An Example of Incremental Thinking...

Three or four years ago, when I was still working at Cisco Systems, I was involved with a number of projects looking at next-generation communications and collaboration. At this point, we were well past the early technologies that we created in 1998. We were spending much of our time thinking about the new ways that people were interacting through Social Media, Interactive 3D worlds, and through Contextual Content. We thought about Mobility and Video and how this would change the thinking about a workspace and interactions with co-workers and customers.

And then one day, we went to a meeting with the group focused on new communication devices. The "next-generation" of IP Telephones. Throughout the meeting, they tried to tell us that they were creating new types of "end-points", but the focus kept coming back to telephone functionality. We tried to tell these engineers, designers and product managers that they needed to stop thinking about the device as phone-centric. We told them to think about it as being a communications portal, where voice was just one of the things it could do. Thinking about it as primarily a phone would only lead to an incremental set of features.

Much to my dismay, I saw this today as I surfed the Cisco homepage. After three years of engineering, and at least two years of watching the iPhone change the communications landscape, they still produced a phone.

Somewhere I'm sure there is a Product Manager with a spreadsheet showing a justification the ROI for making incremental changes. And that spreadsheet is probably right next to this new device that looks eerily similar to my Asus Eee PC netbook. And as Steve Jobs reminded us last week, "a netbook is not better at anything...".

Innovation is difficult. But I've found that breaking the mold of Incremental Thinking is even more difficult.

A Moment of Zen

I sent this out to my team several weeks ago, but for some reason I keep thinking about this.

Detroit Newspapers to end Daily Home Delivery

I mentioned in my LOB presentation that my first job was a newspaper boy. It was for the Detroit Free Press. I now work in technology. I've seen alot of things change due to technology, but this is the first time I've truly seen where something I created (Internet technology) actually destroy something I had previously worked on, on a major scale. It was sort of a circle of life moment for me.

Back in 1998, I started working on a technology called Voice over IP, which was going to revolutionize how people communicated using the Internet. My previous CEO, John Chambers, told an audience of Telephone Company CEOs that "voice will be free in 10 years", which was considered blasphemous at the time. I even wrote a book about the technology. And even though landline voice calls are now essentially free, it didn't eliminate people using a telephone to communicate with one another.

The power of the Internet does some amazing things, many of which we take for granted today. I've been very fortunately to have been on the leading edge of many of these changes, but sometimes the changes hit closer to home.