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Talking Technology By Steve Burns, Capital News contributor Thank you to the readers who provided me with great feedback on my column last week about leadership. I not only enjoy the challenge of writing a column and giving my perspective on a topic but I also like you sharing your viewpoint with me. Your feedback is always welcome. In this continuing series on the leadership summit put together by The Leadership Centre Willow Creek Canada (www.growingleadership .com), we are looking more closely at the leadership teachings of Steven Sample, author of The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership. I enjoyed Sample's counterintuitive leadership lessons: 1. Never make a decision today that can reasonably be put off to tomorrow. 2. Think gray. Don't form opinions if you don't have to. 3. Think free. Move several steps beyond traditional brainstorming. 4. Listen first, talk later. And when you listen, do so artfully. 5. Shoot your own horse. Don't force others to do your dirty work. 6. The best leaders don't keep up with the popular media and the trades. 7. Know what hill you are willing to die on—and keep its exact location to yourself. 8. Know the all–important difference between being leader and doing leader. 9. You can't copy your way to the top. In this column, we will look more closely at a couple of the key points. Many might think, “what could I possibly learn about innovation from a university president?” Well, in Sample's case, he has the credentials and experience to back up his advice. Not only has Sample turned around the State University of New York-Buffalo and then the University of Southern California, he is an innovator at heart. I think that innovation drives the new economy. “Innovate or evaporate” is a phrase that applies to all of our companies. We must drive innovation or it will drive us. Sample knows a tonne about innovation. For example, Sample used his “thinking free” concept to help him create a breakthrough patent on the digital electronic control system for home appliances. As Sample puts it “thinking free is not just thinking out of the box or brainstorming. It moves several steps beyond that.” The analogy that Sample uses in his book is like swimming in a warm heated swimming pool on a cool brisk day. When you think out of the box, you are willing to come out of the pool for just a couple of minutes until you begin to feel uncomfortable and then you jump back into that warm pool, which represents conventional thinking, safe thinking. But when you are thinking free, you get out of that warm pool and you stay out of the warm pool until your teeth chatter, until it is actually painful. You force yourself to contemplate outrageous and improbable possibilities for solving problems, and it is a very difficult thing to do. It is, in every sense of the word, an unnatural act. With respect to applying his “thinking free” concept to innovation, Sample describes his innovation in further detail “I was retained by an appliance manufacturing company to invent a new way to control a dishwasher. I wasn't making much progress because all appliances were controlled by a clock order timer. So, to think free, I laid on the floor of the family room and forced myself to consider hay bales and elephants and planets and ladybugs and sofas and microbes and newspapers and hydroelectric dams, French horns, electrons and trees, each individually and in combination controlling a dishwasher. It was a very painful experience for me. I admit that I could never do it for more than 10 minutes. In fact, most human beings cannot do it for even one minute. But after this radical approach, I suddenly saw in my mind's eye an almost complete electronic circuit diagram for a totally new approach to controlling an appliance. We were so early in this field of technology that I was able to get very broad patent coverage. As a consequence, some 500 million home appliances, especially microwave ovens, have been built and sold around the world utilizing this particular innovation – all because of being able to “think free.” Sample's thinking free concept can be applied to almost anything. After all, the reality is that some of the most important innovations are often made by people who are new to that field. That is, by people who don't know all the reasons why something can't be done and who are, therefore, able to think more freely about solving the problem. The same is true about leadership in our companies. Often it is fresh blood and a fresh perspective from outside that can turn a company in a new direction. So the next time you want to solve a problem or create an innovation, try Sample's unconventional, creative, thinking free approach. Ideally, you will have several people involved, including individuals not even directly involved in your company – those that are not stuck with how you do business. You will have everyone bring their most radical ideas to the table, regardless if they are directly relevant to the problem. No one is allowed to criticize the ideas but rather, after all radical ideas are exhausted, you are only allowed to build upon the ideas of others. These fresh, new ideas allow you to think of the problem different, possibly even to create a totally new solution that you would not have thought of otherwise. As I think of Sample's radical, contrarian approach to almost everything, I think of the words of John F. Kennedy. “Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.” Next week we will learn more from Sample's contrarian ways. Steve Burns, a chartered accountant, is the president and CEO of Burns Innovation Group Inc. which provides consulting and accounting services to entrepreneurs. |
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