Follow your S curve

strategy+business, February 28, 2022

by Theodore Kinni



Photograph by R A Kearton

Recently, someone on LinkedIn asked me for career advice. LOL. The ink line of my career is a random squiggle with lots of breaks and blotches. It isn’t until about halfway through that the line begins to look like it might be going somewhere. That’s the point at which I found something I enjoyed doing that paid enough for me to keep doing it. I grabbed that like a drowning man does a life ring.

I grabbed Whitney Johnson’s new book, Smart Growth, with similar enthusiasm, because it seemed there might be a more rational and ordered way to view my career. There is. As Johnson might tell it, I didn’t flounder for years; I followed the “S Curve of Learning.”

Johnson, a consultant and speaker, has a knack for picking out theories from the discipline of innovation and applying them to individual growth. In her 2015 book, Disrupt Yourself, she used Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation as the foundation for a guide to career-changing moves. In Smart Growth, Johnson applies Everett M. Rogers’s theory of innovation diffusion to forging a career path.

In his 1957 doctoral dissertation, Rogers showed that the number of Iowan farmers adopting a new weed killer followed an S curve: adoption started slowly, with only a few farmers willing to take a chance on the new product; shot upward as the majority of farmers became convinced of its benefits; and then leveled off as the remaining, most cautious farmers finally committed. By the time Rogers’s seminal Diffusion of Innovations was published in 1962, the rural sociologist was convinced that the S curve of innovation diffusion depicted “a kind of universal process of social change.” Indeed, S curves have been used in many arenas since then, and Rogers’s book is among the most cited in the social sciences, according to Google Scholar.

Johnson’s S Curve of Learning follows this well-established path. There’s the slow advancement toward a “launch point,” during which you canvas the (hopefully) myriad opportunities for career growth available to you and pick a promising one. Then there’s the fast growth once you hit the “sweet spot,” as you build momentum, forging and inhabiting the new you. And, finally, there is “mastery,” the stage in which you might cruise for a while, reaping the rewards of your efforts, before you start looking for something new, starting the cycle all over again. Read the rest here.

Think Globally, Innovate Locally

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

MIT Sloan Management Review, February 23, 2022

by Satish Nambisan and Yadong Luo


Michael Glenwood Gibbs/theispot.com

Digitization and globalization are converging to transform innovation in multinationals across industries. Companies such as Bayer Crop Science, John Deere, Johnson Controls, Philips, and Unilever are pursuing the promise of what we call digital globalization. They are finding that digitally infused innovation assets, such as data, content, product components, tools, and processes, are not only readily portable across national borders but also amenable to mixing and matching. This digitally enabled innovation generates new offerings, business models, and operations to suit specific country markets — at a faster pace and lower cost than previously.

Fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger has deployed a fully digital design workflow across all of its global apparel design teams. Designers catering to the demands of different markets around the world can create, store, share, and reuse digital design assets. Transforming traditional design and sample production steps into such digital-infused processes enables the label to not only accelerate its innovation but also diversify its offerings.

As promising as digital globalization sounds, however, it is facing headwinds that are driving deglobalization (or localization), including trade restrictions and uncertainties fueled by geopolitical tensions and nationalism. China, for instance, recently passed a host of protectionist laws and regulations aimed at controlling the internet and cross-border data flows. As companies such as Apple, Morgan Stanley, and Oracle have discovered, there is ambiguity around what constitutes personal data and what should be localized in China. This is significantly limiting the portability of multinational companies’ digital innovation assets and raising the level of innovation uncertainty and risk. Geopolitical tensions can also result in more closed and less trusting stances when companies pursue collaborative innovation ventures.

Thus, for multinationals, the coexistence of globalization and localization creates a challenging context for innovation. How, then, can they pursue innovation to take advantage of the forces driving digital globalization while also adapting to the forces driving localization? Read the read here.

Pay attention to your attention

strategy+business, February 10, 2022

by Theodore Kinni


Illustration by Sean Gladwell

Once upon a time, the Segway was going to revolutionize the transportation industry. Steve Jobs reportedly said that Dean Kamen’s invention had the transformative potential of the personal computer, and venture capitalist John Doerr predicted that Kamen’s startup would reach US$1 billion in sales—a lot of money in 2001, when nobody but tweens believed in unicorns—at record speed. Instead, sightseeing tours and mall cop beats were nearly the only things the two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter transformed.

There are many reasons why the Segway never achieved its purported promise, but a lot of them track back to the misplaced focus of Dean Kamen. He didn’t see the forest for the trees. He was so intently focused on one narrow aspect of the Segway—the innovative technology that enabled its intuitive, automatic balance and operation—that he and his early boosters were unaware that its markets were extremely limited. Where in a nation of cities and towns that considered skateboards too dangerous for the sidewalks would hundreds of thousands of Segway riders be allowed to zip around? And short of that, who was going to pay $5,000 to take a Segway for a spin in the driveway?

An overly intense focus on a goal can lead to what cognitive psychologists call goal neglect. That may seem counterintuitive to the average goal-oriented MBA or entrepreneur, but take, for example, the dynamic at work in micromanagement. Often, when leaders micromanage employees, an intense focus on task performance distracts those leaders from the larger goals of the company. They obsess over the trees and neglect the forest—and drive employees crazy while they’re at it.

Where you direct your focus is a function of the brain’s attention system. This system has three subsystems, which Amishi Jha, a professor and the director of contemplative neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative at the University of Miami, describes as the flashlight (or orienting system), which enables you to selectively direct and concentrate your attention; the floodlight (or alerting system), which enables you to take in the larger picture; and the juggler (or executive function), which enables you to align your actions to your aims. “What happens with goal neglect is that the flashlight is pointed very intently, but the floodlight is not quite working,” she told me in a recent Zoom interview.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using the flashlight or the floodlight—leaders need both. In both cases, writes Jha in her new book, Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day, “we are paying attention. But our attention is too narrow or too wide, too stable or too unstable. You’re paying attention in some way successfully—but it’s not appropriate for the moment.”

This cognitive error arises from using the flashlight or the floodlight in an unconscious way. An Australian helicopter rappeller gave Jha a dramatic example of this when he told her about fighting one section of bush fire with such intensive focus that he lost track of the rest of the fire until he heard the air being sucked up behind him. The fire had nearly engulfed him. “There is a very enticing emotional quality to dominating something in that way, and so, it pulls you in,” said Jha. “It’s even hard to pull yourself back.”

The feeling of intense focus—of being fully and productively engrossed in a task—is a good indicator that it is time to take a step back and assess if your attention is properly directed. Even better, and more proactively, according to Jha’s research, you can hone your meta-awareness. Read the rest here.

Actuarial outsourcing trends in the insurance industry

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

Deloitte Capital H Blog, February 10, 2022

By Tony Johnson, Maria Itteilag, and Ashlyn Johnson


As insurance industry leaders seek to transform the cost structures, capacity, and capabilities of their companies in response to business, regulatory, and technological challenges, the actuarial function is a natural focus for their attention. The actuarial function is a driver of growth and profitability of insurers, so maximizing its value generation is a tantalizing prospect. At the same time, the function is an expensive one, so a successful transformation can generate significant savings on the cost side by focusing the actuaries’ attention on value-creating activities as opposed to those better suited for other professionals and functions to own.

The promise of getting more for less from the actuarial function is tempered by challenges and risks inherent to transformation initiatives. According to Gartner, 70% of transformation initiatives in finance fail to deliver their expected benefits and our observations suggest that actuarial transformations are no exception.1

However, we also find savvy insurers who are bucking the odds of transformation failure. They are using outsourcing arrangements in the execution of actuarial transformations to bolster implementation success, and as an integral element in the design of a revamped actuarial function that can deliver greater value to insurers at a lower cost. Your company can potentially do the same.

The imperatives of actuarial transformation

Like any business transformation, successful actuarial transformation hinges on the ability to navigate two imperatives: the first imperative is design—the vision of what the function will become, and the second imperative is execution—the journey that must be undertaken to make the vision a reality. Transformation failures are usually rooted in the inability to meet one or both imperatives.

The involvement of actuaries in the design of the transformed function is necessary. After all, who knows the processes better than the people who use them every day? But necessary is not always sufficient. Actuaries are experts in their work, but you should not expect them to be familiar with the transformational potential of new technologies or new ways of structuring workflow and executing tasks. Without a fully informed view of the art of the possible, the new design of the function will not likely reach its full potential.

Moreover, executing functional transformations requires mustering the resources and skillsets needed to implement the transformation while conducting business as usual. In the actuarial function, this often entails using highly specialized and highly paid actuaries to design and implement the transformation. In some cases, the actuaries do not possess the skills needed for this work. In many more cases, they simply do not have the time. As insurance companies begin to transform, their actuaries become overloaded as they try to meet the ongoing dictates and priorities of daily business, as well as the dictates and priorities of the transformation efforts. Many transformations fail when people become overwhelmed while simultaneously performing the work of today and building the capabilities of tomorrow. Read the rest here.