Looking for Innovation in Recruiting Technology

Tomorrow and Friday I will be attending the Recruiting Innovation Summit, an ERE Media event, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I will also have the great pleasure and honor to serve as one of the members of the judging panel for the event's startup competition, where six companies, selected from almost 50 initial submissions, will vie for a $10K grand prize, and get the chance to demonstrate their innovative solutions to a gathering of industry experts and leaders.

Innovation in any market often comes from the startup space, where experimentation is encouraged, barriers to change are less, and ideas often have more of a chance to find their way to the market. Having a chance to demonsrate their solutions, and to network and engage with so many industry experts in one setting makes for what should be a really fantastic experience. 

In addition to the startup compentition, the Recruiting Innovation Summit will have presentations led by lumiaries like Steve Cadigan from LinkedIn, Lars Schmidt from NPR, Mike Junge from Google, and more.

Additionally, the Recruiting Innovation Summit will stream live over the next two days, you can sign up to be notified when the stream commences where to watch from here.

It should be a fantastic event and I hope to see and meet up with anyone in attendance, and if you can't make it out to Mountain View then be sure to check out the live stream, it will definitely be worth your time.

Great Thoughts Time

You've likely heard or read about Google's famous of '20% time', their practice that allows and even encourages Google engineers to spend as much as 20% of their working hours pursuing projects of their own creation and choice. Google's history and some part of their culture is shaped by this unusual convention, most organizations would be hard pressed to define roles and manage teams and project commitments if a large part of their workforce was simply 'given' one day a week to do as they pleased.The Hamming Distance

Certainly Google has benefited from this practice as much if not more than the individual engineers. Many successful projects, (Gmail being the most well known), are said to have gotten their start as '20% time' projects. But despite how well known Google's program is, the clear successes it has helped to produce, and the seemingly obvious talent attraction and retention benefits that such freedom, (and trust), must accrue to Google; this program has not seen widespread adoption outside Google. 

So while the actual practice of formal '20% time' is more or less a Google-specific program, the idea of taking some time to step back from the day-to-day grind and think about new projects or tricky problems that may or may not be related to current initiatives is not at all unique. But the problem for most of us that have to try and find available time or seek opportunity for similar consistent stretches of exploration is that well, we just never find the time. Or we only find the time when we should be doing something else. Like actually having a life outside of work, taking a vacation, or participating in family or community activities.

I was thinking about this over the weekend when I came across the transcript of a talk titled 'You and Your Research' given by the late mathematician Dr. Richard Hamming on March 7, 1986 to an audience at the legendary Bell Laboratories facility in New Jersey. The hour or so long talk covered a fairly wide range of topics and bits of advice from the then 71 year-old Hamming, but none more interesting than his description of his personal version of '20% time', something he called 'Great Thoughts Time.'  What is 'Great Thoughts Time?' From the written transcript of Hamming's talk:

If you want to do great work, you clearly must work on important problems, and you should have an idea. Along those lines at some urging from John Tukey and others, I finally adopted what I called 'Great Thoughts Time.' When I went to lunch Friday noon, I would only discuss great thoughts after that. By great thoughts I mean ones like: `What will be the role of computers in all of AT&T?', `How will computers change science?''

Very cool. Hamming invented his own version of '20% Time' sometime in the 1950s, except it was really just '10% Time', (from 'Friday noon' onward), and rather than an open and free-flowing kind of exercise, he concentrated his thinking on what he called 'Great Thoughts', those critical and truly important ideas that if he focused on them, he could do great work. If you read the entire transcript of Hamming's talk you get the sense of the competitiveness inherent amongst these super intelligent scientists at Bell Labs.

Hamming clearly believed that having the smarts alone would not guarantee a scientist, or anyone for that matter a shot at real greatness. To do great work you had to work on only the truly important problems. And to identify what those truly important problems were, you had to set aside a block in your schedule for 'Great Thoughts Time'.

What do you think? Do you set aside time to think about the biggest issues facing you, your profession, or your organization today?

Why not?

Relative Creativity

Take a look at the promotional posted for the 2009 movie 'The Men Who Stare at Goats' :

I didn't see it eitherNot a bad looking promotional effort most would say - edgy, creative kind of typeface, clever use of the actual goat in the series of profile images, stars of the film staring out wisfully into the middle distance.

Some big time names in the form of George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey also help the piece achieve a little bit more wow factor.

I am pretty sure the movie was not what you'd call a smash hit, or even a 'hit', (the IMDB page for the movie indicates about a $32M gross on an estimated $25M budget). But surely any disappointment in the eventual box office receipts for the movie would not be attributed to the poster that you see on the left, after all, while perhaps not being incredibly artistic and memorable, it certainly is a solid, 'B' kind of effort.

But take another look at the 'Men Who Stare at Goats' poster, this time in a larger context of very similar looking pieces, (courtesy of the Daily Inspiration site):

Look closely at the 'collage' image on the right - the 'Goats' poster is in there, (second row, third from the left). Keep looking

Weird how alike so many movie posters seem to be in terms of design, layout, color schemes, etc. If you take a longer look at the Daily Inspiration piece you'll see more examples of how similar movie genres, (Action, Romance, etc.), have consistently spawned similar looking promotional posters.

What might be interpreted as interesting, attractive, and well-executed when approached individually, (like the 'Goats' poster), takes on a slightly different tone and feeling when viewed through this lens. When thrown together dozens of other pieces informed with the same mindset and sensibility, the 'Goats' poster simply vanishes into the sea of sameness, (and safety, I suppose).

The point to all this? Not much of one admittedly, I saw the Daily Inspiration piece and it simply seemed interesting to me. I guess if there MUST be a point, (I think the Blogging for Dummies Book I read five years ago mentioned something about each post having some kind of point), it's that understanding context, and the ability of your audiences to compare the work we produce, the systems we design, and the strategies we devise and deploy with what else is being created, designed, and deployed is an important, and sometimes overlooked component of our success.  

It can be really easy to spring something out to our internal customers with the mindset that they are a kind of captive audience, without the ability to make free choices from competing alternatives. Kind of like a movie-goer whose multiplex has the same film running on all 12 screens. And for many workplace systems or policies that is indeed true. Employees can't choose their own HRIS if they don't like the one the company has deployed, and they can't create and elect their own medical or dental plan coverage if yours are not to their liking. 

But what they can do, and what has become increasingly easier in the age of social networking and open communication is have a much, much better understanding of competing alternatives and what is possible outside of your own organization. It has never been easier to compare almost everything about one organization's operations with others that are potential competitor's for a good employee's services. 

The 'Goats' poster is fine. There is nothing wrong with it. It just looks like every other one you've ever seen. Whether or not that is good enough is really the question.

Have some extra cash laying around? Don't try and bring it to a bank

From today's NY Times a sign that perhaps for corporations and individuals that even caution, restraint, and endless 'waiting for more clarity before we do anything with our money', may also be losing effectiveness as a strategy or hedge against tough economic conditions:

The article titled: In Cautious Times, Banks Flooded With Cash, describes the plight of some bankers large and small from across the country that faced with shrinking interest rate spreads, (which reduce profits), general reduction in demand for loans and loan products, and a public increasingly seeking 'safe' havens for cash stores, have collected too much cash in the form of deposits, and are even beginning to refuse or discourage customers from giving them more.

From the Times piece:

Bankers have an odd-sounding problem these days: they are awash in cash.

Droves of consumers and businesses unnerved by the lurching markets have been taking their money out of risky investments and socking it away in bank accounts, where it does little to stimulate the economy.

Though financial institutions are not yet turning away customers at the door, they are trying to discourage some depositors from parking that cash with them. With fewer attractive lending and investment options for that money, it is harder for the banks to turn it around for a healthy profit.

So the banks, at least some of them as indicated in the Times piece, can't really make a meaningful profit with all the excess cash and deposits that have come in. While the piece doesn't really try to make us sympathetic towards the bankers and the banking industry, (good luck with that), it does at least seem to indicate that for a few banks anyway, they'd rather play by the rules and at least try to steer some deposits to more productive ends compared to pretty much driven down to zero return traditional deposit accounts.

While the safe havens for cash may not have stopped being safe, at least some of them have become unavailable due to overcrowding. 

The giant cash reserves that many US organizations are sitting on have been well-reported in the last year or so, but this is the first time that I've noticed reports that even the 'sit on all our cash until times get better' strategy might have some practical problems actually being executed.

If the local bank doesn't want your cash, then maybe just maybe, it's time to think of some more creative ways to use those 'unwanted' funds.

It's pretty likely at least one employee out there has a great idea for a new product, improved service, enhanced process - something that could use a little seed money to explore further.

I'll bet you have lots of loyal, solid performing employees that have not seen a raise or bonus of any kind in several years, they might find something to do with a few extra dollars around this holiday season.

And chances are about 100% if you have a job opening at your company you have no shortage of applicants. Hire the one with the best attitude and spend the money to train them how to do the job, rather than waiting for the 'perfect' candidate to walk in. 

The easiest money to spend is other people's money, I get that. But when even the bank won't take your money, it seems to me like their are lots of organizations that could use this advice.

Is your organization sitting on a pile of cash? What needs to happen to stop hoarding and start investing?

Can Innovation be Departmentalized?

It has been an exceedingly dreary few days (weeks, months, years?), here in the USA, with the seeming inability of our government leaders to find solutions for significant issues like the national debt crisis, the ensuing downgrade of US Treasury debt, and the most recent and horrible loss of soldiers in Afghanistan. 

Unemployment remains unacceptably high, many large organizations while reporting strong profits, are choosing to sit on cash stockpiles, rather than increase or expand their labor forces. It is a very uncertain climate, and in this uncertainty it seems like for many companies, caution and restraint make a more prudent choice than more aggressive expansion. Sure, there are still (and always will be) exceptions to this rule, and we have seen several successful tech companies like Apple, Google, and Zynga (and more), continue to increase revenue, create new products, and expand hiring. But for all the high-flying tech successes, there are perhaps more news reports of organizational contraction and mass layoffs, (RIM, Cisco, HSBC, to choose just a few). Image - smithsonian.com

What marks the key difference that allows some companies to succeed and thrive in these tough economic times compared to ones that struggle to survive, or that hope to endure through this sustained period of economic malaise with exercises in cost-cutting, hiring freezes, and even workforce contraction?

Might one of your answers be 'The ability to innovate?'

It makes sense right? Apple wins because they created new and better ways to buy and enjoy music with the iPad, transformed the mobile phone experience with the iPhone, and re-invented and continue to dominate the tablet computing space with the iPad. They have simply out-innovated (and executed, and marketed, and managed), their way to success and dominance.  Heck, they might still have more cash on hand than the US government.

So the question is then, if 'innovation' is the prime cause or factor for sustained growth and success, can organizations and nations simply declare 'We are going to become more innovative', and set up a department, task force, blue-ribbon panel - whatever; and sit down and commence innovating?

I thought about this while reading some articles on a new blog on the Smithsonian.com site called 'Department of Innovation', a resource that describes itself as follows:

"...in the spirit of banging the drum for new ideas and fresh thinking, this blog will track all things innovative, not just in science and technology, but also in how we live, how we learn, how we entertain ourselves."

And while that sounds like a worthy and perhaps even productive undertaking, (there are already a few cool articles on the site), I can't help but think by (at least by name), compartmentalizing innovation into its own 'Department', might not be the right way to frame the discussion, and certainly not the right way to try to advance innovation inside organizations. 

My sense (and this is completely unresearched, so if I am off base, please feel free to bash me in the comments), is that the most truly innovative organizations don't try to box up or to departmentalize innovation. They realize that innovative concepts or even creative ideas can come from anywhere and at anytime in the organization. 

It seems to me that the pre-requisite for improving the chances for innovative ideas to spring up and take root in any kind of an organization is to create an environment where people feel free and safe to share ideas, explore new concepts, and have a real chance to see their work and effort impact the organization, their colleagues, their customers, and their communities. The first step to becoming more innovative might just be granting permission.

For real success today, I wonder if every department in the organization needs to be the 'Department of Innovation.'