Who is bringing you hot ideas

Rising global average temperature is associated with widespread changes in weather patterns. Scientific studies indicate that extreme weather events such as heat waves and large storms are likely to become more frequent or more intense with human-induced climate change. This chapter focuses on observed changes in temperature, precipitation, storms, floods, and droughts. Long-term changes in climate can directly or indirectly affect many aspects of society in potentially disruptive ways.

For example, warmer average temperatures could increase air conditioning costs and affect the spread of diseases like Lyme disease, but could also improve conditions for growing some crops.

More extreme variations in weather are also a threat to society. More frequent and intense extreme heat events can increase illnesses and deaths, especially among vulnerable populations, and damage some crops.

While increased precipitation can replenish water supplies and support agriculture, intense storms can damage property, cause loss of life and population displacement, and temporarily disrupt essential services such as transportation, telecommunications, energy, and water supplies. Back their ideas. The single greatest factor determining whether ideas catch on in a company is the perception of CEO backing. Create an idea-friendly culture.

To ensure that good ideas flourish, communicate the importance of embracing new ideas to risk-averse managers in your organization. Also encourage tolerance for the inevitable failures that come with exploration of new ideas. Exactly who are these people in your particular organization? You probably already know. Product innovations are copied quickly and easily today, leaving managerial innovation as an important way for companies to differentiate themselves. That is to say, they share a common way of working and resemble their counterparts in other organizations more than they resemble their own colleagues.

We tested this notion by identifying and interviewing of them in various organizations, industries, and locales. The group was diverse—it included, for example, a chief financial officer of a global manufacturer, a chief learning officer of an investment bank, and a chief operating officer of a large U.

The similarities begin with how they scout for ideas. All of them, not surprisingly, are avid readers of management literature and enthusiastic participants in business conferences, and many are friendly with business gurus. They are extraordinarily attuned to the zeitgeist—the often opaque economic, social, or technological environment that can determine whether an idea will thrive or quickly perish. In our interviews, too, we discovered that idea practitioners tend to value an interdisciplinary perspective, looking to fields outside business for new approaches to solving problems.

When we interviewed Lawrence Baxter two years ago at Wachovia Bank, for example, he was reading a book on superstring theory in physics.

Scouting for ideas is only the first phase of a four-part process by which these practitioners infuse their organizations with new ideas. The next phase is packaging an idea with promise for broader organizational consumption. When Antonella Padova, an idea practitioner, wanted to bring knowledge management to Whirlpool, she realized she would need to tie the concept to innovation—as opposed to, say, cost efficiency.

She personally believed knowledge management would prove valuable in many ways, but to ensure that the idea got traction, she hitched it to a train already leaving the station.

No business idea takes root within an organization purely on its own merits. Instead it has to be sold—to senior executives, to the rank and file, to middle managers. Finally, all good idea practitioners have some hand in the fourth phase: making it happen. Most are well versed in the principles of change management and understand the importance of rolling out a new idea simultaneously from the top down and the bottom up. Idea practitioners also know when their work is done.

They are usually involved in early, small-scale experiments, but when those take off, they get out of the way and let others execute. People who do these four things—scouting, packaging, advocating, and implementing ideas—are properly called practitioners because, by sharing practices and a common body of knowledge, they learn from one another how to better advance what they do.

Indeed, one of the surprising findings in our study was how many of these people are repeat offenders. Dave Barrow at BP, for example, has worked on a variety of special projects involving government relations, network computing, crisis management, capital productivity improvement, and human resource processes in engineering. Each has been able to apply lessons learned in successfully championing one idea to those that follow. Optimism is one quality we observed in nearly all our interviewees.

Many executives are quick to dismiss the endless stream of new practices and approaches as fads or as opportunism and media hype gone mad. But where cynics see only consultants hungry for billable hours or academics jockeying for tenure and speech deals, idea practitioners see the true potential of new business ideas.

They see the possibility of a better way and hold out a belief that people and organizations can change. In its heyday, Westinghouse was an innovative giant—at least in terms of its products and services.

The company brought to market the electric power plant, air brakes, the shock absorber, nuclear power, commercial radio, radar, frost-free refrigerators, and many other less dramatic innovations. Yet despite its vibrant product history, Westinghouse is effectively dead as a company, its businesses dismantled and sold off.

Its decline came as no surprise, because its financial performance had languished for many years. Why did GE rise to the top of the industrial heap, while its onetime powerful rival sank into the graveyard?

Many factors were at work, but surely one is their different approaches to business improvement. Westinghouse had innovative products, but the only business notions it pursued involved financial analysis, acquisition and more often divestiture, and a late-in-the-game approach to quality.

Key initiatives continue to be discussed and monitored at year-round meetings in which senior executives and idea practitioners from GE and outside companies gather to discuss the best new ideas in management. Globalization has been through more than a dozen annual cycles. Six Sigma has gone through five; services orientation, six; and e-business, three.

Idea practitioners are also devoted to ideas in general. Most of the people we interviewed are well educated, often with liberal arts backgrounds, and are clearly not lacking in basic brainpower.

One entered Harvard at 14, for example, and completed a PhD program at They are well versed in the art and science of management, but most also subscribe to a variety of nonbusiness, idea-focused publications.

But on-demand CSP features, such as autoscaling and load balancing, make this an extraneous expense. There are several ways to do this, but readily available heat maps are good tools. There are different versions of heat maps, but they generally give you real-time visibility into enterprise demand for computing capacity. You see when demand spikes and when utilization slows. Heat maps are important mechanisms for cloud cost optimization.

Over time, you can typically detect patterns, then align your CSP contracts with the ebb and flow of your usage. To get to a truly right-sized computing infrastructure, you need to understand the myriad of CSP offerings.

This includes evaluating and choosing the right servers, which may be optimized for memory, database, storage capacity, throughput, and other key considerations. Most CSPs want you to get value from your relationships with them, and they have consultants available to navigate the literally millions of potential combinations and make good decisions — at least until you get a feel for your options.

If you can accurately predict your minimum usage for a quarter or year, you can purchase or reserve capacity at a significant discount. The key, of course, is analyzing your historical usage and accurately forecasting changes in demand. But if you measure total cost of ownership TCO and factor in concepts like agility in the innovation process and speed to market, and contribution to your innovation process, a multi-cloud approach can be a smart financial decision.

In addition to preventing vendor lock-in i. Cloud tiering is emerging as an approach to ensuring cost efficiency as you decide how to store your entire range of data, including unstructured data and assets that have minimal use. Local tiers are great for general user files, such as documents and email attachments that need to be retained for 30 days. Remote tiers are generally best suited for day storage. Hot and cold tiers are ideal for general backend data that needs to be stored for up to 36 months.