Some take-aways from Nordic Business Forum 2019 Growth- Marketing- Innovation - Leadership Day 1

This was my 6th Nordic Business Forum attendance and I have learned from different seminars that in order to deepen my own learning and apply chosen things as part of my life as well as share the findings with others, it’s important to come back to the notes and make a summary of the most important take-aways. I am aware that, these kind of summaries are highly subjective, since each person focuses on different perspectives in the same speech based on background, focus and interests. I hope you can learn and use some of these in your life.

The first day started with Costas Markides, Professor at London Business School, who talked about Innovation as a Springboard to Success. According to him innovation is correlated to growth and many more. How to make organizations more innovative? He said that you cannot answer to that questions, because innovation is so many things. However, he differentiated two basic forms of innovation 1. Sustaining innovation, which is incremental and includes less risk and is easier to make, and 2. Disruptive innovations which are more impactful, more risky and more difficult to do. It is important to first decide which one to choose. When you choose sustaining innovation, it is important to encourage day to day innovations, including allowing experiment, mistakes, questions, look outside and work across silos. However, doing this will not allow you to achieve disruptive innovation. Innovation is discovery and scaling discovery, and for that to happen you need different kind of people.

I have also noticed in my own work with leadership and expert teams, that it is important to have diverse personalities who naturally perceive things in a different way and can challenges each other and build a more versatile picture of the world to see innovation possibilities. Key is how to be aware of the diversity and value it instead of being distracted or annoyed by it. This often needs growth both as individuals and as a team.

The second speaker was Anssi Rantanen, Finland CEO at Growth Tribe academy, focused on answering the question “Why experimentation is the future of growth. Technology allows us to experiment much faster. He demonstrated his point by doing an amazing demonstration at the stage in creating a brand, website and chatbot in 5 minutes. He pointed out that the important ways to use experimentation for growth are 1. Underscore importance of contribution, 2. Ask for honest feedback 3. Be honest about having failed yourself showing that every failure is a possibility for growth. He referred to the Google's research on teams that experimentation is the future of growth but that is impossible without psychological safety. He claimed that 50 % do not say when they have something to say.

This resonates very well to my experience with teams. Psychological safety and trust are the most important basis for people to be themselves and share their honest views and even stupid ideas, which can be the springboard to greater innovations. Building psychological safety often needs effort and focus.

Next speaker was Juliet Font Ceo at Whitespace at Work. Her topic was The Strategic Pause. She claimed that it is mad how most people work and that nobody changes before everyone changes, which means that no one changes. Many industries do not have time to think, which causes their businesses suffer. People are exhausted and too much time is spent in ineffective meetings and interruptions. Interruption requires interruption recovery time. She stressed that we should always take a strategic pause before making decisions and we need to have “whitespace” as well. Whitespace is not, according to her definition, mind wandering, mediation or following mindfulness instructions, but boundless thinking where you can think about unthought thought. Thinking is what changes everything. Good White Space Simplification questions are “Is there anything I can let go of?” Where is good enough, good enough? What do I truly need right now? What deserves my attention?” In time of anxiety, we can change the anxiety into a moment of whitespace. However, she pointed out, you cannot have open moment when people have too much work. Important to work on how to change that first.

Having worked as an executive coach for a long time, many people appreciate when a coaching session allows time and space to think and reflect with a mirror=a coach. Also using different tools often help us to learn how to efficiently unplug ourselves in the midst of too much external and internal input, and access our true wisdom and what is really important in a given moment.

DR. Prag Khanna Leading geo-strategic expert shed us light in understanding Asia and opportunities in the future of business. Asia is much bigger than China of which we are often too obsessed about. Asia is already half of world’s economy and Asianization of Asia is now taking place which means that Asia is becoming self-sufficient. Asia is catching up to Europe in share of total world trade. There are more people living in democracies than in the rest of the world. Asia wants to have the best solution, what are the things that help them to overcome pollution, which is a huge problem. According to him Europe should take the lead in shaping Asian and global standards.

Alex Osterwalder’s topic was The Invincible Company: Closing the innovation Culture Gap. He made his point clear right at the beginning of his talk by saying that if you are not good at changing your business model it can end your business, which happened to eg. Kodak. It’s competitor, Fuji, on the other hand, had the will power to change and transform their business into a totally different business- a cosmetic company. He reminded that if life is good, we get complacent, and then someone else can have a plan for us. He raised Amazon as a great example of an innovative company. Amazon allows their people to innovate all the time and therefore is a serial innovator in products and business models. For innovations to emerge you need to have a culture where it is normal to experiment. 

How to build invincible company? The speaker summarized four areas that need to be in place for that to happen. 1. Innovation & execution culture live in harmony. Innovation is close to surgery. It is important to design a culture like a garden. 2. Leadership understands & supports innovation 3. Organisational design gives innovation power to act (eg. by appointing Chief Entrepreneur), with independence on making decisions. Without the decision-making power, the innovations will die. 4. Innovation teams exhibit world class innovation practice. With innovation you cannot pick a winner – you need to invest in innovation and build world class innovation funnel. The failure is not a problem but part of the process.  

Of all the speakers this speaker used most versatile teaching & learning methods with the audience, which was quite an effort with several thousand people. Eg. we could experiment in building a culture map for Amazon. The culture map consisted of Enablers, Blockers, Behaviors, and Outcomes. The map was easy to use tool to use in designing a culture.

Daniel Pink shared with us scientific secrets of perfect timing. He started with stating that we often believe timing is an art, but timing is really a science. A day is a fundamental unit how the time affects us, and the hidden pattern of the day profoundly affects our mood and our performance. Interesting anecdote was that he suggested that we should never go to a hospital in the afternoon, because there are massive deductions of performance of the staff in the afternoon. For example doctors tend to prescribe more antibiotics/opioids in the afternoon.

He raised three key points what comes to the timing: 1. Our cognitive abilities don’t remain static over the course of the day. 2.The daily fluctuations are more extreme than we realize 3. The best time to perform a task depends on the nature of the task. Therefore, it is important to 1. be much more deliberate and intentional in scheduling individual and team work, 2. Move analytic tasks to the peak, administrative tasks to the trough, and insight tasks to the recovery, 3. Take more breaks, that are social, moving, outside, and fully detached. We tend to go to the meeting if we are available. We do not question often enough what is the purpose of the meeting.

Given a choice human being prefer endings that elevate, and endings help us energize and elevate. He presented an interesting research about when people are most likely to run the first marathon. The answer was at the age of 29 and 39 and 49! So it was not a co-incidence that I did my first half-marathon at the age of 29! When the end of something is coming visible we tend to kick harder. Having a elevating ending is also true when hearing news. If someone says to us “I have some good news and some bad news? Most people want to hear bad news first.

Last speaker for the first day was Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple who was interviewed by Henkka Hypp?nen. I admire his sincerity and how he throughout his life always had follow his passion for computers and not on making money. Eg. he gave up a lot of money right at the beginning of Apple’s history to the people in the organization and has also been a teacher in the public schools. He seemed to be a man with high integrity, ethics and appreciation for people. He said he would not want to be any another person in the world.

My even shorter summary of the first day would be: Innovation needs hard and purposeful work, diversity, right culture and leadership with processses to experiment and permission to fail. Do the work which requires analytic skills in the morning, deliver bad messages before good ones, organize thinking time especially before decisions, and find your passion and the rest will follow. I will summarize my take-aways of day 2 in another blog.