Good Morning Thinkers!

Good Morning Thinkers!

Many Thanks to IN friend and author Chuck Frey from
InnovationTools.com. He has a new book coming out as we speak and
he was kind enough to give us a sneak preview. The book is titled
"Creativity Hacks: Shortcuts to Help You to Crush Your Challenges
& Live a Kick-A** Life." 'It is filled with tips, strategies and
tactics that readers can use to enhance their creativity and
productivity.’

After a quick review, "Creativity Hacks" looks to be an excellent
compilation of tools for the creative problem solver to help
create, capture and improve their ideas and turn them into
profitable solutions.

Interested? Find out more about this e-book and all the other
innovation tools available at:

http://www.innovationtools.com/

CAT Innovation

In all the hoopla about radical, breakthrough or disruptive innovation, we sometimes lose sight of the importance of "ordinary innovation" -- the unique approaches to every day issues that create new value.  These small stories of personal innovation deserve to be celebrated and that's just what Steve Lundin (co-creator of the incredible "Fish! Philosophy" series) and Jimmy Tan (innovation consultant and trainer from Australia) are doing in their new book-in-process, "CATS: The Nine Lives of Innovation" which focuses on the premise that all innovation, at its core, is personal. Steve and Jimmy are looking for stories of personal innovation and stories about how leaders view innovation at the personal innovation level.

If you would like to share your story with them, please contact Jimmy at [email protected].  For an example of the type of stories they are looking for, please see the ones below.

Simple Rules from Starbucks

I have this fascination for simple rules and here comes a set from a new book about Starbucks which will be out shortly: "The Starbucks Experience, Five Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary," by psychologist Joseph Michelli.  Seems like a very worthy entry into this category.

1 -- Make it your own
2 -- Everything matters
3 -- Surprise and delight
4 -- Embrace resistance
5 -- Leave your mark

Passion and Innovation

Tom Peters says:  "dispassionate innovator" is an oxymoron.  This is only one of 50 tips for increasing your luck and success at innovating.  Check out the rest here.

Napkin Sketches

I first heard the term "napkino" while doing some work with the design group at Johnson Controls.  They had an idea contest where people submitted idea sketches as "napkinos."  Tom Aitken, the group's innovation champion at the time described it as, "A competition using this term just means a very informal sketch on any old type of paper with no attention to formatting, or even drawing quality.  Just get the idea down so people can see it.  Otherwise designers will get too elaborate with the 2d work."

I just ran across the following article from a Steelcase e-zine and thought it might be of interest.  In the article Don Moyer writes "the leading edge of every wave of innovation is flecked with little drawings scrawled on cocktail napkins ...."  I thought it might be fun to think about what companies, projects or inventions started as a napkin sketch over drinks or lunch?   Tell us your napkin sketch stories in the comments below.

Napkin Sketches Recap
by Pamela (Brenner) Hamp

“Napkin Sketches 101” written by Don Moyer in last months’ 360 e-zine, registered as our most popular article to date (as noted by number of pdf downloads). Moyer writes, “the leading edge of every wave of innovation is flecked with little drawings scrawled on cocktail napkins, envelope backs, scratch paper and whiteboards. Napkin sketches can help you see what you think about a topic and make it easier to communicate your ideas to others.“

His piece is interesting, well written and extremely practical. So much in fact, this 90-second article will re-cap some of Don’s napkin sketch tips.  (9 rules below)

Design for a “Think Week?”

I have long been fascinated by Bill Gates’ legendary Think Weeks which he takes twice a year to read and reflect on the world around him. After his Think Week in 2005, Robert Guth, reporter with The Wall Street Journal, wrote an article that included this statement:

Four days into this Think Week, Gates had read 56 papers, working 18 hours straight some days. His record is 112 papers.

"I don't know if I'll catch my record, but I'll certainly do 100," he said. Among the unread papers: "10 Crazy Ideas to Shake Up Microsoft."

I was curious about the ten crazy ideas and delighted to find them listed on the blog, Mini-Microsoft I’m not sure what I expected but it definitely wasn’t what I saw. (list shown at the end of this post). I only want to talk about #1-- Schedule Unscheduled Time into Performance Reviews.

Think about it. The number one "crazy idea" from one of the most successful companies in history is the same thing I hear from companies large and small: more time to think. Obviously whoever suggested this at Microsoft thought the only way it would happen would be to make it an official part of the performance review process ... but that if it could be done, this change would "shake up" the company.

Across the world, the demand for innovation has reached a fevered pitch. But, the universal fuel for innovation -- time to think -- appears to be the most elusive resource of all.

What Would a "Think Week" Look Like?

After thinking about the time issue for several years now, I don’t think that trying to find time to think within the normal context of our over-busy, down-sized and outsourced working environments makes a lot of sense. Urgent always bullies its way past important.

We take time to respond to an email from our customers or managers even when it means putting a strategic project on hold. So, we probably need to do what Gates does and get away somewhere.

So, here’s the question: if you were going to design a Think Week for yourself, what would you do to create the most productive, thought-stimulating week possible? We thought this would be an interesting survey question ... and might also help you think through what would be most helpful to you. So please click this link and share your thoughts -- We’ll summarize the results in a 3-4 weeks.

Microsoft’s "Ten Crazy Ideas to Shake Up the Company"

1. Schedule Unscheduled Time into Performance Reviews

2. "Break Up" the Company

3. Encourage Loose but Prominent Couplings

4. Exile and Empower Incubation Projects

5. Offer Super-exponential Rewards

6. Offer Different Risk-Reward Compensation Profiles

7. Cut Back on Bureaucracy

8. Review Cost Cutting

9. Reduce Headcount on Large Dev Projects

10. Eliminate Exec Reviews

Sam Walton's 10 Rules

Sam Walton's 10 Rules for Success

Not much need for an introduction, explanation or commentary. (ed.)

The basics ...

Rule #1
Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anything else. If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do the best you can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you - like a fever.

Rule #2
Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.

Rule #3
Motivate your partners. Money and ownership aren’t enough. Set high goals, encourage competition and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs.

Rule #4
Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.

Rule #5
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Rule #6
Celebrate your success and find humour in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails put on a costume and sing a silly song.

Rule #7
Listen to everyone in your company, and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front line - the ones who actually talk to customers - are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know.

Rule #8
Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses - apologize. Stand behind everything you do. ‘Satisfaction guaranteed’ will make all the difference.

Rule #9
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.

Rule #10
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.

---

Sam Walton's 10 Rules For Success - from Sam Walton: Made in America, My Story, co-authored by J. Huey, Doubleday.

"Easy" is the new "free"

My first job out of college was as a direct mail copy writer, so I quickly learned the magic words that create response -- the most powerful being "new" and "free."  That was quite a few years ago, however, and life is different... not only were there no blogs, vlogs, text messaging or MyPlace, there was no email, fax, internet, cell phones, cable TV, infomercials, or ezines.  Back then movies came with cartoons instead of advertising and doctors, dentists, accountants, and lawyers didn’t advertise at all.  "New" didn’t happen all that often and we believed people when they said "free."

It wasn’t till I saw the Staples "easy" ads and actually purchased four Easy Buttons (which say "That was easy!" when you press them) to use in a workshop, that it dawned on me that "easy" is the new "free."  Life is complicated and everyone seems to be on an endless learning curve.  Just about the time I start feeling comfortable with my software, a new version comes out or someone tells me about a new tool I "just have to have."  When my career first started, I felt very competent with my tools, now, with all of the technology available, it seems like everyone has a low-grade sense of
incompetence.  So tell me something’s easy and I’m all yours (of course, you have to make me believe it first).

Here’s a recent experience. We just bought a house and decided to get the mortgage through our bank (which will remain nameless) because we’d had very good experience with our "personal banker." We quickly got a pre-approval and once the purchase deal was signed, we were on our way to a mortgage.  But then ... our "personal banker" quit and things spiraled quickly out of control.  Endless calls to and from a variety of people, different stories, interest  rates promised and then retracted.  It got ugly.

After a frustrating two weeks, I decided to create a backup plan. This was Sunday night.  Ten minutes of filling out an online form with Ditech and a two-hour wait and I had six "offers" at interest rates better than my bank was offering.  A quick inquiry at LendingTree yielded an almost immediate email response saying someone would call me soon.  A short form at QuickenLoans prompted another "We’ll repond soon" reply. Monday morning, Jason from QuickenLoans called, took a little more information and told me he’d call back in an hour.  Forty-five minutes later he called to tell me we’d been approved and exactly what needed to happen.  By the end of Tuesday, we had signed documents through a simple online process and had a written commitment to rates and costs.  "That was easy!"

In the meantime, while someone from LendingTree finally called on Thursday, no one ever called from Ditech and the bank is still grinding in circles, presumably still cranking out a mortgage but who would know for sure? That definitely wasn’t easy.

So, how could you make life easier for your customers (internal or external)?  It may be the most powerful thing you could do.

* Apparently over 100,000 Easy Buttons have been sold (at $4.95 each) with all the proceeds up to $1 million going to the Boys and Girls Club of America.

Google's 9 Rules

We love simple rules so thanks to Chuck Frey and Paul Hobcraft for alerting us to these from Google:

From Chuck Frey's Innovation Tools: Thanks to alert reader Paul Hobcraft for alerting me a link to this video on the Stanford website, in which Google VP of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer (their innovation guru) gives a presentation on the search engine giant’s nine principles of innovation. These rules are:

1. Ideas come from everywhere
2. Cheer everything you can
3. You're brilliant, we're hiring
4. A license to pursue dreams
5. Innovation, not instant perfection
6. Data is apolitical
7. Creativity loves constraints
8. It's users, not money
9. Don't kill projects, morph them

Marissa also gives examples of how each principle has been applied in practice This presentation contains many ideas and practices that you may be able to adapt to your organization. You can view the presentation by clicking here (approximate length, 45 minutes).

What are you waiting for?

Years ago, in what seems like simpler times, we had philosophers such as Plato and Socrates, Confucius and Descartes, Machiavelli and Sartre, all talking and writing, helping us figure out this thing called life.  Today we have Visa.

It may not be quite the same but don't miss the "What's Life Take?" video-ad which you can see by clicking "Watch Video."

According to Visa, we need:   

• Ambition & Practice
• Luck & Tradition
• Exploration & Wonder
• Confidence & Respect
• Determination & Talent
• Risk & Joy
• Spontaneity & a little Help

What do YOU need today?