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7/1/2010
Lazy
Stephen Burt is a poet who has a great line about how poets ?accept on purpose what they have created by accident?. It makes me wonder how many perfect ideas, perfect new products, new names, new positions I use as touchstones of excellence ? all creative ideas academics take apart, analyze, diagram and reassemble ? were shot gunned into existence.
The business proposition for creativity and innovation that no one in business likes is this: excellence is not a common activity. It is, by definition, a rare activity. Rare activities that are successful are done by rare individuals. Creativity is an embrace of change. Change is an elite activity, and those who say different, who claim to heed the wishes of the common person out of professional duty, are, to my mind, lazy.
Lazy bows to the convenience of see-Jane-run-it-is-red-it-is-for-us simple-mindedness because, by gosh, that?s how you make money. You productize everything and besides, that?s all clients want from their innovation processes ? something that is fast, easy and never risks too much.
Lazy will never come clean and tell you that not all creative people are created equal and that creativity is an acquire activity, that the pleasure of doing it comes from years of smaller, slow to learn skills. Lazy will never insist that you never stop creating, that you read a lot from a wide variety of sources, old and new, and try to keep them in your head to help train and trust your thoughts. And lazy will certainly never stress that you need to love creativity and innovation?s artificial and formal aspects.
It?s silly to think that business organizations don?t have a taste for this. Business people have an odd idea of who a creative person is. Accessibility to an idea is far more complex, clients far wiser, than current innovation processes are willing to accept. Clients who have created worth for certain key creative people did so because of the value created by their ideas, and not just because of the simplicity (and repeatability) of their innovation processes.
Anyone can be lazy. Faced with creative people who have taken great pains, some would rather not take the time or the trouble. They don?t have to, of course. And its better they don?t. But let?s not let the many who don?t sell short the many that do.
3/9/2010
Go Fly A Kite
When you talk to innovation people in business, you?ll hear quite a bit about creativity, ideation, brainstorming, focus groups, discovery, action and delivery. Sometimes, you?ll hear about relevancy and difference. Sometimes you won?t.
What will probably come to mind when someone tells you about these things is what usually comes to mind: a group of people sitting in room with lots of paper on the walls, trying to all talk at once, or not at all and one person, probably the person who called the meeting, eventually calling it quits and going off and writing a report telling everybody what they just said and most likely, telling them what everybody is going to do next, like it or not.
Or, maybe there?s a image of someone slightly off center, a little temperamental, vaguely unkempt?maybe even a little strange sitting in the back of a dark focus group room writing notes in a black pad, who leaves without saying much and then writes a report telling everybody what they just heard and what they could do next, if they have the time and the will to do it, which of course, they don?t because they have to go off to the next innovation session.
It?s perfect corporate citizen?s grind.
Well, as they say, that?s innovation. At least the kind most people are familiar with.
But there?s another way to bring purpose into your corporate innovation business and it has little to do with meetings and strategic plans and new normal innovation activities. It has to do with being grounded and knowing where your feet are planted.
This idea originated with someone else, although like the speaker, I too have been married for 33 years and have taught actors to act and worked in movies and on stage. The idea came from this year?s Academy Award winner, Jeff Bridges.
Bridges tells a story about running into Francis Ford Coppola and asking him, 'What you been doing?' He said, 'Just gave a class to a bunch of young actors.' I said, 'What did you teach them?' and he says, 'I taught them the main thing, the most important thing you should do as a young actor: Get married. Think about it?all movies, everything, is about love and having a family. Then you have a purpose for making the money and doing the things you do. It gives you a grounding, to go off and do your stuff. The kite has a string. You go way out there, but you've got this thing grounding you.'
Innovative people need to be grounded too. There?s good reason for this. Innovative people are not only different in the way they view the world they are different from each other in the processes they use to think through a problem. For example, corporate innovators are best able to understand ideas in context ? how they might fit inside a corporate portfolio or in popular culture. They are politically sensitive and politically aware.
Innovation problem solvers are less inclined to consider the long-term effects or appropriateness of an idea. ?You asked me to solve a problem didn?t you??
There are the non-linear innovation thinkers ? loosely put together, random, abstract thinkers. They are capable of brilliance but they need good and patient editors. And then there are the social innovation misfits, so wrapped up in their own models that they forget to eat, sometimes they forget to sleep.
For the most part, except for the first group, these innovative thinkers are not welcome in a corporate environment. Sometimes it?s because their personalities are too difficult to manage. Sometimes their lifestyle is too hard to manage: try to get an artist to check email. But more often, it?s because the more often need inside a corporation is for managerial talent and executional skill.
So the value of most innovative people is lost because no one has found a way to adequately ground the activities of innovative people outside the organization with the needs inside the business: being patient editors, good directors and providing the kind of support innovative people need to deliver their best thinking.
If you can manage this, and this is what Milestone Ideas can do, then you get what you know good innovation people and process is capable of without all the disruption. It?s all of the good and none of the bad.
And the innovation ideas, well, like they say, it?s grounded.
2/3/2010
Anchors Away
Oscar Wilde famously observed, ?People know the price of everything and the value of nothing.?
Now, we have proof.
What we're willing to pay reveals much about the chaos inside our skulls. We think we know the value of the things we buy, but in fact we have little idea, and no clue how much we're being exploited. William Poundstone explains all this in his book, Priceless "the numbers that make our world go around are not so solid, immutable and logically grounded as they appear. In the new psychology of price, values are slippery and contingent, as fluid as the reflections in a fun-house mirror.?
This new reality is based on the work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, both from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Kahneman won the Noble Prize in economics in 2002 for work illuminating the way certain patterns of thinking cause irrational decisions in the marketplace; Tversky would have shared the prize if he did not die in 1996. ?Availability? means the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind. Doctors, for example, who see one kind of case, say, pneumonia in the winter among a group of patients, may, and likely will, make a similar diagnosis of a patient who presents similar symptoms. Such familiarity points thinking in one way and not another.
This might also be called, ?distorted pattern recognition,? caused by not integrating all the key information and excluding contradictory data. Such cognitive picking is termed ?confirmation bias.? This fallacy, confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information, follows what Tversky and Kahneman referred to as ?anchoring.? Anchoring is a shortcut in thinking where a person doesn?t consider multiple possibilities but quickly and firmly latches on to a single one, sure that the anchor is thrown down right where it needs to be. You look at a price on a product, for example, and your mind plays a trick on you ? confirmation bias ? because you see only the features, functions and benefits you expect to see and neglect those that should tell you this product is not as valuable, and not worth the same price. Your skewed reading ?confirms? your mistaken assumption that you have a ?good deal? in your hands. Your affective error resembles confirmation bias in selectively surveying the data. The former is driven by a wish for a certain outcome, the latter driven by the expectation that your initial decision was correct, even if it was ultimately not good for you. This can have disasterous consequences if you?re a patient of a doctor who has anchored on the wrong data; and can cost you a ton of money if you don?t realize how retailers use the same tactic to engage you in pricing tricks.
Here?s how: an extremely high-priced item is offered at such a high price that it makes other high-priced items look like bargains. Ralph Lauren, for example, offers an alligator bag for $16,995 that makes its $2,595 bag, made of mere calfskin, seem a steal. Williams Sonoma didn't sell many of its $279 bread makers until it introduced a $429 model. Sales of the "cheaper" bread maker doubled.
While all of this may sound obvious and old-hat -- because it is -- it raises the question of "why age-old pricing tricks work long after we should have wised up." The reason, according to William, is that the brain is wired to make quick decisions and therefore "constructs desires and beliefs on the fly," leaving us vulnerable to trickery. The solution, he advises, is simply to "stop and think of all the reasons that the proffered price might be unreasonable." To prove his point, the book's cover illustration features a fake price tag of $599.99 ... marked down to just $26.99.
12/29/2009
2K10
In 1962, then President John F. Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
And then, speaking on a similar subject in 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King uttered, ?True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.?
With this holiday season ending in a few days and giving way to our next legal holiday, Martin Luther King?s birthday, I?m thinking about Dr. King today, and his shared vision of one America, and a dreary story I read this morning about a young man who jumped to his death.
The news version of the young man?s story was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a young romance gone badly. I think part of it was something else, something no real news story could cover.
The more I thought on Dr. King?s message and this young man?s story, the more I kept sensing something about America that?s incredibly sad this year. Like most incredibly sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: in shopping malls and other public places, especially at night, when all the piped in music and planned activities and gaiety-noise cease ? despair prevails. The word is extremely overused and banalified, but the word, despair is a serious word. For me it denotes a simple admixture ? a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of our own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It may be close to what people call dread or angst. But it?s not quite these things. It?s more like wanting to escape in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware of how small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It wants to jump off anything.
I don?t think it?s an accident that many people who are near death, die this time of the year. I don?t mean just the decrepitly old, but I mean those for whom mortality is not an abstraction.
Here?s another thing. The holidays are supposed to be a respite from unpleasantness and since consciousness of death is unpleasant, we hear very little about despair this time of the year.
One reason, I think is our very skillfully enabled constructions of various fantasies of triumph are failing. Our way to ?triumph? in the past has been by the rigors of immersion-in-the moment, of hard-work, of self-improvement, or with our culture?s amphetaminic upkeep of institutional, and then personal values, which could always be translated into two words, ?more, more? and is an unsubtle analogue to personal titivation: diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery and the institutional narratives of doing more with less in order to sustain the values of shareholders, which we all value: money.
There were other ways out too. Not titivation but titillation. Not hard work but hard play. And so, when our personal lives were burdened at the holidays, the antidote was ever-increasing levels of activity: parties, festivities, gaiety and song; the adrenaline, the excitement, the stimulation. The hard-play option promised not transcendence of despair but the drowning it out. ?Share the laughter with family and friends,? and after five minutes of that, ?What?s next?? and then everyone agrees, ?Let?s do it all.?
Most of those fantasies are gone this year. They?re just not working the same way anymore. Gone too is the extremely powerful and ingenious advertising that locked us into this kind of rectus of pleasure. And what is left in its place? Despair.
If this hypothesis is even possibly true, how can our past experience inform us, help us what to do next?
One old idea that might be able to spur a new approach is sharing.
It?s no coincidence that over the last ten years, as corporate and government leaders forwarded for our embrace simplicity as a shared mantra, those same leaders and institutions were embracing and sanctioning an increasing array of complex, confounding and sometimes, downright delusional financial investment models like credit default swaps, or collateralized debt obligations.
These models and many more like them were a virus that entered a system and satisfied an epidemic of greed that pitted the powerful, not so much against the weak, but against the less informed. The virus is an inordinate fixation of our leaders ? government and corporate ? on power and authority at any cost. The autopsy points to a lack of anything organic. And the cure is a reaffirmation of the importance of work in our lives, which essentially is the yeast that makes the flour happier lives rise.
To see just how complimentary and reciprocal environments can collude with one another, one needs to look no further than the distribution of N1H1 vaccines to the employees of Goldman Sacks - the same people who, I might add, after creating those aforementioned investment models, bet against the institutions and people they sold them to, pocketing billions of dollars in the process - and before the truly needy, truly vulnerable people suffering from AIDS in New York City got their inoculations.
To remedy this we need to see the re-emergence of meaningful sharing in our country because if we don?t, everything else that is great about us will start to smell funny.
My hypothesis is this: Sharing creates growth. It creates opportunity that leads to happiness that empowers people to want to buy brands and that is just as important for people as it is for business.
Happy people are passionate people. They care about brands because brands care about them. If you want to know how something will make us feel in the future, you must consider the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present. If you want to change the future; change the present.
Work matters. We need to hear from our leaders how work matters to the people doing the work. How work creates meaning and how providing road maps that enable people to lead happier lives, not create meaning for them, will define what it means to be a citizen.
We need business and government leaders who care about what we actually do, not just what we think. We need to know that our leaders know the difference between what actually works and what is being communicated by one-way phrases like shareholder values. We need to know that those who lead us are listening and are willing to touch us in our real lives not just on television or in speeches.
We need people to inspire us because if you can?t inspire us, you can?t lead us. And finally, we need leaders who know how to be with us because they share our common humanity and dignity.
Good luck in 2K10.
11/1/2009
It Is What It Is
In the middle of a client teleconferencing call with a product line marketing team from an educational supply company, a senior leader, trying to get his direct reports to do what they?re told and denying he was being swayed by popular opinion, said, ?Our job is to do our job.? This was an odd statement, I thought. But then I was reminded of a line I sometimes heard among human resource people, usually when they are trying to rationalize a massive layoff, and an unpleasant subject like ?how is this going to impact the lives of the people who are left? comes up: ?It is what it is.? Such tautological assertions have become useful currency of discourse in corporate business settings. The net effect is the refusal to engage or make an argument; instead, the statement is made to foreclose any possibility of debate. The assumption is causation or complication is for wimps. All we have to do is convey a spirit of tough-minded realism while managing to say nothing at all. They are at the same time no-nonsense and nonsensical. Like the gangster language of street, often captured by the FBI on tapes, ?the big enchilada,? or the exegeses of former President Clinton and his cronies, ?It depend on what the meaning of the word ?is? is,? they express the mental atmosphere that seeps out of our collective consciousness, out of the mouths and minds of our leaders and eventually characterizes our entire culture and governs our actions.
Bernie Madoff, questioned by the SEC from his prison cell, said yesterday ?the SEC investigators were a bunc h of blow-hards who talked tough but didn't look at anything. They never even looked at my stock records.?
When I think back on the Bush years and the political, business, and social culture that existed along with his administration, I remember his phrase, ?it is what it is? as a linguistic marker of the intellectual emptiness of those years. The current occupant taking a different tack, which confounds most of the PowerPoint crowd, is substantive predicates.
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