Ed Catmull – WCAGLS 2015

Dan Sullivan · August 11, 2015 ·

This was from an interview Bill Hybels did with Ed Catmull, boss of Disney Animation Studios and co-founder of Pixar.

Two takeaways I got from this was that he saw the deeper cause and motive behind just making movies and a lot of money. That made me wonder about the deeper cause behind me working at Lieberman. Am I just making websites or am I doing something different? Later in the day I caught myself when someone said “What do you do?” and I said “I help people get their business on the internet.” AAAAH! It’s happening!

The other part of his talk that was good was how much he talked about teaching the principles of their company and their work philosophy. Sure, people need to know how to render lighting and keyframe the polygons, but they can learn that their own way, what he was concerned about was teaching the culture of creativity and flexibility and trust that will then turn out amazing movies.

WCAGLS14: Susan Cain, Challenging the Extrovert Ideal

Dan Sullivan · August 18, 2014 ·

I have a lot of extra thoughts and commentary, but they aren’t really on this topic. There were two speakers that were obviously spiritual, but not Christian, and that rubbed me the wrong way. I wrote in my review survey that either have profound topics by secular people or any topics from Christian speakers, but don’t have spiritual speakers that will refer to other spirits in their talk, especially if the content isn’t earth-shattering. She wasn’t as bad as the other speaker that referred to multiple people inside of her, but I had some trouble with this one.

It was also kind of awkward, immediately after what my wife called an “Amway talk” to sing a song about YOU YOU YOU. My church paradigm knew we were singing to God, but the content of the talk with the song following kind of felt like we were singing an anthem to ourselves. We can accomplish anything. We can do it if we believe in ourselves! Now let’s sing, “you you you”

Maybe it was just me being a curmudgeon.

WCAGLS Session 9: Vijay Govindarajan: Innovation

Dan Sullivan · August 9, 2013 ·

Session 9: Vijay Govindarajan: Innovation

Innovation is reacting to change.

How many things you are doing today go in box one?

Manage the Present. (efficiency)
Selectively forget the past
Shape the future

How do you do innovation and efficiency all at the same time? That's what counts.

Continuously improving the quality of what we do today is still limited.

High Jumpers

The scissor jump can only get you up 4 feet.
The western roll took people to 5 feet.
The straddle
Then Fosbury flop took people up to 9 feet!

We have to improve the quality of the scissor jump while we discover the fosbury flop.

The innovation is a virus to ongoing operations. Status quo takes over the dominant logic. If it is working, do it!

If dominant logic is left unchecked, you'll grow old while new stuff is birthed all around you.

Creativity is the idea. Innovation is applying that creativity economically.

Idea + Leader + Team + Plan = Innovation

since 99% of it is execution, that is where this guy is focusing his work. People don't need help coming up with ideas, or help with creativity. How do we make this stuff happen!?

Innovation leaders are not subversives. Sometimes they think their job is to break all the rules and do something bold and crazy. They act like Steve Jobs.

"Harness the great capabilites of the performance engine."
I don't know what that means, but it sounds great.

"you can't just turn scissors into a flosbury flop" (Context is everything on that quote! But it's right on. )

New Wineskins!

Some of the stuff he is talking about gets back to my idea that some churches need to just shut down and close for 3 months and then reopen from scratch.

If you want NYTimes digital to happen, you can't use your print newspaper team. You use different metrics, you use different culture. It's ok to keep them in the same building and link them to the existing team, but much of the team is going to have to be different.

No silicone valley startup can come up with 100 years of digital archives. NYTimes has that! Interract! Work together!

You have to have some shared, amphibious staff working on your breakthrough innovation.

The scissors pays for the development of the flosbury flop. At some point the flosbury flop is going to be the old thing, the performance engine that will fuel the next thing.

Be distinct and separate with your tasks. Don't measure new innovations the way you measured your old reliable stuff.

The team is fighting Organizational Memory. Remember your critical assets, use your history, but do something you've never done before.

Conflicts are healthy if you know how to manage them. That's where your history helps out your innovators.

zero based planning and organizing

Your current business is linear. Reacting to present markets. Signals are clear pointing us in various directions.
(He didn't say anything about this.)
You are betting on the future. You are predicting and learning to resolve unknowns. There are weak signals of where the future is going, so you test, spend a little, and learn a lot.

I wonder what Seth Godin would say about this guy's stuff. Some of this sounds like stuff in The Dip by Seth Godin.

Your team 3 should be evaluated on their ability to learn, apply the knowledge they gain from failures. Can they conduct low-cost experiments and then learn a whole bunch?

Reverse-Innovation
in the past, 3rd world folks invented stuff in the USA and then sold them in the 3rd world. In the future, he says 3rd world will invent 3rd world solutions, and the people in the 1st world will want it.

"Rich people might be interested in learning what these poor people are doing."

"Some say innovation is value for money. I say that innovation is value for many."
"Innovation is a lot more, for a lot less, for a lot of people."

Income inequality has reached alarming proportions. We work hard at producing products for the rich. That's the source of income inequality. What would happen if we innovated products for the poor? Products are already MADE by the poor, what if they are meant to be consumed by and help the poor.

[he just said he discovered "the secret sauce of innovation"]

The US lives in Box 3 thinking. As a culture we look to the future and try to create it.

I'm curious how much we do that anymore. I'm thinking with immigration hate, if we've killed the american dream.

the guy came to america with $11. he spent $6 on a candy bar because he figured there isn't much difference between just having 5 or 11, but at least he'd have a candy bar.

Accepting ideas from any part of the world is a strength of America, he says. I'm not totally sure that is still true!

I wish it were!

Let's make is so!

Innovation by the poor, with the poor, for the poor!

Notes from OneLife church 20130721

Dan Sullivan · July 21, 2013 ·

Global Leadership Summit 2011, Part 4: Seth Godin

Dan Sullivan · September 2, 2011 ·

Next up was Seth Godin. I was pretty exited about hearing him for 2 main reasons:

I had read some of his blog posts (confession: I haven’t finished any of his books)
I heard he had 142 slides for his 30 minute presentation

A lot of the stuff he said struck more an individual and entrepreneurial tone. I think if you listened to this talk but were stuck in a corporate grey cube you’d be really really frustrated.

He talked about the individual hand made item vs. the mass-produced item. The former Better Crocker R&D kitchens now house a hand-made (and expensive) chocolate business.

There are a couple good things in here. The first was about owning your own business. If you are creating great things, and you are full of ideas, why do you hold back and not let them flow‽ He was talking about the pen making machine at this point. Before the pen making machine, it would take a skilled craftsman to make 4-5 pens in a day. Once the pen-making machine was invented, a stooge off the street with 5 minutes of training could make 10,000 pens a day. Karl Marx said, “Workers of the world unite!” and boycott such machinery. Adam Smith said, “Go buy a pen-making machine. Now.”

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art exhibit. It was new, revolutionary, and shook a lot of people up. It changed the way people began to regard art and the adoration and worship of art. If anyone would have come along after him and put a urinal in an art show, though, it would have been a copy. It would not have been as revolutionary.

Basically Godin is saying that if you are the first to come up with something, you are unique and you’re going to change people. If you copy off of someone else it will be mundane and ordinary.