FinTech

Designing a Better Banking Experience

October 27, 2016 by JP Nicols

designing-a-better-banking-experience

This week at Money20/20 in Las Vegas I spent some time behind the scenes at Capital One to see how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience.

I sat down with Scott Zimmer, Capital One’s Global Head of Design, to focus on how design is taking on a growing role in banking. He describes himself as a “Disney-bred creative, someone who’s driven to create”. Not exactly a common bio quote for most bankers, but one that may grow more familiar as design takes an increasingly important role in the industry.

“There’s a pretty compelling story in banking, and the things we do for people matter to people on a human level,” says Zimmer, “and in the design community, that’s what designers were born to do.”

Listen to the interview here:

Design is about a lot more than making things look pretty. It’s about making things work better. Technology has been a democratizing force across so many industries, and banking is no exception. Customers have more choices than ever, and those choices now include products, services and experiences that are often far superior than the you’ll-take-what-we-make era that prevailed for so long.

I have heard a lot of bankers proclaim their desire to make their branches more like Apple stores, but for too many of them that desire begins and ends with the clean visual aesthetic. The effectiveness of the design of the Apple store that makes it so successful goes far deeper than that. Zimmer agrees, “Steve (Jobs) was famous for saying ‘design is really how something works’, and what’s interesting about the Apple store in all its starkness, is they simplified it, to make it work better.”

The business case for beautiful products and compelling customer experiences is a tough one for most boards and executives to get their hands around. I know this firsthand from my work helping some of them with their strategic planning, as they fret about making big bets that might not payoff. A good design process involves a ‘test and learn’ approach that is well known to any fintech entrepreneurs following lean startup principles. It’s an approach that banks should be using in more of their business decisions.

As Zimmer puts it: “We try to avoid failing at scale”

Scott Zimmer – Global Head of Design, Capital One

Las Vegas is an appropriate setting for using a poker analogy to describe the advantages of this approach (blackjack works too). Rather than pushing all of their chips to the center of the table and declaring “all in” as the first cards are dealt, the savvy player makes small bets and only increases them until the cards are in their favor.

“It’s the thing that has transitioned product development dramatically”, says Zimmer, “in days past you might have made two, three big bets a year, and now, any team that’s working in this collaborative, iterative fashion can be making sixty, seventy bets at one time, but with minimal investment.”

Zimmer and his team have brought this iterative test and learn approach inside the organization too. They’ve built user labs to test ideas with customers much earlier, and this gives them better insights into what’s working and what’s not much sooner. He contrasts that approach with the typical big meeting going over a PowerPoint presentation that someone has worked on internally for weeks. That approach can cause teams to be defensive about their hard work instead of working through the options more collaboratively with more early contact with customers.

The future of design is evolving beyond spaces, products and services. Zimmer also talked about the challenge of designing for voice with the Capital One skill for Amazon Echo, with a team focused on conversation design “obsessing around the humanity that has to come through in an interaction and what the word choices are”. That work is continuing with the release of an update to the skill called “How Much Did I Spend?” that was built with a natural language query, “as though you are talking with your money”.

Zimmer sees parallels between financial health and physical health, and he thinks software and good design can help us to set goals and achieve them. “The ability to leverage software’s capability to do that is this new era that’s upon us of creating new products and services. I think design plays a huge role, and there’s a bright future ahead.”

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Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com

Bankers Are From Mars…

September 6, 2016 by JP Nicols

It is not news here, or anywhere else, but bankers and fintech entrepreneurs are from different planets.

They are just wired differently.

Just a few years ago, all of the fintech companies wanted to put traditional financial institutions out of business. Disrupt the industry!, they said.

Despite the fact that we still have over 6,000 banks in the U.S. alone, plus a similar number of credit unions, the industry has been disrupted. But acquiring new customers at scale is hard for fintechs, and now the talk is about the value of fintechs partnering with financial institutions, instead of trying to put them out of business.

That’s not necessarily any easier, it’s just a different kind of hard.

Many have focused on technology integration, getting new apps and systems to work with banks’ aging technology infrastructure. The technology-driven nature of many new innovations makes this necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Successful partnerships between fintech companies and financial institutions need go beyond technology integration to address these three elements:

The Three C’s of Bank/Fintech Partnerships

Cost

Building out an internal innovation team is not cheap. That’s why so few FIs have them, and why an increasing number are adding what I call “And-I’s“– employees with “and Innovation” tacked on as an additional responsibility to their existing job titles.

Banks and credit unions are recognizing the increasingly urgent need to update their products and processes to stay relevant with their customers and members, but searching for, evaluating, and vetting potential partners takes a lot of time and money too.

Often overlooked though is the cost of an inefficient innovation process carried out part-time by inexperienced people. Common traps include devoting too much time to planning and defining user requirements, and not enough time actually testing new ideas; and pursuing a random collection of “interesting” projects that do not tie into the organization’s strategic priorities.

Culture

Most senior executives at financial institutions have spent at least part of their career in a lending role, where they needed to make the right decision just about 99% of the time over the long run.

Entrepreneurs experiment with new ideas with an aim to fail fast and fail cheaply, because each iteration and pivot gets them closer to the right answer in the market. The venture capitalists investing in these companies know that close to half (or more) of them will fail.

Most banks and credit unions are not going to be leaders in product innovation, so partnering with more nimble fintech companies makes sense.

But partnering takes more than simple introductions between two different parties with vastly different approaches.

Successful partnership requires FIs to address their own culture to create space inside their own organizations that embraces change. Fintech companies need to understand the conservative nature of their potential FI customers and adjust their sales and development processes accordingly.

Compliance

Fintech companies also need to understand that the ‘move fast and break things‘ ethos of Silicon Valley does not work inside a highly regulated environment.

Every new solution, no matter how cool the technology, has to be compliant if it is going to be used by a traditional financial institution. There is simply no other option.

At the same time, FIs need to recognize that regulation is always going to lag innovation, and they must take a more proactive approach in trying new ideas. The most innovative banks, credit unions, and fintech companies all have proactive relationships with regulators to try new ideas that will still be compliant.

Choosing to sit on the sidelines out of fear is not an effective risk management strategy.

Improving Interplanetary Relations

Yes, bankers and fintech entrpreneurs are from different planets, and I’ll leave it up to you to decide which ones have more inhabitants on Uranus.

It’s time to improve interplanetary relations. Bankers learn about the 5 C’s of credit in their first days of training, maybe it’s time they learned the 3 C’s of Fintech Partnerships.

Rise of the AND-I’s

July 19, 2016 by JP Nicols

AND-I's

Make way for the And-I’s.

And-I’s are my name for a new phenomenon I’ve noticed in financial services job titles. “And-I” stands for the words “and innovation” tacked on to the end of existing job titles. Your “Head of Digital Banking” is now “Head of Digital Banking and Innovation“.

Boom. You’re now in the innovation game. No one can accuse you of anything otherwise. It’s right there on the business card. The only thing we love more than acronyms in this business is that kind of git er done, check-the-box process efficiency.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every bank needs a full time Chief Innovation Officer (and no one needs the trousered acronym CHINO that comes with it, but I guess we have to differentiate from our Chief Information Officers and Chief Investment Officers somehow). It’s great to recognize the need to innovate and to give someone the responsibility for making it happen. It’s just that simply tacking it on without a means of support usually does not have much of an impact.

The 3 most common types of And-I’s:

Head of Digital Banking and Innovation

The head of digital banking (who was called the head of online banking just a few years ago) has already been put in charge of digitizing an analog business model, so adding innovation to their job title seems natural.

PRO: The service delivery model of financial services has been on the front lines of the disruption wars, so an effective head of digital banking probably has a pretty good handle on understanding how customers’ needs and preferences are changing.
CON: Often times, the head of digital banking’s domain is limited to consumer retail banking, and usually just the front end of customer interactions, at that. Opportunities may be missed to create better outcomes in other business lines, drive efficiencies from back office processes, or build a sustainable culture of innovation.

Head of Technology and Innovation

The only thing worse than the incorrect and incomplete conflation that ‘innovation = technology’ is its even more misguided cousin, ‘technology = innovation’, even though the two do often co-exist as a matter of necessity.

PRO: A senior technologist who understands how to make things work inside the complex machinery of a bank is definitely a great person to have thinking about implementing better ways of doing things.
CON: Senior technology leaders are under a lot of (understandable) pressure to keep all of the systems running smoothly and reliably, and to continually seek out and destroy any potential security threats. It’s hard to ask that person to spend a lot of time building and testing new concepts with regularity.

Executive Vice President of X and Innovation

If a board and/or CEO have decided that innovation is indeed an act of leadership, they may want to vest a member of the senior leadership team with newly minted innovation powers.

PRO: Any innovation efforts without a serious commitment from senior leadership is doomed to fail. Having someone with the ear of the CEO and board and a direct say in the budgeting process is a good thing.
CON: Even if the appointed senior officer isn’t the type who needs their granddaughter to help them figure out all of those apps on their new iPhone, all of that experience of the grizzled veterans can actually work against them in the innovation process. The pursuit of perfecting best practices can get in the way of discovering the next practices.

The Case for And-I’s

Hiring people with a full time focus on innovation is an expense that most banks cannot afford. The cost of a full-time, senior level Chief Innovation Officer, plus a team of supporting researchers, designers, and technologists can easily be a million dollar a year investment (or more). Plus hoodies. You can’t forget hoodies.
Infusing an imperative to innovate into everyone’s psyche and their job description is a hallmark of the most innovative companies in the world. It shouldn’t be reserved for an anointed few.
Far-flung R&D labs and skunkworks activities disconnected from the core business and its practitioners can be a rabbit hole of unproductive navel-gazing.

How to Make it Work

Use all of these people as a team, plus a few others (just none of these people), to help you build out your innovation team. But put someone in charge. Even if it’s part time, someone has to be the leader of your innovation efforts.
Establish innovation goals. What are the business goals you are trying to achieve? (See: 5 New Years Resolutions for Bank Innovators.)
Create a separate innovation governance and funding structure. Innovation projects can’t be managed like typical BAU (business as usual) projects.
Have the appropriate time horizons. Your typical ROI models, J-curves and break-even analysis don’t always work well when you’re experimenting with something new. (See: 5 Ways to Kill Your Innovation Initiative)
Don’t go it alone. Get some help setting up and running your innovation program, and don’t build everything in-house. Nimble fintech companies can build and release a whole new app in the time it can take for you to assemble the committee members required to sign off its release.

Support your local And-I’s. They need all the help they can get.

The Fintech Grief Cycle for Bankers

July 12, 2016 by JP Nicols

Grief Cycle 1000x571

As a few fintech companies like Lending Club, Betterment, and others have run into some rough patches lately, it has been interesting to note some of the reactions, especially amongst bankers (that’s just shorthand, I’m looking at you too, credit union leaders).

Some have taken this news as indication that fintech was just a bubble after all, and it is finally popping.

I think a more pragmatic view is that fintech (and “innovation” in general) has simply moved down from the dizzying heights of the hype curve. That’s a good thing. It’s the natural progression of maturing technologies and sectors. It means that fintech is moving from wild, pie-in-the-sky fantasizing to actual application with customers. Real companies are learning real lessons in the marketplace.

Some will make it and some will not, but technology– financial, and otherwise– will continue to be an increasingly important part of our financial lives. As fintech companies navigate the hype curve, bankers seem to be navigating their own grief cycle about fintech and the need to innovate:

Grief Cycle

The Bankers Fintech Grief Cycle

The first stage is Denial. It is hard to comprehend that the things that have brought us so much success are beginning to be less effective. Denial is a powerful reality-distorting mechanism that can persist for a very long time (and it has). We’ve been doing it this way for years. We’re at the top of our peer group. Financial services are different than just selling books or videos. The industry is too big, too established, too well regulated, too politically protected, too important to the economy, too whatever, to be disrupted. We’re in financial services, and we have technology like a core processing system, some ATMs and a website– we already are a fintech company!

The second stage is Anger. Frustration sets in when reality begins to bevoke harder to deny: This is unfair competition! When are the regulators going to take a look at these companies and smack them back to the real world? I could do more if only I was allowed!

The third stage is Bargaining. Compromise seems like an easier path than change, and we become willing to make trade-offs now that we should’ve made earlier: I know we’re going to have to do something different someday for those millennial (never mind that the oldest of this demographic group are already in their mid-30’s), but we can just stay the course until I retire. Maybe if we just clean up our website a little and update our mobile app (or just come out with one), we’ll be OK. What if we just add the word “innovation” to a couple of our people’s job titles?

The fourth stage is Depression. As the new reality persists in the face of all of the other coping mechanisms, despair sets in. Why bother? The industry just isn’t the same anymore. Maybe it’s just time to sell.

The final stage is Acceptance. The inevitable is finally accepted, and for some, even embraced. You know, beyond the threats, there are actually quite a few opportunities in all of this. Some of these companies have some pretty good ideas, maybe we should work with them instead of fighting against them. This could actually be good for us!

Fintech is the new normal, and the bankers who move from Denial to Acceptance faster and step up their own innovation efforts will reap the benefits in this new era of digital disruption.

Your Fast Follower Strategy is Riskier Than You Realize

February 8, 2016 by JP Nicols

In my last post Leaders, Learners and Laggards I talked of banking leaders who describe their approach to innovation as being a “fast follower, and how my typical retort is that they are half-right— most of them are definitely followers, but there usually isn’t anything fast about their approach.

This has spurred some great discussions on social media, including some comments from people who defended the fast follower approach as a sound strategy. So it appears some clarification is needed on my overarching point.

A fast follower approach in terms of making big public bets on new products is absolutely a proven strategy.

A Great Strategy When Well Executed

Apple is often cited as one of the world’s most innovative companies, but they are not known as a bleeding edge pioneer of new technologies. The Apple computer was not the first personal computer, the iPod was not the first digital music player, and the iPad was not the first tablet computer.The iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it controls 92% of the profits of the global smartphone market.

The Apple Watch is not the first smart watch either, as any Android fan will be quick to point out, but within the first quarter of its release it reduced Samsung’s global market share of smart watches from 74% down to 8%.

Within the first quarter of its release.

Within one year Apple became the second largest watch manufacturer in the world. (For way more detail on how Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook are taking over the world, watch Scott Galloway’s breathless take from the DLD conference.)

The ‘first mover advantage’ theory established in the early days of high tech in the 1980s was pretty much dismantled by Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis at USC in 1993. They found the almost half of product pioneers failed, and even those that didn’t fail had lower average market share than later market entrants. Countless stories abound today of product pioneers being quickly supplanted by upstart rivals.

The Fast Follower strategy is viable, but the operative word is fast. At least in relative terms.

And that is what is missing from most financial institutions, who measure speed by the decade.

Where’s My Jetpack?

As a child of the 1960s, I was promised a jetpack and vacations on the moon. Those were scaled back to a hoverboard and a time-traveling DeLorean in the 1980s, but the future destination of Back to the Future has come and gone with no such improvements in my daily life.

But I do carry around in my pocket every day a the equivalent of a 1970s supercomputer, I regularly video chat with friends and colleagues all over the world on it, and I can now summon my self-driving car from my watch.

The Gartner Hype Curve is a useful construct to visualize how exaggerated expectations come down to earth in the short run. Some ideas die off, and others are iterated upon and adapted, and their lifespan is extended. Sometimes the passage of time can also help the market catch up to those that were initially ahead of their time.

Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, they catch on (or not) in a society of humans through a fairly predictable pattern that Everett Rogers called the Diffusion of Innovation curve.

This bell curve shows how early or late segments of the population adopt new ideas. Innovators flock to new ideas, followed quickly by the Early Adopters. Over time some of these ideas are picked up by the Early Majority, followed by the Late Majority, and eventually even the Laggards.

Trailblazers, Traditionalists, and the Chasm Between

In 1993 Geoffrey Moore introduced to Rogers’ curve the concept of the ‘chasm’ that exists between the Innovators and Early Adopters and the rest of the segments on the curve. Left of the chasm, people live to explore new ideas, and they are willing to take a reasonable amount of risk in order to reap the benefits of being early. They are the first buyers of new products, the ones waiting in line overnight for the pride of owning version 1.0.

Right of the chasm is where phrases like “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” come from. They want to take zero to very little risk, and they are willing to accept a relatively limited upside in exchange for this reduced risk.

These two broad groups— the left and right sides of the chasm— align closely with the groups I have highlighted before as Trailblazers and Traditionalists. Trailblazers want to explore the unknown and establish next practices, while Traditionalists want to master the known knowns and enforce best practices.

The picture becomes even clearer when you plot the two curves together. Ideas must cross the chasm to have commercial viability.

This highlights the challenges of truly being fast when you’re a follower.

The kinds of companies full of Trailblazers that come up with groundbreaking new ideas often do not have the very different skills of scaling up those ideas for mass market adoption. This goes a long way to explain why the first movers often fail to maintain commanding market share over the long run.

Likewise, mature organizations in mature industries full of Traditionalist employees, like, say, financial institutions, often don’t have the skills (or inclination) to develop and incubate new ideas. Hence the launch of new bank innovation teams and labs in recent years.

The Key to the Fast Follower Approach

The danger is in waiting too long so that the new idea— once groundbreaking and with the potential to set your institution apart from the pack— is now mainstream.

Before long, mainstream becomes table stakes. The longer you wait, the wider becomes the customer experience gap— the gap between what your customers have come to expect as a minimum, and what you actually provide them.

As Innosight’s Scott Anthony puts it in Harvard Business Review:

“But make sure that when you say that you want to be a fast follower you aren’t really saying, “Can’t I just go back to running my core business?” Too often people find that when it is a strategic imperative to respond, it is too late.”

So a fast follower approach can be a wise one, providing you’re actually fast enough to capture an idea on the upside of a growth curve.

Otherwise, it’s a riskier strategy than you realize.

Leaders, Learners and Laggards

January 27, 2016 by JP Nicols

I talk with a lot of banking leaders who describe their approach to innovation as being a “fast follower. My typical retort is that they are half-right— most of them are definitely followers, but there usually isn’t anything fast about their approach.

Pioneers are the ones who get hit with arrows, and it is only natural that bank executives who are (quite appropriately) concerned with avoiding and managing risk as a large part of their job duties don’t want to be out on the bleeding edge of innovation.

New ideas are unproven, while existing products generate today’s earnings from existing customers. The idea of diverting precious limited resources and managerial attention toward unproven ideas makes prudent managers understandably uneasy.

The risk of not taking risk

Today more than ever, though, leaders should also be concerned about the risk of not taking risk.

The risk of not taking risk is much harder to identify and manage. It’s the risk of not investing in new ideas that can keep the company competitive, or even leapfrog the competition or create new products or markets.

While the payoffs can be huge, this is not a risk-free investment.

Not all new ideas will pay off. Some will be be total failures, and this is a hard reality to accept for managers who spent their careers making safer bets and avoiding losses. That’s the core operating model of banking, where nearly 99% of loans made are expected to be repaid in full with no loss.

A Fixed Income Investment Approach

Traditional retail and commercial bankers are not venture capitalists, where five total losses and four break-evens in ten investments is simply the price to be paid for a shot at the one homerun that pays off all of the other bets and then some.

Bankers are more like fixed income investors, where the best outcome is a return of principal, plus a single digit interest rate spread on the principal.

The formula for winning that game is taking a large amount of relatively safe bets, with a pretty high confidence level that the risks involved are well known and quantified.

And so has gone the approach of most bankers, not only for their loan portfolios, but by extension their very business models, for literally centuries. This approach works well when the competitors are all similar and all are playing the same game by the same rules.

However, when new disruptive forces shake up the status quo, and new competitors this approach carries hidden risks.

Like the risk of not taking risk.

Enter the S Curve

Most businesses have S Curve growth cycles— a flattish early period during the business’s launch and early adoption, followed by a period of steeper growth which eventually declines as the business matures. If new products, customers or markets cannot be harnessed to jump to the next S curve, the business will die out.

How do they ‘jump the S-Curve’, as Paul Nunes and Tim Breen put it in their book Jumping the S-Curve: How to Beat the Growth Cycle, Get on Top, and Stay There? I think this is an especially troubling question for banking leaders.

This is a new phenomenon for banks, whose fixed-income investment approach to management has led to a more stable (and lower) growth trajectory, once adjusted for economic and interest rate cyclicality. In other words, what has historically caused variability in bank earnings has been changes in interest rates and economic conditions (and therefore loan losses and reserves), rather than major competitive shifts in the marketplace.

Until now.

The rise of new competitors and new business models in financial services are forcing bankers to confront the S curve for the first time. Companies who thrive in dynamic industries are used to using innovation to effectively transition from one curve from the next.

Innovation is all about creating new options, and this is becoming increasingly important in banking.

Leaders, Learners and Laggards in Innovation

I have talked and written before about Leaders, Learners and Laggards in innovation.

There are just a handful of banks we could consider leaders in innovation. Leaders deeply understand the need to innovate and they prioritize ongoing innovation as a business activity just as necessary as compliance and asset-liability management. Senior leadership, from the CEO on down, require and reward innovative thinking, and they set a growth agenda for the company that puts emphasis on generating new sources of revenue. They try to disrupt themselves before someone else does it for them.

But Leaders don’t just rely on top-down strategies to improve and expand their business, they also encourage and invest in bottom-up innovation. Likewise, they supplement their internal innovation efforts with external involvement and investments in incubators, accelerators, hackathons, venture capital, and lots of other ways to engage in and help develop the broader ecosystem. Innovation is a 360 degree activity for Leaders.

A slightly larger, and growing, group of Learners have just begun to realize the need to innovate. Learners may even have pockets of innovation within the company currently, but they haven’t really embraced innovation as a business necessity. Early Learners may be infected by FOMO, the fear of missing out that arises from seeing others’ success, and they may be tempted to make token gestures to drive appearances rather than actual results.

Early Learners may also think that merely adding the word ‘innovation’ to someone’s job description is a major accomplishment. If they are truly committed to learning though, they will discover that ongoing attention and support is needed to get business results from innovation. Later stage Learners start to realize the benefits of their efforts, and start to make additional investments to accelerate results.

Unfortunately, there is still a long tail of Laggards, the institutions that still don’t even know why they should innovate. Laggards still have tunnel vision on the way things used to be, so they can’t even see the changes happening all around them. They are convinced that success is just about perfecting their existing products and services, and they very narrowly define their competition as just their peer group of similar institutions.

Moment of Truth for Laggards

As the release of loan-loss reserves is no longer fueling bank earnings, and interest rates and loan spreads remain low, banks must innovate new revenue sources and new ways of delivering customer value. The gap between the laggards and the learners and leaders will only expand, and many laggards will be acquired by faster moving institutions.

Many laggards are simply unable to sense the shifting landscape, while others have willfully disdained what they perceived to be the riskier path of trying new things. The true cost of their inaction and ignorance will be borne out in the coming months and years.

As Warren Buffett says, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked”.

The Four People Who Ruin Innovation

January 19, 2016 by JP Nicols

Innovation is fun. Except when these types are around. How many do you know?

The Hypemaster

The Hypemaster is, well… a master of hype. Everything they’re working on is amazing, and you must absolutely drop everything and check it out. Right now! “Hey we’re getting ready to launch Hypemaster.io, check it out and let me know what you think!”

I love meeting new people and seeing new ideas, even though I usually don’t have a lot of free time to look at a stranger’s project and give them a bunch of free advice. But I try to be helpful, so sometimes I do it, if the approach is right.

The Hypemaster doesn’t respect your time or your own commitments, and they really don’t even want your advice anyway. They just want you to promote their link on social media, or worse, ruin your friendships by introducing them to other people. Their project descriptions are stuffed with enough buzzwords to make Dilbert’s pointy headed boss jealous. “We are radically disrupting this vertical with a full stack digitized approach to the blockchain, with fully-configurable architecture and a lightweight contextualized interface”.

Natural Habitat: Startup Conferences, Conference Apps, Twitter DMs, LinkedIn InMails

The Innovation Snob

Nothing is cutting edge enough for the innovation snob. 3D Virtual Reality? Yawn. It’s been done already. Self-driving car? The Innovation Snobs claims to have been into them 10 years ago, but it’s too mainstream for them to bother with now. They think Elon Musk’s rockets are too similar to what NASA did in the 1960’s.

Continuous improvement and incremental innovation are an important part of keeping a company growing, but they are nothing but eye-rolling material for the Innovation Snob. Solving real problems that paying customers care about is the true heart of innovation, but the Innovation Snob only wants to see something they have never seen before. Preferably on a touchable hologram emanating from a smartphone that hasn’t been released yet.

They also think they are the only ones entitled to an opinion. Everyone else is a pundit, armchair quarterback or wannabe, they’re the real deal, damn it.

Natural Habitat: The Bar after the Conference, Finovate Twitter Feed, Facebook Comments.

The Disruption Denier

The Disruption Denier is the 180-degree polar opposite of the Hypemaster. NOTHING is impressive or impactful to them. All of the good ideas are already taken. Anyone with a new idea is simply a charlatan trying to separate you from your hard-earned money. They’ve been there, done it, got the T-shirt, and knew better the whole time. They also know far better than than you now that your new idea will never work. They’ve tried it before. Didn’t work then, won’t work now.

Disruption Deniers think they alone have figured out how the world really works, and that the current state of affairs is permanent and unchangeable. Worse, they sometimes are even convinced that some previous era was actually the ideal situation, and that most progress made since then is regrettable.

Sometimes this perspective comes from a comfortable perch built from doing something that did indeed work just fine in the past. Usually though, it really just comes from a dark and bitter place where they just don’t want to accept their own failures, so it makes them feel better to lash out at others, usually through drive-by assaults in the comments section.

Natural Habitat: Mid-Level Management, Golf Courses, LinkedIn Group Comments on Others’ Posts

The Chameleon

This person can be hard to spot. They might seem at first to be a Hypemaster, singing the praises of the hottest piece of technology, especially if it isn’t exactly brand new. At other times, they may appear to be a Disruption Denier, clucking at some previous market darling’s fall from grace. They gyrate wildly from pro to con, and from fanatic to critic.

They were the first to tell you how excited they were about the Apple watch when it was announced; but now that their friend is less than enamored, they tell everyone how much it sucks. All through secondhand knowledge, because they won’t buy their own until Version 5 comes out.

The chameleon has an incredible ability to blend in to its immediate surroundings; sensing the environment around him and adapting to it quickly and without notice. Apparently the price for this superpower is a lack of original thought and reasoning ability. They do, however, possess 20/20 hindsight.

Natural Habitat: Company Lunchrooms, Cable News, Facebook, Twitter (main feed)

Everyone around you is either helping you get to where you are trying to go, or they are not. These people definitely are not. You can’t always pick your boss, your coworkers, or a lot of the other people you come across daily, but your innovation efforts will improve if you get rid of these people.

And you’ll have a lot more fun.