My columns for Fast Company are being migrated to the new Fast Company.com website. In the meantime I’m posting as many of the originals as I can find here. Be aware that some of these go back to 2004 and many ideas have moved on to say the least. ‘Columns’ also includes various other magazine and newspaper writings.

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Everything you need to know about innovation is growing (and dying) in a garden near you. So forget balanced scorecards, six sigma and SWOT analysis and read this instead.

There is an element of business, which, as far as I know, has never been written about. Business is like gardening. That’s right; growing a business is like growing a tree. I know this sounds flaky, and I’ve probably lost many of you at this point, but for those of you that remain consider this: most metaphors about business are about sport or war. This is useful, but the fatal floor in these analogies is that both have an end point in the immediate future. Moreover, the objective of both is to defeat a clearly defined enemy. Aims and outcomes are always fairly clear.

But business isn’t like that and neither is gardening.

Gardening has no end. There is no finish line. It is about a journey not a specific destination. Moreover, whilst business and gardening certainly have enemies, focussing on them too much can divert your attention away from the real game. A good example of this is the historical war between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which, in my view, has all too often shifted attention away from the customer.

The feeling in most organizations like these is that business is a mechanical process. In this context the analogies of war and sport are very apt. It’s all about pre-planned strategies, resources and control within a fairly fixed environment or known set of rules.

But real life doesn’t work quite like that does it? We cannot control everything and it is egotistical to think that we can. So perhaps better metaphors are rooted in plants not machinery, especially as we move away from fixed pyramidal structures to informal (and often temporary) organizational networks.

If you start to think of business ideas as plants your mindset shifts.In this metaphor you plant a business idea in a patch of soil, which is set within an overall grand scheme or design, water it and watch it grow.

But, as any gardener knows, half your plants won’t grow. There is an early American saying about gardening that you can apply to business: “One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow”. Business, like gardening, is about flexibility and persistence in the face of changing external circumstances.

However, even tenacity doesn’t always work. Sometimes plants don’t grow because they have been put in the wrong place or because pests have destroyed them. Either way you have to nurse them back to health or yank them out and start all over again.

Planting things in the right place is vital. This is something that McKinsey might agree with. According to McKinsey: “In sectors such as banking, telecommunications and technology, almost two-thirds of the organic growth of listed Western companies can be attributed to being in the right markets and geographies”. In other words, a good business idea in the wrong place can struggle whereas an average business idea in a perfect spot is likely to do well.

Then there’s the opposite problem. Sometimes things grow so fast that they overshadow what’s next to them and they have to be moved if both plants are to flourish. Perhaps the parallel here is with ‘skunkworks’, where teams are moved away from the shadow of parent company.

For example, the telecommunications firm Vodafone was created by accident as a tiny division of Racal Electronics. Someone, somewhere, was given the green light to plant something and see whether it would grow. It did and Vodafone is now a GB £80 billion colossus that dwarfs it’s former parent, although I wonder whether this rapid growth would have been achieved if it had been left in the shadow of Racal.

Of course, sometimes things grow so well that, over many years, the soil becomes exhausted and the only solution is to start again. This is not a bad thing. It is just part of a natural cycle. Fields must be allowed to lay fallow every so often if they are to regain their natural health and vitality. This applies to organizations but it also applies to people. Sometimes there is a tendency to think that you’re useless when in fact all that is wrong is that you are working in the wrong place or you are exhausted. So if you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired take some time off and take a rest.

Does any of this apply to innovation?

Yes and no. Business is like gardening but ultimately the metaphor falls down because innovations are like weeds. They grow where they’re not supposed to and cannot be cultivated like orchids in a greenhouse. You cannot sow weeds in any meaningful sense, you can only provide the conditions necessary for them to grow, which in many instances means leaving them well alone. Weeds thrive on neglect.

Therefore, if you want innovation in your business, all you can really do is recognise what a weed looks like and allow certain of them to carry on growing even when they are in the ‘wrong’ place in your garden.

A while ago I wrote a piece for Fast Company called An Evolutionary Approach to Innovation. The central idea was that Darwinism teaches us quite a bit about innovation. In particular, random mutations and adaptations caused by a particular local context or by rapidly changing conditions can spread to become the norm through a process of natural selection. Innovations are generally mutations created when one or more old idea is cross-fertilised by another.

The same is true with trends. New trends emerge when someone starts to think or behave differently – or starts to create or customize something because existing offers do not fit with their needs or circumstances. If conditions are right a trend will become widely accepted, eventually moving from the fringe to the mass-market and from early adopters and trendsetters to laggards. Trends that occur at an intersection of other trends may also turn into mega-trends, which are the key disrupters and drivers of innovation and change across all industries.

Creative leaps also tend to emerge when someone with a differing perspective tries something new – either through bravery or sheer naivety. If that person is young or comes from another place (i.e. a different discipline or perhaps a different country) things sometime start to happen. Put two or move differing people together and the sparks can really fly.

But why is this so? In my experience it’s because older people have usually invested too much under the current system and therefore have too much to lose if a new idea displaces an older one. Equally, people that don’t move around or come from the same department or discipline sometimes fail to see what is hidden under their own noses, whereas people from ‘somewhere else’ often see it.

For these reasons game changing ideas and radical innovations tend to come, not from well-funded industry incumbents (i.e. large organizations), but from lone inventors or a couple of individuals in a cramped garage. In other words, too much experience, too much familiarity or too much money can kill innovation faster than phrases like “I like it but” and “We tried that once”.

Perhaps this explains why, for instance, 25% of Silicon Valley start-ups are created by either Indian or Chinese entrepreneurs. They see things differently. Another example of outsider thinking and mutation is Virgin Atlantic Airways. Richard Branson managed to shake up the airline industry precisely because he did not have an airline industry background. So when other airlines were worrying about legroom, routes and punctuality, Branson was cross-fertilising his experience from the entertainment industry and worrying about why flying wasn’t more fun.

Not all new ideas and innovations make it of course. It’s a case of survival of the fittest (or luckiest). Eventually, however, the sheer number of new ideas that are hatched means that a few emerge and make it into the mainstream where they do battle with deeply set vested interests. Then it’s usually youth and energy versus experience and money. Organizations are like this too in a sense. They start of hungry, agile and curious and end up bloated, lazy and stiff.

So my question is this. If external events and adaptation are the driving forces of innovation, is it possible to develop an innovation culture and process that seeks out change and mutation? Moreover, if evolution is the result of genetic accidents is it possible to replicate such accidents through experimentation? An imminent threat of extinction would certainly explain why it often takes a crisis to spur a lazy and bureaucratic organization to adapt and embrace change.

My answer is that generally speaking it’s not. This may be a heretical statement, especially coming from someone that makes a living advising companies how to create innovation systems, but I think it’s true. Some large companies are excellent at innovation. It’s their reason for being and is imprinted in their DNA.

However, for most large organizations innovation is an inconvenience. Organizational cultures develop a kind of corporate immune system that subconsciously suppresses or rejects any new idea that could threaten the existing business. Quite right too.The primary aim of established organizations is to extract revenue and profit from legacy businesses and not to do anything that would upset the apple cart.

This primarily means executing flawlessly in the present and requires tight control and strict hierarchies. Small companies, in contrast, have less to lose and are not encumbered by their history. Their mental models about ‘what works’ are less fixed and they are more open to picking up weak signals about change.

So here’s my idea. If you are the kind of organization that’s does innovation well great. Equally, if you’re half-way decent at innovation keep with the programme and perhaps play around with some of these thoughts about using trends as a framework for innovation and scenario planning. If you’re lucky you may give birth to a strange mutation. If this happens recognise it as a gift and run with it as far as it goes.

If, however, you are the type of organization that’s not very good at innovation then give up. That’s right. Throw in the towel and get into hunting instead of agriculture. In other words stop trying to grow your own through research & development and go out hunting with mergers and acquisitions instead. Seek out small innovative companies and buy them.

Big organizations, even ones that are really bad at innovation, are very good at scaling up an idea and dealing with everything from intellectual property and sales to marketing and finance. This is handy because these things are precisely what start-ups and small companies are often very bad at.

Why is it that some innovations score a home run, whereas others leave the field almost as soon as they walk on? The reasons obviously vary according to on the specific context, but two culprits are undoubtedly timing and the irritating and irrational behavior of human beings.

The future is not what it used to be. In the 1950s, as Daniel H. Horne has pointed out, there were flying cars, x-ray specs and personal jetpacks. In the 1960s we had personal teleportation devices, moon bases, Smell-O-Vision television and warp-drive. At least we had all these things in our imagination. So why have none of these things happened yet in reality? Where did the expected future go?

Our futuristic frustration has been building up for a many years. First there was the millennium. Despite all the Y2K hype, nothing really seemed very different on 1 January 2000 did it? 2001 was also expected to be a futuristic date, but all we got was a bunch of lunatics with old-fashioned box-cutters taking over some airplanes (not to be underestimated for its impact, but not quite the life-changing event that many people were quite anticipating). Indeed, it almost feels as though ‘progress’ has slowed down or been put on hold recently. Look, for instance, at the boom in retro video games, ‘vintage’ sneakers, retro car design or remakes of movies from the 1970s. I haven’t made my mind up about why this is the case, but it could be the thought that we are living in anxious and uncertain times, so we escape into era’s that we perceive (often incorrectly) as simpler, safer and more certain.

When we think of the future we usually think of it in terms of space travel or time machines, but what has arrived is no less fantastic. Innovations from the last thirty years or so include; the Internet, iPods, mobile phones, industrial robots, microwave ovens, smoke detectors, GPS, Wikipedia, Second Life, and DNA fingerprinting. These innovations, and others, are just as futuristic as silver space suits and ray guns. Moreover, many of the things that were predicted back in the ‘50s and ‘60s have made a brief appearance, but then vanished again before you could say Segway or Apple Newton.

So what is the takeaway here? First, many futuristic ideas haven’t shown up, but given enough time they will. Remember space tourism? Or how about meat grown in a laboratory or domestic robots? Well the US Federal Aviation Authority has already published a set of proposed regulations for space tourism operators, cultured meat is around the corner and it is predicted that there will be 6.1 million robots in domestic service worldwide by the end of 2007. In other words, future predictions can come true if only you give them enough time to happen.

Timing is everything and from a purely commercial standpoint being too early can be just as disastrous as being too late. However, as the inventor Ray Kurzweil points out, “an invention has to make sense in the world which it is finished, not the world in which it started.” So unless you have very deep pockets think very carefully about long-term trends and the world in which your innovation will live. This isn’t easy, but it is essential. For example, there is an argument that the more life speeds up and becomes virtual the more that some people will want to slow it down and take their lives offline. So products that make our lives quicker will work for a while, but ultimately I’d expect there to be a significant demand for products and services that do the opposite. For example, MetroNaps is, to my mind at least, an early example of this.

The second key takeaway is perhaps the point that the future usually arrives subtlety and unannounced. We are all somehow waiting for aliens, hover-boards, time travel, robocops, dinner-in-a-pill and eternal youth, whereas what actually shows up is computer speech recognition, data mining, artificial ears, Astroturf, carbon dating, IVF, digital photography, pocket calculators, disposable contact lenses and Viagra.

But we shouldn’t get too hung up on technology. The reason that many of our scientific fantasies haven’t made it into reality is that many innovators and futurists sometimes make the mistake of forgetting about human history and psychology. Technology tends to change fast and exponentially, while people tend to change slowly and incrementally. So whilst reading e-books on cell phones might look good on paper (and are big hit in Japan already), it may take more than a generation for such an idea to significantly displace traditional reading habits in countries like the United States.

In other words, one reason why the future is never quite as we expect is because innovations that are logical and technically feasible, smash up against people, who are irrational and emotional. And that’s one thing that I predict won’t change in the future.

Life is speeding up and we are constantly inventing new ways to make things move even faster. But what are some of the consequences of this constant busyness? Are we losing our ability to think and properly relate to other people?

‘Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity’ is an interesting book by John Henry Clippinger – a senior fellow at the Beckman Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. One of the central thoughts of the book is that people only become themselves through their relationship with others. If we become isolated our growth becomes stunted. This seems like a great idea although, being rather busy this month, I haven’t actually read the book myself so I can’t actually tell you for sure.

According to a snapshot review that I did manage to read on my way to work, technology is changing our territorial and psychological boundaries. This point is somewhat picked up in a recent essay by another thought-leader, Sherry Turkle, who is Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She argues that “what people mostly want from public spaces these days is to be left alone with their personal networks” and that a new “state of self” is now developing whereby people can transport themselves somewhere else at the touch of a button.

I think I’ve witnessed this first hand very recently. First on holiday last month where numerous couples were sunbathing next to a swimming pool, each of them on some kind of portable electronic device. What were they doing? I have no idea but they certainly weren’t talking to each other. They were undoubtedly connected to something but I couldn’t tell you whether their ‘self’ was developing or not.

The second instance was when I took my brother’s kids to an indoor playground last Christmas. Soon after I sat down a couple in their late twenties sat down next to me with a girl aged perhaps six years of age. The girl was dispatched into the safe play area and both parents took out Blackberries and proceeded to check email. They did this for over sixty minutes without once speaking to each other or acknowledging the presence of their small daughter. Again, they were certainly connected but to what and what and for what reason I’m not sure.

It’s the same at work. Ten or fifteen years ago people didn’t take calls in the middle of meetings. Today it’s commonplace. I was in a meeting last year with News Corp when someone from their ad agency took a call and the rest of the room was put on hold for almost ten minutes until the call had ended. You can see this teleportation process in operation in countless restaurants too where couples are talking to each one minute and then divert to receiving phone calls or checking emails the next. In my day this would have been considered rather rude and people would have switched these devices off or hidden them under the table. These days it’s just considered normal and these devices are proudly and openly on public display.

In short, we are becoming so tethered to our electronic devices that we never entirely switch off and escape from the presence of others. Now this may be a very good thing in terms of the development of individual identity, because we are constantly connected to other people, but I wonder what it’s doing to the quality of our thinking.

Firstly, our connectedness to others through digital networks means that a culture of rapid response has developed in which the speed of our response is sometimes considered more important than its substance. We shoot off email mails that are half thought out and long-term strategic thinking is constrained by a lack of proper thinking time. We are always responding to what’s urgent rather than what’s important. I could have probably put all that together a lot better but I’m pushed for time and really can’t be bothered.

This connectedness is constant but our full attention is only partial as a result. If I can mention just one more thought leader then it needs to be Linda Stone, an ex Microsoft researcher, who has coined the term Constant Partial Attention to describe the fact that we feel some kind of need to scan electronic and digital environments to ensure that we are not missing out on something more important. We don’t want to be left out of the loop. As a result nobody feels secure enough to leave these electronic devices off for an hour during a meeting, let alone for a week when they are sitting next to a pool on holiday.

But it’s not necessarily the speed thing that worries me. There is evidence that many of our best decisions are made when we have little or no time to think. What concerns me the most, rather, is that we just don’t switch off. Ever. We are now so connected, available and never alone that we have left ourselves no time to properly reflect.We scroll through our days without thinking about what we are really doing or where we are ultimately going. We can probably get away with this for a while, especially when the decisions that need to be made are at a fairly low level, but sooner or later I suspect our lack of aloneness and reflection will catch up with us.

Rule # 1 – None of us are as smart as all of us.
The image of a lone genius slaving away in a dimly lit basement or garage is the traditional image of the inventor. However, according to Andrew Hargadon (Assistant Professor of Technology Management at the University of California) this is largely a myth. Moreover, when it comes to innovation, a collective effort is more usually the norm. Andrew Hargadon’s book (How Breakthroughs Happen) says that innovation is largely a result of networks. These are formal and informal collections of people and projects ranging from employees and suppliers to customers and even competitors. These networks are highly social in nature, which means that cultivating relationships is important. Another key observation is the thought that ideas are rarely new. New ideas are usually a recombination of old ideas and thus diversity in terms of people, ideas and experience is key for innovation. Having said all this, the best way to kill a good idea is to involve a committee, so ensure that there’s someone in charge to bang heads together and, if necessary, dislodge the gridlock.

Rule # 2 – Pioneers get scalped.
The theory of first mover advantage is bunk according to Nicolas Carr (author of ‘Does IT Matter’), who says that when a disruptive technology arrives the real growth opportunities lie in fixing the disruption. In other words the pioneers often get scalped. His argument is that the future arrives in “fits and starts” and many of the most profitable innovations are inherently conservative. Ditto companies (look at Toyota or Wal-Mart). Innovators (especially technology innovators) often get too far ahead of customers who are fundamentally change adverse. A good example is the Internet. Many of the early dom.com firms failed, not because they had a bad idea, but because they had an idea too soon and lacked the patience, managerial or marketing smarts to hang around. Another example is Netflix. The company is a wild success because it doesn’t fight current technological restraints. You could set up a movie rental company that delivers films via huge downloads but it’s currently a much better idea to let people order over the Internet and let the US postal service deliver the goods.

Rule # 3 – The more you try, the luckier you get.
As Linus Pauling said: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” Innovation is partly a numbers game. Fail often and fail fast and learn from your mistakes. Apple didn’t give up after the Lisa or the Newton. Moreover, don’t punish people when they make mistakes. Punish them when they don’t make enough mistakes or when they repeatedly make the same mistake. Some companies don’t get this. They are on an eternal quest for the perfect solution and spend so long researching and developing single ideas that by the time they’re launched it’s already too late. This conflicts, to some extent, with rule #2, but not much. Timing is everything and generally it’s better to be approximately right and slightly early than perfectly right and very late. Furthermore, the old model of create, edit, publish is rapidly being pushed aside in favour of a new and faster, model which is create, publish, edit (i.e. let the customer co-create the final product). This particularly true where speed to market is important and links into ideas like ‘thin slicing.’

Rule # 4 — Don’t confuse ideas with innovation.
Organizations think they can be great at ideas and innovation, when generally speaking they’re either good at one or the other. Small organizations and start-ups tend to be good with ideas, but can be weak on implementation and scale. With big organizations it’s often the other way around. The trick is to know what you’re good at and then go outside for help with what’s missing. A related thought is that when it comes to long-term success it’s very often the companies that avoid radical innovation that win in the longer term. Innovators who come up with disruptive ideas often go bankrupt or fail to grow beyond a niche position in the market. Thus being a fast follower (using innovation transfer or even M&A) is a perfectly good (if less glamorous) innovation strategy.

Rule # 5 – If you love something, give it away.
Got a good idea? Then give it away. In my experience too many people (especially lone inventors) hide their idea from the world in the belief that someone will steal it. Someone might. But at least if you talk to people it gives you the opportunity to polish the idea by rubbing it between your brain and theirs (see rule #1).

Rule # 6 — Innovation is about breaking rules, so ignore any or all of the above.

Is life getting better or worse? Reading between the lines in my local bookstore there certainly seems to be a new sense of doom and gloom in the air. Bitterness is the new black as they say. But is it really so? Reading magazines like Fast Company and Wired makes me feel like anything is possible — or rather that nothing can’t happen. So here are four things to cheer us all up.

1. Technology
If you can dream about it you will increasingly be able to do it in the future. Think of self-driving cars, space hotels, 500GB memory sticks, child-care robots, sleep surrogates, memory pills, artificial eyes, self-building buildings and full immersion virtual reality suits. What’s more many of these innovations will be widely available and super-cheap.

2. Connectedness
Thanks to the Internet everything will be connected to everything else in the future. This won’t just be people — they are already connected- it means things. Thanks to precise locational information we’ll know precisely where everyone and everything is all of the time. Low cost travel will also mean that we’ll be able to go anywhere in person too. This should bring the world closer together in terms of understanding and create a new ethically based, transparent culture where secrets are harder to keep. Benefits should include customer empowerment and better corporate governance.

3. Globalisation
Distances and boundaries will both be dead. In the future you will be able to have whatever you want whenever you want it. You already can in many places. This means a global melting pot of cultures, experiences and ideas. You will be able to live or work in whatever country you want or sell your own wares from your own home-based mini-multinational thanks to the Internet’s ability to find and connect like-minded individuals and groups. Shopping will be globalized too with easy access to whatever you want anywhere on the planet too thanks to digital delivery and low-cost transportation. A Free Agent and small business owners dream come true.

4. Ageing
What do you want for your hundredth birthday? How about a party with your parents? In the future you will live for longer and look and feel younger for longer too. And imagine what an extra thirty years practice could do for your golf handicap? If this doesn’t float your particular boat then how about living forever inside a machine? From a business opportunity point of view older people not only have time on their hands, they will, increasingly, have money too thanks to booming real estate values and soaring stock markets around the world.

On the other hand:here are four things to really worry about in the future.

1. Technology
Technologically speaking privacy is dead. In the future governments and corporations will know who you are, where you are and what you are doing all of the time. They may even know what you are thinking. Getting lost or not knowing where you are going (sometimes a good thing) will be almost impossible as will anonymity due to digital payments and various embedded tracking technologies. Faster technology will also force life to accelerate making slowness and reflection almost impossible. This will have knock on effects in terms of attention spans, relationships, proper understanding and accidents.

2. Connectedness
Because it will be so easy to instantly find out what everyone thinks in the future a collectivist online majority mind will trample on the thoughts and needs of the minority. Anonymous Internet aggregation will ensure that might is always right and big will always be equated with best. This is dangerous because it’s difficult to bring an anonymous idea or source to account. Connectedness plus speed will also mean that localised stupidities will impact globally and a type of groupthink will develop at the expense of rigorous individual thought and eccentricity.

3. Globalisation
The opportunities are global but so too are the risks. Failure will be networked so local disasters will cascade globally. This means that pandemics will travel almost instantaneously and local economic difficulties will cause ripple effects internationally. If China collapses it will take the US with it and vice versa. The future will also be a less colourful place in the sense that we will all be wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, seeing the same movies and eating the same food which cannot be good for originality, creativity and disruptive thinking. However, due to impending resource scarcity and nationalism there is every possibility that globalisation will come to an abrupt end leaving people yearning for low interest rates, long-haul foreign holidays and cheap goods from China.

4. Ageing
Living until you are one hundred is all very well but how are you going to pay for it? Equally, retirement has meaning when it follows a long period of work. Its fleeting nature makes it feel special. But what if retirement went on for forty or fifty years? What would you do all day? What if older politicians and business leaders simply refused to go away blocking younger people with newer and better ideas? What if the Rolling Stones never give up touring or you lived with your parents forever?

So what’s the takeaway here? To my mind the key point to remember is that there isn’t just one future. There will be many conflicting and contrasting futures depending on who you are and how you think. Crucially, whichever future you believe will probably come true. So don’t worry, be happy ☺

People divide their lives into work and play. But a clever few realise that if you pick the right work it ceases to be work and becomes play. The trick is finding something that you are passionate about and then devoting your life to it. This won’t necessarily make you a fortune but it will usually make you happy. It may also turn you into a successful innovator because playfulness is an essential prerequisite for invention.

In 1989 58% of people in the UK said they were happy. By 2003 this figure had fallen to 45% despite a 60% increase in average incomes. Also in the UK the Observer newspaper recently claimed that most Briton’s would rather have a cut in working hours than receive an increase in salary. There are various explanations for all of this but one is that people are doing the wrong kind of work. But what does the ‘wrong’ kind of work look like? The answer is highly personal but in my experience it means working with people you dislike, doing something that’s too easy or doing something that’s repetitive. It can also mean having a job that lacks meaning or doesn’t make a difference.

According to Charles Handy there are three forces driving change at work. The first is globalization. As Thomas Friedman argues in his book The World is Flat, there is a single global market emerging for everything from products to people. In theory this means that you’ll soon be competing against everyone else on the planet for your job although in practice there will be a limit to what gets outsourced. Nevertheless, if your job can be done cheaper somewhere else it might be worth looking at other employment opportunities. The flip side of this global village is that if you’re really good at what you do companies will compete globally for your skills, as jobs become more mobile.

The second driver of change is demographics. Most countries face a demographic double-whammy with an ageing workforce colliding with a declining birth rate.According to the Herman Group this means there will be a shortage of 10 million workers in the US by 2010. Employers will therefore have to get smarter about how they attract and retain good people so we can expect to see more flexible working practices and the development of initiatives to attract older workers. For example, B&Q – a Home Depot style retailer in the UK — offers jobs to retired tradesmen. The results are improved customer service and lower employee turnover. Similarly BMW in Germany has designed a factory to attract older workers while Procter & Gamble has developed YourEncore – a network of retirees that it dips into when it needs to crack a problem. Incidentally, one further idea implemented by P&G is ‘reverse mentoring’ to help older workers (especially men) understand the problems faced by newly recruited staff (especially women).

The third driver of change is technology. Thanks to cell-phones, laptops and the Internet work is becoming less tied to a physical location. Instead we are becoming a tribe of digital nomads working whenever and wherever we choose. This means that in the future employment contacts will have to change. Companies will realise that they are buying people for their ideas not their time or physical presence, so annual contracts will be related to objectives met, not hours worked. This will see an increase in sabbaticals and a further blurring between what’s done at home and what happens ‘at work’.

But this is just the beginning. In another twenty or thirty years artificial intelligence and robotics will have displaced another layer of workers. So if your job can be reduced to a set of formal rules that can be learnt by an intelligent and emotionally aware machine it may be worth looking for another career because your current profession could disappear.

In other words we are facing a third industrial revolution. The first swapped fields for factories while the second – the information revolution – replaced brawn with brains. The third revolution will be the shift from left to right-brain economic production. During the last century people were paid to accumulate and apply information. The acquisition and analysis of data is logical left-brain activity but, as Daniel Pink points out, it’s an activity that is disappearing thanks to developments in areas like computing. For instance, speech recognition and GPS systems are replacing people for taxi bookings while sites like completemycase.com are giving mediocre lawyers a run for their money.

One fascinating statistic that I came across recently is that twelve years ago, 61% of McKinsey’s new US recruits had MBAs. Now it’s around 40%. This is partly because of an oversupply of MBAs in the domestic market and the fact that data analysis can be outsouced to cheaper countries. But it’s also because arts graduates are demand. In a globalized world products and services become homogenized and then commoditized. One of the best ways to create differentiation is through innovation but what some people mean when they say innovation is actually design and design involves the application of lateral thinking and physical beauty both of which bring us back to right-brain thinkers.

Of course there are some jobs that cannot be done by a machine or outsourced to India. These include what I’d call ‘high-touch’ jobs like nursing and teaching that involve a high level of emotional intelligence. As I’ve said, it also includes jobs that involve the application of creativity and imagination but as Richard Florida points out these types of jobs don’t work just anywhere. Cities that are attractive to right-brained entrepreneurs and innovators score highly on the Three Ts – Technology, Talent and Tolerance. Technology refers to the proximity of world class research facilities. Talent is the clustering of bright, like-minded people from varied backgrounds and Tolerance is an open progressive culture that embraces ‘outsiders’ and difference.

Finally I’d like to mention something called Psychological Neotency. This is a fascinating new theory that says that the increased level of immaturity among adults is an evolutionary response to increasing levels of change and uncertainty. This initially sounds ridiculous but it does make a certain amount of sense if you stop and think about it. Historically maturity was useful because in a ‘fixed’ environment it indicated wisdom and experience. However, in a rapidly changing environment experience can actually be disabling. What is required in the new economy is child-like receptivity and cognitative flexibility. In other words youthfulness and playfulness may be adaptive responses to change where jobs, skills and technology are all in a state of flux. This could certainly explain the apparently adolescent behaviour of innovators like Richard Branson and Steve Wozniak and, if true, has profound implications for everything from HR policy to office design.

Someone (I think it was Kevin Kelly) once said that in the future all media will be free – we will only pay for functionality and personalisation. I’d like to disagree – but I can’t. I can’t think of a single reason why this statement won’t be true, especially if you take a liberal view of what constitutes payment, functionality and personalisation.

Newspapers are a good example. In 1960, 80% of Americans read a daily newspaper. Today the figure is closer to 50% – and it’s failing. Globally it’s the same story. Between 1995-2003, worldwide newspaper circulation fell by 5%. In 1892 London had 14 evening papers. Now it has just one. Also in the UK, a staggering 19% of all the newspapers delivered to retailers in the first quarter of 2006 came back as returns and three national newspaper titles had return (non sale) rates approaching 50%.If these trends continue the last newspaper will be probably be produced by Grace Murdoch sometime in the year 2040.

However, if newspapers were invented tomorrow they would be hailed as a miracle innovation. They are cheap, paper thin, easy to annotate and don’t use batteries. You can read them in the bath and when you’ve finished with them they can be thrown away and safely recycled. Unfortunately they also go out of date the minute they’re printed, cost a fortune to distribute and user-generated content is limited to the letters page and classified advertising.

Despite predictions of paperless offices and the leisure society we are all working harder than ever. As a result we are time starved and the family breakfast (along with home delivered newspapers) is being replaced by fly-by breakfasts listening to up-to-the-minute cable TV. Either that or it’s a milkshake in the car listening to the radio or a Starbucks and nytimes.com in the office.

In other words we are becoming digital nomads. We read, listen and watch what we want when we want. We no longer have the time (during the working week at least) to read newspapers and readers are shifting their eyes and ears to online sources of information delivered via everything from mobile phones to iPods. Online news is especially useful because it’s usually free and the content can be easily controlled and personalised. If you’re of the active (or exhibitionist) persuasion you can comment on the news through your own blog or send your own homemade entertainment to Youtube. We don’t even trust newspapers these days. Only 59% of Americans believe what they read in the newspapers compared to 80% in 1985.

What used to be a passive one-way conversation is thus turning into an active relationship. Content flows both ways and consumption has time shifted and place shifted.

According to research by comScore, Six Apart and Gawker Media, 50 million people visited blog sites in the US in the first quarter of last year — which is about 30% of all US Internet users or one-sixth of the entire US population. What’s more they weren’t all reading about Ms Hilton – the most popular sites were about politics (sorry Paris).

So are newspapers yesterdays news? Not quite.

Firstly newspapers are using innovation to improve their products. Some of the best ideas include compact formats for commuters (e.g. The Times and The Independent (UK) have been available in a choice of two sizes), there are kids newspapers (e.g. Play Bac Presse in France) and newspapers written entirely by readers (OhMyNews in South Korea is created by 33,000 ‘citizen reporters’ and is read by 2 million South Koreans). In the US the Wisconsin State Journal (the State’s second largest selling paper) asks its readers to go online everyday between 11am and 4pm to vote for the next day’s lead story. Consequences include the fact that sports stories have started to appear on page one.

In other words we are entering what Jonathan Schwartz (COO of Sun Microsystems) has called a new participation age where the traditional boundaries between the creator and the consumer are becoming eroded or disappearing altogether. One of the biggest questions arising from this type of open innovation is who owns openly created content? This question will drive new business models and radically transform the relationship between media owners their audiences.

A second significant innovation in newspapers is the growth of free. Most newspapers create revenue by charging people twice. You pay to buy the paper and you pay to place an ad (e.g. classified ad). The theory is that advertising supports subscriptions and newsstand sales but it won’t for much longer. In the future most weekday newspapers will be free. Early examples of this trend include Metro and 20 Minuten. Alternatively, you can buy a copy of Loot – which costs money – but it’s free to place a classified advertisement. Another future variation on this theme could be ad free quality newspapers available on a paid-for subscription basis.

Moving slightly outside newspapers other interesting developments include a magazine created by Nokia and MTV that is produced entirely by their customers who send in content via text and picture messages. Moving further in the digital future sites like Craig’s List are giving traditional media owners something to think about. Classified revenues from accommodation through to autos and jobs are moving online, as is time sensitive information like stock prices and weather. The New York Times recently announced that is was cutting back its stock market price tables because so many readers were accessing this online. Meanwhile, the Washington Post has announced that it has hired the creator of Chicagocrime.org to create ‘mashups’ for the online edition of the paper.

So who will be delivering tomorrow’s newspaper?

The answer, apart from you and me, will be a mixture of mainstream media companies and brand owners. Mainstream media owners will increasingly divert investment into digital media platforms while companies like Nike and Procter & Gamble will create their own content. For example, see www.joga.com and www.homemadesimple.com

And I don’t believe that newspapers will totally die any more than I think that people will stop reading paperback books or stop visiting movie theatres. Part of the reason for this is historical but it’s also psychological.

It takes time, often a generation, for one innovation to replace another. Newspapers are a ritual purchase and loyalties run deep. If you ask people in focus groups why they read newspapers some people can’t tell you. “Because I’ve always read it” is a typical answer. I once did some work with United News and Media on the UK and found quite a few people reading the Daily Express and the Daily Mail because their parents and grand parents did. That’s brand loyalty.

Sticking my neck out a bit I’d even suggest that there could a newspaper renaissance around the corner. Many local titles are thriving because they are personalised. The news is local and advertising tends to be localised and highly accountable – which is something that people are making a song and dance about in new media circles. For example, Fox Network is customising its TV ads so that local neighbourhoods can receive tailored TV commercials.

The other reason I think that newspapers could be making a comeback is the ubiquity of online media. Put simply, there is now so much digital content around that it’s becoming valueless. Physical media in contrast — especially content that is thoughtfully written, expertly edited and well designed — cuts through. If you think this is an exaggeration just think about how much e-mail you received today and then consider your response if someone had actually taken the time to send you a letter.

The author William Gibson once said “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed”. In the case of travel this is certainly true. The travel industry has experienced dramatic change post 9/11 but it is the Internet that has really shaken things up. The web has connected new low-cost operators with newly empowered customers with the result that intermediaries like travel agents are becoming increasingly redundant.

So what else is happening and what else can we expect to see in the not too distant future? In terms of airlines the general trend seems to be towards polarisation. On the one hand low-cost operators like JetBlue are expanding low cost services outside the US, while on the other hand national carriers like Virgin Atlantic are upgrading business class services to the point where aeroplanes are starting to resemble hotels and airline lounges are starting to resemble restaurants. Up at the pointy end of the aeroplane we’ve already seen innovations like in-flight mixologists, private fridges, flat beds, in-flight massage, sky-nannies and personal chefs and it won’t be long before we see showers and possibly lockable cabins. Down in economy we’ve got self-check-in, pay-as-you-go lounges, Internet access and pay-TV on some planes so things like seats that inflate and deflate to fit individual body shapes can’t be far off. Other innovations include business class only flights (e.g. Lufthansa and OzJet) and business class only terminals. Interestingly, one consequence of tighter security screening at airports is that people (in the US at least) have started to dress more casually. Gone are lace-up shoes, belts, coats and jewellery and in are more search friendly t-shirts and track pants.

Of course getting from the airport to your hotel can be a bit frustrating so we’ve seen a number of transport innovations here to. These include the Heathrow Express (rumoured to be the most expensive train journey in the world on a per mile basis) and the Maglev (magnetically levitated) train that runs between Pudong airport and Shanghai city centre.

Over in hotels the rate of innovation is not as great but we are still seeing some interesting new concepts. One of the latest ideas is Miniature hotels,(for example easyhotel.com and yotel.com in the UK). These are like boutique hotels but without the frills. Rooms are typically very small (in one case smaller than a prison cell) but they’re also very cheap.In some cases this means no phone, no wardrobe, no toiletries (except soap), no chair and no shelves. If you want to watch TV or have a window that’s extra – as is fresh laundry after your first night. Other recent hotel ‘innovations’ include bath butlers at the Sydney Hilton (to run your bath for you), e-butlers at the Dorchester Hotel in London (to explain how everything in your room works), personal oxygen bottles (Optus hotel in Vancouver), iPod hire (Dream hotel in New York), Wi-Fi access inside elevators (Langham hotel London) and personalised room lighting (Sofitel Paris). However my favourite hotel innovation is the humble room safe at the Langham Palace hotel in Kowloon (China). Not only is the safe large enough to hold a laptop, there’s a cable inside to charge it up. Now that’s what I call a real customer need!

But what about somewhere to go? According to the World Tourism Organization, cultural holidays are the fastest growing sector of the tourism market. In other words more of us are getting tired of just sitting on a beach and want to see something interesting, authentic or both. Hence the growth in ‘holidays that help’ — vacations that combine an interesting location with conservation or making a difference in some other way. We’re also seeing the growth of more exotic destinations (Brazil and Dubai for example), the rise of the mini-break (taking a series of short holidays each year instead of just one due to time pressures), the growth in religious tourism and the emergence of rich-packers (wealthy urban professionals that return to the countries they once visited as penniless back-packers).

And what about the more distant future? One area to watch is socio-economic trends including demographics. In the future there will be less young people, more single person households and more (active) old people.There will also be much more outbound tourism from countries like India and China (in 2003 there were 800 million domestic trips taken in China – that’s approximately the same number of trips taken by the rest of the planet that year). The latter could mean that popular tourist sites (even whole countries) will have to ration access while ecotourism could actually become harmful to the planet. However, looking even further ahead, this issue of growing tourist numbers could be solved by the emerging oil crisis. Put simply, nobody has yet invented an alternative to jet fuel so when the oil really starts to run out travel will once again become the preserve of the ultra-wealthy. For everyone else it will be a case of either staying put or taking your vacation closer to home.

Here are a few other travel related innovations I really like:

1. A company called Vocation Vacations lets people try out other jobs.
2. The ‘whatever, whenever’ desk at W Hotels.
3. Pillow menu at Hilton Hotels (airlines should steal this idea immediately).
4. The double beds on Virgin Atlantic Airways.
5. The women only floor at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington.
6. Cabin lights in first class on Emirates airline that resemble the night sky.
7. Borrowing a goldfish bowl for your room at the Monaro Hotel in Chicago.
8. Retro-tourism — using the slowest means possible to get from A-B.
9. Space tourism – coming soon to a galaxy near you.
10. The Laboratory of Experimental Tourism (it really exists).

My last column on the benefits of failure prompted one reader to ask whether the converse is true: “do successful companies sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Given that the average lifespan of a top 500 Company in the US is 40 years (12.5 years in Europe) the answer appears to be yes. Nothing recedes quite like success — or, as Bill Gates once said, “success is a lousy teacher, it seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose”.

All companies start off as an idea. Start-ups are usually small and poor, which tends to create focus and urgency. If they develop a great product or service with an easily communicable point of difference, they usually grow.

And therein lies a problem.

One of the first issues to arise in a growing company is that management gets separated from innovation. Peter Drucker made this point many years ago, although he used the term entrepreneurship. Although these activities are different dimensions of the same thing, most companies regard them as separate. Moreover, as the urgency to stay alive evaporates, the focus shifts to internal management issues. But without continuing to innovate, companies die.

There are other challenges too. As companies grow, senior managers become physically separated from their customers. The entire board of one of the major Banks in Australia takes calls from customers every week, but this is a rare exception. A recent survey by Bain & Company found that 80% of companies believed that their firm delivered superior service. Only 8% of their customers agreed. Perhaps senior managers are confusing profitable customers with happy ones. Departments like sales and customer service are usually close to the needs of customers. Hence they are close to one of the primary sources of innovation. Managers generally aren’t – they are close to the needs of management.

The culture of an organization can also contribute to failure. The dominant culture of most successful companies is conservative – to avoid risk and to proceed in an orderly fashion. This is fine in the short term, but longer-term, what made your company successful in the past may not do so in the future.

Eventually a kind of ‘corporate immune system’ develops that resists innovation and tries to free itself from any form of obligation to adapt, even when change is clearly on the horizon. IBM failing to see the rise of desktop computing is a good example of such Group Think. One suspects that Sony’s loss of the portable music and entertainment market might be another. I’d say that most banks and newspapers are similarly in denial.

You can spot such organizations a mile off because they tend to distrust people from the outside (including their own customers). They also think that they have absolutely nothing to learn from anyone or anywhere else. A classic mistake is only recruiting from the inside. I once worked with a retailer that strongly favoured home-grown talent over external hires. Nothing wrong with that, except in this case it reinforced the arrogant and complacent attitude that there was anything to learn from the outside.

There is also the issue of creating the reality you want, rather than seeing what is really happening. It is not uncommon for senior managers to ‘edit’ news before it reaches board level — so things appear much better than they really are. There’s even a story about a supermarket chain in the US that repainted its stores, and hired extra staff, just before the CEO was due to make a visit. I don’t think the company ever went as far as hiring customers for the day, but once you start editing reality where do you stop?

In addition to corporate culture, corporate structure often gives rise to another problem. As Clayton Christensen points out, large organizations are generally structured on departmental levels. As a result most innovation is incremental. For example, most innovation inside fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies is endless line extensions to existing products. Unfortunately, young start-ups have no respect for these boundaries, so it is generally they who invent new categories and business models in response to changing conditions or new customer attitudes and behaviour.

In other words, unless you can look at innovation from a whole business perspective and make innovation truly cross-functional (twinning designers with R&D staff as Procter & Gamble now does for instance) innovation will never get beyond the component or existing category/product level.

But perhaps none of this is a bad thing. After all, survival is not compulsory. Perhaps everything (individuals, organizations, markets, countries) need to die — or at least be threatened with extinction – so that the cycle of innovation can begin again.

Here are a few quick tips to prevent your organization from doing dumb stuff and dying too young.

1. Water your roots. Re-discover the entrepreneurial zeal and focus that founded your company in the first place.
2. Think about how a start-up would operate in your market. How could you apply this thinking to make your own organization more resilient?
3. Don’t just look at what the big guys are doing. Study what the start-ups are doing, especially those on the fringes of your market.
4. History repeats itself. Companies and markets tend to operate in cycles, so know where you are and act accordingly.