Innovation « 800 CEO Read

May 21, 2012

KnowledgeBlocks

Filed under: Ask 8cr!,Big Ideas,Book Reviews,Careers,Entrepreneurship,General Business,General Management,InBubbleWrap,Innovation,Internet,Leadership,Personal Development,Publishing Industry,Small Business,Technology,The Company,Thought Leaders,Training and Development — 800-CEO-READ @ 3:34 pm

We’re very pleased to announce the official opening of KnowledgeBlocks, a subscription-based service and online resource that gives readers access to quality content and business resources, a way to save, organize, and customize the information that is important to them, and engages business authors and thought leaders to help solve business problems and build new knowledge.

Among the key features of the site, subscribers have access to the following:

Explorations: Every month we publish three business book explorations that examine a narrow subject within a broader business topic. Each begins with a featured book and then branches out in unexpected directions, introducing you to author insights via podcast or interview, other related must-reads, curated links, and brief analyses that will help you build your business knowledge.
Thinkers-in-Residence: This key feature of the site offers authors the opportunity to connect directly to a dedicated audience via webinar and a stand-alone page of author-contributed material such as Q&As, blocks, and featured books.

Giveaways: Continuing the weekly book giveaway tradition of our inBubbleWrap program, we will put the latest releases in the hands of a smart, dedicated, interested and influential business audience.

The site is being administered and curated by the immensely talented and capable Sally Haldorson, who has been with the company for 14 years and was the editor of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, giving her a wealth of knowledge on the business genre that is hard to top.

We hope to see you over there.

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May 10, 2012

LeaveSmarter: Stephen Shapiro

Filed under: Blog,Book Awards,Innovation — Jon @ 3:09 pm

Yesterday, Stephen Shapiro was in town for our private LeaveSmarter event, sponsored by BMO Harris/M&I Bank and Whyte Hirschboek Dudek. His talked focused on ideas from his recent book, and 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award winner for 2011, Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition.

According to Shapiro, the main problems we have with being innovative, is how we think about things, the kind of questions we ask, and what we already know about the challenges we face. Here’s a clip from his talk that gives examples of this:

Following this, Shapiro states that asking the right questions, looking at similar problems but that occurred in different situations from our own, and thinking calmly about those situations, can have a markedly successful effect. From Einstein to everyday people, his book offers great examples of how people have found solutions that were truly great, and how we can do the very same thing.

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March 27, 2012

Net Smart

Filed under: Big Ideas,Innovation,Internet — dylan @ 5:00 pm

Regular readers of this blog know that we’re very interested (or at least I’m very interested) in how the internet is changing not only how we socialize, shop, and work, but how we think and function as human beings—individually, culturally, and as a society. Going back to 2007 when Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur went up against David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, and continuing through last year when Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows was released around the time of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus, we’ve been fortunate that publishers have put out books by great thinkers that take opposing sides of the issue that we can compare and contrast. It always sparks a lively conversation.

So, when Jack brought me a book he received from MIT Press today by Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, and Smart Mobs, I was thrilled.

His new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, doesn’t take sides in the debate. It is a book about overall digital literacy and the skills necessary to navigate our increasingly digital world, and he covers a lot of ground—from mastering personal attention to crap detection 101 (“How to Find What you Need to Know, and How to Decide If It’s True”), from mastering participatory skills and using collective intelligence to the uses and limitations of social networks and how to use all of this to make you smarter individually, Rheingold has really got it covered. He is also both practical and prophetic (a rare combination) and the book is written for everyone—both in its philosophy and implementation. The philosophy of the book keeps it interesting, the tools he provides keep it immediately relevant and applicable.

First up, as to not scare you away, I’ll give you a taste of the practical side:

Who Needs to Read This Book, and Why?

[...]

Adults who are Adept at using online tools and networks, but face challenges of time and attention management, and seek a balance between their physical and virtual environments
Intelligent but perhaps less knowledgeable and fearful and fearful parents of young people who are going online for the first time, or spending more and more time online
Young people who are immersed in the digital “hanging out, messing around, and geeking out” online that is such an important part of youth culture today, but are ready to learn deeper, broader ways of using social media productively and collaboratively
People who are old enough to remember the world before it was webbed, and are simultaneously puzzled, attracted, and fearful about new media
Businesspeople who want their employees to be net smart with each other inside their enterprise as well as social media literate when dealing with customers—net smarts within enterprises are different from social marketing competencies
Educators who want to help students connect old and and new

While we’re waiting for research to provide more definitive evidence about what our media practices are really dong to our minds and social relationships, I think we can all benefit from adopting some of the rules of thumb discovered by mindful digital media users.

In that last sentence is the key to the overall philosophy of the book—mindfulness. Rheingold explains how the way we use technology in its infancy shapes the development and implementation of that technology and, therefore, the course of humanity itself. So it’s incumbent upon us to use emerging technologies as mindfully as possible.

Pontificating on the present moment and how it fits into the long arch of history, he writes:

I don’t believe that technology itself, a fixed human nature, or the powers that be wholly determine who ends up in control and who ends up being controlled by others when a communication medium is adopted. But I recognize that that powers eventually emerge that try to close gates, meter resources, and lock down liberties. I’m enough of an optimist to persist in believing that this hasn’t happened quite yet, despite real advances in the direction of control by governments and corporations around the world. Right now (and for a limited time), we who use the Web have an opportunity to wield the architecture of participation to defend our freedom to create and consume digital media according to our own agendas. Or by not acting in our own interests, we can let others shape the future.

If I am correct that informed actions might still influence the outcome, declaring that technology is alone will solve social problems caused by the use of technology is dangerously naive; at the same time, it is dangerously nihilistic to dismiss all the mental and social tools that microchips make possible as irredeemably destructive. People’s actions influenced the ways print media shaped the cultural evolution of the past five hundred years. The early users of the telephone insisted on using it to socialize, not as the broadcast medium envisioned by the first telephone companies. Just as people in previous eras appropriated printing presses and telephones in was that the inventors and vendors of the enabling technologies never imagined, the shape of the social, economic, political, and mental infosphere now emerging from the combination of inexpensive computers, mobile communication devices, and global digital networks is not yet fully hardened, and thus can still be influenced by the actions of literate populations. We’re in a period where the cutting edge of change has moved from the technology to the literacies made possible by the technology.

Five hundred years ago, Gutenberg presses did not immediately enable people to overthrow monarchies, drive the Protestant Reformation, and invent science as a collective enterprise. The interval between the technological advance of print and the social revolutions it triggered was required for literacy to spread. Print, a technology that leverages the power of the human mind by making possible mass distribution of written documents, required decades for the intellectual skill of decoding those printed pages to spread through populations. The sheer scarcity of painstakingly crafted manuscripts (the word manuscript literally means “written by hand”) had constrained literacy for thousands of years. Thirty thousand pen-and-ink books existed in Europe in Johannes Gutenberg’s lifetime, but more than ten million printed books became available within fifty years of his invention. The sudden abundance of printed material meant that the mental know-how that had been reservedfor elites for millenia abruptly became available to anybody who was able to put in the effort to learn to read. For decades and centuries after Gutenberg, newly literate populations began to learn what to do with the new media of their time, and then they started to foment the Reformation, institute political self-governance, and systematize the discovery of knowledge.

Digital literacies can leverage the Web’s architecture of participation, just as the spread of reading skills amplified collective intelligence five centuries ago. Today’s digital literacies can make the difference between being empowered or manipulated, serene or frenetic. Most important, as people who are trying to get along day to day in a hyperscale, warp-speed civilization that seems so often to be beyond anyone’s control, digital literacy is something powerful we can learn as well as exercise for ourselves and each other. [...]

When enough people become proficient at these skills, then healthy new economies, politics, societies, and cultures can emerge. If these literacies do not spread through the population, we could end up drowning ourselves in torrents of misinformation, disinformation, advertising, spam, porn, noise, and trivia.

That may be too black and white, and being a professor, Rheingold probably uses a few more words than he really needs to (check out the length of these excerpts compared to the ones we usually post), but he has a lot to teach us, knows how to do so, and his professorial tangents entertain as they educate. As someone who often struggles getting comfortable with how digital technology and media fits into my life, this is a great read, a welcome resource and an important addition to the growing number of books on my shelf about the internet and the human condition.

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March 15, 2012

The Innovative Team

Filed under: Blog,Innovation,Leadership — Jon @ 3:43 pm

To some degree, we’re all creative, and can all become better at what we do and how we do it. But think about a time you were in a group of people where you maybe felt like withdrawing and not speaking up because you felt intimidated that you might say the wrong thing. In fact, what you might have said, right or wrong, may have lead the discussion into a different direction; a direction that lead to an innovative result.

Often, it’s the people we’re with that can drive how we contribute to innovation. Perhaps there’s another situation you can recall, where everyone seemed quiet, and you were compelled to speak up and try to instigate input. Again, how we interact with others not only effects what we contribute, but how it causes others to provide input that helps move things forward.

This is the issue portrayed in Chris Grivas and Gerard Puccio’s recent book: The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results. Written in a parable style, the book tells the story of a business team trying to deliver a project for a client. Through their journey, they break through their dysfunction by understanding the dynamics present within their team, outline a new and effective set of tools for enhanced performance, and deliver the project successfully, while also enabling themselves to work better in all capacities of their respective roles.

The Innovative Team is a personable and insightful read to help management, team leaders, or anyone interested in working better within groups of people to develop our own innovation skills, and assist in developing those skills in the teams we work in.

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November 14, 2011

Thoughts on “Generation Sell”

Filed under: Careers,Current Events,Finance and Economics,General Business,Innovation — dylan @ 9:09 pm

“The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.”

That quote comes from an intriguing opinion piece called Generation Sell that was published in the New York Times this weekend. It is a piece about a generation just coming of age and today’s youth culture. It really deserves to be read in its entirety, but I think that if one passage can sum up the basic argument of the article, it is this:

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration—music, food, good works, what have you—is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

The piece was written by William Deresiewicz, and there is so much I agree with and so much I disagree with in it—and it’s all wound tightly together in a wonderful and entertaining piece of writing. I’m a member of the generation he’s writing about, “people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less,” so I probably took it more personally than others, more personally indeed than I should, but I do take issue with some of Deresiewicz’s characterizations.

The first issue I ran into was in what I think was an unnecessary or misguided attempt to say something about hip-hop, which has undoubtedly had an affect on the generation and merits mention, but the sentence Deresiewicz offers doesn’t do it justice. After describing the (counter)cultural characteristics of the beatniks, hippies and punks, he briefly offers this:

Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

Because that’s all he offers us on the subject, I feel it would have been better to have left it out altogether. Because hip-hop, like jazz or rock-and-roll, shouldn’t be defined as a “youth-culture” in and of itself, but as an art form that influenced youth culture. And while some of its currents may have been “all about rage and nihilism,” it began as party music more predominantly wrapped up in a social conscience and commentary, cultural irreverence, and the urban art forms of dance, painting and poetry. There may have been a decent amount of rage there, but I don’t get the nihilism. To “punk’s younger brother” seems to miss its roots and how it ended up as part of the youth culture he’s critiquing. It would be more accurate to define it as a part of the millennial generation in the way he did with jazz and beatniks, of which he wrote:

Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; … of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

Something like this might have been more accurate:

Theirs was a culture of hip-hop, with its social conscience and cultural irreverence (and confusion); of finding a voice, of the city street; of the quest for personal invention and aggrandizement.

But, of course, that doesn’t ring true either, because it isn’t a culture defined solely by rap. The generation wasn’t defined by any single movement in music as much as previous generations have been—movements that the major record labels could latch onto and push out into the wider consciousness to become the soundtracks of their generations. I think, if anything, this generation was shaped by the demise of the major labels’ cultural influence, the proliferation of independent labels, and all the noise, cross-pollination, creativity and confusion that has spawned from that. The last real uprising or rebellious “movement” in popular music was the rise of grunge music in the ’90s. Since then, the only movement I can detect is one toward ever smaller, more focused independent labels. It is, as the author rightly notes, a movement to a new business model, and he’s right that “selling out” has largely left our lexicon since then:

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out—an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary.

But I think there’s a more important reason for that. “Selling out” used to mean that a band was abandoning one of the little labels so many cherished for a major. People were passionate about those labels—Dischord, Matador, Thrill Jockey, Touch & Go, etc.—and a move like that felt like an abandonment of something just on the verge of exploding and choosing a paycheck over principle. “Selling out” was also applied to those who sold a song for use in advertising, a move I don’t think many begrudge bands for anymore due to the paradigm shifts in the music industry. And I think the larger idea that starting a business 20 years ago was considered selling out is a misnomer. I doubt anyone accused Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye of selling out when he started Dischord in 1980, or told Aaron Rose he was selling out when he opened Alleged Gallery in the early ’90s. Selling out would have been signing with a major label or taking a job curating art at the The Met.

And this leads me to a the generalized character at the heart of the article—the “hipster” that the author feels is “a lot more representative [of the Millennial Generation] than most of them care to admit.” The definition is bandied about and applied to many people, but I’m still not sure what exactly a “hipster” is (though perhaps n+1‘s What Was the Hipster could help), and putting it in the same category as the counterculture figures that preceded it seems problematic to me. Beatniks, hippies and punks were all actively participating in larger countercultures, and defined themselves with those movements. The one predominant characteristic of a “hipster” is that nobody self-identifies with it. It’s always a label attached to others, and usually with a heavy dose of derision. As such, it’s not really a counterculture that anybody’s participating in or defining themselves with as much as it’s, if anything, an alternative lifestyle loosely defined. I do agree with the author that this lifestyle and its bohemian values were heavily influenced by the baby boomers and “Bobo in Paradise” parents that David Brooks wrote about a decade ago.

But outside of the skinny pants and fixed gear bicycles, the irony and the vanity, the defining character traits of the so-called “hipster” lifestyle—being young, urban, fashionable, artistic, and entrepreneurial—are mostly seen as positives. And I think the aversion to the label “hipster” is an aversion to labels and definitions in general. This generation hasn’t fully defined itself and doesn’t want to be defined by others—even their peers. Statistically, it’s more likely to switch jobs many times, move to new cities, to freelance, start a business of the their own or work for themselves. I don’t think of this as the end of history of counterculture in any major way, but as the rise of many independent yet interconnected subcultures that are entering the popular culture in a way that mirrors how previous countercultures were absorbed and watered down—except that today’s subcultures seem to be entering it with more artistic and economic control and largely on their own terms.

The characteristic art form of our age is not the business plan; it is do-it-yourself, independent local production, scale and control. Most people I know didn’t start with a business plan and still don’t have one. They started with a vision and are working every day to realize it. They made the decision to strike out on their own and practice their art, craft or trade—and hope people value their vision enough to pay for it. My wife, a self-employed photographer, began Ellagraph Studios. My friend dwellephant is a working artist. My friends Daniel and Maria run Ball & Biscuit, the best catering company in Milwaukee. My neighbors run Orchard Street Press, an eco-friendly printing company. I could go on and on, and wouldn’t be able to find a “hipster” in the bunch—just a lot of hard-working, creative and passionate people.

If I could sum up the generation, it would be with the once annoying labels “indie” or “underground” (which became so annoying simply by virtue of being such ubiquitous labels). The indie rock and the underground dance music and hip-hop that grew up in the ’80s and ’90s dominated the subcultures that we ourselves grew up in, and have since turned into more codified and sustainable (though possibly not very profitable) small business models. That simple yet profound change in how we learn about, purchase and consume (in the best sense of that word) the music that so shaped us during our formative years has fundamentally altered the cultural landscape. The “rockstars” of our generation were closer to us, more accessible, usually a part of our artistic communities. And alongside the independent music sprang up independent labels, music venues, galleries, coffee shops, screen printing operations, skate shops, DIY arts and crafts fairs. The internet then came along and kicked it all into overdrive.

The author says “the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent.” But I think that that is what so defines the generation. It’s a rebellion of production, a commercial rejection and inner dissent. It’s a rejection of corporate principles and a simple consumer choice for the alternative. It’s a generation not fundamentally different in attitude than its predecessors, but in the solutions it offers. The heretics of today saw previous generations’ protests and rebellions crushed in the street, so they rented the abandoned buildings beside it and started trying to build something new inside them. It’s in some ways a return to mom-and-pop capitalism.

Sure, you can call it “generation sell,” but I think “selling” is a dirty word rather deliberately used. It could easily be called “generation create” or “generation present.” It does often seem as if everyone nowadays has something to present, advertise, market or “sell,” but by-and-large I think it was and is being done with good art, the right intention and decent manners. And if one of the results of that shift is that people fault this generation for being polite and pleasant, well… being the affable generation it is, I think they’d be okay with that.

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October 13, 2011

Innovate

Filed under: Blog,Innovation — Jon @ 10:25 am

Readers of this blog might be familiar with books on innovation by authors like Steven Johnson, Stephen Shapiro, Clay Christensen, and others. How do the ideas we read in these books get put to use? Are they just words on pages or screens, or do they translate to our activities?

UK publisher Visual Editions are not a business imprint, but they are certainly innovators. This morning, I received a copy of their latest publication, Composition No. 1 by Marc Saporta. The book is a series of unbound pages, housed in a hard box. The idea is that the reader mixes the pages and reads the story however it unfolds. This, of course, allows any number of ‘books’ to emerge. A note inside the box mentions that the instinct against this process is “almost overwhelming.” And that made me think about not only innovation, but the reaction to it.

It is challenging enough to think of how to change something, how to better a process, and how to revolutionize an industry, let alone convince people not to expect the same thing they’ve always received, or follow the steps they’ve always followed.

Change, or innovation, is about more than just making something new, it’s about leading people to a different place. How will you get them to follow you?

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September 28, 2011

Is Your Idea Crazy Enough? An Excerpt from Creative Thinkering

Filed under: Big Ideas,Excerpts and Essays,Innovation,Uncategorized — Sally @ 12:42 pm

IS YOUR IDEA CRAZY ENOUGH?
An Excerpt from Creative Thinkering: Putting Your Imagination to Work
by Michael Michalko

The playful openness of creative geniuses is what allows them to explore unthinkable ideas. Once Wolfgang Pauli, the discoverer of electron spin, was presenting a new theory of elementary particles before a professional audience. An extended discussion followed. Niels Bohr summarized it for Pauli’s benefit by saying that everyone had agreed his theory was crazy. The question that divided them, he claimed, was whether it was crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. Bohr said his own feeling was that it wasn’t crazy enough.

Logic hides in Bohr’s illogic. In genius, there is a tolerance for unpredictable avenues of thought. The result of unpredictable thinking may be just what is needed to shift the context and lead to a new perspective.

Here is what one marketing agency did. As reported on PSFK.com, it persuaded the “Unilever corporation to place GPS devices in selected boxes of its Omo brand detergent in Brazil. This enabled the agency to track the purchasers right to their doorsteps and surprise them with gifts. As soon as any one of the fifty Omo boxes bearing GPS devices was removed from the store shelf, one of its teams swooped into action and reached the shopper’s home within hours.”

The playful freedom that accompanies a “bizarre” idea permitted the agency to juxtapose possibilities that would not otherwise have been available, and to construct a sequence of events that would otherwise not have been constructed.

In another example, Spencer Silver, a 3M chemist who liked to play around with chemicals, tried mixing together different ones just to see what would happen. One of the things that happened was his invention of the special adhesive that made Post-it notes possible, a product that had accounted for over $300 million in business by 2002.

Spencer Silver is quoted as saying, “If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can’t do this.” If he had studied the literature, he would have stopped his work. The key was not knowing what the experts believed, and experimenting to see what he could do. Silver, in a “Eureka” moment, realized he had developed an adhesive that created an impermanent bond.

But the problem was how to use his discovery. The company climate permitted Silver to continue with his efforts, but no one could develop it into a useful product. Silver had found a solution, but he hadn’t found a problem to solve it with. The breakthrough came when another 3M employee, Arthur Fry, got his inspiration. Art was a member of a church choir and used paper slips as bookmarks in the songbooks to identify the songs to be sung. Sometimes the paper would fly off and create problems. The idea of using Silver’s adhesive to make a better bookmark came to him while singing in the choir.

The bookmark inspired him to think of other paper-to-paper applications in which only one of the sheets of paper was coated with the glue. The problem was that 3M did not have the equipment to do this, so management was not enthusiastic about Fry’s application. Consequently Fry designed and built his own machine in his basement to manufacture the forerunner of the Post-it note. The machine was too large to get through his basement door, so he blasted a hole in the wall to get the machine to 3M. He then demonstrated the machine to management, engineers, salespeople, and production managers. His demonstration generated the enthusiasm to get management behind the project.

THINKING OUTSIDE YOUR CONE OF EXPECTATIONS

Thought is a process of fitting new situations into existing slots and pigeonholes in the mind. Just as you cannot put a physical thing into more than one physical pigeonhole at once, the processes of thought prevent you from putting a mental construct into more than one mental category at once. This is because the mind has a basic intolerance for ambiguity, and its first function is to reduce the complexity of its experiences.

When you come up with crazy or fantastical ideas, you step outside your cone of expectations and intentions — which is what happened to a manufacturer of dinner plates who had a problem with packaging. The plates were wrapped in old newspapers and packed in boxes. Every packer would eventually slow down to read the papers and look at the pictures. Most employees would drop to about 30 percent efficiency after a few weeks on the job.

The manufacturer tried using other material for packing, but that proved too expensive; the newspapers had been free. They tried using newspapers in different languages, but these were hard to obtain. They even offered incentives to workers to increase the number of plates wrapped, but without great success. Finally, one day in a meeting an exasperated supervisor said they should tape the workers’ eyes shut so they couldn’t read. This absurd comment created a lot of laughter as the others joked about his comment. But the supervisor had an “Aha!” moment: he got the idea to hire blind people to do the packing. The company not only greatly increased its packing efficiency but also received tax benefits for hiring the disabled.

MICHAEL MICHALKO is the author of Creative Thinkering, Thinkertoys, Cracking Creativity, and ThinkPak. While an army officer, he organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics to find the best inventive thinking method. He has expanded and taught these techniques to numerous Fortune 500 companies and organizations. He lives in Rochester, New York. Visit him online at http://www.CreativeThinking.net.

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September 1, 2011

What’s Your Plan B?

Filed under: Blog,Innovation — Jon @ 9:11 am

When we have an idea, or work on a project, it can get absorbed into us. We dream of what it will be like when realized, and imagine all the great things that will happen because of its creation. Eventually, it can be hard to separate our imagination from the unknown variables of reality.

Nonetheless, reality wins. The idea launches, and the results might not be what we expected. No problem, we’ll just fire up Plan B. Wait, do we have a Plan B?

I’ve been a big fan of David Kord Murray since reading his book Borrowing Brilliance, and meeting him in person when he spoke at our LeaveSmarter event during the time of that book’s launch. He’s an incredibly smart guy (yes, an actual rocket scientist!), and also human enough to have experienced a rollercoaster ride of life’s curve balls, finding simply effective ways to deal with them along the way.

Now, he shares his insight with us again in his new book, Plan B: How to Hatch a Second Plan That’s Always Better Than Your First.

Murray states that most strategic plans fail. Look again at the beginning of this post. Sound familiar? Usually, we get so wrapped up in the perceived quality of our ideas and plans that we don’t see that we might need an alternative. With the speed of change in our lives, based on technology, the economy, and social forces, we have to be more flexible than ever, while still maintaining strong footing in whatever discipline we operate from.

This book helps you find that balance.

Murray states, “Business models, put simply, are solutions to problems. And business are created and evolve by solving new problems or finding new ways to solve existing problems…Taking the time to understand the nature of the problem you’ve identified is like laying the footings for a foundation. The footings for a large skyscraper are concrete and steel pilings that are driven deep into the soil so that the building rests on solid bedrock, far beneath the surface, and not on the less stable topsoil that may buckle under the weight of a large structure. Finding the root cause of the problem you want to solve acts the same way for a business plan.”

By identifying the root cause, and fully understanding why it exists, how it might change, and how you can help solve it, will create a stronger Plan A. Recognizing the need for flexibility and analyzing areas of change within that plan is what Murray refers to as the Plan B.

Filled with many case studies of large corporations, social media startups, and even rock climbers, Murray takes us on a thorough investigation about our purpose, intent, and understanding of what we’re trying to accomplish in our business, ideas, and life.

Read this book!

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August 31, 2011

To Be or Not to Be…Creative

Filed under: 100 Best,Big Ideas,Innovation — Sally @ 10:31 am

A friend posted on Facebook a link to this article, with the somewhat obvious title, “People are biased against creative ideas, studies find,” and it’s contents have stuck with me all week. It comes from a website called PhysOrg which I’ve never heard of despite having a science geek for a husband. PhysOrg’s mission as described on it’s website is “to provide the most complete and comprehensive daily coverage of the full sweep of science, technology, and medicine news.” And with a goal of 100 new articles posted a day on “physics, earth science, medicine, nanotechnology, electronics, space, biology, chemistry, computer sciences, engineering, mathematics and other sciences and technologies,” and a membership of 1.75 million scientists, researchers and engineers, PhysOrg is an impressive ~~sight~~ site.

While I joked that the title of the article is somewhat obvious–we certainly know that there is a percentage of the population who disdain creative ideas, or defensively discredit them, and sometimes we excuse them as being left-brained–but the article (and the study it is based on) itself is making an additional more provocative point. In addition to bias against creative ideas, the research (from a forthcoming article in Psychological Science) shows that some people don’t know a creative idea from a hole in the ground, that some people can’t actually see a creative idea.

In addition to a sort of creativity blindness, another point that the research highlights is: “Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.” Considering the number of PowerPoint presentations that are often crafted to defuse any skepticism of the overall “big idea,” this is perspective-changing stuff. In fact, the authors of the study suggest that the only way to rid organizations, even those whose intentions are deeply rooted in innovation and creativity, of this bias or blindness could even be this drastic: “The field of creativity may need to shift its current focus from identifying how to generate more creative ideas to identify how to help innovative institutions recognize and accept creativity.”

That’s a pretty big task, and how exactly can it happen? Perhaps we can look to Micheal Michalko for help. Michalko is the author of Thinkertoys, one of our The 100 Best Business Books of All Time.

While readying The 100 Best for it’s updated paperback release this fall, we spent some extra time with the books we featured briefly in our Takeaway chapter of the book, expanding the reviews to include more detail. It was especially fun for us to revisit Thinkertoys not only because some of the content is reminiscent of those variety puzzle magazines found in drugstores that we all secretly and not-so-secretly love, but because of it’s applicability. Just as the subtitle–A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques–says, Thinkertoys can help those aforementioned folks who aren’t the creative type learn how to be creative. That’s the important word here: learn. No, not everyone is creative. But creativity, according to Michalko, can be self-taught, cultivated, discovered. You can choose to BE creative.

And Michalko knows a thing or two about getting creativity-resistant organizations to change. His website bio explains:

As an officer in the United States Army, Michael organized a team of NATO intelligence specialists and international academics in Frankfurt, Germany, to research, collect, and categorize all known inventive-thinking methods. His international team applied those methods to various NATO military, political, and social problems and in doing so it produced a variety of breakthrough ideas and creative solutions to new and old problems. After leaving the military, Michael facilitated CIA think tanks using his creative thinking techniques.

Just a visit to his website, not unlike PhysOrg in its wealth of references, which yields an absolutely stunning assortment of articles, interviews, resources: a veritable practicum. You can also follow Michalko via his blog on Psychology Today. But perhaps his work is best appreciated in book form, where you can scribble in the margins, and bend the pages, and carry it over to your coworker’s cubicle to test them on one of his thought experiments. Yes, make sure you have a pen when you are opening up one of Michalko’s books, and we are all very lucky that he has a new one available for us to learn from, titled Creative Thinkering.

In Creative Thinkering, Michalko challenges us to put our imaginations to work and believes with a great passion that everyone is creative. Or should be. Or can be. It is as though we’ve unlearned creativity. “We’ve been educated to process information based on what has happened in the past, what past thinkers thought, what exists now. Once we think we know how to get the answer, based on what we have been taught, we stop thinking,” he explains in the Introduction, and then immediately proceeds to challenge the way you think with some mind-bending games.

In this new book, Michalko wants to teach us conceptual blending, “which is the act of combining, or relating, unrelated items in order to solve problems, create new ideas, and even rework old ideas….It is no coincidence that the most creative and innovative people throughout history have been experts at forcing new mental connections via the conceptual blending of unrelated objects.” And once again, the material he presents throughout the book is entertaining but also so very do-able. Through the exercises and insights in his books, Michalko provides the material to train even the most creatively-blind how to open his or her eyes to their own and others’ creative ideas.

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May 26, 2011

LeaveSmarter with Peter Sims

Filed under: Events,Innovation — dylan @ 2:43 pm

We were overjoyed to have Peter Sims in town earlier this week for our LeaveSmarter* series. We first became aware of Peter when he coauthored True North with Bill George, which was a favorite of ours when it came out, and one of our bestsellers in 2007 and 2008 (and, coincidentally, Bill was in town to speak about True North at a previous LeaveSmarter event). So, we were really excited when we saw Mr. Sims had a book of his own coming out. That book is Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, released last month by Free Press. The book is based the idea that you don’t need a big idea to get into or change your business; you simply need to take small, experimental steps to see what works and consolidate small victories. Or, as Peter puts it in the introduction to the book:

Little Bets is based on the proposition that we can use a lot of little bets and certain creative methods to identify possibilities and build up to great outcomes. At the core of this experimental approach, little bets are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. They begin as creative possibilities that get iterated and refined over time, and they are particularly valuable when trying to navigate amid uncertainty, create something new, or attend to open-ended problems. When we can’t know what’s going to happen, little bets help us learn about the factors that can’t be understood beforehand. The important thing to remember is that while prodigies are exceptionally rare, anyone can use little bets to unlock creative ideas.

As you can see from the pictures below, the event was held in lovely environs, amongst the “Man at Work” collection in The Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Grohmann Museum . I took video of the event, but I am no video expert, so we’ll have to wait until Jon gets back from BEA next week to see if it’s up to par and get it on the site. In the meantime, you should check out Peter’s Little Bets manifesto at ChangeThis.

*We began our LeaveSmarter series in 2006 to bring nationally recognized business thinkers and their books to our hometown. M&I Bank approached us soon after the first event to discuss partnering with us on the series and, along with local law firm Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, they have been the series sponsor ever since. If you’re interested in partnering with us to create a future event, let’s talk. You can contact me at dylan[at]800ceoread[dot]com.

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