As I’ve written about before, Diego Rodriguez and I taught a class at the Stanford d.school last spring on Creating Infectious Action. One of the student projects, perhaps the most successful, focused on spreading the use of Firefox, the open source web browser. I learned from that experience that, as an engineering professor who lives in Silicon Valley, I sometimes make assumptions things that people know about the web and technology that turn out to me dead wrong. The students in the class taught me that there are many experienced web users who don’t know what Firefox is, or in fact, that there different kinds of browsers. As a result, when I talk to audiences about the project, I now ask them "how many of you have heard of the Firefox web browser." And the answers surprise me. A few weeks ago, I asked this question to an audience in Des Moines Iowa composed of about 100 of the top senior executives of Principal Financial. I was giving a speech on evidence-based management. I was surprised when only about 5 people raised their hands. NOW before you get judgmental about ignorance of the web (an instinct I have, but have learned is dangerous), you should also know that this company has splendid financial performance as well as some of the most progressive HR practices I know, they were persistently friendly and very smart, and are on Fortune’s list of the best 100 places to work –and unlike many employers — the HR people are developing ever more progressive programs, like on site childcare. In my mind, any company that achieves these two "bottom lines" is doing something right.
Then about 10 days later I was giving an innovation talk in Frankfurt, Germany to the clients of Lupus alpha, an asset management firm. There were perhaps 300 people in the audience, and I asked them "how many of you have heard of the Firefox web browser?" I was amazed when over 75% of them raised their hands. I am not sure of the reasons for this, but the difference was striking, as I didn’t expect institutional investors to know so much about the web given my experience in Des Moines in the prior week — I am not sure of the reason for this awareness, but one of my students told me that Firefox has been in Germany a long time and is widely used.
The lesson, as we tell our students in the d.school, is to keep testing your assumptions. Indeed, in a related vein, I recently realized that many people in an audience of executives that I was teaching did not quite understand what it meant to do an experiment. If evidence-based management is going to spread, this is something people need to understand — I won’t go into the answer here, but if you want to see the answer, go to Wikipedia does a splendid job of defining and explaining experiments and check out the Campbell Collaboration for an impressive array of information on experiments and related methods.
P.S. I am sure that I biased the crowd with my connection to the d.school, but quite a few Germans told me that SAP founder Hasso Plattner (who donated 35 million to the school, and it is named after him) was the known as the most innovative German executive. And one German told me that he believed that Hasso and Arnold Schwarzenegger were two of the most admired people in the country.
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