All his life, he hated brushing his teeth. Getting toothpaste onto a toothbrush can be messy if your fine motor skills are still developing. And, of course, even though you know you’re supposed to replace a toothbrush every three months, who really keeps track of that? So, Houston Diaz decided to invent a solution. And several prototypes later, he designed a toothbrush that has the toothpaste dispenser integrated into the brush itself, allowing himself and others to have a more convenient solution. And when the toothpaste runs out? It’s a natural reminder that it’s time to buy a new brush.

Even though he’s only five years old, that product will one day be on the shelves of your local Bed Bath and Beyond, or Target. And, no, as precocious as this kid is, he is not an entrepreneur, and doesn’t need to raise VC money or write a business plan.

This five-year old is able to be the inventor without also creating a company because of a product innovation company called Quirky. What Quirky does is make invention accessible to anybody — and quite possibly everybody. In the Industrial Era, becoming an “inventor” meant you also had to create an organization that could produce, market, and sell your invention. Thus, it’s been a hard gig to crack. You not only had to be able to come up with great winning ideas, you also had to deal with the complexities of financing, engineering, distribution, recruiting staff, and legal liability — to name just a few. The intensity of the organizational demands narrowed the chances that new solutions would ever actually come to market. And, of course, this slowed innovation and restrained market outcomes.

Quirky has created an innovation engine more suited for the Social Era — in which work and jobs are no longer the same thing, and collaboration happens outside of organizations as much as within it — in three ways:

1. It disaggregates the process of innovation from the innovator’s work itself.
2. It aligns interests and economics so that all parties have a shared interest.
3. It engages community to improve ideas and ultimately co-create the value.

To date, Quirky has allowed 590 inventors to bring their products to market. Anyone can submit an idea, or you can help another idea be improved, or you can collaborate in further design refinement. Over 407,000 community members (growing at a rate of about 1,000 members a day) help create the solution in a variety of ways (from voting on best ideas to iterating or actually prototyping the concept). Organizationally, this means that with 140 people on payroll, less than 1% of the people involved are “inside” the organization in the traditional sense. This is scale in the social era: scale happens not by having more people report to you, but by having people engaged with you. Interests are 100% aligned. Both the inventor and the larger community get compensated for their work.

By working with an extended community, Quirky can bring at least three new consumer products to market each week. And by “market” we mean 188 retail partners. Ben Kaufman, the founder and CEO, says there is no limit to what they can create. “Even cars?” I asked him, curious about how far his vision holds. “Yeah, sure,” he replied. Ben himself is 26 and has been on the Tonight Show to tell the Quirky story. Thus far, Quirky has brought nearly 500 products to market, since 2009 and the level of sophistication and quality continues to grow.

Back to Houston Diaz’s toothbrush. He started this project with help from his dad. When he was done, he uploaded video and watched as votes started to roll in for his “no mess toothbrush. He agitated for more support himself, even calling his dentist and asked his vote. “No one was exempt from his pitch,” says Houston’s mom, Nancy Lublin. (As CEO of Dosomething.org, she’s clearly raising someone who believes in action.) Then Quirky put it “under consideration” — a live debate takes place for vetting ideas, which entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend. Houston and his dad wore matching jackets and ties, and Houston made sure his mohawk was extra spiky. He listened as people debated his idea, and answered questions as they came up. And very shortly (in the next 3-4 weeks), they will put the product into production.

Now you may not want to be an inventor. And maybe your kid doesn’t want to either. But the Quirky business model embodies a set of ideas that every business ought to be considering, in light of the Social Era. Quirky builds on a fundamental truth of the social era: Ideas can come from anywhere, from anyone without first being vetted to see if that person is “allowed” to have that idea. And as we find our way into the Social Era, we’re going to grapple with what it means to be a leader like Ben Kauffman — more like a community organizer than a traditional head honcho. Show me a leader, goes the saying, and I’ll show you a bunch of followers. The challenges of our era don’t require more followers; they require the kind of leadership that encourages the community to build what’s needed so that anyone and quite possibly everyone can exercise initiative.

Today, a few smart people see this as “the future.” Even smarter ones see it as “the present.” Which one are you?

And, more importantly, what are you doing about it?

***

This post originally appeared at HBR, here: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/05/why_you_should_let_a_5-year_ol.html. As is my traditional request, please post comments there so I can manage 1 conversation, which helps the personal sanity by a factor of 10.

The post Why You Should Let a 5-Year Old Design Your Next Product appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

This is a delightful tiny, but busy bakery.  Everyone in town either knows first-hand how good the bread is or has been tipped off by Yelp.

I was visiting from Houston (recently relocated) and yearning for some sourdough.  These friendly ladies sold me and my friends a sourdough baguette ($2/baguette) and to top it off, they gave me some sourdough starter.  For free.  You need to bring your own lidded, airtight container, and if they have enough starter to give away, they will happily fill your container nearly to the brim.

This sent me on a quick run to the Walgreens on San Pablo Avenue and Gilman,  and they did not have any plastic containers!  I headed over to REI where I almost paid for a $10 hardcore camping-style container.  I told an employee my story, and he ran upstairs to give me a Pilot gas station plastic mug with a lid.  He found said cup in the employee lost and found bin.  I washed it next door in Chipotle’s bathroom and then returned to Acme where they filled it up.  (You can see I was desperate and willing.)

Fast forward three weeks: I fed this sourdough for three weeks in Houston and baked delightful bread.  I followed instructions from King Arthur Flour for sourdough baguettes.  All of my Cali-transplant coworkers in Houston are digging the sourdough, too, now.  We all say it tastes better and more authentic than any “sourdough” you can get in Houston.

Thank you, Acme Bread Company and kind REI employee, for my delicious sourdough.  I promise to send all of my friends, family, and fellow Yelpers here (both to Acme and REI) as much as I can!

You don’t get this kind of care and passion by hiring simply for a job description or by asking people to fit into a box. No way. People are not cogs and they don’t thrive if they feel treated as such. Every leader knows that success comes from how you bring together talent, purpose and culture. Purpose brings out the best in people and the best people. More on that thread here.

Of course, I’ve written about REI in the Social Era and I hope I can always talk about them with this much enthusiasm. REI rocks because they embody their purpose, which gives their brand (and their people) meaning.

Do you have similar stories of other companies? Share ‘em below. We ought to celebrate them.

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Language encodes our thinking. To write a new future, we need to use a new language. Let’s stop focusing on the overly narrow term “social media”. Let’s simply be social.

Instead of capturing value, let’s find new ways of creating value, together.

Think of collaborators as those you work with. Let’s have co-creators design what to build. Let’s ask communities to create scale. And, when we embed this new social language — words such as collaboration and purpose and community — into our discussions, value creation will flow. Relationships are to the social era, what efficiency was to the industrial era. And we all remember what relationships are built on, don’t we? Trust. After decades of building business on capital, oil, land and silicon, trust will be our foundation for what we create next.

Get the full article by going here: http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/03/ideas-bank/we-need-a-new-language-for-the-collaborative-age

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What is a source of fulfillment in your life? Is it work? Or perhaps a non-profit you work with? Or perhaps the family you are raising? Whatever it is, I bet it is something you personally value. Sometimes that comes from our paid work, our careers, and sometimes not.

From my own experience of 20+ years working with or in “corporate” Fortune 500 work and in the research I follow — work satisfaction was nearly obliterated by the pressures of deadlines, of work that went no where, of overwork, of bosses demands that made no sense, of being told what to do without asking what you know that could solve the problem.

So it was through that lens that I watched this recent talk by researcher and professor Dan Ariely. Some of you might know of him — a behavioral economist who has written Predictably Irrational & Others. This talk is on the meaning of work:

Ariely points out that when we think about work, the “usual” thinking about motivation is tied to payment. In other words conventional thinking is that money is why people work.  He shares a series of specific projects he’s been doing that *proves* how much meaning, engagement and ownership change our experience of value creation. It’s a great set of stories about how much we care if someone will use our work, how much we fundamentally care about the thing we’ve made ourselves. Like I said in Social Era, value creation has changed; You don’t have to sell me the thing I helped make. In other words, when people co-create products and services, it disrupts the thinking of traditional strategists and their “value chain”. In the Social Era, value creation derives from commitment, not a transaction where the consumer is at the end of a long supply chain. Meaning, co-creation, overcoming challenges, sense of ownership, relationship to our personal identity, and — of course — pride all matter in how value is derived.

There’s plenty of empirical data to support the strategic direction Ariely talks of. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement brings an uplift of every business performance number. Profitability up 16%, Productivity up 18%, customer loyalty up 12% and quality up an incredible 60%. I wrote about that a few years back, here, in the piece called People are Not Cogs.

Seeing this talk has me thinking and asking:
How do you create your own pride, and motivation at work? Or, with your kids?
Are they one and the same, or different and how?
What is it you measure this value creation by?

Many times over the last few years — since I have moved from running a company to having a portfolio career — I wonder how to measure “success”. I can believe I am purpose aligned but still feel unclear if “success” is happening because I lack a “hard” metric. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The reason many of us struggle with the meaning / ownership / pride thing is because it’s hard to measure. Which is why I think many  cling to the paycheck as a proxy for value creation measurement.

What do you think? What say you on this thread of how we measure fulfillment at work?

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Nilofer Merchant, Management Thinker, Feature Story of HBR Magazine, April 2013

One of the featured 3,000-word articles is on Leading in the Social Era. It’s entitled, When TED Lost Control of it’s Crowd. In this article, I discuss how “open” does not mean “easy” or “free” and that in the #socialera, you need to get communities working with you, as a key strategic edge. TED did just that, and they are navigating new ground (not easy to do!). I share three practices I see as key to know: “listening loudly,” realigning the community through shared purpose, and being strategic about what part of the organization should be open.

Sarah Green, my very talented editor over at Harvard Business Review worked with me on this piece (along with a big crowd of editors and such) and we are proud of how it came out.  The voice, the story telling, the nuanced lessons were just what we aimed for… and sweated over… because we wanted the idea to shine through. Which is this: Through communities, people create value not because of rank or title or affiliation (or even pay in this case) but because of the way they can create something together. Knowing how to “lead” in that context is something each of us is going to have to learn.

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Amanda Palmer has been a disruption in the music industry for some time. (By sheer coincidence, I was sitting at the conference next to some senior executives in the music industry and got to observe them as they gasped at each truth she said. I only checked out their badges after hearing the gasp-after-gasp to confirm my suspicion.)

The message of the talk is that it’s not only important for musicians or artists to be OK and asking for help, but audiences – especially given what’s happening on the Internet –  be OK with being asked. Actually, what I think she was talking about to creators of products is this: trust that things will be okay. And what I think she was saying to all consumers of those creative acts is: Don’t abuse the creators of things you value because that’s what makes the world go round. This is a new set of economics. An undervalued set of economics. One that lets people give and take, and to honor one another.

(Please don’t take this as pollyanna. This is a hugely complex issue. But the issue is not going to go away and we need to move on from the question of “is this happening?” to “how do we make it work”… look to how Andrew Sullivan and Brainpicker as two creative creators who have built viable systems.)

This new set of economics is going to require new measures. This one isn’t adequately measured by GDP. And it is also isn’t measured by the number of people on the payroll. As work is freed from jobs, we’ll need to find a new way to measure the economics of the day. It is the economics of generosity.

Related articles

• Amanda Palmer Wins TED
• TED: Amanda Palmer: The art of asking – Amanda Palmer (2013)

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If you don’t know, you might be using the wrong term in the wrong context. Which doesn’t sound so bad, but the cost of this is to risk misunderstanding, or quite possibly sounding stupid. It’s like using poor grammar; using “you’re” when you really mean to use the term “your,” some people are going to notice. Beyond looking silly, the much bigger risk – the risk to the business – is that when we throw terms around imprecisely, we risk introducing confusion into the strategy we’re trying to execute.  So let’s disambiguate the terms so we all know what we’re talking about…

The term ‘Social Media’ was popularized by Chris Shipley in 2004, as she described the impact of influencers and bloggers in shaping product adoption, more so than traditional media outlets. Because it includes the word media, and the genesis is marketing, most people think of this as the stuff the CMO and their team worry about. It’s like describing electricity by tying it to what came before it. Saying Social Media is like saying electric candle, in that while it points to the new, it is still anchored in the old.

Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor, coined the term Enterprise 2.0 about six years ago, and the emphasis was on the on software tools and platforms that increase information flow. The idea was that if we use social tools, we would share information freely within the organization, and external marketplaces. The specific definition in his book of the same name was how “how the Web 2.0” technologies could be used on organizations’ intranet and extranets”.^[2]It’s like describing electricity by describing the wires instead of the light — it’s a technologist’s point of view.

Social Business (sometimes going by the hashtag #socbiz) was a term first created by Mohammed Yunus but more recently claimed as a popular way to describe the way companies can generate greater value for all the constituents (stakeholders, employees, customers, partners, suppliers)—the idea being to add a social overlay to the existing enterprise, and thus more meaning. This second generation of Social Business terminology was coined by the Dachis Group, a marketing organization, and specifically by Peter Kim, who consults on it. Some experts use the Social Business term as the evolution of Social Media as the same tools used for marketing efficiencies can be applied to product development, customer care, or supply chain work. Some people tie it to Michael Porter’s Shared Value concept. Sometimes people use the term Social Capitalism to get to this same idea.

And Open Innovation or Crowdsoucing are often linked to any of these three terms – enterprise 2.0, social media and social business. Organizations can use social tools to improve how others work with you to create value together.

With all of these definitions around, you might wonder why I even added to the terminology when I wrote a book, and coined the term #socialera. I didn’t want to create a new term, and yet I felt that none of the terms to date capture the key shifts. The term “Social Media” is limited by its connection with marketing and communications. “Enterprise 2.0” is too technological. And “Social Business” added an important social overlay but didn’t challenging the fundamental premise of an organization. Social Era then captures two distinct power shifts:

1. Organizational. Connected individuals can now do what once only large centralized organizations could. This fundamentally alters the structural core and role of “the firm,” and of working people. As more and more freelancers and solopreneurs enter the market, work is increasingly freed from jobs (to the tune of 43M in the US and climbing to 70M by 2020). The shift is from “value chain” to “value flows.” (An earlier post of mine on this idea can be read here.)
2. Individual. Anyone can be a game changer by using the power of their ideas. They need not first be vetted or chosen to be powerful. These largely unheard voices are essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without celebrating what anyone – quite possibly everyone can offer, people are simply cogs in a machine – dispensable and undervalued. By celebrating each person and the value they can create, economic power is unlocked. And it’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can. (See earlier talks and posts on this idea).

Sometimes it helps to see distinctions side by side. (Chart was updated 2/22/12 to correct mistake re: attribution of CrowdSourcing to Clay Shirky rather than Jeff Howe. Apologies. )

As you can see, in some cases, we’re talking about tools. In others, we’re talking about how the marketplace economy changes. And, other times we’re talking how the organization changes.

Yet, when we use the terms interchangeably, confusion is prevalent and meaning is lost.

Here’s my recommendation…. Unless you’re talking about marketing specifically, don’t use the term “Social Media.” (and I think the term is limited because really… the electric light bulb wasn’t a new kind of candle. Not to mention, CEOs and Boards think of Social media as the stuff their marketing team drives.) If you are discussing ways social tools can be applied to all parts of a value chain, Social Business is probably the term you are looking for. And, if you describing a reconstitution of work and institutions, then use Social Era.

To be fair, no term is ever complete. Each of us are building on each others’ ideas as we collectively grapple with understanding and decoding what is happening, and what we think it means. We are all seeking clarity but are limited by our own understanding, our vantage, and by, of course, the examples we witness.

But this is not about semantics. When we focus on tools alone, I think we’re making a mistake. It’s geek chic, it’s even interesting, but it’s not talking about what is possible. The bigger point is that major changes are afoot that change value creation, the meaning of work, and the structures for our institutions.

When we conflate the tools with the outcomes, I think we risk meaning and impact. As we all use more precise language, each of will find people understanding our meaning, and seeing more clearly see the light of what the future can bring.

***
As is the norm for the pieces I first write at Harvard, please help me by contributing your comments on the original posting site (or in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/what_we_talk_about_when_we_tal.html). Sorry the titles don’t match up…this time, someone made a mistake over there and changed the title without us agreeing — so silly!

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Onlyness is that thing that only that one individual can bring to a situation. It includes the journey and passions of each human. Onlyness is fundamentally about honoring each person: first as we view ourselves and second as we are valued. Each of us is standing in a spot that no one else occupies. That unique point of view is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and vision. Some of those experiences are not as “perfect” as we might want, but even those experiences are a source for what you create. For example, the person whose younger sibling has a disease might grow up to work in medicine to find the cure. The person who is obsessed with beautiful details might end up caring about industrial design and reinvent how we all use technology. The person who has grown up under oppression might end up advocating for freedom of speech and thus advance the condition of his country. This individual onlyness is the fuel of vast creativity, innovations, and adaptability.

Someone can be (for example) only woman in a crowd, but this is not her onlyness. In this case, she is unique because of the context. Onlyness may be present in that story, but onlyness is not a relative thing. It more about what makes that person unique based on their own story, or their “through-line” of their own story, their own narrative. I am trying to point out the inherent source of each person.

Embracing onlyness means that, as contributors, we must embrace our history, not deny it. This includes both our “dark” and our “light” sides. Because when we deny our history, vision, perspective, we are also denying a unique point of view, that which only we can bring to the situation. Each onlyness is essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without it, people are simply cogs in a machine – dispensable and undervalued – and we’re back to the 800-pound gorilla approach in organizations (and our economy). With it, gazelles [employees, community members, and partners] are singularly unique and able to contribute meaningfully.

Now, this fall I gave a great many talks, and I learned a lot in the process. This talk that follows is on Onlyness and is — by far — my FAVORITE (and quite possibly the best — if I put my humility aside for a second) talk I’ve ever given. Not only is the topic one I care about deeply, it resonates because it speaks to a universal truth. Which is this:

It’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can contribute.

And until we celebrate onlyness, we are not honoring the person. And, until you unlock your onlyness, you are not fully alive. And, collectively, until we honor onlyness, we are limiting ourselves, our organizations and our economies.

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The idea of this post started when several months ago, a person who runs a professional networking organization here in the Valley stood me up just shortly before we were to meet. And when I saw her again, she wasn’t even embarrassed by it but just did the platitude thing of “we still gotta meet”. I BARELY managed to stop myself from rolling my eyes. (But maybe not!) The whole thing got me thinking about the people we choose to work with, and the people we should just avoid. And while it’s one thing to think of it, it’s another to write of it. But I did. Because, here’s the deal. I know that connections are what creates value in the #SocialEra.

Our network can make or break our success. None of us are creating value all by ourselves. We’re doing it with other people. And these people – or, network using the more technical term – in our lives shape who we are (by influencing what you think about), and what we make (by helping us get things done). Yet, it’s only through trial and error that we figure out who to choose to work with, and who to avoid. Here’s the start of the list:

1. Distract-o-matic. Ever been with someone obsessively doing a check-in on FourSquare as you arrive, stops your lunch conversation to foodspot their meal, and the moment you say something just slightly longer than 140 characters, they surreptitiously check their mobile device under the table? These people are opting out of the present moment, and texting other people with the hopes of being perpetually entertained. Quick and connected might make for a good packager of an old idea, but highly distracted means you can’t work with them develop ideas. So, if you are trying to hone an original idea, maybe even a big idea, this is not the person to surround yourself by. That’s because big ideas take time and focused attention to develop. Big ideas need deep engagement to many people to become both better and bigger. But none of these attract a distracted person; he is already off and running to the next entertaining thing by then.

You can find the rest of the list, here, or in long form: http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130114194534-1131485-5-types-of-people-to-run-like-heck-from

Please do add to the list…

(This is the first of my LinkedIn columns, where I plan on writing about career nuggets and such. Of course feel free to follow along there, or you can continue using nilofermerchant.com/blog as the hubspot for all content even if it first appeared at HBR, Wired, Fast Company or so on.)

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Phase 1. Everyone works in the same building, in the same time zone, because the culture is so tacit that anyone working away from the building doesn’t integrate into the core.

Phase 2: The organization has remote offices—major hub centers in different cities allowing for different time zones. This lets them have access to talent not found near the headquarter. Online platforms are starting to be used to coordinate work.

Phase 3: People work across time zones and cities, and some portions are freelance. The flexibility is built into location and time zone, across all talent levels. Online platforms are central to everyone being able to hand off to one another, and share status.

Phase 4: The organizational design is set up to optimize for flexible talent. The purpose of the organization is sharable such that it can be clear and you don’t have to belong to the organization to create value with others. Online platforms become strategic to the flexibility of the organization, which is central to an organization’s ability to adapt to whatever happens.

The entire article is a great recap of ideas from #SocialEra. So, if you haven’t yet read the already-best-selling book, AT LEAST read the article. It’s very well done. I’ll be writing more about the organizational design shifts involved in moving from traditional models to the more modern ones I discuss in the book… let me know what questions you might have along that front so I can answer those…

(Oh, and Happy New Year. Just realized this is my first post of the year…)

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