Monday Morning Mojo

Changing the Game

Rasmus Nyerup was designing a museum and at the same time admitting ignorance. It was not just his lack of knowledge he was lamenting, but everyone’s. The year was just 1806. He was the director of an organization that would become the National Museum of Denmark.

He wrote in his book, Review of the Country’s Ancient Monuments, "...everything from the earliest heathen period hangs before us as if in a thick fog, in an unmeasurable period of time. We know it is older than Christendom, but if by a few years or a few hundred years - even maybe over a thousand years - older, is sheer guesswork and at best only likely hypotheses.“

Ten years later he appointed Christian Thomsen head of antiquarian collections in what was then the Museum of Northern Antiquities. To organize his objects for exhibition Thomsen developed the three-age system, placing ancient objects into one of three periods: the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, named for their tool-making technologies.

It was a game changer. Thomsen introduced a framework that forever shifted the way people thought about the ancient past, removing it from the fog and parsing it into three neat chronologies that the average person could readily understand. There were many problems with the system of order, and no shortage of critics. But the basic concept spread and was soon infused with additional layers that spelled out other associations including how societies were organized and even religious developments.

The term, Game Changer, refers to anyone who fundamentally alters the rules of play for an activity that involves skill and luck. In this book I am discussing the game of business, the activity of buying and selling that hopefully generates profitable returns whether you define profit as cash left over when all is said and done or mission accomplished in the case of non-profits. If business is the game, innovation is the changer.

Let’s go back to dating objects of antiquity for just a moment. In 1949 Professor Willard Libby at the University of Chicago again changed this game fundamentally. There he led a team of scientists who developed carbon dating, a process to determine the age of organic matter (wood, flesh, pottery, eggshells, metal casting ores, wall paintings, soil and lake sediments, and so on) up to about 60,000 years of age.

This breakthrough generated real value for a myriad of disciplines, received the Nobel Prize in 1960, and spread rapidly. Further it made possible other kinds of dating which worked for objects much older than 60,000 years. For that, the same principle is used but something other than carbon is measured.

The result is that our picture of our world comes into greater focus. We have a more accurate understanding of time and this makes possible a myriad of breakthroughs. Suddenly there is a shift across disciplines, like a pulse that goes through the entire system changing everything, changing the game. The pulse is rapid and widespread.

Innovation in business is no less dramatic.

When I started working with leaders on change in the mid 1990s it was not unusual for a CEO to come to me for assistance in implementing a well-thought out scheme for improving business. “Here is a new piece of technology,” he or she would say. “Help me to roll it out. I need to get uptake, traction, and support. I need this to spread so I can build capacity, increase effectiveness across the organization.”

Today it is very different. Most of my clients come to me and say something like, “I want to grow, but I am not sure how. The market is changing so fast and it is hard to get a grip on what is possible. I am now competing not only with young, brash contenders who are playing by different rules, but even with my own customers who are building new applications and developing better ways of doing things. The market is in turmoil, too. Most of my clients are dealing with financial issues. New technologies are disrupting our standard business practices and our major product lines. And new business models are emerging. Can you help us through this confusing, rapidly shifting morass?”

I have supported over 100 CEOs in the last sixteen years and learned by working hand-in-hand with them on really tough issues. By taking the best of what works across industries and sectors, by identifying the successful patterns I have identified three distinct activities that distinguish the road to success:

    1.    Change the Game - Become an agent, take an active role as a defining force in your market

    2.    Generate Value - Ally with stakeholders to identify, make full use of and benefit from worthy pursuits

    3.    Sustain Innovation - Build an organization that operates consistently and systematically in the innovation space

The leaders who are getting innovation right develop and master these competencies.

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