Mike Lehr's Blog

How many times have you heard, “Don’t reinvent the wheel”? Why is it then that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued over 30,000 wheel patents since 1790? Moreover, as patent attorney, Lawrence Ebert, indicates, they’re approving about three hundred new ones a year. However, even Lawrence doesn’t tell the whole story.

You see, he only quoted figures from Patent Class 295 (Railway Wheels and Axles) and Class 301 (Land Vehicles: Wheels & Axles). He didn’t include wheels from Class D21 (Games, Toys, and Sports Equipment) which includes the following:

• Subclass 375: Roulette wheels
• Subclass 175-177: Steering wheels
• Subclass 204-213: Toy wheels
• Subclass 458: Pinwheel
• Subclass 477: Toys with steering wheels
• Subclass 543: Paddle wheels
• Subclass 779: Skating wheels for roller skates and skateboards
• Subclass 667: Fly Wheels
• Subclass 763: Rollers
• Subclass 563: Wheels for toy vehicles
• Subclass 829: Ferris wheel

Furthermore, he didn’t include Class 472 which contains crank wheels such as those powering our bicycles. He also didn’t include pulleys which fall under Class 474 and various kinds of tires (Class 152) and wheels that fit around other wheels (Class D12)

Now, just imagine if no one “reinvented the wheel.” We wouldn’t have all these wonderful wheels not to mention many folks wouldn’t have jobs and businesses. In short, many people wouldn’t be making the money they’re making now. Technological advancement has come because we like to reinvent things, always making them better and more adaptable to a need.

So, when people say, “Don’t reinvent the wheel,” take them up on the challenge and show them how you can make the “wheel” better and more profitable. Don’t let their lack of creativity chain your creativity and innovativeness to the ground.

In a previous post, I briefly mentioned the work of Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology as reported by Elizabeth Kolbert in her article, “Sleeping With The Enemy,” which appeared in the August 15/22, 2011 issue of the The New Yorker. At the time, I cited Tomasello’s work to emphasize the natural orientation humans have toward cooperation. In this post, I am suggesting that cooperation is a higher form of intelligent behavior than self-interest.

Here are two quotes from the article indirectly suggesting this:

1. Apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society.
2. If you were at the zoo today, you would never have seen two chimps carry something heavy together. They don’t have this kind of collaborative project.

Only thinking and working towards your self-interest without consideration for others is definitely easier to accomplish than cooperation is. Additionally, when you add the importance of context, empathy and intrinsic rewards – all ingredients we’ve discussed earlier – to encourage natural cooperative tendencies, the achievement of cooperation is difficult, demanding and warrants a higher form of talent, aptitude and skill.

Furthermore, we can even take cooperation to a higher level when it comes to encouraging it within a diverse workforce. Such a workforce is more likely to be creative, innovative and adaptable. It’s much easier to gain cooperation within an homogeneous workforce than a diverse one. Moreover, creating the context, empathy and intrinsic rewards to appeal to such diversity requires special talents.

Again, all of this is to suggest that the desire and ability to cooperate belongs in the realm of a higher life form, humans rather than apes. Seen more simply, whereas self-interest puts our behavior more in line with those of apes, cooperation elevates us above them.

Other links in this series:

• Cooperation vs. Competition on the Business-to-Business Level
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest: Which Reigns Supreme?
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 2): Context – The Great Influencer
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 3): Empathy
• Cooperation vs. Self-interest (Pt 4): Intrinsic Rewards

One of the paradoxes of best practices is that they promote unimaginativeness because if everyone followed best practices the differentiation among competing firms would drastically narrow.

In its raw form, BP is copying. Companies do not transform markets or shoot ahead of the competition by copying. If they do, they need to enhance the original. A better practice than the best practice will achieve this especially if every other company in that space is following the best practice. As a result, BP’s encourage “inside the box thinking” resulting in a workforce based upon complying with the BP rather than thinking about making the best better.

This occurs because to find a “best practice” people only need to dredge the internet or current research material. If they don’t want to do this, they only need to find an unimaginative expert who has already done this for them. However, bettering a best practice requires much thought and inspiration. That’s why in many law firms there are research assistants assigned with this task so attorneys have more time to think about the uniqueness of their cases.

Of course, many unimaginative people offer this defense: “Let’s not reinvent the wheel.” What they don’t realize is that since 1790 the United States Patent Office has approved over 30,000 patents for wheels. This number doesn’t include many specialty wheels in toys and machines such as the wheels on toy cars or the pulleys in machines like transmissions. It also doesn’t include the Ferris Wheel.

BP’s encourage employees to do exactly that: not reinvent the wheel. They don’t encourage them to think about improvements to make the wheel better or for other purposes. BP’s say, “Someone else has already solved the problem.” Thus, the best practice of inside-the-box thinking is to adopt a best practice.

Additional recommended reading: the post “The Downside of Best Practices” by Mike Wyatt

If you examine the two opposing sides in the Star Wars Epic, The Empire (Bad Guys) and The Rebels (Good Guys), there are two major contrasts:

1. There are no women on the bad side.
2. The good side has diverse characters, the bad side doesn’t

Upon contemplation, Point #1 is easy to see. Point #2 is a little harder, but essentially the Empire’s army consists of robotic droids who all look alike in white, shock-troop armor. Conversely, the Rebels are a collection of species, some humanoid, most alien and some even animalistic. Moreover, whereas the Empire’s forces are all dressed alike, the Rebels are not. Similar themes exist in Lord of the Rings.

What does this mean? Very simply, we tend to see evil as being a life of conformity without feminine qualities. In business, this movie helps us to see the emotional forces aligned against standardization and processing. It might also help us to understand why women are making such advancements: perhaps as an offset to these negative forces. Finally, it shows our inherent emotional propensity for diversity including in personality.

Women are closely associated with diversity; as they’ve been the first ingredient of diversity in many business settings. Heck, their wardrobe alone adds immense diversity to them. What would happen if two women actors arrived in the same dress for the Academy Awards: chaos, confusion, anxiety? What if two men came in the same black tuxedo, would anyone even notice?

Movies tend to tap into our deep, unseen, collective emotional currents. Consumer research shows there is often a different between “what people buy” and “what people say they will buy.” Thus, while we wring every cost saving from standardization and processing, perhaps on a deeper emotional level we feel “The Bad Guys” are winning.

In the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic, I ran across Richard Florida’s article, “Where the Skills Are” and found myself rethinking the idea of a diverse workforce. The idea has two paradoxical forces playing on it:

1. Diversity improves a company’s adaptability, creativity and innovation
2. Employers tend to hire employees who are like them

For the moment, let’s imagine that employers can hire a diverse workforce. The next challenge is managing it. It’s difficult because personality conflicts are side-effects of diversity. Since everyone’s a people person until people are the problem, managers are more apt to “get rid of the problem” rather than incorporate it. Consequently, employers will not only tend to hire those “who fit in” but also dispose of those “who don’t.” This moves them ever faster toward a homogenous workforce lacking adaptability and innovation.

Even though Richard’s article focused on talented individuals adept at connecting with diverse people, there are applications from a managerial perspective. It will take a very talented person to manage diversity. That’s because personality conflicts manifest themselves in many ways as differences in approaches, organization, ideas, behaviors and others. A manager will need to be able to see through this, account for his own biases, creatively solve it, and have the discipline to pursue the solution. We do not solve personality conflicts overnight.

Moreover, the need for such managerial talent is only going to increase as technology continues to take over the more routine and predictable tasks of various jobs and as the marketplace becomes more dynamic. The need for diversity not only in demographics but also in personality is only going to increase too.

Sensitive people (SP) can increase team intelligence in very much the same way mortar makes brick and stone walls stronger. Since diverse teams tend to be more creative and intelligent than homogeneous ones, SP will often provide the relational glue keeping diverse groups from fracturing under the stress of diverse views.

In “What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women,” an article in the June 2011 of the Harvard Business Review, Anita Woolley and Thomas Malone found SP:

• Listen well
• Share criticism constructively
• Possess open minds
• Aren’t autocratic

Since “Many studies have shown that women tend to score higher on tests of social sensitivity than men do,” Woolley and Malone found that adding more women to groups would make them more intelligent. They “saw pretty clearly that groups that had smart people dominating the conversation were not very intelligent.”

SP’s concerns for the well being of others will help ensure that diverse views receive a hearing even from more dominant and autocratic members of the team. In effect, we don’t increase the intelligence of the group by necessarily adding more intelligent people. We do so by adding more SP who give deference to others so stronger more effective bonds are formed. Through these bonds flow the life-blood of ideation, more simply called communication. Under the influence of dominant, head-strong members, these arteries become constricted by fear and tension thus preventing the free, open flow of ideas necessary for increasing team intelligence.

As we saw, nurturing positive feelings in others dramatically improves performance. SP are perfect additions to improving the intelligence and performance of teams. Their talent for being more aware of the emotions running through others will help ensure team members will feel good about the team and their contributions.

Other links in this series:

• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt I): Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt II): The Unconscious
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt III): Self-Awareness
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt IV): Talent
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. V): Intimidation
• Emotional Self-defense for Sensitive People (Pt. VI): Defeatism & Courage

High-end retailers are expecting us to spend more money on our kitchens even though we are spending less time in them. Why? Cooking is slowly transforming from a necessary activity to a leisure one (see the article “The Joy of Not Cooking” by Megan McArdle in the May 2011 edition of The Atlantic). People are not cooking out of necessity but out of desire. There are many alternatives to cooking such as dining out and prepared foods.

So, here is the lesson in problem solving:

We can alter a problem simply by altering how people feel about it; thus, we create additional potential solutions.

Marketers, advertisers and merchandisers know that if they can alter our preferences through education or branding, new markets for existing products and existing markets for new products open.

If this holds true in these disciplines, why can’t this be true:

If we can change how employees feel about their employers and work, we can create additional potential solutions to our business problems.

So, posed as two questions we arrive at these:

1. If we could change how people feel in a way we would like, what potential solutions come into play?
2. What must we do to change their feelings?

In one post, we saw how we could change the interpretation of a message simply by changing feelings. In another, we saw how simple gestures by company executives change feelings and performance. Finally, we saw the problems that arise when employees have bad feelings for employers.

Thus, if people’s feelings for their kitchens can open up new opportunities even when traditional perspectives of the statistics indicate gloom, imagine the opportunities that would avail us if people’s feelings changed at our businesses.

Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Creation Myth” in the May 16, 2011 edition of The New Yorker was the best article I’ve read about the challenges of managing relationships in an innovative environment.

You need two key attributes to manage relationships in this environment:

1. Comfort with the tensions that can come from extremely diverse personalities working together
2. Discipline to overcome the tendency to score failures

Long ago, I believed creativity was a flash of brilliance that popped into someone’s head. Reading about Picasso drastically changed this. He often did dozens of sketches and renditions before he painted the final piece, if he even intended that piece to be the final one.

Mature red oaks can drop 15,000 acorns in a season; however, few become 100-year oaks. Those are the memorable ones though. As Gladwell mentioned, Steve Jobs and Xerox overlooked some fabulous innovations (high definition screens and the mouse respectively). However, the ones they did capture, the mouse and the laser printer altered their businesses. Innovation is about the one you caught, not the ones that got away or never materialized.

Here’s my nomenclature for the three personalities Gladwell indicates as essential to innovation:

1. Visionary: crank out many ideas
2. Builder: engineer ideas
3. Commercialist: make the idea sellable

You need many ideas. Remember the oak tree. The winnowing down of those ideas will encourage many opportunities for intense friction among these personalities. However, many managers prefer a quiet, efficient team. They terminate “troublemakers” as some of those in Gladwell’s piece were threatened.

Innovation is an act of aggression on existing perspectives cured in concrete. Upsetting that is anything but clean and quiet. It’s about large numbers, a lot of work and much tension.

I’m frequently asked about the difference between emotional intelligence (EI) and intuition. Essentially, EI is a head thing, intuition a heart thing. EI is being “intelligent” about emotions; it’s not about feeling. If you look at EI’s definition of empathy according to Daniel Goleman, this distinction becomes clear:

Ability to understand the emotional makeup of other people

In my work with intuition, I define empathy as a feeling (or collection of feelings):

Ability to feel what the other person is feeling

Just because we understand someone’s emotions, it doesn’t mean we feel what he feels. If a truly totally empathic person existed, she would not be able to kill anyone because she would die too from intense pain and sorrow. The closest real example is a mother losing her child; that bond is so empathic, that mothers never really recover from this. A part of them dies with their child. EI understands this but wouldn’t necessarily feel it.

This head/heart difference between EI and intuition shows up in two other areas besides empathy: the unconscious and problem solving.

EI is about intelligence; therefore, it’s concerned with conscious activity (the head). On the other hand, since intuition is about the acquisition of knowledge and the making of decisions through emotions, unconscious activity plays a vital role because emotions emanate from there.

As for problem solving, EI doesn’t play if you’re alone in the woods. It requires a social or interpersonal context. However, intuition plays in social, interpersonal and solitary contexts. Thus, while an inventor would not need a high EI, he would definitely benefit from keen intuition.

Therefore, EI and intuition differ when it comes to empathy, the unconscious and problem solving. Symbolically, EI is a matter of the head while intuition a matter of the heart.

In a discussion with an attorney a while back, he told me about a client who routinely included him in their business planning sessions. He was puzzled because they didn’t seem to require his input on many of their discussions. This caused him to doubt the value he was giving them.

I told him a story about attending a client’s son’s little league baseball game. During the game her husband and the other fathers were busy yelling instructions. Meanwhile, the mothers were shouting encouragement. This exemplified two types of support: instructional (direct) and emotional (indirect). The sons played better because not only were fathers giving tips but moms were demonstrating their love and support through encouragement. Knowing someone about whom you care is supporting you is a powerful motivator.

I then connected this to trees. When businesses hold retreats to do their planning, they often leave the work environment for a serene setting. The setting often has trees. Now, the trees don’t offer any practical business advice but they create an emotional environment conducive to planning very much like the mothers were doing for their sons at the baseball game.

Relating it to him, I said that most likely the clients just felt better by having him there. While they might not acknowledge this consciously, they will rationalize his attendance in some way. In this way, he was like a tree. While he might not provide any practical business advice, he was creating a situation that encouraged his client to plan better.

The attorney chuckled and said he felt better about charging his fees, but the point is that some of us have the influence of trees. Our mere presence can make people do better; we don’t need to offer any pragmatic tips.