Avoid Mistakes That Plague New Leaders: An Interview with Warren Bennis

A noted authority on leadership with more than 25 books to his name, Warren G. Bennis is University Professor and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, and founding chairman of the school's Leadership Institute. His most recent book is Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, coauthored with Noel M.Tichy (Penguin Group, 2007).

Bennis began examining the nature of leadership more than 50 years ago when he was one of the youngest U.S. infantry commanders fighting in Germany, service for which he was decorated with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. 

He and I spoke in 2006 about the mistakes and missteps that plague newly appointed leaders and how to avoid them. Here is an edited record of our conversation. — Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay, Editor

CBD: I once heard a fascinating keynote address delivered by a young executive at a world-famous medical products company. He spoke frankly about how close he came to failing in his first high-profile leadership role some seven years earlier, and how he turned his performance around. In your experience, what distinguishes leaders who can pull away from disaster from those who plunge right over the edge?

WB: The understanding that they can't lead alone. The myth about leadership is that it's a solitary act, that "it's lonely at the top." But effective leaders know the truth of this passage from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451: "We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?" Talk to us about our 28 day program to strengthen your innovation capabilities to drive growth.

Leaders, like the rest of us, have all sorts of ways of not looking at themselves, of overlooking shortcomings. For that reason, leaders need not to be alone. They need to be "bothered" by people who will give them what I call reflective back talk.

How can a leader make sure that the right people are giving him or her "reflective back talk"? How can leaders encourage those with less power to feel comfortable doing this?

I'll answer your second question first. To get people to bother you, you have to bother them. Otherwise, people won't take you seriously. Putting out a suggestion box, advertising an open-door policy, even walking the floors and asking, "What can we do to improve?" — they're all well-intentioned actions, but, unless there's a deep culture of trust and openness, people won't tell you what they really think.

It's analogous to the heart: for it to do its job and keep the body healthy, the right amount of oxygenated blood needs to get to the right part of the heart at the right time. Likewise, it's critical that enough true, honest opinion and information make it to leaders for them to be effective and keep their organization fit and healthy. A leader, at whatever level, has to make a real effort to create a culture in which people feel free to commit candor.

As for making sure the right people are bothering you, you have to keep widening and widening your sources — you need to practice "open source management." You need to get your information from everywhere. This serves three purposes:

1. It increases the chances that you'll learn something important. The more sources you use, the more certain you can be that you're being bothered about the right things.
2. It will loosen up your own people. If someone in your closest circle is tempted to withhold information from you, they'll think twice about this when they realize that someone else might reveal it.
3. People learn from dialogue — it stretches them. I know that I don't know all that I know until I'm in conversation. Engaging in dialogue with a wide selection of people both inside and outside the organization uncovers knowledge and awareness the leader didn't even know she had.

Let's go back to your story for a moment: Can you tell me what made the leader aware that he was failing — what it was that "bothered" him?

It was an official letter from HR putting him on notice that his performance was unsatisfactory. It was, in his words, a "2 X 4 moment" — he'd thought he'd been doing great! When he started probing, he was told that the biggest problem was that his failure to delegate had caused morale among his top team to plummet. They thought he didn't trust or respect them.

Learning to delegate is difficult. It's tempting for all of us, especially ambitious business professionals, to believe that unless we do something ourselves, it won't be done right.

What new leaders need to understand is that by not delegating, they're disrespecting not only others but themselves. They're not using themselves to their best advantage, and they're demonstrating that they haven't learned one of the key truths about leadership, which is that the only way to make your weaknesses irrelevant is to respect others' strengths and use them.

What steps can new leaders take to become better at delegating?

In my experience, most leaders and aspiring leaders are, with very few exceptions, driven type As. They're perfectionists. But delegation requires letting go of perfection and relinquishing control. It's very difficult for some people to let go, but being an effective leader absolutely requires it.

For one, if you're not delegating, you're not doing your job. As someone moves up in an organization, their job becomes less about their facility at the functional tasks that, earlier in their career, defined their performance and more about their skill at making the best use of all the capabilities and talents that surround them.

By definition, an organization is a system of collaboration and interdependence. The work of leading an organization — whether a team, a business unit, a regional division, or an entire corporation — is to fit together the organization's independent pieces so they create the most value. It's to increase the sum of the parts. If you can't delegate, you shouldn't be in this business.

For another, as the leader in your story learned, a failure to delegate appropriately drives down motivation and morale. Competent, creative, hardworking people want their talents and effort recognized. I was reminded of this rather poignantly in a conversation with a friend of mine. An extraordinarily gifted person, she chose to take early retirement from an organization where she'd worked 30 years because she said she never felt that her full talents were utilized.

What else is crucial to making the leap to leadership — and succeeding at it?

I'll single out two things. One is attentiveness — keeping your eyebrows raised all the time. You know, even if a leader has surrounded herself with trusted advisers who give her straight talk, she still needs to cultivate attentiveness. That means whenever an issue or crisis arises, asking herself, What have I done to create this situation? What did I contribute to this mess?

The goal is not to blame but to understand. Accepting failure is pretty easy; to understand it is the hard part.

In the case of a crisis, the dangerous response is to look for someone to blame. But always pointing the finger at yourself isn't good, either; there are some people whose self-esteem is so low that their default response is to blame themselves. Brooding about one's failings, obsessing about them, is not productive.

What leaders want is a certain detachment. They should aim to be observing participants. But they don't want to be so detached that they're always in the balcony observing things; they have to spend time in the fray.

The other is contextual intelligence. Get the business literacy down pat. Just as a musician has to master the scales before he can become a master, so a leader has to gain a command of the basics to break free of the grid of technique and become an eminence.

It also means knowing the whole industry: what it's about, what makes one an expert in that particular space.

Finally, it requires knowing your company inside and out: the products, how customers see you, the culture — and what employees particularly value about it. This is where [former Hewlett- Packard CEO] Carly Fiorina really stumbled. She said she wanted to preserve the best of the HP culture, but she never really got the culture in the first place. While she paid lip service to [William] Hewlett and [David] Packard, and the company's early days, she never truly saw the company from the employees' perspective.

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Homeboy Industries Reboots The Lives Of Tattooed Former Gangbangers, And Even One CEO | Co.Exist

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One Sunday late last summer, just after Mass, Father Gregory Boyle took a drive through Boyle Heights, the East Los Angeles neighborhood where he has lived for 26 years. That they share a name, the priest and his neighborhood, is a coincidence. Word simply came from the archdiocese one day that a parish in Boyle Heights, one of the poorest in L.A., was without a priest. On this day, though, it seemed fitting. People beamed when they saw Boyle’s old Toyota turn up their street. Families leaned out of their houses and waved. Alone, he was a parade. Tough young men rushed to the curb to rest tattooed forearms against his open window. "Mijo!" Boyle greeted them, slapping hands and bumping fists. Around the corner, a giant, faded mural stretched nearly half a city block. Painted a story high, beside an Aztec pyramid, were the solemn faces of César Chávez, Martin Luther King Jr., Emiliano Zapata, and a smiling Gregory Boyle.

Noe Cruz used to be a gang member. Today he works at Homeboy’s bakery. Photo by Melissa Gordon

Editor’s Note

See many more pictures of Homeboy Industries and its clients in the slide show above.

When he arrived in Boyle Heights, back in the 1980s, Boyle began preaching at Dolores Mission, a little yellow church with a Spanish-tile roof and a hardy old tree by the door, a statue of Mary nestled where its two trunks diverge. At night, he would walk. No one knew what to make of this at first. The young men who lingered on the corners stayed aloof. Police stopped him outside a housing project, assuming he was there for drugs. But whenever guys would get beaten up or shot, he would visit them in the hospital. He had an ear for the neighborhood’s slang, and he adopted it as his own. And he was a Jesuit priest, in a neighborhood where gang members were mostly Latino. ("They’ll be running from the police, and they’ll still cross themselves when they pass a church," Boyle jokes.) Once, he came upon a brawl, still the largest he has ever seen--50 or 60 men, with baseball bats, blocking four lanes of traffic. He ran into the middle of the mob, bellowing, "Put down the motherfucking bats!" The men stood down, shocked. "It was like the parting of the Red Sea," Boyle recalled, chuckling. "They said, 'G . . . you cursed!'"

Eventually, some neighbors pooled their money and bought him a bicycle, so his walks, which seemed to have a calming effect, might cover more ground. After that, they would see the priest just about every night, pedaling through the projects.

It occurred to Boyle during those rides that the biggest problem facing his community was the lack of work--especially for young men who had spent time in prison--and, by extension, a pervasive sense of hopelessness. So he started looking for jobs for the men. When he couldn’t find nearly enough, he decided to create some. In 1992, with a large donation from a movie producer, Boyle took over a small, shuttered bakery and founded Homeboy Industries.

At Homeboy’s L.A. headquarters you’ll find the Homegirl Cafe, which serves breakfast, lunch, and Saturday brunch. It’s also the workplace of dozens of homies. Photo by Melissa Golden

By 2010, Homeboy was the country’s largest gang-intervention program, employing hundreds of felons--Boyle calls them his "homies"--at a cafe, a silk-screen shop, and other small businesses, and offering services such as free tattoo removal, GED classes, and counseling to thousands more. Boyle had become famous, even by Los Angeles standards. (Periodically, tourists will peer into his office and snap his picture, or ask him to sign a copy of his 2010 best-selling book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.) Still, he remained Father G, addressing his employees as "son" and "kiddo," "dawg" and "mijo," and marrying them, and baptizing their children--and, sometimes, burying them. He stayed in the same room in Boyle Heights, a converted garage of a Jesuit group house, with just enough room for a mattress on the floor and a shelf for his books. And he still gave his cell-phone number to every hard case he met. "Blow it up," he says, and they do.

Boyle describes Homeboy as a place of miracles. More than a few times, that has extended to its finances. Once, a day or two away from failing to make payroll, Boyle found an elderly woman at his door with a paper bag full of cash, thousands and thousands of dollars. In those days, Homeboy was small enough that a bag of cash could cover a shortfall. But by 2010, it had an operating budget of nearly $10 million, and its cash reserves had been dwindling for months.

On a Thursday just after lunch, two years ago this month, employees filled Homeboy’s lobby, and the stairway, and peered down over the railing from the second floor. They grew quiet. Boyle told them that Homeboy was out of money. Most of them were going to lose their jobs. And he wept.

Bruce Karatz read about those layoffs in the paper. He was at his weekend home in Malibu, with his wife, Lilly Tartikoff, the widow of former NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff. (Karatz’s previous wife, his second, was Sandra Lee, the Food Network personality.) Karatz had plenty of time to read the paper. Too much time, for his liking.

Three weeks earlier, a jury had found him guilty of four felonies. It was possible the judge would sentence him only to parole. It was also possible that, at 64, he could spend the rest of his life in federal prison. He would not know for months.

Bruce Karatz used to be the CEO of KB Home. He’s not at Homeboy, which he has helped put on firmer financial footing. Photo by Melissa Golden.

From 1986 to 2006, Karatz was CEO of KB Home, cofounded in the 1950s by a young accountant named Eli Broad. Karatz grew Broad’s first company into one of the world’s largest home builders. During Karatz’s time at the helm, KB Home increased home sales by nearly 1,000%, bringing in $9.4 billion in revenue in 2005, his last full year as CEO. For his efforts, Karatz paid himself a staggering amount. In his final year at KB Home, he made, by Forbes's count, $135.53 million.

Then came the investigation. In 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission began to crack down on the practice of backdating stock options. Karatz’s board found irregularities with stock transfers he’d authorized, worth roughly $36 million. He was fired, and the SEC opened a criminal investigation. Ultimately, in April of 2010, a jury cleared him of intentionally manipulating stocks but found him guilty of obscuring the accounting, a felony.

"We ought to share a common anguish over the crisis that threatens to cripple Homeboy Industries," columnist Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks later. Then Rutten quoted former L.A. mayor Richard Riordan, a wealthy man and a Homeboy supporter: "There’s no question Greg Boyle is a saint, but even saints need good businessmen."

Karatz had never thought much about incarceration, until recently, or about gangs. But he was a businessman, and he was anxious for something to do, something to keep him from dwelling on his future. Oddly enough, he had plans to meet Riordan later that morning for a bike ride up the coast.

The next day, Carol Biondi’s cell phone rang. Biondi, a longtime Homeboy board member and the wife of Frank Biondi, the former Viacom CEO, was in a Las Vegas boutique, shopping with Edythe Broad, Eli’s wife. It was the former mayor calling. He wanted to introduce Karatz to Homeboy.

You can now find Homeboy-branded chips and salsa at Ralph’s stores in Los Angeles. Sales could generate $500,000 in revenue for Homeboy this year. Photo by Melissa Golden.

I paid a visit to Homeboy last summer. Sunlight filled the lobby. Dozens of young men, and some women, sat in rows or loitered outside. Most were garishly tattooed. Boyle appeared, and the men gathered around him, three or four deep, for a hug, or a whispered blessing: "You are exactly what God had in mind when he made you." Karatz sat nearby, thumbing at his BlackBerry, in trim gray jeans and a dark sport coat. He had been coming in pretty much every day now, for more than a year.

Karatz and a small group of social workers, finance people, and supervisor-level homies piled into Boyle’s office for a meeting. One of the supervisors, Kyle Shoaf, had called to say that he’d be late. His car had been towed, which was an especially big deal because he’d been living in it, a fact that shocked everyone.

Conversation turned to a woman whom conversation often turned to. She is unstable and, years ago, had failed to hold a Homeboy job, but still, she showed up most days. A few months earlier, she had charged one of Boyle’s supervisors with a baseball bat--a boulder of a man who brushed off the incident, as did Boyle, who figured if she was actually looking to hurt someone, she would have picked a softer target. Then, yesterday, she had punched the receptionist in the face. This was more serious. "Her lady left her, and she’s sad," Boyle said, sympathetically. Most of the violence he sees, he chalks up to hurt and depression.

There was also business to discuss. A large foundation, the California Endowment, was planning to convert an old hospital building into a community center and offered Boyle the industrial kitchen--a 35,000-square-foot space, larger than Homeboy’s entire headquarters.

"I think we say yes," Boyle said. "Absolutely."

"But to do what?" Karatz asked.

"Well . . ." Boyle said.

Veronica Vargas, Homeboy’s director of operations, spoke up: "This would probably add another $1.5 million to our operating budget."

"A year from now," Boyle said.

(Shoaf came in quietly and took a seat.)

"But where will the revenue come from?" Karatz said.

"We don’t need to say how we’ll use the space, or what our plan is. Eventually we’ll need that," Boyle said. "All we need is a yes."

"And that is the spirit that built Homeboy," Karatz said. Everyone laughed.

"It has brought us to the brink many times," Boyle admitted.

Back in the summer of 2010, during the first few weeks after the layoffs, Homeboy’s normally teeming lobby had been quiet. Word had gotten out that Homeboy had no jobs to offer. If Boyle ever doubted what made Homeboy work, that empty lobby settled it for him. People hope for jobs, and that hope lures them in. But hope expires quickly in Boyle’s experience; without encouragement, people return to the life they know. He had to start hiring again.

Boyle, Karatz, and a few Homeboy board members met with their largest donors, who were deeply unsettled that a grantee of Homeboy’s stature could be so close to insolvency. ("I put Father Greg in the category of two or three supremely magical people I’ve met in my life," said Robert K. Ross, the California Endowment’s president.) But once they began to look at Homeboy’s numbers, the crisis made sense.

For years, Boyle operated out of a small storefront near Dolores Mission. He moved Homeboy into big, new headquarters in October 2007. The economy was already beginning to collapse. Los Angeles County’s unemployment rate climbed from 4.9% in mid-2007 to more than 13% in mid-2010, among the highest in the nation. Homeboy has never kept good data on job placement outside the organization, but the staff could feel the difference. Men and women with felony records became virtually unemployable, and Homeboy went from seeing a few thousand clients a year to 8,000, 10,000, 12,000. Its payroll ballooned to more than 400 workers, mostly entry-level homies, and Boyle handed out cash when people struggled to buy food or pay bills. "It was like dinner at my house, when I was growing up," he said. "If somebody showed up, throw some more water in the soup."

Homeboy raised $6.8 million in 2009, but it spent $11.3 million, and was on pace to spend more in 2010. Even with a little more than $2 million a year in business revenue, Homeboy was operating at around a $2 million deficit.

The woman who punched the receptionist had returned. Alone with Boyle in his office, she paced frantically. "I didn’t touch nobody!" she shouted. Typically, people crowd Boyle’s door, hoping to catch his eye and steal a moment with him, but everyone kept their distance. Karatz put his jacket over his shoulder, slid on a pair of big designer sunglasses, and stepped out to check on a new Homeboy business down the street.

When Karatz first reported for work two years ago, Boyle had no idea who he was--just that Karatz was rich and a friend of the former mayor. Boyle is not one to Google people. His impression of who you are seems only marginally informed by what you have done. As for Karatz’s felony conviction, which Boyle discovered a few weeks later, he said: "Everyone is a lot more than the worst thing they ever did. This place is about redemption and restoration."

Boyle found Karatz a desk alongside three fundraisers in the tiny, crowded development office. (They later moved him to a nearby cubicle. "He was reeeaaally loud on the phone," one of the women said.) Homeboy’s foundation funders seemed ready to offer a bailout. Karatz helped draft a basic financial plan--mostly, cutting Homeboy’s payroll and services to a level of funding it could reasonably expect to raise--and hustled for donations from friends and acquaintances. He also pushed, successfully, for a new chief financial officer, one with a finance background.

Some 65% of ex-cons in California are back in jail within three years. Cost per adult prisoner, per year: $46,700

Karatz was especially intrigued by Homeboy’s businesses. Boyle had never planned to offer free tattoo removal. But when he kept failing to find a job for a young man with an especially unfortunate tattoo (fuck the world, on his forehead), he found a doctor who could erase it. Homeboy’s businesses were born in much the same way. Boyle opened Homeboy Bakery because a bakery across the street had closed. "If it had been an upholstery shop, we would have opened Homeboy Upholstery," he said. From Boyle’s perspective, Homeboy was primarily in the business of hiring people: "We don’t hire homies to bake bread. We bake bread to hire homies."

Karatz, though, thought Boyle had the makings of a real food brand. "Homeboy has a very strong logo," he said. "And I’m a big believer in authenticity. Homeboy is real. If you’re in downtown L.A., you can come to Homeboy, have tacos in the cafe, you’ll be served by homegirls who are just out of prison." Homeboy would always depend on philanthropy and government contracts, but building its businesses could be just as good as traditional fundraising, maybe better. "If we just have our hand out," Karatz said, "I think it’s very dangerous."

We don’t hire homies to bake bread. We bake bread to hire homies.

The large supermarket chain Ralph’s had invited Homegirl Cafe to sell its salsa in the deli section of a downtown store. The store sold out every morning, and Ralph’s was interested in taking the salsa into other stores, but the conversation had stalled. Karatz called Ralph’s and said he wanted to develop labels and packaging and push Homeboy Salsa into every Ralph’s in the region. He wanted more flavors, too, and a line of tortilla chips.

Last January, four flavors of Homeboy Salsa and a new line of Homeboy-branded chips rolled out at 250 Ralph’s locations. (A $50,000 donation from Ralph’s helped cover some startup costs; Karatz wrote personal checks for the rest.) In a matter of weeks, Homeboy Salsa and Homeboy Tortilla Strips were the chain’s top-selling deli items. "He used to be on the board of Kroger, which owns Ralph’s," said Vargas, the director of operations. "Bruce calls, and all of a sudden, things are moving fast!"

Karatz spotted another opportunity in a request for proposal from the city. For years, a tiny, dilapidated coffee business on the second floor of City Hall had been the only shop in the building. It was closing, and the city wanted a new vendor. "To have Homeboy as the only place to eat at City Hall, all the movers and shakers walking by, on their way to meet the mayor," Karatz said, "I thought, 'This is very cool.'" Homegirl Cafe could stock it each morning with premade sandwiches. It would be a simple, straightforward business.

Karatz got a well-known local architect, Mark Rios, to agree to design the space. But he still needed to find around $400,000 to get the shop built and open, and Homeboy wasn’t in any position to borrow. A few weeks later, he was at his desk when one of Homeboy’s fundraisers, a few feet away, hung up the phone. Someone named Jesse Bonderman had just donated $5,000 to pay for holiday turkeys and gifts.

"Bonderman?" Karatz said.

"Do you know him?" she asked.

"No. But there’s a guy named David Bonderman who is a founding partner of TPG, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms." He asked for the phone number. "Lo and behold, it’s David Bonderman’s son. I told him, 'I have a big idea for you,'" Karatz said. A few days later, Jesse Bonderman donated $400,000. Homeboy Diner opened last June.

"Bruce!" said a heavily tattooed guy behind the register at the diner, as Karatz approached. The space looks like a national chain, with black-and-white photographs of homies framed against lime-green walls, printed with a repeating Homeboy logo. Homeboy chips and salsa are on display.

This was something new for Homeboy, building new business lines as an actual business would. And Karatz saw opportunities everywhere.

Homeboy offers to its clients free tattoo removal, often an essential step to shedding gang life and entering the workforce. Photo by Melissa Golden

Before he arrived, Homeboy agreed to license its name to a concession company that was bidding to open restaurants at Los Angeles International Airport. The company proposed some sort of Homeboy eatery in exchange for a donation and a share of revenue. Boyle was grateful for the revenue, but Karatz got excited about the business. He pushed for display cases to advertise Homeboy’s grocery line, merchandise sales, and design features that could market Homeboy’s mission to the millions of people who walk by. The restaurant will open this summer. He has also been in conversations with Harry Morton, owner of the Viper Room and the son of Hard Rock Cafe cofounder Peter Morton, to bankroll a Homeboy bar and grill in Hollywood, near the ArcLight Theater. He hired a director of businesses, who has pitched a second Homeboy Diner and bid to take over the cafeteria in a large government building. And he developed prototypes for three flavors of Homeboy salad dressing.

Not everything has worked. Karatz struggled to get better results from Homeboy’s bakery, which he identified as their most challenging small business. He has eased back on plans to take Homeboy’s grocery line national. And steep shelving fees have halted, for now, his plans to introduce salad dressing. Still, according to Karatz, proceeds from licensing the chips and salsa are on pace to net the organization $500,000 this year. On every sign and every label: "jobs not jails."

When Karatz received his sentence in November 2010, some people wondered if his months at Homeboy had bought leniency. "It was smart for him, and it was smart for us," concedes Boyle’s deputy, a former homie named Hector Verdugo. But the judge’s sentencing statement emphasized that Karatz had not caused shareholders or the company to lose money, and that Karatz himself had lost a lot--more than $175 million, between penalties, repayments, and benefits he forfeited upon his firing. The court sentenced Karatz to eight months of home confinement, five years of probation, and 2,000 hours of community service, which Boyle could supervise. Karatz’s sentence was essentially to keep working at Homeboy.

"Have you talked to Kyle?" Karatz asked me after our diner visit. He was referring to Shoaf, the supervisor who came in late after his car got towed. "He showed up this morning. Didn’t have a long face on. I told him, 'If I still had my company, I would hire you in a second.'"

Karatz has felt that way about many of the men and women he has met at Homeboy, and that has surprised him. After a few months, he began interviewing job applicants as part of Homeboy’s selection committee, and although he has nagged Boyle about hiring too many people, he votes yes after interviews more than anyone else. "It’s something that I never thought about before," Karatz said. "This whole population that I never knew--I never knew one person, much less hundreds--who have a devil of a time reentering society." Even the company that approached Homeboy about licensing its name for an airport restaurant never imagined homies would actually work there. "They said they weren’t sure the airport was going to allow homies to make it through TSA control and get a badge," Karatz said. "I said, 'You tell me how many people you’ll hire. I know the head of the airport commission. Let me go to work on that.' " He added: "I don’t think it has to do with security."

In her book The New Jim Crow, Ohio State University law professor Michelle Alexander counts all the ways that felons, even those arrested for minor drug offenses, end up excluded from productive life. Depending on where they live, they can lose, forever, the right to vote, to serve on a jury, to receive professional licenses, and to qualify for food stamps and even financial aid for college. Alexander points to recent research by the National Employment Law Center that found Craigslist job postings for warehouse workers and pizza-delivery drivers that explicitly bar anyone who has committed a felony from applying. In Ohio, where Alexander lives, a felon can even be denied a barber’s license.

"You should talk to Kyle," Boyle told me.

I found him in Homeboy’s crowded lobby, running interference at Boyle’s office door. Shoaf is tall and broad-shouldered, with a steady, thoughtful manner and an easy charm. He grew up on a Crip block, and got pulled in early. At 18, he was arrested for assault. He spent most of the next 10 years in and out of prison.

No one thing prompted him to change. He was just tired of the life he had. But he needed a job. All day, he would look for openings and fill out applications. Each time, he would check a box, admitting that he had committed a felony. Nobody called. Finally, filling out an application to work in the deli at Ralph’s, he stared at the felony box. And he left it blank. He got the job.

For a long time, he was afraid to tell his parole officer. He actually missed parole meetings, he said, because he was working, and made up excuses. Finally, he explained. His parole officer asked if his boss knew he had committed a felony, and he confessed that she didn’t.

"He went to Ralph’s," Shoaf said. "He said, 'Did you know Kyle lied about committing a felony?' My boss was fine with it. I was one of her best workers. She was about to move me to register. So my PO went over her head, to corporate. And they fired me."

He woke up the next day angry and embarrassed. He packed up his things and left his halfway house. A few weeks later, his parole officer sent him back to jail. And he would be sent back again--for a technical violation, Shoaf said--after he began working at Homeboy in January 2010.

"The day you get out, you have your job back," Boyle told him. Soon after Shoaf returned, he earned his promotion, one of only a handful of homies to make supervisor.

But he was sleeping in his car now. He had been living with his girlfriend. Then they broke up. For the first few nights, he slept on a friend’s couch while trying to save up for a security deposit for an apartment. The guy and his girlfriend, though, they argued a lot. One night, the guy put his hands on her, and Shoaf stepped between them--and the guy swung at him, and they grappled. After everyone else calmed down, Shoaf panicked. He had been sent back to prison for far less. He decided it wasn’t safe to stay with friends.

So every night, after work, he drove to a Burger King parking lot, reclined his seat, and tried his best to sleep. Every morning, he stopped at a friend’s apartment just long enough to iron his shirt.

"People go, 'Oh my God, it must be so hard.' And I just think: I’ve died and gone to heaven. This is the most joyful place. I wouldn’t trade my life for anybody’s," says Boyle, in his office at Homeboy HQ. Photo by Melissa Golden

One Saturday, I went with Boyle to a girls’ probation camp, for Mass. Around two dozen teenagers, wearing matching green T-shirts and black, shapeless shorts, filed into a room that looks just like a school classroom, except the bulletin boards remind the girls not to throw gang signs and to think about self-control.

Boyle told a funny parable about facing fears, which involved being chased by dogs, back when he was "a new booty priest." Then he told the story of a 19-year-old boy who showed up at Homeboy looking for $50. After some prying, the boy admitted he wanted to buy fireworks.

"I’m not giving you money to buy fireworks," Boyle told him.

"Well, I guess my baby girl isn’t going to have a Fourth of July . . ." the boy said. Boyle spoke the boy’s lines in a mopey voice.

"How old is she?" Boyle asked.

"Three months," the boy said. Boyle’s teenage flock giggled.

"Three months? Just wave your lighter in front of her face, she won’t know the difference!" Boyle said.

The room erupted, the girls rocking in their chairs with laughter.

When the boy got up to leave, Boyle gave him the money. "Go get your explosion on," he said.

There was a theological point: "I always have a funny story at communion time that underscores that no one is perfect, and that communion is not for perfect people but for hungry people," Boyle told me. But that probably matters less than this: The girls were rapt. After Mass, they came to him and lingered as long as they could. He spoke to each one in turn, as if she were his favorite niece: "You are so much more than the worst thing you’ve ever done." He asked when they were getting out and gave them all his card, with his cell-phone number. "Come see me," he said. "We have jobs."

Back at Homeboy, young people kept arriving in Boyle’s office straight from prison, looking for work or money. "Have you eaten anything today?" Boyle asked a skinny, dull-eyed teenager. The boy shook his head. Boyle reached across the desk, slipping him a folded twenty in a handshake, and then squeezed his fist, instead of bumping it.

Boyle looked out into the lobby. "My God, where do all these people come from?" he said.

There are 1.6 million people in U.S. prisons, and very few are in for life. The rest have to go somewhere, and do something. In California, 65% end up reincarcerated within three years, at an average annual cost of $46,700 per adult prisoner--and much more for Division of Juvenile Justice inmates. The recession has forced states to think about ways to reduce their prison rolls. In October, California began an 18-month process of cutting its state-prison population by 33,000, in part by transferring responsibility for some inmates to county authorities. Other states are watching closely.

Homeboy is on solid financial footing now. Its 2012 budget is roughly $14 million; about $8 million of that will come from foundations and private donors, $2 million from government contracts, and $4 million from business revenue--almost double what Homeboy’s ventures earned in 2009. Recently, Boyle promoted the finance director Karatz hired to a newly empowered COO post that will report directly to the board if Homeboy’s budget becomes precarious again. But head count is also back up to more than 380 employees. The job market has made it harder than ever for homies to graduate to regular employers, and Boyle believes Homeboy must continue to hire, so the payroll grows.

Boyle also continues to give cash to people who show up in need, and to pay for things he could never get a budget line for, despite his board’s entreaties to stop. The woman who punched the receptionist? Boyle gave her $200 the next day, when he learned she had been kicked out of her place and had no money, and nowhere to go. His receptionist hugged her. "We are all she has," Boyle said. He gives away nearly his entire salary, and when his wallet is empty, he writes Homeboy checks. "You have the power to remove me," he has told his board. "He is going to help his kids by any means necessary," said Ross, of the California Endowment. "For someone with as big and as authentic a heart as he has, he’s no political neophyte."

One day, Karatz said, Boyle pulled him aside. "Bruce, I know you don’t believe this, but I believe that a supreme force sent you to me," he said. "You’re right. I don’t believe you," Karatz said, and laughed. "But I would not be so bold to say I know how the world works."

"It’s been interesting," Boyle told me. "We’ve butted heads from here till Tuesday. But it’s nice, I actually enjoy it. The day won’t ever come when I could run GE, but Bruce could. And the day won’t ever come when Bruce could run Homeboy, but I have great affection for him. Because he gets who our people are, and he’s moved by them."

It was nearly dark. There was just one person left for Boyle to see. She had been waiting for hours. Shoaf brought her in and lingered for a moment. "Can I borrow the van?" he asked sheepishly. He left with the keys, of course.

"You don’t know me," the woman began. Her hair was pulled back into a thin braid that fell to the middle of her back. Her face was hard, opaque. "When my daughter was growing up, I was never able to put new clothes on her for school, not one time," she said. Her voice started to shake a bit, but she kept going. Her daughter was grown now, with her own kids. The woman had started at Homeboy two weeks ago, as a janitor, and today, she got her first paycheck.

"I told my daughter I’m going to buy her kids an outfit for school," she said. She tried to continue, but she started to cry, and then sob, her whole body shaking. "I wanted to thank you," she said, struggling to speak. "I’m going to tell her how you helped me."

"No," Boyle said. "No, tell her you did it. You did it."

A version of this article appears in the May 2012 issue of Fast Company.

via fastcoexist.com

 

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As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

 

Scott D. Anthony: 3 essential ways CEOs can innovate now - Fortune Tech

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Leaders often perceive innovation as the province of the few, isolated to white-lab coat wearing research scientists or "out-of-the-box" thinking marketers. That's not so.

By Scott D. Anthony, contributor

FORTUNE -- Leaders often perceive innovation as the province of the few, isolated to white-lab coat wearing research scientists or "out-of-the-box" thinking marketers. That's not right. In today's quickly changing world, innovation should be a corporate-wide capability.

Isolating innovation hurts a company's ability to compete. After all, shrinking product life cycles driven by globalization and rapid advances in communications technologies means that competitive advantage is increasingly a transitory notion. Companies like Yahoo! (YHOO) go from darlings to also-rans seemingly overnight. Widespread innovation capabilities improve a company's ability to incrementally improve today's offerings and create tomorrow's offerings.

Further, it isn't just the way in which companies compete that needs to change; it is the way in which people fundamentally do their work. Think about the rise of communications technologies such as Yammer (the corporate equivalent of Twitter) and WebEx or collaboration tools like Campfire. It seems as soon as you master a new tool, a new one starts to emerge. A corporate-wide innovation capability helps an organization's employees more readily adopt and adapt to these new technologies.

Companies like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon.com (AMZN) seem to have innovation in their DNA; others like Procter & Gamble (PG) and General Electric (GE) have spent decades developing systems to support innovation. If you are just starting your innovation journey, consider the following three tips.

MORE: How Microsoft grew into a giant

Forming and spreading a common language of innovation.
While innovation discussions often carry mystical tones, innovation is really nothing more than finding new ways to solve problems. But when people define innovation differently, it inhibits an organization's ability to have productive discussions on the topic. And makes it more difficult to identify, understand, and respond to innovation challenges -- or opportunities.

Here's a simple test to determine if your organization is lacking a common language. Ask a group of people to write down and read out their definition of innovation. Odds are there are material differences in the definitions, which can lead to confusion and frustration. Beyond a basic definition, consider detailing the different types of innovation strategies you plan to follow. For example, P&G has four distinct types of innovation strategies, ranging from commercial (marketing and promotion methods to drive trial and use of existing offerings) to disruptive (ideas that have the potential to create entirely new categories). Precise definitions of each strategy help bring clarity to innovation efforts.

Once you have a common language, spread it through formal and informal mechanisms. Agrichemical giant Syngenta (SYT) demonstrates the payoff that can come from an investment in a common language. In 2006, a small team of dedicated trainers created an innovation course targeted at project and leadership teams. The course's goal was to provide language and tools that would help the company improve the productivity of its $1 billion annual investment of R&D. Over the course of five years the training spread to all of Syngenta's geographic regions, helping the company reorganize its product groups while launching geographical units focused on finding solutions to specific customer, climate, and crop problems in each region.

The result has been an explosion of new products that not only boosted land productivity but also the personal productivity of farmers. Syngenta benefited not from just one or two new products but from a repeatable way to bring to market successful new hybrid seeds and new ways to protect soy, barley, wheat, sugarcane, corn, apples, and flowers from droughts and disease. Between 2006 and 2011 revenues increased by 45%, net income doubled, with new products contributing $700 million in global revenue at twice the company's overall growth rate.

MORE: The future of innovation

Frame specific innovation challenges
There's a misbegotten notion that chaos and innovation are friends. In fact, the best way to accelerate innovation is to constrain it. That is, to tightly define the problems that you are seeking to solve. These problems can be broad strategic challenges, such as "How do we win in China?" They can also be tactical challenges, such as "How do we make the process of filling in time sheets less onerous?" The more specific the problem definition, the better.

Then determine which employees are best equipped to handle the problem. Some challenges are ready-made for "spare time" thinking from broad groups of employees. Others require a more dedicated approach. Don't fall into the trap of assuming complicated challenges involving the creation of new business models can be solved by people in a fraction of their time. Most new businesses fail, and that's with an entrepreneur spending every minute of every day thinking about a problem.

Many companies think that the best way to get employees to participate in innovation is to give them financial incentives. However, research summarized in Daniel Pink's helpful book Drive shows that financial incentives actually decrease performance on creative tasks. Pink instead counsels giving people autonomy, providing them opportunities to develop mastery, and instilling a sense of purpose in their work.

Role-model desired behaviors
Innovation is an unnatural act at many companies. Leaders need to regularly role model desired behaviors to help shape their organization's culture.

MORE: Computing's next milestone is "thinking"

Consider prudent risk taking. While innovation is more predictable than many perceive, not every innovation effort is going to work out. The best innovators follow a process of careful experimentation, and accept that course-correction and failure are natural parts of the innovation process. However, it is hard to follow that process if people perceive that they will get punished if things don't pan out. Leaders can help to encourage the right behavior through the way in which they drive disengagement from projects, how they treat managers who work on commercial flops, and how they humanize the topic by describing their own failures.

For example, noted entrepreneur Jeff Stibel created a "failure wall" in his company. The wall combined memorable quotes about failure with personal examples describing individual failures and lessons learned. Stibel himself detailed three of his most memorable failures -- and signed his name to those failures. You don't get clearer signals from leadership than that.

* * *

Innovation is the challenge, and the opportunity, of our times. Developing a common language, framing pertinent innovation challenges, and role modeling desired behaviors are straightforward ways to help make innovation a more widespread capability in your organization.

Scott D. Anthony is Managing Director, Asia-Pacific, of Innosight, an innovation and strategy consulting firm. He is the author of The Little Black Book of Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).

 

via tech.fortune.cnn.com

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As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

7 Reasons Why You Need a Wedding Website

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GeekSugar    

How do you feel about wedding websites? Some people find them a good outlet for narcissism, while others find them to be a helpful guide during modern digital times.

Sure, tossing 600 photos of yourself on your wedding website with an accompanying story about how you met is a little extreme (and totally unhelpful), while building a simple site to share important event details and anecdotes from your relationship is not.

Here are 7 reasons why you need a wedding website, and what your site should include to be of maximum benefit for your guests.

• 1. Save on printing costs. If you’re having invites printed, you know how quickly the price will rise by just adding another piece of paper to the mix. By directing everyone to your site in any engagement party, shower, or wedding correspondence, you’ll save time, money, and effort on printing costs.
• 2. Easy registry access. You’re probably already refreshing your gift registry to see which items have been purchased; why not give guests easy online access, too? In most cases, you can link directly to your registry info, which makes it easy for guests.
• 3. Your fridge can only hold so many magnets. If your friends are anything like mine, you already have a fridge full of Save-the-Date magnets from friends and family. The side of my refrigerator is busier than the wedding announcement section of my local newspaper. Skip the magnets, save some cash, and put together a website.
• 4. Change of plans? No problem. Last minute location change? In-case-of-rain info? Hotel updates? While major changes to the big event can make for one hectic bride, making the change on your site takes five minutes of your time. Plus, you can add updates as the date gets closer instead of feeling the pressure to nail everything down before your Save-the-Date notices are sent.
• 5. It’s easy to stay in contact with your guests. Many wedding site templates offer guest book and RSVP sections. Ask guests to sign the book or enter their email addresses to be notified of site updates or changes. Then happily send one email instead of making 150 calls.
• 6. You don’t have time to deal with 150 calls from 150 guests trying to figure out directions. The last thing you, your parents, or your Maid of Honor has time to deal with is an endlessly ringing cellphone from friends and relatives asking to clarify the location one more time.
• 7. It’s eco-friendly. No matter how you use it, your site will probably save you cash on paper and stamps, not to mention the trees you’ve saved by using less paper and carbon emissions you’ve spared by not loading the mail carrier down with a whole lot of envelopes. Whether you prefer to go completely paperless and use your site for everything or just plan to ask for eRSVPs for a portion of your wedding-related festivities, every little bit helps.

via mashable.com This article originally published at GeekSugar here.

 

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

 If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

 

My Lessons From Cain's Arcade

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As you can imagine my thoughts run deeply upon the subject of this young man doing the very thing all kids want to do. What is particularly important are the parents. They are the ones who posted Cain's work. They encouraged his creativity which became an innovation the moment it added value. Cain isn't unique. 

All children have this capability. In fact all adults have it as well. To paraphrase Maslow, We are all born singing, and dancing and creative. The question isn't how or why. The question is why we stop." 

Children in essentially all countries do this everyday. However, many many parents will "beat" this out of their children in one form or another. I assure you everyday a child has an equally creative project that no one ever notices. So, why do parents squelch the geniuses at home to keep their children ordinary? Why do those parents then grow up to do so in their careers? These questions are important because less than 1000th of a percent ever have the courage or opportunity to break free. Those that do become the rabble rousers, the "deviants," the rebels who change the world.

The short film about the “Caine’s Arcade” flashmob will premiere October 28th at DIY Days at UCLA. Caine will be joining Nirvan to present the film, and will be staffing his arcade during the fest. We hope you can make it!  via cainesarcade.com

Speaking

 As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth.  

If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may call us at 719-649-4118. 

 

 

The Culture of Collaboration: Competition and Collaboration

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They compete in the marketplace, but now they’re also collaborating.

BMW and Toyota have announced they will collaborate in two areas: the companies will share costs and knowledge for electric car battery research, and BMW will supply diesel engines to Toyota. Toyota owns the luxury brand, Lexus, and therefore BMW and Toyota directly compete in the luxury car segment. Both companies have a significant collaboration track record.

In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how BMW and Toyota create value by collaborating internally and with business partners. The preface, which you can read here, reveals how my visit to the BMW design center in Munich some years ago sparked the book.

So why would two competitors collaborate? Collaborating makes sense within enterprises and with partners, but the marketplace requires pure competition. Right?  Well, that depends.

Collaborating among competitors makes sense when the collaboration:

1. Creates value for both parties
2. Begins with structure and clarity
3. Involves non-differentiating processes

Clearly, the BMW/Toyota collaboration nails number one. “We think that this collaboration will allow for development of next-generation batteries to be done faster and to a higher level,” Toyota Executive Vice President Takeshi Uchiyamada said at a news conference. Both companies will share the costs of battery development. 

Toyota will reportedly use BMW’s 1.6 and 2-liter diesel engines for cars sold in Europe beginning in 2014. This is reportedly the first time Toyota has procured an engine from a competitor. According to a story by Yoshio Takahashi and Kenneth Maxwell in the December 2, 2011 edition of the Wall Street Journal, the collaboration will reduce BMW’s engine production costs per unit by increasing volume. So, value creation is at the heart of this collaboration.

What about #2, structure and clarity? Based on what I know of BMW and Toyota and their approaches to collaboration, chances are this effort involves much of both. In any collaboration among competitors, both parties must establish boundaries for collaboration at the outset. Most importantly, the competing collaborators must determine use and ownership of existing and jointly-created intellectual property. Far fewer problems arise when business unit people, engineers, marketing folks, lawyers and others from both companies hash out these concerns rather than simply handing off the issues to lawyers to hash out in a vacuum.

Regarding #3, I’ve found that collaboration among competitors works best when the effort involves eliminating redundancy in non-differentiating processes. These are typically under-the-hood processes that are not part of a company’s market or product perception.  Two companies that each make hot sauce might use the same bottling equipment. Two newspapers in the same market might use the same printing presses. Entire industries participate in consortiums for purchasing, saving each competing company substantial money. These shared, non-differentiating processes are invisible to the customer. 

Engines are invisible to all but the most die-hard car enthusiasts, so collaborating on this process arguably fits the bill as non-differentiating. Typically, car batteries have nothing to do with the vehicle perception in the marketplace. In the case of electric cars, though, the jury is still out whether the battery is invisible to the consumer. The technology is in its infancy, and therefore the market consists primarily of early adopters. These consumers are more techno-savvy, realize the lithium-ion battery is intrinsic to the product’s technology and performance, and therefore may place a heavier emphasis on the battery in their purchase decisions.

So, it remains to be seen whether battery research and development is non-differentiating for BMW and Toyota. Nevertheless, if both companies can save substantial money on development and bring vehicles to market sooner and customers perceive and actually get better electric vehicles, this collaboration will prove successful.

via collaborationblog.typepad.com

Speaking 

As the CEO and founder of InnoThink Group, Jim can help your organization enhance the strategic innovation and competitiveness of your business policy and strategy, with an emphasis on increasing top line growth. 

If you’re interested in having Jim speak at your next event, simply use this form to send us your details and speaking requirements, and we’ll be in touch shortly. Or you may cal us at 719-649-4118. 

How To Make Your Work Environment Innovation-Friendly

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What message does your work environment send to employees and customers about your philosophy and approach to innovation and change? Do you want clients to view your business as being at the forefront of your industry, and yet people in your organization resist change and can’t quickly solve clients’ problems in new ways? An innovative business relies on every member to be on the lookout for trends and shifts in the marketplace. If only the entrepreneur or the management team searches for new opportunities, the business will find it nearly impossible to keep up with change, let alone grow. In fact, successful small businesses need every member’s creative contributions to keep them on the innovative edge of the industry and marketplace. So how can you create an innovation-friendly environment that encourages the continual flow of ideas and embraces change?

• Provide as much information as possible to employees. Knowledge stimulates creativity, and people cannot solve problems they don’t know exist. Tell employees and team members about problems; don’t try to solve everything yourself.

• Give employees permission to say yes to customers, suppliers, or others they interact with and make sure they have the resources they need to solve problems on the spot.

• Encourage experimentation. Reward nice tries instead of focusing only on mistakes. Make heroes out of the people who solve a problem in a different way so others get the courage to emulate them.

• Encourage employees to improve one thing every day. Set up a suggestion system that collects ideas and solutions; provides feedback to everyone who contributes an idea, explaining whether or not it will be used and why; and rewards participation through recognition by the management team. via businessweek.com

Want to increase the sustainability of your innovation initiatives or need a speaker?   Contact us or call 719-649-4118.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A leading consulting firm specialized solely in enabling organizations of all sizes in all industries develop top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. 

Get More Business by Choosing the Right Keywords

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Are you speaking the same language as your customers?

You may use the phrase "pest control" to describe your services, but someone who just found bedbugs and turns to the Web to find a local service provider might be more likely to use the phrase: "how do I get rid of bedbugs?"

These discrepancies hurt your bottom line. You pay for search keywords that don’t deliver new business, and you lose customers because they’re not able to find you when and where they’re looking.

Improve results of search advertising by choosing the right keywords. Do that by getting to know your customers.

1. What keywords do they use? Test a few search campaigns and analyze the data. For example, a carpet cleaner in Orange County, Calif., discovered that using the term "pet stains" worked well in certain neighborhoods, but not in others. He realized that to increase business in affluent neighborhoods, he should instead use the term "elite steam cleaning."

2. What state of mind are customers in when they need your services? Will they wait until they have time to conduct research from the leisure of home, where they might be thinking more clearly? Or will they use their phones to search from the road in a panic?

3. Use "negative" keywords effectively. Positive keywords are those phrases you want—such as "elite steam cleaning" in the example above. Negative keywords represent business you don’t want. For example, a mechanic makes good money when his ads are displayed for "muffler service" or "muffler repair," while services related to "smog" and "tires" are not as profitable. These terms thus become his negative keywords.

My company recently analyzed 551 campaigns to understand the relationship between the number of positive keywords, number of negative keywords, and the number of leads per campaign. It turns out that using negative keywords sparingly improves performance, but using too many can restrict lead flow unnecessarily and degrade performance. The verdict: use one to five negative keywords—and no more than 11.

Doug LaBahn
Vice-President of Product
WebVisible
Irvine, Calif.

Hire us to work with your team.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A leading consulting firm specialized solely in enabling organizations of all sizes in all industries develop top line growth through strategic innovation. Want to increase your innovation initiatives or need a speaker? Contact us. 719-649-4118 or email. 

 

 

 

via businessweek.com

 

Plantable raincoat is made from potatoes and laden with seeds

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Equilicuá’s Spud Raincoat is made from potato starch and impregnated with seeds, making it fully biodegradable, compostable and suitable for planting.

It’s one thing for a cardboard box to be infused with seeds and designed for planting at the end of its useful life. It’s quite another, however, to see a similar concept in something made from plastic. However, it’s no ordinary plastic used in Equilicuá’s Spud Raincoat — rather, the PVC alternative is made from potato starch and fully biodegradable, compostable and suitable for planting.

Equilicuá’s Spud Raincoat can be reused numerous times, its maker says, since it’s only biodegradable under specific conditions. Available in white with red print, the poncho-style garment is priced at EUR 15. Once the user is done with it, however, the Spud Raincoat can be planted in the ground. Not only is its potato starch-based “Fantastic Bioplastic” fully compostable, but — through a collaboration with La Fundación + árboles — it’s been impregnated with the seeds of various Mediterranean plants and shrubs. For that reason, in fact, Equilicuá currently distributes the raincoat only in the European Union and Mediterranean countries where the seeds are native; coming soon are versions with seeds derived from other parts of the world.

Green innovations are no longer just the reserve of obvious ecological offenders such as those in the automotive industry. No matter what your product or service, there’s no longer any excuse for not doing it greener.

Website: www.equilicua.com

via springwise.com

We are a leading innovation and hypercompetition consultancy with a passion for profit. Want to increase the sustainability of your growth initiatives or need a speaker? Contact us.

Jim Woods is president and founder of InnoThink Group. A leading consulting firm specialized solely in enabling organizations of all sizes in all industries develop top line growth through strategic innovation and hypercompetition. Jim has over 25 years consulting experience in working with small, mid size and Fortune 1000 companies. He is a former U.S. Navy Seabee and grandfather of five. For availability email or call us at 719-649-4118. Subscribe to our innovation and hypercompetition newsletter.   

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