Thoughts on The Apprentice...

A recent article in the Independent on Sunday questioned whether The Apprentice represents the antithesis of what modern business is really about and if it's time to promote business in a better way on mainstream TV.

Here are my thoughts but please feel free to comment and add your own...

I don’t know any serious businessperson or entrepreneur that would disagree with The Apprentice being the antithesis of modern business. I’m sorry Lord Sugar but even you can’t deny that it’s just good prime time entertainment, less-real business and more show business!

Its remit is without doubt to entertain and it certainly does but I think it’s a stretch to suggest the candidates represent the top young business talent the UK has to offer. Any serious young entrepreneur (having said that some of the candidates aren’t that young) wouldn’t be distracted with thoughts of self-promotion or capitalizing on short-term fame. Unless an appearance on the show, however brief is a premeditated, strategic, fame-hungry move that is?

As a genuine thought leader and speaker myself I can tell you that the speaker circuit is ‘flooded’ with ex apprentice contestants now hungry to impart their extensive business, strategic, leadership and motivational expertise. A few are exceptional, like Tim Campbell from series one for example. Others seem more focused on capitalising on the opportunity of a radio or TV career that a momentary appearance on the small screen creates. However, should we really condemn them for that?

Unfortunately we live in a society that values the opinion of a celebrity over that of a true expert. So, I think it’s time to ‘fire’ the apprentice and make way for the true experts to be given a platform to impart real knowledge and insight into what it’s really like to run, lead and grow successful, dynamic and agile businesses. Understanding ‘real-world’ subjects like leadership, engagement and innovation will help our public and private sector organizations rescue our economy, repositioning the UK as the economic powerhouse it should be.

On another, more topical note, maybe ‘firing’ The Apprentice will free up some much-needed budget creating the financial breathing room for BBC Director General Mark Thompson to deal with his issue of not being able to offer ‘commercial salaries’? And maybe the new director of BBC Vision will breathe a little innovation into the institution and create a business programme with real substance. Get in touch and I’ll host it if you want? Just don’t condemn me for wanting my five minutes of fame!

Promotion: The only way isn't always up!

The value of any brand is based on the talent of the people in the organisation!

It is not a business that takes a revolutionary step or comes up with a must-have product, but the people behind the business. It is the final few words that make all the difference here - knowing what to do with the talent you have in your organisation. Unfortunately, many modern businesses still operate in a traditional way when promoting talent: in other words, the best salesperson becomes the head of sales. But this is an approach that can, at best, misplace talent, and at worst do serious damage to a business. Just because you're great at sales, doesn't necessarily mean you'll be great at managing a sales team! While the person becoming head of sales has been rewarded with a pay rise and more responsibility, the business may have lost its best salesperson and, in cases where the management skills are lacking, contributed to a major downturn in the sales team's morale and performance.

Getting the right people on board is hard enough to do in the first place, so finding the right way to retain them should be your top priority, right? The traditional approach has been to reward top performers with a promotion, as it typically comes hand-in-hand with a pay increase. As the global economic recovery slowly gains momentum, research suggests that nearly half of your top talent will look to the horizon for fresh opportunities. But is the dangling carrot of 'career advancement' the best way to retain them? It is time for organisations to look beyond linking engagement and remuneration with 'promotion' - it isn't guaranteed to align employee goals with an organisation's fundamental objectives. Engaged employees are people that are highly motivated and are passionate about your organisation. They will have an emotional attachment and in most cases be willing to contribute far more than they are contractually obliged to. When you have a culture where discretionary effort is part of the day-to-day differentiation, business performance and shareholder return will far outpace your competitors.

What you will also have is shared purpose: openness and a level of understanding (being 'people-centric') that will allow you to align employees' aspirations and goals with the vision and strategy of your organisation in order to inspire them to maximise their personal potential. When you start dialogue with your people about what they want, you might be surprised to find that 'promotion' probably isn't it; but it's often a fait accompli. The world's leading organisations have 'talent mobility' that allows alignment, engagement, development and freedom for their talent to rotate or take different directions, other than upwards. It is about allowing your people to decide how they want to progress through your organisation, instead of only being promoted upwards. The challenge then is to support them, train them and develop them to reach their true potential.

Apple's tagline is: 'To build something truly different, you need to work in a truly different way.' It may be time for such a change in your organisation. Is it time to ask yourself some questions about your business and your team? Have you asked your people what they want? Have you ever offered them the ability to create their own role, or have you ever considered letting your people choose their managers and leadership teams? On the face of it, these seem like pretty big questions, but your company will only become 'outrageously good' as a result of doing things differently. If you engage your people and align them to your organisational journey, you will set their talent free. Utilise your people - make them a part of the decision-making process and you won't be constantly faced with the dilemma of 'do we or don't we?' when playing the promotion card. This may seem like a radical prospect, but remember what Mark Twain said: "If you always do what you've always done, you will get what you've always got!"

How to create innovative organisations?

February sees the launch of my new book, The Road to Innovation co-written with David Gallagher of www.chapterandverse.co.uk who for the last six months has painstakingly helped me dot my i’s and cross my t’s.

The book is as valuable to business and organisation leaders as it is for HR practitioners and employees because it’s a practical guide to the business buzz word de jour ‘Innovation’. Because of the current economic downturn it’s come to even greater prominence and in the boardrooms of large organisations and in meeting rooms of small and medium-sized businesses up and down the country, the call from business owners, directors and managers is unanimous:

“We need more innovation”

But what does innovation mean in the modern business context? Can a business become more innovative? What do these organisations actually want to achieve? How will the leaders in the business make the changes required? And where on earth are they going to start? Innovation isn't embedded into a company’s DNA by reading books on how to brainstorm or play creative thinking games. The Road to Innovation finally gives business leaders clear, practical and actionable insight into the seven key areas that are fundamental to creating a company capable of thinking differently and innovating.

Cris Beswick is an accomplished speaker, advisor, author, non-executive director and consultant. Having founded several successful companies over the last decade and following the sale of his last award winning design consultancy, he now works with businesses and organisations to help them understand innovation, helping create the right strategy for it and developing an environment and a community in which it can thrive. The results are great places to work for your people, added value for your customers, and sleepless nights for your competitors.

The Road to Innovation will be available on general sale from the 20th February but if you’d like to order copies in advance for you, your colleagues or your team please email orders@ltbpublishing.com and we'll be glad to help...

To discuss Cris's availability for consulting, advising, facilitating and/or speaking please feel free to call Nikki on +44 (0)8453 72 44 22 or email her at nikki@crisbeswick.com for more information...

Thinking Differently about Innovation...

Innovation is as vital to a business as a desk and telephone, but many only realise it when they lose touch with customers, spiral into decline or lose position to a competitor. Only then do they appreciate the importance of using design and creative thinking to generate fresh ideas, manage them and re-connect them to their customer.

Innovation should be a never-ending process, a part of company culture, embraced by all and not seen as a magic wand wielded only by the creative team. It should be a cornerstone of strategy and have a place in ongoing business development with its own budget. According to Design Council research in 2003, 47% of rapidly growing businesses had introduced new products or services in the last three years, compared to 26% of companies overall.

This kind of evidence suggests that innovation isn't something you'll get round to when you can afford to take on more staff or when you have time - it's an essential, without which a company can only maintain the status quo. But how does it work in practice? How do you increase the odds in favour of good ideas emerging in the first place, let alone turn them into commercial winners? A recent study by the Design Council and the DTI showed that innovative businesses have remarkably similar attitudes, be they blue chip manufacturers or creative industry start-ups. For these companies, innovation is part of the culture. Instead of shutting people away in a room marked 'ideas' or ‘brainstorming’ while the rest of the operation trundles on as before, they ensure innovation permeates every aspect of a business. People working for innovative businesses are inspired to pursue innovation with genuine passion that goes beyond simply doing a job.

Many creative companies place too much significance on their creative departments to unearth ‘aha’ moments of brilliance yet stifle them of creative freedom and thinking time in place of getting ‘stuff’ out of the door. Real creativity and innovation that delivers a step change to create real competitive advantage takes time, money and effort. The latter is the only one most companies count on whilst not allowing people the time and freedom to be creative and not setting creativity and innovation budgets.

As a class leading example, Google’s employee job description states that each person must spend 20% of their time on something creative and innovative that they believe will benefit the company and its customers and they even have someone who heads that initiative up on a global scale. He has the title of… Director of Other.

The truth is that people generally think of creativity and especially innovation as an ‘aha’ moment. A tiny spark of light that hits you out of the blue without warning; Eureka is the common phrase. In fact creativity and innovation are about habit, repetitive thought processes and a culture created by a team that promotes constant questioning and incremental development of everything they are doing. This is what the Japanese call kaizen, ‘Continuous Improvement’ or literally ‘Transforming Value’.

It’s the ‘aha’ moment that people search for and think that they can turn on as and when they want to be creative or innovative. It’s this conventional idea that many people define what creativity is. The reality is, you can’t ‘manufacture’ ideas as they come from constant thought about problems and they come from habits. Creative people generally have different habits for how they use ideas, how they play with ideas and how much time they spend seeking alternatives (experimenting). It’s also about how low their inhibitions are about filtering things out we would filter straight away and how much longer they will entertain those ideas to see what value they have. That’s why they’re creative.

So in essence, the ‘aha’ moment isn’t as important as the habits that lead to the moment. Unfortunately this means there is no creativity pill but a realisation that creativity and innovation will take time effort and resources and will be achieved by incremental changes that will create sustainable and commercially viable points of difference.

I help facilitate all of the above by mentoring in a hands on, sleeves rolled up way within a company or team. I like to get my hands dirty and create relationships with the people I work with by helping solve real problems or briefs, using them to illustrate alternative viewpoints and ways of approach. I don’t believe you can expect a step change from a two day workshop or creative thinking course as that’s not enough time to change a culture within an organisation to embrace innovation and creative thinking. My approach is Kaizen based, incremental, sustainable and commercially viable.

Cris Beswick

Creative Leadership...

Creative leadership is about process not product! Let me explain; Creativity and problem solving is about thinking, thinking differently and wider, using different perspectives than everyone else, yet traditionally creative individuals and teams are measured on the end result not their mindset or their process.

Organisations that embrace creativity and different ways of thinking should also have real vision, not a mere mission statement but something that calls people forward to be part of something bigger than they are as individuals. Human nature pushes people to aspire to being part of a great story. That’s when you get emotional attachment from your team, when they feel they have a stake in the big picture.

It’s no different than what all designers do in any field whether it is the latest Aston Martin, iPhone or Sony TV. We try to achieve emotional attachment and experience to products, services and brands. So, creative leadership should be about the company’s own brand and what it means to its team members as individuals. What does it mean to work here? What’s the ‘Signature Experience’ and how am I emotionally attached?

I believe a lot of this comes back to honouring the process as much as the end product. Encouraging entrepreneurship in individuals is crucial as it breeds confidence to take small calculated amounts of risk. That means people push boundaries and feel confident doing so, without fear. That’s where innovation comes from. The outcome or product could actually be wrong but creative people are motivated just as much by the process or the journey as they are about the end result. The job of the creative leader is to make that journey inspirational, publicly highlighting ‘on-vision’ behaviour and attitude.

All this serves to create loyalty and engagement and when people are engaged they are more often in line with the company vision so the whole process becomes self perpetuating. Just like a brief from a client creative teams (and others for that matter) within an organisation must have a brief that leaves no room for interpretation or misdirection. They must understand what the core company vision is so they can align everything they do to it in a long term strategic way. With those defined boundaries set they can concentrate on what they do best, being creative, answering the brief and enjoying doing it.

However, here’s the word of warning. This vision must constantly be reinforced because different people within any organisation will have different roles and tasks that seem removed from contributing to that vision. They will also let their day to day task list overshadow the big picture letting the pressures of delivering the ‘product’ distract them from the reason why. Everyone must be shown where they fit into the strategy and how they uniquely contribute to the big picture as without the engagement of everyone the vision isn’t achievable.

Every business should look at itself as if it were a client and constantly look to add value by answering an internal brief. What do we want to do, what’s our vision? Why do we want to do it, what’s our reason? How are we going do it, what direction do we take? Then how do we constantly communicate that to our clients and our people?

Part of what I do as a creative consultant is to help business leaders define ‘What’ and then be the one that champions ‘Why’ and ‘How’ as part of the strategy for creating an internal culture that is highly creative, motivated, engaged and is the perfect ‘Greenhouse’ for cultivating innovation. A company’s point of difference should be significant not only because of its ‘products’ (what it delivers to clients) but its ‘processes’ (how its people deliver). In a corny way maybe what I’m saying is beauty really could be on the inside!

Cris Beswick

Experiential Mentoring...

OK, what do I mean by experiential mentoring? My belief is, if you want to increase creativity and innovation within your business you should start with a real, high priority business problem rather than investing in broad-based “creative thinking and innovation training”. Traditionally companies who have “invested” in such workshops presume that mindsets have been changed overnight so just “wait and see” if the investment pays off.

My approach is based on delivering visible and tangible results by engaging a team on real life business issues that they can sink their teeth into. Often it’s these problems/barriers and the mindset of the stakeholders that they cannot be solved that holds a company and its teams back.
By using real situations like these I believe that teams are engaged more, inspired and enthused as to what is possible with the right help and guidance instead of wondering how to sustainably apply tools learned on one day workshops.

Common knowledge suggests that as human beings we progress in our abilities when we are coached, guided or assisted which is why my approach as a mentor works towards helping team members deliver tangible differences that they and the wider team can see have value. This then starts to create an organisational culture that embraces creativity and innovation.

Motivated and entrepreneurial cultures within organisations thrive on stories and experiences of fellow team members or the business as a whole. So what better way to inspire a culture of creativity and innovation than to use “experiential learning” to allow teams to participate in the process first hand and be part of the solution creating authentic and motivational experiences that are relevant.

Cris Beswick