You see, I’m one of those people who eyeballs his emails if he happens to wake up in the middle of the night (before heading off to parts unknown, one of my two vacationing colleagues scolded me – and rightfully so – when I let it slip that I had taken one of these insomniac moments to reply to a late night note from a client). Who always needs to know where the hotel business center is, even if I’m not at the hotel on business. Who fakes bathroom breaks just to catch up on unanswered texts or scan my tweetstream. Who might occasionally read the dinner menu by the iPhone’s eerie glow. Don’t judge me — you know you do it too.

In fact, for some of you, these behaviors may seem perfectly normal signs of a proper “work-life blend” — the seamless work-anywhere-work-anytime state described by my friend C.C. Chapman in a recent post that takes on the old fashioned notion of work-life balance. And pokes holes in the notion of easy compartmentalization that assigns business cards and balance sheets to the work bucket, but bride and babies to a totally separate life. C.C. is correct, of course, that we are living in a time when easy-on-easy-off can only be described as quaint. But if you’re inclined to interpret this as blanket permission remain plugged-in even when you have a chance to unplug, you’re missing the point.

You see: He’s even more correct when he writes, “We have the technology to allow us to work from anywhere and at any time, but this doesn’t mean you should be a slave to electronics. Rather, remember that you are in control of when you choose to use the tools… No one else is going to set your priorities…It does not require us to spend more hours in the office than is necessary. No one says that we must check our email every five minutes or that we can’t choose to get a little work done over breakfast.”

Which brings me back to my colleagues and their decisions to take some time and turn off technology. I think we’d all agree that technology provides plenty of benefits but as one Harvard Business Review blogger wrote, tech’s best feature just might be the off switch. In a world where we’re constantly connected; always available; always anticipating the next text or tweet; and prone to viewing just about every life experience through the smartphone lens, it’s important that we give ourselves permission to be “present, focused, and in the moment.”

Not possible, you say! People rely on me. My business simply won’t allow it. Or forget possible, it’s not even desirable. Staying connected overnight, over the weekend, or on vacation prevents me from stressing out about what’s not getting done while I’m away from my desk. In fact, I love my work so much that I don’t need a break — work is its own reward. I enjoy my life fully every day so who needs a holiday?

Sound familiar?

And this time around, I’m not judging. I’ve said (or at least thought) those things too. But when two colleagues have announced that they’ll be out, about and inaccessible at the same time, I’ve come to recognize those mindsets for what they are. Total B.S.

So if you’re at all inclined to break the cycle — but not at all inclined to blow up your business in the process — here are just three simple tips for making your time away from technology work not only for you but for everyone who counts on you.

• Communicate Clearly, Early and Often. In the three weeks leading up to his three week vacation, one of my colleagues mentioned his intention to unplug in no fewer than four conversations, going so far as to remind me of the exact start and end dates of his trip, and suggest that I put his vacation on my calendar to be sure I didn’t forget (I actually did this, after his second suggestion). He complemented all of this with a concise email laying out the details, setting my expectations (essentially, that I should not expect to get hold of him while he is unplugged), and letting me know how I’d be taken care of in his absence. Overkill? Maybe — until you think about the last time a co-worker, colleague or client went missing with little more than an out-of-office autoresponder you didn’t see until they were already gone fishin’ and you were up a creek without a paddle.

• Have a Back Up Plan (That Doesn’t Include You.) One colleague left me with the name of not one but three individuals who will make themselves available in the event anything urgent arises while he is away. Each has a clearly defined role (e.g., call this one to place an order, that one for complex client-related questions, the other if you can’t get the product to work). For my other colleague, I am the back-up plan — covering for him and completing a joint project while he’s away. Neither suggested that they’d have their trusty smartphone at their side in the event I need to reach them, neither offered to dial in for seemingly critical conference calls, neither hinted that they would check email periodically and respond to urgent messages in a timely manner. And here’s the kicker — both of these colleagues are solo entrepreneurs. If they can trust others to not blow up their businesses, what’s your excuse? What’s mine?

• Commit to Yourself. When your logic allows you to power down just because it will make your family or fellow travelers happy, you might be making a commitment to others but you’re probably not making a commitment to yourself. And when you “cheat” by peeking at emails under the table or perusing your high school friends’ Facebook pages while your spouse is in the shower or snoring beside you, you’re only cheating yourself. You’re jeopardizing a rare (for many of us) opportunity to recharge, to live in the now, to experience the world around you without distraction, to embrace mindfulness. And you’re sacrificing the rush you get when — powering back up at the end of a well-deserved and much needed break — you discover the promise of technology with fresh eyes. As Webby Awards founder and “Connected” filmmaker Tiffany Shlain (hardly a luddite) wrote on the HBR blog, when she and her husband return from even a one-day tech sabbatical, “we can’t wait to get back online. We’re hungry for connection. We appreciate technology all over again. We marvel anew at our ability to put every thought and emotion into action by clicking, calling, and linking.”

This summer, I won’t be sending so many of those middle-of-the-night email responses. I might not check Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn every five minutes. I may even turn my phone off on the weekend now and then. I’ll certainly make time for a technology-free vacation — even if it’s only a long weekend away from the fray. I’ll be sure to let everyone I work with know my plans well in advance, assure them they’ll be in good hands when I’m gone, and refuse to let myself off the hook (or on the web) once I’ve made the commitment to go off the grid. And my work will be better for it.

How about you? Leave a comment, add a tip, share this post with your friends who need it most. Unless you’re on vacation. In which case you shouldn’t be reading this at all.

If there’s a poster child for innovation, it’s most likely Thomas Edison. And if there’s a slogan scrawled across his poster, it’s probably his often-cited quote, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”, which is generally believed to relate to his work on the light bulb.

If you’re looking for a nicely packaged call for the power of perseverance, the rewards received for taking risks, or the benefits of having a go-get-’em can-do attitude you really can’t do much better than these words of wisdom from the man who gave the world the light bulb, the telegraph, the phonograph and motion pictures. It’s little wonder that innovation pundits love to trot out this oldie but goodie to inspire business leaders to lean further into the future, take chances, accommodate failure, and adopt an innovation mindset.

Granted Edison may never have actually said these words (although generally attributed to the inventor, they’ve never been confirmed as his own). For that matter — despite what many believe — he didn’t really invent the light bulb, arguably the object most often associated with his name and the icon that has become the de facto visual shorthand for “great idea”, but an invention that predates his work to improve upon it by roughly 50 years. So not to take anything away from the man (his accomplishments are many), but the 10,000 ways that won’t work story is a myth. An innovation creation myth of sorts, from which the permission to innovate springs forth.

But neither a questionable quote nor a faulty fact point to the real issue here. You see, as inspirational as it may seem, the 10,000 ways quote doesn’t actually provide a formula for successful innovation (sorry experts!). By any measure, no matter what the end result, 10,000 tries for every every successful completion make for a very poor track record. 10,000 to 1 is a ratio that favors quantity over quality, and suggests that the answer lies in generating more ideas when in reality it lies in generating good ideas. More and good are not mutually exclusive of course, but imagine the resources a 10,000 idea torrent would consume in your own business. And imagine how long it could take to generate, filter and then find the (arguably) few ideas even worth testing — even with an open innovation model in which the ideas may come fast and furious, the follow up effort of giving each idea the appropriate level of consideration is hardly a trivial task. Maybe businesses had the luxury of time back around the turn of the last century, but a dozen years into this century the frenzied pace of change means that time is of the essence. Innovators need fast. Innovators need efficient. Innovators need to find the one thing that works without having to wade through the 10,000 that won’t.

So 10,000 ways is a myth that might encourage an otherwise risk adverse leader to consider innovation — but it’s not one that serves today’s companies particularly well. Oh well…

That said, this type of myth may actually be the lesser of two evils. At a bare minimum, the 10,000 ways quote speaks to the importance of trying again and again, until you ultimately break through the roadblock that sits between you and your goal. It’s benign compared to the many innovation myths that have the exact opposite effect: The effect of holding businesses back — misconceptions about what innovation is, where it sits in an organization, how it gets done, and what it’s meant to accomplish. For the remainder of this post, I’d like to run down some of these myths — the innovation roadblocks — and bust them one by one.

6 Innovation Roadblocks Worth Busting Through

Myth #1: Innovation Is Just Ideas. Edisonian math aside, ideas are indeed important to innovation — what’s less clear is whether your innovation effort will require three, 300 or 30,000 ideas in order to get to a single solution. They key word there is solution. Innovation isn’t about generating ideas — it is about finding solutions. To create value, innovation must focus on solving a clearly defined challenge (for the company or, even better, for its customers) through applied creativity, a clear path to implementation, and an eye on accountability. If your company’s attempts at innovation amount to little more than shiny object chasing and trivial distractions from the matter at hand, it’s not because your ideas aren’t any good (they may be, they may not be). It’s because you haven’t kept your purpose in mind.

Myth #2: Innovation Can Be Handled as an Event. When companies confuse ideas with innovation, they tend to rely too heavily on event-based innovation exercises like brainstorming sessions or executive off-sites. Sure, they can be fun, the participants leave jazzed, and the organizers feel like they’ve amassed a handful of new ideas. But within a day or two, everyone goes back to business as usual. Plenty ventured, nothing gained. Why? Because real results require an always-on approach, sustainable processes, and platforms that empower your people (and in the social era, your customers and partners) to function as a well-tuned innovation capability. (More thinking on innovation capabilities here.)

Myth #3: R&D Owns Innovation. R&D absolutely plays a key role in product innovation, but even on that front it can be a mistake for the customer-facing functions in an organization (like marketing, sales and customer support, at the very least) to relinquish their own roles in making sure innovation is market-focused. But that’s not the only reason to debunk the notion of R&D-only innovation. Done right, innovation creates competitive advantage by differentiating your business across all core areas — from strategy, sales and customer service, to people, product and process (not to mention everything in between). I can’t think of many R&D organizations that would consider improving marketing efficacy by employing new social or mobile strategies, increasing company cash flow by adopting an untried approach to collections, or increasing knowledge sharing and productivity by fostering a more collaborative mindset to be among their top priorities. In fact, I can think of exactly zero R&D departments where this would be the case. So who really owns innovation? Everybody in the organization — at least as it pertains to delivering excellence in their own areas of subject matter expertise. But even better, beyond their own areas of subject matter expertise. Who’s to say an accounting clerk might not have a creative solution to a supply chain problem or branding challenge?

Myth #4: Innovation Is All iPhones. This is my shorthand for a common innovation objection — one that is closely related to the R&D argument just above, and hinges upon the notions that all innovation is radical or disruptive, and that all innovation aims to bring bold new products into the world. A couple of years back, I was doing some work with the innovation lead at a large consumer packaged goods company. In his role, he considered it his job to bring to life not only innovations that were new to the world or even new to his category, but also those that were simply new to his company. Good thinking. No matter what business you’re in, success requires you to manage a diverse portfolio of radical, substantial and incremental innovations that together strike the right balance between risks and rewards. In fact, it can often be the incremental, bread-and-butter changes that add up to lasting value. Remember — Edison didn’t invent the light bulb; he improved on it. Yet a century later, his is the name we most closely associate with our bright present.

Taking things one step further (Myth #4.5 perhaps), it might even be a mistake to think of new products as core to innovation (whether radical, substantial or incremental) at all. Today, businesses are more likely to have greater impact by focusing their efforts on creating new value through experiences (products + services + participation) or new business models, even where the product itself is essentially unchanged. For example, Zipcar didn’t change the car but they did introduce a new model by which urban dwellers can rent it; Netflix didn’t reinvent the DVD but they did change the model by which movie fans rent those. Business Model is the new iPhone — and your company or industry may not be aching for its next iPhone-caliber product innovation, but its basic business model might benefit from some shaking up (from the inside out).

Myth #5: Innovation Is Out of Reach. This one comes in a variety of forms but the two objections I hear most often boil down to my industry isn’t interesting enough and but I’m not a visionary. Neither holds water, in my opinion. One of Clayton Christensen’s most popular examples of disruption pits upstart, low-end rebar manufacturers against established, high-end sheet metal fabricators. I’m sure the steel industry is fascinating to some, but it’s hardly the stuff of next generation entrepreneurial day dreams. No business is so boring as to be insusceptible to change. Then we have the popular mythology that surrounds modern day Edisons like Steve Jobs — here was a man who foresaw the future not just once but several times over, remaking industries as diverse as home computing, entertainment and telecommunications. How can anyone compare, particularly if she’s a merely mortal accountant, attorney, corporate program manager, or marketing strategist? Here’s how… Innovation doesn’t require you to understand the future, so much as it requires you to understand your customers’ needs. I know Jobs was famous for disregarding customer needs in favor of creating new-to-the-world products that would ultimately create unrealized customer demand. Fantastic, but for most of us, defining more effective or more efficient ways to meeting known or clearly emerging customer demands — whether your customers are external to your business or internal to it, as they may be for those who work in finance, corporate communications, project management or other ostensibly meat-and-potatoes functions — lies at the heart of sustained, always-on innovation. In short, if you can conceive of a better way to do even just one small aspect of your job, and have just enough drive to do something about it, you are playing a role in business innovation. It may not be iTunes, iPhone or iPad sexy, but it is just as vital to the ongoing success of your company.

Myth #6: Innovation Is Optional. In today’s business environment, it’s difficult enough to sustain momentum, all-consuming just to maintain the status quo. Can we really afford to invent the future when there’s so much to get done just to keep pace with the present? The truth is, you can’t afford not to. For businesses — and business people — who believe that innovation is a nice to have more than a must have, a flavor of the month more than a nourishing staple of their diet, this myth is the most damaging of all. It’s the one that gives permission to get by with an occasional and ineffective check-the-box-for-innovation brainstorm, to abdicate responsibility to the guys in the goggles, to place the promise of innovation just out of reach. It’s the one that causes companies to fall behind, fall out of favor, and fall apart in the face of disruption. Disruption is only disruption when it happens to you from outside your organization and beyond your control. Otherwise, it’s transformation — and innovation is the engine for positive transformation. It is essential. Just as Peter Drucker (or Milan Kundera, or maybe both — yet another disputed quote) contends that innovation is one of only two basic functions of a business, former Proctor & Gamble chairman A.G. Lafley has said, “Innovation is the central job of every leader — business unit managers, functional leaders, and the CEO.” Now that’s a mandate worth repeating 10,000 or so times over.

Now, while I don’t suppose there are 9,994 additional roadblocks — or harmful myths — that throw businesses off track when it comes to innovation, I do expect there are more than the simple six I’ve laid out here.

So this is where you come in. What other myths, misconceptions or roadblocks do you see holding companies back when it comes to turning innovation into a competitive advantage?

In the well-known race scene in Lewis Carroll’s classic Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”

Given the pace and pervasiveness of change happening everywhere around us — in technology, in culture, in business, in consumer behaviors and expectations, in media and more — I’d imagine that many marketers feel like they’re racing alongside the Red Queen in Looking-Glass world. Writing and rewriting marketing plans in a constant state of flux. Favoring near term wins over long term value. Adopting agile approaches from IT brethren. Darting from shiny object to shiny object. Whipping around flavor-of-the-moment blind spots only to stumble over competitors also turning the same corner. Jumping through hoops thrown across their paths by customers and by their own C-suite executives. Busy busy busy. It’s exhausting work and ultimately gets you nowhere. Fast.

I’m late! I’m late! For a very important date! You chase the White Rabbit and then — fwoop! — just like that, you’re tumbling head-over-heels down a very dark hole. (Yes, I know — that’s the other Alice book. Work with me, people.)

You could hardly be blamed for feeling a bit like a befuddled Alice who, having grown up in a world where doing “all the running you can do” generally gets you “to somewhere else,” can’t quite wrap her mind around this paradox. You’re doing all the things you’ve been told to do — social and mobile, video and apps, deals and gamification, this and that — but still you find yourself more or less exactly where you started. At the starting block and on par with just about everyone else. Panting from exertion as you stare quizzically at the Red Queen.

If an incident from literature frames the challenge, a theory from the world of evolutionary biology — inspired by the very same race scene, of course — may help shed some light on why it is a challenge. Dubbed the Red Queen’s Hypothesis or Red Queen Effect (those evolutionary biologists are a clever lot), this theory essentially states that “continuing adaptation is needed in order for a species to maintain its relative fitness amongst the systems being co-evolved with.”

Ah. Now We’re Getting Somewhere (wink)

Arguably, evolution in biological systems moves at a relative snail’s pace when benchmarked against the rate of today’s business revolution. Yet, in biology it is a species’ inability to adapt alongside co-evolving systems that drives those species’ to and — unless something changes — beyond the point of extinction. Clearly, failure to adapt to today’s evolving business environment will have (and indeed has had for businesses as diverse as Blockbuster and bailed-out automakers) the same effect.

But now, consider the fact that the forces shaping our business environment don’t roll forward at a slow, methodical crawl but sprint forward at breakneck speed, lurch side-to-side, occasionally double back then retake the lead again from behind. If you’re standing still, you’re falling behind. If you’re keeping pace, you’re still falling behind. You might survive but you will not thrive.

And Along Comes Agility

The agile movement got its start in the world of technology, where some developers shifted to a rough-and-ready continuous improvement process that favors frequent small changes over the more traditional, cumbersome waterfall process made up of phase after lengthy phase of discovery, documentation, design, coding, testing, and deployment just to get to a single release. More recently, some marketers have embraced a similar shift. As Mike Moran describes in a recent Biznology column, marketing has itself become more of a continuous improvement process that “is built around experimentation — try small cheap ideas and see if they work, rather that planning big expensive campaigns without knowing how successful they will be.” That sounds an awful lot like one of the theses I laid out in microMARKETING (which I like to think of as Through the Looking-Glass for big brands) a couple of years back, so you’d think I’d be one of agile marketing’s loudest advocates.

But here’s the rub…

Agility may bring speed, flexibility, and nimbleness. But by definition, agility is rooted in reaction. Agility is “the ability… to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”, “a rapid… change of velocity or direction in response to a stimulus”, “the capability of rapidly and efficiently adapting to changes.” This is not a bad thing. Rapid response to change — keeping pace with the evolution of the systems that you’re co-evolving with (like media, the economy, the consumer population if you are of the marketer species) — is better than a sluggish response, and certainly far better than no response at all. Better than facing change with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror and one foot riding the brake. Proactive beats reactive. If your choice lies between doing what you should have done yesterday and doing everything you could be doing today, I’d like to think the decision is obvious and agile marketing is an engine for evolution.

That said: While it might allow you to be the ball (Danny), it probably won’t put you ahead of the ball. It might set you off running but, just like Alice in the Red Queen’s Race (full circle, people), doing all the running you can do just to keep pace isn’t the same as getting ahead. And in the end, you’ll probably find yourself in the same relative position. A position of parity.

There is no advantage in just keeping up.

Beyond Marketing Agility (or Outpacing the Red Queen)

Obviously, I’m not outright against the concept of agile marketing — and that isn’t really the point of this post anyway. But I do support the notion that the marketers that will thrive, truly move forward, get ahead of the pack are those that step beyond the simple state of response to change, and step into a position of leading change. This begs the obvious question: How does a marketer get there?

For an answer, let’s revisit Looking-Glass land. What was the Red Queen’s advice to Alice as the two raced their way to a standstill? She said, “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” Taken literally, that order is so tall as to be unscalable. Run twice as fast? We already are! This year, we’re running at least twice as fast as we did last year, just to keep up. Next year, it’s conceivable that we’ll run twice as fast as we do this year, and still just keep up with constantly shifting market conditions. And if it turns out we’re running in the wrong direction — if we’re chasing White Rabbits shiny objects, there’s a good chance we are — we might get somewhere else but it’s not likely to be a place we’d want to be.

But what if instead of running twice as fast, we were to think twice as far ahead? What if rather than being first to react to a sudden shift in present market conditions, we were first to anticipate the future state of markets? (Trade in our sneakers for a time machine, so to speak.) What if instead of instead of settling for agility, marketers were anticipatory?

Rather than fret over this approach or that for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter; the collapse of Zynga or the triumphant return of MySpace; whether Pinterest or Instagram is right for your brand; or the relative merits of infographics vs memes – you might instead focus on big picture considerations with the potential for lasting business impact. See the challenges that your business — or even better, your consumers — will face in the future, so that you can solve them before they happen. See the opportunities that tomorrow’s markets will present then do the things necessary to turn those opportunities into realities.

Make the future happen for you, rather than wait for it to happen to you.

You may need to place some bets, take some risks. But the future isn’t as unknowable as it seems. Here are just a few things that we already know to be true:

• The world’s population is aging as the Boomers head toward their golden years.
• Digital natives will continue to enter the workforce and consumer adulthood, bringing with them clearly carved preferences and expectations for connected experiences.
• Emerging economies in India, China and Russia will continue their march toward consumer culture and their demand for more and more consumer goods.
• Technological advancement will continue to accelerate, along the way making technology smaller, more powerful, and ultimately so pervasive as to be invisible.

Formulate a clear vision for how your business will anticipate these trends (and others). What will your product portfolio include? What will your distribution strategies be? What will your business models look like? How will you sustain meaningful relationships with consumers who will undoubtedly be savvier and more skeptical, more time-starved and attention-strapped than they are today?

This isn’t agile thinking (although agility may play its part). This is anticipatory thinking, backed up with future-forward doing that promises to drive the corporate growth agenda. It gives you a far better answer than the Red Queen could. You’re running a marathon rather than a sprint. You don’t need to run twice as fast (and certainly won’t need to do so much reactive running around) to take yourself, your brand and your business to someplace new.

So tell me. Am I onto something or am I as mad as a Hatter?

This got me thinking about the ways in which our experiences — and more broadly our closely held points of view — can cause us to presume a solution before we’ve considered the options, to assume an outlook before taking in a variety of views, to miss the opportunities that might present themselves if we were to look at the obvious in an entirely new way. Clearly, we have lots to lose when we fail to consider perspectives that fail to jive with out own.

But the most interesting part of this, to me, is that it’s not just the defenders of the tried-and-true who are guilty of putting on blinders. Champions of change are just as likely to introduce their own biases in a way that causes them to misread the cues.

In other words…

Sometimes We’re Blinded By Old World Biases

I assume you’re familiar with the tale of the Trojan Horse, and have most likely heard the term Trojan Horse used in business contexts to signify (among other things) a seemingly good deal that the customer can’t refuse but that has the deliberate effect of locking the customer into future bigger ticket purchases. A Trojan Horse is effective in achieving its objective because it is (or seems) bold, audacious and big (big enough to hide an army of men!); which also means it can be complex to create, timely to build, and difficult to pull off. There’s no arguing the original Trojan Horse was effective in achieving its objective. Big is indeed better! But in reading innovation expert Harold Jarche’s blog, I came across the contrarian concept of trojan mice. Trojan mice “are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojan mice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.” Is it necessary to change the game? Or can you accomplish more by simply tweaking a few of the rules by which you play? Are you more likely to bet on one big thing? Or would you be better off experimenting with lots and lots of small things?

I’m mid-way through Nilofer Merchant’s 11 Rules for the Creating Value in the Social Era. The book mines many of the usual “might is no longer necessarily right” veins that I did in microMARKETING but with a broader focus on how social transforms all of business. In it, she argues — correctly, of course — that it’s no longer a good thing to be your industry’s powerful but lumbering 800-pound gorilla when the new environment favors the fleet agility and lock-step coordination of 800 running gazelles. It’s an evocative analogy. And one that should cause any business leader to question whether a quest for scale is likely to lead them to the Holy Grail.

But Other Times We’re Blinded By the Shock of the New

Maybe the so-called small things are actually masking something bigger indeed. Take the role technology has played in media fragmentation. The web has brought with it a massive proliferation of content choices, social has accelerated that shift exponentially by putting the power of content creation into the hands of individuals, and hyper-connectivity is fueling everything from television time-shifting to outright cord-cutting. With a few rare exceptions — the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the Academy Awards, and the like — we have seen the demise of the massive scale communal experience. And with it, the old school viability of mass marketing. And yet, when Felix Baumgartner set out to break multiple world records in his daring Red Bull Stratos mission, more than 8 million people around the world watched live on YouTube. Yes. One of the new media upstarts responsible for fragmenting the media marketplace has now become a venue for experiencing live events together and at scale. Oh, and a forum for next generation, highly experiential, fully participatory brand promotions. So are we looking as massive disruption? Or are we simply remaking mass media (and mass marketing) all over again?

Sometimes we’re so enamored of the new that we fail to see that the things we view as sudden and disruptive have actually been years — or even decades — in the making. Or make the mistake of thinking that innovation in the post-information age is de facto driven by technology, when (as Pearlfisher’s Johnathan Ford argues in this video to view) true impact may have little to do with IT. What if everything we look upon as disruptive and new were in fact older than we’d care to admit? That insight alone might put innovation in a very different perspective. For every business leader too wrapped up in the past to take the risks associated with trying something new, there’s another who is so fixated on the future that he or she is bound to overlook new-found value in things we have written off as yesterday’s news.

The Power of Seeing the World With Both Eyes Open

I appreciate that I’ve bounced around quite a bit in my examples above. I am well aware (I’m sure you’ve noticed it too) that I seem to contradict myself in a couple of places — is scale good or is scale bad? Or can it be both depending on how you view it? All deliberate and all in keeping with my point. If we want to see the path clearly, we need to view it with both eyes open. More than that, we need to view it from different perspectives, just as seeing a road at street level and seeing that same road shown in wide-angle from above will yield not only different views but also different, complementary sets of information.

If you’re bound by experience (mixed metaphor warning), imagine what it might be like if you threw out the old playbook, applied some new rules to the game, or outright considered what game you could be playing if you cleared the field and started over again from scratch. If you’re oriented toward change to begin with, consider the treasures that might be found in the past (or even the present) – not simply the lessons learned or the best practices proven, but the real gems that can be unearthed and polished into something truly valuable when applied to the challenges your business faces today (even if they amounted to little more than coal or fool’s gold in the past).

In the end, if you know you’re only seeing some of all there is to see, you’ll end up seeking out more. And in seeking out more, you’re bound to bring both your challenges and your solutions into sharper focus.

Help me bring my vision into sharper focus. How do you balance hindsight and vision to keep your eyes on the prize?

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.”

– Peter Drucker

It should come as no shock that marketers love talking about innovation. And you’d think that if — as Drucker once said — marketing and innovation are the only two basic functions of the enterprise, then the marketers who can crack the code on innovation, bringing the two together into a single, sublime discipline, would be bathing in tubs full of hundred dollar bills. But somehow, most marketing innovations amount to little more than shiny object chasing; one-off gimmicks followed by second, third and fourth rate rip-offs; or promotional razzle dazzle that pays little attention to product, pricing or place. If you’ve spent more than a wee bit of time in this business (brand-side or agency, it doesn’t matter) you’ve heard the lip service, maybe even lipped it yourself, then wondered why your big innovative idea didn’t actually do much to drive business impact.

The problem, in my opinion, might be rooted in a shoddy definition of marketing innovation. A definition that is more likely to name check channels, apps or technologies than it is to cut to the chase. True marketing innovation better addresses customer needs, opens up new markets, or newly positions a firm’s product on the market, with the objective of increasing the firm’s sales. Period. This may not be an especially sexy POV, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to unearth something new to the world, or even new to your category. You just need to do something new for you.

And let’s be honest — in an age when the rules of marketing (and business) change almost daily, marketing innovation just might be (is?) the main engine for business growth. It should be a component of every plan you pen and every program you put in the market. Because, as they say, “If you’re standing still, you’re moving backwards.”

But that means innovation has to happen more than once in a blue moon. And when it does happen and it actually works, you need to know how to repeat your success over and over and over again — not by aping yourself but by applying lessons learned and principles proven. For this to happen, innovation can’t be an event; it must be always-on. It can’t be happenstance; it must be a core capability of your organization.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while and I’ve developed a simple — but I hope elegant, in a mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive kinda way — framework for making innovation a core capability. My point of reference may be marketing, but I’d say my framework applies no matter when, how or where you hope to establish a truly sustainable innovation capability in your organization.

And so — because as anyone who has worked with me knows, I do love me some alliteration — let’s take a look at The 6P Model for Making Innovation a Core Capability.

That sure is a pretty picture, but let’s unpack it a little and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Align Innovation With Your Business Strategy

Purpose: Innovation of any kind — not least of all marketing innovation — must (not should and certainly not could) be purpose-driven. In other words, it must be fully aligned with your organization’s overarching marketing strategy and its foundational business strategy. This sounds obvious, but I’ve worked with enough big brands and inside enough agencies to know that — more often then not — this clear sense of strategic purpose is the exception more often than it is the rule. We have a name for innovation for innovation’s sake — we call that the shiny object syndrome. And while a quick, creative approach to some new new thing can sometimes pay-off, the “once is witty, twice is shitty” principle comes on fast, and you’re rarely left with a properly grounded, repeatable process for making magic time and time again.

Purpose means starting with why  — why must we innovate in the first place. It means considering what — what do we hope to achieve through innovation. It then uses your overarching corporate strategy as a no-nonsense filter to turn innovation into a how — how will innovation in this area empower us to more effectively deliver upon our top priorities; whether those priorities are revenue generation, top notch service delivery, cost savings, vertical or horizontal expansion, or just about anything else that differentiates your company from its competitors.

Are you grounding your call for innovation with a clear sense of purpose?

Build an Innovation Program of Substance

This is where the rubber hits the road, as an organization puts in place all the necessary elements to deliver on its innovation purpose (or purpose-driven strategy, if you will). Here lies the difference between talking a good game and actually doing the work. Truly sustainable, always-on marketing innovation isn’t an event — it’s not the stray brainstorm the account director or brand manager organizes when it’s time to come up with something new and different. And it also isn’t rampant, unfettered “think outside the box” creativity. It needs to be (or if it isn’t today: become) an organizational capability — just like account management, media planning, art direction, or even accounting. And like any core capabilities, you’ll need the right resources in place. And that’s when we come to People, Process, Platforms, and (we’re working in the social era, after all) Partners.

People: You’ve already got people, right? But have you got the right people? If you’re like many companies I’ve worked with over the years, you probably have senior leaders on the wrong side of the digital divide (that’s less about age and more about mindset btw), too vested in the status quo, too resistant to change (or scared of the repercussion), or too beholden to this quarter’s P&L. You probably have staffers too tapped with their current workload, who mean well but lack the charter to drive change from within and the authority to make it happen, or might be disengaged or disenfranchised (it’s an epidemic). All of that said, these people may be very good at what they do and incredibly valuable to the company. But they’re not the right people to drive an innovation effort.

This doesn’t mean you need to restock your team or your company with Steve Jobsian innovation super-humans. iPhone-caliber marketplace disruption is only one flavor of innovation, and it may or may not be what your business needs — and you certainly don’t need, and probably can’t withstand daily disruption anyway. It also doesn’t mean you need a wonk with a Monocle subscription and the word innovation on his business card. So what do you need? The right mindset, for starters — individuals committed to the challenge of change; who are well aware of the world outside your walls; who can view your business challenges through a series of new lenses, apply solutions from beyond your account team, department, company or even industry. And then you need to guide them, support them, and give them permission to fail. (Which — not coincidentally — moves us nicely to the next P.)

Are you staffing your business with innovative thinkers that bring uncommon, outside perspectives and approaches to their work every day?

Process: OK, so now you’ve got your free spirits and free thinkers — set em loose, right? Well, not exactly. Sustainable innovation, done right, means you’ll capture new ideas from all corners of your company. All. The. Time. You know how you’ve gone into all those standalone brainstorms, spent an inspiring hour batting about cool new concepts, then went back to your workaday world as your new ideas die on the vine? We all have. A true innovation capability has clearly defined processes that govern how ideas get surfaced, how they get evaluated, what criteria they must meet to advance to the next stage, and what happens when the company commits to testing the idea in the market. Process may not be sexy, but it’s necessary if you want your innovation efforts to succeed.

Have you defined and communicated clear processes to guide your innovation efforts?

Platforms: Systems and software go hand-in-hand with old fashioned process, making it easier — and at scale, possible — to move ideas to execution efficiently, cost effectively, and with the right number of checks and balances. My purpose here isn’t to pimp specific platforms; there are lots (from Imaginatik to Innocentive, from Brightidea to Spigot). They make your life as an innovator easier and the output of your process more viable. Without them, even the best innovation intentions will give way to chaos over time.

Do you have innovation platforms in place today?

Partners: You didn’t think you could do it all yourself now, did you? If you truly intend to innovate (to create new value for customers in order to realize new value for the company) you might want to think of your customers themselves as your partners in innovation. You may know this as crowdsourcing… But as much as the lines are blurring between company and customer, the lines are also blurring between company and company (even company and competitor). Large corporations might consider ways to bring nimble upstarts into the fold in order to up the fresh ideas quotient, while leading edge start-ups might consider how well resourced multinationals could fund edgy new ideas. Public sector and private sector can work together. The possibilities for partnership are limited only by your willingness to collaborate with others.

Do you involve your partners — customers, competitors, collaborators and other companies — in your innovation approach today?

Define, Measure & Reward Innovation Success

Performance: Way back at the First P, I wrote that everything starts with purpose. But, truth be told, performance is as good a place to begin and one of the most critical components for innovation success. Let’s be frank — it feels good to talk about innovation, but it’s a different matter to rework the way we incentivize our people to make it worth their while to bring new ideas, process improvements and more to the table on a routine basis. Simply put, innovation will never become a core capability (much less a cornerstone of a company’s culture) when the only measures of performance relate to near term profits, successful completion of day-to-day tasks, and other measures of the here-and-now. Of course those things are important — there’s no sense in prepping your business for tomorrow while you run the risk of going out of business today. But a truly innovative organization knows that the right incentives, rewards, and recognition systems are necessary conditions for innovation excellence. Think intrinsic rewards (status, recognition) as well as extrinsic rewards (prizes, money). Think beyond the check box on the performance appraisal…

How do you measure the impacts of innovation and reward the people who make it happen?

Now… like innovation itself, the 6P model is a work in progress. Open to inputs from partners — like you. I’d love your thoughts. Chime in. In the meantime, I’ll be working on a Part II of sorts that takes a deeper dive into a framework for generating, vetting and bringing to market truly innovative marketing (and business) ideas.

Like this post and want to download the 6P framework as an ebook (PDF format)? Grab a copy on Slideshare.

Need some help putting this model to work for your business? Get in touch.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down to talk shop with digital media consultant Chris Dorr. As the business conversation wound down and talk turned to trivial bits of this and that, Chris mentioned that he has recently begun learning how to play the guitar. What he said next gave me one of those insights that sits at the intersection of a ha and but of course. Chris told me how valuable it has been for him to “be a beginner” at something. So much so that next he may teach himself how to write code.

We’re all expert at something. Some of you reading this may be marketing experts or — heaven forbid — social media experts. Others may be marketing novices with deep expertise in technology, engineering, analytics, manufacturing, accounting, law, medicine, or just about any other profession or business competency. Expertise is good. Expertise is necessary. When I choose a lawyer, doctor or accountant I expect them to be at the top of their game; I’d imagine you do too. When I bring a business analyst or web metrics guru into a client engagement, I expect that they have a firm grasp of current best practices — and can deliver the value my clients expect.

But being a beginner is necessary too.

Why?

Because with expertise, of course, comes the curse of knowledge – the inability to see the subject of our expertise from the perspective of less expert others; a jaded perspective that suffers from a deeply ingrained set of assumptions about how things are and how they are meant to be; a distorted view through an overused lens; a less-than-helpful lack of empathy for the novice.

I’ve noted this kind of thing before among so-called social media experts — the hyper-connected insiders always on the hunt for the next big thing, who often declare a tool, technology or platform “old news” long before the mainstream population has adopted it as their own. I’ve been guilty of this myself. And as someone with a 20+ year track record in marketing strategy, I can sometimes forget that the concepts, approaches and processes that seem obvious to me might be totally alien to an executive who hasn’t spent a career thinking about the nuances of building brands.

Becoming a beginner reminds you what it’s like to view something through a new lens. What it’s like to tackle a fresh challenge. How it feels to accomplish something for the first time. And frankly, how it feels to struggle with a concept, task or skill that you haven’t yet mastered. Becoming a beginner reminds you that expertise is a gift — and also a curse. A thing hard one over time and through a daunting amount of hard work. And a thing to keep in check by constantly reexamining it as if it were something truly new. Because to others, it probably is…

So what should you begin? Almost anything will do — pick up an instrument you’ve never played, a paint brush you’ve never held. Learn more about wine tasting or bookkeeping. Whatever suits your style. For certain, any of these things will open your eyes to new possibilities. Or — quite simply — remember that the world of business has never been so ripe with change. That just about every day brings new developments, disruptive changes, revolutionary or even just evolutionary ideas that bear consideration. Go through your work day with your blinders off and become a beginner at all the things that lie just outside your core area of expertise.

You just might become a better expert in the process.

What does summer mean to you?

It might mean beach books, lazy afternoons spent poolside, fun-filled camp days (memories of yours or sending your kids off to theirs), cook-outs and vacations. With a bit of luck, it means slowing down — even just a bit — to enjoy the warm weather, the longer days, and the chance to do a little something more than work work work.

For me, summer means drum corps.

As a teen, I spent my summers touring the country by bus; sleeping on gymnasium floors; putting in grueling rain-or shine, heat-or-more-heat rehearsal days leading up to 12-minute shows on football fields all over the United States and in Canada; then it was back on the bus to do it all over again. I did all of this surrounded by 100 or so other kids (none over the age of 21), as a member of the now defunct Long Island Kingsmen Drum & Bugle Corps (pictured above circa 1979).

As an adult, I’m lucky if I have the time to attend one show each season, but I do try to get out when the tour passes close to Long Island (when I was a kid, Long Island was home to dozens of corps of all calibers — now we hardly have any and we don’t warrant even one major tour stop of our own – oh well). And from the moment the first corps steps off at the first show of the season through the moment the last score is announced at the championship event in mid-August, I catch as many performances as I can by online video, keep up with news from my favorite corps through their Facebook pages and Twitter streams, analyze scores as they post to the Drum Corps International website and annoy my wife by playing the DCI podcast on the car stereo.

Once drum corps gets in your blood, it tends to stick there — bolstered by the memories that last a lifetime and reinforced every time you unexpectedly learn that someone you know through another context (a coworker, a neighbor, a friend’s father, some random dude you met at a conference) did drum corps too.

Reminiscing is nice, isn’t it? But if you’ve made it this far into the post, you’re probably wondering what any of this has to do with business.

Set aside the reality that any elite drum corps today needs to operate as a well oiled machine — it’s not easy or inexpensive to dress and equip 150 high school and college performers, then move them (along with dozens of instructors and support personnel, their gear, a mess truck, a merchandise truck and more) around the country for a solid two months or more. If you’re looking for cost effective ideas you can use to bolster your company’s brand or strengthen its customer relationships, you’d do well to study how a variety of individual corps — not to mention DCI itself (the association under which the corps and the tours operate) — employ savvy marketing tactics to fill both their membership ranks and the stands at shows, raise money, foster meaningful relationships with passionate fans through just about every social media channel available, and activate armies of real world advocates to drive the growth of the sport (yes – drum corps is a sport as much as it is an art).

But I mentioned my experience with the Long Island Kingsmen for a reason. We were scrappy back then, operating on a shoe string without many of the tools (from corporate sponsorships to national fundraising drives fueled by digital and social media) modern corps have today. But what we did have was passion, ingenuity, and a level of commitment any business would do well to emulate. And that brings us back to business.

A couple of weeks ago, one former member started a thread in the Kingsmen alumni group on Facebook to swap memories of all the different ways the corps — and the kids themselves — raised the money necessary to put the corps on the road. Nearly 80 comments later, other members had contributed stories about selling candy and candles door-to-door. Running the local BINGO games and raffling off Cadillacs. Maintaining a booster club and going “begging” (the quotation marks probably weren’t necessary – it’s exactly what it sounds like: Imagine 100 local kids walking door-to-door, coffee cans in hand, asking for donations). Shivering outside the local flea market selling Christmas wreaths our moms decorated in our basements. Slogging up and down some sleepy mid-western Main Street during a Fourth of July parade, when what you really wanted was just one day off between competitions.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not suggesting you send your best employees out “begging” (although let’s be honest, isn’t that exactly what small businesses are doing today when they vie for Chase/Living Social grants or an American Express OPEN Big Break for Small Business?) What I am suggesting is that you take a few cues from a bunch of buglers. I’m sure we were all too young to realize this back then, but looking back on it now I see an organization bursting with ingenuity, committed to making things happen, and driven by an entrepreneurial spirit that equaled its passion for putting the show on the field. All attributes any business would be lucky to possess.

And that — finally! — is what this post is really about…

Your business — any business — is as much about its people as it is about its products. The best companies are staffed with people who are not only passionate about doing the work of the business, but also committed to doing any extra work that might be necessary just to make it possible to do the work itself? For the Kingsmen, that meant begging and BINGO and raffles and wreaths — anything we could do to raise enough money to keep the buses rolling. For your company, it might mean always thinking like a marketer or sales person – regardless of the title on your business card. It might mean cutting costs without cutting corners, all the while treating every dollar spent as if it were your own. It might mean going above and beyond to solve a problem for a client or even a co-worker, especially when the solution isn’t easy to find. It might mean wearing an extra hat, making the tough choices, or making do without. It probably means trying lots and lots of small tactics to find the ones that deliver the best results. And it most certainly means being your own best advocates and knocking on doors — literally or figuratively — to garner support from your audience.

It means operating as a true team, and doing anything within your power to keep the company solvent, on track, and moving forward (march).

Does this sounds like your business? What’s some of the work-behind-the-work you do? What tips do you have for creating an environment of passion, commitment, ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit?