The material is from Tom Peters book The Circle of Innovation published by Vintage Books,1999. Many of the themes outlined in Mr. Peters book have not changed and many companies have still not figured out how to do innovation. Companies do parts of innovation, but forget the other parts. Mr. Peters outlines 15 themes to help companies innovate better.

11. Become a Connoisseur of Talent – when you were younger, you likely tried many things – some you liked, you did not. The ones you liked drew you in and you did more of them. The stuff you did not like, means others do. Hiring great talent is hiring people like you and not like you – whom you hire for the attitude and train them. Practicing diversity means more ideas, points of view and possible approaches.
If you were depreciating a physical asset you would write it off at 10 or 20%; if you look at the people have they depreciated? do you have a formal investment strategy to build them up or talent renewal program?

12. It’s a Woman’s World – women are the drivers of the economy, if your company is not focused on them, it is missing them it is going out of business. To stay in business, look at the effect that women make on purchasing your products and services and returning to purchase them and see if you are catering to them or not. Most likely you need to change something.

13. Little Things are the Only Things – to stay competitive in the marketplace the design of the product is more important than ever. Bad design losses sales. Your objective is to give the client … that what he/she never dreamed he/she wanted.

14. Love all, Serve all – great service is the greatest innovation. Look around who provides great service on a consistent basis, why? and why not your company? One method to do this is hire, reward and promote convivial, customer-obsessed folks.

15. We’re Here to Live Life Out loud – be passionate about your life. Passion demands people and telling the truth.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, one of the easiest things to see on the list is how does your company target women. Women make most of the decisions in the economy, they can make or break you. Some of the others are internal but are reflected in the many reports which company’s give and are available to be seen.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

The material is from Tom Peters book The Circle of Innovation published by Vintage Books,1999. Many of the themes outlined in Mr. Peters book have not changed and many companies have still not figured out how to do innovation. Companies do parts of innovation, but forget the other parts. Mr. Peters outlines 15 themes to help companies innovate better.

6. All Value Comes from the Professional Services- People come to work everyday and arrive in a department, the way of thinking is all value chain elements are services; all services can be outsourced? why should the company keep the department if outsourcing is better? If you changed titles of departments from Manager of … to Managing Director …, besides a title change would that inspire a different way of thinking. If the Managing Director knew either improve customer service by thinking like a client or be outsourced would that improve customer service? Would the Managing Director visit every internal client to see how they could do better? could every job be turned into a project? could the department be changed to thinking about improvements and better problem solving rather than responding? could standards be pushed up to WOW? would you have better people?

7. The Intermediary is Doomed – if you chop out the middle management, do your people have the ability to change from an organization to organizers? One method to do this is to empower your customers. In many industries the gate keepers to the information changes by allowing customers access to information which gives them more power to do. Those that are left are the top are responsible for network and character of the organization and those at the bottom have greater ability to do and make decisions that are in the customers interest.

8. The System is the Solution – part of the system is to ensure your forms/documents match beauty, grace, parsimony and focus. Are the forms easy for people to read and do? The other part of systems and perhaps more important is the social side or people. Face to face still counts.

9. Create Waves of Lust – just about everything in the world can be commoditized, but to combat it you have to provide Great or WOW service or WOW experience. What makes your product or service which allows the customer to say WOW that is great? Find it and do it.

10. Tommy Hilfiger Knows – to stand out in the crowd you need great branding. Branding means creating a distinct personality and telling the world about it. The only way you do it is to have an obsession with branding in every department and every decision should reflect branding. How much? no one knows, but it is an art. Leverage is good, too much leverage is bad.

a few more rules for part 3

Linking to dividend paying stocks, much of the rules are internal but they reflect to the customers and potential customers. How is your company’s brand? what does head office look like when you do your homework about the company?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

Continuing with the theme of innovation, recently read The Circle of Innovation by Tom Peters published by Vintage Books,1999. Many of the themes outlined in Mr. Peters book have not changed and many companies have still not figured out how to do innovation. Companies do parts of innovation, but forget the other parts. In the service economy the greatest asset is people, but if you look around do most companies treat and pay their employees as their greatest asset? The answer not surprisingly is no, often companies ask for innovation, but stability for the employee remains off the table. In just about every group meeting of employees the author has been in, the first question was about job stability, the second how the company can do better. Each and every employee would know the competitive landscape has changed, more is asked, less is given and whatever fat existed is just not there anymore. Even in these conditions companies can and need to innovate.

Mr. Peters has 15 themes of how innovation works and includes
1. Distance is Dead – with high speed internet which is the standard, we are all neighbours. Some you like, some you work with, but you all share something and every year it is easier to communicate with those around the world as it is to communicate with those around the block. Another aspect is cutting jobs, while part of any solution, is only a short term fix; the more important question is how does the company innovate to grow?

2. Destruction is cool – in many ways it is easier to destroy an organization than to change it. However most of us do not want to destroy, we prefer to change at the margins. It is hard, destruction means to try a new approach using the tools of the trade which now exist. One company the author worked for spent many dollars on a new motto for their letterhead, the consultants noted each aspect of the motto represented a different strength of the company. Most of us in the audience and customers thought it was ugly and liked the old one better. The moral is just because something is new, it is not necessarily better if it does not reach the customers. The understanding has to go beyond the designers.

3. You can’t live without an Eraser – the eraser means to wipe out some of the old thoughts about how business is done so you can figure out how business is done today. Part of that is having an organization that accepts mistakes, learns from them and keeps trying without firing everyone. Mr. Peters has a great chart with questions is failure tolerated? do ideas flow? do we swing for the fences or hit singles? do we thrive on change? do we take a new idea and test it..fast? we think anyone can be a big winner?
Another aspect to innovation is cost, many expect costs to be high. In a survey in Inc. – the cost to start up a company 34% of the time was less than $10,000 and 59% of the time less than $50,000. The numbers indicate to start does not need a great amount of resources. To do the next steps to a roll out to potential customers and existing customers that is where the resources are needed. The point is to start and test does not need many resources.

4. We are all Michelangelos – can every department be converted into a business? Mr. Peters would say yes. If it was a business would it be serving its customers or would they want to go somewhere else? If the number one reason for switching providers is service, are the departments within the company delivery the service to both inside and outside customers? Could every department be providing awesome customer service? why not? does the leadership see and acknowledge the lowest paid employees as great people or are they seen as cogs in a wheel?

5. Welcome to the White-Collar Revolution – to stay in the job, the question is how have you made your company a better place?
more in part 2 and 3.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, every company whether they pay dividends or not has to live and breath innovation. Much of innovation stems from the leadership at the top, do they really want it or do they say they want it? When the company is living off its dividends it is easier to say than really want to. When the company is losing money or market share, it typically moves to wanting it more. As a shareholder, you have to look to see if your company wants innovation, has new revenue streams and is the dividend safe?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

In the town where the author’s parents are from, one of the natural pieces of the environment is a river and the town is located on the mouth of the river. As an outsider looking in you would think the town would have a good marina to service the boats that come down the river, but for a variety of reasons, the town only built a marina for 20 boats. If you think about recreational boat traffic, boats can only go on the river, there are no alternatives, which means the boats coming by the river go right on by and stop at other towns and cities with marinas. This summer, the town is breaking ground or dredging to build the new marina which is 50 years in coming. When the town was formed industrial uses dominated the landscape because the rivers were the main highway to transport goods and services. As time moved by, the industrial uses were replaced by commercial ones or park land, because park land can be maintained at low costs. Over the past 10 years or so the local community groups have raised money to put in walkways, benches to enhance the parks which is good. The commercial uses decided that being on the water was a great thing and now have patios for people to sit and eat by the water. 15 years ago the government offered money to local communities to build up the marina but the local government did not want to spend any money, to keep taxes low and no deficit funding (understandable reasons) but every town and city around it enhanced their marinas on the senior level of government dollars. By the time, the town reacted the program was fully funded. It has taken 15 years, but in the spring time the town will finally capitalize on their location on the river.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in this case the town has cautious for understandable reasons but it missed the increased recreational uses of boats and many dollars because of its stance. Sometimes dividend paying companies must take a risk to capitalize on future opportunities, when purchasing the stock ensure it has an idea of the future will retaining its profit making ventures.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

Many of us who live in urban areas live near the water and our first view of the water is from a recreational point of view, which is a great way to see it. However if we look back, the water meant a great deal more to the our way of life. Living in the northeast, the body of water known as the Great Lakes with cities of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal dominate the landscapes. From the library a book about the history of the Great Lakes called The Golden Dream by Ronald Stagg, Dundurn Press, Toronto, 2010 was picked up. In this book the example is the St Lawrence Seaway where ships can travel halfway through North America. When the earliest explorers came they were trying to find a shorter way to China than going around Africa. Also the usual hunting for gold and silver was a reason to go travelling, which a couple of hundred years later was found. When the explorers travelled down the St. Lawrence they came across rapids, where hydro electric plants are now days, but the rapids must been similar to the ones seen on the west coast. As settlements grew up on the other side of the rapids and given the roads of the day were the rivers, many thoughts went into how to move goods around the rapids. In the early years, because the boats were relatively small, canals were built to accommodate the small boats.

Every 10 years brought an increasing sized boats and no real plans to enlarge the canals, by the time there was a desire to enlarge the canals because the grain trade and bulk commodities such as coal and iron ore were needed to be shipped at a cost effective manner, there was never an agreement who should pay for the expansion of the canals or locks on the Seaway. Part of the reason was other possible methods were coming forth – railways can move commodities to ocean ports, roads and trucks, and various towns and cities had grown up not dependent on the shipping. With most operations there tends to be competing interests who have to taken care of. That which seems logical to do or the straight line thinking, in the real world of needing government help, the line with waver and flow until the people with the greatest concern with the problem are in power. One or another community will benefit or think they will benefit and other communities think they will suffer or may suffer with the investment by the governments. In the case of the Seaway with two countries and their appropriate levels of government nothing is simple, except the dream.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, in the case of the Seaway, which was designed for the freighters to move commodities at a lower price than the competitors, by the time governments invested in the Seaway (years had passed) the economy had changed. The backbone of the economy moved from ships, to rail, to road and from the large institutional uses on the waterfront to more recreational uses. Every time there was a shift, there company would have to be flexible enough to capitalize on it and keep their competitive position. As a shareholder you have to be aware of the competing interests towards your company, how they change and how important they are. Goodwill moves for all sorts of reasons.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

The book The Disney Touch by Ron Grover published by Richard D Irwin, Homewood, Illnois, 1991 provides the material for this column. The characters of Disney of Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Pluto and the early movies of Snow White, Cinderella and Pinocchio are known are the world and loved by many people. The stories are universal to people and Walt Disney did an excellent job in creating them. As a business person, Walt needed help except for similar to many founders of companies he made most of the decisions by himself. There were many reasons why this developed including during the early years the company almost did not survive. It is not surprising when founders risk all of their assets and credit lines before the company experiences regional or international growth, the founders have a certain management style. As the company grew, Walt Disney envisioned theme parks although the one in Florida was larger because Disney did not like all the land uses around the California site. He was trying to have a particular image of the park and surrounding land uses. Eventually, Walt Disney passed away and his successors ran the company like Walt would have wanted. That type of management works for a couple of years, but will quickly go down, because very few new projects will come forth. In the case of Disney, shares traded on the stock exchange and it was not long before various people recognized Disney had great assets but were not using them.

Many homes have a dvd and video cassette player. Disney has a wonderful library of movies that were worth millions of dollars. Although they technically were not in a vault, since very few people had access, the originals could have been in a vault. The new management examined the video market and took a long time to break the ties of the old management. If they released a movie in video would people still want to see it on the movie screens. Remember people in the movie industry thought a movie is to be made to be played only on the big screen. Eventually management released Pinocchio and learned lessons about price points. When Sleeping Beauty was released it broke new records. The video cassette/ dvd release would now be part of corporate strategy and earnings for the company.

Kids of all ages like Disney stuff, most of it was to be found in Disney theme parks. The new management wanted to test whether people would buy in a store in any mall. The day the test store was to open, line ups were to be found. Disney expanded on the experience and there are now many Disney stores, including those in the theme park.

People like Disney TV shows and Disney similar to everyone else tried a cable TV network, without a great deal of thinking behind it. The name Disney worked in the early years, however the expectations were not realized and soon there was more people leaving the service as there was coming in. A revamp needed to be done to bring value and quality to cable program. It showed the company just because the name is Disney does not make it a winner. People choose to come back for very good reasons which need to exist.

The same thing happened with TV programs, for a while Disney on Sunday evenings was one of the lowest rated shows. the entire TV strategy was overhauled to make it connect to viewers.

Disney started in animation with Walt Disney drawing the Mickey character. The number of people doing animation dwindled until the new management put resources into it and found good stories to do and tell. Movies such as the Little Mermaid and Lion King were be made and equally important sell very well.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, Disney is shown as an example of a stock with great assets than needed to be renewed to connect to audiences. Many companies have the same thing, they have a great brand but something slips along the way, the assets constantly need to be evaluated to ensure they connect to their customers. At annual meetings, you want to know how does the company keep connecting to its audience? and do you think they are?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

The book The Disney Touch by Ron Grover published by Richard D Irwin, Homewood, Illnois, 1991 provides the material for this column. The characters of Disney of Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Pluto and the early movies of Snow White, Cinderella and Pinocchio are known around the world and loved by many people. The stories are universal to people and Walt Disney did an excellent job in creating them. As a business person, Walt needed help, similar to many founders of companies he made most of the decisions by himself. There were many reasons why this developed including during the early years the company almost did not survive. It is not surprising when founders risk all of their assets and credit lines before the company experiences regional or international growth, the founders have a certain management style. As the company grew, Walt Disney envisioned theme parks although the one in Florida was larger because Disney did not like all the land uses around the California site. He was trying to have a particular image of the park and surrounding land uses. Eventually, Walt Disney passed away and his successors ran the company like Walt would have wanted. That type of management works for a couple of years, but will quickly go down, because very few new projects will come forth. In the case of Disney, shares traded on the stock exchange and it was not long before various people recognized Disney had great assets but were not using them.

Eventually new ownership and new executives were put in to add value to the brand. What does that mean? The first example is the theme parks that were located in Orlando, Florida and Anaheim, California, the cost of a day pass was $18 in 1984. Attendance had declined because little was done to add to the rides since it opened, although people still went to the parks. Previous management were almost afraid to raise prices because Walt had set them, the new management looked at the prices and saw for every dollar the price was raised an addition $30 million would come to Disney in profit – some of which could be used to upgrade the parks. Over the next three years the prices were raised $5. People came to the parks and with increasing investments in the park, there are very good reasons to return.

At the present time, it is hard not to find a Disney commercial, but in Walt’s day they did very little advertising. Most of the advertising was inviting travel writers to the park to be written about. However the new executive team found that for every $1 million spent on TV ads brought in 154,000 guests The average person buying the ticket would spend a similar amount on food and souvenirs, thus a $10 million campaign would yield upwards of $55 million in revenues. Disney is now a big advertiser.

In the early 1980’s most of the hotel rooms around the Orlando site did not belong to Disney, many other companies had built hotels. The new executive team looked at hotels and saw they can be very profitable, if the vacancy rates are low. The rooms inside the park had very low vacancy rates and under those terms profit margins of 60% for rooms and meals were the norm. It took Disney a number of years to built the hotels within the park, but it took new management to see how the assets could be used better.

Now days Disney had some wonderful movies – some under the Disney label, some under the Touchstone label, but in the old management the Board of Directors insisted on only very wholesome entertainment, the Board often watched all the movies. The movies the Board approved appealed to a very limited market and the Disney market share was 4%. It took the new management a number of years and always emphasising the story, not the stars, to bring the movie share upwards to 40% in a great year. In the movie business, people talk about tent poles, need some in case the next movie does not do as well. In the early 90’s the number was a movie grossing $ 100 million. As Disney turned itself around it went on to have many $100 million plus movies. The early ones included Pretty Woman, Three Men and a Baby, Ruthless People, Good Morning Vietnam.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, every company which pays dividends has great assets, they provide the profitability of the company, it is up to the shareholders to ask are they being used or getting the most value out of the assets and what could be? Some of the answers will come to the shareholders just from owning the stock and observing; some will be is the management the correct one? and other questions will be asking where is the competition and what are they doing?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.

The Innovator’s Tool Kit by Dr. Ralph Katz is published by Harvard Business Press, Boston, 2009 and includes 10 practical strategies to help you develop and implement innovation. Whatever you do in life, you are doing some sort of innovation. If you find a better way or one that is more suited to you, you have innovated. If you have thought is there a better method? is there a solution to my problem? then you have innovated. Whether you have taken the idea to the market, the market has embraced it and you and your company made money, that is a different story. However we are all innovators because we want to do something easier, better, less expensive, needed to create better efficiencies, we innovate to solve a problem. The book also includes charts and questions to help you, if you rather look on line try http://www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools. The important thing a book such as this one does for you is help you focus and bring ideas to market.

As the idea moves from great idea to something that can work, one of the critical aspects after time and resources have been allocated to working the idea is getting a handle on risk. The risk is between two aspects – getting it right and making money from the idea or getting it wrong and needing a quick exit. The easiest method to gain a handle is to do a risk matrix with the headings new to the company, adjacent to current offerings, and similar to current offerings on one side reflecting the product/technology. The other side is same as present, adjacent to present and new to the company reflecting the intended market. As the dots are marked you have a better understanding of the probability of failure is. For information about the matrix is found in an article in the Harvard Business Review, Dec 2007 in the article written by George S Day “is it Real? can we Win? and is it worth doing?

There is no easy answer about innovation except it eventually is a decision made by people. A great number of variables must be in place – your boss or your organization has to be willing to want to do it; you need to find a champion to move the idea through the company; resources need to be found to try; the solution has to solve a problem or maybe just use the assets of the company better. Years ago the author worked for a family owned company which was sitting on wonderful assets but really did not want to change anything more than at the margins. Only the highest senior level people were allowed to make a decision and they quickly learnt making too many meant a short career. The author had to go around the leadership team find a champion and when they were successful, others would take the credit. When they were not, the blame went downwards fast. Google has a policy where people spend 20% of their time working on their own projects and this had lead to many different ways for the company to grow and expand its reach. The difference between the two companies above is night and day, but both need innovation.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies which own a almost guaranteed part of the market, unless they lose money from other ventures, they tend to be conservative in their operations. In is important as a shareholder to determine even if they have a monopoly position how innovation is handled and what is different than a few years ago. There are some very good companies that rest on the work of the founders, what would the founder do and after a couple of years are afraid of making simple but effective decisions to make use of the assets they have.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions

The Innovator’s Tool Kit by Dr. Ralph Katz is published by Harvard Business Press, Boston, 2009 and includes 10 practical strategies to help you develop and implement innovation. Whatever you do in life, you are doing some sort of innovation. If you find a better way or one that is more suited to you, you have innovated. If you have thought is there a better method? is there a solution to my problem? then you have innovated. Whether you have taken the idea to the market, the market has embraced it and you and your company made money, that is a different story. However we are all innovators because we want to do something easier, better, less expensive, needed to create better efficiencies, we innovate to solve a problem. The book also includes charts and questions to help you, if you rather look on line try http://www.elearning.hbsp.org/businesstools. The important thing a book such as this one does for you is help you focus and bring ideas to market.

The idea generation is the easiest one, if you challenged everyone in your group or company to bring one idea a week or two weeks for the rest of the year you would have generated hundreds of ideas. Some are just ideas whose time has not come yet, some of ideas which could lead to something, some will be ideas that lead to something and some will go on the way to implementation. What you should see is the funnel approach – many ideas in, a few come out for lots of reasons.

Assuming you have a company that wants the ideas, which is an excellent start, then you have to find resources to determine how much money they cost to implement and if some look like they are winners, you need champions in the company to bring them up to getting approved in the company’s budget to be implement. There is a wonderful museum in upstate New York which collects retail products that made the shelf space in stores and fail to deliver sales. The reason the museum is wonderful, is it shows there is not a lack of ideas in the marketplace. After coming up with an idea or ideas, the next step is who is the idea for? what can we do with this? are great questions to ask. One method is see the buyer utility chart developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in the Harvard article “Knowing a Winning Idea When You See One” the six stages of the buyer experience cycle of purchase, delivery, use, supplements, maintenance, and disposal are one side of the graph. The other side is the six utility servers of collective productivity, simplicity, convenience, risk, fun and image, and environmental friendliness. The mapping helps you provide the business case for the idea. Eventually an idea only works if you sell more things.

After you have determined the case for the idea, then you have to fit into the company’s plans. What are the company’s strategies and long-term objectives? do you have the people to implement it? who wants to champion or sponsor the idea. Champions have the ability to give resources to the idea and have a good sense of timing in the company. If you do not have champions you may have the best idea in the world, it is just not going anywhere in the company. Champions spend their time on the RWW Method – Is it real? Can We Win? Is it Worth Doing? Questions such as in the market real? is the product real? can the product be competitive? can out company be competitive? will the product be profitable at an acceptable risk/ does the launching of the product make strategic sense? If you answers to those questions and more, the next step is trying it out.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, companies which are making money like it if they do the same thing year and year and continue to make money. That may work in a few industry groups but for most industry groups there is a great amount of change in the marketplace. It is reasonable to ask the senior management how much of their revenues is coming from products or services more than 5 years old and how much is coming from new ones? what were the latest products that were introduced and with all the resources behind the products how did the market like them or buy them? In hindsight and with a bias of being a shareholder you can see if the latest ideas are good.

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions