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This week at the Business of Community Networking conference I listened to a number of speakers talk about the nuts and bolts of running customer communities. My interest in this topic has to do with the customer focus. Innosight’s approach to innovation starts with customers’ jobs-to-be-done. Social media and the rise of community-based marketing has resulted in a proliferation of information about customers. Indeed, a theme running through the conference was, what are companies doing with all this information?

I wonder whether the marketers (and they are usually marketers) running these online communities are maximizing their communities to gather more insights about their customers, including clues about jobs-to-be-done and even ideas for products, services, and customer service. And if they are doing those things, how are they calculating ROI on these kinds of qualitative results?

That question never really got answered, although speaker Chris Carfi of Cerado illuminated it further by pointing out that marketers have vocabulary and measurement units to allow them to quantify monetary value — but they don’t even have the words, let alone units of measurement, that allow them to quantify and measure more qualitative aspects like how strong the community itself is and how much value as an information source it may have.

To be fair, "community" can be created for many different reasons. I sensed at the conference a move away from the early days of community when a company built a community and then tried to make that commnity do everything. Nowadays companies might have idea-generation communities, customer-support communiites, and customer-evangelist communities, to name a few. However, an observer with a skill for sophisiticated pattern-matching analysis could likely spot innovation opportunities within the customer chatter in any type of community. It would behoove companies to make sure they are paying close attention to the stream of insights coming from their communities, regardless of the nature of the community.

Chris Carfi offered an interesting perspective in his conference talk. He proposed putting the power and the impetus on the customer to pass along their insights to a company. His question – how do we let vendors know about us? How do we let them know what we we’d like them to do? His answer – what if customers had a “terms of service” like software does, that spells out these things.

If such a thing were possible, I think such a terms-of-service document would be where we as customers would spell out our jobs-to-be-done – if we knew what they were, explicitly (and that is a very big “if”).

We at Innosight would like to congratulate our Co-Founder and Chairman, Mark Johnson, whose December 2008 cover article, "Reinventing Your Business Model" (co-authored by Clayton Christensen and Henning Kagermann) was recognized with a McKinsey Award as one of the best articles published last year in Harvard Business Review.  Mark will further explore the importance of business model innovation in his upcoming book, Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Transformative Growth and Renewal (HBP, January 2010).

Also Scott Anthony's work on his upcoming book "The Silver Lining" is prominently featured in Harvard Business Press' newly launched Leading Through Uncertain Times, an online center that delivers practical action plans, resources, tools, and content to help leaders handle the downside of business cycles.

In this issue's Voice of Disruption Innosight's Editor, Renee Hopkins Callahan, picks the brain of SimulConsult's CEO, Lynn K. Feldman, on their innovative medical pattern-matching software.  Here's an excerpt:

The concept behind SimulConsult began with Michael Segal, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric neurologist, who as a resident observed how hard it was to remember the hundreds of overlapping diseases in his specialty. Today, our company helps doctors to make difficult diagnoses – diagnoses where there is some unusual pattern of findings. “Findings” include symptoms, test results, and observations the doctor makes when you are in the office, like reflexes or peering in your eyes. The SimulConsult software enables doctors to enter their patient’s unusual pattern of findings and get back what they’re seeking – a differential diagnosis, which is a probability-weighted list of diseases. The software then prompts the doctor to add additional useful findings so that the differential continues to be refined to the point where the diagnosis is either conclusive or there’s clearly one lab test that would clinch it.

In the Disrupt-O-Meter, Innosight's Senior Associate, Kathleen Poe, suggests that despite Adobe being several years late to the Web 2.0 party, they still bring a worthwhile offering: Photoshop.com.  Here's an excerpt:

Photoshop.com, Adobe’s Web-based photo editing service, is among the latest examples of the shift away from desktop software and towards online software that started with companies like Salesforce.com. While Adobe is a bit late in arriving to the game of Web-based applications, Photoshop.com is an impressive effort relative to the company’s core retail software business, primarily because it is available for free. Is Photoshop.com likely to be a disruptive success? Our analysis is that if Adobe had launched Photoshop.com a few years ago, it would be ringing the bell off our Disrupt-o-Meter. Rolled out in the current market, however, the product tips the scale at a lukewarm due north.

For the next couple of days (Wednesday and Thursday, March 25 and 26), I will be live-blogging and posting Twitter updates from The Business of Community Networking conference here in Boston. If you're interested, the conference will be at the Doubletree Guest Suites at 400 Soldiers Field Road. I'll be on the lookout for information and insights about the disruption that social media has caused in publishing, advertising, and marketing. How are companies making the best use in their innovation efforts of the direct conduit that online communities provide into customer needs and desires? If you're going to be around the conference, I'd love to meet you. Send me a tweet!

The Internet has laid the foundation for a tremendous variety of disruptive innovations, enabling serious threats to everything from newspapers to brick-and-mortar stores to desktop word processors, but one segment has seemed to enjoy built-in protection from online disruption. Video games require relatively powerful hardware (in the form of fast computers or consoles), so games generally must be run on machines sitting next to the players. Sure, casual games can be hosted online, and games can even be purchased online, but the Internet just isn't good enough to stream the kinds of games that the Xbox 360 and PS3 can handle. Right?

Wrong: OnLive, a new company making its debut this week, is planning to offer streaming games that can be played by anyone on virtually any computer. This is a remarkable technical achievement, and it could usher in a powerful new business model that affects different incumbents in different ways.

On the one hand, game publishers like EA and Ubisoft are probably ecstatic. Owning the latest and greatest hardware necessary to play the latest and greatest games can be very expensive, and the high prices of gaming-oriented PCs prevent many people from even considering games with demanding system requirements. Making high-end games available to people with even low-end netbooks (as long as they have reasonably speedy Internet connections, which most people do) could greatly expand the market for their products. Unsurprisingly, quite a few of the big names in game development and publishing have already signed on.

On the other hand, hardware manufacturers are probably sweating bullets. OnLive could be hugely threatening to console manufacturers like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, and high-end PC manufacturers like Dell and HP (which acquired Alienware and Voodoo, respectively, just a few years ago to gain a stronger presence in this lucrative segment). Why buy a $3,000 computer when OnLive promises almost exactly the same experience with a $300 computer and a cable modem? Even that's more than you'll need to spend: OnLive plans to sell a "MicroConsole" for less than $250.

"Good enough" technologies on the Internet have gotten better and better, from those prehistoric "newspapers by computer" to movie rentals and streaming video. As technology continues to improve and broadband becomes available to more and more people, who knows what will be disrupted next?

The most recent issue of Wired featured a great article dissecting the ascendancy of small, simple portable computers called netbooks. Everything about the story feels disruptive ... except for the fact that market incumbents seem to have caught the trend.

The netbook revolution started a couple years ago when MIT Media Lab visionary Nicholas Negroponte started the "One Laptop Per Child" project. The notion was to use open source software and off-the-shelf technologies to make laptops affordable enough for children in developing nations.

While the OLPC project itself hit some roadblocks, the concept of simple, cheap laptops surged. A Taiwanese company called Asustek, which had done outsourced design for many leading personal computer manufacturers, introduced a $300 computer called the "Eee" a couple of years ago.

The company designed the device to be "good enough" to perform simple tasks like email and surfing the Web, hence the name "netbook." It sacrificed speed and the ability to run more complicated software to hit the radically low price point.

Netbook usage has surged, particularly in Europe. Consumers have found the devices more than adequate for the tasks most people do on their computer — e-mail and basic word processing.

Willy Shih, a Harvard Business School Professor who teaches a section of Innosight co-founder Clayton Christensen's "Building a Sustainably Successful Enterprise," told Wired, "netbooks are a classic Christensenian disruptive innovation for the PC industry."

Yet ... there's one strange part to the story. Usually when a wave of disruption hits an industry, the market leaders get caught flat-footed. Either they wait too long to respond, or they bungle their response. But in this case, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Acer, Lenovo, and other laptop leaders seem to have successfully "caught" the disruption. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog, Innovation Insights.

Any time a barrier prevents consumers from satisfying an important job, the market is ripe for disruption. Consider the significant barriers keeping physicians from adopting electronic medical record (EMR) systems, or expanding on those systems they do have. In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 88 percent of physicians without electronic medical record (EMR) systems and 80 percent of physicians who already have EMR systems cite “cost of capital” as a barrier to adoption or expansion.

Who can blame them? Widely published estimates cite the costs of electronic medical record (EMR) systems as ranging from $15,000 - $50,000. However, this does not take into account the costs of hardware, implementation, training, and ongoing support, which can easily take the full costs of an EMR system to $250,000 - $300,000 for the first year.

So who will enable the disruption for which this market is ripe? Enter WalMart. Long known as a purveyor of cheap toothpaste, toilet paper, and televisions, WalMart announced this week that it has partnered with Dell and EClinicalWorks to offer physicians a package of hardware, software, installation, maintenance, and training for the everyday low price of $25,000 for the first physician and $10,000 for each additional physician in the first year.  While WalMart’s announcement is significant (especially to incumbents in the healthcare IT space), it is also significant, and important, to note that they are entering healthcare IT in a classically disruptive manner: 

1. Understand the important and unsatisfied jobs of key stakeholders: Physicians today are not just caregivers, they are businesspeople forced to deal with the bureaucracy of managed care and the headaches of managing an office. Any solution that enables them to spend more time with clients and less time on paperwork without a significant impact on the bottom line will be quickly embraced.
2. Create an innovative business model: With its understanding of physicians’ important and unsatisfied jobs, it was likely easy for WalMart to create a solution with an appealing value proposition. However, they likely realized that additional resources would be needed (or at least helpful) to execute the strategy. Enter Dell and EClinicalWorks. Each brings its unique experience and reputation to the solution creating something greater than the sum of its parts: 
   • WalMart claims that its role is one of an integrator. While this is true, largely because of their purchasing scale, it does offer three other key resources: widely recognized expertise in logistics and coordination, an existing physician customer base of approximately 200,000 physicians, and an existing distribution network through its 600 Sam’s Club stores. 
   • Dell supplies the hardware – either a desktop or tablet PC – and the installation services. While WalMart could likely have partnered with another hardware vendor, Dell’s experience in supply chain management and reputation for good customer service likely gave it an edge over cheaper but less well-known hardware companies.
   • EClinicalWorks supplies the Internet-based electronic medical record and practice management software, training, and maintenance. Already used by 25,000 physicians, EClinicalWork brings credibility in the healthcare IT space.
3. Use an emergent strategy: This is neither the beginning nor likely the end of WalMart’s foray into healthcare. In 2007, it partnered with the University of Arkansas and Blue Cross Blue Shield to conduct research on how to improve healthcare IT in the US.  In February 2008, it opened co-branded clinics with a common EMR platform operated by EClinicalWorks (surprised? You shouldn’t be), and in September it promised to provide all employees with access to electronic health records. It’s reasonable to assume that each of these activities were small steps to resolve assumptions related to IF and HOW WalMart should enter the EMR space. 

Supported by the Obama administration’s $19 billion investment in healthcare IT via the Recovery Act, WalMart’s foray into EMR is likely to be yet another successful step in its journey into the healthcare space. In the short term, WalMart is likely to benefit from sales of the system and the ability to influence patients and physicians to fill their prescriptions at WalMart’s pharmacies or to buy medical supplies and durable medical equipment at Sam’s Club. In the long term, its savvy use of the principles of disruptive innovation positions it well to successfully disrupt incumbents.

Last Thursday (March 5) I ran a Webinar for Harvard Business Publishing and Chief Learning Officer about "Leading Innovation in the Great Disruption: Keeping Organizations Moving in a Downturn" (slides and audio will be available on the Chief Learning Officer web site later this week). With close to 500 attendees, the questions flew fast and furiously. I thought it would be useful to share my perspectives on some of the questions more broadly (as I did after my February audio conference with HBP).

Q: What would be the one key question that businesses should ask their customers?

Most companies start conversations with customers by asking "What don't you like about what I am selling you?" or "What do you need?" or "How can I get you to buy more of my stuff?" These questions aren't bad (well, maybe the last one is), but they tend not to provide overly useful guidance to innovation decisions.

Instead, seek to understand the problems customers are facing that they can't adequately solve today. And probe to understand the "why" behind any response. Digging into the why almost always illuminates innovation opportunities.

Q: What is the best approach to identify "jobs-to-be-done" when you are far back in the value chain, i.e. material provider?

There are a couple of different approaches to follow. One of course is to do market research among end consumers. For example, the most important customer for most consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies like Procter & Gamble and Unilever is large retailers like Wal-Mart and Amazon. But CPG companies clearly spend billions to understand end consumer markets.

Another approach is to involve the companies who purchase your materials into the discussion. See if there isn't a way to build a common perspective about the jobs-to-be-done that helps inform opportunities for collective innovation. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Harvard Management blog.

• Game-Changing Management Ideas - BusinessWeek

  Package of stories highlighting ways businesses are seeking breakthrough management ideas to spark growth during the recession; includes a story about innovations that are now trickling up from emerging markets instead aof the more traditional trickle-down effect innovation has had in the past.

• Attacking_Recession: How Innovation Can Fight the Downturn

  Report from UK-based NESTA puts forward a "total innovation strategy" the UK should use to fight the recession.

• Local Economies Seek Own Revival - WSJ.com

  Some cities are putting together their own "stimulus packages" to help their own economies.

• Pushing the Limits of Crowdsourcing - BusinessWeek

  Crowdsourcing continues to grow as social networking grows.

Given the shaky state of the world economy, companies are in a tough spot: while there is the need to be fiscally conservative, it is more important than ever to push initiatives for current and future growth. However, attracting new customers can be an expensive process, and a common response to a financial crunch is cutting marketing and advertising budgets.

We here at Innosight always recommend that companies address nonconsumption, since doing so is the surest way to create new growth. But nonconsumption does not exclusively refer to noncustomers; an oft-overlooked dimension of nonconsumption is the nonconsuming occasion. In other words, consumers of your product may not be consuming in all the ways and at all the times that they could.

That’s why existing customers might be the easiest place to look for new growth. Among the population of consumers that already know and like a product, there may be barriers preventing them from more frequent consumption. Understanding these barriers to full consumption helps to illuminate solutions. Two disparate industries, pharmaceuticals and home cooking, illustrate what such solutions might look like.

Pharmaceuticals and Packaging

Although more than half of Americans take at least one prescription drug, massive nonconsumption exists in the form of medical noncompliance. Noncompliance is such as widespread problem, in fact, that the Boston Globe reported recently that the US economy loses $100 billion annually as a result. In addition, health insurers pay for expensive hospitalizations and procedures that might have been preventable, employers experience reduced employee productivity, and, of course, the patients themselves may face injury or death. And yet one of the major contributing factors to medical noncompliance is simple forgetfulness.

Accordingly, combating forgetfulness would be a logical way to boost sales for the pharmaceutical industry (not to mention reduce costs for health insurers). One new product that offers a potentially inexpensive and effective way to remind people to take their medication is Vitality GlowCaps, pill container lids that glow and eventually play a tune when it’s time to take your medicine. Already available for sale, the company believes that with volume, such technology could be a fairly cheap and ubiquitous part of medication packaging. Embedding such a sensor and alert system into pill bottles could eliminate the forgetfulness barrier, reducing nonconsumption among existing pharmaceutical users.

Home Cooking and Marketing

PAM cooking spray has long been a choice of home cooks for preventing cookies and muffins from sticking to the pan. Con-Agra has recently decided to push PAM into contexts in which consumers currently use other products like oil or butter, or in many cases, nothing at all. Con-Agra is banking on the idea that consumer awareness of PAM’s myriad uses is a barrier to consumption in those additional contexts.

A recent print and tv advertising campaign educates consumers that PAM spray can perform such tasks as helping cooks work with sticky food like popcorn balls, give baked potatoes a crispy skin, and prevent spaghetti from clumping while cooking.  Even simple marketing solutions — like printing additional use suggestions on packaging — could spell big returns if they overcome such awareness barriers.

It is worthwhile to periodically consider your existing customers and any barriers they might have to more frequent consumption. Opportunities like these may be low-hanging fruit for growth, without the need to create a new product or attract a new customer. Keep an eye out for them! 

There's a great deal of talk now about the need for companies to innovate through the recession and to be able to transform themselves in order to continue to grow. But are “transformation” and “innovation” interchangeable concepts? We don't think so. As Scott Anthony writes in this week's feature, mastering transformation requires mastering innovation. Innovation fuels the engine of transformation. And in these difficult times, companies can't afford to cut back on fuel. Read more, including results from our annual transformation survey, here, but meanwhile, here's an excerpt:

A growing realism is setting into corporations around the world. Times aren't getting better any time soon. Times aren't getting more stable any time soon. So the question turns from, “When will things return to normal?” to “What do we do now in the face of the ‘new normal' of constant change?” Charles Darwin serves as a useful guide in today's tough times. Darwin noted that the species that survived weren't necessarily the strongest or the smartest, but the ones that are most adaptable to change. Similarly, a recent annual survey Innosight conducted in conjunction with Forbes magazine highlighted how managers increasingly recognize the new corporate imperative: transformation. A huge majority – almost 80 percent of respondents – said that their organizations recognized the need to transform. Close to 70 percent of survey-takers reported their companies had already committed to transformation. Today's tough economic climate hasn't dampened the desire for transformation; both figures were virtually unchanged from the last annual survey Innosight administered in 2007. Further, close to 80 percent of this year's respondents reported that today's economic environment has increased the need for transformation.

In Innovators' Insight: Thinking Outside the Box — of Wine, Taylor Owings asks, what causes roadblocks in the up-market march of disruptive innovations like boxed wine? An excerpt:

In a down economy and in the midst of a “green” movement, there is good news for oenophiles: high-quality boxed wines are on the rise. Both cheaper and more environmentally friendly, wines packaged in cardboard instead of glass make perfect sense for people who are willing to give up the elegance of the bottle. Boxed wines have had great success disrupting the low end of the wine market, and are now beginning to make the march upward. The question is, will this march continue until the entire wine market has been transformed?

Last week First Solar, one of the world’s leading solar power companies, announced that it was buying start-up OptiSolar’s portfolio of impending projects for $400 million. OptiSolar had appeared out of nowhere last year to ink massive contracts with utilities, including a record $550 million deal with PG&E, and seemed poised to become a major player in the industry. I and others wrote admiringly about their differentiated, fully integrated business model – whereas most solar power companies simply make solar modules that they sell to contractors and developers, OptiSolar planned to control their full value chain – they would actually build and operate power plants using their panels.  

• Council on Competitiveness President to Senate Energy Committee: "America Leads in Innovation, but Is Bleeding Opportunities" - MSNBC Wire Services - msnbc.com

  Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president of the Council on Competitiveness, called for "focus" on turning energy research and development into real economic value.

• Firepower of the Lowly Caulk Gun - WSJ.com

  More effective in conserving energy than any green solutions on the market now is measuring where air is leaking into and out of a house and caulking those spots.

• The Music Industry's New Internet Problem - BusinessWeek

  Turns out that a large group of consumers would rather listen to streaming services than buy even mp3s, let alone CDs.

• TaylorMade's Innovation Test - BusinessWeek

  "The only way you are going to innovate," TaylorMade CEO Mark King says, "is if you build chaos into the system."

According to Wired, University of Hawaii roboticist Peter Berkelman has developed a robot-assisted surgery droid for just $75,000, while higher-end surgery droids can cost more than $1 million and require extensive set-up. Berkelman's version isn't good enough for higher-end surgeries but is small enough to fit in a soldier's backpack and easy to set up. It could certainly be good enough for removing shrapnel and handling other battlefield injuries. The technology is still in the testing stage. 

The current issue of Fast Company was sure to get my attention. "The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies!" the cover blared. I start flipping through. The first eye roll came when the #1 ranking went to "Team Obama," which last time I checked was not a company. Then Google. Seemingly fair enough. Then Hulu, the online video joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal. Huh?

I am a big fan of Hulu. Chapter 9 of The Silver Lining names it as one of 10 innovations that are well positioned to thrive in today's tough times. My colleague Renee Callahan has done an excellent analysis of Hulu's success to date. But the third most innovative company in the world?

My pet peeve with these kinds of compendiums is they often don't define what exactly an innovative company is. Often they will list companies that are doing cool things, or companies that have done a masterful job exploiting their core business. I couldn't even find a description of how Fast Company put its list together in the magazine.

I'm even more skeptical of surveys that ask executives to name innovative companies. Those surveys suffer from endless Halo Effects, and really shouldn't be trusted.

I empathize with editors trying to put these lists together, because it's awfully hard. After all, what does an innovative company look like?

In my mind, an innovative company does more than exploit a single idea. It develops the systematic ability to extend into new markets, and create entirely new business models. And importantly, it doesn't just invent new things; it makes money with its new efforts....

Read more at Scott's Innovation Insights blog.

Here's a seemingly career-killing sales tactic: tell your customers they waste a lot of money on the product that forms the core of your company's business. Good way to land on the next cost-cutting list? For Xerox, this approach has actually created a powerful growth strategy.

The core of the strategy is Xerox's innovative shift from selling products to selling solutions. Instead of pushing copiers, printers, and related parts and services, Xerox is increasingly helping customers manage their end-to-end printing processes.

Xerox (and other vendors like Hewlett-Packard) offers customers the long-term ability to keep costs under control by providing consulting services to help them better managing their existing equipment. An article in today's Wall Street Journal suggested that such efforts can reduce printing costs by up to 30 percent.

That's a strong sales proposition in today's tough economy. While Xerox might miss short-term printer and copier sales, it is building long-term, potentially lucrative relationships -- and a base to move into additional productivity-related services. ...

Read the rest at Scott's Innovation Insights blog.

I received a thoughtful email from developer Stuart Henshall regarding this post on the potential for Twitter to come up with a business model. Stuart makes a great point:

Twitter is a pipe and we send signals down it. That means it’s not that different to the internet, just text-based. … The tweets that are valuable are the ones that escalate to conversations. An @ reply is also many times more valuable to the community than a DM. Both are an escalation. Both imply some form of relationship or exchange. Key word that! Exchange.

Stuart goes on to point out the many ways in which Twitter could benefit from selling services that allow users to escalate their conversations beyond basic tweets. Yet Twitter offers none of these "escalation" services – all of this development is taking place by outside developers like Stuart. The problem? Twitter has not offered these developers a way to make money from providing services that allow Twitter users to escalate conversations into exchanges, nor does Twitter offer any mechanism for developers pay for access to Twitter users. The end result is that developers can't make money from escalating exchanges and Twitter’s not making money they could make from providing the “pipeline” for the exchange.

Stuart again:

So Twitter if you want to make money you have to allow commerce to flow through your veins. You have to let me turn each Tweet into something more valuable. You have to keep it really simple and find a money model that doesn’t gouge my efforts.

Consider the Innosight construct for business model innovation. Key is the Customer Value Proposition – the way a company creates value for customers, or, in other words, helps customers get an important job done. “The best customer value proposition is an offering that gets that job – and only that job – done perfectly.”

It would seem that Twitter has an opportunity here to create value for the developers, who would then create value for the Twitter users. Yet according to Stuart, Twitter does not adequately engage its developer community and hasn’t optimized a value proposition for them, which would in turn help them solidify a value proposition for the user base. It is only when these customer value propositions are created and priced appropriately that the optimum value would be created for all stakeholders in this system – Twitter, the developers, and the Twitter users.

Harvard Business Publishing, in cooperation with Chief Learning Officer magazine, will present a free virtual seminar this Thursday, March 5, from 2 to 3 pm EST.featuring Scott Anthony speaking on Leading Innovation in the Great Disruption: Keeping Organizations Moving in a Downturn.

As Innoblog readers know, Scott is president of Innosight. He is also author of the forthcoming book The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times (Harvard Business Press, June 2009), in which he counsels that leaders need to be challenged to consider not only new products and services, but also novel ways to look at business processes, organizational structure, and innovative management – especially during an economic downturn. In this Thursday's free virtual seminar, Scott will share examples of how organizations can increase their chances for creating growth through the right tools and actions.

'Overconfidence, Bad Assumptions Can Cause Management Veterans to Underperform Less-Experienced Colleagues' read the subhead in today's Wall Street Journal. The story pointed out that experience can often blind us to new ideas and new solutions, make us unable to cope with new situations, and cause overconfidence.

Now where have we heard that before? Oh yes - in the theories of disruptive innovation. However, the Journal article isn't talking about a new start-up disrupting an incumbent company -- it's talking about newer, younger employees disrupting experienced managers. As Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, is quoted: "Companies overestimate the value of experience. Experience becomes a liability in times of change."

All is not lost for the experienced managers, however. Some companies are using computer simulations to train managers how to be more flexible. And although the article doesn't come right out and say it, the implication is that the recession will force that learning on those who have not already been laid off. One manager said, " 'I try to force myself to be nervous. Whenever I find myself falling back on what I did last time, or think I'm doing well, I try to unsettle myself.' " Reading the business news pretty much does that for me these days. It's good to know there's some value to that!