Experience the new two-day intrapreneurial journey to transform you organization with exponential results!
Don’t miss EBCG’s intense and hands-on Intrapreneuring Workshop “Building an innovation framework to design, launch and execute business projects” in the Driving Innovation in Healthcare series in the “Golden City” of Prague, Czech Republic, on April 6-7, 2016.
Sign up before December 23, 2015, to save during the special promotion period.
Contact me for a 50%-off discount code for the 1-day Wednesday program (Oct. 21) at the upcoming Intrapreneurship Conference in New York City, Oct. 21-23, 2015!
Join me for my workshop on How to build a strong foundation for a sustainable Intrapreneuring program at 1:35pm to 3:30pm on Thursday, October 22, 2015:
Join me for my intrapreneuring workshop at the 2015 ePharma Summit in New York City!
Be Heard! A Hands-On Workshop for Future Leaders Ready to Take Action
Beginning in 2012, Boehringer Ingelheim launched a global initiative to encourage more intrapreneurial spirit of employees and offer them a platform that enables generating and implementing disruptive innovations across the organization to either decrease expenditures or increase revenue. With a focus on developing and executing game changing ideas, part of this initiative is focused on providing associate-level executives with the tools they need to evaluate their ideas and best position them when pitching them to more senior management.
About ePharma
ePharma is the incubator for cultivating a diverse and innovative digital marketing plan to help you move your commercial initiatives forward.
Augment your expertise, dissect current biopharma trends, and uncover new opportunities at ePharma. Get the tools to build robust, cost efficient marketing campaigns over three days of tactical and strategic learning.
New for 2015:
Join me at the 5th Annual Pharma PPM Toolbox in Basel/Switzerland on March 5-6, 2015!
Presentation at 3pm on March 6, 2015
Come to discuss my talk about “Changing employee mindset to boost collaboration and engagement for extreme business results”
Workshop at 3:30pm on March 6, 2015
And take my Intrapreneuring Workshop “Building an innovation framework to design, launch and execute business projects”
The workshop participants experience the role of an intrapreneur to bring a project to life using disruptive methods and collaboration.
About the Conference
Pharma companies stand on a cross-road for a few years now. They can choose to stick to their old ways that will probably slowly kill their business or successfully adapt to the reality of continuously shrinking pipelines and growing obstacles.
The 5th Annual Pharma PPM Toolbox will provide you with fresh ideas and solutions from experts who work hard to keep up with uncompromising market demands.
The prestigious Ivey Business School of the Western University in Ontario, Canada, published an insightful new teaching case study on intrapreneuring and corporate innovation titled “Boehringer Ingelheim: Leading Innovation” in which the case writers, Professor J. Robert Mitchell, Ph.D., and Ramasastry Chandrasekhar, follow the footsteps of the newly appointed innovation director.
Meant to raise questions and serving as a learning opportunity for graduate students in academic program around the globe, this case study lifts the corporate curtain a bit to show how innovation through intrapreneuring really happens and decision points along the way.
Outline (by Ivey Publishing)
The newly appointed director of Innovation Management & Strategy at Boehringer Ingelheim, a German-based multinational pharmaceutical company, is finding his way forward in his firm’s new, first-of-its-kind role, which is central to the company’s growth rejuvenation strategy. His job has a threefold mandate: to build internal networks, to establish internal structures and to leverage internal ideas. His biggest challenge, however, may be transforming the organization’s DNA. The blockbuster business model that has characterized the company for decades is no longer appropriate. Instead, the firm needs to develop healthcare products available to end users over the counter. This shift in strategy requires innovative changes in distribution, delivery and customer focus. To accomplish this goal, he needs to institutionalize innovation so that it becomes sustainable. But in doing so, he must also identify the metrics for assessing progress. The case provides an opportunity for students to step into the shoes of an innovation leader, to develop an innovation roadmap for the organization in the face of uncertainty and to understand how to engage in innovation leadership at various levels of a global enterprise.
Learning Objective
This case has two key objectives. First, this case provides students an opportunity to grapple with the difficult decisions associated with innovation in an uncertain environment. Second, this case highlights that anyone has the ability to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset and to lead innovation. The case divides the attributes of an innovation leader into five components: observing, questioning, experimenting, networking and associating. It shows the real-life experiences of a manager doing seemingly routine activities, who evolved into a leader who transformed the DNA of a global enterprise. The case also provides a template of the tasks, responsibilities and value-added changes as an individual moves progressively within an enterprise from an operations manager to a senior manager to an innovation leader. This case can be used either toward the beginning or toward the end of any course that addresses innovation and creative thinking in a large organization. At the beginning of a course, it illustrates the challenges of acting in the face of uncertainty in a large organization. At the end of a course, the case provides an opportunity for students to apply what they have learned about innovation, entrepreneurial thinking and innovation leadership.
Angel Investing as corporate venturing within a company concludes the 3-posts mini-series as guest blogger for CURE.
However, it’s not over! Please check in occasionally for more innovation and intrapreneuring-related posts in the future!
CURE serves as the bioscience cluster of Connecticut, a diverse network of small and large life and healthcare sciences companies, ranging in scope from therapeutics, to healthcare technology, to medical devices. Universities, government agencies, scientists, educators, mentors, students, entrepreneurs, business experts, service providers and investors join in to begin nucleate the breadth of the network.
As participants in CURE, we educate, cultivate entrepreneurship, support the build of bioscience companies and collaborate to ensure a sustainable, high-value bioscience and healthcare community that improves our quality of life and keeps the Connecticut community strong.
Meet me at the Intrapreneurship Conference 2014 at the “Kennispoort”-building of the Eindhoven University of Technology, John F. Kennedylaan 2, 5612 AB Eindhoven, The Netherlands, from December 10-12, 2014! Contact me you are interested to attend, as I may be able to get you a discounted ticket!
Don’t miss
Why attend?
Intrapreneurship is the most powerful engine for growth. With innovation being priority #1, how are you implementing and leveraging innovation from within?
Now being organized for the fourth time, the Intrapreneurship Conference 2014 is the premier global event for Corporate Innovation Managers, Intrapreneurs, Business Managers, HR-Managers and Innovation Consultants. This is not just another conference on innovation, where you will be listening to motivational speakers all day. We intentionally keep the number of available seats at a level that enables you to really connect with everyone.
Discuss the best and next practices in implementing and leveraging intrapreneurship. We have carefully curated a program for you that includes all relevant topics in the field of intrapreneurship, and invited experienced intrapreneurs and experts to co-create an impactful learning experience for you.
You will leave the conference with a clear action plan and practical tools for the next step in implementing intrapreneurship. Plus, you will meet like-minded people to connect, share and collaborate with – as most Intrapreneurs are the lone mavericks in the corporate jungle.
Join me for eyeforpharma’s Value Beyond the Pill Summit 2014 and come to my talk on “Build an intrapreneurial ecosystem to ensure your innovative services deliver the value required by patients” at 2:10PM on December 3, 2014.
Why attend other than hearing me speak? 🙂
The topics are around delivering patient value and reimburse your services by innovating your business model. A new way of healthcare is here; services are now an essential part of patient care and will help the pharma industry to make a bigger impact as a healthcare provider. Learn how to put successful services in place to gain better access, reduce costs and help your end-user, the patient. Find out what the most innovative and forward-thinking companies are doing to differentiate their brand in the most competitive times pharma have ever faced.
The Value Beyond the Pill Summit is held at the Wyndham Philadelphia Historic District Hotel, 400 Arch Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA, on December 3-4, 2014.
See the full speaker line up and agenda in the event brochure.
Intrapreneuring: Building an innovation eco-system with the “School for Intrapreneurs” continues the mini-series as guest blogger for CURE.
My first post “Why large organizations struggle to innovate” looked at innovation obstacles in large organizations. This second post discusses on how to overcome these obstacles and followed by another successful approach covered in my next post in few weeks.
CURE serves as the bioscience cluster of Connecticut, a diverse network of small and large life and healthcare sciences companies, ranging in scope from therapeutics, to healthcare technology, to medical devices. Universities, government agencies, scientists, educators, mentors, students, entrepreneurs, business experts, service providers and investors join in to begin nucleate the breadth of the network.
As participants in CURE, we educate, cultivate entrepreneurship, support the build of bioscience companies and collaborate to ensure a sustainable, high-value bioscience and healthcare community that improves our quality of life and keeps the Connecticut community strong.
“Why large organizations struggle to innovate” is my first post in a mini-series as a guest blogger for CURE. This first post looks at obstacles large organizations face to innovate, while the following posts will look at ways on how to overcome these obstacles over the next few weeks.
CURE serves as the bioscience cluster of Connecticut, a diverse network of small and large life-sciences and healthcare companies, ranging in scope from therapeutics, to healthcare technology, to medical devices. Universities, government agencies, scientists, educators, mentors, students, entrepreneurs, business experts, service providers and investors join in to begin to nucleate the breadth of the network.
As participants in CURE, we educate, cultivate entrepreneurship, support the build of bioscience companies and collaborate to ensure a sustainable, high-value bioscience and healthcare community that improves our quality of life and keeps the Connecticut community strong.
The traditional world of corporate Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is being disrupted by a new take on D&I and combining it with innovation and talent management. What some perceive as a threat to the D&I establishment may just be the next step of evolution that could invigorate and drive D&I to new heights.
Though not an entirely novel approach (see also How to create innovation culture with diversity!) the new thinking gains traction. As this could play out in different ways and only time will tell what worked, here are my thought on where we are heading.
Struggles of the Front Runner
Many traditional D&I programs, let’s call them “version 1.0” of D&I, struggle transitioning beyond a collection of affinity groups, tallying corporate demographics and competing for D&I awards to post on their webpage. In these traditional D&I programs ‘diversity’ is often understood to be reflected by more or less visible differences among individuals at the workplace while ‘inclusion’ translates to supporting defined sub-populations of employees through, for example, establishing affinity groups.
The United States is seen as the front runner of the D&I movement. D&I has been around in the U.S. corporate world for decades. For historic and demographic reasons it hones in on removing obstacles for minorities at the workplace supported also by strict legislature and execution; exercising Affirmative Action, for example.
This legacy in the U.S. lends itself to an inside focus on organizations that became the backbone of the traditional D&I programs. It comes down to the question ‘what can or should the organization do for specific groups of people’ defined by ethnicity, gender, age, sexual preference, faith, disability, war history and so on. Apparently, it still is work in progress as, for example, Silicon Valley just recently got on the public radar, which stirred up the debate afresh along the lines of D&I 1.0; see Google releases breakdown on the diversity of its workforce.
Stuck in the ‘Diversity Trap’?
The inside focus and minority messaging of D&I 1.0, however, can be limiting when D&I erodes to a process of ‘doing things right’ by pushing for quotas, ‘checking boxes’ and inflating variations of terminology perceived as ‘politically correct’. This can in fact be different from ‘doing the right thing’ for the company overall, its employees as well as the affinity groups and their constituency. It should not surprise that Affinity groups can be (and often get) stigmatized and perceived as self-serving and self-centered social networks without significant and measurable business impact.
Under this paradigm these D&I 1.0 programs struggle to get serious attention, support and funding from executives beyond operating on a minor level to ‘keep the lights on’ more for public image purposes than business drive. The fundamentals seem to get forgotten: in the end, a business exists to generate a profit, so less profitable activities are likely to be discontinued or divested. It’s a symbiosis and to say it bluntly: without healthy business there is no D&I program and no affinity groups. When this symbiosis get lopsided, D&I 1.0 gets stuck in the trap.
D&I 2.0
“Diversity” is catching on beyond the United States in Europe, for example, where many countries do not have share a highly heterogeneous demographic composition, for example. Here, companies can start with a fresh approach jumping straight to D&I 2.0 – and many do! It reminds me of developing countries installing their first phone system by skipping the landlines and starting right away with mobile phones.
The 2.0 internal focus corresponds to hiring workers that truly think differently and have different backgrounds and life experiences some of which overlaps with D&I 1.0 affinity roots. In addition, there is also an external focus putting the staff to work with a clear business proposition and reaching even beyond the organization. So here a candidate would be hired or employee promoted for their different thinking (2.0) rather than more visible differences (1.0).
While need remains for affinity groups to tend to their members needs within the organization, the “new” D&I 2.0 opens to shift focus to go beyond the organization. It goes along the lines of a statement President John F. Kennedy became famous for and that I tweaked as follows: “Don’t ask what the COMPANY can do for you ask what you can do for the COMPANY AND ITS CUSTOMERS.”
D&I 2.0 gears towards actively contributing and driving new business results in measurable ways for the better of the employees as well as the organization and its customers. A visible indicator for D&I 2.0 affinity groups helping their constituency beyond company walls is affinity groups identifying and seizing business opportunities specific to their constituency. They translate the opportunity and shepherd it trough the processes of the organization to bring it to fruition. For example, affinity groups are uniquely positioned to extending and leveraging their reach to relating customer segments in order to identify ‘small elephant’ business opportunities; see How to grow innovation elephants in large organizations.
The D&I 2.0 approach demonstrates sustainable business value which is why D&I 2.0 sells much easier to executives. It makes a compelling business case that contributes to new business growth, the life blood of every company.
Challenging Transition
U.S. companies stuck in D&I 1.0 are hard pressed to keep up with the D&I 2.0 developments and overcome their inner struggle and resistance. With decades of legacy, D&I 1.0 programs in many organizations lack the vision and ability to make a compelling business case, to develop a sound strategy as well as capability and skill to implement it effectively. This is the requirement, however, to truly see eye-to-eye with senior executives and get their full support. This can become a serious disadvantage in the markets relating to products and customers but also in attracting talent.
In the end, the saying holds true that “talent attracts talent” and all organizations compete over talent to compete and succeed. Therefore, a D&I 2.0 program combines business focus and talent management while tying it back to the core of diversity and inclusion: Fostering diverse thinkers and leveling the playing field for all employees. This requires a level playing field that offers the same opportunities to all employees, which is the real challenge.
How do you level the playing field effectively in a large organization? How this will be implemented becomes the differentiating success factor for companies transitioning to D&I 2.0!
Here is a example 2.0-style for a level playing filed that has its roots in the D&I affinity group space yet opened up to include the entire workforce. It empowers and actively engages employees while leveraging diversity, inclusion and talent management for innovative solutions with profitable business outcomes. It may take a minute or two to see the connection between D&I, talent and disruptive innovation but it is at work right here in the School for Intrapreneurs: Lessons from a FORTUNE Global 500 company.
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Previous posts relating to innovation and employee affinity groups / employee resource groups (ERG) / business resource groups (BRG):
Insightful diversity breakdown of the Google workforce. Would be interesting to know how its Silicon Valley neighbors compare.
After tip-toeing around the makeup of its workforce for a while, Google (s goog) released a blog post Wednesday afternoon that gave a breakdown of the company’s diversity in both gender and ethnicity.
Collected from data gathered in January of 2014, the employee base of Google is predominantly white and male (61 percent and 70 percent, respectively), with nearly a third of employees identifying as Asian.
But the overall numbers not entirely representative of the diversity in the company’s most important parts. For example, employees in leadership roles at Google are 72 percent White and 79 percent male:
But the biggest disparities, perhaps unsurprisingly, are in the company’s tech employees. Women don’t even make up a fifth of the company’s tech workforce — representing just 17 percent.
Laszlo Bock, Senior Vice President of People Operations and blog author, said that Google is actively trying to recruit more women and minorities for its staff:…
View original post 70 more words
Here are my Top 10 posts for Employee Resource Groups (ERG) / Business Resource Groups (BRG):
1. Why do companies need business-focused ERGs?
The answer is as simple as this: Because it makes good business sense!
2. Build ERGs as an innovative business resource!
The increasing diversity of employees at the workplace led to employees gathering along affinity dimensions like birds-of-a-feather to form networking groups within organizations. The next step goes beyond affinity and establishes employee resource groups (ERGs) strategically as a business resource and powerful driver for measurable business impact and strategic innovation bottom-up.
3. How to start building a business-focused ERG?
Let’s start with what it takes to found a successful ERG on a high level and then drill down to real-life examples and practical advice. What you cannot go without is a strategy that creates a business need before you drum up people, which creates a buzz!
4. Starting an ERG as a strategic innovation engine! (part 3 of 3)
While many companies demand creativity and innovation from their staff few companies seem to know how to make it work. – Is your organization among those hiring new staff all the time to innovate? The hire-to-innovate practice alone is not a sustainable strategy and backfires easily.
5. How to create innovation culture with diversity!
Strategic innovation hands-on: Who hasn’t heard of successful organizations that pride their innovation culture? But the real question is what successful innovators do differently to sharpen their innovative edge over and over again – and how your organization can get there!
6. “What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)
What every new employee resource group (ERG) requires most are people: the life-blood for ideas and activities! But how do you reach out to employees, help them understand the value of the ERG and get them involved to engage actively?
7. Next-generation ERG learn from U.S. Army recruitment!
What do Generation Y (GenY) oriented Employee Resource Groups (ERG) share with the military? – More than you expect! A constant supply of active members is the life-blood for any ERG to put plans to action and prevent established activists from burning out. The U.S. Army faces a similar challenge every year: how to attract and recruit the youngest adult generation? Next-generation ERGs listen up: Let the U.S. Army work for you and learn some practical lessons!
8. Q&A – Case study for founding a business-focused ERG
If you are planning to found an ERG or are a new ERG Leaders, you might find the attached Q&A helpful.
9. How to attract an executive sponsor?
10. Generation Y for managers – better than their reputation?
It’s a long list to describe Generation Y with a commonly unfavorable preconception. This youngest generation at the workworkplacern after 1980, also called Millennial) is said to be: lazy, impatient, needy, entitled, taking up too much of my time, expecting work to be fun, seeking instant gratifications, hop from company to company, want promotions right away, give their opinion all the time and so on. But is it really that easy to characterize a new generation?Don’t miss my Top 10 Innovation posts and Top 10 posts for Intrapreneurs!
Strategic innovation hands-on: Who hasn’t heard of successful organizations that pride their innovation culture? But the real question is what successful innovators do differently to sharpen their innovative edge over and over again – and how your organization can get there!
The MIT – an institution of success
As an example, let’s look at one of the most innovative institutions in the world: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) located in Cambridge, Boston. Since success can be defined many ways and comparing academia with industry can be iffy. Given the MIT’s extraordinary entrepreneurial spirit, however, here is a metrics that business can easily relate to: the MIT’s living alumni formed over 25,000 companies that employ 3.3 million people with revenues close to 2 trillion dollars. This resembles the 11th highest GDP in the world – compared to countries, the MIT ranks among France and Italy! – Not a bad track record for a single institution that fames 50 Nobel laureates! For comparison, France has 57 and Italy 20 Nobel laureates.
So much for a success metrics on a social, economic and personnel scale… There is no doubt the MIT is successful in many ways and quite different from the other 2,500 or so graduate schools in the U.S.
What does the MIT do differently?
What can we extract, learn and apply to our own organization to become more successful? What is it exactly that makes the MIT different and so successful?
The MIT is not a traditional university that seeks knowledge for knowledge sake. ‑ Believe it or not, this has been the mindset of many scholars and scientists since centuries and still is being lived today and taught to be carried forward. This engrained mindset became a way of thinking and approaching challenges for graduates – in the commercial workplace! Now, the workplace is different from academia as it typically must generate profit to sustain. (Let’s not consider the recent bail-outs an incentive to build business models around.)
The downside of this traditional ‘curiosity-only’ based approach is that one can easily fall in love with working towards perfection, diverting on interesting tangents or ending up with a product of academic beauty but falling short of commercial potential – ingenious, but useless. It’s like making the proverbial ever better mousetrap that hardly anyone will ever buy… (Well, in all honesty, I have seen some really cool new mousetraps just recently, but that’s a different story that I am happy to share upon request… anyway, you get the point)
Innovation is novelty plus application
That’s where the MIT is different: it backs up new ideas for tangible application with solid science. This approach is consistent with the MIT’s internal definition of innovation that also meets the commercial needs of companies outside this alma mater and comes down to this: Innovation is novelty plus its application.
A good idea alone is not enough – no matter how ingenious it is. It must be applied help solving a real-world problem effectively. Where the success metrics of traditional universities counts published articles, hence the classic ‘publish or perish’, the MIT focuses on practical and hands-on application as in ‘demo or die’! It brings together ivory tower and workbench in a most symbiotic and practical way. Less talking, more doing – and commercial success tends to follow naturally.
Do it like the MIT?
So, how can your organization become more like the MIT and making its innovation potential actionable in a reliable, robust and repeatable process?
Besides seeking knowledge for tangible application, the power of the MIT lays in its ability to bring together experts from many disciplines for cross-pollination. They work together and they learn from and with another by looking at problems from many different angles. Not surprisingly, the break-through solutions developed by these teams found on hands-on experimentation: demo or die! This often proves more creative and powerful than traditional and less diverse teams or organizations that tend to focus on incremental improvements. – Let’s take a closer look:
Does diversity matter?
First of all, what is ‘Diversity’? Diversity in organizations is often understood bluntly or interpreted narrowly as the goal to meet a certain quota of easily observable attributes like color or gender leading towards a more mixed and ‘colorful’ workforce. Voila! – Mission accomplished? Not really!
Imagine this more theoretical but possible case, where different looking staffers grew up together and shared similar experiences for a longer period like, let’s say, in an orphanage, a boarding school or an academy. The optical impression of this diverse workforce then is an illusion as they are anything but diverse except for their physical appearance.
(I am not elaborating on the likelihood of this example or the need for a customer-facing organization to reflect their customers and partners in the marketplace, since I want to make a different point here.)
Why diversity matters
What counts within an organization for innovation to go beyond incremental improvement is the diversity of thought, expertise and experience for a simple reason: Locking up your subject matter experts in a room to have them come up with innovative ideas over and over is not a recipe for success.
Sitting inside a box of conformity, homogeneity and consensus does not make good ingredients for breakthrough ideas and innovation – that is why we need to enable experts, in particular, to think ‘outside-the-box’ by mixing up teams by inducing meaningful diversity.
Innovation happens at the crossroads
Since break-through ideas tend to emerge at the crossroads of disciplines and experiences, closed and less diverse groups of experts simply cannot come up with them easily – if at all!
In fact, working with non-experts or experts from very different disciplines or lines of work not only opens up your experts’ network but also forces them into a different thought processes for this fresh and different perspective we are all looking for. Many managers initially regard this as sand in their well-oiled machine that only delays or complicates getting the work done – and therefore avoid mixing in heterogeneous expertise. Nonetheless, experts thinking out of their box of expertise emerges from combining different disciplines – related or completely unrelated fields of research and application.
Outsiders or even laymen ask questions that experts would not dare to ask their peers so not to appear incompetent, inefficient, insulting or insane! Research even shows that experts tend to trust other experts too much whom they worked with closely over extended periods: They don’t question each other’s judgment and assumptions anymore – which may just be what is needed to innovate!
Why experts don’t research enough
Experts do not research enough. – Does this sound counter-intuitive to you?
Interestingly, scientific data suggests that experts research less within and on the fringes of their own field of expertise. A high level of expertise can therefore become a liability and lead to blind-spots for experts. – Why is that? Established experts in their field tend to focus rather on what they already know, assume knowing what there is to know about the subject matter and stop questioning their own knowledge. This leads to a pattern seeking to reinforce the own knowledge, thinking and point of view rather than challenging it!
What experts should do instead is exploring more what they don’t now, seeking out challenges of ideas, experiences and findings by experts of other disciplines. This cross-pollination is more likely to lead to the next breakthrough.
By the way, on the other end of the expert spectrum, the naïve laymen researches too little too, because they don’t understand the basics and don’t know what to look for or what is important. It is the ‘amateurs’ with a general understanding of the subject that research most, since they feel they need to get a deeper and broader scoop while knowing what to look for and what could be relevant.
Establish a ‘meritocracy’
A key ingredient of the MIT is championing a meritocracy, i.e. honor and progression of talented and able individuals based on their achievements rather than their status, tenure or other privileges in the organization. This levels the playing field and motivates by focusing everyone on the only thing that really counts: performance.
Sure, many companies and organizations claim to have a ‘performance culture’ or claim to ‘pay by performance’ as the primary incentive for their employees. This ‘performance culture’ often looks better on paper than in reality (except for small pockets of jobs like freelancing sales staff, who only receive a margin or commission for a successful transaction, but a low or none fixed salary otherwise).
For staff without commission incentive, how much of the compensation actually does tie to performance directly? Odds are you can get along just fine in a day job even without exceeding expectations in performance reviews.
It is difficult to compare a company with an academic institution (like the MIT) directly in a meaningful way, since students are typically in for the glory of pushing limits to try out and create things together with other brilliant minds that exceed most people’s wildest dreams. However, it is fair to say that the MIT’s meritocracy and entrepreneurial framework sets up a winning concept with commercial success and material pay-off to follow rather naturally. – Check out the MIT’s fabulous Entrepreneurship Center (http://entrepreneurship.mit.edu/) to find more on entrepreneurship at the MIT.
The lesson here is not to focus on monetary rewards alone or as the first tool at hand but to become flexible and cater to what is important to inspire your staff to greatness. Foster an environment of healthy competition, transparency, high ethical standards and consider catering to individual preferences and needs beyond handing out money broadly like watering flowers. While money is indeed most important to one, others may prefer a few days off, handwritten note by an executive or individual office decoration, for example.
Open Innovation
Another aspect to consider is that research is costly and resources are limited. Cross-pollination can be a cost effective alternative.
Open innovation, however, works differently and is for genuine out-of-the-box thinkers. It is a powerful approach especially if you don’t have the resources or time to conduct the needed research yourself. The basic idea is that other people or organizations may already have a viable solution or approach to your problem. You don’t find and make these connections though if you don’t leave your ivory tower! Open innovation refers to looking for existing solutions beyond your usual area of expertise and even outside your industry and adapt or configure them to your problem at hand.
Sure, there are also options other than buying or licensing solutions, such as joint ventures, spin-offs or ‘skunkworks’ projects to invent outside the company. What model fits best depends on the organization, its environment and other constraints.
Classic examples of Open Innovation – and there are many, many more!
Bottom line
Innovation and Diversity are a dynamic duo! Both go hand in hand to wipe out blind-spots created by using the ‘usual suspects’, i.e. relying on the same team of experts over and over again.
In a nutshell, for organizations to thrive, diversity of thought and continuous innovation need an environment to flourish in and become embedded in the organizational culture:
Links on innovation in the OrgChanger.com blog:
It is difficult if not impossible to assess organizational culture directly. Instead, managers favor surveys to measuring organizational climate as a first step. However, surveys fall short in many ways and can lead to skewed results as input to managerial decision-making. Better than surveys is observing employee behavior with a meaningful metrics.
What is your organizational culture?
No matter where you work, you are a part of it: the organizational culture. Culture is understood to comprise shared beliefs, values, norms, traditions but also myths of employees about interpersonal relationships, behaviors and activities of the organization.
A (favorable) strong culture indicates alignment to organizational values and goals – some call it the organization’s personality. This is the internal glue for collaboration and outstanding results as an organization. In a strong culture, ‘can do’ stories share ‘how things are being done around here’ that inspire and motivate employees to action and ‘organizational citizenship behavior’. A strong culture supports employee satisfaction and retention as well as innovation and productivity. (See also: How to create innovation culture with diversity!)
In contrast, misalignment of values and goals in an unfavorable weak culture has an eroding effect. They easily lead to extensive rules and bureaucracy that rely on exercising control. Working in this place is not much fun. Don’t expect anyone to go the extra mile!
Unfortunately, organizational culture is a slippery and complex subject, which makes it hard to grasp – and hard to measure directly. It is easier to feel than to express.
– Try it! How does the culture of your organization feel in your gut? How about putting it in words?
How to measure culture?
A common approach is to measure a company’s organizational climate by looking at the culture’s outcomes or consequences rather than trying to grasp culture directly. Thereby, the climate is used as surrogate marker for the underlying culture, since outcomes are easier to observe and to measure.
Here we find a handle on whether the employees are happy at work and feel valued, if they enjoy their work environment and trust their colleagues, if they go the ‘extra mile’ for their team – or if they are frustrated, disengaged or even act hostile against coworkers or the organization.
Factors to establish a metrics offer themselves relating to –for example- communication, accountability, behavioral standards, rewards, trust, and commitment.
Organizational climate’s primary driver is daily leadership that influences the expectations as well as the behavior of all individuals in the organization. The leadership also determines the organizational structure, another key to an organization’s effectiveness. Both enable the organization to reach its goals, but also reflect priorities and heavily affect how employees communicate, collaborate and interact with each other.
Many factors obscure the clear picture including rapidly growing workforce and geographic separation but also the way we actually measure organizational culture.
Yet another survey?
Many companies invest in surfacing climate data to ‘feel the pulse’ of their staff and to confirm positive effects or apply corrective action to adverse findings.
The most common way to measure climate is a climate survey and repeated to compare changes over time. Despite our daily information overload, many companies typically use surveys to collect data from as many employees as possible to paint a representative picture of the company.
Surveys seem the first tool in the managerial arsenal. They appear attractive, seem simple and powerful. Survey results are seen as straightforward, clear, quantifiable and reflecting the ‘truth’ since the workforce was asked directly.
‑ But are surveys truly the best tool available or even an proper tool at all as a starting point?
What is wrong with surveys?
Unfortunately, surveys are far from ideal for several reasons.
The first issue we face is that there is no common standard for measuring the ‘climate’. Every organization or consultant comes up with a different scale. If an organization introduces its own scale and applies their metrics consistently, it can build a database over time. The data, however, only compares directly against other client organizations or industries that were measured similarly, i.e. sharing the same scale, at a premium for this proprietary benchmarking.
Even worse, results hardly compare because surveys ask questions relying on language. A slight nuance in phrasing of a question may change the meaning and influence the responses. After all, words are ambiguous and open for interpretation – and even more so in a multi-cultural society and multi-lingual. For consistency and easy processing, they typically come with a fixed set of response options such as multiple choice, which can limit the responders’ options and influence what they respond.
Often overlooked, the real workload comes after the survey closed in the analysis, when you start slicing the data to combine questions, sub-populations or start exploratory analyses in an afterthought with all the shiny data you find in your hands that seem to open endless opportunity for finding answers. This is where you easily run out of time or budget – and where it becomes tempting to cut corners just to finish up and deliver results while sacrificing depth and consistency.
Surveys tend to be inherently skewed – Why?
When was the last time you enjoyed taking a survey?
Our email in-boxes are full of customer service surveys for a recent purchase or some service call over the phone or online. The whole world seems wanting to improve their services – and sends us a survey.
However, surveys are far from ideal for several reasons including these (and many more):
The list goes on… you got the point. The question remains what is a better approach to measure organizational climate?
Why it is better to measure behavior
A survey measures our intent – not our behavior. Unarguably, behavior is a much stronger indicator than intent. It comes down to whether we observe people putting their money where their mouth is or if we get only the lip service that a survey represents. – Think of it as the litmus test you remember from chemistry class: It shows you the truth and reveals whether your assumptions hold true!
Let us look at the benefits of measuring behavior using the same list again:
How to measure behavior?
Now, measuring behavior is not always easy. It requires thinking through the cause-and-effect dependencies. – A well-known example of how not to do it is the questionable relation of using the price of butter in Bangladesh to predict the stock market in the USA…
What the right metrics is depends on what you want to find out. What is the underlying business problem you are trying to solve? Many roads can lead to Rome, so to speak, but the basic idea is to keep your target simple. Choose a target that is meaningful, robust and easy to observe.
Clarity helps. As much as we crave being informed and gather data this approach is not helpful, since it tends to produce clutter. Instead, focus on measuring the minimum you need as the basis for making a sound decision. Don’t fall for the nice-to-have and garnish data you could have in addition.
How precise do you need the results really to be? – As an example, you may be concerned about low meeting attendance. Does it make a difference for your decision-making if you find out that in three consecutive meetings “63.26%, 58.18% and 69.4% of the invitees did not show up” versus “on average, 2/3 don’t attend”? – Let me guess, “2/3” does just fine to decide slimming down who is invited in the future or to change the purpose of the meeting, right?
The key is to stick to clearly observable behavior. Some solid behavioral data may already exist within the organization. – For example, a long tenure and low turnover may reflect that employees prefer to stay with organization, while many internal job applications reflect dissatisfaction with their current position or department.
Bottom line
Next time you think of running a survey consider taking a close look at employee behavior first!
References
The proposed business model for ERGs forms a foundation for continued innovation, strategic alignment and measurable results. It turns an ERG into a true and sustainable business resource for its members as well as the hosting organization.
Summary – The increasing diversity of employees at the workplace led to employees gathering along affinity dimensions like birds-of-a-feather to form networking groups within organizations. The next step goes beyond affinity and establishes employee resource groups (ERGs) strategically as a business resource and powerful driver for measurable business impact and strategic innovation bottom-up.
Limited to social?
Employee resource groups (ERGs) emerge for various reasons. They tend to start with a social underpinning that naturally unites and organizes like-minded employees. ERGs come in different flavors mostly along the traditional lines of diversity characteristics such as ethnicity, skin color, age, gender, physical (dis)ability, sexual orientation, military veterans, etc.
For ERGs, a ‘social stickiness’ is important and can be the key integrating factor of employee populations within organizations. It may also influence the choices of ERG goals and activities to a large extent. This may result, however, in possibly limiting the ERG and its members to be seen as a ‘social club’ of sorts by others. Management, in particular, may not see the direct (or even indirect) positive business impact that an ERG can have.
This is where ERGs can fall short: when they fail to tie a strong business-focused bond that ensures continued support by leadership that in return ensures the ERG can sustain and proper for the better of its members as well as the hosting organization.
Becoming a business resource
From a management perspective, ERGs can provide social ties within the workforce that are mostly seen as favorable ‑ at least as long as it does not affect the employee performance; whether perceived or real.
Better off is the ERG that demonstrates an unambiguous contribution to the bottom line. A clear business value proposition sets a solid foundation that makes it easy to communicate with and convince executives securing their continued support. The company benefits from positive business outcomes as a direct result of the ERG activities, while it engages employees broader and deeper. This uses more of the employees’ true potential to ‘maximize the human capital’ as an important element also of employee engagement, development and retention.
This approach serves not only the company but has advantages also for its employees and the ERG in return. The ERG members benefit directly in many ways such as by interesting work outside the immediate scope of their job, by developing new skills and by increasing their visibility within the organization and continued ‘employability’, i.e. their personal market value as an employee.
So what is the key to success, how do you ‘build’ an innovation-driven and business-focused ERG?
A ‘business model’ for ERGs
My proposal is to establish the ERG as a self-propelling and sustainable system, an ongoing process that continues functioning quite independently from changes in the ERG leadership and consistently delivers innovations. Individual leaders are important for operations and make valuable contributions, but the ERG must be able to continue functioning even if key players become unavailable and replaced.
The following dimensions are generic and apply to any organization. Here, we use them to describe a general business model for the ERG:
1. Strategy
2. People
3. Processes
4. Organization
5. Metrics/Rewards.
To illustrate the model and making it more tangible I use a generic example. It is based on NxGen (for Next Generation at the Workplace), a generational-oriented and business-focused ERG that I founded. NxGen was recognized in early 2010 as a best-practices approach by the National Affinity Leadership Congress (NALC).
1. Strategy
The strategy brings to the point the ERG’s goal and objectives. A well-thought-out value proposition is a foundation for the ERG.
For example, NxGen is a forum to develop leadership skills, networking and problem-solving that aims to open up cross-functional/cross-disciplinary opportunities for its active members through strategic business projects with measurable results. As a goal, NxGen aims to become a sounding board for management as a valued business resource.
2. People practices
People, active volunteers, are the life-blood of every ERG. Staffing and selection are crucial and continued activities to induce fresh ideas and prevent burn-out of established ERG members. What you are looking for are active volunteers who are passionate and energetic. You want members who become active change agents, role models, within the organization. Value a diverse set of backgrounds and capabilities that can complement another.
Rather than trying to recruit new members, focus on how to attract new members to engage and actively participate (in contrast to the ones signing up to receive email updates or a periodic newsletter, which is a passive form of membership). NxGen membership is open to all employees.
There is a broad range of benefits for active ERG members that can include (but are definitely not limited to):
At NxGen, we see that younger employees (primarily Generation Y also called Millennial, born after 1980) tend to drive the ERG activities most. The explanations I offer is that GenY’ers, in particular, enter the workplace as well-educated professionals, optimistic and motivated to make a difference. GenY was brought up to believe they can achieve anything and are interested to explore lateral career moves. They are used to collaborating in teams to overcome obstacles and network while leveraging technology effectively to this end. At the workplace, GenY typically is not (yet) part of the decision-making bodies due to their junior positions ‑ but they do want to be heard (and should be listed to given their increasing numbers in the demographic shift of the population that has reached the workforce).
3. Processes
The ERG acts through business-relevant projects. At NxGen, the member ‘grass-roots’ identify otherwise un-addressed or under-served business needs that the ERG chooses to pursue. Based on a clear value proposition (return-on-investment, ROI) for the organization the ERG seeks executive sponsorship for each project. The executive sponsor ensures strategic alignment with the organization’s goal, expertise in the functional area, political support and funding for the project (since the ERG has no funds of its own).
The project scope often lays outside of the immediate job description of the ERG-appointed project leader allowing for broader hands-on learning opportunities. Applying professional project management methods to all projects ensures the projects deliver the specified deliverables.
The ERG core team steers and administrates the ERG project portfolio which is documented in an annual business plan and shared publicly. As resources are limited, not all imaginable projects can be conducted at once but are staged. Projects can build upon and leverage each other while making use of synergies whenever possible.
In the beginning, it might be challenging to find meaningful projects that make the best use of the ERG’s resources and capabilities with favorable business impact. It takes time and persistence to develop a trustful relationship with executive management and to gain credibility as an ERG to attracts more complex and important projects from management in return.
NxGen works and communicates openly, it acts transparently and leverages (social) media to inform and connect with its members and non-members displaying operations and result of the ERG’s work.
4. Organization
The NxGen ERG operates within a general framework set by a company’s office to ensure all ERGs abide the company policies. This office also provides an organizational home for ERGs within the company. It generally coordinates and supports the different activities across ERGs and ensures each ERG has a distinguished executive sponsor to connect the ERG with senior management.
A charter defines the basic roles and processes of the NxGen ERG in more detail and is posted publicly. A core team of active members guides the ERG activities and ensures ERG operability. The core team is lead by the ERG’s elected chair and co-chair(s); it further comprises the project leaders, distinguished role-holders, and liaisons to key functions in the organization. The core team members support and advise each other. The ERG provides a safe and social environment that relies on trust among the members to connect, to build relationships, to network and to run projects.
NxGen actively reaches out to other ERGs, innovative groups within the organization but also other operating units and companies to cooperate, share, benchmark and collaborate on common goals.
5. Metrics and rewards system
How do you measure success, i.e. the effectiveness of an ERG? An annual business plan covers the portfolio of ERG projects. It serves as an instrument to measure the ERG performance across all ERG activities that the ERG chair is held accountable for.
What are the rewards for active ERG members? Besides the benefits listed in the above section ‘People’, accountability and success for individual members derive from their projects or their input to other ERG activities that all have clear objectives and a success metrics attached. Driving the change and making a difference is a reward in itself.
NxGen and individual members received several awards and recognition for their work inside and outside the company which the ERG celebrates in public. Some members list their ERG involvement and experience proudly on their résumé which is an indicator that the ERG’s value proposition is effective for its members, i.e. the members value the ERG membership, projects, recognition and awards as means of their ‘employability’.
Building the ERG as an innovation incubator
The business model positions the ERG clearly as a powerful business resource for the organization but it can be even more. The ERG can serve as an ‘innovation incubator’ by combining an attractive system with creative space in an effective governance framework. The processes create measurable value for the individual and the organization that can significantly contribute to process innovation and also drives product innovation.
In an empowering bottom-up movement, the ERG directly connects its active members from any level of hierarchy with the decision-makers high up. This bears the potential to cut right through established or perceived boundaries such as hierarchy, bureaucracy, and red-tape or functional silos that may severely limit the effectiveness and innovative effectiveness of other units that were created top-down within the organization.
Herein lays the deeper potential of ERGs as a true business resource and going beyond possible self-inflicted limitation to social affinity. ERGs can well be the means that contribute to driving the future success of an organization for an organization that understands and value how ERGs open opportunities to tap into its workforce and unleashes hidden potential.
Additional reading
Changing the organization from within by engaging employees in business-focused employee resource groups (ERGs) – the practical “how-to” guide!
Why do companies need business-focused ERGs?
The answer can be as simple as this: Because it makes good business sense!
But what makes this answer so simple? – Well, because it’s made up of a few simple aspects:
First of all, every company, unless it is classified as a non-profit, is in business for one reason: to make money by providing some sort of product or service to its customers.
Simply put, if a company fails to rack up profits it will go out of business. That’s why focusing on the business benefits, the “bottom line”, the return on investment (ROI) makes not only sense but is key for successful employee resource groups (ERGs). It’s the bottom-line arguments, the financial benefits, that open the doors to executive support, buy-in, and funding.
Second, to take advantage of the diversity and capabilities of the human capital readily available.
Let’s look at companies, its workforce and its markets today: We live and work globally – everyone is connected. Our markets today are just as diverse and multi-faceted as our workforce should be. It takes all we know and who we are as diverse human beings (coming from different cultures and ethnicities, religious beliefs, physical characteristics, sexual orientation, and so on) to understand what our customers need and how we can give it to them.
Therefore, it makes sense not only to diversify the product portfolio to mitigate risk and seize opportunity but also to diversify the workforce for the same reasons. Not tapping into all of your workforce’s diversity and capabilities puts you at a disadvantage to companies who know how to maximize their human capital effectively.
Are you still with me? So, the next question is how to meet this goal.
Stay tuned for practical advice, keeping it simple, and examples taking you through the steps on how to build a business-focused ERG.
– Any questions so far?
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