How to Advance Your Career: Be a Value Creator
Curt Carlson, Ph.D.
Professor of Practice, Northeastern University and Distinguished Executive in Residence, WPI
Ten steps to becoming a uniquely valuable professional with endless opportunities
Introduction
If you work in a typical company, you might feel unappreciated and often ignored. You might think of your management as brain-dead or content-free. You may be unhappy, discouraged, and unmotivated but uncertain about finding another company where you would be treated better. I feel your pain.?
If you relate to these issues, I have a suggestion that can help and even transform your career. But we must first reframe the problem to provide a solution.?
We constantly see brilliant employees who don't know how to create end-user value and then describe it to management. But when an employee has those skills, their relationship with management is usually very different.??
In most enterprises, senior management has few, if any, valuable new ideas. Most managers are not Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. They might have had transformative ideas in the past, but as they move up, they become removed from the marketplace, technology, and end-user needs. As a result, they depend on others to provide those insights. That was certainly my situation as CEO of SRI International. My role was no longer to create innovations but to help liberate our teams' collective genius.?
When an employee knows how to identify, develop, and describe new end-user value, they are a very rare professional – a Superstar. And, if management doesn’t appreciate them, Superstars have endless options elsewhere.??
The Epiphany
Awhile back I was a middle-level technical manager at GE, working on HDTV when my division was sold to SRI International. SRI is a high-tech company in Silicon Valley that creates new products and services for others, like the computer mouse and electronic banking. GE gave me millions of dollars to spend each year, and I was terrific at it. However, at SRI, I was now expected to earn millions of dollars each year, and I was terrible at it. I didn't have a clue.??
Fortunately, I had a brilliant friend, Norman Winarsky, who said the words that changed our lives. He said, "Curt, this is like everything else we have done; we must just learn." Okay, learn, but how? I went to see the Senior VP of marketing, Joe V., and asked if he would help us. He said, "No. I don't think your projects have any future. You're on your own." As I remember telling Norman later, I respectfully and appreciatively thanked him for his insightful and caring career advice. Of course, Norman remembers my reaction a bit differently. But in retrospect, Joe gave us a gift.?
We had to do something. So, with no official management support or money, Norman and I set out to learn how to create value for others. Our team of about twenty middle-level managers and researchers met from 5:00 to 9:00 PM over pizza and coke every two weeks. Each person briefly presented their project and shared something they had learned about our new business.?
We knew almost nothing at the start. We read every award-winning book but discovered that none helped. These books were all about the "what" to do but said little about the "how" to do it. We needed the "how" of value creation and innovation. For over a year, we had no success, but we slowly discovered concepts that worked, and, bit by bit, our team began finding success. We found that only the most fundamental value creation concepts mattered. Complicated systems don't work because they can't work. They add confusion when you are struggling to find a path forward.?
The steps below summarize what we learned. My team started to grow, and eventually, I became the company's CEO. But at that time the overall company's situation was terrible. After twenty years of decline, the company was nearly bankrupt, the buildings were falling down, and everyone blamed someone else for the company's bleak future.
But again, bit by bit, we added these concepts, grew SRI 3.5 times, and became a global model for creating transformative innovations, such as Siri, HDTV, and Intuitive Surgical. Norman became president of SRI ventures and, among other achievements, helped pioneer Siri with Adam Cheyer and Bill Mark, which Steve Jobs bought for the iPhone. The same people at SRI who had been in decline for twenty years were now positively changing the world.?
Value Creation
A fundamental responsibility of all professionals is to identify and address the needs of importance to others. If you are like Norman and me at the time of the GE-SRI transition, working in a typical company, you likely don't know how to do that. When I became CEO of SRI, we trained everyone in the discipline of value creation, which became our competitive advantage.
Why every company doesn't do that is a giant failure. The gains in performance from that are huge. Although you likely can't fix that in your company, you don't need to. You first need to help yourself and then your team. Then maybe you can help your company.?
To get started, here are a few basic definitions, which are often confused:
A responsibility of all professionals is value creation, constantly developing innovations of sustainable value for your teams, partners, and enterprise. This responsibility applies whether you are in research, finance, operations, or human relations. Your job is to deliver new value to your end-users and stakeholders. Most of those innovations will likely be small, but if you are prepared, some may be of significant impact. Conversely, if you stop being a value creator, you are no longer a full professional and may soon be replaced, perhaps by a new IT system or robot.??
To get started, you need to know one more thing: the definition of a "value proposition." It has four major parts: The goal of value creation is to address a significant unmet end-user and market?
This definition is the most crucial concept in value creation. Every situation addressing a need that matters to others starts by answering those four NABC questions.??
NABC Action Plans
Answering the four NABC questions sets the direction for all subsequent work. However, addressing those four questions is exceptionally challenging, so answering them requires intense, rapid iteration. To aid this work, we add two other ingredients to the NABC framework to make it more effective. We call this an NABC Action Plan, defined by:
Answering these questions and developing these value creation skills is difficult, so you must start and stay fully engaged.???The good news is that you can begin impressing people after just a few weeks. For example, a workshop participant immediately started giving NABC Action Plan presentations in her company. At first, everyone was slightly surprised at how uniquely clear her presentations were. Something was different, but what was it? It was a bit like someone wearing attractive new glasses. The person looks better, but it takes a few moments to figure out why.??
?Ten Steps to Superstar Status
Below are the ten steps required to master value creation and innovation. You should start by applying these concepts to your current tasks. Thus, you don't need permission or additional resources. Over time you will be become more efficient and effective in all your roles.?
As you will discover, these concepts are not complicated, like learning quantum computing, but it doesn't mean they are easy to apply. On the contrary, they require practice until they become intuitive mental models.?
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Value creation starts by identifying a significant unmet end-user need. First, look at your projects, company, and market ecosystem to identify a significant problem. Then within that problem, find an unmet need you can potentially address.
2. Get Started
Immediately write down your NABC Action Plan.???Start with just four viewgraphs with your best guesses for answers. Of course, they will be wrong at first. But don't worry, they always are at the start. Too little is known, and many of the ideas assumed are wrong.
3. A Few Great Partners
Effective teams have someone with business or marketing skills, someone with deep knowledge in the market or technical space, and someone with operations skills. All teammates must share the vision, have unique complementary skills, and share in the rewards. Start with the minimal team. The critical first goal is to develop your NABC Action Plan.
4. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate?
Don't wait; start by showing your concept to others and iterating. Present your NABC Action Plan to partners, friends, and others while researching on Google and other resources to gather information. Your immediate colleagues are your primary resource; tap into their collective genius.
5. Quantify?
Where appropriate, quantify your value proposition. If uncertain, give your best guess and then improve it over time. One of our rules is: never say bigger, better, faster, cheaper. No one knows whether "bigger" matters until you tell them or show them. Don't add ambiguity to the lack of knowledge.
6. Master Value Creation?
Continue to study, learn, and apply the basics of value creation (see my Linkedin posts at the end of this Post). As you develop your NABC Action Plan, you will need to address other concepts, like risk reduction, business models, and market positioning. The basics are described in my posts.?
7. Team Feedback
Take every opportunity to present your NABC Action Plan to others.???You can start with teammates in review meetings and ask them for feedback from multiple perspectives. For example, go around the room and ask your colleagues what was good, ideas for improvement, the eyes of the end-user, and finally, the eyes of management.??Those different perspectives help reframe your value proposition, to check if it is complete.??Reframing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to learn and improve. It is almost impossible to make progress fast by ourselves without reframing help from colleagues. We all get trapped in our conceptual cul de sacs.?
The most effective approach is to find 3 or 4 other teams working on projects and meet over lunch for an hour with pizza, salad, and coke every few weeks. Take turns presenting 2-5 minute NABC Action Plans and giving each other feedback. We call these Value Creation Forms, and they are the most effective way for your team to learn, improve, create, and test propositions faster than the competition.
Note that the comments and feedback must be supportive and helpful.? Great human values are essential. Respect for others and integrity are required for teams to collaborate intensely.
8. Know Your Ecosystem?
You cann't get all the answered needed at your desk. You must engage in your ecosystem, which we call "playing in traffic." That starts inside your enterprise but must soon reach outside to deeply understand your end-users, and including the competition, business models, and technology trends. Fortunately, with videoconferencing, much of this is easier and less expensive.
9. Mitigate Risk
Rapidly de-risk your NABC at minimal cost before building a prototype. Most teams want to quickly build their idea or create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Immediately forming a big team and building a prototype is almost always a mistake. At first, the objective is to perform low-cost Minimum Viable Experiments (MVEs) to mitigate significant risks. Until those risks are mitigated, the MVP will likely be wrong. It is also helpful to write down all the objections stakeholders might have to your initiative and find ways to address them. Mitigating risk through MVEs and objection identification typically saves teams large amounts of time and resources.
10. Everyone a Champion
Creating anything of significance requires enormous work and perseverance.???Champions master value creation, don't complain, persevere, and succeed. Our rule is: no champion, no project, no exception. Everyone on the project must be a champion for their part.???For example, someone must be the champion for driving the development of the NABC Action Plan.??
Conclusions
These are some of the core concepts Norman and our team learned the hard way, through endless experiments over many years. One of the non-obvious advantages of using even the most basic concepts is, when every presentation on a team or in an enterprise starts with the end-user need, it is transformative.? That focusses everyone on the objective.
This quote captures a major lesson Norman and I learned [1]: "The moment one commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Begin it now."
I hope you will go on this journey to learn these essential life skills. This short Post contains enough for you to transform your career. So, write down your NABC Action Plan and begin. Begin it now.
References
Go here for Linkedin:??https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/12325071/
Go here for Coursera:?https://www.coursera.org/learn/valuecreation
BioInnovation
2 年Hi Curt! I still have that first NABC playbook from those early days at Sarnoff/SRI. You were truly inspirational and I remember those lessons fondly. Thanks for all you do! I continue to use those lessons in my own classes today.
Mehr Ertrag durch h?here Produktivit?t, massive Kostensenkung & konsequente Umsetzung | Interim Manager | CEO / COO / CRO | Restrukturierung | Transformation | Lean | Automatisierung | International Markterfolg EU & USA
2 年Thank you Curt Carlson, Ph.D. for teaching this valuable skillls. These are valuable not only for the individual but for humankind as we need to innovate better and with higher results to master the many challenges we are confronting.
Professor of Practice, Northeastern University and Distinguished Executive in Residence, WPI
2 年Dear Pam: Many thanks. And look at you now! Congratulations on all you have done. We had one huge advantage when we started -- a group of fantastic colleagues. The most amazing thing I have learned since that time, working with thousands of teams in our workshops from top companies and universities, is that none of their companies teach them their job -- value creation and innovation. Business schools don't teach it. They teach "entrepreneurship" but that is the end of the journey from value creation to innovation and then, for one in a thousand, on to entrepreneurship. You can't be an entreprenur if you are not a value creator. Almost all the failures we see start there. Thus, the waste we see is immense. You likely look at 1/100 offerings to invest in. I just gave a talk to the leadership of NSF and challenged them to improve their R&D results by 10X. But since they have never been exposed to working in a more productive way, they had nothing to say. Thanks again for reaching out. Take care; be well.
Managing Partner | PhD EE | Capita3 | Operator | Venture Fellow @ MATTER |
2 年Hi Curt Carlson, Ph.D. ! I remember NABC from those days. It became a standard fixture of our presentations. I also recall joining in the second of 5 years of GE’s funding and the need to develop a sustainable business model. As part of several teams that learned how to develop and spin out viable startups from core company teams and technologies, that experience set the stage for my career. Thank you for your vision and your novel learning style of leadership. I’ve been modeling that ever since and it was good to be reminded of the source!!!