failing forward?

Geez. If I had known that Genevieve was going to join us for class today, I would have made sure that our "Happiness in Mundane Places" presentation was done more professionally. Since it wasn't clear that it had any impact on our grade, and since we wanted to continue the pattern of using humor in class and basing it on Jennifer and other classmates, we made some stuff up and tried to have fun.

Sounded like the class was OK with it in general, but Genevieve did not like it because no real ethnography was done. Too bad it just wasn't of high quality like many others were, either. If I could do it over again, I would have used Glendale Arena, where the Phoenix Coyotes play, as a place where happiness is unlikely, and interviewed people there about how they deal with having a pretty unsuccessful team in a small market - things like coming to games with their grandkids, meeting the players at events, learning about the game, etc. That would have been much cooler, and totally do-able, because I was making videos anyway. Plus I could have gotten in some jabs about how it's not happiness to lose to the Red Wings every time.

But, I definitely think I got more out of this class as a result of getting knocked down by Genevieve. It made me pay hard attention to the other presentations and take her commentary on them to heart, because I actually happen to have a soft spot for doing ethnography - it was one of my key recommendations for Starbucks this summer (to do it in their stores so they could really understand customers in certain types of stores more deeply than they do today). I just didn't take this all that seriously because we were so wrapped up as a group in the other piece due today, and our strategy was simply not aligned with what a professional needed to say.

I was glad that Genevieve was so honest, and I am even more glad that she chose to make reference during her future comments to the parts of our presentation that she actually thought were good tactics, like playing on the Ratings and making fun of testimonials. I think if it had gone better, I might not have taken some of the learnings to heart. I just hate not getting things right the first time! But at some level it's what motivates me to do an ever-better job at stuff.

On the whole, I feel like classes are going pretty average as a result of simply having too much to do. The consulting project takes a huge amount of energy because it's a Fortune 15 company that I want to do a killer job with. Game Theory and Negotiations, for some strange reason, are a lot of work. I dunno...just seems that it's actually kind of hard to buy a house, turn 30, adjust to marriage, physically move into our new place, and feel happy about 100% of what I'm doing in school. I just don't get to some things because of the time I put into HP, but I'm only partially satisfied about the work we are doing there. No real valuable feedback from the client because Gary hasn't been involved.

Anyway...now I'm just complaining to get some of this off my back. Doesn't have a lot to do with creativity, except that I need to be more creative in order to get a better ROI on the time I am spending in my classes and doing assigned work. That's about mainly (a) the Yellow-Hat thing of using my "creative time" more to my advantage (tough because of wife's early wake-ups); (b) realizing that delegating is OK; (c) trying to stick to times I've set aside to do work, not falling into the trap of reading x or y online because it sounds interesting.

Never thought b-school would be as busy as life in consulting, but it sure is, and 2nd semester of 2nd year is no less work than last year at this time! I get what I signed up for!

everything coming up green

Ever since I started working on the HP project, it seems like the only thing I can read about relative to corporate efforts is the Environment. For instance, I just glanced at the newest (March 5) FORTUNE. There is an interview with the 32 year-old CEO of a company that supplies more solar power to US companies than any other. There is a whole section on sustainable forestry that has ads from Waste Management, Sustainable Forestry Initiative, and other organizations touting their environmentally-friendly businesses. Haas has already won two business case competitions this year relating to triple-bottom-line businesses. Richard Branson, the world's favorite mogul, has just announced that he's donating $25mm (albeit in very small steps) to any individual who can come up with a working remedy for removing at least 1B tons of carbon dioxide each year from the Earth's atmosphere. HP has joined a couple of tech consortiums that are actively trying to reduce the amount of energy required by its servers, and has already had success with smart cooling technologies that appeal to customers with high power bills. The Economist keeps me updated about progress on green technologies and environmental groups' progress in Europe. And An Inconvenient Truth just won Best Documentary at the 79th Oscars.

The list could go on and on - it's just part of the developed world's DNA to be talking about climate change right now. Not sure that anyone on his own has developed a solution per se, but it certainly has be thinking about (a) the importance of recommending some action on Environment for HP; (b) the potential to do something related to Climate Change for our final project in this class. Certainly there is a happiness angle on it, though it might not be intuitive at first. One, people will be happy if they pay less for power. Two, they will be happy knowing that they are reducing the Earth's footprint (can back this up with data). Third, and possibly most interesting, climate change means different things to different people...which means that we as b-school students can add some value to the "debate" (not sure why there is debate...really have to figure out how much of that is political rhetoric vs. science) by showing certain insights and creative analysis of what's important to people. Very tired right now after coming home from class but will think more on this later.

team stuff

I keep going back and forth as to how much I am getting from the team experience in this class. Well, that’s not entirely right. So far, I’m not getting much from it at all. What I go back and forth on is whether I’d do it differently.

This is a stretch-the-status-quo class. That’s why we’re here. I also think it’s a really appropriate “capstone” type of course, in that you have to be comfortable working with others, expressing and defending your views, listening, and doing lots of different types of assignments.

The main frustration is related to the theory of team composition. Because we’re divided into teams that feature both full- and part-time students, scheduling is very difficult. It’s hard enough when everyone is in the FT program, but here, our only campus overlap time is during and immediately after this class.

Now I know the real world works that way, so perhaps it’s just practice in dealing with what I will encounter for the rest of my life. It actually is that, so I am not going to turn this into a bitch session, because even though I’d like if it were done differently, I appreciate that Jennifer set it up the way she did. If it were a BAD idea, Simona would have voted strongly against it.

Maybe it’s that I’m more frustrated with my actual team. There are some cool perspectives emerging, but unlike in all other classes of which I’ve been a part, I can’t quite seem to identify whether there is another team member that shares my interest in getting stuff done without all the stalling and non-decision making. We have our Team Teaching project on Monday, and we didn’t really begin working on it in earnest until this week, because it wasn’t clear until then who actually was working on it. No one would commit to wanting to work on this project vs. another project, or even saying whether they felt whether it was important or a good idea to divide and conquer. I tried to play facilitator during our after-class meetings, and/but no one wanted to take the baton, and no one was decisive about much of anything. VERY different from the other team experiences I’ve had at Haas. Again, prep for life.

So I tried a new approach. I had what I thought was a differentiated and fun approach to the Happiness project, so I asked for one other person to help, then did the project along with a bit of help from him. Then I emailed one of the other group members to ask her if I could “take a look at the draft of the presentation” for the Team Teaching to see how it was going, since she had loosely committed upon my asking last week to take a first stab. She sent out a shell deck, I gave her some thoughts, and suggested that she work primarily with the 3 other members who had not done anything on the Happiness piece. So she did that and copied me on it and I think it is going well, or at least better, now. I just sent out an email indicating that I think we should be dividing work that’s due in March, and that each person should choose 2 to get involved in (maybe opting for less work if you do Team Teaching because that’s non-trivial)…let’s see if that works better! Hopefully we can actually get some quality face time as a bunch of colleagues instead of a group of people that doesn’t know each other very well.

puzzling the mind

One of my favorite mental exercises a few years ago was to go slowly through logic-puzzle games. Whenever I’d be in the airport waiting for a flight back home from college, I’d pick up a little magazine with a dozen or so LSAT-type logic games. For some reason, once I started work, I kind of stopped doing those altogether…it was almost like I had totally forgotten it was an interest of mine.

I don’t think it’s coincidental that the my relatively lower creative score (that is, compared to the class) comes on the heels of my ignoring this series of fun exercises for the last few years. I used to actually see myself as more creative than I do now. Some of my relative rank is attributable to my peers, to be sure – I look around and see more creative colleagues/peers now than I’ve ever been around either at work or in sports. But I really think the other part of it is parallel to working out – I haven’t been flexing my mental muscles by doing regular workouts with the logic puzzles.

So, I made a run to the bookstore about two weeks ago. “Where are your logic puzzle books?” I asked. This was a pretty small bookstore in downtown Berkeley, so they just didn’t happen to have the types of puzzles I was looking for. So I went on to the Borders near my apartment in San Francisco, where they have no less than 4 shelves of logic puzzles. To my chagrin, roughly 3.75 of these 4 shelves consisted of Sudoku books. I have nothing at all against Sudoku, but it’s the same game every time, just with differential levels of difficulty. The remaining 0.25 shelves did not have anything I wanted, so I was stuck doing a few online to start getting back into the swing of things.

But my wife loves me, so when she went to the bookstore in search of some titles to help us find hotels for our honeymoon, she also snagged me a Kurt Smith logic puzzle book. I had a total of 4 hours in planes and airports this weekend (alone) so I was stoked. Nothing made me so happy as to be figuring out how many of which type chocolate bars went to Tyler, Max, Aaron, and Tim, and who ate them in which order. That’s what I’m talking about!

So now I am doing 1-2 puzzles a day to keep the creative muscles in my mind working. On BART on the way back from school, sitting on the couch while dinner is in the oven, during the intermission of the Red Wings game, whatever…as long as my rib is still fractured and I can’t do anything to exercise my body, might as well do everything possible for the mind.

creativity in skiing

I have decided that, with a fractured rib, it is best for me to try not to exercise my creativity on the ski slopes, especially when there is nearly a foot of powder on very steep hills. That hurts a lot. Let’s confine that to mental exercises for now.

on geoff moore

I stumbled upon Geoff’s Blog by Googling him (why does that word come up with a red squiggly line? Isn’t it a verb? Anyway.) and was addicted. I haven’t been that addicted to something I stumbled upon since I read Ted Fishman’s book about doing business in China over the summer, and before that, since I discovered Warren Buffet’s MD&A section in the Berkshire 10-K. At any rate, Geoff’s stuff is enthralling. It’s that way because he describes things that ordinarily are (or seem) so complex in very simple terms – things like business strategies, innovation, next macro steps in technology, and so on. Clearly one of the foremost thinkers about the nexus of business, technology, and creativity, Geoff certainly gets the attention he is due, proven by the key role he played at Davos this past year.

All the same, I can’t say I truly agree with everything he says. For instance, he simply equates Brand to reputation, implying that (essentially) something must explain the gap between a company’s book value and its trading value. This argument ignores the degree of noise often present in the market, the propensity for a sector to be a rising or falling tide that affects all ships, and the efforts of companies to build relationships that allow them to cement their brand. I suppose it could be argued that it’s a question of which comes first: the brand or the trust that people put in the brand?

My position would be that an enterprise needs to take a position that somehow differentiates its from its competitors, and if that position is aligned with what a group of buyers is looking for at a given place and time, this position can be the catalyst for future brand credibility. By extension, neither the brand nor the trust come first, but rather, the calculated risk taken by the enterprise does. I could make this case for a number of companies including Starbucks (re-creating the European coffeehouse in the U.S.), FedEx (turning the paradigm of shipping on its head and having the courage to view and take on the USPS as a competitor), and Caterpillar (investing in equipment ahead of the economic cycles, thus being comfortable with short-term financial risks offset in the future high levels of customer loyalty).

So what do Geoff and his positions do for my outlook on creativity? Well, in this case it’s actually rather simple. It’s kind of like working on the LSAT brain teaser question books or on a Sudoku puzzle – great mental exercise. Sometimes reading corporate manifestos or Fortune articles about how important innovation is can be monotonous and devious, because the perspectives articulated in those forums represent the “here and now” of what’s been on authors’ minds for the last 6-12 months. That’s important in business, but long-run insights (and provocative positions) are far more interesting. So reading Geoff is educational, fun (but, alas, not humorous), stimulating, a bit enraging, and just plain smart – and it makes me a better objective and contextual thinker.