We get asked this all the time in our Cisco Heritage project, along with "What is the output?"
We describe four elements of the procedure that we use -- IDENTIFY, CAPTURE, PRESERVE, and INTERPRET. The overall purpose is to CAPTURE YOUR STORIES BEFORE THEY ARE LOST
Turns out, we're lucky re the technology, businesses, and organizations of the past fifty years--years that have spawned stunning sweeping changes in civilization that we still scarcely can appreciate--because many of the people who made it happen are still alive.
Interestingly, historians have traditionally focused on OLD THINGS, viewing recent events and trends as POLITICAL SCIENCE, SOCIOLOGY, or worse.
We couldn't disagree more. Professionally produced oral and video histories are a valuable asset for the group (whether company, organization, or groups of friends) that commissions them. For the organization itself, much value accrues via advertising content and public relations activities. As a motivator for employees, these are powerful stories connecting a past to the present and future.
More broadly, though, such interviews capture and preserve lessons that span multipole groups, both inside and outside the sponsoring organization--they are an impressive investment in the future, for understanding the origins, the decisions, the conflicts, and the successes.
InnovaScapes interviewers are practiced in these techniques, with significant work in major corporations and organizations over the past twenty-five years. Sometimes the work results in interpretive assets (e.g. "The Return Map" (Harvard Business Review), THE HP PHENOMENON or SERIAL INNOVATORS (Stanford Press); frequently it is a compendium available for many researchers to glean important insights for their own themes and perspectives.
We bring both contextual understanding and an empathetic style to each interview, resulting in a conversational tone that relaxes the interviewee, promoting more reflective and candid appraisals. It is an engaging and open process, which concludes with a transcript that the interviewee can review and approve before committing it to the preservation file. Cross-interviewing with multiple folk later allows an important ingredient--fact-checking, or memory enhancement as we call it. "Oh, yes, George, I'd forgotten your key role in this project..."
InnovaScapes has several projects underway at the moment; contact us us if you'd be interested in knowing more about the process or the impact of these activities.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
What have we learned re Oral & Video interviews
We're now halfway through the second phase of the Cisco Heritage interviews. With 100+ completed sessions, some conclusions are clear....
1. These stories, mostly focused on the 'early era' 1984-1996, are a magnificent testimony to the style, ethos, culture and drive of a company obsessed with its impact on the world as the Internet unfolded
2. The people 'knew that' but were so busy they didn't have time to reflect on the larger meaning. The interviews invariably evoked a pride, a satisfaction, even a whistle of admiration for what they did do
3. The stories are widespread, and varied, as you'd expect. Many interviewers select the 'leaders'--we consciously selected widely, from tech writers to service techs, to engineers, to data entry folk, to admin secretaries, to speech writers, marketing and HR folk, as well as the executives 'in the books'
4. The need for 'credit' is uncommonly low, a bit of a surprise for us, and a pleasant one at that. Instead, there is a pride of being part of 'the team' and a shock that 'my story' is of much interest. Self-effacing is not often used about Cisco as a company, but we find it over and over.
5. The warts are showing through in places--no one (well, hardly anyone) has focused on 'the dirt' but many have shared stories that are seldom discussed in 'polite circles' We feel that the candor and the respect that people have shown in sharing these colorful vignettes adds greatly to the mix.
6. Views from competitors and vendors alike have also given a richness to the activity, providing a different perspective and a cross-reference point for many of the stories.
Would we recommend this procedure be used more widely. No question!
1. These stories, mostly focused on the 'early era' 1984-1996, are a magnificent testimony to the style, ethos, culture and drive of a company obsessed with its impact on the world as the Internet unfolded
2. The people 'knew that' but were so busy they didn't have time to reflect on the larger meaning. The interviews invariably evoked a pride, a satisfaction, even a whistle of admiration for what they did do
3. The stories are widespread, and varied, as you'd expect. Many interviewers select the 'leaders'--we consciously selected widely, from tech writers to service techs, to engineers, to data entry folk, to admin secretaries, to speech writers, marketing and HR folk, as well as the executives 'in the books'
4. The need for 'credit' is uncommonly low, a bit of a surprise for us, and a pleasant one at that. Instead, there is a pride of being part of 'the team' and a shock that 'my story' is of much interest. Self-effacing is not often used about Cisco as a company, but we find it over and over.
5. The warts are showing through in places--no one (well, hardly anyone) has focused on 'the dirt' but many have shared stories that are seldom discussed in 'polite circles' We feel that the candor and the respect that people have shown in sharing these colorful vignettes adds greatly to the mix.
6. Views from competitors and vendors alike have also given a richness to the activity, providing a different perspective and a cross-reference point for many of the stories.
Would we recommend this procedure be used more widely. No question!
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Attitudes about innovation
At some recent workshops, I put six groups of ideas in front of people as shown here
The answers surprised me (a bit). Innovation ranked FOURTH from a group of 120 senior managers at a large multi-national company.
At another company, Innovation ranked SECOND, from 89 managers
At yet a third, it was FIFTH, from about 70 managers
WHERE SHOULD IT BE?
The answers surprised me (a bit). Innovation ranked FOURTH from a group of 120 senior managers at a large multi-national company.
At another company, Innovation ranked SECOND, from 89 managers
At yet a third, it was FIFTH, from about 70 managers
WHERE SHOULD IT BE?
Internal Chasms, canyons and voids
Many of you studied (or at least skimmed) Geoffrey Moore's CROSSING THE CHASM a few years ago. His thesis was (and is) a great one--enthusiasts (read NERDS) and early adopters provide initial sales for any new product or service. But then there is a big GULF before the quiet majority sign up. The majority has several categories--the WAIT and SEE crowd, the SKEPTICs, and the OVER MY DEAD BODY types. But the problem is that all of them are slow to adopt new methods, and that hampers the enthusiasm of any start-up, or new offering.
This is an EXTERNAL CHASM--meaning it is to a significant degree OUT OF YOUR CONTROL
We've identified three INTERNAL CHASMS as well, reasons that larger companies so often fail at innovation by comparison with small companies.
The FIRST in a FUNDING CHASM. Paradoxically, larger companies, with lots more money, have less to spend on speculative things than do smaller companies. HUH? Well, oddly, this is true. The shareholders want it back, in terms of dividends, or share price, or both. To drive share price, the earnings spiral must be ever upward, which means that speculative 'new money' is not spent. Refinement becomes not just the norm, but the rule. So new research money doesn't get spent.
The SECOND is a RESEARCH CHASM. As the money doesn't get spent, the best researchers tend to leave for greener pastures. This leads to outsourcing your new product development. Ohmygawd
The THIRD, by far the most prevalent way to shoot yourself in the heart, is the CANNIBALISM CHASM. This is the one where the sales teams (and often manufacturing and marketing and support) refuse the new product / service / concept because of the disruption it causes for smooth operations. Case in pony: Kodak pioneered digital photography just fine, holding more than 17,000 patents in this area. So the funding chasm and the research chasms were handled. But the operational side didn't like the new stuff, and loved the old wet chemical stuff. And they rode it into the grave.
Moore covers some of this in DEALING WITH DARWIN, but we think it could be explicated more completely. Hopefully, we'll get that into a readable version this year.
This is an EXTERNAL CHASM--meaning it is to a significant degree OUT OF YOUR CONTROL
We've identified three INTERNAL CHASMS as well, reasons that larger companies so often fail at innovation by comparison with small companies.
The FIRST in a FUNDING CHASM. Paradoxically, larger companies, with lots more money, have less to spend on speculative things than do smaller companies. HUH? Well, oddly, this is true. The shareholders want it back, in terms of dividends, or share price, or both. To drive share price, the earnings spiral must be ever upward, which means that speculative 'new money' is not spent. Refinement becomes not just the norm, but the rule. So new research money doesn't get spent.
The SECOND is a RESEARCH CHASM. As the money doesn't get spent, the best researchers tend to leave for greener pastures. This leads to outsourcing your new product development. Ohmygawd
The THIRD, by far the most prevalent way to shoot yourself in the heart, is the CANNIBALISM CHASM. This is the one where the sales teams (and often manufacturing and marketing and support) refuse the new product / service / concept because of the disruption it causes for smooth operations. Case in pony: Kodak pioneered digital photography just fine, holding more than 17,000 patents in this area. So the funding chasm and the research chasms were handled. But the operational side didn't like the new stuff, and loved the old wet chemical stuff. And they rode it into the grave.
Moore covers some of this in DEALING WITH DARWIN, but we think it could be explicated more completely. Hopefully, we'll get that into a readable version this year.
Friday, January 10, 2014
The nature of research -- courtesy Jim Pelkey
Jim Pelkey's 'new book' The History of Computer Communications" is outstanding, both because it is done from a serious engineer's and investor's standpoint vs. a historian's approach, and because it is a time capsule from twenty-five years ago.
I referenced this earlier, but if you missed that, See http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/7/7.10-ReturnVentureCapital.html
What I want to call you attention to, though, is the significant interview that Pelkey had with Phil Kaufman, then CEO of Silcion Compilers after a terrific areer at Intel:
JLP: I hold a view that the research process in the United States is in great disarray. With ARPA becoming DARPA, and Bell Labs post-divestiture, NSF funding individual professors at universities, but the needs of today of systems projects where you cross disciplines and there are many people and they are big projects, and if we don't start investing in research in a different way, in terms of these information technologies, we're living today off stuff that was done in the '60s and early '70s, for the most part.
I referenced this earlier, but if you missed that, See http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/7/7.10-ReturnVentureCapital.html
What I want to call you attention to, though, is the significant interview that Pelkey had with Phil Kaufman, then CEO of Silcion Compilers after a terrific areer at Intel:
JLP: I hold a view that the research process in the United States is in great disarray. With ARPA becoming DARPA, and Bell Labs post-divestiture, NSF funding individual professors at universities, but the needs of today of systems projects where you cross disciplines and there are many people and they are big projects, and if we don't start investing in research in a different way, in terms of these information technologies, we're living today off stuff that was done in the '60s and early '70s, for the most part.
PK: Oh, I agree completely.
JLP: And where are we making the investments today that we're going to see, in 20 years time, that's what's become (unintelligible)?
PK: I think there's a vast hole to do the kinds of systems, if you will, research that the Bell Labs -- Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, Sarnoff Research, those don't exist in the same form today, even if they exist. The companies that are still doing it are doing much less of it, and much more short term product-oriented. At the same time, as you say, the government funding is going into one-off kind of things, and mostly researching the past. A lot of the universities are turning from real research to product development. I consider that, for example, that Berkeley's done a lot of wonderful stuff in CAD, but they haven't done research. They've done product development. They've been a low-cost employee product development team. That's very nice, but it isn't research, and it isn't really advancing the state of the art, but it's where they can get funding. Companies will fund them because it's short term.
JLP: I think it's a real issue for us as a society. I'm going to address it in this book.
PK: I'll tell you a related issue that you may want to think about, which is one I've been giving a lot of thought to, and that is 'how do companies do research and product development?' In the US, venture capital drives the disassociation of companies, and new start-up companies and small companies, and the nature of a start-up company is you have to do everything, but you have to build your product from scratch too. Fifty or 75% of what you put into R&D is building stuff that isn't innovative and isn't part of the essence of the technology you deliver, and has no secondary use because you're a small company and you don't have any other place to put it. Big companies, where they have some cross-fertilization potential, at least in the US, are notoriously bad at doing it, and I can't say that I know how to do it. I spent a lot of time at Intel trying to drive synergy, and I'm convinced that's the wrong thing to do, that big companies should be holding companies and at most they should drive communications, but the ones that are doing it best are the vertically integrated Japanese companies, not the American companies, of reusing things, and the relatively larger companies. If Mentor develops a schematic editor, they can use it across a very broad products line. If we develop a schematic editor, we use it across 500 customers. One of the things that I've been trying to come up with is a way for multiple small companies to share technology, not just technology but real products that are developed, that aren't in their mainstream.
JLP: Right. I agree.
PK: And nobody's come up with a way to do that, but I've been trying to work on some things like that, and other efforts --
JLP: Actually, you should get together with Gordon, because Gordon just gave a speech last week that he was telling me about, where he was saying that he wants companies to break up their engineering efforts. He thinks you only need one fifth the number of engineers doing engineering. In fact, a lot of engineers are doing enabling things, such as testers and so on. Those should be shared across companies.
PK: Absolutely.
JLP: So it's the same vein. He's going to try to write an article for Spectrum on this issue.
PK: Well, I've got a paper that I've written and circulated to a number of companies that I call a Technology (unintelligible), on how to try to do things like that. It was dastardly hard to do, because you've got NIH and management issues.
JLP: One of the issues I address because I'm addressing technology industries is that we, in this country, going to your point, have been very good at building small companies. We haven't been all that good at building big companies. If the trend of today continues, we need more big companies in order to be able to compete on this global basis with the pan-European and the Japanese companies, and we're not doing that. Is that important or not important?
WAS THIS PRESCIENT OR WHAT? 1988 words
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
So WHICH COMPANIES, PEOPLE made the rapid Internet DEPLOYMENT
My twenty focus groups were each essentially groups of eight to twelve folk, 195 in all
Virtually all of them were professionals--half were designers in the high-tech sector, a quarter are or were executives in high-tech circles, and the final quarter are business people or academics very familiar with our technological age.
In other words, not a David Letterman "man on the street" interview set
The companies they named included a potpourri:
The clear winners were BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman), CERN, Netscape, RAND, and XeroxPARC
A second group included IBM, Microsoft, Synoptics, WorldCom, Adobe, 3Com, Apple and DEC
Universities and societies got named a lot: UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, MN, Utah, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Illinois
A third group was AT&T, A/OL, CompuServe, Telenet, Bridge Networks, Vitalink, and Equatorial Communications (I had not heard that name in years!)
Companies with single mentions included Cisco, Cray, Disney, and HP
The people named were almost a 'who's who':
Vint Cerf was a clear winner; Doug Engelbart was 2nd; Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Metcalfe, and Larry Roberts tied for third, just ahead of Bob Kahn. All of these are well-known inventors of the infrastructure, but 'deployment'?
Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, Michael Eisner, Paul Baran, J.C.Lickliter, and Ivan Sutherland each drew several votes.
Al Gore got mentioned, as did Len Kleinrock, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, Irwin Jacobs, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Ed Teller, and Bill Gates.
No one from HP was named. The lone person who cited it had no name to go with it.
No one from Cisco was named. The lone person who cited Cisco as a company was asked "who" at Cisco. The answer: "Cisco was headed by a man and a woman; I don't know their names, but she was always grumpy.”
Virtually all of them were professionals--half were designers in the high-tech sector, a quarter are or were executives in high-tech circles, and the final quarter are business people or academics very familiar with our technological age.
In other words, not a David Letterman "man on the street" interview set
The companies they named included a potpourri:
The clear winners were BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman), CERN, Netscape, RAND, and XeroxPARC
A second group included IBM, Microsoft, Synoptics, WorldCom, Adobe, 3Com, Apple and DEC
Universities and societies got named a lot: UCLA, UCSB, UCSD, Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, MN, Utah, Maryland, Cornell, Wisconsin, and Illinois
A third group was AT&T, A/OL, CompuServe, Telenet, Bridge Networks, Vitalink, and Equatorial Communications (I had not heard that name in years!)
Companies with single mentions included Cisco, Cray, Disney, and HP
The people named were almost a 'who's who':
Vint Cerf was a clear winner; Doug Engelbart was 2nd; Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Metcalfe, and Larry Roberts tied for third, just ahead of Bob Kahn. All of these are well-known inventors of the infrastructure, but 'deployment'?
Steve Jobs, John Lasseter, Michael Eisner, Paul Baran, J.C.Lickliter, and Ivan Sutherland each drew several votes.
Al Gore got mentioned, as did Len Kleinrock, Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale, Marc Andreessen, Irwin Jacobs, Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Ed Teller, and Bill Gates.
No one from HP was named. The lone person who cited it had no name to go with it.
No one from Cisco was named. The lone person who cited Cisco as a company was asked "who" at Cisco. The answer: "Cisco was headed by a man and a woman; I don't know their names, but she was always grumpy.”
The 'story' behind the posits
Posit #1, that the Internet is an epochal shift for civilization
James Fellows, an erudite Atlantic Monthly contributor, conducted a survey of "The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs since the Wheel," published in the November 2013 Atlantic Monthly, pp. 56-68
His panel of a dozen experts included Leslie Berlin, John Doerr, George Dyson, Walt Isaacson, Joi Ito, and Padmasree Warrior--indeed a prestigious grouping.
They concluded that the Internet ranked 9th, behind (in order) vaccination, the internal combustion engine, paper, optical lenses, semiconductor technology, penicillin, electricity, and the printing press.
It was well ahead of airplanes, refrigeration, the personal computer, the automobile, making steel, nuclear fusion, the telephone, radio or television.
Hummn, quite a list of what makes our society work, huh?
NO ARGUMENT THAT IT IS A BIG DEAL, RIGHT?
Posit #2, it happened OVERNIGHT
November 17, 1988 was the date of the first contact from America to Europe via 'an Internet'
The Internet Society says in 1991, there were 900 operational networks in the world on the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee released the WWW URL definitions in 1993 from CERN
Internet Society founded in 1993
Netscape went public in August 1995
October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (USA) defined "Internet" as the official name
The Internet Society says that in 1996, there were 50,000 operational networks WW on the Internet
According to the Internet Society, January 1, 1999, there were 50,000,000 operational networks in 206 of the 248 countries of the world on the Internet
Dec 31, 2000: 360 Million users, one-third in the USA
Dec 31, 2012: 2.406 Billion users, one-eighth in the USA (80% of population); Europe has 63%, Asia 27%, and Africa 16% penetration. Overall, 34% of the world's population is using the Internet
NO ARGUMENT THAT IT HAPPENED "OVERNIGHT", RIGHT?
Compare this to television in America, for example. Demonstrated in 1927, offered for sale in 1937, 2,000 sets sold by 1940; 9 TV stations in 8 cities by 1945; 3.6 M sets by 1950; first national broadcast October 1951; 21 M sets end of 1953.
James Fellows, an erudite Atlantic Monthly contributor, conducted a survey of "The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs since the Wheel," published in the November 2013 Atlantic Monthly, pp. 56-68
His panel of a dozen experts included Leslie Berlin, John Doerr, George Dyson, Walt Isaacson, Joi Ito, and Padmasree Warrior--indeed a prestigious grouping.
They concluded that the Internet ranked 9th, behind (in order) vaccination, the internal combustion engine, paper, optical lenses, semiconductor technology, penicillin, electricity, and the printing press.
It was well ahead of airplanes, refrigeration, the personal computer, the automobile, making steel, nuclear fusion, the telephone, radio or television.
Hummn, quite a list of what makes our society work, huh?
NO ARGUMENT THAT IT IS A BIG DEAL, RIGHT?
Posit #2, it happened OVERNIGHT
November 17, 1988 was the date of the first contact from America to Europe via 'an Internet'
The Internet Society says in 1991, there were 900 operational networks in the world on the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee released the WWW URL definitions in 1993 from CERN
Internet Society founded in 1993
Netscape went public in August 1995
October 24, 1995, the Federal Networking Council (USA) defined "Internet" as the official name
The Internet Society says that in 1996, there were 50,000 operational networks WW on the Internet
According to the Internet Society, January 1, 1999, there were 50,000,000 operational networks in 206 of the 248 countries of the world on the Internet
Dec 31, 2000: 360 Million users, one-third in the USA
Dec 31, 2012: 2.406 Billion users, one-eighth in the USA (80% of population); Europe has 63%, Asia 27%, and Africa 16% penetration. Overall, 34% of the world's population is using the Internet
NO ARGUMENT THAT IT HAPPENED "OVERNIGHT", RIGHT?
Compare this to television in America, for example. Demonstrated in 1927, offered for sale in 1937, 2,000 sets sold by 1940; 9 TV stations in 8 cities by 1945; 3.6 M sets by 1950; first national broadcast October 1951; 21 M sets end of 1953.
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