 |
Corporate
executives like to declare that the business of making money
is the business of business. "You want to know why most CFOs
wear pin striped suits?" knowingly asks Rick Knight, a former
Baxter Healthcare marketing director. "Because they look like
the lines on a ledger sheet."
But Andy Bolton of American National Can doesn't buy the argument
that "staying within the lines" is all "the suits that run
the store" want. He points to the number of new entrants in
the global market that do not shy away from aggressive, no-holds
barred tactics to pry consumers to their brands. "Competition,"
Bolton says, "forces you to not polish yesterday's successes
but to out-innovate your competition." That means, outthink
them.
Hint: Innovation is about thinking smart and acting smarter.
"If you don't have them, get them. If you do have them, rewrite
them, once a year," remarks Anthony Barrett, retired Amoco
vice president on corporate creativity and innovation initiatives.
"We're all in this together, which means creativity, and its
first cousin innovation, can't only happen in those departments
with that name. And like everything else, they need to evolve."
It's a "minds-on" experience in which everyone participates.
Enter the new millennium mantra: Innovate or disintegrate.
The question is, bow? What follows is a list of attitudes
and practices l have found most useful in the more than 100
"ideation" (or brainstorming) sessions l facilitate each year.
BIG
IDEA #1:
THINK SMART, ACT SMARTER
My colleague, Bryan Mattimore, author of 99% Inspiration
recently sat down with a group of insurance executives whose
responsibility it was to add customer focus to their claims
processing group. Their job was as important as it was daunting.
To a great degree the company was a profitable, well-managed
bastion of predictability. Ho-hum! They reasoned the management
of customer claims was a deliberate (a.k.a. "slow") process.
____Mattimore chose not to confront
the process. Instead he questioned the assumptions on which
the process evolved. He told them to "forget about" conventional
wisdom which had lead them to the notion "claims were bad"
and embrace its antithesis. TRANSLATION: make claims good.
____Think about it. What would
happen if your customers knew your company had the fastest,
most fair claim fulfillment policy in the industry, or that
your customer service representatives were compensated more
on their polite, efficient fulfillment of claims than their
sales records? Here's a hint: Customers would pound a path
to your door. And they did!
BIG
IDEA #2:
QUESTION
YOUR ASSUMPTIONS
It is ... I repeat ... it is arguably your greatest creative
challenge to relentlessly expose those sacred, DO NOT TOUCH
product, market and corporate assumptions, and purposefully
question them one-by-one. And while you are at it, don't take
anything on face value. Be unreasonable. Keeping repeating:
Nothing is sacred. Remember, sacred cows make great hamburgers!!!
____And go, get yourself fired.
Think about it: What could you do that would be so unexpectedly
unwise, so seemingly silly that you could literally get yourself
fired from your job? Consider Post-It Notes. Its creation
was a mistake, a failure. Nobody wanted it. Nobody even asked
for it.
____Imagine its inventor walking
into a product review committee meeting and getting glued
(pun intended) to the wall, "Nice job, Sticky, an adhesive
that doesn't bond to paper. What's next? Are we going to put
it on easel pads?"
Here's another consideration. Imagine a dozen Disney executives
armed with the latest data on "Marketing to Generation Xers'
walking into offices of Otis Elevator and asking (demanding
is more like it) for an elevator that descends at the rate
of a scream. "Okay Mr. Eisner, can l fill that pipe for you
again?"
____Is this another Mickey Mouse
idea? Think again. What Disney saw (crystal clear, as a matter
of fact) is that teenagers love to be scared. Really scared.
Scared out of their wits. What do you do with this knowledge?
You create the Tower of Terror, and profoundly scare the bee-Jesus
out of your teenage sons or daughters while your soon-to-be-teenage
children are on the other side of the park playing with Mickey
and Daffy. Magic? You bet it is. It's also very, very smart.
BIG
IDEA #3:
TURN YOUR WORST IDEA INTO
YOUR BEST IDEA
Frankly, this is perhaps the most profound, yet profoundly
simple, technique l have ever used. By design, it eliminates
performance anxiety. Imagine our new product review executive
again. "I'm sorry, Sticky, we were looking for something much
worse than that? You haven't disappointed us enough. Try again."
____l have long held the belief
that if an idea doesn't seem utterly ridiculous at first,
there's no hope for it. Translation: Give them a good W-H-A-C-K.
Search for the light through the cracks! Let it shine! Make
'em squirm! Success is not guaranteed. And that is exactly
the point. You have to take chances.
____Failure to take a chance
is your fastest ticket to staying right where you are. The
world's greatest inventors, most talented entrepreneurs, most
successful leaders were, at one time or another, the biggest
failures you ever met.
BIG
IDEA #4:
CREATE YOUR OWN LEONARDO
Do you know who was perhaps history's most spectacularly successful
failure? Let me give you some clues. Few of his paintings
were ever finished, at least to his satisfaction. His most
visionary inventions - airplanes, helicopter, cars, bicycles,
tanks, and submarines - were never built in his time. We can
only imagine how this self-taught genius leapfrogged the knowledge
of his time and saw into the distant future. His name: Leonardo
- not DiCaprio - but DaVinci.
____DaVinci's lesson is to find
the "sweet spot" between failure and success. Both extremes
are central to finding your own Leonardo.
____Reverse your logic. Take
the best of your worst idea and combine it with the worst
of your best idea. This is not a trivial point. It is at the
heart of innovation.
____Failure may not be something
you brag about to your friends or children but it's nothing
to fear. Embrace it! Use it fearlessly.
Failure. Safety. Combine the two. Failure and safety. Fail-safe.
l like that. Combine a bad idea with a good idea. They compliment
each other. Together they spell S-U-C-C-E-S-S.
BIG
IDEA #5:
CUSTOMERS
SEEK VALUE BEFORE THEY SEEK PRODUCTS OR SERVICE
Tony Winch, former creative director at Hill, Holiday in Boston,
got it right 20 years ago when he said, "Computers don't make
smart people smarter. They make dumb people faster." What
Tony didn't know (neither did anyone else) is the speed at
which information is absorbed is not proportional to its availability.
It's all around us in nanosecond time. E-mail, voice mail,
direct mail. Internets, extranets ... safety nets? (We need
one.)
____It's obvious - to me - as
we automated back office (spelled B-O-R-I-N-G) tasks, they
got faster, not better. Remember the "paperless office." Winch's
comment, "That'll happen when we have the paperless bathroom."
So what did we do? We took the same "make it faster" paradigm,
polished it, and brought it into the front office. Viva la
revolution! What were we thinking?
____Fast and smart are not inextricably
linked. Achieve one at the expense of the other and both fail.
SPLAT!
Today, the focus is value, as in better-run companies with
hordes of service-minded individuals - accountants, engineers,
planners and resource managers of all kinds -needing to provide
better value.
____Smart companies, the best
of the best passionately pursue one goal: providing value
to their customers. Let me repeat that: They provide value.
You've got to think SMART before you can provide VALUE.
____Think about what your customers
and clients value. People assess value after the time of purchase.
The smart money says if you understand what motivates your
customers (internal and external) before the time of purchase,
if you embrace their needs, if you articulate them, and if
you invest in "customer/client outcomes" (before your own!),
you can create products and services that will keep them coming
back in droves.
____My point (the only one worth
remembering) is unabashedly create ... create ... create customer
value. Or, drop your resume off in the mail today!!!
BIG
IDEA #6:
COPY
THE HABITS OF COMPANIES YOU ADMIRE AND FEAR
Virgin Atlantic, Ritz-Carlton, Saturn, Disney, Starbucks,
Wal-Mart, Nordstrom's, my paper delivery person (create you
own list) are "doing" things differently than their predecessors.
If stealing is the highest form of flattery, why not copy
their habits. See why they work. Feel how they work - feel
it in your guts.
____Stir the waters of convention
by putting into practice the "best practices" of your most
admired and feared competitors, companies and individuals.
Ask yourself: What would they do? How would they do it? What
would they say about your plans?
____Take our previously mentioned
insurance company. What would they do if Wal-Mart adopted
them? Perhaps they would revamp their sales and distribution
channels, slash their legions of agents and vend more products
through banks and brokerages. Perhaps they would eye creative
ways to buy insurance through television infomercials. Perhaps
they would steal a page from the books of mutual fund supermarkets.
Maybe, (now this is heresy) they'd even sell other companies
insurance products.
BIG
IDEA #7:
ENGAGE
ALL FIVE SENSES
Time and time again, l walk into an office building for a
"ideation" (A.K.A. brainstorming) sessions only to find hundreds
of ecru-colored (is ecru really a color?) cubicles, lined
up in graveyard rows, all looking, feeling and smelling alike.
It's part of the human condition to make do with what you've
got.
____Let's take dunking as an
example. You take something bad - like a stale cracker - and
dunk it into something not so bad - like a sweet glass of
milk. Eventually, by limiting your choices to stale crackers,
you think stale crackers are better than fresh ones. That's
because the mind adapts. The body then follows and the organization
sinks like bloated crumbs to the bottom of the cup.
____Shame on you. Wake up! Smell
the problem. Shamelessly use all your senses. "Improve or
modify your environment if you want people to be involved"
asserts creativity guru Mike Vance. "Create your own stage.
Theme your own space." Bring in stimulus - books, tapes, pictures,
gadgets, widgets. Create a monument to your imagination. Change
it every week.
____Step into the office of David
F. D'Alessandro, president of John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance
Company, and you'll find a red Fender guitar that Ron Wood
of the Rolling Stones once played, Mohammed Ali's satin boxing
shorts and a $22 check that Mae West signed. Is D'Alessandro
trying to make a point? You bet he is. Insurance companies
aren't the same anymore. For Hancock policy holders, the writing
is on the wall!!! "Symbols are ideas made visible," says Vance.
Make your ideas visible. Let them live out loud!!!
BIG
IDEA #8:
DISPLAY
YOUR THINKING
Add a whiteboard and a box of colored pens to every cubicle
in the building. Put an idea, opportunity or problem in the
center of the board. Tony Buzan calls this idea mindmapping.
____Add thoughts, words, colors
and symbols to the board every day. Have others add to it.
Make it fun. Collect it at the end of the week. Do it again
next week ... and the week after that ... and the week after
that.
____You can't think differently
unless you do things differently. And if thinking about things
differently is not accompanied by the act of doing things
differently, then the thought (and the message) is to do things
the same. And being the same is just about as exciting as
ecru.
Written
by Robert Taraschi
Reprinted with permission of Insight Magazine,
January 1999
|
