February 2006
Creativity Labs Stimulate Innovation
Where do great ideas come from?
The answer in terms of physical location could be the shower, or in the car on the way to work, or at your desk daydreaming what could be. These places for creativity are all commonplace. But being corporate beings, we tend to gather in a conference room and brainstorm ideas in a group setting. You know that setting ... four wood-paneled walls, a conference table and chairs, and a white board. Not a terribly stimulating place to innovate new products, new promotions, new ways of doing things. Kind of like a white shirt with a starched collar.
What's missing in the traditional conference room is mental stimulus.
Paul Williams, a clever marketer who has passed through the halls at Disney and Starbucks, shares his concept for what a conference room should look like if you want to stimulate creativity instead of same ole' thinking.
Located in Starbucks Coffee Company's headquarters (Seattle Support Center) in Seattle, this once drab conference room, filled with corporate-stock chairs and boardroom style table, is now a 336 square foot haven for brainstorming, problem solving and thinking. The room can hold up to 15 people comfortably - and all the ideas anyone can think of.
There are more visuals of the CreativityLab at Paul's blog Idea Sandbox.
The promotion agency that I ran for 20 years had a similar ideation room, with tack walls, bar chairs at high round tables, bean bag chairs, and funky stuff (idea starters) scattered everywhere. Actually, we borrowed the idea from a business partner -- Doug Hall who ran the Eureka Ranch and hosted product innovation sessions responsible for about 90% of the products under your kitchen sink. I like these kinds of settings. They help break the log jam in our heads.
But there is also a need for those boring old conference rooms where we all meet incessantly to exchange information and plot out big deals -- so don't sell off all your conference room furniture just yet.
But maybe there's a seldom used room at your office that could be converted into a creativity space. Kill the fluorescent lighting. Put marker walls around the space. Bring a bunch of old used, comfy furniture from a Good Will store. Pop in a CD of thumping music and play ideation games. You just might invent the future.
Thanks to Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer for bringing Paul's Creativity Lab to our attention.
Posted by Dale Wolf on February 20, 2006 at 10:52 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Imagine
-- by Tom Nies
“Technology,” Daniel Bell* once said, “like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.” Here, Bell wasn’t simply talking about technology and artist disconnect. The Greek word “techny” actually means “art.”
To confirm Daniel Bell’s point, we can point to Albert Einstein who said, “Imagination is more important than intelligence.” I’ve always liked that thought because I feel that even though I may not be much more intelligent than anyone else, I can still work my imagination harder around what is possible – in other words, I’m willing to think big!
And I encourage everyone else to think big also. This way, even if I don’t achieve the “big objective,” it doesn’t frustrate me. I’d much rather go for a gigantic accomplishment and fall just a little bit short, than try to put a little tiny step forward, because too many tiny little steps forward can cost a lot of time.
And look what can be done with technology when we think big! When we in our business now talk about “real time,” we’re saying something that happens here in Cincinnati instantaneously is known in Tokyo, Australia, Rio de Janeiro, and all other points in the world. That’s what real time is ? virtually at the speed of light. When we talk broadband, we’re talking about tiny filaments of light, millions of those concurrently traveling around the world. So, instead of single handedly channeling information, voice and/or data, we’re sending many channels of information. That’s amazing – and it’s all the result of people using their imaginations and thinking big!
So, let’s go for it and make the most of our life. We humans, each and everyone of us, have gifts of adaptive skills and redirected thought, which enable us to prefigure or imagine innovations and improvements and seek to change the reality that exists in accordance with the thoughts we imagine.
* Daniel Bell is perhaps the most famous sociologist of our time. He put forth the concept of a post-industrial society or information age in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Later, he re-named this concept the “information society,” for which he is generally considered as the creator of the term (1979).
Posted by TomNies on February 20, 2006 at 04:04 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Method to Our Madness
-- by Tom Nies
Daniel Bell* says that the heart of modern discovery is method. Method is to mind what levers are to muscles. We must have method and we must know how to work with method. Within this structure, thoughtful activity produces positive results.
Our search for method is not just pursuit of exactitude and a measure of our progress; it has a double purpose. The first of those purposes is to raise our general intellectual powers so we become more powerful.
Descartes once said, “An artistic ignoramus with a compass can draw a more perfect circle than the greatest artist working freehand.” And you know that’s true, since you remember your early days in grade school where you stuck in a compass and drew perfect circles. You had a tool to guide your hand. Method makes perfect.
The correct method is to the mind what that compass is to the hand. In business it makes more perfect sales cycles. I emphasize this over and over again because salesmen often resist method. They want to lift stones barehanded instead of using levers and tools. They want to do things free-form their own way, and they don’t understand why they never seem to be able to do very much. Those who understand how to use tools and to use methods will always have skills that others don’t.
* Daniel Bell is perhaps the most famous sociologist of our time. He put forth the concept of a post-industrial society or information age in his book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973). Later, he re-named this concept the information society, for which he is generally considered as the creator of the term (1979).
Posted by TomNies on February 15, 2006 at 03:57 PM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Top 10 Technologies for 2006
"Top Technology" lists are enticing -- who doesn't want to read about the latest gadget or learn how a new application can make our lives easier? This top 10 list is particularly noteworthy, though, because it represents the collected insights of "professionals who sit at the intersection of information technology and accounting."
The 17th annual Top Ten Technologies survey by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) places information security in the top slot. The list, which was produced based on the result of votes from 2,000-plus AICPA and (for the first time, this year) Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) members, also suggests that the pace of technological change continues to quicken. Four new technologies -- assurance and compliance applications, IT governance, privacy management and spyware detection and removal -- make their debuts in the rankings. The accompanying analysis fleshes out why these technologies are important to CPAs and also defines each category.
Posted by Dale Wolf on February 14, 2006 at 02:51 PM in Business Infrastructure | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Two Changes that Will Improve Your eMail Marketing
The most critical thing about email marketing: it all starts with establishing a profile for an e-mail customer.
Most marketers struggle to optimize this channel -- not because they aren't bright, but because e-mail is a practice that is predicated on multiple kinds of expertise in strategy, technology, creative and analysis. There is no “Hail Mary” play in email marketing. It all stems from placing great importance on each e-mail address. If you don't know this, you are dead in the water. No campaign or creative concept will work without understanding how the persona behind the email address impacts acquisition, activation and retention strategies.
Another key factor: email marketing won’t be effective until you move from episodic campaigns (“hey, our competitor just came out with a new whatever, we better run a promotion”) to long-term, longitudinal thinking about the customer. And don’t confuse this with Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) because there aren’t 10 CEOs in the nation who are likely to fund CLV. But long-term communication with a customer will absolutely improve your results – and it will improve not marginally, but dramatically.
Your enemy is not the customer. It is not SPAM. The enemy is inside the business – decision makers who do not understand the need to build a personal profile behind every email address and to communicate to that address longitudinally, watching and measuring what the customer does when s/he receives your email. Every outbound campaign should have a pre-planned mode of follow-up based on what the customer does. Low click through rates are not an indication of failure, but a lesson on how to improve.
Posted by Dale Wolf on February 13, 2006 at 10:11 AM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Zen Story
-- by Tom Nies
I'd like to relate to you a Zen story:
Two people were wandering around in the desert aimlessly. They didn’t know where they were and they were weary. They sat down on a rock, quiet and silent, just sitting, until the one fellow said to his companion, “My brother is lost.” And the companion responded back, “I am not lost. Only the way is lost. I am here.”
Now that story may make us chuckle, because we can realize from this fellow’s predicament that often when the way is lost, everything is lost. And yet aren’t we often like this in our everyday lives? We show up yet we don’t really know how to get where we want to go.
In order to ensure that this does not happen, we must learn to always “check our bearings” so we can understand where we are, where we’re going - and what price we are willing to pay to get there.
In order to “stay on track,” we often have to improve ourselves and work with others (such as our customers) to get information we need to know. For instance, we don’t want to be lost when we’re trying to navigate our way through a sales account. We don’t want to be in the position of knowing that we are sitting there, and yet the way forward is lost.
One way to do this is through “confirming by questioning.” We want to say to our customers, “Do I have that right? Is my understanding correct? Is it correct to assume this or that? Am I overlooking something? Is there something you want to do (somewhere you want to go) that we haven’t really touched on yet? Am I talking to you about the right things?” Thus, we can ensure that we know where we stand (or sit, as the case may be) – and that the way is not lost.
Posted by TomNies on February 3, 2006 at 04:19 PM in Customer Dialogue | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
