Innovation lessons from Richard Noble

Richard Noble is defined by his multiple land speed records, and also by the attempts that didn’t go quite as well as expected. His first effort, for instance, back in 1977 in a car he built himself, finished upside down in a field after a death-defying, mid-air triple-roll. Noble, somewhat dispassionately, describes the order of events as: crash, pub, scrap yard. He says back then he hadn’t a clue about engineering, let alone any motor racing experience. He was obsessed by speed, and invigorated by the desire to break records, and that seemed enough.

It’s impressive, this insouciant ambition, which drives Noble to achieve things that to others seem inconceivable. Innovation has never seemed so natural. His latest record attempt is called BloodhoundSSC. The car, which Noble hopes will destroy his own land speed record, becoming the world’s first 1,000mph vehicle, is currently being built in Bristol. He’s set firmly on that record, but goal number two is more altruistic: to inspire a new generation of engineers.

Young scientists may well be enthused by Bloodhound’s potential. Provided the team can keep it on the road, the car will be able to travel the length of four football pitches every second. Although it would be too dangerous to try, should the driver be of the mind to swivel in his seat and fire a gun back towards the car’s origin, the car’s sheer velocity would render the bullet impotent. It would leave the chamber and fall straight to the ground.

Noble retired from the cockpit soon after breaking the record with Thrust2 in 1983. These days he looks after the business side of things. You might think such an experienced campaigner would rule his project teams with an iron fist. Actually, the reverse is true. “Every employee should have enough authority to fail the company,” he tells me. Why? Because to inject a workforce, any workforce, with passion, commitment and ingenuity, you need to forget about the concept of natural leadership.

Noble's project teams are almost completely flat. Noble is the sole director, looking after planning, finance and company culture. On everything else, his teams answer to no one. "I only want to know when things go wrong," he says. With no manager to go through, people are forced to collaborate. Teamwork prospers. In a flat organisation, says Noble, "you see people develop like you've never seen them develop before".

Here’s an interesting lesson: if you want innovation to thrive, take your hand off the tiller.

Why the world needs fewer handbags

One of the marketing department’s cleverest tricks is product life extension. With a “new improved formula” here, and a version 2.0 there, the marketer can reignite interest in a fading brand with minimal investment. For the purveyors of FMCGs, such as toothpaste and shampoo, marketing sheen is administered in lieu of real research and development, no matter what those white-coated boffins in the ads lead us to believe. And this is considered good business. Money for old rope is every finance director’s dream.

But while extending the life of a brand of detergent isn’t necessarily all that harmful (we’ve all got to wash our clothes occasionally) pull that same trick with electronics and the downside is more pronounced. How many iPods have you bought in your lifetime? How many DVD players? How many TVs? These faux product upgrades provide something for nothing, but it’s what we do with all the somethings that causes alarm. Continuous flogging of the product life cycle is a serious environmental threat, packing landfills to the brim with materials that nobody really knows how to dispose of safely.

Acclaimed minimalist designer Dieter Rams spoke out recently against our throwaway culture. He told the Times:

“There’s such a lot of things. Such a lot of unusable things. Most things are unnecessary and overdone. Look around: we cannot send to the third world all the garbage we don’t need any more. We have to go back to more simplicity, longevity.”

Longevity is anathema to marketers, of course. But perhaps if consumers were trained to see that Rams’s philosophy of “Weniger, aber besser” (less, but better) is both practical and desirable, marketers would begin decorating their brands with more sustainable messages.

Sustainable doesn’t have to mean green. According to IDEO UK managing director Sue Siddall, obsession with product life cycle is dissipating, partly because endless replenishment isn’t always commercially desirable.

“Look at the handbag business: high-end, luxury handbags. These brands taught their consumers to be promiscuous around brands, they taught them to buy the “it” bag every season, four bags a year. They now have a bunch of consumers that are brand disloyal. They don’t care which brand, it just has to be the one Sienna Miller is wearing. They have driven a behaviour that has shot them in the foot.”

Why we should leave design thinking to designers

Design thinking is the business buzz-phrase of the year. This I judge not on its novelty (it originated in the 90s), but on the sheer weight of design thinking books now littering my desk. This is not to belittle its worth. Design thinking’s growing prominence is a welcome shot in the arm for both innovation and customer value.

In essence, design thinking is a process that allows businesses to match their boring analytical sides with creativity and intuition. It sprinkles old, dysfunctional products with designer dust, creating “user experiences” that fundamentally define brands. It's about using creativity to change behaviour.

I spent most of last week talking to a variety of design luminaries, most of whom displayed a messianic reverence for Apple designer Jonathan Ive. Those iPods are pretty, right? But Apple’s nod to design thinking goes way beyond white earphones. As Stewart Emery and Robert Brunner write in their book, Design Matters,

“Close your eyes and imagine you are holding an iPod. Now take away iTunes, take away the ability to buy the song you like for 79p without having to pay £100 for a dozen more that you don’t want, lose the ability to create playlists, cut out the packaging, take out the ads, delete the Apple logo and close all the stores. The remaining question is: do you still have an iPod?”

To a designer, that iPod in the palm of your hand has its own form of communication. Design language is the term designers use to describe how a product makes the customer feel. It is what happens when a product’s form and function fuse to elicit an emotional response.

According to Brunner and Emery, design language “is the consciously orchestrated work of a designer”, the way your product speaks to its target market.

BMW is one company fluent in design language. That’s largely thanks to the efforts of the Dutch designer Adrian Van Hooydonk, who assumed responsibility for all the company’s car designs in 2004.

Back in 2004, BMW was expanding its range, producing more cars for more markets. But was there a central message BMW could hang on to? A consistent product vision for all BMW cars? Van Hooydonk decided he wanted all BMW cars to appeal to the type of consumer that wanted to own “a drivers’ car”.

His strategy perfectly illustrates the inherent balance of design language, where form is just as vital as function. The design team had to produce beautiful cars, but looks had to be supported by performance, otherwise the customer experience would be compromised. “A car shouldn’t look like it can corner well if it can’t.”

How a BMW car speaks to its owner, in the way the leather interior smells, in the soft thunk of the door as it closes, in the way the wheel feels as it turns, its solidity at high speed, its reliability, these are all elements of its design language. They elicit an emotional response in the driver, but more important, they are inextricably linked to BMW’s marketing strategy, to build “a driver’s car”.

Design thinking, which puts the user at the heart of a product’s development, is partly about the transmission of design language. What message is your product sending to the customer? What does that message say about your brand? What does it say about your strategy?

Design thinking is also credited with the creation of innovation and discovery. Design tools such as networking, brainstorming and fast prototyping are all essential components of the creative process. But discovery also comes from an ability to pose new questions while others revel in predictability. If you walked a designer around the shop floor of a customer services call centre, his or her first question would not be to do with operational efficiency, it would be about why the product creates so many customer questions in the first place.

Companies such as BMW and Apple didn’t break the mold. It’s eminently possible to build businesses that balance creativity with predictability and efficiency, but most chief executives just aren’t very good at asking tough questions. As design consultant Lydia Thornley puts it:

“There is an element of otherness that design thinking can sometimes bring in... It’s that level of questioning, slightly outside of the comfort zone, that can unearth an issue that nobody had thought about, and suggest ideas that might not otherwise emerge.”

How to fund the bailouts, part two

Thanks to Tory MP Brooks Newmark, we can now view the spiralling public debt in a new and more frightening way: that is, rising at a rate of £700,000 every minute. Quite an image, regardless of your political bent. It doesn’t end there.

As the angriest of angry bloggers, Wat Tyler, so eloquently puts it: if you add the cost of future state pension payments, throw in the liabilities of our two largest semi-nationalised banks, consider the burden of decommissioning our old nuclear power stations, and remind ourselves of our PFI obligations, that hole in the public finances does actually start to look a bit scary:

“If we wanted to be cautious—admittedly not something our present rulers have been much good at—we'd say our real national debt is now in the range £7-8 trillion. Or around £300 grand for every single household. Gulp.”

Gulp indeed. But for the time being, the size of the debt is irrelevant. We can only begin making cuts once the economy is back on its feet. If nothing else was learned from the horrors of 1929, the importance of managing the recovery slightly better than the decline is paramount. A third-quarter contraction of 0.4 per cent suggests we are not ready to commence tinkering.

Whatever Cameron says, we must stop thinking of the public budget in the same terms as an everyday household budget. Households balance the books by spending less when the pay cheques become lighter. Governments do precisely the opposite. £700,000 a minute is a scary image, but every time we sensationalise the DEBT CRISIS, there is a risk of undermining valuable spending projects that only months earlier seemed perfectly reasonable. All that hyperbole increases the pressure on the Chancellor to say no to everything.

One sector up for review is the UK's space industry. For those of you surprised to learn that the UK even had a space industry, it is worth recognising that British success in this field over the last few years has been largely incidental—at least as far as the government is concerned. We spend about £200m of public money a year on space, a pitiful sum considering the sector’s huge contribution to our economy—70,000 jobs and more than £6bn in revenues. But space is precisely the kind of industry that needs continued financial support to go on producing a net benefit.

The Space Innovation Growth Team (IGT) is currently preparing a plan for the next 20 years of UK involvement in the sector. The report, due in December, will outline how to turn a potentially greater government subsidy into a competitive advantage. There is of course a very real chance that the report will be ignored completely. And here, in a nutshell, is the potential DEBT CRISIS fall-out: industries that contribute vital skills and revenues starved of the necessary investment capital by unnecessary meddling.

Europe’s space industry is only as competitive as ESA, one of the space industry’s largest client, allows it to be. It is no coincidence that French lobbying of ESA is much more effective than UK efforts. France’s government spends almost £2bn on space—ten times the UK’s contribution. That £2bn is very difficult to ignore. When those lucrative private sector contracts are handed out, it is the countries that have sufficiently greased ESA’s palm that triumph. It may not be particularly democratic, but these are the rules. Making poorly timed, schizophrenic spending cuts may remove us from the game entirely.

Fred Destin’s ignorance theory

A few days ago, I had an interesting chat with Fred Destin, Atlas Venture's ebullient technology partner. Atlas bought a stake in the property website Zoopla at the beginning of 2008, which wasn’t exactly a fun time to be involved in the property game. It was also a pretty difficult period to source capital in any sector—all in all an investment climate fit to make even the coolest of VCs twitch. Destin, who has a seat on Zoopla’s board, adds that at that stage, his firm’s investment was in “two people and some PowerPoint slides”, hardly an invulnerable guarantee of success.

It is often said of European VCs that they lack the gumption of the Sand Hill road mob—the kind of formalised chutzpah that turns garage upstarts into grade A businesses. European investors, it is said, need data, data and more data, followed by proof of concept, before they are willing to stump up any capital. And to some extent that remains true. But Destin added an interesting spin.

The problem with European investors, he told me, was that even when faced with unmistakeable proof of concept, they tend to undercapitalise, thus hampering their investment’s ability to scale to its full potential. Put it this way: not many US VCs get accused of undercapitalising a potential winner.

He also did a great job of making early-stage investments sound very much like sticking it all on red and preying to the gambling gods for clemency. Destin says he actually prefers working with unknowns. He says:

“Our job is to manage risk proactively. We don’t think about it as a casino at all. We scrutinise and think about it very hard. But it’s our job to take these shapeless risks. I am early-stage, my natural DNA is around early-stage. It’s tough to make investment decisions without much data, [but] that’s what makes it exciting. Your average market practitioner does not know how to deal with that level of risk. You take data away and they panic."

Conversely, Destin says he revels in a vacuum of information:

“I profess ignorance and use that as a tool. I can assess market attractiveness. I can assess the management team. We then make absolutely no assumption as to what’s going to work because if you do, you lock yourself into a strategy that you haven’t [yet] proven. You tend to be internally led rather than market led. This is where the risk may seem inconsiderate because you’re willfully declaring ignorance about the market you’re addressing.”

But ignorance allows you to

“…force yourself to be smart. You use what you know in terms of company building, supporting entrepreneurs, discovering the market. We will design the product around what the market needs with an intuition, but then we’ll go and test it. We don’t want to be smarter than the market we are entering.”

And here’s Destin’s view on Europe’s investment weakness. There are, he says, three stages involved in readying a start-up for potential greatness:

“At Atlas we call it ‘prove-build-scale’. You spend very little at the prove stage. You have 6-15 people, spend as little as you can proving the hypothesis. The build stage is [about] scaling up the management team, adding talent, putting in place the technology you need to accelerate. Only when you’re ready can you understand how to scale properly, go into a big investment round and hit the accelerator.

“I think that Europe usually fails on the third category: we tend to undercapitalise the businesses that are doing well. And this is where we get a competitive disadvantage to the US. They have a tendency to overcapitalise early, but when they scale they scale well because they are able to raise repeat large rounds of money to really capture an opportunity.”

Gordon Brown's brain: explained

Gordon Brown has long been accused of lacking in emotional intelligence, defined as the ability to read and comprehend people’s emotions and act on that analysis to effect positive change. This is a polite way of saying that he’s a bastard to work with. According to a Bloomberg report earlier this year, a new aide was warned to watch out for "flying Nokias" when he joined Brown’s team. The Prime Minister was also alleged to be fond of trashing printers.

Brown’s belligerence can be traced back to a personality disorder, according to Dr Thomas Stuttaford, a medical columnist who writes for the Times. Apparently, Brown shows symptoms of having a “cluster A” personality disorder, which means

“…he is likely to be demanding, self-absorbed, have difficulties in relationships with others, suffer discomfort in social situations with unfamiliar people… and may be so focused that he finds it difficult to concentrate on subjects other than that which has caught his immediate attention."

Dr Stuttaford’s armchair diagnosis is somewhat weakened by the fact that he is a former Conservative MP. But Brown’s inability to connect with, and therefore to lead, his inner and outer circles is unlikely to resonate well with voters, many of whom may recognise that Cameron, however slippery, at least engenders unity and respect in his associates.

Brown’s a clever guy, so why can’t he do something to change his image before it’s too late? Researchers at UCLA believe they have the answer. A report by neuroscientists Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman delves into the link between emotional intelligence and management, and discovers a neat paradox: clever people often make the worst leaders.

What’s the link between social intelligence and leadership? According to Eisenberger, all physiological and neurological reactions “are directly and profoundly shaped by social interaction.” This means that employees respond well to praise (which, incidentally stimulates the same area of the brain that lights up after a financial windfall), but their response to a perceived threat is often far more severe and longer-lasting than the response to a reward. When Brown’s aides have to duck a flying mobile phone, or indeed when any employee is reprimanded, given an unworthy task, or given a pay cut, they experience that threat as a neural impulse, “as powerful and painful as a blow to the head.”

That’s because when people feel excluded, says Eisenberger, there is “activity in the dorsal portion of the anterior cingulate cortex”, which is the area of the brain that also deals with physical pain. Brown’s aide might as well take that flying Nokia in the face. As far as his brain is concerned, the damage done to his future level of engagement is likely to be the same.

According to business+strategy, an employee’s response to such treatment

“… is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person—or of an organization. Because this response uses up oxygen and glucose from the blood, they are diverted from other parts of the brain, including the working memory function, which processes new information and ideas. This impairs analytic thinking, creative insight, and problem solving; in other words, just when people most need their sophisticated mental capabilities, the brain’s internal resources are taken away from them.

“Most people who work in companies learn to rationalize or temper their reactions; they “suck it up,” as the common parlance puts it. But they also limit their commitment and engagement. They become purely transactional employees, reluctant to give more of themselves to the company, because the social context stands in their way.”

One of the key aspects of high emotional intelligence is self-awareness. When a leader is self-aware, “it gives others a feeling of safety even in uncertain environments. It makes it easier for employees to focus on their work, which leads to improved performance. A self-aware leader modulates his or her behaviour to alleviate organizational stress and creates an environment in which motivation and creativity flourish.” Does that sound like an accurate description of Brown’s cabinet?

So the Prime Minister, once described by Baroness Morris of Yardley as the “last Cabinet colleague you'd have thought of suggesting a drink with", may be causing his associates untold pain, and his conduct is inspiring poor performance. He’s an intelligent man, why can’t he moderate his behaviour?

Lieberman’s research helps explain why many intelligent people struggle to lead. High intelligence, he suggests, often corresponds with low self-awareness. That’s because the neural networks required for information holding, planning, and problem solving are in the lateral, or outer, part of the brain, while the networks that support self-awareness, social skills, and empathy are nearer the middle. These regions are “inversely correlated”. Or in other words, use of one region can inhibit use of the other.

Says Lieberman:

“If you spend a lot of time in cognitive tasks, your ability to have empathy for people is reduced, simply because that part of your circuitry doesn’t get much use.”

Or as Sir Bob Geldof once put it:

"Would it be easy to spend a night in a bar with him? No, he'd get bored.”

How much does a fact cost?

Opinion is cheap, so the maxim goes, but facts are expensive. The question is, how expensive? Gerry Marzaroti, editor of the New York Times Magazine, is unequivocal: “Investigative reporting is very, very expensive,” he says. A Hurricane Katrina story his magazine recently published on its front cover cost $400,000 to produce.

Or at least it would have done had his own reporters done the investigating. As it stands, the story was put together by a freelancer named Sheri Fink, who financed the first four months of the investigation herself. As her story gathered pace, she was part-financed by the Kaiser Foundation, a US health research lobby, and ProPublica, a non-profit news organisation that funds investigative journalism.

Fink’s tale is undoubtedly of (US) national interest. She investigates suspected cases of euthanasia at a New Orleans hospital marooned by the floods of Hurricane Katrina back in 2005. The article is too lengthy to describe in detail here, but Fink’s efforts are well worth spotlighting. She introduces new evidence, analyses “previously unavailable records” and interviews “dozens of people who were involved in the events at Memorial and the investigation that followed.” It took her two and a half years.

Those facts that are buried underneath reputations, those nuggets of information hidden by the rich and powerful, are always the hardest, and therefore the costliest, to exhume. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab blog holds a running tab on the cost of investigative reporting. Among the most expensive editorial investigations it can find is The New York Times’ Baghdad office, which costs $3 million a year to run.

There are UK parallels. How much did the Daily Telegraph sink into exposing the MPs’ expenses affair, bearing in mind the initial cost of the leaked documents, and the 25 journalists the newspaper assigned to the task? According to Telegraph assistant editor Benedict Brogan, you can add to that the price of “lawyers [and] all sorts of experts”.

Let’s just focus on the cost of uncovering the facts. Assuming an average journalist salary of £40,000 (although some will have been on considerably more) and a conservative estimate of three months’ work, the direct cost of the expenses investigation would have been at least £250,000. Add to that the cost of acquiring the information, which could have set the Telegraph back anything up to £300,000 and the pressure on a publisher to recoup their editorial outlay begins to tell.

Canny news editors are well aware of the value of just one Duck Island, of course. In May, Telegraph sales were boosted by an average of 18,718 copies per day. The problem comes when the economics start to cloud judgment. Competition from low-cost Web publications has left traditional reporters with evermore spaces to fill. Fewer reporters reporting news is a situation that inevitably deprives editors of the kind of stories that tend to shift more papers. With newspaper sales on the decline and advertising revenues down, publishers are increasingly less inclined to hire more reporters. And so the decline of the newspaper industry descends into a depressing, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Or at least the old model does. Back in June, 4iP and Screen West Midlands announced funding for an interesting start-up called Help Me Investigate. Founder Paul Bradshaw describes his creation as an online “platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. It allows anyone to submit a question they want to investigate,” and volunteers to club together in order to find the answer. Because it relies on the goodwill of participants rather than the whim of megalomaniac publishers, the breadth and variety of investigations is assured. Examples of current questions include: “Is it less safe to have a baby at night?” and “Where is Diana really buried?”

Bradshaw has already achieved notable success for the citizens of Birmingham, where the company is based. A question concerning the most likely place to get a parking ticket prompted a Freedom of Information request, which revealed that the most ticketed street was Alum Rock Road in Washwood Heath, where drivers received an average of nine tickets per day—almost twice as many as the next most ticketed area. Data released by Birmingham City Council also showed that in July, wardens were handing out an average of 200 tickets a day more than at the same time last year.

According to Bradshaw:

“Investigative journalism is about more than just ‘telling a story’; it is about enlightening, empowering and making a positive difference. And the Web offers enormous potential here, but users must be involved in the process and have ownership of the agenda.

"The Web allows you to ‘atomise’ processes, [to] break them down into their constituent parts. The site breaks apart investigative journalism, allowing users to contribute in specific and different ways. This is not citizen journalism. It is micro-volunteering.”

Despite Bradshaw’s protestations, some will inevitably see Help Me Investigate as another Web threat to traditional reporting. If the crowd proves to be more adept at investigative reporting than the journalist, it challenges the essence of the journalist's medium, the newspaper. But such questions misunderstand the nature of collaboration. Does it really matter if extra credit is attributed for a discovery deemed to be in the public interest? Is an official, unpaid army of sources and helpers so very different to the current unofficial, unpaid model?

Writers with bylines almost as big as their egos may despise sharing the limelight. But perhaps those journalists and editors that come to regard Help Me Investigate as a source rather than as a threat, may well find that the cost of their investigations has suddenly and miraculously been reduced.