After site was hijacked, we’re back up again! Look for regular postings on innovation and leadership.

NPR interviewed Wilbur Ross this morning, in which he revealed that he had tried to be a creative writer in his student days. I found really interesting his answer to the question of what he had found useful from his creative writing training, however short-lived that was, to his work today as he takes over and revived failed companies. His answer was not ideation or any such thing, but “analytical skills” (!) When you have 1000 words to write a piece in, he said, you have to “organize your thought processes, organize your questions, and think through what your observations were.” He went on to say how these abilities are useful in any kind of activity that calls for analytical abilities, and especially in his work in the private equity space.

I won’t belabor how this fits the ISmarts-framework…..

Seven years ago. It was a non-teaching day for me at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. The cab driver who dropped me off at school from a breakfast meeting was from Kabul. He had NPR running, and we caught versions of the events on the 9 am news. Little did he or I know the dramatic change that would come upon the America we knew.

I remember the horror–the darn lump in my throat wouldn’t go away–as I watched the chaos unfold on TV. I had worked on Wall Street a few years ago, and knew the WTC quite well.

All we can do today, is to take a moment to reflect on the precious and innocent lives that were lost in the thousands that day. May they be blessed in every way.

At the bookstore, waiting for a friend, I picked up Mark Sanborn’s book, You Don’t Need a Title to be a Leader. “No, you don’t,” I said to myself smiling, as I thought about my Quotidian Leadership workshop. I liked the ideas in Sanborn’s book, and was familiar with his style, having read his “Fred book” before. In any case, I tried to think of how the six leadership principles that Sanborn discusses fit into the LSmarts 5-intelligences framework. (They say when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but hey, on the flip side, isn’t is also true that when you want to put in a nail, everything looks like a hammer.)

Sanborn’s list includes 6 principles:

(i) Know yourself: good leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses first

(ii) Focus: excellent leadership has a laser-like focus on its goals

(iii) People: leadership must motivate people

(iv) Communication: good leaders use channels of communication that they keep open

(v) Execution: how leaders make the rubber meet the road, and

(vi) Giving: excellent leaders put others above self

Let’s see the 5 leadership intelligences from the LSmarts framework: Analytical, Inventive, Operational, Communicative, and Ethical LSmarts.

Clearly “Know Yourself” comes under the Analytical LSmarts, but so does “Focus” because Analytical LSmarts reflect an ability to monitor performance. “People” and “Communication” very obviously are powered by Communicative LSmarts, “Execution” relies on Operational LSmarts, and “Giving” is governed by Ethical LSmarts. What about Inventive LSmarts–the source of visionary leadership? Missing in Sanborn’s framework? Hmm… interesting.

I recently came across a very interesting question: Is leadership morally neutral? In other words, can we regard dictators or “heads” of fascist countries as leaders?

From the LSmarts perspective, here’s an answer:
One of the five intelligences in the LSmarts framework is called “Ethical LSmarts.” This intelligence reflects the person’s ability to recognize and act upon the ethical dimensions of an issue. It is not about the ethical beliefs of a leader or how ethical you perceive the leader to be. It is also not about doing “good work” (as in “the ethical mind” that Howard Gardner of Harvard has proposed.) Rather, this aspect of intelligence reflects how capable the leader is of recognizing and understanding the ethical implications of a new situation. Ethical LSmarts bestow upon the leader a capacity to understand the ethical standpoints of people who may not share his or her personal ethics. This aspect of leadership intelligence makes the difference between why somebody like Mahatma Gandhi or Abraham Lincoln is called a great leader and why somebody like Hitler is called a demagogue.

To answer the question then, leadership is definitely not morally neutral—great leaders display the ability to lift the question of ethics from that of the personal and transform it into the ethics of all of humanity. For a demonstration of this, watch Richard Attenborough’s movie, Gandhi. Toward the close, there is a scene that depicts Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the immediate aftermath of Hindu-Muslim religious riots that followed the partition of India. Gandhi went on a fast-unto-death if the riots did not end. The scene that I mention shows that the riots have stopped, and rioters are going by the house in which Gandhi lies. They are throwing down the arms they used in the riots in front of Gandhi who lies on a cot. Suddenly a Hindu man rushes toward Gandhi’s bed, throws a piece of bread at Gandhi, and orders him to eat it; the man then breaks down and tells Gandhi of how he killed a small Muslim boy because the Muslims killed his young son. Gandhi’s answer: “Adopt a Muslim boy the same age as your son, and bring him up as a Muslim.”

After many months of co-directing and volunteering (with my wife) on a child literacy project in Hyderabad, India through DukeEngage, I’m back. The project was exhilirating but also exhausting–apart from the literacy work in underpriviliged government schools, we were also  in charge of 8 Duke undergrads. But I would not trade it for anything. I learned many lessons for the ISmarts and LSmarts framework. I am back to innovation and leadership consulting and will blog regularly now.

The discovery of a sound recording made in Paris in 1860 has established that Edison was not the first to record sound. The BBC reports that:

The short song was captured on April 9, 1860 by a phonautograph, a device created by a Parisian inventor, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.

The device etched representations of sound waves into paper covered in soot from a burning oil lamp.

Lines were scratched into the soot by a needle moved by a diaphragm that responded to sound.

However, as the BBC report says, these sounds were never meant to be replayed. Edouard-Leon Scott, perhaps owing to his being a printer by profession, seemed to be more interested in recording the human voice in a “printable” fashion, or in transforming the human voice into a visual form. Recently, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California “read” very high-resolution digital scans of the original paper and reproduced the recorded sound. It is fascinating to hear an ethereal female voice from 150 years ago render a French folksong.

Scott died impoverished and frustrated that his invention was never recognized. As an interview with his great-grandson shows, it was a bitter irony for Scott that he had to be an assistant when Edison’s invention was demonstrated in Paris, and his own name was not even mentioned.

What went wrong with Scott’s phonautograph that we had not heard of it till now? Is it that it was a “partial” innovation–by this, I mean that it could only record but not reproduce sounds–while Edison’s could do both? One can argue that in a society that was print-oriented, a device that converted human voice into paper records might have been easy to accept. So, why didn’t Scott succeed? The answer to me lies in this: Scott lacked Communicative iSmarts. For instance, he could not persuade the Academy of Science of the value of his innovation. After the Academy expressed to him that it was not interested in audio-related invention given their focus on optics, I do not see much evidence that Scott tried to “market” his invention in other ways, or to other audiences. For example, there is not much evidence to argue that he tried to reach the general public with his “phonautograph.” In short, he did not demonstrate the flexibility in communication that is critical for innovation to succeed, a flexibility that Communicative iSmarts provides.

The phonautograph is but one example of a constant stream that we find of innovations that do not succeed, not because they are not good, but simply because the inventor(s) do not have or use communicative iSmarts. I find it heart-rending to picture this brilliant man, who had to stand before audiences in Paris demonstrating a machine from the USA, when he–and perhaps only he–knew fully well that twenty years ago, he had built something that recorded human voices. All because he lacked the critical intelligence of communicative iSmarts.

Along the lines of Michael Porter’s value chain in strategy analysis, it is possible to conceptualize an innovation value chain. Often companies get stuck in a rut by confusing innovation with ideation and not moving beyond idea generation.

Recently, researchers at INSEAD have pointed out that “The [innovation value] chain starts with idea generation, but then moves to prioritising and funding ideas, to converting those ideas to products and finally to diffusing those products and business practices across the company.”

It is interesting how this maps into the ISmarts framework.

The problem with an innovation value chain is that it can mislead us into visualizing the innovation process as linear, proceeding in sequential stages, whereas in reality, the stages spill over into each other. The innovation value chain reminds me of the waterfall model in software development. Further, such stepwise conceptions of innovation make it easy to compartmentalize the organization into hermetic silos by assigning ideation to one department, budgeting to another, and so on. In the ISmarts framework, a focus on the abilities needed for innovation rather than on processes and stages, allows us to break free of sequential mindsets and compartmentalized organizations. But by providing a organized framework, ISmarts helps to structure chaos, or as Tom Peters puts it, ISmarts helps to provide the “disciplined disorganization” necessary for innovation.

An article last week in the Wall Street Journal (March 18, 2008) about how drivers are beginning to blindly trust GPS devices caught my eye. The article reports that by letting the devices overrun common sense, these drivers are “getting lost, hitting dead ends, and even swerving into oncoming traffic.” This reminded me of my growing up years in India, a time when my grandparents used to complain about how “digital watches” were not letting us kids learn how to tell the time.

The problem of overtrusting technology, and becoming inflexibly attached to devices and technologies is an old one. Dorothy Leonard in her Wellsprings of Knowledge wrote more than ten years ago about “core rigidities” which are the twin side of “core capabilities”, arguing that the core strengths of the organization are simultaneously core weaknesses. An organization derives competitive advantage from its core capabilities now, but is unable to extract itself from them and do other things when there is a need.

An innovative organization must recognize this need to remain flexible, which is why I argue that ISmarts is essential to develop and sustain in any organization that seeks to be innovative.