Become an Accomplished Value Creator: Steps to Advance Your Career

"Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.??Begin it now."??William Murry?

A Common Frustration

Would you like your colleagues and managers to pay more attention to your ideas???And how about being included more often in your enterprise’s critical meetings because you bring a uniquely valuable perspective???Our experience listening to thousands of presentations indicates that most presentations are neither complete nor compelling, which leads to frustration for both presenters and listeners. The presenter can't figure out why their idea was not taken seriously, and the listeners wonder why people can't give complete, actionable presentations.??

Almost all the presentations we see at first are "Big As."??They are about the person’s approach – their new idea.??But these presentations leave management in a bind because they don’t address all of the critical issues. Until they are answered, it is impossible to move effectively forward.

There are three steps you can take to address this issue, which can have a profound impact on your career.??Critically, experience shows you will be unable to make the improvements needed alone.??Why? Because none of us has all the skills and perspectives needed and we all have conceptual cul de sacs.??To eliminate Big As and wow people with your insights, one of the fastest and best ways is based on the steps described below.??

Note. To get started you don't need management’s permission, new resources, or a reorganization. How do I know???Because it is how I got started and grew my team so rapidly that they eventually made me CEO of the company.??Indeed, when I got started as a mid-level manager at SRI coming from RCA, the VP of business development at SRI told me we were on our own.??I said thank you, and with my terrific colleague Norman Winarsky and other great colleagues, we developed the i4i value creation methodology.

By the way, I did need some money because I bought pizza and soda for our meetings.??Food stimulates creativity.

See more here:??https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/main-mistake-innovators-make-big-curt-carlson-ph-d-/ ).

A Three-Step Plan

First:?Unmet Needs

Start by understanding what critical unmet customer or enterprise needs your function has and the metrics used to evaluate them.??Because all professionals have the responsibility for solving problems that matter to others, the teams you form can come from any function, whether HR, Finance, R&D, marketing, or operations.???Understanding your actual unmet needs will likely be confusing at first, but as you perform steps 2 and 3 below, they will become clear.??

See more here:?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/work-important-customer-needs-ones-just-interesting-carlson-ph-d-/

Second: Action Plan Pitches

For all presentations use Action Plan pitches.??They look like this:

This framework is your NABC Value Proposition with an introductory "Hook" to set the stage for your presentation and to get everyone's attention. The Hook provides a compelling, quantitative reason why your audience should be interested in what you will present.??

Additionally, as my partner, Len Polizzotto, says, "A meeting without next steps is a social event." The same goes for presenting your NABC Value Proposition.??After your NABC, the ending must include the "Action" you want.??It might be a meeting, funding, a resource request, or approval of milestones and deliverables.

Here are some tips:?

• Quantify whenever possible: never say bigger, better, faster, cheaper.??Don't add ambiguity to lack of knowledge.??When in doubt, give your best guess (SWAG) and then work to establish a defensible estimate.?
• Use figures, images, mockups, trend graphs, and stories.??A bad picture is often more effective than a good description.??My terrible picture of a Segway still rapidly communicates the concept.??
• "Bring-it-to-Life" so partners and investors can repeat it.??If they can't repeat it, they can't help you sell your idea to others.??This will typically take many iterations with feedback from your colleagues.??

Find more here on NABC value propositions:??https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/starting-point-all-innovations-nabc-value-curt-carlson-ph-d-/

Third:??Value Creation Forums

Every two weeks, ask 3 to 6 teams, each with 2 to 5 partners, to gather for an hour to share their Action Plan pitches.??Diversity of teams and teammates are both pluses because they add additional perspectives. Forums are designed to generate intense iteration and constant reframing of the NABCs presented to help the teams understand their actual customer’s needs and then create compelling solutions.

Doing this over lunch with pizza and coke is efficient and sets a positive tone.??As facilitator, you schedule the meetings and implement the following practices:

• Each team has someone present for 3-to-5 minutes.??Then the speaker is quiet, actively listening to the feedback.??Arguing back is not helpful.??It makes the meeting too long and it can seem quarrelsome.
• You call on people at random to give feedback from at least four different perspectives: what was good, ideas for improvement, eyes of the end-user, and eyes of the investor or buyer. Then, as appropriate, ask for other feedback.
• Assure that the meetings are always positive:??it is about learning and improving fast, not criticism.??It is the short presentations, concise NABC framework, and feedback from multiple perspectives that creates surprisingly rapid improvement.??Keep all presentations and feedback crisp and to the point.
• At each session, add another value creation concept as the issue evolves, such as reframing, business models, beachheads, risk reduction, and IP.

See more here:???https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/three-laws-value-creation-keys-systematic-innovative-carlson-ph-d-/

WIIFY? (What’s in it for you?)

Finally, a bit about motivation.??Why should colleagues join you???First, it is a way to improve any presentation remarkably fast.??Sitting at your computer looking at a bank screen, which we have all done, is not efficient, productive, or fun.??Your colleagues have skills and perspectives that can save you weeks or months of work.??Second, your presentations will impress others and get attention.??Third, mastering value creation is a skill that lasts a lifetime, and that only gets better with experience.??People who master value creation are constantly sought out by other accomplished professionals.?

Begin it Now

That’s it.??Those are the three steps and Value Creation Forums are engaging learning communities.??After your teams have presented numerous times, the quality and specificity of the presentations and proposals will be visibly better.??It is likely people will notice and ask what you have been doing.

Give it a try and see what happens.??You and your teams must have lunch anyway.??Just doing this much enabled SRI to go from failing for 20 years to growing 3.5X while systematically creating major innovations, such as HDTV and Siri.???At SRI we started with just a few teams with no management support and eventually expaned to the entire organization. And through repeated participation in Forums, our colleagues added other value creation skills to become master innovators and some successful entrepreneurs.

Next Steps and Support

If you are interested in more information, we have a free program from Northeastern University on Coursera with a 4.8 out of 5 rating (see the link below).??It takes about an hour.??I often post here and answer comments.

With Northeastern we have also developed an online interactive platform that enables participants to learn and use the i4i value creation methodology across the enterprise.??We are now in trials with multiple companies.??If you are interested in bringing these skills and Value Creation Forums to your teams and enterprise, let me know.

See: Curt Carlson, Harvard Business Review,?“Innovation for Impact”