Ravenweb Blog

The measure of an organization is often what it does when no one is looking. This week, I was fortunate enough to experience this firsthand from a local organization. It all started when I learned last week that Jake* -- the 11 year-old son of some family friends -- was experiencing serious health problems due to a degenerative liver condition. I was told that Jake had been in and out of the hospital for the past few weeks, and that the prevailing opinion was that he would need some medical/surgical intervention or a liver transplant. Understandably, Jake was a little down and out of sorts because of all the health complications. I was saddened by the news but resigned that there was little I could do to help or improve the situation. Then I recalled that Jake loved the Buffalo Sabres, and I thought perhaps I could contact them. I'd heard Ted Black speak on WGR-550 and was very impressed with his willingness to make himself available and always answer q...

To close out this blog series, I wanted to express my appreciation for everyone who's stopped by and provided feedback. Thanks so much. Writing a daily blog post about a different BIF speaker every day turned out be more difficult and time consuming that I thought, and I appreciate the interest. In addition to a general thank you, I also want to call out four people: Sandy Maxey - For all the RTs and mentions. Thanks! http://sandymaxey.wordpress.com/ Twitter:  @sandymaxey Jessica Esch  - For sharing her wonderful BIF sketches that helped jog my ossifying memory as I was writing the recaps. http://www.sayitbest.com/ Twitter:  @jesch30 Amanda Fenton  - For those crystallizing and invaluable mindmaps that captured the essence of each BIF  storyteller and help me refine the posts with appropriate detail. Twitter:  @AmandaFenton Deborah Mills-Scofield  - For promoting BIF like no other and tweeting all my posts. Thanks, ninja fairy god mothe...

You can't do a blog series about BIF without mentioning Saul Kaplan and the outstanding BIF team. Saul self-identifies as the "Chief Catalyst" of the Business Innovation Factory, but he's much more than that. He's smart, professional, friendly, inventive, and, most of all, always open to "random collisions of unusual suspects". There was a telling moment toward the end of BIF-7 when the audience stood as one to show appreciation to Saul with a standing ovation. Saul looked horrified, but not because he's uncomfortable with public speaking. He's just the kind of leader who would rather deflect praise to his team, or talk about the inspiring stories shared at BIF, or make that next connection with a suspect he hasn't met yet. Thank you, Saul, and thank you, BIF team. The BIF Team Saul Kaplan http://businessinnovationfactory.com/about/leadership-team/saul-kaplan Twitter: @skap5 Christine Costello http://businessinnovationfactory.c...

I don't know how much Dan Pink personally likes Halloween, but it sure corroborates the talk he gave at BIF-7. People love to innovate and push the envelope with costumes. Just on our street this Halloween I saw someone dressed up as a cell phone, a meticulously made up geisha, and a Facebook profile page. Some of the creative costumes worked and others failed, but the point is that creative thinking and a willingness to try new things accompany innovative costume-making. This is strikingly similar to the point Dan made at BIF-7, that unconventional and non-commissioned work can lead to breakthroughs and innovation. As an example, Dan cited Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking experiments with graphene during their free "Friday evening experiment" time. (Note: Dan explores the potency and value of non-commissioned work in more detail in his newest book, Drive .) Most unconventional and non-commissioned experim...

I would love to listen to a debate someday between Duncan Watts and Malcolm Gladwell. Because, in his BIF-7 story, Duncan came across very much as an anti-Gladwell: precise, deliberate, and respectful of the difficulties and complexities involved with attempts to influence and predict behavior. During his BIF-7 talk, Duncan talked about the problem of obviousness and common sense -- basically, that "the way we make sense of the world can actually prevent us from understanding it." This is also the hypothesis Duncan delineates in his new book, Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer . As Duncan elaborated, we are susceptible to errors of reasoning when we rely on common sense: When we think about why people do what they do, we place too much emphasis on incentives, motivations, and beliefs, and not enough on the thousands of other influencing factors Groups are extremely complicated to predict -- we erroneously apply the logic of "individual" action to...

What are the greatest innovations and accomplishments from organized religion? I ask this question as a response to Jim Mellado, who in his BIF-7 story talked about how the church can be a contributor and innovator to society. Jim's claim was fascinating and foreign to me, as I've always equated the church and organized religion with the status quo (at its best) and repression (at its worst). My intent with this post was to list out the most commonly agreed upon innovations/accomplishments of religion from a number of sources. Unfortunately, my searches turned up very little about this topic. I've reproduced the best items I could find, but I welcome additions to this list: Preservation of historical documents Preserving writing and intellectual inquiry in Western Europe after the collapse of Roman administration Revived interest in Classical Greek and Latin from the lead up to the Protestant Reformation Islam: the notion and push for universal education, algebra, t...

Matthew Moniz's story was probably the most heartwarming and life affirming of all the stories at BIF-7. An accomplished mountain climber at 13, Matthew described the major peaks and summits he's climbed, including Everest and 50 peaks in 50 states in 50 days. It was even more revealing when Matthew talked about one of his best friends with a medical condition and symptoms that ironically emulated the effects of high-altitude environments Matthew typically encounters while climbing. Like everyone in the audience at BIF, I was pretty much blown away by Matthew. He was so focused, yet modest; engaged and driven to be great. As the days passed and I reflected about Matthew and his story, I realized that one of the reasons his story stood out is he's exceptional, a true outlier, and I wondered why that is. Why aren't more kids like him? Is it that schools educate for compliance and not creativity and innovation? It's noteworthy how much Matthew has learned outside...

Talking about the evolution of capitalism seems like a daunting task, even for an innovator. But that's exactly what Christopher Meyer did at BIF-7. Capitalism is moving, Chris suggested, and the genome is going to shift as emerging economies like Brazil, India, and China grow and begin to dominate the global economic system. Organizations that maximize growth in change over time, Chris suggested, will benefit the most from a new prevailing version of capitalism. I brought up Isaac Asimov and the Foundation Series in reference to another BIF storyteller , and I thought of speculative fiction when Chris presented as well. Here, it was China Mountain Zhang , by Maureen McHugh, a celebrated near-future novel where America has gone through a socialist revolution, China is the new superpower, and a hybrid of capitalism and socialism has become the major economic system. The future described in the book seemed to fit the evolution Chris described. Additional information: http://w...

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. You look up from the two documents on your desk. One is a business plan, and the other is a resignation letter. You are anxious and diaphoretic. Totally afraid of making the wrong decision. Of failing. As you acknowledge your fear of failure and let it sit for a while in your gut, you begin to calm down, and then, eventually, smile. Because, in the words of Whitney Johnson, "If it feels scary and lonely, you're probably on the right track." During her BIF-7 talk, Whitney focused on disruption as a key trigger for personal transformation. Fittingly, her anchor quotes crystallized her points and recalled some of the other BIF speakers. "If it feels scary and lonely, you're pro...

Though a successful entrepreneur by any measure, at BIF-7 Angus Davis talked repeatedly about failure. Like Graham Milner who emphasized that innovation can take multiple tries (sometimes 40!) before a breakthrough, Angus went even further and indicated that the secret to success is failure and managing your fear of it. In this context, failure is to be expected and even embraced. It's an interesting notion -- and given that Angus has been failing (and then succeeding) since the early days of the Internet when he worked at Netscape as an intern -- I don't doubt the veracity of the claim. I do wonder though if this might suggest that some people are more likely to succeed at entrepreneurship and innovation not so much because of attributes like creativity or imagination, but because of a heightened capacity to accept failure and move on. Additional information: http://angusdavis.com BIF Profile Page http://businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/angus-davis Th...

I searched for definitions of "health" on the Internet today. Below is a sampling of the top results: The state of being free from illness or injury: "he was restored to health"; "a health risk". A person's mental or physical condition. - from http://www.takesteps.univerahealthcare.com Health is the level of functional and (or) metabolic efficiency of a living being. - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health The condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit; especially : freedom from physical disease or pain. - from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/health And, now, here is the definition of health offered by Alex Jadad during his BIF-7 talk: "The capacity of an individual and a community of people to adapt and direct their own lives." This sentence explodes the old, normative definitions of health because Alex and innovators like him in the healthcare industry have crafted it deliberately by rebuilding the notion ...

Check out my guest post on Career Rocketeer: Recession-Proof Yourself http://www.careerrocketeer.com/2011/10/recession-proof-yourself.html For more of my guest posts on other blogs, access my Writing page .

Think about the last time you visited a museum and the painting that most interested you. Now imagine you can view that artwork in a digital display using touch screen technology and pan and zoom the image as much as you want. Thanks to Andries van Dam, this kind of interactive technology is becoming viable for access in museums and other exhibit spaces. Andries van Dam enticed the audience at BIF-7 with a demonstration of the software (Microsoft Surface) he and his Brown students are employing to display images the size of "a football field" and zoom in "as close as digitization allows". It was pretty cool and, along with the smaller-scale iPad, a glimpse into the future of display technology. Additional information: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~avd/ BIF Profile Page http://businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/andries-van-dam This is part of my 31 (More) Days of #BIF7 blog series .

I was fortunate enough to hear John Hagel speak at BIF-6 and BIF-7. During both of his talks, he shared personal stories that helped contextualize and illuminate the framework of pull, which he has elaborated (with co-authors John Seely Brown and Lang Davison) in The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion . For anyone reading this who hasn't heard of John Hagel or The Power of Pull , I encourage you to research the text and consider reading it. In brief, the authors posit that social media and collaborative technology platforms have fundamentally changed the rules and costs of exchanging information and forming groups. The consequence of this shift is that people are now able to "pull" information/resources they require as needed and on-demand instead of in the old "push" model, where organizations disseminated information to clusters of people, often based on forecasts, market research, and guesses. Additional informati...

Of all the BIF-7 storytellers, Chris Van Allsburg stood out as the only author who wrote fiction (children's fiction, specifically). Naturally, he was an accomplished storyteller, with most of us familiar with his crowning work, The Polar Express . But did that make him an innovator? I wasn't sure. As it turns out, during his BIF-7 story, Chris's revealed that he knows a few things about innovation. First, there was the focus of his talk, his new book, Queen of the Falls . This is a children's story about Annie Edson Taylor, the sixty-two-year-old charm school instructor who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. Annie's plan to go over the Falls was conceived to earn her fame and fortune, but there's no doubt that it was audacious and innovative. Chris's conceit to spin a mature story about a confidence woman as a children's book was also innovative. On the surface, Annie's story is not really suitable for childre...

I have to be honest. When Dennis Littky walked across the stage to speak at BIF-7, I was a little scared. The signifiers perplexed me. He looked happily crazy, and had on tie-dye shoes of sorts. I could only think, "here comes a seriously worked-up ex-hippie." But then he started talking about kids and school and it became evident immediately that he was committed to bringing dramatic change to education. At one point, he pulled out all these little pieces of paper and started tossing them into the air. Every 12 seconds, he related, a kid drops out of school. 9,600 drop out every 24 hours. "Something's not right about that," he said. The good news is that Littky created an organization to help stem the tide of dropouts by "encouraging, inciting and effecting change in the U.S. educational system." The Big Picture Company was founded in 1995 and now has 72 high-schools across the country. Littky is now also involved with collegiate education refo...

You start up and get an instant message almost immediately: "Quest notice: find all 14 unclaimed invs and bring them back to _Reeves (Player 411) for processing to Accounting. Time completion bonus and one hidden power up." You gear up and prepare your Avatar, and then head toward the center of town where transport rigs can take you anywhere you need -- to the Tea Room, where you can meet up with co-workers, to the Library containing every administrative and quality form, and to the Towers, residence of the c-suite. Game on. Time to track down and pay those vendor invoices. If only work were as enjoyable as exploring a MMORPG. But might it become so? During his BIF-7 talk, Byron Reeves elaborated the growing phenomenon of gamification and explored the prospect of interjecting gameplay into traditional work modes and processes. Byron summarized the reasons we enjoy games (achievement, immersion, exploration, competition, and socializing) and posited that the same bas...

Sometimes I wonder how anyone can muster the energy to work for change in our massive, bureaucratic, and sometimes sisyphean healthcare system. But then I hear people like Rebecca Onie speak, who helped found Health Leads, and I get inspired that you can reform from within. Health Leads mobilizes volunteers in urban clinics to connect low-income patients with basic resources, including food, housing, and heating assistance. This works with a simple resource checklist: physicians can check food, housing, health insurance, job training, fuel assistance, or other resources their patients need. Health Leads volunteers then work to connect patients with key resources. It's a classic case of shrinking change to a small and manageable scale. Additional information: http://www.healthleadsusa.org/ BIF Profile Page http://businessinnovationfactory.com/iss/innovators/rebecca-onie This is part of my 31 (More) Days of #BIF7 blog series .

What does Isaac Asimov have to do with BIF? The answer: Valdis Krebs. You see, Valdis looks at network topology and sees all kinds of innovative possibilities for analysis and extrapolation, not unlike Asimov's Hari Seldon, who famously developed psychohistory, the science of predicting the future in probabilistic terms. During his BIF-7 talk, Valdis explained the guiding principles involved with social and organizational network analysis: Birds of a feather flock together What you know depends on who you know (and vice versa) Valdis demonstrated the depth and utility of this analysis by showing a network genome of BIF-7 attendees who had completed a pre-conference survey. The algorithm depicted a connected system and suggested recommended connections based on interest. Valdis was kind enough to send me the visual, and I've reproduced it below: The demonstration was impressive, even though Valdis had extremely limited input data and an incomplete sample set (not ever...

I love The Big Bang Theory and think it's hands-down the funniest show on television, but there's one thing about it that puzzles and bothers me. The characters frequently use plastic water bottles and other consumables (paper cups, take-out cartons, etc). Given the intelligence of the main characters (Penny gets a pass) and their affiliations with the sciences, you would think at least one of them would have enough conviction about climate change and sustainability to try out a metal water bottle, order from restaurants with less packaging (and no styrofoam), and maybe even experiment with composting. I understand the show is a comedy and is not pursuing a cause or seeking to change the world. But Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj are scientists and uber nerds and the show does a fabulous job showing all the painful and obsessive details -- you just expect reusability and recycling to come up more than it does.