'Solutioning Council'....an internal start-up

For any organization to survive, irrespective of size and scale of operation, it has to balance both – manage earnings against budget and invest carefully into next growth trajectory.

While the well-oiled machinery of sales, delivery and support functions carry out the first one, month after month, assessing variances against budget and taking corrective actions; an independent team or function is normally setup to oversee the second one in a different way to ensure the right direction towards tomorrow’s growth.

Some set up this independent team in a formal manner and some in an informal manner and many names are coined for this internal team as ‘Innovation Council’, ‘Research & Development’, ‘Solutioning Council’, so on and so forth. Irrespective of name, structure and size, three important factors are to be kept in mind while setting up such internal team(s).

- Organization should foster a culture of ideation, conceptual thinking, innovation, and solutioning across the floor; rather than confining it as the sole responsibility of the internal team. It should be treated as a habit where employees can exchange ideas and thoughts freely and fearlessly, cutting across the hierarchical structure; where employees adopt a childlike inquisitiveness and behave as risk-takers and do not feel afraid of failure.

-  The identified team or group or council should have a mindset to oversee the above. Organizations should be careful in selecting the leaders of this internal team, as they are required to be mature, committed, hands-on leaders and moreover avid readers, who not only read, but apply and teach. They are required to be heavily networked both internally and externally keeping eyes and ears open on the trends in the market, discussion topics, and make sure that new ideas and thoughts are being exchanged.   

-  Organization should have a structured process to gather, document, review the funnel of concepts, thoughts, ideas, solutions and select the ones to invest based on the organization’s capability, capacity and market need. However, such investments should be treated as internal projects with set milestones so that the progress is tracked against investment. At the same time, organizations should have a big heart to accept the fact that all investments will not result in desired outcomes and hence should be able to decide winding up a project midway and move on.

Such internal teams or councils are required to operate as internal start-ups, and to be nurtured carefully pursuing tomorrow’s growth.

Youth Power

Enthusiasm, passion and sense of commitment are contagious. More so when one comes across a youngster brimming with these positive attitudes propelled by youthful energy. I came across such an individual who is from a lower middle class family in Bangalore. He has just passed out his engineering course and has already become an entrepreneur since last 3 years with a portfolio of customers and healthy pipeline.

I decided to invite him to one of our quarterly leadership meeting to present his company and offerings. The objective was not to review his solutions, but to energize the room with this youngster’s positive attitude, passion for building a company from zero cash, innovative mindset, playing with business risk, relentless effort in acquiring customers while maintaining services to existing ones and a commitment to his employees. I must say that the one-hour session was the highlight of the day for all the leaders in the room.

Next 5 years will be the era of youth i.e. less than 30 years old. India is rightly poised with its educated youth population as armor to gallop in the world economy.  We will see more innovators, entrepreneurs, thought leaders from this section of the society and in fact I will not be surprised if teenage section also will join this bandwagon owing to their exposure to technology world and creative mind.

Let us get contaminated with the new tonic of youthful energy, keeping the heart young and filling the mind with agile wisdom, by inviting more and more youngsters to our meetings, brainstorming sessions, strategy workshops and boardroom discussions. 

"Please Point"...@KFC

I went for lunch yesterday with a colleague to nearby KFC. In fact, normally I am not a KFC fan. But it is good that I went. 

The store is like any other franchisee fast-food joint. But there is something unique about this joint. All the boys and girls working there including those at the counters are deaf and dumb. When you stand in the counter and as usual looking at the board on the wall behind the counter, start placing the order, you suddenly see fingers from counter pointing to the chart on the counter table. Also you see the badge on their shirts. It says "please point".

Then  you realize the difference and you are not accustomed to placing the order this way. Any way, I followed the fingers and start ordering from the chart pointing to pictures and labels. No problem, the order was placed correctly. 

The great thing to observe is the confidence on the faces of these boys and girls. Twinkling eyes, beaming smiles and fingers pointing to charts communicate a lot. In fact the body language is so positive that it is infectious.

Do not know who is the franchisee owner, but definitely kudos to him/her for this novelty for including disadvantaged youth in mainstream customer service, providing them respectable economic independence, making them confident young folks and providing wow factor in servicing the customers. Great idea to create unique customer experience….

Innovation Culture

Knowing the things may be adequate enough to become wiser, however one needs to have an attitude of thinking entwined with inquisitiveness to be able to think beyond emotional and volitional ones; mere needs and wants. This aspect of cognitive thinking is an absolute platform for thinking new, thinking afresh, thinking raw, thinking something which has not occurred in anyone's thoughts, thinking to create.

Innovation needs creative thinking expressing itself in a state of desire to experiment, courage to fail and an iron will to learn from failure and carry on. As Thomas Edison said "  I have not failed, rather I found thousand of ways that won't work".

Ideation and experimentation are the axes of innovation with higher probability of failure- larger the experimentation, larger the failure. In the process of innovation, one needs to weed through, froth of bubbles of despair from repeated failures while remaining focused on the idea at the center, fastidiously.

Aspects of creative thinking, experimenting, learning and persevering at an individual level will not be sole promoter for innovation without an eco-system that fosters a culture to accept failures as a learning process, inspires the experimentations through a platform of continuous motivation. The institutions like universities, enterprises, countries where such a culture exists and is nurtured are the perfect abode for intellectual minds to be successful in their innovation pursuits.

Value and not Technology

Recently I came across an article on Peru’s innovation drive which narrates an exciting story of building a network hospital with simple concepts like investor-doctors, mobile hospitals with old buses, bringing hospitals to the patients and allowing patients to choose physicians to consult.

In my view this is a true example of “Innovation”. It is related to delivering to the needy and directly benefiting a cause. And let us look at the data-point ....50,000 poor patients a day with a waiting time max 30-45mins with a charge a meagre $2.8 per patient.

This innovation in delivering healthcare services to the poor Peruvians came from a simple thought from passionate doctors who questioned themselves as to how the poor patient would like to avail the service.....at his location, at a price that he can afford and at a service level which is not compromised because of low cost.

It is somehow parallel to the EMRI launched in India (Andhra Pradesh). The major difference that I see is the investor-physician.

Nevertheless the moral of the story is that we often link innovation to technology or a game changing product. Truly speaking the innovation lies in the process of creating value from the perspective of consumer. And it is more important that the value is delivered to the consumer in a way that the consumer likes to receive.

Technology may or may not be part of this process. If it is, then it acts only as a catalyst.