Following on from my posts about faster horses, it may appear that I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the subject. Don’t believe it. It’s fairer to say that everywhere I went, the subject being debated seems to be at least tangentially connected to that of  “the voice of the customer in innovation”.

Maybe it’s a variant of the “when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome. For example, when we first decided to have children and started trying for one, I remember my wife being able to spot a pregnant woman at a hundred paces in the dark; somehow, she was sensitised to noticing pregnant women, ostensibly because she wanted to be one.

But that’s as may be. On to the subject at hand. Everywhere I looked, I could interpret the discussions as related to this issue of the role of the customer in innovation.

First, let us remind ourselves of Michael Schrage’s oft-quoted saying:

Innovation isn’t what innovators do…. it’s what customers and clients adopt.

Innovation takes place when the customer adopts something, not earlier. Invention by itself is relatively valueless …. until and unless someone comes along with a business model that allows people to consume the invention simply and efficiently. That is one of the reasons that Silicon Valley is as successful as it is in fostering and realising true innovation. Silicon Valley is not just about PhDs and MBAs and garages, it is about an ecosystem. An ecosystem of universities and students and angels and venture firms and early adopter customers, even realtors and similar service providers,  working closely together to develop virtuous circles of innovation, creating and adapting the business models needed to make inventions valuable. Otherwise it would be a case of  “Suppose they gave an invention, and nobody came?”

Why is this important? Today, while reading the latest Economist, I came across this intriguing article: Innovation in America — A gathering storm? [Thank you, Economist, for not putting the article behind a paywall!] The article quotes Amar Bhide, the Lawrence D Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University on some very interesting ideas. In summary, Bhide postulates that it does not matter where the idea or invention takes place, what matters is where the business model innovation takes place. My words, not his. Do read the entire article yourself, don’t rely on my uncharacteristically brief precis.

The Economist article goes on to say “Edison did not invent the light bulb and Ford did not think up the motor car, but both came up with the business model innovations required to profit from those marvels”.

Invention often needs wild-eyed zealots; innovation needs changes to business models, sometimes subtle, sometimes radical. Take Amazon for example. What differentiated Amazon from everyone else to begin with? Their ability to ship one book to one customer at one home address, while their competition was busy with words like “reorder levels” and “inventory” and “distribution hub”. Business model innovation. As was 1-Click. As was Amazon Reviews. Not invention.

I would contend that innovation is often about business models, and that innovation often cannot take place without the voice of the customer. Invention yes, innovation no.

Moving on. Earlier today, I spent some time catching up on my reading: it was raining in Bangalore, so the time I’d reserved for watching the cricket could be put to other uses. One of the articles I read was this one: People are from Earth, Machines are from Outer Space. Written by usability guru Don Norman, the article looks at the way we are being ‘enslaved’ by machines, and the need to do something about it. Over the last four decades we’ve seen significant improvements in human productivity as a result of the effects of the Laws of Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder. What we haven’t seen is a similar shift in human longevity; as a result, simplicity and convenience (of inventions) are becoming more and more sought-after virtues.

I would contend that in order for an invention to become simpler and more convenient to use, the voice of the customer becomes an imperative. After all, she’s the one who’s going to use the invention, she’s the one who does the adopting.

A day earlier, catching up on my tweets, I came across this one from Michael Krigsman, quoting the CEO of SAP. “It’s arrogant to dictate to customers. Better to ask them and respond to what they need.” Now that’s not rocket science or even unusual per se. What makes it worth remarking on is who’s doing the saying and where he’s doing it. SAP are the post-industrial (but still pre-information) society equivalent of Ford and “any colour you like so long as it’s black”. Why do I say that? Because SAP has come from a background pof manufacturing processes, not service processes, and the information needs are therefore expressed in the words of a past paradigm. Nevertheless, even SAP is talking about asking customers what they need.

Conversations with customers have to be dialogues, not monologues, as the Cluetrain guys reminded us. And this requires us to do some shifting. What do I mean? Take this for example:

I enjoy travelling, and I’ve been blessed to be in an occupation where travelling is part of the job. Whenever I travel, I spend time observing people, and many things delight me, many things serve to educate me, and some things never fail to amuse me. An example: where an English-speaking person is under the misapprehension that the person he is speaking to will suddenly understand everything just because he speaks English slowly and loudly to that person.

For a conversation to flourish, two things are necessary. A common language and a context in which to place the conversation. Which means it is time I meandered into Alpine territory and spent some time there with Hugh MacLeod. Hugh has been in fine form at gapingvoid, particularly with these two posts: Marketing evolves when language evolves and Marketing as Transformation.

If you’re not listening to the customer’s voice, then she might as well be speaking in a Finno-Ugric language for all you care. And, in the context of what Hugh is saying, you have absolutely no chance of even spotting the narrative gaps your customers would like you to fill. [An aside: Is Hugh MacLeod the only person in the world to live somewhere where the population is lower than the size of his Twitter following?]

Sometime earlier this week, I had occasion to be at MIT, meeting with Tom Malone at CCI, which shares a floor with CISR. Which is where I bumped into George Westerman and spent some time discussing the subject with him. His definition of innovation really works for me:

Adopting or modifying a product, service or process in a way that creates value and is relatively new to the industry.

In our dialogue, George stressed the importance of regular and informal conversations between the designer and the customer during the process of innovation; the engineer wants to solve problems, to remove defects and inefficiencies from the current way of doing things; the customer wants her experience to be better, but only she can describe what she wants improved. She knows it when she sees it; [incidentally, my reference to the phrase has more to do with John Guaspari’s book on quality than with the “threshold of obscenity” usage quoted in Wikipedia.

Finally, as I remarked in an earlier post, when I was having dinner with MR Rangaswami (no relation) in San Francisco later that week, he reminded me of what Peter Drucker had said, about listening to the customers you don’t have, not just the customers you have.

So where is all this leading? Much of the time, when we use the word “innovation”, we mean “invention”. This may have been fine in the past, but it’s not sustainable any more. Invention is about making new things, innovation is about doing things in new ways. For invention to have value, there must be innovation in business model and in process. Innovation in business model and process requires us to understand the language and context of the customer. This is patently hard to do without listening to the customer during the process of innovation.

To make matters “worse”, things have moved on. Customers now want to make these changes themselves, to become partners in the innovation process, to co-create value. More and more, they have the tools to be able to do this; when they are denied the tools, they react with force and power.

As I stated recently, it took IBM 40 years to “become evil”; it took Microsoft only 20 years to follow suit; Google gained that epithet in 10; Facebook raced to it in 5. As Umair Haque noted, the cost of “being evil” is fast outweighing the benefits.

Time we listened.

When I was five years old, I was commissioned to do something very very important: it was my job to read the morning newspaper headlines to my father. [There wasn’t really much competition for the job: two of my siblings had arrived by then, but the eldest was only 3 at the time].

I loved the job; it meant I could see my dad before I went to school, even if “seeing” was stretching the truth; he normally came home very late, and we knew to keep as quiet as possible in the early morning. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, reading the morning headlines to my dad.

It was early morning on the 23rd of November 1963, I was a few days past my sixth birthday. I had the Statesman in my hand (we used to take three papers in those days in Calcutta: The Statesman, the Amrita Bazar Patrika and the Hindustan Standard). I began reading. Unlike any other day, I didn’t have to choose an order in which to read the headlines. There was only one. Kennedy Shot Dead. So I read it.

And my father got up, something I’d never really seen him do that early. He began searching for his glasses, called for coffee (which appeared mysteriously), and said to me “Keep reading aloud” while he got dressed. It was the first day I can remember reading complete paragraphs, complete stories.

I have no idea why we were such Kennedyphiles at home, but we were and continue to be. There was something about JFK and Jackie and Camelot, everything about the family and the legend. And you know something, it didn’t matter what I heard and saw and read since. We remained Kennedyphiles warts and all. I was particularly taken with two photographs taken around then, photographs that received immense publicity then and later. Tim O’Reilly reminded me, via a tweet, of the Resolute Desk one, and that made me think of the Salute:

The emotion in those photographs has stayed with me ever since.

Today, as Tim’s tweets brought those emotions to mind, I started musing about the process by which some of the remarkable events of the last 50 years were “broadcast” to me.

The Kennedy assassination was the first such event in my life. Given that he was shot dead around midnight IST, and that he was pronounced dead around 1am IST, radio was not appropriate. For one thing we didn’t have 24 hour radio. So the morning paper was the expected route. While the event became a defining moment for TV coverage for many people, this was not the case in India.

When it came to the Martin Luther King assassination, I was older, and read the news for myself. Again, the time of the event militated against the use of any medium but newspaper. When Robert Kennedy was shot, I was nearly eleven, and heard it on the radio. As far as I can make out in retrospect, the only distinction between radio and newspaper for me was the time. In the early morning I read the paper. For the rest of the day I listened to the radio. There were no midday or evening papers in those days, and no television.

The next event to evoke similar strong memories for me was that of Apollo 11, man landing on the moon. I was a little bit older, and was taken to the United States Information Services offices to watch the event, on grainy television. While the images are ingrained in my memory, the stronger memory is that of hearing the radio at the same time, and the One Small Step speech stood out as the defining moment. On radio.

Over a decade later, the momentum was still with newspaper and radio. The scene moves to December 1980, a few weeks after I’d left India. Television was now part of my life, but in those days it wasn’t anywhere near 24 hours a day. After 11pm or so all you saw was the Test Card. So, when I went for a walk to smoke a cigarette and buy a newspaper on the morning of the 9th, I was mystified. There were people sitting down on the pavement near the paper shop at the end of St Anthony’s Road, Blundellsands, and they were crying. Openly. Young and old. I walked in, picked up a paper, read the headlines and joined the others on the pavement, crying. John Lennon had been shot dead. Again, the medium by which I came across the information was newspaper.

A decade or so later, I was bemused by the way the Gulf War began; it was heralded by CNN, and, in turn, it announced the true birth of CNN. Cable news was born. And for a while it defined the way I received the news.

The sudden and tragic death of Diana, Princess of Wales did not fit the mould; I was on holiday in India, and read the news as I got on board an aircraft. Back to newspaper.

And then came 9/11. A turning point. The core communications device by now was the mobile phone. A colleague of mine, Kumud Kalia, called me around 850am Eastern Time, to tell me that there had been a small explosion at the World Trade Center, and that there was some talk about a Cessna crashing into the tower, with potential terrorism implications. I went to the COO, we agreed to call for the highest state of alert and notify the Gold Emergency Team, and we were all watching CNN in a hastily-arranged command centre by the time the second plane hit the tower.

The mobile phone became the way I received news, and it’s been that way ever since. CNN via television has receded in importance while CNN via computer has gained relevance; quite often I go there after being alerted by a friend, either via a phone call, a text message or via Twitter.

Of course there were other noteworthy events in between the Kennedy assassination and 9/11. I’ve just picked a handful. There’s a serious point I’m trying to make. And that is this:

In the past, I went to the news. Today, the news comes to me. In the past, when I went to the news, it was written by news professionals. Today, when the news comes to me, it is brought to me by a friend, an amateur. In the past, the place I went for the news was fixed. Today, the place the news comes to me is mobile.

There are other implications. Because I am mobile, the news genuinely comes to me 24/7. In the past, even if the television provided 24/7 news, it didn’t matter. I didn’t watch television for 24 hours a day. Similarly, in the past, the news was broadcast to me. Today, I can choose to subscribe to the things that matter to me, so that the news is relevant to my interests.

That’s why Twitter is so important. The ability for amateurs to publish news instantaneously; the capacity to embed the tweet with context and detail via the inclusion of urls, tiny or otherwise; the facility to bruit that news abroad via the publish-subscribe mechanisms and the RT or retweet mechanism; the ability to receive all this via mobile devices…..all these are signs of change, of significant change.

More importantly, all this is done globally and in an affordable and inclusive manner.

That’s an amazing amount of progress in just 45 years. We have only just begun to learn about the value of these things. I look forward to learning more.

[Apologies in advance. I woke up at 1am, unable to go back to sleep,  with no cricket to watch, with the residue of San Francisco time still in me, and so I started writing from the hip.]

I think of many things as projects; in doing so, I use what I assume to be fairly common definitions of what constitutes a project.

A project:

• must have a start date
• must have an end date
• there must be a bunch of resources at the start
• the resources should be of three classes: unstarted (where the resource is the labour used to build other resources); raw (where the resource exists, but work has to be done to convert that resource into something usable; componentised (where the resource is ready for use).
• There should a fourth type of resource, the tools used to integrate the other resources together

Project management is then the art or science of bringing together the three types of resources, using the fourth type of resource, in order to create some valuable output between the start and end date.

A project can be constrained in a number of ways:

• you could be required to have it done by a specific time
• you may be asked to complete the project within a particular cost envelope
• you may have limited choice about the resources used
• you may be restricted to using a particular set of tools
• and you may be asked to ensure the output meets or exceeds some defined standard.

Using this kind of definition, you can understand why I think of many things I do as projects. Take cooking for example. Every time I cook, I’m managing a project. I acquire some raw ingredients, primarily vegetables, meat, spices and, where appropriate, cooking oil. First I prepare those ingredients for use: cleaning, chopping, puree-ing, parboiling, mixing together, whatever. Then I combine those ingredients with others I may have in component form already: dried spices, condiments, sauces and gravies. If I’m lazy, if there is some unavoidable time constraint, or sometimes because I’ve inherited them, I may have some resources already in a prepared state: carrot batons, chopped onions, stuff like that. Then I’m all set to go, follow the instructions.

Some people use recipes or cookbooks, some prefer not to. When I was young, I refused to use a cookbook: I wanted to be an artist, to be creative, to make things up. Which was fine…..if I succeeded. And sometimes I didn’t succeed, with horrifying results. So I began to use recipes, modifying them when appropriate, but experimenting with the modification first before trying it out on others. A private beta as it were. Sometimes I created the recipes, but the beta was even more private in that case, just me.

[Regular readers of this blog will know that I love cooking. And eating. So when I describe cooking, I’m describing a labour of love].

When I was young, I insisted on many things. I insisted on getting all the ingredients myself. I insisted on clearing whole hordes of space in the kitchen, as much free work surface as possible; i insisted on having all the right tools, the right music, the right everything. I wanted to be left alone, undisturbed, while I worked on the food.

Yup, I was a right prima donna. An occasional not-particularly-talented artist who thought the world belonged to him just because he deigned to be in the kitchen. In the meantime, my wife would cook every day, insist on none of the things I insisted on, go about her business pragmatically and efficiently, and come up with the most amazing food every day. Without a fuss. Sharing the kitchen with others, doing other things at the same time, getting on with her life while producing quality food for the rest of the family on time and to budget day in day out. And she used recipes, recipes from cookbooks, from friends, from supermarket cards, from magazine articles, from the Web. She used prepared ingredients when she needed to. She got on with the job and did it well, not looking for credit, not complaining; she did it with no excuses, she did it even if she was ill or tired. I salute her. I have learnt a lot from her.

What point am I trying to make? It’s about control. A family household is all about sharing, about consistency and reliability and security, about pragmatic choices, about managing to budgets and times. It’s about consideration for others. A family is not about control, it’s about loss of control. It’s about relationship and covenant and caring and respect as the motivators to do something, rather than command-and-control and more-stick-than-carrot.

A household is a good model for shared services. It is possible to run a household as a set of isolated end-to-end units, with every person having his or her own infrastructure for cooking, washing, cleaning and so on. But it would be very expensive and time-consuming. Skills can and should be replicated: everyone should know how to cook and clean and wash. Infrastructure should be shared not replicated.

So it is with enterprises and markets. Skills can and should be replicated where possible; human beings are versatile, humans relish variety. Sometimes I think of assembly line as nothing more than an Industrial Age instance of the Caste System, a formal division of labour. Sometimes I think of professions the same way, particularly when we try and raise barriers to entry with the usual “you don’t understand this, you’re stupid, this is too complex for you, and anyway we speak a different language, a secret language, and we’re not going to tell you. You need to do your crime and your time before you become an expert like the rest of us. In the meantime, you’re barred from the holy of holies”. You know what I mean. Priests, accountants, lawyers, doctors, computer scientists, we’ve all done it.

A project manager’s first instinct is to insist on control. Control everything, end to end. Every ingredient. His own recipe. Not Invented Here. Clear work surfaces. Matrix not spoken here, go away.

It works. In fact, for amateur project managers, it’s probably the only way. But then let’s recognise them for what they are. This may appear fine from a results-oriented viewpoint. Until you look at the costs. Which is where the problem lies. The control-freak no-matrix project manager is an expensive proposition, expensive in terms of costs and time. And margin.

Shared-resource models and matrices did not enter enterprise life because there was some pinko lefty tree-hugger involved in organisational design. They did so because other models were not affordable.

Collaboration is not an option, it’s an imperative. Shared-resource models are not nice-to-have, they’re the only choice we have, particularly in these straitened times.

Which brings me to my coda. End to end control and devices. Many people point at Apple and BlackBerry as excellent examples of what happens when you have real end-to-end control, how quality is obtained and sustained, how the customer experience is so brilliant, and so on and so forth.

It’s true. End-to-end control, as in the Apple and BlackBerry device cases, does yield excellent results. But there’s a cost. A considerable cost.

Actually there are three costs:

• First, the process is more expensive, end to end control does that to you, and you have to pass the cost to the customer. Yes you could do a Henry Ford and reduce options in order to reduce the costs and deliver something affordable to the customer, any colour you like so long as it’s black.
• Second, there is a time delay. Shared service models, once they’re set up, reduce cycle time. There’s true component architecture and reuse. End-to-end control freaks tend to shy away from shared services and reuse. Witness the innovation cycles in OpenOffice and Office and you will get what I mean.
• Third, there is a loss of freedom. Freedom expressed in breadth of choice; freedom expressed in the options available, in the features and functions, in the tolerances for data migration in and out of the system.

Collaborative development is all about layering rather than silos, about horizontal consistency rather than vertical control. It is about open standards and interfaces rather than closed locks. It is about pragmatic community rather than prima donna behaviour.

It’s been some time since the telco lost control of the device; guaranteeing the end-to-end experience then becomes a question of influencing a series of horizontal layers while being accountable for the integrated experience. We’re learning about it, we have some way to go, but we’re on the way.

And so it is with computers. People, we’ve lost control of the device. Which is a good thing. Provided we are able to grow up and work with component architecture and reuse models, with open standards, with collaborative partnerships.

Provided we’re able to deal with the loss of control. [Which, by the way, has already happened. And it’s not coming back, whatever we do.]

It could be said that it took 40 years for IBM to “become evil”; 20 years for Microsoft to do so; 10 years for Google to follow suit; and 5 years for Facebook to join the gang. None of these companies is evil, there’s nothing evil about them. I have friends in all those companies, though I may not use all of their products. They haven’t changed. What has changed is the perception of value by the customer, the perception of the cost of a closed-system world.

Umair Haque said something along the lines of “The costs of being evil now outweigh the benefits”. So we have to move with the times. And that means giving up control.