A truly innovative agenda and prepping for jobs that do not yet exist

I had a great discussion over lunch with a colleague recently who shared with me about a particular Malaysian conglomerate’s expansive innovation agenda. The conglomerate in question maintained businesses in several large, complex industries. Traditionally, conglomerates like this are not always seen as the most innovative – as they are normally regarded as lumbering business stalwarts whose main business agenda is to keep things going as they were to maximize profit.

With this conglomerate, however, their Chief Innovation Officer recently shared some of the ideas that they had already started exploring. They are already exploring the applications of cutting edge technology in what we’d consider very traditional industries. For example, the use of remote-control drones in agriculture; smart home technologies in real estate development; wearables in healthcare; and the implications of driverless cars for automotive manufacturing.

Our discussion led me to several thoughts, namely:

Jobs that are in demand today did not exist as recently as a few years ago.

Think about it: today, some companies like the conglomerate I referenced, has a Chief Innovation Officer. It’s not exactly the Chief Technology Officer or the more traditional “Chief IT Officer” – but someone specifically mandated by the company to help them move towards adapting and adopting tomorrow’s innovations today (or at least, as soon as possible). It’s a role that is both strategic and tactical, combining the skillsets of a “mad scientist” and an “entrepreneur”, and blending together both business and technical insight (or even foresight!).

This position didn’t always exist. It is a C-level, leadership position that – in a large conglomerate – would typically require at least 8-10 years of experience. The problem is that 8-10 years ago – there wasn’t exactly a career path towards becoming a “Chief Innovation Officer”. What courses 8-10 years ago would you have taken to reach this career path? IT? Business studies? Computer science?

This fact was further brought home when we talked about the kind of jobs the conglomerate said they were hiring for at the moment: Data Scientists, startup incubators, developers, and such. 3-5 years ago (i.e. when you started college), how many places did you know provided the basic training to pursue these opportunities as careers?

Prepare for tomorrow’s opportunities today – even, or especially, if they don’t exist yet.

In light of my first point, how do you build a “track record” for jobs that are in demand today but which did not exist previously? How do you “future-proof” your career path and avoid obsolescence? One of the best examples about career obsolescence comes from Danny Devito’s monologue towards the end of the movie “Other People’s Money”, redactions and emphases mine:

This company is dead.

I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me.

It was dead when I got here. […]

You know why?

Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence.

We’re dead, all right. We’re just not broke.

And do you know the surest way to go broke?

Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure.

You know, at one time there must have been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw.

The key takeaway lesson for me as I think about this has been truly inspired by Tom Peter’s seminal, “The Brand Called You.” You are your own brand and company – be mindful of the PESTs around you so that you can prepare and pivot accordingly to avoid obsolescence. (In fact, this is part of the reason why I’ve made the career choices I did – but more about that on another day).

Innovation is one of today’s most sought after transferable skills.

Innovation isn’t just doing something in a new way. It’s about creating impact in a way that leads to sustainable results. In a way, it’s the “proper” answer to definition of insanity, popularly attributed to Einstein: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So, how do you become more innovative? Well, I’ve come across two quotes about creativity – one from the illustrious Steve Jobs and another by Colin Gottlieb, EMEA CEO of Omnicom Media Group – which I think applies to innovation as well. Both quotes highlight the fact that creativity is ultimately about making connections between two things that you wouldn’t ordinarily associate. Think about the conglomerate’s example I mentioned: remote-control drones in agriculture.

Besides building on your “innovation” as a skill, one also needs to demonstrate it as a “track record” along with the impact achieved. Be mindful of the opportunities you pursue within your current positions, find out more about what it means to be an “intrapreneur“, and always look at how you can quantify your innovation impact in a way that demonstrates value to the business.

All these thoughts, to me, are most starkly depicted in this video, Shift Happens which I first discovered in 2009, which has since been updated for 2014. Much of what it posits are turning out to be true.

 

Reimagined Apple Logo Tribute To Steve Jobs

In just a day, this reimagined Apple Inc. logo tribute to the passing of Steve Jobs has made its way around the world – a testament to the nature of truly brilliant, elegantly simple viral ideas, the power of the internet, as well as the speed of social media.

This wonderful design came by way of 19-year-old Jonathan Mak, a self-described designer, photographer and philosopher living in Hong Kong.

RIP Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Today, I join the chorus of many who have enjoyed Steve Jobs’ “game changing” innovations to bid him adieu. Truly a visionary and creative genius, the world is less of a place without him.

“Because the ones who are crazy to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Jobslessness: Steve Jobs Resigns as Apple CEO

No matter how inevitable, it’s always shocking when what you expect really does finally happen. In a gasp heard around the world, Steve Jobs has announced his resignation as CEO of Apple. While there are plenty of analyses and implications to come in the following days, I think it’s just enough for today that we celebrate the man who really did revolutionize the world, one iDevice at a time.

From The Edge Malaysia: Steve Jobs has a different operating system

 

Apple Makes You Pay For Piracy Without Making You Pay For Piracy

I was reading this bit of news about Apple’s newly launched iTunes Match – touted in the article as “more than just a cloud storage system for songs that fans buy legitimately through iTunes.” What really intrigued me was the value proposition and how Steve Jobs sold it: essentially, Apple has succeeded in making you pay for music piracy without making you pay for music piracy.

What do I mean by this?

Aside from offering to freely distribute new and old iTunes purchases on all of a user’s devices, the Apple impresario unveiled “iTunes Match,” a $25-a-year service starting this fall that will scan users’ devices and hard drives for music acquired in other ways, store it on distant computer servers and allow them to access it anywhere.

The service acknowledges a well-known fact — that most music on iPods, iPhones and iPads was ripped or swapped. Apple reached a deal that gives recording companies more than 70 percent of the new fees, addressing a dark secret that has crippled the music industry, and provides them with some economic payback.

Where Apple is able to identify and match songs from its 18 million-song database, it will transfer them into the user’s iCloud, a storage area housed on servers, including those at a massive new data center in North Carolina.

This is exactly the kind of creative strategic thinking that is lacking in so many businesses and brands today! No wonder we are faced with “more of the same” despite so many new brands coming to life these days. In fact, innovation is highly rewarding:

Industry observers said the new service could translate into big bucks for both Apple and the recording companies.

Apple has about 225 million credit card-backed accounts on iTunes. If only 10 percent signed up for the convenience of accessing music they hadn’t bought there, it could turn into more than $500 million a year in new revenue, said Jeff Price, CEO of TuneCore Inc., a company that helps independent artists sell their music on iTunes and other digital music outlets.

The best thing is that consumers get the sense that they’re paying for convenience, not for things they already own, he said.

“It allows for revenue to be made off of pirated music in a way that consumers don’t feel that’s what they’re paying for, and that’s what I find fascinating about it,” Price said.

Read the full article here (and also learn just how much “better” Apple always tries to make things).