Speaking of Dave Ferguson, he points us to a great article from Fast Company’s archives called Four Rules for Fast Teams.  This is interesting stuff and could definitely lead to a really productive discussion around our place.  And it’s short and sweet.  Four simple ideas:

• Let the group make its own rules.
• Speak up early and often.
• Learn as you go.
• and Fast has to be fun.

Three of the four are fairly straightforward.  "Speak up early and often" sounded like it meant something really different, but turned out to be a main takeaway for me.  The team in the article developed a two-minute rule for seeking advice and help.  In other words, they encouraged their team to look for help quickly, within two minutes of realizing they were stuck.  That could save some serious time.  Think about the number of times you’ve found out weeks later that a project wasn’t going to land because one team member was stuck on a detail.

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Great article in Business Week by Diego Rodriguez of Metacool on thinking big by recognizing the place where business and design meet.  I love the three main points and they’re easily applicable to an organization that wants to innovate.  Check it out:

First, it’s important to ensure desirability for users by going out into the world to develop true empathy with the end user.  Makes sense.  If you think about what we’re trying to do, it really only works when it has genuine appeal to the people we’re trying to reach.  What’s the temptation?  The temptation is to aim for what WE really like or what WE think our primary customer will enjoy.  Finding out what the people we’re trying to reach are looking for will be hard work, but will be the only thing that will really pay off.

What’s next?  Second, you’ll need to balance desirability for stakeholders.  In other words, if you want to increase your venture’s odds of success you’ll need to engage not only your primary customers but also your employees, partners and other stakeholders.  Here’s the age old tension between the motivations of your existing customers (current attendees and members?) and the future customers that you hope to reach.  The delicate balance is important to achieve.  Can you please everyone all the time?  No.  But you’ve got to enlist this group in the mission of reaching the end user that you don’t yet have.

Last?  You need to iterate for viability.  This is an interesting point.  Rodriguez points out that developing a great experience requires "rapid prototyping."  When I think about the organizations that succeed they are clearly the ones that are unafraid to try something new and are always looking for a next innovation.  Rodriguez makes a great point that "rather than making a big bet and swinging for the fences" we ought to be doing what design thinkers do…"create something quick and cheap, show it to real people, and roll the learning back into the the venture."

Right on target.  Read the whole article here.

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When you’re looking for better solutions when faced with a challenge, what do you do?  Do you pull everyone together and brainstorm?  Do you break out the whiteboard?  Do you break out Doug Hall’s new book, Jump Start Your Business Brain : Ideas, Advice, and Insights for Immediate Marketing and Innovation Success ?

How about this idea from Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force : when you’re looking for a solution to a problem/challenge, tape a sheet of paper to your office door.  Anyone visiting your office must add an idea to the sheet before entering the office.

That’s got possibilities! 

How do you determine whether what you’re convinced is a great product or service…is really a great product or service?  Beyond your opinion, I mean.  What are the earmarks of something that is really great?

I’m reading Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba.  It’s not new, it came out in 2003, but I’m finding lots of good stuff in it.  For example, here are the aspects that make a great product or service based on what the authors call the SEAMS model:

• First, a great product Satisfies a customer need.
• It’s Easy to use.
• It’s a Good value.
• It Makes the customer’s life better.
• And it Solves a customer problem.

When you think about what you’re doing, does it meet the SEAMS test?  Combining this idea with a discussion about Who I Your Primary Customer can lead to some new insights about the way you’re doing what you’re doing.

By the way, McConnell and Huba have a great blog called Church of the Customer, a constant source of good material.

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How ready are you to try a new idea?  Have you reached a point in your whiteboard exercise where you knew the only reasonable next step was the unknown, uncertain, or unsure…but a step that held promise?  And to stay where you were was a commitment to the tried and somewhat true…but would eventually lead to…well "lead to" is the wrong expression…but it would end up badly?

A few years back Fast Company featured a great article on the 20th anniversary of In Search of Excellence : Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies.  The article was called, Tom Peters’s True Confessions and had some really interesting insights about the conclusions of 20 years earlier.  One in particular that really grabbed me was a new understanding of his well known mantra, "ready, fire, aim."  He wrote, "action was fine when Search came out, because the norm was analysis-paralysis. So action — any action — was better than "Ready, aim, aim, aim . . ." Today, it’s all about speed. It’s "Fire, fire, fire." If you’re looking for one of the killer apps, from this day forward, it’s speed."

In a related idea, Seth’s post on trial and error is right on target.  How’s this for clarity:

"Error occurs whether you want it to or not. Error is difficult to avoid. It’s not clear that research or preparation have an enormous impact on error, especially marketing error. Error is clearly not in short supply.

Trial, on the other hand, is quite scarce, especially in some organizations. People mistakenly believe that one way to successfully avoid error is to avoid trial."

How do the two ideas relate?  Sounds like a willingness to "fire, fire, fire" is at the heart of avoiding analysis paralysis.

For more on the keys to avoiding analysis paralysis take a look at Fail-safing Early Stage Innovation

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Fast Company has a great feature in it’s current issue.  50 glimpses of the future.  I love the one on Michael Viscardi, a 16 year old homeschooler who just won a $100,000 Siemens Westinghouse prize for…sorry, I have to quote this.  It is too good.

"Who just won …for his new theorem on a classic late-19th-century problem by mathematician Lejeune Dirichlet.  "Basically," Viscardi says, "I studied the Dirichlet problem for the Laplace operator on any simply connected, bounded domain in two dimensions given rational holomorphic boundary data.  I came up with and proved a new theorem that characterizes all such domains for which the solution is rational."

Okay.  Raise your hand if your understanding of any of this is based on Ghostbusters.

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Check out this cool idea over at the New York Times.  The two co-founders of Rite Solutions, a software company with a very specialized business, have developed "an internal market where any employee can propose that the company acquire a new technology, enter a new business or make an efficiency improvement."  This internal market idea is very cool.  Think about what it would do for our organizations if EVERYONE got involved in the innovation game.  Don’t you know that the really great ideas often go undiscovered in our own labs. 

How could this work for us?  Think about all the genuinely satisfied customers who’re filling up our auditoriums every weekend.  What if they all got involved somehow with making it better?  Is there a way to adapt this so that it works for us?

Or what if instead of allowing the Devil’s Advocate element to slow down innovation we involved as many as possible in what could happen?  What if instead of allowing the What if we were able to capture that sense of Vuja De that Tom Kelley wrote about in The Ten Faces of Innovation? 

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Thanks to John Moore over Brand Autopsy for the link to the story!

Ever worked really hard to develop an innovative solution that will capture an entirely new market and put together a presentation that compellingly makes the case only to have someone in the room say, "Prove it first"?  John Moore over at Brand Autopsy shares a great quote on innovation from Roger Martin of the Rotman School of Management.  "Ban the term ‘prove it’ from your business vocabulary.  Anything that’s truly innovative can’t be proven in the early stages." 

That is a very Blue Ocean Strategy idea.  You’ve read it, right?  If not, check out a few posts that I’ve developed to highlight some of the key ideas: Broken Windows, Learning From Non-Customers, Changes in Strategy…Oooops #1 Competition and Churches, and Reorienting Strategic Focus.

I love it! 

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What is it that creates an innovative organization?  As Diego Rodriguez talks about it in his most recent BusinessWeek Online article, "the key to unleashing innovative behavior is asking the question, ‘how can I help each person in my organization achieve a state of happiness on a daily basis?’"  What’s interesting is that he’s not talking about making sure you’ve got bean bag chairs or nerf artillery (although those are really fun).  He’s talking about integrating Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of Flow into your org’s culture.  What’s flow?  "Flow occurs when the complexity of the thing you’re doing just outstrips your ability to get it done.  In other words, it’s challenging, but not overwhelmingly so."  Check out the article.  Rodriguez makes a good case.

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For two years I’ve been plugging Constant Contact as an easy way to put together an html newsletter for small group launches, smaller churches, specialized ministries, etc.  It really is easy to use and has some features that are pretty good.  I’d been plugging it…but had never had to use it.  I always just sent what I needed to our inhouse IT people and they took care of it.  Now…I’m using it because I need to.

Last week I was trying to dress up a newsletter going out to my new small group leaders and remembered a stock photo operation that Guy Kawasaki was plugging, called istockphoto.com.  I have to say, what a great solution.  If you’re doing things that need a cool photo you really need to check it out.  Very easy to use.  Lots of great shots.  Here’s the cool shot I bought for one section of the newsletter: 

I know what you’re thinking.  "But what does it mean, baby?"  I have to say, "I don’t know!  But I love the way it looks!  Check out istockphoto.com!  It’s free to join.  And really reasonable to use.

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