Category Archives: Innovation

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A Wright Brothers Moment

Like most business leaders these days, I am obsessed with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Not a day goes by without the promise or threat of AI dominating the headlines. There is insurmountable prognostication from pundits on all sides of observation — thinkers, doers, computer scientists, investors, executives, academics, journalists, policy-makers, and just regular folks — about where AI will lead, with or without direct human control.

As always, my core belief is that technology advances faster than our ability to understand its social implications. This is also another one of those situations where it is impossible to say if anyone can paint a clear and true picture of what we’ll see on the road ahead, be it five, ten, or a hundred years from today.

This for me has become a Wright Brothers moment. What I mean by that is trying to imagine what the Wright Brothers might have thought about where their first powered flyer might lead in the ensuing hundred years. Although they understood the potential military applications of flight, they couldn’t have imagined the 37-hour round-trip path of the recent B2 intercontinental bombing mission. They couldn’t have imagined commercial flights filling up daily at relatively low cost with endless travelers. They couldn’t have envisioned space travel with or without humans to the moon, Mars, or beyond our own galaxy.

I’m familiar with the Wright Brothers story as it was foundational to the first storytelling project I joined to bring to life in technology, a very early computer game called Wings. That game followed the life of a young pilot in World War I, an extremely rudimentary military use of aeronautics long beyond the imagination of the innovators Wilbur and Orville Wright. The success of the Kitty Hawk biplane experiment in 1903 led to armed aircraft and pilots fighting each other in flight a decade later. That was an early twentieth-century sign of how fast technology would evolve from concept to unplanned implementation.

The more I study AI and approve early-stage projects where it is being applied to our business, the more I am convinced we are in a Wright Brothers moment. Virtually no one reading this blog will be around in a century to either say “I told you so” or gasp at the outcome of where machine learning, large language models, generative AI, or agentic adoption will take us. It would be like the Wright Brothers on that remote North Carolina beach envisioning a frequent flyer program and pre-ordering their inflight meal — or trying to picture an aircraft carrier at sea, or a massive rocket lifting into the air and landing again on its base.

Futurists may try to see through a crystal ball, but we all know that’s mostly a fool’s errand. What we may think the history of science will bring and what it actually delivers are almost impossible to reconcile within a lifetime, let alone beyond a lifetime.

I felt similarly when I bought my first personal computer in the mid-1980s at the beginning of my career, mostly to use as a word processor. That was a few years before a small team of collaborators built that WWI game called Wings. In those few years following the first monochrome monitor on my desktop, we created a brightly colored rendering of a three-dimensional flight simulator at extraordinarily low cost and sold at a similarly attractive consumer price point. I thought to myself, where will this exponential compounding take us in the tangible decades ahead of me?

The quantitative advances in processing instructions were already staggering. We had just bought new computers with 20mb hard drives and the Holy Grail of local storage appeared to be CD-ROM. That was before the commercial internet, before broadband, before widely available cellphones, and long before any kind of advanced mobile device in your hand that could access and display unlimited high-definition video. No one could have pictured an iPhone, not even Steve Jobs.

All of that pales in comparison to what I think AI will bring. I’m trying to envision the world in a decade, in two decades, which hopefully I will see. A hundred years from now, what will be the human experience? What is the equivalent of boarding a plane with 400 other passengers for a flight of several hours across an ocean and hoping to get upgraded versus waiting in line at a port hoping to find passage on a steamship for a week or two of unsteady seas?

Together we are sharing a Wright Brothers moment. We’re on a windy shoreline, staring in awe at an ingeniously designed, materially fragile, heavier-than-air, modestly motor-powered, fancy bit of kite architecture, equipped to carry a single passenger off the ground for about 12 seconds.

What this means is that we are about to fly.

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Photo: Pixabay

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Don’t Yell at the Pilot

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I spend a lot of time on planes. When you fly a lot or spend a hunk of time at airports, you observe human behavior in many of its less magnificent expressions. There’s no way around it — the more you fly, the more likely things are to go wrong. It’s a numbers game. Take 100 flights, and if just 5% of them don’t go as planned, that’s five bad days of travel interrupted. That 5% is optimistic.

Frequent travelers know that getting angry at the people trying to help you with a canceled or rerouted flight is not likely to get you what you want. You may think yelling at the person on the other side of the computer will get their attention. What you don’t know is what they are typing, or would have typed if you had been a little kinder.

Last week I had one of those bad business travel days. Shortly after takeoff, we were notified by the captain that there was an unexpected rumbling we all heard in the retraction of the landing gear. Although he assured us we were safe, to be even safer he was going to make an unscheduled landing at the next major airport we were approaching.

You can imagine the groans from the cabin passengers. “There goes the day.” “So much for our plans.” Yep. That’s what happens. The captain makes the call and the plane goes where the captain says it goes. Twenty minutes later we were on a runway and at a gate two hours short of our destination.

Indeed there was confusion when we landed. We were asked to disembark and wait at the gate. Job 1 of course was to inspect the plane and see if it could be airborne again. If you have ever experienced this scenario, you know the chances were maybe 10% that plane was going back in the sky the same day, but you do what the crew advises and take it a step at a time.

Because we were an unexpected landing the gate was understaffed. While they tried to get the connecting passengers rerouted, they asked the single destination passengers to wait for a call on whether the plane was safe to fly again or we would need to be rebooked. Frequent travelers know not to wait — you get on the phone or internet, rebook while seats are available on other flights, and take whatever seat you can get to keep moving. Of course not everyone can be helped immediately with long lines and on-hold wait times, so there was reasonable angst in the gate area.

Reasonable, that is, until the captain came off the plane and visited with us while we waited. That’s when people became unreasonable. He told us the likelihood of that plane taking off again the same day was extremely low, and we should all be making other plans. He was honest and straightforward. He didn’t have to do that. He didn’t even have to talk to us. In exchange for his candor, a number of passengers started yelling at him. “This is unacceptable!” “Do you know how to run an airline or not?” “What compensation do we get for this inconvenience?”

There are a few cardinal rules frequent travelers embrace. Don’t make jokes when passing through security. Don’t step in front of small children or anyone in a wheelchair when boarding or deplaning. And don’t yell at anyone in uniform. Ever. Do not yell at a flight attendant. Absolutely never yell at a pilot.

For all these angry passengers knew, this pilot might have just saved their lives. Sure he said there was no danger in the air, but you don’t know if that’s really true. A captain would never create a panic in the cabin. This captain made a call and set the plane down. Now we’re calling family to tell them we’re going to be late and worrying about retrieving our luggage. Could it be worse? At 37,000 feet above the Earth?

I remember during Covid when passengers were complaining to flight attendants about wearing masks. Sometimes that exploded into yelling. I thought to myself, what makes people think that flight attendants have any discretion over enforcing federal policy? What can passengers possibly hope to accomplish by yelling at those making it possible to fly during the pandemic?

Airline inflight personnel are heroes who look after our safety first and foremost. They don’t run the airline. They aren’t in management or marketing. They are not jet manufacturers or maintenance crews. Their job is to get us where we are going safely. They do that with 99.99% accuracy, maybe more 9s. To yell at a pilot for the inconvenience someone might be suffering is beyond ignorant, beyond disrespectful, beyond lunatic. The pilot did his job. Applaud him, thank him, write a letter of commendation on his behalf.

Don’t yell at the pilot. Never. You’ll get where you’re going because a highly trained and experienced professional kept that option open for you. Their thousands of hours in the cockpit prepared them to make split-second decisions, perhaps a few consequential times in their careers, that allowed you to read these words. I’m in awe of their talent, commitment, dedication, and perfectionism. Yell at them and you’re going to get a different kind of feedback from passengers like me, their most devoted fans.

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Photo: Pexels

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What Does Winning Look Like?

If you’ve ever been in a planning meeting with me, you are familiar with this question: What does winning look like? This is how I like to frame decisions around initiatives we are considering. If we can define success in advance, we will know if we achieve it. If we have no idea what winning looks like before we commit resources to a project, how do we know if it was worth it once we deliver the work product?

We all know what winning looks like in sports. If one team has a higher score than its opponent, that team wins. Simple enough, but is it also winning if there were so many injuries in the latest game that half the team can’t play in the next game? What if the team’s coach coach delivers the win, but on a series of controversial decisions that damage team morale for the rest of the season? What if someone cheats? Some of winning is straightforward, but not all of it.

Let’s consider a working example in business.

Let’s say we have an idea for a new set of features we think we want to create for our e-commerce platform. One way to decide what winning looks like is a simple ROI (return on investment) calculation. Suppose the project cost is a million dollars. The first thing we want to do is get back that million dollars through incremental profits. Remember always that revenue is not profit. We have to take all our fixed and variable costs out of sales before we achieve a contribution to earnings. A million dollars of revenue does not pay back a million-dollar investment, but if our contribution margin on those sales is 20%, then we need an incremental $5m of revenue to produce $1m of incremental cash (presume that general and administrative costs are unchanged to simplify things).

Let’s say then we’ve articulated the minimum payback to break even we need on $1m of investment is $5m of incremental sales (that is, revenue we would not have received without the new initiative). Of course, no one wants to break even in business, we want a multiple of that investment back. Do we want 5x, 10x, or more? A lot of that depends on the scale of the business, but let’s say we want 5x our investment to call it a win. That’s $25m of sales generating $5m of cash for a 5x return.

The next question we might ask is how soon do we want that return. Some of that will depend on the numerous initiatives competing for investment. If two potential initiatives are evaluated to deliver the same 5x return, but one can do it in six months and one can do it in a year, I’d say we go with six months. So the cash we produce is important, but so is the time we have to wait to get it back.

Does winning end there? Is selecting an initiative solely based on return on investment and time? Seldom are those the only factors in play. We need to think about the strategic value of our initiative. Does it lift our customer count? Sometimes that is even more important than the incremental cash we are producing, particularly if we are focusing on the lifetime value of a customer. In this case we might set a goal that the new initiative increases our customer count by 5% in no less than a year. If we know what those customers are worth to us in the long run, we might go back and pick the initiative with the one year return on investment over the six month time frame if the additional customers we are acquiring are all the more valuable.

Another factor in winning might be market positioning in the competitive environment. Let’s say we’re convinced the feature we’re considering is something our customers have been requesting in customer service feedback, because no one else does it very well. Winning in this instance might be about acquiring market share above other metrics. When we launch the feature, if we see our online orders increase by 5% while a competitor’s volume stays the same or declines, we might call that winning, particularly if we can translate that gain in market share into higher customer count or improved lifetime value.

The point here is not to enumerate all the ways we might factor winning, but to force a robust dialogue ahead of committing to an initiative that builds a consensus around the work we will do together. If we collect data in advance, set goals for the improvement of key performance indicators (KPIs), ardently debate the relative merits of the various initiatives before us, and then make an informed choice, we can clearly measure the success or failure of the initiative. If we just reach to heaven for inspiration, how can we know if we won or lost?

Wise business leaders know that if we discuss upfront what winning looks like and then fail to achieve it, there is no blame to be assigned. We haven’t failed at all, we have learned in an experiment that mattered and held consequence. The argument is for better process management, to spend the time in advance discussing what winning looks like so we know it when we see it or don’t see it. Failure to invest that time ahead of committing resources to an initiative is indeed a form of failure, even if the initiative happens to succeed (how you know it succeeded when you didn’t address that in advance is another story entirely).

Don’t move forward without deciding what winning looks like. Crafting a thesis of the change you are trying to affect and the benefits you intend to bring establishes a benchmark for measurement. Insisting on this step early in product development will not only improve the odds of success, it will improve the teamwork and ability to share in the success a team creates together.

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Photo: Pixabay

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Easing Up on Advice

When I started writing this blog more than thirteen years ago, I never intended for it to be an advice column. The tagline has always been “Ideas, Business, Stories.” Sometimes it’s not about business, sometimes I fail to shape a decent story, but I always try to center the content around ideas, which comes first for a reason. Nothing in these words other than keeping me in practice between books is more important to me than causing people to think harder and test those thoughts in ardent dialogue and discussion.

I’ll admit, too often I’ve delved into the realm of advice. I won’t apologize for that per se, because I’ve heard from many of you over the years struggling with similar challenges that extracted bits of this advice have led to course corrections, strategic realignment, saving a customer, or even circumventing the unneeded pain of a failed initiative without key learning. If the reading material was helpful, great. If not, perhaps at least I got you to reconsider the ordinary.

What is better than advice and where I’ve hoped to steer a lot of these words? That would come back to ideas, and that would be anchored in inspiration.

With advice, we often suggest what to do and when to do it.

With inspiration, we better suggest why something is worth rethinking and how perhaps to approach a framework for effective resolution.

Never was this clearer to me than in a candid panel discussion at my latest college reunion ostensibly about third acts in our lives. Understand this is a collection of oldsters whom I would be so bold as to characterize as not yet ancient. This group now has four decades of life and career under its belt post-college, with all the setbacks and curveballs we are certain everyone else is likely to encounter. In simply introducing this panel, the moderator found several of the participants rejecting the very premise of the panel in asking: Why does any life have to be structured in three acts? While that framework might (or might not) work at times for commercial storytelling, what relevance does it have to most human arcs, which are infinitely more nuanced?

Yes, it was that kind of discussion. The ideas that emerged were worth the nitpicking.

Key among those ideas for me, and quite a surprise at that, was the somewhat common theme that all the diverse participants shared in acknowledging most of the advice they received throughout their lives as well-meaning but demoralizing.

Wait, huh? If you know people genuinely care about you, or at least give them the benefit of that doubt, why would the advice offered too often hurt more than help?

Again, the commonality in response was striking: Advice considers the general case rather than the personalization of the specific case. Indeed, if the recommended advice worked for you in your set of decisions and you were happy with the outcome, that’s terrific. It’s more than terrific if you navigated a complex maze to get safely and successfully to where you wanted to be. What relevance is it likely to have for me? Much less than you think.

In these cases, the advice individuals received from people close to them centered on career, family, self-realization, medical and health problems, losing loved ones, even planning for retirement. The standard expressions of get an education, get a starter job, climb the ladder, pursue a family, invest wisely, and confront demons as they emerge all seemed too pat in hindsight. Get an education to you might not be the same as get an education to me. Find fulfilling employment, even gainful employment, again proved a landmine of difficult-to-connect dots.

The biggest problem seemed to be that rejecting advice could insult the advice-offerer, but more troubling, cause the advice-offerer to segue from advice to criticism. To the extent this set of unique, highly motivated fellow travelers at difficult junctures in their lives wished to hear criticism… well, you can imagine how that kind of rejection lands. Feedback opens the door to curiosity, which fuels the exploration of a theme and extends two-way dialogue. Even the tiniest implication of judgment can shut it down.

Instead of advice, the panel craved peer interaction, within and across disciplines, within and across life stages, to light a torch that could lead them through opaque corridors and dark tunnels. To some extent, this means active listening combined carefully with real-time conversation, avoiding the trap of prescriptive solution crafting. It is precisely the inspiration of those exchanges that people found most useful in designing and committing to better outcomes. It’s the difference between canned narrative touting relatively obvious answers and imaginative moments of shared realization. Advice was predisposed to be narrow. Inspiration was ceaselessly unlimited.

Still think we’re nitpicking? I don’t think so. I’ve written many times that in my own worldview, the course of our lives often comes down to four to six invisible forks in the road. As Yogi Berra liked to say, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” The problem with these invisible forks is just that — you don’t know you’re there when you are. We understand our relationships and careers in hindsight way better than we plan them forward. We can point to those stunningly revealed forks looking back. We can’t necessarily know that a decision we make today will affect our lives for decades to come.

If you are potentially at one of those invisible forks, and you start to explain it to someone, the advice they offer you (“Why, yes, you have to take that job”) is as likely to be wrong as right. Throwing darts would probably get you better results because at least the dartboard is unbiased. On the other hand, if the dialogue we enjoy at those potential forks causes us to think differently and make a decision we are comfortable living with right or wrong, the interaction is likely to be memorable and long-term laudable. It’s the difference between practical direction, which is somewhat hierarchical, and empathy, which is bonding.

All of this is to say if any of my advice in these passages has been useful, I am happy I didn’t blow it. If it has been thin and irrelevant, or worse, demotivating, I do apologize. On the other hand, if any of the ideas here have lifted your spirits to encourage better decision-making, I am humbled. My goal is not to articulate what I think you ought to do. My goal is for you to feel great about your choices and decisions. If I have stretched your notion of possibility along the way, then the words did the job I intended.

To my aging classmates, thank you again for the inspiration. You got me to rethink my own sense of purpose in a manner only you could achieve. I’ll try to repay the favor going forward with the precious time ahead we can still share.

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Image: Pixabay