Culture and innovation go hand in hand. Without a culture of tolerance and acceptance of other people, and diverse thinking there is no collaboration, no trust, no knowledge sharing and in the end no innovation. This is what differentiates Silicon Valley from many parts of the world, although India, China and other regions are now beginning to innovate in other ways such as business network transformation. The valley is a Mississippi river of diverse cultures and different ways of thinking along with the glass is always half full attitude. We don’t drink negativeaide in Silicon Valley, we are rewarded when we fail, it’s called experience here and innovation flows like water, it is everywhere.
There is something else special about the valley and that is the atmosphere of passion that comes with the innovation. There is an intense passion for ideas, accountability, products, business, people and leaders that can’t be found anywhere on earth. That is why Apple, Yahoo, Google, ebay, Cisco, HP, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and on and on and on, were founded in Silicon Valley. Small business leaders can learn a lot from this and should pay careful attention to the people they hire and the culture they build. Culture breeds innovation and enables small business to be more competitive and agile in competitive markets, look for those that think differently when building out your organization.
Top Ten Characteristics of Silicon Valley Thinkers
- Open
- Passionate
- Highly intelligent
- Multi-cultural
- Connected
- Visionary
- Strategic
- Rule breakers
- Innovative
- Focused
The Culture of Judgementalism
I grew up on the East coast in a culture that is the opposite of this, and after twenty years here in Silicon Valley and four startups later I see culture as the game changer. Some parts of the East coast have an oppressive culture with caste system origins where negativeaide is sold on every corner, and a passion for judgementalism pervades along with an underling mistrust of anything or anyone different. I can remember being discriminated against just because my name ended in a vowel. And when I go back there now people still look me up and down when I enter restaurants as if I were a foreigner. Although the culture of judgementalism has lessened to some degree and there has been some innovation like Lotus for example, it is still ubiquitous, pervasive and stifling. What amuses me most is that many Easterners, (New York and the Washington DC area excluded) still think they know everything and are the center of the universe. At this year’s World Innovation Forum I had to laugh when I heard venture capitalist Brian Cohen talk about how much innovation had emerged from highway 128. He even went on to pontificate about what a genius the former CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation was. History tells us that Ken Olsen made one of the most strategic blunders of all time in the technology industry; he dismissed the concept of a personal computer. This was the kiss of death for DEC. Mr. Cohen needs a reality check on where innovation happens and for the most part it hasn’t been on highway 128 where I grew up.
John Hagel and the Pizza Guys
I had the pleasure to hear John speak recently at the Berkeley Innovation Forum and part of his discussion revolved around the culture of innovation in the valley. He spoke to us for quite some time without the use of power point, how refreshing indeed. John told an unsettling story about a recent discussion he had with the CEO of a large technology firm in the valley. When he asked the CEO where the innovation people were in the company, the CEO said, “oh you mean the Pizza Guys.” The unnamed CEO said “oh we can’t put them in front of senior management you don’t know what they are going to say, they are unpredictable and so we keep them locked up in a room and slide pizzas under the door.” This is not the leadership style that built Silicon Valley and you can probably guess which company he was talking about, the one with no innovation.
When I first came to the valley in 1973 it was all about semiconductors and you could trust leadership, and in some companies after five years of intense work you got a sabbatical, a paid year off to recharge your batteries. The valley has changed and some leaders are displaying a spectacle of greed that reeks of mistrust and unaccountability. This type of leadership will drive no innovation. John went on to talk about how innovation in large organizations doesn’t start at the core, but at the edge. He used the example of how Hasso Plattner, brought innovation to SAP by buying a company and in essence to get its leader, Shai Agassi a major innovator. Shai’s innovation began at the edge of SAP in the form of middleware called NetWeaver and the SDN, (Solutions Developer Network) a network of one million plus engineers focused on innovation of SAP business process solutions. The point is that innovation rarely comes from the core of business it usually emerges from the edge. I would highly recommend John’s new book, The Power of Pull .
Centers of commerce have migrated over the centuries, the Venetians controlled the commerce of Europe through the Adriatic Sea, the Dutch mapped the world, the conquistadors of Herradura were the original .comers, and New York is still our financial center. The center of the world’s commerce has shifted west; the center of commerce is now on the best coast, the west coast. We are not fruit and nut land; we are on the Pacific Rim, at the bleeding edge of the world’s most innovative economic growth centered around India, China and southeast Asia. Until next time I wish you great selling and marketing in the millennium.
We are now the best coast, not the left coast; we are not fruit and nut land we are the land of opportunity, we are not flaky we are fantastic, and the last time I looked we had more people than the country of Canada and an economy larger the Italy.
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Posted by: Account Deleted | 11/28/2011 at 08:34 PM