McCain Wins Florida - What it Means to Tech Companies

I met Senator John McCain last May at the Wall Street Journal's "All Things Digital 'D' Conference." He was surrounded by some of Silicon Valley's best and brightest including Cisco's leader John Chambers. My prediction is that high tech firms such as Cisco will benefit from McCain's victory, and my perception from observation is that there has long been a partnership between McCain and some of the leading tech firms in both the valley and the beltway. Despite the liberal democrat stereotype of northern California voters, McCain's pro-business, pro-technology stance is bound to win votes in Silicon Valley. Fully six times more venture capital flows into Silicon Valley than any other region in the U.S. New England and Orange County, CA follow but are a distant second and third. Giuliani spoke at the Churchill Club in San Jose a few months ago. Now I think it is McCain's turn. No World Borders' team visits conferences and accesses research reports regularly, examining technology, political, human and investment capital issues across industries. Feel free to contact us for a consultation on your next change management project.

DEMO 08 - The Power of the Individual - Personal Scheduling

Palm Desert - Enterprise scheduling company Time Trade demoed their new application TimeDriver today at Chris Shipley's DEMO 08 conference. TimeDriver is a new kind of sales tool that lets users pro actively invite customers and clients to schedule an appointment. By embedding a �schedule now� button in email messages and on Web pages, users can provide a compelling call-to-action for scheduling a demo, support call, consulting session, interview, briefing and other interactions. TimeDriver borrows rules based scheduling technology from TimeTrade's Enterprise Scheduling Application used by organizations such as Charles Schwab, Sears, PETCO, Quest Diagnostics and Harvard. Their pitch at DEMO was very straightforward and went off without a hitch. DEMO should be proud to have such as pragmatic team with a cool application as part of their lineup this year. DEMO is one of those great, though provoking conferences that you should put on your list for September 08 when they come to San Diego.

This was one of the most practical, useful technologies demonstrated at the DEMO conference so far.

Below is a video of the demo at DEMO.

Was the Fed Tricked?

Today in the Wall Street Journal:

"When the Federal Reserve surprised markets with a 0.75 percentage-point cut in the federal-funds target Tuesday morning, the thinking was that concerns about a U.S. recession had so fully enveloped the markets that just about anything could happen. Sure, the thinking went, the Fed was in danger of looking like it had responded to market action rather than an economic report, but if markets were reacting to economic reports, well, it's all the same in this world these days.

The revelation that Societe Generale is taking a $7 billion write-down due to the activities of one rogue trader — and additional reports that the French bank may have been unwinding those positions on Monday, a thinly traded, volatile day when Asian and European markets were rocked with losses, puts the Fed's move in a new light. Namely, that they were taken in."

That's right – a single French rogue trader is believe to have caused the Fed to make an emergency move to adjust rates in reaction to the market sell off.

This highlights the highly deterministic methods used in computer based selling and analytics in the markets today. It spells out a need for more sophisticated methods to monitor market fluctuations. See our earlier post in this Blog regarding Semantic Webs. Collective intelligence helps when you are making big decisions.

The Street Reacts to Fed's Rate Cut

Today's Wall Street Journal video summarizes the downward reaction AND the market rally after the adjustment. Look to healthcare and tech stocks to be the least affected overall by the ongoing issues in the financial markets.

Ten Tips for the Innovative Leader

I recently read and enjoyed Paul Sloane’s latest book, The Innovative Leader. Here are a list of just some of the gems from this book. It's available at Amazon.com (click the title of the link above and go directly to the page on the Amazon web site).

1. Have a vision for change
You cannot expect your team to be innovative if they do not know the direction in which they are heading. Innovation has to have a purpose. It is up to the leader to set the course and give a bearing for the future.
You need one overarching statement that defines the direction for the business and that people will readily understand and remember.
Great leaders spend time illustrating the vision, goals and challenges. They explain to people how their role is crucial in fulfilling the vision and meeting the challenges. They inspire men and women to become passionate entrepreneurs, finding innovative routes to success.

2. Fight the fear of change
Innovative leaders constantly evangelise the need for change. They replace the comfort of complacency with the hunger of ambition. They'll say, "we are doing well but we cannot rest on our laurels, we need to do even better." They explain that while trying new ventures is risky, standing still is even riskier. They must paint a picture that shows an appealing future that is worth taking risks to achieve. The prospect involves perils and opportunities. The only way to get there is by embracing change.

3. Think like a venture capitalist
VCs use a portfolio approach and balance the risk of losing with the upside of winning. They like to consider lots of proposals. They are comfortable with the knowledge that many of the ideas they back will fail. These are all important lessons for corporate executives who typically consider only a handful of proposals and who abhor failure.

4. Have a dynamic suggestion scheme
Great suggestion schemes are focused, easy to use, well resourced, responsive and open to all. They do not need to offer huge rewards. Recognition and response are generally more important. Above all, they have to have the whole-hearted commitment of the senior team to keep them fresh, properly managed and successful.

5. Break the rules
To achieve radical innovation you have to challenge the assumptions that govern how things should look in your environment. Business is not like sport, with its well defined rules and referees. It is more like art and is rife with opportunity for the lateral thinker who can create new ways to provide the goods and services customers want.

6. Give everyone two jobs
Give all your people two key objectives. Ask them to run their current jobs in the most effective way possible and at the same time to find completely new ways to do the job. Encourage your employees to ask themselves—what is the essential purpose of my role? What is the outcome that I deliver that is of real value to my clients (internal and external)? Is there a better way to deliver that value or purpose? The answer is always "yes", but most people never ask the question.

7. Collaborate
Many CEOs see collaboration as key to their success with innovation. They know they cannot do it all using internal resources. So they look outside for other organisations to partner with. A good example is the Mercedes and Swatch collaboration, which produced the Smart car. Each brought different skills and experiences to the team.

8. Welcome failure
The innovative leader encourages a culture of experimentation. You must teach people that each failure is a step along the road to success. To be truly agile, you must give people the freedom to innovate, experiment and to succeed. That means you must give them the freedom to fail, too.

9. Build prototypes
People's Bank has a refreshingly original attitude to new ideas. "Don't debate it, test it," is the motto of this innovative American financial services organisation. Try the new idea at low cost in a section of the market and see what the customers' reactions are. You will learn far more in the real world than you will in the test laboratory or with focus groups.

10. Be passionate
Focus on the things that you want to change, the most important challenges you face and be passionate about overcoming them. Your energy and drive will translate itself into direction and inspiration for your people. It is no good filling your bus with contented, complacent passengers. You want evangelists, passionate supporters. You want people who believe that reaching the destination is really worthwhile. If you want to inspire people to innovate, to change the way they do things and to achieve extraordinary results, then you have to be passionate about what you believe in and you have to communicate that passion every time you speak..

Paul Sloane is an Advisor to No World Borders, and the founder of Destination Innovation (www.destination-innovation.com). He writes and speaks on lateral thinking and innovation. His book, The Innovative Leader, is published by Kogan-Page.