The Brainzooming Group | Strategy Consulting and Strategic Planning

Fast Company – Creative Thinking Ideas from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

Mike Brown — Wed, 30 May 2012 09:50:56 +0000

Following up the previous post on the June 2012 Fast Company list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012, today’s list of creative thinking ideas from the Fast Company issue focus on disruptive and divergent thinking along with suggestions for enhancing your creative perspective. As with the other lists in this series, these creative ideas were inspired by the profiles in Fast Company. My intent was to pull a single creative thinking idea or creative lesson from each of the 100 profiles.

One interesting note about the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business list is that the numbered rankings don’t seem to have any real meaning. At least I draw that conclusion from how certain groups of people who have similar characteristics (i.e., apps developers, two-person teams, fashion industry leaders, etc.) are given consecutive numbered rankings. That would be just TOO much of a creative coincidence.

Despite this indication the numbered rankings are so much hooey, each of the thirty-three creative thinking ideas below references the person whose profile inspired it, along with the person’s number on the 100 Most Creative People in Business list.

Here’s hoping these creative ideas get you thinking and provide ideas for enhancing your own creative efforts.

Disruptive and Constraint-Based Thinking

What’s your creative imperative – the one thing that HAS to be part of your creative effort? - Leslie Berland – SVP, Digital Partnerships and development, American Express (#6)

What in your past is like what you’re doing today? What did you learn that applies to what you’re doing now? - Steven Zeitels – Director, MA General Hospital’s Center for Laryngeal Surgery and Voice Rehabilitation (#14)

When evaluating data or an idea, challenge what’s being presented from the completely opposite point of view to determine how strong the strategic thinking is. - Rebecca Van Duck – Head of Consumer Marketing, Facebook (#2)

What are multiple ways you can create more strategic connections than anyone else does? – Garet Hil – Founder, National Kidney Registry (#9)

Compile and share information to connect separate audiences who don’t have any basis to talk to each other right now. - Ma Jun, Director – Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (#1)

Take on creative initiatives that allow you to collect massive amounts of data you can mine to direct your own organization or sell to others. For Foursquare, it’s about connecting information on people, places, and time-specific actions. - Alex Rainert – Head of Product, Foursquare (#77)

How can you substitute easier processes for the hard parts your audience deals with every day? - Ben Horowitz – Cofounder, Andreesen Horowitz (#8)

For cool ideas and design to be successful, they can’t be embarrassing to wear or use. - Steve Lee – Product Management Director, Google [X] (#20)

If you’re facing creative detractors, how can you create creative baby steps they’ll find more acceptable for getting started? - Maelle Gavet – CEO, Ozon Holdings (#10)

Innovate with only things that already exist in your business. Put together new combinations from pre-existing elements. - Adam Brotman – Chief Digital Officer, Starbucks (#3)

Invite people to exercise their creative talents . . . maybe no one has ever asked them about creativity before? - Rosario Dawson & Maria Teresa Kumar – Founders, VotoLatino (#12)

Find a compelling motivation (and the associated process) to allow customers to commit to purchases earlier than they might now to make it practical to buy things that would never make it to market on spec. - Aslaug Magnusdottir – Cofounder, CEO, Moda Operandi (#78)

Apply design and pleasing aesthetic principles to the most necessary, thankless, and joyless tasks humans have to do to raise the creative energy from them. - Jessica Alba – Cofounder, The Honest Company (#17)

Consider every interaction as a performance and allow the audience to participate, shape the outcome, and leave with the results. - Björk – Musician (#36)

Creative Thinking Perspectives

Design isn’t a liner process, so incorporating strategic thinking is vital to successfully handling a problem that doesn’t have a nice, neat structure. - Matthew Schmidt – Assistant Professor of Political Science, School of Advanced Military Studies (#22)

Be okay when the first examples of your creative work aren’t what you expected. - Wes Anderson – Director, Moonrise Kingdom (#28)

Go do the equivalent of whatever “biking around the neighborhood” would be in your market and soak up the inspiration from a different perspective than you have before. – Marcus Samuelsson – Chef, Owner, Red Rooster (#90)

Throw out how you usually categorize things and come up with a completely different categorization approach. - Ron Johnson – CEO, JCPenney (#4)

Defy the creative rules of your world while still delivering a cohesive creative whole. - Kin Ying Lee – Creative Director, Madewell (#31)

Don’t be afraid to call someone’s bluff and create what they say you can’t or shouldn’t do. - Marvin Ammori – Lawyer, The Ammori Group (#32)

What incredibly worthwhile activities are hiding behind the “scary monsters” in your world? – Tim Schafer – Founder, Double Fine Productions (#39)

Explicitly pick a time or point in your life and use it as a reference to solve creative or design problems faced now. - Ken Parks – Chief Content Office, Spotify (#33)

Create so that what you’re creating is “stunning” to at least one of the senses. - Diébédo Francis Kéré – Architect, Kéré Architecture (#34)

What would an experience look like that is destined to “disturb the universe”? – Ross Martin – Executive VP, MTV Scratch (#46)

How can you use your creativity to add more serenity to your customers’ lives? - Leah Busque – Founder, TaskRabbit (#42)

What would you change about your product to make it more inviting to people? – Deborah Borda – CEO, Los Angeles Philharmonic (#44)

How would Sesame Street (or Romper Room, if you’re old enough to remember it) teach new things to people who think they’re too old to learn new things? – Bruktawit Tigabu – Founder, Director, Whiz Kids Workshop (#45)

Change the natural order that things happen to spark innovative ideas, i.e. What if you focused a picture after it’s taken? - Ren Ng – Founder, CEO, Lytro (#70)

Get out of the office or conference room and go look around at people, places, and things both relevant and tangential to your creative objective. – Rick Barrack – Chief Creative Officer, CBX (#79)

Not everyone that makes the “Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business” list has a strong enough profile to yield even one creative inspiration of substance. – Chris Milk – Director (#83)

What are you doing today to make your product, business, or market wildly controversial? Are you doing enough? - Rufus Griscom – Cofounder, General Manager, Babble Media (#88)

Think Africa. “There’s something really exciting about the word . . . It evokes an emotion in everyone.” - Tal Dehtiar – Founder, Oliberte Footwear (#96)

Who would you fire if you fired co-workers or clients that aren’t good for your business? - Jimmy Smith – Chairman, CEO, Chief Creative Officer, Amusement Park Entertainment (#43) - Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic new ideas! For an organizational creativity boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these innovation benefits for you.

Fast Company – Creative Strategy Lessons from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

Mike Brown — Tue, 29 May 2012 09:50:06 +0000

The June 2012 issue of Fast Company highlights the magazine’s list of The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012. I will admit to not reading all of previous Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business lists. This year, however, having Ceelo Green on the cover (along with Purrfect) compelled me to take a shot at reviewing the entire list in-depth for the first time.

And of course, taking the time to read the whole list necessitated coming up with a way to turn the effort into a Brainzooming blog post. My starting idea was to pick one creative inspiration from each of the 100 people and turn the creative lessons into a massive 100-item list post.

After going through and identifying the 100 creative lessons that stood out for me, however, I realized the post was about 3000 words! That is typically a week’s worth of blog posts!

To not overtax you, the list of creative lessons I captured from the Fast Company Most Creative list is going to be spread out over several days in this shortened week. Each lesson references the person whose profile inspired it, along with the number they had on the list.

Today’s list includes thirty-one creative strategy lessons from this year’s list. Other days will include lessons from the list on creative perspectives, storytelling, and disruptive thinking. The hope is the lessons get you thinking even more creatively and provide ideas for enhancing your own creative efforts.

Creative Strategy Lessons from Fast Company – The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 List

Surround yourself with people who have contrasting thinking styles . . . then hold on. - Flavio Pripas & Renato Steinberg – Cofounders, Fashion.me (#54)

Success and determining which of your efforts will be successful are for your audience to decide. It’s a numbers game, so launch and see which things will hit. - Julie Klausner – Comedy Writer (#59)

If people aren’t buying you based on your talents, maybe it’s because they don’t how your values and goals fit with their aspirations. - Shara Senderoff – Cofounder, CEO, Intern Sushi (#63)

Start with your life problems and think through how to solve one of them if you want to make better apps (or maybe anything else). - Lee Linden – Cofounder and CEO, Karma (#67)

Really hone what you do strategically by only addressing the most important part of your customer base and quit focusing on everyone else. - Sarah Robb O’Hagan – President, Gatorade (#23)

What opportunities exist for your organization to be a creative magnet to your audiences? – Marci Harris – Founder, Popvox (#13)

To build connections online, start with asking questions and offering your knowledge to aid others. - Claire Diaz-Ortiz – Manager of Social Innovation, Twitter (#21)

Try presenting an all-or-nothing creative vision and strategy. No room for compromise. Take it or leave it, but don’t tweak it. - Celestine Maddy – Founder, Wilder (#99)

To make your creative pitch, play out the negative things that would happen to the potential client if they don’t follow your recommendation and embrace your creativity. - Laura Mather – Cofounder / Chief Strategy Officer, Silver Tail Systems (#16)

Even though it’s easier to sponsor another organization’s event, create a sponsorship property specifically for your organization. - Abanti Sankaranarayanan – Deputy Manager Director for India, Diageo (#37)

“I don’t ever want to represent anybody. It’s my duty to enlighten people.” - Neil Degrasse Tyson – Host, PBS’s Cosmos and Radio Show StarTalk (#49)

When volunteers are able to use their natural talents and expertise (as opposed to donating time for something they’re not good at doing), you’re more likely to retain them. - Rachel Chong – Founder, CEO, Catchafire (#56)

Have a review board comprised entirely of your target market – even if that’s a group of grade school kids – to see if what you’re planning resonates with them. - Olajide Williams - Founder, President, Hip Hop Public Health (#65)

When you’re getting started, be prepared to chase after possibilities and test cases you hadn’t imagined. - Glenn Rink – Founder, AbTech Industries (#71)

If you had one thousand “followers, friends, and fans that meant something,” that’s better than 10 million unengaged people. (Really? In pure numbers, to get the same amount of participation from 100% of one thousand people, you’d only need 1/100 of 1% participation from 10 million people.) - Jared Leto – Entrepreneur, Musician (#72)

Borrow (complete) strong design contexts from outside your industry and apply them to what you do to look different. (Example: Applying Heathrow airport signage to mobile phone interfaces.) - Jeff Fong – Design Lead for Windows Phone, Microsoft (#81)

Unlikely customers will stretch your organization’s creativity in finding new ways to solve their problems. - Hannah Choi Granade – President, Advantix Systems U.S.A. (#73)

Give your team an assignment from a demanding fictional client to stretch its creativity beyond the marketplace’s expectations and extract your “creative aspirations from (y)our finances.” - Mike Simonian, Maaike Evers – Designers, Mike and Maaike (#76)

“Seventy percent of an experience should be what consumers know and thirty percent should be surprise and delight.” - Rachel Shechtman – Founder, Story (#80)

What are you doing to make “eye contact” with potential customers virtually? And what are you doing to engage them (with their interests in mind) when they get really close? - Sam Mogannam – Owner, Bi-Rite Market (#86)

Find ways for your best customers to share their expertise and hacks with your new customers. - Cindy Au – Community Director, Kickstarter (#82)

Head directly to where your audience is. Do not wait around at your online site. Share your content where they are and get something started. - Vivi Zigler – President, Digital Entertainment, NBC Universal (#89)

Manufacture greater scarcity in the experience you create over time to push more robust intensity, deeper interaction, and the possibility of greater participant leadership in shaping the experience. - Jerri Chou – Founder, The Feast Social Innovation Conference (#94)

What would your design process look like if the client specified every detail they wanted? Do you think that’s a level of involvement your clients are really seeking? - Edwin Neo – Founding Partner, Ed Et Al Shoemakers (#98)

Celebrate customers using your product in incredible ways. Make them the creative heroes of your brand. - Sally Grimes – Global Vice President, Sharpie (#100)

Whether in traditional or new media, people spend time with and pass-on content they expect friends will enjoy. - Ben Smith – Editor, Buzzfeed (#29)

Great advice from Magic Johnson: “It’s okay to be famous and be well liked, but you got to start owning things.” - Shaq – C’mon. It’s Shaq. He doesn’t need a title. (#74)

When trying to signal your commitment to the market, there’s no short cut to the time advantage of starting now and sticking with it. - Lourenço Bustani – Founder, Brazil CEO, Mandalah (#48)

Celebrity still counts for something so find a way to borrow the authority of celebrities to gain attention and action. - Yael Cohen, Founder – F*ck Cancer (#38)

Look and create five years ahead. What creative inputs will be important then? - Carla Schmitzberger – President, Havalanas (#97)

Look for games as the high impact form of artistic expression for decades to come. - Chelsea Howe – Director of Design, SuperBetter Labs (#41) - Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Visual Thinking Skills – Getting Them in Shape with Letters and Shapes

Mike Brown — Fri, 25 May 2012 09:50:55 +0000

I’ve been promising myself I’d write about incorporating visual thinking skills into work meetings since last summer when a client asked me for some ideas on visual thinking resources. He wanted to enhance his ability to facilitate meetings and capture meeting notes where he was a participant.

Visual Thinking Resources

My initial recommendation to him was checking out several books on visual thinking skills that have been helpful for me:

One older book which helped shape my early thinking on diagrams is the “Marketer’s Visual Tool Kit: Using Charts, Graphs, and Models for Strategic Planning and Problem Solving, “ by Terry Richey.
Another classic on the topic is “Information Anxiety” by Richard Saul Wurman (the guy who originally created the TED conference). It is not as tool and exercise-based, making it more of a “read it” than “use it” type of book for me.
Finally, Edward Tufte is the guru of data visualization. If you ever get a chance to see him in person, it is very intriguing – a university professor who has a rock star feel to his presentations. Tufte’s stuff is great and inspirational, but unless you are a designer, it feels tough to put it into practice on a daily basis.

A more recent visual thinking skills book that may have put the topic of visualization (back) on the map is “The Back of the Napkin – Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures,” by Dan Roam. The issue for me with this book is that the original edition has really small type and really small diagrams, so it does not really help convey the message nearly as strongly as it should.

Getting Over the “I Can’t Draw” Visual Thinking Skills Hurdle

When it comes to using drawing and visualization on the fly in meetings, people often become bogged down with drawing something in front of people out of concern it will not look right (or even look like anything). In reality, the ability to draw something is simply selecting and sketching shapes that SUGGEST what we want to depict.

We all understand and can re-create the shapes of letters. I have taken people who do not think they can draw and helped them see that they can “draw” simply by putting together a bunch of letters to create bigger, more complex shapes. Take letters, throw in a few geometric shapes, and realize all you are doing is trying to SUGGEST something (not create a photo-realistic depiction of it), and you’ve got a lot of what you need to visualize.

It’s All about Shapes

Shapes also come into play in note taking as a way to highlight certain types of information: ideas, conclusions, action items, etc. Some things might get stars beside them; others might always be written in circles. Grids can really help capture notes in an organized fashion as a meeting flows.

We also still use post-it notes in our strategy and creative thinking exercises because ideas on post-it notes can be re-arranged and grouped in new ways (i.e., put into shapes) to provide stronger understanding. Meeting notes tend to be captured chronologically, when notes really need to be presented afterward based on a logic flow, not a time flow.

The Missing Piece for Visual Thinking

What’s stopped this post from appearing before today was not getting the graphic drawn to put shapes and letters to common situations that present themselves in meetings. Then lo and behold, my Twitter friend and visual problem solving expert, Dean Meyers tweeted a link to this PowerPoint which does a really wonderful job of covering visual thinking skills. It has a valuable discussion on the necessary resolution for your drawings in addition to an approach for stronger visual thinking. And slide 28 contains the type of graphic I was planning on drawing relating shapes to objects.

“Yea” for waiting things out, and “yea” for people sharing great presentations on PowerPoint. - Mike Brown

Visual Thinking Presentation for UnitedHealth Innovation Day

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Using Social Media: 11 Things Every Internet Guru Needs You To Believe

Mike Brown — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:50:36 +0000

I’ll admit it. Yesterday kind of sucked IRL, and then I got home to see another post about how some Internet guru has decided to quit using a social media platform that now sucks and should be immediately abandoned.

Give me a break. Who the hell cares?

If any social media platform sucks so badly you have to officially quit it, why would you still need to write an official declaration about how much it sucks?

The reason?

Because there are a whole variety of things about using social media that every Internet guru needs you to believe. Think I’m kidding?

Here is my list of 11 things every Internet guru needs you to believe about using social media (and to be more grammatically correct, each item is placed in the first person):

1. It’s a big deal when I start using a social media network in an exaggerated way.

2. If you aren’t on the new social network I’m pimping, your business (and potentially your life) is within two weeks of complete collapse.

3. It’s a big deal when I ceremoniously quit using the social media network I’ve now discovered I scorn.

4. If you’re still using the social media network I recently quit cold turkey, you’re an idiot.

5. I provide unbiased product recommendations.

6. I know lots of things and lots of people you don’t know. If you want to find out more about them, you need to “Get to know me!”

7. My excitement for an obscure topic (or one that seems characteristically odd for me to celebrate multiple times per week) is driven purely by my curiosity and personal passion, not a potential or current client relationship.

8. FILL IN THE BLANK WITH WHATEVER I SELL is King!

9. I’m not doing what I do because I’m trying to sway you to my point of view. I really don’t care what you think.

10. I know what’s in the Google search black box.

11. Edgy = Critically Important. Me = Edgy. Me = Critically Important.

Okay, that’s my social media rant for the day. Any things you’d care to add that makes you want to rant? – Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Emailus at info@brainzooming.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

Making Big Ideas Happen – 9 Ways to Address Innovation Fears

Mike Brown — Wed, 23 May 2012 09:50:54 +0000

One question near the end of my “Making Big Ideas Happen” presentation at the Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference was on how to handle people who try to say no to challenging thinking and plans because of potential risks.

My answer was people who say no to a big idea are doing so out of some type of fear. It could be fear of change, failure, or the unknown. It could be fear of any number of other things.

There’s no single answer for addressing innovation fears across organizations. Your best strategy depends on the people and circumstances standing in the way of your big ideas. That’s what all the work we’ve done on Taking the NO Out of InNOvation is all about. Here are nine initial possibilities thought to consider for conquering risk-related innovation fears within your organization when you’re the one who is pushing for making big ideas happen.

Work to redirect fears about your big idea toward one or more threats that could loom even larger if your innovation doesn’t come to fruition.
Mitigate the fear of risk by breaking the steps to accomplish your idea into small phases. Then sell-in only a few steps at a time.
After determining what is critical to your big idea’s success, compromise on elements that are not essential but whose absence could lower potential fears or perceived risk with big innovation.
Involve the naysayer directly in developing your big idea to attempt to get them invested in your innovation effort.
Create a stealth innovation effort. Only reveal the innovation effort’s existence after it has moved down the road to being realized.
Provide case studies of organizations or people who have overcome the same fear of a new idea.
Share case studies of comparable situations where an idea similar to yours brought about favorable improvements for another organization.
Get the fears out in the open and innovate around them.
Present facts and logic (along with some emotional impact) to refute the fears.

What do you do about making big ideas happen when you’re behind them? – Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

If you’re facing a challenging organizational situation and are struggling to maintain forward progress because of it, The Brainzooming Group can provide a strategic sounding-board for you. We will apply our strategic thinking and implementation tools on a one-on-one basis to help you create greater organizational success. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you figure out how to work around your organizational challenges.

61 Online and Social Media Resources for Motivating People to Create

Mike Brown — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:50:30 +0000

Long plane flights are my most-prized creative times. With the opportunity to be free from the many distractions that drain creative energy, long plane flights always lead to many new ideas. Last Saturday’s flight back from New Jersey and #BigIdeas12 was no exception. I finally had the chance to look at the Adobe “State of Create Study” issued recently. The study polled 5,000 people across the US, UK, Germany, France, and Japan regarding their perspectives on creativity across multiple dimensions of society.

There are enough intriguing insights on creativity in the Adobe “State of Create Study” for multiple Brainzooming blog posts, but the last slide really struck me. The headline read, “Social media plays a minor role, if any, in motivating people to create.” Across the global study, only 11% of respondents said social media plays a “great deal” of a role in their creative motivation.

Huh?

If that’s the case, people around the globe are really missing out on the incredible new opportunities for creative motivation presented by online and social media resources. This disconnect was fodder for generating a list of sixty-one ways you can use online and social media sources for creative motivation. I KNOW there are more than sixty-one ways, but I decided to constrain myself to only ideas jotted down on the plane.

If you can read through this list and NOT think there are a great many online and social media resources for motivating people to create, let me know. We’ll expand the list beyond these first sixty-one ideas!

1. Find people who trigger creative ideas for you

2. Find people who support and cheer your efforts

3. Find people who you disagree with and want to sway to your point of view

4. Find people who disagree with you and cause you to explore new topics

5. Allow yourself to be pointed to creative places online based on others’ social media links

6. Use an online exchange with someone as creative inspiration

7. Identify new creative experiences to try

8. Connect with people you meet at conferences more frequently than you would if not for social media channels

9. See what other people are saying about creative topics of interest to you

10. Request creative input from someone half a world away

11. Virtually visit creative places

12. Go to museums you might not be able to visit in person

13. Ask an online friend who has visited a creative place to share the experience

14. Track content coming out of creativity-oriented conferences and events

15. Share a creative experience you’ve had with people around the world

16. Try to talk to a famously creative person you’d never expect to meet in person

17. Share your works of creativity online

18. Use online images, video, and conversations as creative fodder for your work

19. Hang out with creative people online

20. Closely follow what other creative people are interested in

21. Closely follow what other creative people are talking about

22. Build an outpost for creativity where others can congregate online

23. Give away your creativity for others to build upon with their ideas

24. Sell your creative output

25. Showcase the creative output of IRL and online friends

26. Learn new tools to express creativity

27. Find a new job or project that allows you more time for creativity

28. Sponsor a place for ideas to solve world problems

29. Issue a creativity manifesto

30. Help online friends become more creative

31. Create original social media content (instead of simply lurking)

32. Share your creative stories

33. Download the Adobe “State of Create” study

34. Learn productivity or time-saving techniques to free up your time for creativity

35. Learn artistic skills

36. Change the educational system

37. Become a risk mitigation expert (to address people who see risk in creativity)

38. Encourage others to live up to their potential for creativity

39. Increase the diversity of your creative interests as you get older

40. Find people online in Japan and help them understand creativity isn’t just for the arts community (78% of respondents in Japan think this)

41. Collect the facts to build a case for more creativity at work

42. Learn more about creativity in Tokyo, New York, Paris, London, and Berlin (They were rated as the top five creative cities in the “State of Create Study”)

43. Explore creative environments and adapt your environment to better foster creativity

44. Source new creative tools

45. Find a creativity-oriented music list to listen to (This one is courtesy of #BigIdeas12 attendee Matt James @TheMJames)

46. Share examples of overlooked creativity in your world

47. Download Taking the NO Out of InNOvation eBook for free

48. Express your ideas – express a lot of ideas – for the world to see

49. Read / skim creativity-oriented blogs

50. Read / skim design-oriented blogs

51. Point out why things people think are boundaries to creativity really aren’t

52. Become more childlike and open to wonder

53. Take a virtual museum tour

54. Curate your own museum of the greatest works of creativity in the world

55. Perform a crit and share it online

56. Connect with a local artist in your community

57. Write about what you’re going to do in place of the time you spend complaining about not having time to be creative

58. Learn ways to vary someone else’s creativity

59. Start planning now for next year’s World Creativity and Innovation Week

60. Find free creativity tools

61. Find even more creativity tools

That’s my long plane flight list of online and social media resources for motivating people to create. What links or ideas do you want to add to the list? - Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

A Corporate Sociopath and How Dilbert Handles Bad Behavior from One

Mike Brown — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:50:11 +0000

Last summer, a client requested insight into dealing with a sociopath as a boss. In response, I wrote a series of Brainzooming posts on handling bad behavior in an organizational setting, including from a corporate sociopath and horrible boss.

One of the most important pieces of advice for working with a sociopath as a boss is to minimize one-off conversations and avoid decisions during them.

The reason?

Well, quite frankly, a corporate sociopath won’t hesitate to tell you one thing, then say or do something completely different later. If you don’t have a witness or some way to hold the corporate sociopath to the decision, it’s your word against theirs. And in business, at least to my point of view, you NEVER want to be in a situation where it’s you and a horrible boss squaring off on a matter of opinion about what was said or done.

I was intrigued to see this weekend’s Dilbert comic strip depict avoiding one-off conversations with a sociopath in the organization. Even though it’s a comic strip (albeit a dark one), Dilbert plays the situation completely correctly in asking his co-worker, Alice (who has some bad behavior issues of her own), to witness the conversation with Larry the sociopath. When someone else is around, Larry masks his true personality and harmful perspective.

It’s intriguing that the client who inspired the original Brainzooming post has crafted a pretty intriguing scenario to gain distance from the corporate sociopath in the real-life situation. Without providing too many details that could compromise identities, it looks like understanding a weak spot for the boss has allowed our client to create a non-traditional working arrangement. The intent is to minimize the potential negative impact this particular corporate sociopath can create. It’s not a fail-safe approach, but it definitely creates more options for my client to react in a positive and self-protected way. I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out.

If you have a sociopath as a boss, I’ll repeat a discussion thread that appeared in the original comments: get out of the situation if you have ANY opportunity to do so. Life is too short to deal with bad behavior in an organizational setting daily.

If you can’t get out, however, I’d encourage you to go back and look the Brainzooming post and use it to prepare your survival strategy. - Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Making Big Ideas Happen – Strategic Connections at #BigIdeas12

Mike Brown — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:50:58 +0000

What a first day at The Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference (#BigIdeas12)!

I flew in from Kansas City Thursday morning and arrived at Rutgers University just as the first presentation was about to begin. And in keeping with what happens at church if you arrive late, I was placed in the front row, first seat – about 6 feet from the interviewing area. For someone who usually hangs back, it put me right in the heart of great presentations on social networking, disruption (particular of higher education), innovation, and incredible stories of the triumph of the human spirit.

Suffice it to say there will likely be multiple recap posts from The Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference on the Brainzooming blog.

I’m doing an innovation workshop today called “Making Big Ideas Happen.” My charge is to integrate all fifteen #BigIdeas12 presentations from today and make strategic connections to help attendees of The Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference to apply the lessons from an eclectic group of TED-like presentations into their work and personal lives. While I tried to make some guesses upfront about what presenters would talk about relative to innovation and strategic connections, there were definitely late night adjustments to the “Making Big Ideas Happen” session to ensure it reflected all the incredible content from the opening session.

Making Big Ideas Happen Mike Brown – The Brainzooming Group – May 2012 – BigIdeas12

View more presentations from Mike Brown

To support “Making Big Ideas Happen,” here are links to a variety to articles supporting topics we’ll be talking about in today’s workshop. And once again, while this is targeted for workshop attendees, the concepts are of benefit to a much broader audience:

Capturing Big Ideas and Strategic Connections: Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference – This setup post for The Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference lends itself to looking for strategic connections in any situation where you’re processing content

Did You Know Video: Although a few years old at this point, this video gets your attention with a compelling presentation of the demographic and technological realities of modern education.

6 Strategic Success Skills for Today’s Workplace – Recaps some of the educational and attitudinal changes needed to prepare students with the success skills needed to enter today’s workplace.

Brainzooming – First Questions – A short and sweet article on the fundamental strategic question to ask.

Strategic Connections – 3 Tips for Identifying More Opportunities – These 3 steps provide a strong way to look for many more and richer strategic connections.

Extending Brainstorming Ground Rules to Everyday Business Life – There are typical approaches to brainstorming that can benefit coming up with ideas in brainstorming sessions. If you work at it, you can extend this approach to every day work life too.

Look Inside for Distinctive Talents – 5 questions to identify your distinctive talents as a first step to taking better advantage of them to shape your creative pursuits.

Why strategic thinking doesn’t happen, part 3 – Somebody’s missing – A brief case for the value of incorporating individuals with different thinking and implementation styles to get more innovative thinking.

Crowdsourcing Diverse Input – 3 Ways to Make Crowdsourcing Work Harder – Crowdsourcing for input is great, but if you want it to be fruitful for the crowd and the requesting organization, providing appropriate structure is important.

6 Ways Social Networking Platforms Can Boost Creative Thinking - Social networking platforms can be an outstanding source to boost creative thinking – if you use them well.

Benjamin Zander and the Art of Possibilities - A small snippet of the wonderful Benjamin Zander presentation where he lets us in on the Art of Possibilities with the vital admonition: It’s all invented!

A Poor Question for Valentine’s Day: “Can You Change Your Look?” - If you’re always looking at the same situation from the same place, you’ll see the same things. Change how you look at the status quo and find incredible new ideas.

15 Ways Whoever Is Going to Disrupt Your Market Isn’t Like You- Trust me, higher education played the part of a big fire hydrant during day one, and there was a lot of peeing going on around it. The forces that disrupt higher education aren’t going to have pretty quads and columned buildings!

11 Strategic Questions for Disruptive Innovation in Markets - If higher education professionals (or any of us) are up for truly disruptive innovation, here are 1 strategic questions you can use to start identifying opportunities.

We’ve Seen the Enemy & They Don’t Look Anything Like Us - More questions to begin understanding who might be the surprising disruptive forces in a market. One critical element is to generalize and understand what is like your current situation.

Change Your Character - One of the easiest ways to come up with new ideas is to delegate your innovation challenge to someone else. Here’s a creative thinking exercise that does just that.

Creating Memorable Experiences - There are three keys to creating memorable experiences for any event – whether it’s a special event or an event that happens every day.

Creating Intriguing Social Media Content – 3 Fundamental Steps - There are also three keys to identifying and creating intriguing social media content. Get these right, and you’ll have much stronger content.

Social Media Content Ideation: Think – Know – Do - Sure you get to talk about topics of interest to your business. But you only get to talk about them after you’ve thought about what your audience really wants to hear about in their lives. Then you can fit what you think, know, and do to into their expectations.

Five Innovation Lessons from Improv Comedy – by Woody Bendle - A whole lot of improvisation is based on fantastic planning and anticipation. It’s ironic, but it’s the truth.

Creating Change and Change Management – 4 Strategy Options - Some change can be incremental, but often an incremental approach to change won’t do. In those cases, here are three other strategy options to consider for creating change.

Being Perceived as an Innovative Leader - Not all innovative leaders are doing outrageous things (sorry if you think otherwise, but it’s true). Many times, being an innovative leader means innovating processes to allow innovation to happen.

Share the Credit! - Give more credit for successes to others, and don’t take much (or any at all) for yourself.

Strategic Thinking – Do Your Own and Let Us Know What You Think - You don’t have to simply spit out what you hear form business experts. Consider what they have to say, then do your own strategic thinking and share it.

Outsmarting Fears about Your “Inferior” Expertise - Nobody is better at telling your own story than you. So start telling it in multiple channels! - Mike Brown

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

The Brainzooming Group helps make smart organizations more successful by rapidly expanding their strategic options and creating innovative plans they can efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can help you enhance your strategy and implementation efforts.

Continuous Innovation for Higher Education by Woody Bendle

Mike Brown — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:50:18 +0000

Last week, frequent Brainzooming guest blogger Woody Bendle was tweeting some interesting thinking about innovation for higher education. Knowing I’d be at The Big Ideas in Higher Education conference today, I asked Woody to write up his full perspective to share with you (especially if you have children in or on their ways to college) and conference attendees as well.

Continuous Innovation for Higher Education by Woody Bendle

I was on the way into my office last week listening to NPR, and a story discussed the daunting employment and debt challenges of many recent college graduates. The statistics are frankly staggering!

The average total cost (tuition, room, board) for a four year education across all US institutions is in excess of $84,000 according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. This is up 72% over the past 20 years – in real dollars.
60% of college students take on debt in excess, on average, of $20,000 as reported by Rutgers University, Heldrich Center for Workforce Development (pdf link).
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports student loan debt is rapidly approaching $1 Trillion – and is greater than total US credit card debt ($703 Billion) and is more than the total owed on automobile loans ($734 Billion).
The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is 8.9% – higher than the national average according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems states 55% of all freshmen entering a four-year college graduate within six years.

I’m guessing I am not the only person amazed by these statistics. And, I honestly shouldn’t be entirely amazed as I am currently supporting two students who attend public university. But these figures definitely caught my attention!

Well… so what?!

A Process for Continuous Innovation for Higher Education

Photo by: Saimen | Source: photocase dot com

I look at the above data and acknowledge the magnitude of the challenge, yet think to myself, what an incredible opportunity for innovation!

Rather than jumping in and offering a bunch of ideas (opinions) about ways Higher Education institutions might do things differently, it is important to step back and think about this innovation challenge in a more methodical, proven manner.

Innovation isn’t just about coming up with a bunch of new “cool ideas” and tossing the proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. It is commonly accepted that the failure rate of this approach to innovation is typically between 70-90%. Innovation is a process, and following a process, the odds of coming up with and implementing successful innovations can be greatly enhanced.

In a prior Brainzooming article, Continuous Innovation and Continuous Improvement, I introduced a three-stage process for continuous innovation – i³ Continuous Innovation:

1. Identify – Opportunities for new products or services

2. Innovate – And create new products or services

3. Implement – And scale

Let’s focus on the first stage, Identify as we think about Innovation in Higher Education. I’ll leave Stages 2 and 3 – Innovate, and Implement, for a later discussion.

The Identify stage of the i³ Continuous Innovation process is comprised of three sequential steps:

1. Identify the need

2. Come up with ideas

3. Evaluate the ideas

OK, so I’ve already offered up my opinion that there is a likely need for innovating Higher Education, but that isn’t exactly what Identify the need actually means in the i³ Continuous Innovation process.

Identify the Need through “Jobs to Be Done”

The i³ Continuous Innovation process purposefully starts with Identify the need.

One of the most valuable ways I’ve found to think bout this is by leveraging the Jobs to be done approach to innovation. Jobs to be done – first formally introduced by Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor in their book The Innovator’s Solution – is “based on the notion that customers ‘hire’ products to do specific ‘jobs.’ The classic reference for this concept comes from Harvard professor, Theodore Levitt: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” In other words, people don’t need a drill, they need a hole; and the drill is the solution for their need. With this in mind, the questions we need to ask are:

What ‘job’ does a college or university help a student ‘get done?’ (or What is it that a college ultimately helps a student do?)
What ‘job’ is a college being ‘hired’ for?

While Colleges and Universities serve many constituents beyond students and provide exceptionally valuable benefits for many different consumers’ needs, let’s focus on what students need from Colleges and Universities.

Tony Ulwick in What Customers Want provides instructive clarity to the Jobs to be Done approach for innovation. Ulwick states: “To figure out what customers want and to successfully innovate, companies must think about customer requirements very differently. Companies must be able to know, well in advance, what criteria customers are going to use to judge a products value and dutifully design a product that ensures those criteria are met. These criteria must be predictive of success and not lagging indicators.”

Relative to Higher Education within Ulwick’s approach, think of:

Colleges and Universities as the Companies
Students as the Customer
Degrees (or education) as the Products.

In order for Colleges and Universities to develop new highly valued innovative degrees and/or education, they first have to deeply understand the core student need.

Why Do Students Hire Colleges or Universities?

So…why do students ‘hire’ Colleges or Universities and rack up so much debt? Fundamentally, I feel students hire them to obtain skills and capabilities valued by employers, that enable them to either get an intellectually, emotionally and/or financially rewarding job – or start a successful business.

Maybe not every student thinks this way as they are entering or attending college, but I have to believe at some point, this is in fact the desired outcome from attending college and obtaining an education.

With this as our central job statement for Higher Education, we now have a solid foundation to begin the process of thinking about relevant innovation opportunities. First, however, we have to identify all the things that prevent or get in the way of students getting the job done. Examples of this might include:

Not being able to pay for college
Not wanting to rack up a mountain of debt to get a college education
Not knowing what job / degree they really want
Not knowing what college would be ‘right’ for them
Missing classes
Not understanding the professor or TA
Not handing in assignments
Not being sufficiently prepared for a given class
Failing exams
Not having the ability to apply the class knowledge
Not having any relevant work experience
Not having a degree / education that is valued by employers
etc…

Typically, any given core ‘job’ will have between 75-150 challenges or obstacles that prevent the job executor (in this case, a student) from getting it done in a highly satisfactory way. Once all of these are known and prioritized, based on the legitimate opportunity indicated by the market, we can move onto the next step which is:

Come up with Ideas

Let’s assume our Jobs to be done and opportunity evaluation identified two highly significant obstacles for successfully accomplishing the job:

Not having the ability to apply class knowledge
Not having any relevant work experience

By ‘significant’ I mean something deemed very important by a large portion of the market (students) and not presently perceived to be well satisfied by the market (institutions of Higher Education).

Reworded, these become the following ‘needs:’

Be able to apply class knowledge
Have relevant work experience

With these two primary needs identified, we can now focus on coming up with possible ideas for solving these two very specific problems.

There are many approaches for generating ideas for possible solutions; some good, some not so good. Two references I particularly like for approaches to generating ideas are:

In addition, my good friends from The Brainzooming Group have an exceptionally good approach for helping organizations identify game changing innovative ideas and concepts.

Some consistent themes, however, for successful idea generation are:

Start with an objective, or a specific challenge
Utilize diverse perspectives and information, customer, market, industry, technology, etc
Include people in your idea sessions with diverse backgrounds and professions
In the beginning stages, all ideas are good – the more the better
Don’t shut down ideas – let them flow, keep them coming and encourage more
Don’t worry about viability at this point in the process

Thinking back to the needs we are assuming as significant opportunities for innovation in Higher Education, we can come up with dozens of ideas about how Colleges and Universities might uniquely provide solutions for these needs. Examples include:

Integrate some institutions (or departments within some institutions) into corporations or organizations
Incorporate practical, hands-on internships throughout the entire degree program
Require a minimum of a six months internship with an applied, full scale project prior to graduating
Require more “real world” problem solving into the curriculum
Have Colleges and Universities function similarly to the farm leagues in baseball
Structure collections of courses within and across semesters designed to support teams of students working on collaborative projects with substantial goals
Organize academics more like college sports with regular academic competitions and championships
No up front tuition – have tuition be a small fixed proportion of a student’s post-college salary or income – for a set period of time (i.e., 20 years)
etc…

Evaluate the Ideas

You could likely have a hundred ideas ranging from ridiculous and naïve to very complicated and expensive, to simple and elegant. The objective here is to group all ideas into themes and begin determining which ideas to discard and which ideas to retain for consideration. A method I particularly like for this is NABR (pronounced, neighbor); which stands for Needs, Approach, Benefits, Risks. NABR is my twist on the NABC (Needs, Approach, Benefits, Competition) approach introduced by Curtis Carlson and William Wilmot in their 2006 book Innovation. NABR is an effective tool for quickly filtering ideas at a 30,000 foot level plus a solid framework for developing a full business case.

In terms of a high-level evaluation, I’ve found it useful to utilize the following NABR assessment template.

At this point in the innovation process, we’re only trying to determine which one or two ideas are worth moving forward to the next stage of the i³ Continuous Innovation process, which is Innovate.

We have not performed a rigorous business case analysis because we don’t even have a fully thought out solution to address the need. But, from diligently following the three steps of the Identify stage of the i³ Continuous Innovation process, we have confidence the proposed idea for innovating Higher Education will:

Address a legitimate need in the marketplace;
Which is currently perceived to be unmet or underserved; and
We are uniquely positioned to deliver a valuable solution to the market.

While I willingly admit I currently do not have the answers for what innovations might be most wanted or needed in Higher Education, I will enthusiastically be among the first for offer assistance should I receive a call from Education Secretary Duncan. I’m truly passionate about both Innovation and Education and feel the application of the i³ Continuous Innovation process could help change the Higher Education game in extraordinary ways. - Woody Bendle

Download the free ebook, “Taking the NO Out of InNOvation” to help you generate fantastic creative ideas! For an organizational creativity boost, contact The Brainzooming Group to help your team be more successful by rapidly expanding strategic options and creating innovative plans to efficiently implement. Email us at info@brainzooming.com or call us at 816-509-5320 to learn how we can deliver these benefits for you.

C-Level Executives and Ethical Missteps – W W WYTYATHTYCEO D?

Mike Brown — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:50:43 +0000

Photo by: IS2 | Source: photocase.com

Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal included multiple stories on recently ousted C-Level executives whose ethical missteps and poor judgment led to their departures:

And those were simply the highest profile stories about ousted C-level executives. There were others where it seems as if C-level executives and their egos have (or are in the midst of) leading to significant business disruptions.

Contrast these stories of C-level executives, ethical missteps, and poor judgment with a Saturday story, also in the Wall Street Journal, about a research study from Ontario’s Queens University which claims that individuals (okay, “students” – it was one of those studies) are much more successful at forsaking their personal desires when God was on their minds. When certain students were exposed to expressions referencing God, they demonstrated a greater ability to endure discomfort and forsake instant gratification. The results held whether the students were spiritual or professed agnostics or atheists.

The article from Jonah Lehrer (who does seem to be everywhere these days), closes by reporting how scientists are a bit stymied to explain the results. One suggestion was that thinking about God replenishes “psychological nutrients” similar to how Gatorade helps an athlete perform better. A rabbi compared God to the police car watching us which makes us drive more slowly. (I think maybe we’re hard-wired toward the right behaviors no matter how much we try and fight against it.)

The juxtaposition of these stories made me recall a slide in a spirituality presentation I give that includes just the letters:

W

WYTYATHTYCEO

D?

You may ask what in the world these letters represent. The answer: What Would Whoever You Think You Answer to Higher than Your CEO Do?

The slide in the spirituality presentation is a reminder you can’t expect to look to a company’s top leadership as a moral compass. It’s too easy for them (or any of us for that matter) to fool ourselves into thinking that when no one is looking, a lot of things we should know better are wrong all of a sudden can be rationalized into being okay. You have to look higher for a moral compass to guide your actions. I can’t presume who or what it is for you, but the Queen’s University study seems to confirm the benefit of doing that.

So what’s the take-away on this story about C-level executives, ethical missteps, and poor judgment?

When deciding how you’ll conduct yourself, you could benefit from taking even a brief moment to ask: W W WYTYATHTYCEO D?

And if that question doesn’t fit with your belief structure, you’d still better at least ask what you’d do if everyone were watching you.

Because in an era of rampant social networking, an increasingly large contingent of social media journalists, and heightened expectations for authenticity and transparency, everybody really could be watching us when we have opportunities to make ethical missteps whether we’re C-level executives or not. – Mike Brown

If you’d like to add an interactive, educationally-stimulating presentation on strategy, innovation, branding, social media or a variety of other topics to your event, Mike Brown is the answer. Emailus at info@brainzooming.com or call 816-509-5320 to learn how Mike can get your audience members Brainzooming!

The Brainzooming Group | Strategy Consulting and Strategic Planning

Fast Company – Creative Thinking Ideas from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

Disruptive and Constraint-Based Thinking

Creative Thinking Perspectives

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

Fast Company – Creative Strategy Lessons from the 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012

Creative Strategy Lessons from Fast Company – The 100 Most Creative People in Business 2012 List

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

Visual Thinking Skills – Getting Them in Shape with Letters and Shapes

Visual Thinking Resources

Getting Over the “I Can’t Draw” Visual Thinking Skills Hurdle

It’s All about Shapes

The Missing Piece for Visual Thinking

Related Brainzooming Posts

Using Social Media: 11 Things Every Internet Guru Needs You To Believe

Related Brainzooming Posts

Making Big Ideas Happen – 9 Ways to Address Innovation Fears

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

61 Online and Social Media Resources for Motivating People to Create

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

A Corporate Sociopath and How Dilbert Handles Bad Behavior from One

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

Making Big Ideas Happen – Strategic Connections at #BigIdeas12

Subscribe for Free to the Brainzooming blog email updates.

Related Brainzooming Posts

Continuous Innovation for Higher Education by Woody Bendle

Continuous Innovation for Higher Education by Woody Bendle

A Process for Continuous Innovation for Higher Education

Identify the Need through “Jobs to Be Done”

Why Do Students Hire Colleges or Universities?

Come up with Ideas

Evaluate the Ideas

Related Brainzooming Posts

C-Level Executives and Ethical Missteps – W W WYTYATHTYCEO D?

W

W

WYTYATHTYCEO

D?

So what’s the take-away on this story about C-level executives, ethical missteps, and poor judgment?

Related Brainzooming Posts