How To Protect Your Ideas (BC Business)

I was recently interviewed by BC Business about how to protect your ideas. Here's the article:

Ideas are what drive innovation and progress, and seeing them through to fruition usually means having to share them with somebody. Protect yourself.

But once you’ve shared your wonderful idea with the world, how do you ensure you are rightly credited? We talked with three professionals who know a thing or two about protecting ideas: David Hannah is an associate professor of management and organization studies at SFU; Bradley Herbert is owner and principal of Bradley Herbert HR Consulting Inc.; and Otto Zsigmond is a lawyer specializing in intellectual property at Nexus Law Inc.


Get your papers in order


One of the most important precautions you can take is to make sure you document everything. Once your idea has been taken from you, it is very hard to prove that it was yours to begin with. “Unless you have done something proactive in the first place, like written it down and documented it, it is extremely hard to go back and prove that it is yours,” says Hannah. Whether it is a simple email between you and your boss or something much more complex, like patenting your idea, you will need to have proof that the idea originated with you.


Know whom you’re talking to


In order to put your idea into action, you will eventually have to tell somebody; just make sure you know to whom you are revealing your thoughts. “People don’t generally steal others’ ideas, but those who do tend to stand out,” explains Herbert. Hannah agrees that “there are usually certain people that others will warn you to stay clear of.” But you can’t always be so sure who to trust. “Even when people are told information in confidence, sometimes they breach that confidence, and then it can be messy,” adds Zsigmond.


Be a team player


You may not like it, but sometimes you have to place the organization’s interest before yours. “If you’ve got great ideas and you are willing to share them, in the end this will be beneficial to you,” says Herbert. Good team players are active participants; it is important to keep your co-workers in the loop with important information and expertise. Herbert stresses that “when you are giving freely, people recognize that.”


Set the record straight


Set The Record Straight

If you think that someone has stolen your idea, the best thing you can do is talk to the person. You need to get the record straight; did they actually mean to steal the idea, or did they take it inadvertently? Herbert stresses that it’s important to have a “positive” conversation with the person you suspect of stealing your ideas; you really don’t want to make a bad situation worse.


Report it


As an employee, you can always tell your boss about the progress that you have been making concerning an idea. Keep your boss or your superiors in the loop, and then if a dispute arises, they will know that you were the individual originally responsible for the idea. “The thing about ideas is that they need to be shared,” explains Hannah. “A lot of companies will have a system in place for an employee to document an idea and report it up the chain.”

Transparency

Great article on the benefits of a fully transparent organization. In my experience smart people absolutely need and respond well to full information. There will be the inevitable hiccups along the way, but in the big picture I think this author nailed the huge benefits.

http://workforce.com/wpmu/bizmgmt/2010/02/05/the_case_for_transparency/

Structure? The Flatter, the Better.

This is a great article from the NY Times with Cristóbal Conde, president and C.E.O. of SunGard on managing modern, info-rich, highly decentralized organizations (thanks @mitchlasky).

Favorite quotes:
(1) "You have to work on the structure of collaboration. How do people get recognized? How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The answer is to allow employees to develop a name for themselves that is irrespective of their organizational ranking or where they sit in the org chart. And it actually is not a question about monetary incentives. They do it because recognition from their peers is, I think, an extremely strong motivating factor, and something that is broadly unused in modern management."

(Q2) Besides the endless travel of that year, was there something else that made you shift styles?

(A2) "Yes, it was a huge disagreement with somebody who worked for me directly, and he ended up quitting shortly thereafter. And it wasn’t that the decision that we disagreed on was so big. It was more that, to him, it just wasn’t as much fun anymore. He felt he could do more, and I was in his way. I was chasing away somebody extremely valuable, and that is when I realized I never would have put up with that myself. If you start micromanaging people, then the very best ones leave.

If the very best people leave, then the people you’ve got left actually require more micromanagement. Eventually, they get chased away, and then you’ve got to invest in a whole apparatus of micromanagement. Pretty soon, you’re running a police state. So micromanagement doesn’t scale because it spirals down, and you end up with below-average employees in terms of motivation and ability.

Instead, the trick is to get truly world-class people working directly for you so you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing them. I think there’s very little value I can add to my direct reports. So I try to spend time with people two and three levels below because I think I can add value to them."

(Q3) Is there anything unusual about the way you run meetings?

(A3) I actively despise how people use PowerPoint as a crutch. I think PowerPoint can be a way to cover up sloppy thinking, which makes it hard to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas. I would much rather have somebody write something longhand, send it in ahead of the meeting and then assume everybody’s read it, and then you start talking, and let them defend it.

The question from the beginning of the meeting to the end of the meeting is, “Have we added value: yes or no?” And I would say that if the meeting is mostly the presentation of a deck of PowerPoint slides, you conveyed information, but you didn’t actually add value.

Deloitte's Talent Development Framework

Here's an interesting article from Kim Lamoureux at Bersin & Associates, a research firm focused on talent management systems. She shares how Deloitte helps its employees describe their ideal career through four factors. I think this is a smart idea, especially for a firm like Deloitte with highly specialized employees in a physically decentralized environment. The key to this is (1) accurately profiling your jobs in a standardized way so people can compare and contrast opportunities; (2) rewarding managers for strong talent development results (3) allowing employees to revisit these preferences throughout their lives as things change and (4) having online tools that allow easy access to essential information, preferences, and availability. These tools are worthless, however, if the organizational culture offers disincentives for managers around talent mobility and development, so look honestly at rewards, symbols, practices and managers' experiences to see what will need to change before they will participate willingly. Here's the article:

If you haven’t noticed, the workforce and the workplace have changed. We are now living in an age of a multi-generational workforce with an enhanced need for interconnectivity, an aversion to long-term commitment, and an expectation of unlimited career opportunities. At the same time, the workplace is faced with new leadership, significant restructuring and increased expectations of high performance.

Companies are transforming in many ways to meet these demands including a focus on globalization, mobility, flexibility, and collaboration. In this same spirit, organizations are beginning take a much broader view and build dynamic internal processes for moving talent from role to role at the leadership, professional and operational levels. We refer to this as “talent mobility.”

As a matter of fact, one of the biggest success-drivers in enduring organizations is their ability to rapidly and transparently move people from role to role and function to function as business needs change. To do this requires a new way of thinking about and managing talent. It requires managers to become more fluent and transparent when speaking about talent and it requires employees to become more actively engaged and candid about their career aspirations and development goals.

Talent mobility can only be achieved through a well integrated talent management strategy. How a company recruits talent, manages its employees’ careers and develops the right capabilities to fulfill business needs is essential for enabling a mobile, high performing workforce. Below are two examples of companies that have demonstrated best practices in this area.

Deloitte
Deloitte, a $27 billion company with more than 165,000 people, is one of the best talent management organizations we have studied. The company spends more than $300 million a year on development, and has built an innovative career model called the “career lattice.” Deloitte’s model enables employees to build their own customized career – by looking at the tradeoffs between four dimensions:

• Pace – rate of career progression
• Workload – quantity of work output
• Location / schedule - when and where work is performed
• Role – type of position and responsibilities

By transparently discussing these four dimensions, employees of all ages and experience can plan their careers as high powered consultants, leaders, experts, or support. Even in today’s tough times, Deloitte expects an 18% growth this year and their ability to quickly move into new industries and new businesses is one of their greatest strengths.

PEMEX
Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) is an $86 billion company which discovered one of the world’s largest oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico in 2006. But its exploration and production organization is rapidly retiring – they expect 32% of these professionals to leave in 5 years and 20% within 3 years.

To fill this gap, the company has implemented an end-to-end succession and career mobility programs for all 9,500 technical professionals – this program takes into account skills, work experience, demographic background, language, educational history, performance ratings, psychometric analysis, certifications and learning results, and the employee’s personal career interests. Every employee in PEMEX has a transparent, published career plan and these career plans are actively managed.

Talent mobility is the movement of talent to where it is needed most – and understanding the opportunities for leveraging key skills and knowledge across the company. For years, companies have talked about the right talent in the right roles at the right time. That is the essence of talent mobility. And now is the opportunity for companies to really rethink how they make that happen more seamlessly and intentionally.

H1N1 Guide From The Society For Human Resource Management

Here's a PDF from the Society For Human Resource Management with comprehensive employer tips on how to prepare for, and deal with, the H1N1 issue.

The key is helping people stay home when they're sick because it really does prevent the spread of the disease. Unfortunately, employees might feel pressure to come into work because:

• They feel deadline or sales pressure.
  
• There are inadequate sick time allowances or programs.
  
• There are unintentional incentives to come into work sick. For example, some employers lump sick and vacation into a simple paid time off category. Less use of this category for sick time means more vacation time or cash-out potential upon termination.
  
• There is a culture of working at any cost and sickness is considered a sign of low motivation towards the team.
• There are limited or no tools for tele-commuting.
• There is poor communication from senior managers (not just HR) about the need to stay home when battling the flu or other contagious diseases.
• Parents have little or no support for sick kids at home. Sick kids generally mean sick parents which can easily mean sick co-workers. Sick time policies should be flexible and include caring for loved ones.
  

In the end, it's always better to have a few people stay home longer than have more people get sick. People will pay attention more to your actions than words, so work with your employees and managers to do a thorough analysis of your organization's approach and ensure that people can do the right thing when ill. There is very clear research that although people may read policies or emails, they will only change behavior when they see peers and managers doing it first. This means that any kind of credible change will require employee and manager involvement and education, and behavioral change from managers and influential employees. Good luck!

Interesting Perspective on Technology and HR

Here's an interesting article from Josh Bersin regarding the strategic importance of learning management (LMS) and talent management systems (performance and succession management, for example) and how the various vendors are evolving to offer end-to-end capabilities.

My take-away is that if you have the money to build, staff, and maintain these enormous systems then you can do some fantastic work with e-classrooms, asynchronous self-study modules, informal learning (ie, Facebook-like social networking), tracking, and analyzing the impact of knowledge investments on performance and succession planning rankings as well as impact on retention. They're a great way to cut down travel and to broaden the reach of your training but they are very complex to install and maintain so your per-employee allocated investment needs to be moderately stable year over year.

Naturally, and appropriately, investments need to prove their impact on the business bottom line across any number of appropriate measures, some of which should be quantitative (sales volume, quality measures, customer satisfaction, employee engagement scores, etc.) and some of which must remain qualitative (employee and/or customer conversations, cultural investments / indicators, organizational "folklore" or stories commonly told to represent the "truth", or even things like your employer brand with employees and candidates).

Employment Brand Example: Apple

I think Apple does many things right, with design and marketing clearly leading the pack. As an example, here are some "unboxing" shots (tech blog lingo usually used in the literal dis-assembly of technology products so people can see the guts of a product) of a job offer packet from Apple.

Note the physical presence of the offer does a great job integrating the look and feel of both Apple's main brand as well as its employer voice (or some would say "employment brand"). By the time a candidate receives this binder, it's usually a foregone conclusion that they're interested in working for the company, but not always. We've lost many strong candidates with multiple offers because "they just had this feeling..." about the other employers. I've learned two lessons across many years of recruiting: (1) people make critical life decisions often based on emotions (whether they're aware of this or not...) and (2) stay involved across every aspect of the offer experience from verbal offer to ensuring the onboarding process has gone well nearly three months into the employment.

While I don't think a slick offer packet would make a huge difference to most candidates, the logical presentation of key employment information and strong visual linkage to the main Apple brand could be sufficiently powerful emotionally to "push" the person towards Apple. How enticing is your employment process and packet and how does it link to your desired organizational brand and employer voice?