Return to the Tute

Innovation, Science No Responses »
Sep 222009

On Tuesday I will be returning to MIT. Even though I graduated well over a decade ago, my feelings about the place remain complex. It has left a taste in my mouth that could be approximated by sipping on a lovely barolo right after touching a battery to your tongue. Memories of emotions from that time are a muddled mix of joy and shock – like having a bucket of cold water dumped on your head while being informed you’ve gotten a much larger than expected tax refund. IHTFP (I Hate This …cough… Fabulous …cough… Place) is the nearly-official school motto for many good reasons. Yet MIT has an incredibly strong alumni community that donates heavily. What’s the source of the love/hate? Perhaps a personal anecdote might help explain.

When I was an undergrad, I was having a lot of trouble with my second-semester physics class. As a result I spent a LOT of time getting tutored by the teaching assistant, a very patient graduate researcher named Wolfgang. God knows how often he had to explain the most basic concepts to me only to watch me drool senseless as my mind struggled pathetically. However, his persistance paid off and I aced the final exam, getting the highest grade in the class, which earned me a C for the course. That’s not a typo – at MIT, a 98% on a final can still leave you with a C overall. Refer back to IHTFP.

About seven years later an article about a recent MIT Nobel Laureate caught my eye. To my surprise, it was talking about Wolfgang! He had won a Nobel Prize for the work he did while he was my tutor (he showed the work to me at the time – I thought it was cool because it had lasers but otherwise had no idea what he was getting on about).

Wolfgang wasn’t a professor, or even anyone particularly notable at MIT – he was just one of many researchers working on an experiment and helping out with some entry level classes along the way. He could have easily brushed me off after it was clear I was a physics retard (day one, really). Instead, he devoted many hours to helping me figure out basic physics, even though I was never going to become a physicist.

My story isn’t as unique as you’d think. It’s actually very typical for MIT, and it happens because some of the smartest people in the world are there and are accessible to students. It’s painful to get through (the level of competition is often unbearable), but at the end most people have had similarly remarkable experiences that stand out above all the hardship.

All that said, I’m very happy that I’m returning as an observer and not as a inmate student.I’m really interested in seeing what cool new technologies are being developed. Who knows, I might even meet a future Nobel laureate who will probably need to explain their technology to me in much the same way Wolfgang had to explain basic physics.

Posted by Wes Sonnenreich at 12:12 am Tagged with: , ,

Siftable Sweetness

Composition, Data Visualization, Innovation, Serious Games 1 Response »
Sep 212009

I’ve been in San Francisco this weekend, caught up with David Merrill and his team (siftables) on Thursday. We had a great chat around where they’re at and when we’ll be able to start playing with a set of the blocks. I also got to see the siftables in action. My impressions follow… Continue reading »

Posted by Wes Sonnenreich at 9:40 am Tagged with: ,

UTS Panel on Innovation summary

Innovation 2 Responses »
Sep 102009

Failing our people: How Australian business systems sell us short

Hosted by Roy Green, UTS: Business Dean

Panelists

  • David Murray, Chairman of Future Fund,
  • Julia Connell, Associate Dean, graduate programmes UTS: Business,
  • Giam Swiegers, CEO Deloitte
  • John Bessant, Imperial College innovation guru, moving to Exeter

Introduction – Roy Green

  • What role should business education play in training and developing the leaders of our organisations?
  • The real challenge is complacency coming out of crisis.

David Murray

  • Have to start with a belief system. If humans are free they will innovate.
  • But freedom cannot be maintained w/o government. Governments unfortunately have budgets.
  • Annual performance reviews do nothing to improve performance.
  • 360 degree evaluation model is a cop out for accountability. Probably best method to lock in nepotism.
  • 360s are a good way to lock in a glass ceiling

Julia Connell

  • Manpower survey – 16,000 interviews, including 2,000 aussies. 62% felt disengaged.
  • Performance management is not rocket surgery, btu so few companies do it well. Why? Because it takes risk and courage.
  • Leadership require risk and trust.
  • US survey shows that only trait women don’t have that men do is decisiveness
  • Q to business: are your programs free of bias? Try to create a level playing field.

Giam Swiegers

  • I’m no expert but just a mere accountant with a little bit of passion for this topic
  • When I came I was very surprised by number of non-Australian CEOs. Why do outsiders perform better? Tall poppy affects the way Australians think about leadership and how they structure internal systems. Tall poppy causes a lack of self belief. This is why outsiders outperform.
  • Example: Lots of resistance developing leadership program for elite teams. HR wanted to make sure nobody was left out – why spend all the money on the elite? But how can a country proud of its elite athletes be unwilling to take pride in their best business people?
  • Talent leadership development is the role of the chief executive, not the HR team. CEO must take personal responsibility for IDing and developing talent. Most search teams are more focused on recruiting for capability vs recruiting for talent.
  • But even after much effort, there is still something lacking. In a recent firm-wide survey of the best mentors and leaders in the firm, the majority of the top performers came from outside Australia
  • 3 questions for leaders: Do you have something to believe in, do you have someone to believe in, do you have someone that believes in you?

John Bessant

  • Innovation matters. If we don’t change, we might not be around. The fuel for innovation is creativity. All people are creative. Trouble is, do we really make use of it?
  • The group always comes up with more solutions to open ended questions and more types/classes of ideas. More minds is not just more volume of ideas but more variety. E.g. Edison wasn’t a solo act. Had a big think tan with varied input.
  • With pair of hands you get a free brain

Questions from floor

Q: If 360 appraisals are flawed, what are the alternatives?

Murray: The alternative to 360 comes down to trust. You must trust leaders to make decisions and they must then make those decisions.

Q: Gen Y wants to be boss on day 2 so they hop jobs until they advance fast enough… how will that impact business and innovation?

Murray: people you hire can either do job or not… but if you don’t keep up with demographic change your dead anyway…

Giam: The Gen X and Gen Y concept is a scam as big as the scam dreamt up by Y2K consultants. They’re great generations that act much like any previous generations that grew up in similar economic conditions. They only job hop when there are boring, uninspired leaders.

Q: How do flaws in the political, regulatory, tax systems affect innovation?

Giam: We don’t have time or energy to fight so we try to win within the system

Murray: of all factors that create engagement, two most important: accountability and authority, and tools to do the job.

Q: Perceive a fundamental gap in basic managerial training.  We let people into these jobs without making sure they understand how to lead. We set our best people up to fail. Issue: people getting promoted based on their tech skill, not leadership.

Giam: Cutting training is the dumbest thing you can do in a downturn. You cannot under invest in developing your people.

Murray: We know in business that stockout is fatal so we keep inventory.  But we don’t keep inventory for development.

Q: What would the panel advise the state about getting rid of business systems that hinder innovation, particularly in the public sector?

Murray: issue is trust. Leader is never trusted to comment on key issues directly. Arms length spokespeople are unworkable.

Too many people employed in interpreting the law… people who do that kind of work burn out by the age of 35…

Closing – Roy Green

  • The role of the leader is to design the work of the organisation. That’s what we want to do at UTS: Business
  • LSE study to be released in a few months shows that Australia has a long tail of mediocre managers
  • UTS is launching b21C – website and magazine designed to develop our proposition to ourselves, students, business community
  • You can find out more about the LSE study through our interactive feature that leads the launch home page of http://bit.ly/Hf3Lo
  • Thanks to the panel, thanks to the audience, and thanks to all of those in the twitterverse who’ve been following us.
Posted by Wes Sonnenreich at 9:31 pm Tagged with: , , ,

Valuing Failure

Innovation 1 Response »
Sep 092009

Fail fast, fail cheap, fail often… but fail valuably!

by Wes Sonnenreich, Innovation Director for Deloitte Australia

“These people succeeded because they understand that you can’t let your failures define you – you have to let them teach you. You have to let them show you what to do differently next time.” – Barack Obama, Sept 8th speech to America’s schoolchildren.

A great idea is just the start of a journey to realizing value.

How far that journey goes depends on effort, skill, timing and luck.

Many great ideas will “fail”.

Some fail because the effort wasn’t enough, often because of inadequate funding. Others fail because the team had the wrong skill set to develop the idea. Sometimes ideas are too far ahead of, or behind, their time. And finally everything else could be right but the idea team could just be unlucky.

In perspective: the best venture capital firms only see 30% of their investments in “new ideas” succeed.

These firms have worked hard to select only the best ideas that have the greatest chance of success. They mitigate risks of effort and skill by making sure the team is the right team and they are adequately funded. And still, 70% or more fail.

It’s not a failure if a valuable lesson is learned from the experience.

To be valuable, the lesson has to be new and relevant to future projects. For example, learning that an idea failed because of poor project management is a valuable lesson. It is no longer a valuable lesson the fifth time an idea fails for the same reason.

It’s often best if the idea fails early, as the cost of the lesson learned will still be low.

Fail early, fail cheaply, fail often, but fail valuably by learning something!

Posted by Wes Sonnenreich at 9:09 am Tagged with: , , , , ,

Reward and Recognition through Achievements

Serious Games 1 Response »
Sep 072009

What’s new and what’s not in the latest trend in video games

by Wes Sonnenreich, Director of Innovation for Deloitte Australia

Videogames have become a mainstream form of gaming entertainment for much of the world. In their early days, scoring systems were simple – one point for each dot consumed by a voracious yellow circle, hundreds of points if the circle touches a fast moving blue blob under the right conditions, game over if it touches anything else. Today’s games have scoring and statistic-keeping systems that are as complex as those used in sports such as baseball, cricket and American football – particularly if the game is played among many people online.

One of the current popular trends in videogames is a system called “achievements”.  These are frequent rewards for accomplishing tasks within the game environment that often have little to do with the primary objective of the game. For example, in a shooter game, someone might get an achievement for only playing with a pistol when everyone else is using machine guns.

Achievements can encourage players to try doing something that is otherwise not rewarded by the standard gameplay mechanisms. In the case of the above example, even highly skilled players would find that using a pistol exclusively would negatively impact their score and statistics. However, a player who retains an achievement by never using any weapon other than a pistol can justify their lower statistics, and even exclusively compare themselves to others who hold a similar achievement.

By engaging in non-optimal behaviours, players can often have a richer experience with a game, particularly in multiplayer environments. Once an “optimal strategy” for playing a game is discovered, those who use it dominate the game. This rapidly forces everyone to adopt the optimal strategy which often leads to boring, repetitive gameplay. However, well designed achievements can break this behavioural pattern and create a more varied playing experience. It can also lead people to explore aspects of the game that, while not optimal from a scoring perspective, may still be very fun.

Continue reading »

Posted by Wes Sonnenreich at 9:48 pm Tagged with: , , , ,
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