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October 25, 2005

Guest Host: Faces of Innovation

I'd like to thank FC Now guest host Tom Kelley for his contributions to the blog last week. I've collected all of his entries in a dedicated category so you can quickly and easily access his posts, and FC Now readers are continuing the conversation in the comments. Feel free to catch up of you missed his entries!

Posted by Heath Row at 7:09 PM | 27 Comments

October 22, 2005

Remarkability and the Ten Faces of Innovation

During my week as guest host here at FC Now, I've tried to amplify, explain, or improvise on the Ten Faces of Innovation from my new book that appears in the current issue of Fast Company. Those posts were mixed in with the prolific blogging of other Fast Company editorial contributors, so in case you missed the narrative thread, here's a link to posts about the Anthropologist, the Experimenter, the Cross-Pollinator, the Hurdler, the Collaborator, the Director, the Experience Architect, and the Set Designer.

Collectively, these innovation roles are intended to offer a chance for people feeling stuck in an ordinary work life to have the rewarding experience of being just a little bit more extraordinary. To break up patterns of routine or boredom with the chance to capture fresh insights or master new skills. In fact, maybe The Ten Faces of Innovation is ultimately about the chance to be remarkable, which is also the theme of The Big Moo a new book by Seth Godin and the Group of 33. You can hear the story of The Big Moo at Remarkabalize.com or at Seth Godin's blog.

Continue reading "Remarkability and the Ten Faces of Innovation"

Posted by Tom Kelley at 5:49 PM | 12 Comments

October 21, 2005

The Secret Power of Space

If you're a Set Designer at heart, you probably have people tell you that office space doesn't really matter. "People can work anywhere," they'll tell you. "Just give them a desk and a comfortable chair." Those skeptics a haven't discovered the secret power of space.

One of my favorite metaphors for the power of space comes from the world of baseball. Growing up in northeastern Ohio, my “hometown” team was—for better or worse—the Cleveland Indians. Throughout my childhood, all the way through my twenties and thirties, the Indians were one of the sorriest teams in American baseball. The Chicago Cubs admittedly had a worse win-loss record some years, but at least the Cubs were lovable. And when Hollywood was looking for a sad-sack team to lampoon in the comedy “Major League,” the Cleveland Indians were the team they chose.

Continue reading "The Secret Power of Space"

Posted by Tom Kelley at 7:25 PM | 20 Comments

Architecting Experiences

Inspired by Pine and Gilmore's ground-breaking book, The Experience Economy, great companies have gotten into the experience business in a big way. Ask loyal cutomers about the "Starbucks experience," the "Lexus experience" or the "Nordstrom experience," and they can tell you stories to support their strong feelings about those brands. At IDEO, we encourage even product-oriented companies to focus on the "verbs" not the "nouns" in thinking about the actions, the behaviors, the experiences that customers associate with their brands.

If you are an Experience Architect who help crafts such offerings, look for ways you can provide more behind-the-scenes opportunities for your customers. Done right, they not only help build a bond with you customer but also help them understand your business better.

Continue reading "Architecting Experiences"

Posted by Tom Kelley at 4:19 PM | 8 Comments

October 20, 2005

Directing is 90% Casting

Hollywood film industry veterans will sometimes tell you that “directing is 90% casting.” The secret of being a great Director is fielding a team of talented people who don't really need much coaching to deliver a solid performance.

In the movie world, Steven Spielberg is the epitome of someone who directs his cast and crew to capture the audience’s imagination, while in business that role falls to people like Steve Jobs, who has proved himself brilliant at motivating his teams to create something “insanely great.” Both Directors have the ability to bring out the best in their teams, often with a contagious enthusiasm that spurs individuals and project groups to extraordinary achievements.

Sure, Directors have the mantle of authority, but the best ones don't have to rely on the power of the hierarchy. I dedicated a whole chapter to Directors in The Ten Faces of Innovation, but the role is more about coaching and mentoring than about being "the boss."

And great Directors--in busines and in film--are content to let others take center-stage, confident in the knowledge that their behind-the-scenes work will make the whole production come together. You never see Steven Spielberg onscreen—-except at the Oscars.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 6:09 PM | 9 Comments

Radical Collaboration: Triathlons Are the New Golf

Golf has always been considered the ultimate business-oriented game, with plenty of opportunity to talk shop on the course and afterwards at the 19th hole. If you're a Collaborator and want to form a real bond, however, maybe it's time to think beyond the golf course. There’s a broad palette of options to choose from. One of my colleagues at IDEO believes preparing gourmet meals together (and then eating them, of course) is a great way to strengthen team bonds. Another friend likes to take clients scuba diving, because it build both mutual trust and shared experience.

But some of the fit young designers in the building next door to me may have carved out the ultimate niche in the world of radical collaboration: they do triathlons with their favorite clients. The trend started when one of them discovered a team member at Daimler Chrysler that was also a serious runner. The next thing we knew, Mercedes was sponsoring them both (complete with team t-shirts and other gear) in a triathlon in Germany.

Now the idea has a life of its own, and the number of triathlons seems to be multiplying. So for example, IDEO-ers Neil Grimmer and Chris Waugh compete every year in the Life Time Fitness Triathlon in Minneapolis—-sponsored by our client, Cargill-—and work on Cargill projects in between. Over a hundred Cargill employees turned out for last year’s event, and the joint effort has built a lot of good will between our firms.

So even if—-like me—-you’re not quite prepared to go scuba diving or run a triathlon with the team, look for new creative options for building camaraderie that go beyond the ordinary.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 2:04 PM | 3 Comments

October 19, 2005

The Art of Hurdling

I had the fun-but-scary experience recently of being on a live radio show at KQED, the local NPR affiliate, taking random calls from listeners in San Francisco. One call-in question essentially asked "Isn't some of this innovation stuff hard to do?" The answer of course is that innovation can take work, but can also be REALLY rewarding in the long run. And putting a little extra energy into an innovation role is not nearly as hard or painful as slogging it out year after year in business-as-usual mode, pigeonholed into a narrow workstyle.

The most remarkable Hurdler's achievement I witnessed in my childhood was the post-sputnik race to put a human on the moon. In May of 1961, JFK threw down the gauntlet, challenging the best minds in America to do what seemed truly impossible at the time. And he didn't pretend for a minute that it would be simple.

"We choose to the moon in this decade and do the other things," said JFK, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win."

And they did it, of course, with a focused effort from industry, academia, and government, combining lots of hard work with some luck thrown in. So what is today's equivalent for great Hurdlers, either inside your organization or on a national scale? If we had a charismatic leader and a dedicated constituency, what "impossible" goal could we acheive? Energy self-sufficiency within a decade? Cure the healthcare system? Conquer a disease? What extraordinary hurdles could your group jump, if you set your minds to it?

Posted by Tom Kelley at 7:45 PM | 3 Comments

Cross-Pollinators in your Greenhouse

Want more innovation inside your organization? I think the secret is to start searching more OUTSIDE. Because no matter how big or successful your company is, there are always more ideas outside than in. For that matter, with 193 sovereign nations in the world, there are also more ideas outside your COUNTRY than in. (Sorry to disappoint nationalists and isolationists everywhere.)

So let others around you read all the same trade magazines, attend all the same industry conferences and talk among themselves about the same variations on a theme. If you have the heart of a Cross-Pollinator, look far afield for ideas that you can translate and adapt for use in your business. That's how metal pie tins thrown by a college student became the classic Frisbee flying disc. It's also how an Inuit technique for preserving fish in the Canadian wilderness became the catalyst for Birdseye's frozen food empire. And how punched cards for creating patterns in silk Jacquard looms became the 80-column Hollerith cards that drove computers for decades. (Younger members of the team may not have even SEEN a Hollerith card, but all of them will have heard of the resulting company: IBM.)

While those three examples of profiting from cross-pollination are all historical ones, the value of the Cross-Pollinator continues today. In the last few years, for example, Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley has urged his entire staff to get at least 50% of their ideas from the outside. And their lineup of successful products may herald the beginning of the end for the not-invented-here syndrome in the business world, since billion-dollar platform products like Swiffer and Spinbrush reflect the work of great Cross-Pollinators at P&G.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 11:31 AM | 3 Comments

October 18, 2005

Crack Cocaine for Authors

Regular amazon.com customers may have visited that site hundreds of times without ever noticing one small statistic buried among esoteric data like a book's dimensions or its ISBN. The magic number I'm refering to is called the amazon sales rank, a numeric value recalculated every hour to reflect how a book's sales compare to the millions of others currently listed on amazon. And while READERS may not be aware of the amazon ranking, ask any author about it, and they will know exactly what you mean. Because as an author, when your book is on the rise, that number can become hypnotic, almost addictive. So much so that a senior executive at one of America's largest publishers once called it "crack cocaine for authors," since it is tempting to get a little obsessive, checking in every couple of hours to see if your stats are rising or falling.

To understand why the amazon ranking has such allure, you have to understand how starved authors are for information about how their book is doing. Typically, they get sales data quarterly, with about a 60-day lag, so if you want to know how your book is selling on, say, October 18th, you have to wait until sometime next February to find out. But amazon will actually tell you today. Right NOW, in fact.

And although I am not completely seduced by the amazon sales ranking for my new book, I confess that I have been hearing its siren song for the past few days.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 6:48 PM | 5 Comments

Failure as a Success Strategy

Look beneath the surface of many great business successes, and you're likely to find a trail of failures that preceded them. Describing the painstaking trial-and-error process that led eventually to the creation of the incandescent light bulb--and General Electric--prolific inventor Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have merely found 10,000 ways that won't work." Many people would have given up, but Edison had the heart of The Experimenter. Henry Petroski, in his classic book To Engineer is Human, says that in his field, failure is almost a prerequisite for success, because only by reaching a point of failure can you define the limits of possibility. I am not sure I would interpret that idea literally for business vetntures, but I do know that lots of stellar successes are built directly on a series of small failures. British entrepreneur James Dyson reports that he built 5,127 prototypes of his cyclonic vacuum before getting to one that was commercially successful. That dedication to the Experimenter role is truly extraordinary, but so was the reward the now-billionaire Dyson eventually received. At IDEO where I work, we try to maintain a sense of "joyful failure" about quick early prototypes, knowing that learning from those first rough versions will point us in the direction of future successes.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 12:00 PM | 9 Comments

October 17, 2005

Anthropologists in Pursuit of 'Vuja De'

Everybody has heard of deja vu, right? It's the distinct feeling you've been here before. When you go out to do field work in Anthropologist mode, you should aspire to the opposite: a state of mind my friend Bob Sutton at Stanford calls "vuja de." Vuja de happens when you enter a situation you've been in a thousand times before, but with the sense of being there for the first time.

As French novelist Marcel Proust said, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." So if you want to find untapped innovation opportunities, watch the world around you with "fresh eyes." Go for a sense of vuja de, and then ask yourself why things are the way they are. Why do people wear a watch when their cellphone keeps perfect time? Why don't movie theaters sell soundtracks as you exit the film? Why do we all have answering machines to record messages from telephone callers, but nothing to record a message from someone who stops by our home or office? Why don't business guys wear hats in the winter, even when it's below freezing?

Once you start asking the right vuja de questions, you might find that the answers can lead to big opportunities for your business.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 7:55 PM | 12 Comments

Think Fast. Learn Faster.

The first three roles in The Ten Faces of Innovation are about learning. Because one crucial ingredient in a culture of innovation is being able to LEARN faster that the competition. In Clayton Christensen's brilliant Innovator's Solution, he describes the ability of upstart "disruptors" to steal market share and eventually surpass the establised players, who suddenly find themselves as "disruptees." In most forms of racing, the smart money is on the swiftest-moving competitor, not necessarily the one currently at the head of the pack.

How to accelerate the learning in your organization?

1) Tap into the power of The Anthropologist, and gather first-hand insights from the field about how people REALLY use your company's offerings. Watch for places where customers stumble, where they hesitate in confusion, ESPECIALLY where they swear in frustration over the status quo. Use that "ground truth" from the field to inform the next iteration of your products and services.

2) Rely on The Experimenter to increase your organization's rate of enlightened trial and error. If you learn from each experiment, and run those experiments quicker and cheaper than others in your industry, you can accumulate more insights and convert them into value at a faster pace.

3) Encourage The Cross-Pollinators on your team, who look far afield--to different divisions,different industries, even different countries--for ideas, and then translate that new-found knowledge for application to your unique circumstances.

Flexibility is the new strength. Find a way to learn faster.

Posted by Tom Kelley at 12:50 PM | 1 Comment

Five Days, Ten Innovation Mindsets

Hi. Guest host Tom Kelley, just checking in. A Fast Company fan ever since Alan and Bill put the first issue together ten years ago, I’ve read the magazine through thick [literally] and thin, attended memorable Real Time live events, and even toured the magazine’s cool office space. This week, I have the distinct pleasure of guest-hosting FC NOW, though I confess that I’m usually more of a guest than a host in the blogosphere. I'll do my best to make it an active conversation, partly by drawing on material from my new book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, ( www.tenfacesofinnovation.com ), which comes out on October 18.

Over the next five days, we'll talk about how organizations can leverage creative roles like The Anthropologist and The Experience Architect to overcome the negativity of The Devil's Advocate and build their capacity for practical innovation. Since I am a first-time blogger, I'd happily welcome any feedback, comments, or stories from the extended Fast Company family as the week goes on...

Posted by Tom Kelley at 1:47 AM | 1 Comment

October 14, 2005

Guest Host: Faces of Innovation

Next week, contributors to FC Now will be joined by Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO and author of The 10 Faces of Innovation. As guest host, Kelley will expand on the ideas behind the book, share stories about his experience at IDEO, and discuss current examples of how design and innovation can go hand in hand. Join us Monday for what's sure to be an interesting week!

Posted by Heath Row at 1:15 PM | 18 Comments