequently affects change.

With that said, the skills, conditions and motivations needed to facilitate innovation are equally important. You could argue that if someone doesn’t have the skills needed to be innovative, then they won’t ever be. However, I would suggest that everyone has the capacity to come up with ideas, the cornerstone of innovation. As one of the oldest adages in business goes: ‘No idea is a bad idea’. Therefore, it must be the conditions and motivations that are created by an organisation that spark innovation.   

Assessing the three leadership styles in turn and their impact on employees, we can begin to uncover the kinds of behaviours and practices leaders need to employ to foster innovation in their organisation.

Laissez-faire leaders essentially leave employees to it. They empower their staff to make decisions and are reluctant to interfere. The result can be highly motivated employees who ‘own’ their work, relish the challenges and may therefore come up with the best innovative ideas. However, this style can also result in excessive stress in other employees, which could limit their ability to think outside the box and dream big. A key result of the laissez-faire style is that employees take responsibility for their work and decisions and they therefore learn from mistakes and grow as leaders themselves. But, as we all know, not everyone can take that kind of pressure and, in most organisations, some level of leadership support, direction and responsibility is needed for most employees to flourish.

Autocratic leaders make all the decisions themselves and don’t trust anyone else to do so. The result is obvious – less motivated employees who are less likely to propose new ideas and suggestions in a ‘the boss knows best’ climate. When employees accept that they should do what someone else wants them to do, with no questions asked, then the results will be as expected. As an example, a common  characteristic of some of the world’s greatest leaders is that they have the ability to nurture other leaders. With new leaders, will come new ideas and anyone who doesn’t appreciate that is unfortunately unlikely to succeed.

Democratic leaders act collaboratively and foster a culture of joint responsibility. Employees are likely to feel supported and encouraged to think big, but with the safety net of being able to learn from others and not having to shoulder excessive responsibility or burden. This style surely creates the best conditions for nurturing innovation. However, as mentioned earlier, different styles are needed for different people and situations. So, although democracy is more likely to feed innovation, in certain circumstances, autocratic or ‘laissez-faire’ leadership might just provide the conditions for your best innovations.

The true skill of a leader is in flexing his or her style to suit changing conditions and situations with the aim of getting the best out of people and the organisation. Nurturing innovation is no exception.

Written by

John MooneyCEO - If the map disagrees with the ground, the map is wrong

Learning to Listen

Katz KielyTransformation, Engagement & Innovation leader, CEO/ Founder Kiely & Co, Ensygnia, Speaker, Leadership I4J, TEDx - 
Katz writes so well !!!!!

I thought you might like to see my 6 minute provocation from last nights #NoDust event.

"I can’t claim to know much about politics but I know a lot about people. 

I’m going to explain why I think political systems need to be redesigned for the 21st Century - for an era where constant change is the new normal.

I have spent my career figuring out how to get people who need to talk to each other, talking, and listening, to each other. Using digital sometimes. But not always.

Its really, really hard. 

For many years I trusted my intuition and just tried things. I made stuff up - some things worked, some things didn’t - but all the learnings helped me to get better and better at building bridges. 

Then I saw Mark Earls speak.

I realised that if I understood the human brain better, I could learn to overcome barriers better

The more I learn, the more I understand the complexity of the challenge in hand.

The world is changing at an unprecedented rate. It is unlikely the rate of change is going to slow down any time soon.

I believe that the digital technologies that are driving that change could be key to a more connected, collaborative, equitable world. 

But we are battling against a smorgasbord of cognitive pre-sets that mean we automatically resist:

Changing 

and listening

and collaborating 

and respecting other people’s way of being. 

The more I learn about the way the human brain works, the more I realise the way we have done things is fundamentally broken. 

We need to change the way we change. 

Stop for a second. Imagine the last time you had change forced upon you. 

It does not feel good. Thats because we are hardwired to resist change.

Our decisions are based on subconscious drivers that mean we will do anything in our power to guarantee things remain the same. 

Coping with constant change is rubbing up against a deep-seated, powerful aversion.

Every time change is forced upon us, we go into flight or fight mode. It makes us anxious, stressed, un-collaborative, It even affects our immune system.

Then there’s the confirmation bias: We like things that confirm our own world-view, and dismiss anything that questions them. 

We don’t listen because we are hardwired to think our own ideas are the best ideas. 

We don’t connect because we are hard wired to stick with our own kind.  

Oxytocin bonds us to our “gang” of like-minded folk. It provokes defensive aggression towards people who think and act differently.

We have an inbuilt aversion to using products or knowledge developed outside of our gang.

We place a disproportionately high value on things they we have helped create.

The same goes with ideas and policies.

Having skin in the game makes people more attached to, and protective of solutions.

And yet we continue to force change on people, rather than working with them. 

The global organisations my company supports need to drive efficiency and productivity. They want to get people collaborating, and sharing, and accepting each other’s way of being.

It’s really hard but we’ve found out what works:

First: senior leadership have to fully buy in to a new way of doing thing. They have to be prepared to shift from command, control and mandate to listen, learn and buy in. 

A series of conversations and peer recommendations help us to identify what we call change- agents: influencers in different departments, brands, regions, levels.

Every change initiative provides a reason to bring these change agents together to co-create solutions. 

This collaborative design process lets them get to know each other. By working together on something they start to trust each other. 

As part of the design process, they feel an affinity to the solution. Remember the IKEA effect and we always think our own ideas are the best ideas. 

They begin to understand the complexity of the challenge in hand. They go back to their departments to share what they’ve learned. People are much more likely to buy into an idea that stems from within their own gang.

Every new change project becomes an opportunity to invite a new batch of change agents into the design process. 

We give platforms to the change agents so they can continue to communicate, to nurture growing networks of trust.

We call the process People Powered Transformation.

Enterprises are realising that top down command and control is not the best way to get the best out of people. 

If people powered transformation works for global enterprises, and it does, couldn’t we do something similar across the nation. 

Could we identify local regional national change agents and use every challenge as an opportunity to bring them together to co-create solutions? 

Could we provide platforms to allow change agents to share challenges, opportunities and learnings?

Could we develop national networks of trust at a time when trust in government is at an all time record low? 

The question is: How can we persuade leadership to shift from command, control and mandate to listen, learn and engage?"

I would as always love your thought and suggestions 

5 Tips On Using #Innovation To Grow Your Business Heading Into 2017

Anthony J James [AJ] Innovation, Digital TransformationGlobal Head of Digital & Innovation, Growth Strategist, Global CMO, LinkedIn Agency Publisher of the Year - Asia Pacific
We are in an environment  of - uncertainty of new technology disruptions,- supercharged connectivity, financial and geopolitical turbulence, - supplier consolidations and - a dramatic increase of data breaches 
Business leaders need to consider how to invigorate a possible stagnant (or worse dying) organisation to reach full potential, and set the RIGHT goals and strategies for growth in 2017.
Innovation is key 

I am passionate about digital transformation and innovation, and I believe...

"...organisations and agencies that consistently explore  culture and innovation, as a part of their business strategy, will realise significant returns"

Innovation is about seeing the dots and connecting them. It’s about deeply understanding the client’s business problems and together developing solutions that solve the problems to generate growth.....However, the  fundamentals need to be put in place. 

From my experience, there are 5 key elements that contribute to transforming a stagnant organisation or agency into a dynamic, thriving, and evolving place to work. 

#1. Experiment, Fail, Learn, Repeat


If there is one quality that deeply impacts innovation and digital transformation projects within all businesses, it is the ability to learn! Many lack this quality in spades, chasing or waiting for the next brief from the client and diligently and carefully responding point-by-point. Innovation simply CANNOT exist in an environment that is not receptive to idea sharing and open discussion – ensuring natural ideation takes place. This learning goes hand-in-hand with a willingness to fully embrace collaboration 

Businesses that have become stagnant may have fallen victim to a resistance to change, sit within a siloed structure, and may have forgotten it’s ok to make mistakes – as long as you learn from them, and be willing to share this learning across the firm – then innovation can flourish. 

* Note: the mug was 'borrowed' and is available from @StartupVitamins

#2. The Attitude Adjustment


Any attempt by management to create change must come through a culture that presents an open, honest, and collaborative work environment and that encourages sharing and the exploration of new ideas and concepts.

Cultures can be incredibly hard to shift, but a culture can also change from dormant to energetic and innovative overnight, literally. Being fearless has driven some of the most creative innovations in our time.

Planet Innovation has spent enormous effort recruiting entrepreneurial thinkers. "We look specifically for people with deep technical expertise coupled with broad commercial acumen. Once on board we mentor our staff to seek diverse experience, share their challenges and champion their ideas" said Stuart Elliott, CEO at Planet Innovation. This key ingredient to an innovative culture, "people" saw Planet Innovation being named Australia’s Most Innovative Company for the second time in three years by Fairfax’s BRW, Australia’s premier business publisher.

#3. Trust Culture


For any kind of innovation to exist, staff must feel as if they are part of a culture in which it is safe to share their ideas and where they are valued for their perspective. We all have different approaches, needs and personalities – trust comes when your teams feel that their needs are being met and their voices heard. Once trust is established, the ability to experiment and communicate, move across boundaries, and create a highly dynamic environment will be imminent. 

#4. Celebrations


In order for any business to experience innovation, there must be a fundamental importance placed on employee recognition – to reward and recognise those that have put in the effort. This does not always need to be money and bonuses. The new employee of today wants their “15 minutes of fame”, and simply recognising them in front of their peers at the next staff meeting might do it. Wins should be celebrated, the added benefit is that it generates healthy competition to encourage others, and it also generates greater knowledge and awareness in the broader team. 


#5. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment


Experimentation and failure are key contributors to innovation

Any organisation that is looking to innovate, especially as it focuses on the year ahead, will need to give their staff the freedom to try new things and shoot for the stars. “No” needs to leave the vocabulary now! The most successful people are those who are not afraid to fail and find excitement in learning, growing and developing as a result.

These are just the first five simple steps to invigorate growth for your business through innovation. However, it is important to remember that there is no magic formula for innovation. Businesses and agencies should always experiment, fail, learn and repeat, with a view to identifying what will work best to achieve business goals and objectives. Doing it the way it’s always been done, not collaborating, telling them how and what to do is a sure receipt for failure. 

It is important to remember that there is no magic formula for innovation

Let me know what other core values need to be embedded in your business to have a more innovative culture!

Anthony J James [AJ] Innovation, Digital 

Boiling the frog

Value Creation in the 21st Century from Curt Carlson 

http://www.practiceofinnovation.com/value-creation-in-the-21st-century/#more-1110

FEATURED

Boiled Frogs

The world is entering a turbulent and demanding economic period. Over the past few decades job growth and prosperity have dramatically slowed in America and many other developed countries, including Japan and the European Union. In America GDP growth has declined from 4% in the nineteen nineties to under 2% per year. Larry Summers has referred to this as the “new normal.”This growth rate will not produce the jobs and prosperity needed. If not addressed, this decline will cause major disruptions across society. Going forward America and the world must significantly improve its innovative performance while educating the world’s most productive workforce.

Today’s innovation economy has four distinguishing properties.  Many technologies improve at rapid exponential rates, global competition is intense and increasing, there are unprecedented opportunities for major new innovations, and emerging global markets are huge. Confronting these challenges is daunting. Most companies and countries are failing to adapt to these powerful dynamics.

America’s competition will increase dramatically over the next few decades. In China two million people move from the countryside to the city each month. Going forward America is competing against four new cities the size of NYC every year. 

The pace of innovation is accelerating. As exponential improvements in information, communications, and artificial intelligence technologies advance they create new tools and capabilities. The positive feedback from these developments makes the world increasingly transparent and competitive, further accelerating the pace of innovation.

Companies are finding it more difficult to survive. In 1930 large companies on the S&P 500 list had lifetimes of roughly 70 years before dying or being bought. Now their lifetimes are well under 20 years. For the first time in U.S. history 200,000 more companies are failing each year than being born. Even in Silicon Valley most venture capitalists lose money. University “tech transfer” programs are mainly unsuccessful absent a major drug license, like NYU’s Remicade. Almost all measures of innovative output show poor results. Our innovative performance is like the poor product quality before Total Quality Management (TQM).

Going forward America will not have the most RD&I professionals or the most resources. China has more honors students than America has students, and Asia already spends 50% more on RD&I than the U.S.  For America to win its share of jobs and prosperity it must leverage its core strengths and work smarter. 

The need for greatly improved innovative performance is being amplified by automation. Autonomous cars, trucks, and buses will eliminate up to three million jobs. Over the next decades years various forms of automation may eliminate half of today’s jobs. Robotics, 3-D printing, bio-engineering, plus many other exponential technologies, along with new business models like Uber, will reshape almost every industry. 

Given today’s poor results, many government RD&I agencies are rethinking their initiatives and policies. Too often the impact of their current initiatives is inadequate. In Finland, the lack of RD&I success resulted in a 23% cut in Tekes’ 2016 funding, their equivalent of NSF. In America I-ARPA and ARPA-E were modeled after DARPA, which is generally considered to be the world’s most successful innovation agency. Japan’s ImPACT program for creating major commercial innovations was also modeled after DARPA. Singapore’s CREATE initiatives are joint RD&I centers between their universities and others, such as MIT, Cambridge University, and ETH Zurich. NSF created the I-Corps program to teach students and others the basics of value creation. DARPA also uses “grand challenge” competitions to create new innovations at the speed of the innovation economy. 

Increasingly universities are responding to these challenges. They understand that students need innovative skills to thrive in a world where rapid, constant value creation is a necessary life skill. For example, Finland created Aalto University, an “innovation university” with a comprehensive projects-based curriculum. At Stanford University, the highly desirable d.school and Bio-X experiential programs are now emulated internationally. WPI pioneered a highly-influential projects-based curriculum in 1970 called the WPI Plan. It includes team projects performed around the world, including in India and China. Olin College has more recently pioneered one of the most far reaching projects-based curricula, with no discipline-specific departments and no tenured professors. 

Today only a few professionals and enterprises have the innovative skills and value-creation processes to identify and systematically develop major new opportunities. The few that do, such as Apple, Google, P&G, GE, SRI International, and IDEO, are all leaders in their fields. Recently improved value-creation processes are being developed, such as Agile and Lean. For creating major new innovations the value-creation practices described in the 5 Disciplines of Innovation and the Innovation-for-Impact methods described here are required. 

In addition, companies are increasingly using other models, such as the X-Prize and Google-X “grand challenges” to drive innovation. On-line competitions from Kaggle and many others are producing impressive outcomes. These programs are showing that large systemic improvements can be made.

What today’s successful company, government RD&I, venture capitalist, and university programs all have in common is the strict adherence to proven value-creation best practices. The key ingredients are:
1) a focus on important opportunities,
2) complementary teams composed of the best practitioners,
3) a “playbook” for value creation, and
4) intense, continuous team ideation.

If the opportunities are not important then they are rapidly overwhelmed by global competition. Only the best, most committed teams win in a hyper-competitive world. The playbook assures that everyone on the team has a shared understanding of the concepts and processes required for innovative success. Intense, continuous team ideation is required because exponentially fast learning is required to stay ahead of the rapid, exponential improvements in technology and the competition.

The value-creation best practices summarized above are just the start. In the coming decades America will be in a profoundly more competitive and challenging world. Even better best practices must be invented and used (see The Transparent Company). Ad hoc innovative approaches guarantee failure. Only the rigorous application of value-creation best practices can lead to systematic world-changing R&D and high-value innovations. 

As previously with TQM, the comprehensive use of value-creation best practices produces transformational results. Improvement in innovative impact of ten or more times is typical. As importantly, developing a U.S. workforce where engineering graduates understand and apply these skills will allow America to continue to lead in the creation of new, high-value, global innovations.

In a future post I will describe the process that GM went through at the NUMMI manufacturing plant to learn and apply the Toyota Manufacturing System, Toyota’s version of TQM. GM took 15 years to take the lessons of NUMMI seriously and then it took another 10 years to implement them. 

Many of those lessons are the same as today’s organizations are experiencing trying to adapt to the demands of the global innovation economy and the use of value-creation best practices. But today companies don’t have 25 years to adapt and they are not likely to be bailed out by the U.S. government with a $50 billion dollar loan. If they are not going to be another boiled frog, they better jump fast.

Innovation is deeply counter cultural and a mindset shift is necessary

Innovation is deeply counter cultural and being entrepreneurial is a mindset - the question is ..... can an entrepreneurial mindset  and a bureaucratic mindset work together?

I think both are needed to create an innovative culture that works.... See Steve Denning's figure 3 below

If you turn figure 1 upside down and the small boxes become customers .... And the big box is the leader supporting the team vs "ordering the team" and in each box, you have figure 4. .... Maybe you have the workings of a successful ecosystem.

It's not easy trying to innovate while keeping order in an ecosystem ....

- However it is key to empower the innovators and the crazy ones to be different and challenge the status quo.

- It is key to encourage collaboration to challenge the order and find new ways of working 

- it is all about creating an entrepreneurial mindset

Idea

- create groups of people meeting regularly, collaborating and being facilitated by a top coach .... Outside their normal job .... with a view to get to know like and trust one another .... So they can feel comfortable in expressing their views and thoughts - without the fear of being ridiculed.

(Look at the power of this i4j group!)

If you understand the problem.... The solutions start flowing. 

Steve a Denning writes

"It often feels like we’re trying to get a dog to stand on its hind legs," as Gary Hamel said back in 2012. "You can do that, but you can’t get a dog to do that for long. It’s a DNA level problem. A dog has the DNA of a quadruped. Once you turn your back on the critter, and you put away the treats, the dog is back on all four legs. Any innovation effort must start by acknowledging that innovation itself is deeply counter-cultural: we’re never going to build a truly innovative company without a gene-replacement therapy. Without that you’re going fail. You’re going to try something and then be disheartened when you discover that three months or six months later, the dog is still peeing on lamp-posts rather than doing the tango." 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2012/12/04/gary-hamel-on-innovating-innovation/

There is no getting away from it: innovation is a mindset problem. 

The track record of trying to ease people into a mindset shift by way of a process alone (and getting to the question of mindsets later) is not a happy one. 

Mindset are nested in systems: individuals, organizations, communities, societies, language groups etc. So one may be looking at change at many levels depending on the level one is focused on. This just underlines what a big, long-term challenge it is.

 If people find the prospect of fundamental mindset shift too daunting, then maybe they shouldn't begin? Maybe they should wait until the pain gets so great that they have no choice?

Geoffrey West’s work at the Santa Fe Institute suggest that mature corporations have a very difficult time changing their mindsets: https://www.edge.org/conversation/geoffrey_west-why-cities-keep-growing-corporations-and-people-always-die-and-life-gets 

Cities, on the other hand, tend to survive indefinitely. Perhaps the difference between Singapore and a corporation can be understood through this complexity lens…

If managers have an entrepreneurial mindset, it hardly matters what process they use: the mindset makes it come out right (although it does help if it is a good process (playbook)). But if they don’t have an entrepreneurial mindset, hardly any benefits ensue, no matter what the process. The bureaucratic mindset instinctively implements the process wrong. 

Changing a mindset is hard work and doesn’t happen overnight.  In many cases, it takes months or years. In some cases, it doesn’t happen at all: the bureaucratic mindset, based on years of MBA training, experience and groupthink, simply cannot be changed. The only solution is death or retirement.

The most frequent impediment to change we encountered is the thinking: “I don’t have to change. It’s my staff who have to change. So let’s put them through the process - the playbook and everything will be hunky-dory.”  Never works.  

Even if the process changes the mindsets of some of the people taking the training, it results in an organization at war with itself. You have to change mindsets throughout the whole organization. Otherwise the bureaucratic mindset at the top will prevail. 

​Bottom line: entrepreneurship is mindset.​

Steve Denning
Forbes blog: http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/