The convergence of opportunity

If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

I was fortunate enough to visit the Boeing Museum of Flight twice in the last month. The Personal Courage Wing of the museum houses artifacts from World War 1 and World War 2, and it was very interesting to see the great difference in how the two wars were portrayed.

The museum describes WW1 in the same way the popular literature does: as a messy, ugly conflict with mud, trenches, poison gas, and much unnecessary death and suffering. WW2, on the other hand, is displayed as an epic battle between good and evil with brave infantrymen, sailors and flyers courageously defending their countries while civilians and government officials banded together in sacrifice for the common good.

Why the change? One could argue that the two wars were fundamentally different because of how and why they were fought. A more interesting case can be made that World War 2 happened at a unique time in history when the elements of public information sharing were for the first time in full blossom. Newsreel coverage for the first time could manage the public perception of grand sacrifice, and triumph.

Newspapers and radio reinforced the message in the United States, where the experience was easier to absorb at a distance from the fighting. Millions of children played with toy soldiers, built model fighter planes and relived the battles they saw in the movies. There were War Bonds, Liberty Ships, and Victory Gardens. Never before or since has a war captured the imagination the way World War 2 did. For those whose goal was to capture public support for the war effort there could be no better time, when all the elements for creating a shared experience were available. We should not be surprised that the same collective sense of purpose has been missing in wartime ever since.

In a business context, the book Outliers makes a similar argument about the inflection point between opportunity and success. Success, the author says, never happens in a vacuum. It is the result of hard work, for sure, but also the luck of being in the right place at the right time.

Would Bill Gates be Bill Gates if he had been born 30 years earlier, or 20 years later? Probably not. He (and to the same extent Steve Jobs) took advantage of the unique circumstances at that particular moment in time to create a business built on the very young market for personal computing. Personal computing was brand new and software was almost nonexistent. The software that was available was limited in usefulness and only the truest of the true hobbyists could work with it to produce anything helpful. By recognizing that the future was in personal computing and focusing on making the software available to solve real world problems, Bill Gates and crew made the very best of an opportunity that had been presented to no one before and to very few afterwards.

Today, in the technology field, there is hardly anything more interesting than the promise of Cloud Computing. If you’re on the inside it is easy to see the promise that the Cloud holds for the future. There will be those who will take advantage of the Cloud while it is in its early stages, when their impact will be the greatest.

Finding those points where circumstances come together in such a way that the truly distinctive can be created should be one of the primary missions of leadership. The most successful entrepreneur, or business person, or non-profit professional, will watch for those opportunities that are unique to their industry, or geography, or community, and use them to their best advantage.

Managing across the generational divide

It’s a whole new world out there for seasoned managers leading younger teams. The standard style and method of communications has radically changed in the last 20 years. Men and women entering the workforce out of high school or college face different challenges than their parents did, and their definition of success is quite different too. More experienced managers (and older workers generally) are not only called upon to absorb technology changes at an ever increasing rate, but also to collaborate with peers and subordinates who grew up in the internet age and expect their workplace to operate at hyper speed.

How smart is your phone? Do you text? Tweet? Are you available by email 24x7? You posted what on your Facebook page? Just keeping current is a challenge for everyone. Understanding how to maintain workplace productivity and reacting to the business risks posed by social networking and always-on communications are some of the biggest challenges for managers, but they are also great opportunities to share the wisdom born of experience. Here are some things managers can do to get the best out of a younger workforce.

Recognizing Innovation

I work for a large multinational software company outside of Seattle. We pride ourselves on being innovators, and indeed many of the things we take for granted in the technology world today were created by this company. My job is in IT. One of our primary goals is to use the company’s software to run the company’s business, and in that we are very successful. In fact, I and other members of our team are often called on to speak to leaders of other companies about how we leverage our products to manage the nuts and bolts of our day-to-day operations, and how they can do the same.

Just last week I was in a meeting with developers and managers from our extended team where we tried to agree on a technical solution to a fairly straightforward problem, and the lead developer for the solution under discussion said that if we adopted his methods it would help us to support future innovation. His proposal used off-the-shelf software built by our company to manage data tracking with a minimum of customization. My question (unspoken, because it was not relevant to whether or not we would agree to use his code) was whether or not modifying an existing product can ever be considered “innovation”.

Webster’s Dictionary defines innovation this way – 1: to introduce as or as if new; 2 (archaic): to effect a change in; 3: to make changes. Under this definition our developer certainly could claim to be innovative. But in my mind something was clearly missing.