We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity; more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.
-- Charles Chaplin (speech from the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator)
I am not an HR person and I have never worked as one, however I have been leading smart creatives (engineers) while I was CTO, Technical Lead or as of now Head of Engineering who leads product, online sales, software engineers, data architects and so on. While I have been leading, I have made several mistakes that finally made me founding theLeader.io and strive for great leadership. As a student, I started to read about organizational learning and leadership, one of the best book I ever read on this topic is called: Reinventing Organizations. In this book organizational structures has been evaluated and segmented with color codes as I briefly explained in below.
- Red Organizations. Constant exercise of power by chief to keep troops in line. Fear is the glue of the organization. Highly reactive, short-term focus. Thrives in chaotic environments. The current examples of red organizations are mafia, street gangs and tribal militias; such organizations achieved great breakthroughs as division of labor and command authority. Their guiding metaphor is wolf pack.
- Amber Organizations. Highly formal roles within a hierarchical pyramid. Top-down command and control (what and how). Stability valued above all through rigorous processes. Future is repetition of the past. The current examples of amber organizations are catholic church, military, government agencies, and public schools. Amber achievements are formal roles and processes. Amber's guiding metaphor is army.
- Orange Organizations. Goal is to beat competition; achieve profit and growth. Innovation is the key to staying ahead. Management is happening by objectives such as command and control on what, freedom on how, examples of such organizations are multinational companies and charter schools. Orange's breakthroughs are innovation, accountability and meritocracy. Machine is the guiding metaphor of orange's organizations.
- Green Organizations. Within the classic pyramid structure, focus on culture and empowerment to achieve extraordinary employee motivation. Fortunately there are number of such organization which are culture driven such as Amazon, Google, Southwest airlines and etc. Green's main breakthroughs are empowerment, value-driven culture, and stakeholder model. Family is the guiding metaphor for green organizations.
- Teal Organizations. These organizations have great breakthroughs such as self-management (driven by peer relationships), wholeness (involving the whole person at work) and evolutionary purpose (let the organization adapt and grow, not being driven). To become a Teal organization, CEO must drive the change and CEO must be fully supported by board and members.
What type of organization is your organization? http://poll.fm/5j1bq
According to all these studies and researches I did, I am thinking if a HR department request other departments to submit following strategies for their own departments it might help on transition.
- Hiring, Recruiting, and Firing Strategies
- Employee Retention Strategies
- What type of organization model is suitable and what is the strategy to transform into it. This plan is one of the most important strategic decisions.
- Employee Engagement Strategies
- Technology Strategies, what kind of technology is gonna be used in order to improve the productivity of team, also what technology will be used in order to execute other strategies efficiently
- Fostering Innovation Strategies, how each department is going to foster innovation in their organization
The business world is awash in ideas for new products, services, and business models. Thanks to creative ideation approaches such as design thinking and crowdsourcing, it has become incredibly easy and relatively inexpensive for companies to obtain a vast number of novel concepts, from both insiders and outsiders such as customers, designers, and scientists. Yet many organizations still struggle to identify and capture big opportunities. Some companies build their entire business based known dots. This we know as status quo: business as usual.
Why is this the case? Clayton Christensen, of disruptive innovation fame, and W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, the inventors of “blue ocean strategy,” have shown that big changes in society and technology fundamentally challenge the conventional understanding of what is valuable. Those changes render obsolete whatever criteria companies are using to identify customer problems they could address. To see which ideas truly have potential, managers need new assessment criteria.
Innovation survival is highly related to change management hence the disadvantages of innovation are relatively the same as the disadvantages of change. One has to get to grips with the paradigm shift, which takes effort and time, and then comes the associated dangers with change, untested effects, long term effects in particular can be a majorly dangerous aspect of innovation. The fact that it invalidates a previous system, there's often some wastage of infrastructure, both human and material, which was invested in the previous system. Finally people are resistance to change and innovation in general.
Despite all these issues, innovation has becoming more famous in South East Asia however the leaders are still America and few countries of Europe.
Captured from Google Trends
The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge, a great book on this topic explains getting to the summit of innovating can seem like the fulfillment of a dream, but it is not enough. After the summit comes the other side of innovation— the challenges beyond the idea. Execution. Like Rainier, it is the other side of the adventure that is actually more difficult. It is the other side that holds hidden dangers. But because the summit itself has such strong appeal, the other side is usually an afterthought. It is humdrum. It is behind the scenes. It is dirty work. But without execution, Big Ideas go nowhere.
innovation = idea + execution
At VietnamWorks and TechLooper we always believed in this formula however a bit more expanded, our innovation formula is consist of:
innovation = idea + leaders + team + plan
Indeed, innovation = idea + leader is really just half of a model. Because of the dominance of this half-model, most companies vastly overproduce ideas and do better than necessary at selecting leaders. But they struggle mightily with organizing and planning. Without careful and distinct models for each, most innovation initiatives are dead from day one. The fundamental prescription at VietnamWorks is that every innovation initiative needs a special kind of team and plan. Specifically: Each innovation initiative requires a team with a custom organizational model and a plan that is revised only through a rigorous learning process.
After 5 years of hands on day-to-day practice of building innovation culture in Asia and 3 years in Vietnam at service of VietnamWorks, I have learned following lessons:
- Executives are demanding innovation however they are not aware of the other side of innovation hence before taking any initiatives on innovation better to inform the executives with other side of innovation
- Innovating has fundamental incompatibility with ongoing operations.
- HR processes on building innovation culture are not well defined and it is lacking significantly and it has fundamental incompatibility with innovation such as annual performance reviews
- Innovating in most of companies are perceived as having an idea and take it to market without any planning and having the right foundation at organization to back up the innovation and its vast failures (the other side of innovation)
- Organizations are lack of a role or a leader who is supervising the execution (execution = leader + team + planning) meaning initiating the process, collaborate and communicate with ongoing operations, learning process and envision the endgame.
I have been also experienced some cultural impediments on building innovation culture such as:
- Avoid risk – do not fail. Failure is not an option. Most of organizations do not welcome failing and failures, even HR processes are designed to punish the failures.
- Organizations are solely focus on financial growth. There is lack of KPIs and target on non-financial efforts such as NPS or Customer Effort Score, employee retention strategies, growth strategies, partnerships, employee engagement approaches and so on.
- Most of organizations think R&D is the innovation team which is a very wrong and dangerous assumption. Innovation is not a cost center in fact it must be revenue center and generate revenue and help the ongoing operations.
- In many firms, employees are told to "go innovate," yet are not given the tools and resources needed to succeed.
- Innovations tend to be born with collaborations among different groups and people working closely together. Such an environment stimulates idea generations and productive teamwork. In most Asian organizations, there tends to be a culture of territory building and silo’s.
Today, more than ever, product innovation is critical to maintaining competitiveness in today’s fast-paced, global market. Yet, as market studies show, many companies find it hard to assess and advance their ability to innovate across the product portfolio. Tools and methods for managing product development in organizations abound, yet none really provide a cohesive framework for assessing a company’s innovation program encompassing the people, processes, and tools needed to speed time to market.
In a recent Tech Clarity Insight white paper, industry analyst Jim Brown asks: “Product innovation is critical to differentiate and remain competitive in today’s fast-paced, global markets. Bolstering innovation to a core competency helps manufacturers drive higher revenue, lower cost, and mitigate risk. So why is it so hard for companies to improve innovation performance and drive meaningful business value?”
A very good question. Why is it very hard? At VietnamWorks we have always tried to empower innovation with different techniques even we have implementedinnovation accounting however as part of new year resolution we are also asking ourselves this question, how can we measure and improve our company innovation level. We found interesting articles on this matter that have tried to consolidate maturity model and innovation in order to measure the maturity level of innovation such as TIM foundation, PlanView or HIMSS.
There are three factors which are essential to an effective innovation program: people, processes, and tools. PlanView's model encompasses the entire full product lifecycle from idea to launch and through to end of life. While the industry is hyper-focused on idea to launch, innovation does not stop there. Being able to manage it once each product is in market is important, as are the processes, effort, and money necessary to terminate it.
Based on my experience of exercising innovation at VietnamWorks, this is my understanding of the levels based on HIMSS is as below:
- Level 1 (Non-Functional) and Level 2 (Developing). Organizations at these levels tend to share many concerns, reflective of the fact that both lack, to a greater or lesser extent, the technological and process support structures that would lessen data, communication, and planning problems.
- Level 3 (Inconsistent). Organizations at this level have crossed the technology chasm from their lower maturity level colleagues by using technology to plan, find and leverage information, and keep execution on track. With gated commercialization processes in place and established process, resource, and project managers breaking down communication silos, these organizations are seeing definite benefits of moving up the maturity model.
- Level 4 (Consistent) and Level 5 (Optimizing). These organizations have embraced the journey of advancement and, by and large, recognize that innovation maturity is not accidental. They have invested in planned growth across people, process, and tools to drive faster yet sustainable and repeatable innovation practices. They have formed cross-functional project teams that support open innovation; their processes are dynamic and adapt to change; and they leverage product portfolio management solutions to do it all.
After adopting and implementing Agile Blueprint at VietnamWorks, we stumbled upon a decision that we need to have a mature and modern product development innovation framework in order to get the right ideas to market, at the right time and cost with a product innovation solution that supports the entire product lifecycle is a key to sustainable growth as well as incrementally innovate current products while we develop our next breakthrough. Hence we are working on a new blueprint as it is shown in image below:
On 29th December of 2014, I wrote a simple and short brief about VietnamWorks Engineering results in matter of deliveries. I will do the same for 2015, also I will put some items that I failed as a leader and also the things that I learned in 2015 including some of books I read which might worth sharing and might help some folks.
In 52-week (plus one extra day) of 2015 we managed to have 195 releases which is 89.32% growth compare to 2014, we also increased the staff by 34% in engineering team with a great turnover rate. I appreciate, admire and respect each of my team members that spent so much effort to make this happen. Incredible team and results.
At the moment, engineering department is running the biggest portfolios that are extremely impactful on our strategic drivers. Engineering department portfolios are listed as below:
- vietnamworks.com, job seeker mobile app and complete set of APIs that empowers open innovation
- employer.vietnamworks.com and complete set of OAUTH2 APIs
- CRM and Lead Automation Processes
- Microsites Platform
- New Services such as TechLooper, Success (newly launched Real-Time Application Tracking System), and new mobile applications
- Data Management
- HelpDesk & Support
In 2015 we have several interesting updates that were extremely impactful in our strategic drivers listed below but not limited:
- VietnamWorks Widget
- RFM, a completely new model of analytics
- New Employer Portal, completely new UX/UI
- Advance Resume Search, our resume search accuracy increased by 68%
- COHORT, that empowers us to measure more efficiently
- ProductBoard, a transparent and kanban-model to improve our internal communication
- CFP, a common platform for all of our front-end development that increased our agility by 35%
- Chrome Extension of Job Alert and many more
Indeed we have many more initiatives that helped us to have better communication and improved our efficiency as well as engagement such as:
- Transition into Slack that help us to have real-time anywhere anytime communication
- Upgrading our tools and products
- Launching innovation accounting fully integrated with Slack
- Data Driven Leadership and open channel for all employees to send feedback 24/7 which this model has been featured in an article from Entreprenuer
At VietnamWorks we always shape the future of recruiting in Vietnam and 2016 is going to be one of the most exciting year for engineering department as I have explained in this article.
Some of interesting things that I learned in 2015 either soft or hard ways are listed below and I hope it is not limited to these ones, I appreciate all those folks that patiently taught me these awesome stuff (I cannot name one by one because there are so many awesome dudes, I salute each of you and thousands respect):
- Real-Time frameworks such as Meteor and FireBase
- Conversion Rate Optimizations
- Basic understanding of Machine Learning and Real-Time Recommendation Engines and building one simple example
- How to build a chrome extensions
- Learned a new term "Intrapreneur" which made me very excited, seems I have to agree I might not be a good entrepreneur but still have some hopes :D
- Website Obesity Crisis
- Data Driven Leadership and Lean Leadership
- How to do a better and more meaningful employee orientation
- I got to know about new job titles "Chief Entrepreneur" and "Chief Happiness Officer"
- A new management model called Holacracy
I also bought a kindle that helped me to read a lot more, here is some of the books I read and I think it worth reading:
- Users not customers
- CEOFlow (Mini-CEOs)
- Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising
- Hacking Sales: The Playbook for Building a High Velocity Sales Machine
- Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker (I read it once a year)
- Work Rules by Laszlo
- How Google Works
- Lean Marketing for Startups: Agile Product Development, Business Model Design, Web Analytics, and Other Keys to Rapid Growth
- The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge
- Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com
- Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
- Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today's Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth
- Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers
- The Viral Startup: A Guide to Designing Viral Loops
- Reinventing Organizations
- Some tech stuff such as (read some chapters as more like a reference): Neo4j in Action, Collective Intelligence (old book but I just read it this year), HBase in Action, Machine Learning in Action, Discover Meteor (hopefully soon Meteor in Action), Tika in Action, and Web Crawling and Data Mining with Apache Nutch