Never in the modern history of commerce has the tectonic plate under our business world shifted so suddenly and precipitously as in the past 2 years. And what do you suppose has been the sector most affected?

Why consumer and customer behavior, of all things.

The bank’s answer to my question was, “Well you do have a point but our system-wide mission and focus is to stay close to our customers on a daily basis.”

I responded  that staying close to your customers in these times is pretty hard when you have over 4 million of them.

I wonder if they ever look at the expiration date on the eggs in the refrigerator.

About the same time I saw a small news item in the Industry Monitor column by Otis Port from a couple of years ago, titled “A Drill That Can Think As It Makes A Hole.”

Quoting from the piece, “Unova Inc.’s Lamb Technicon Machining Systems in Warren, Mich. will introduce a new drilling system…with computer controls that are built into the boring tool itself. The new control system doesn’t need fixtures. Instead it uses piezoelectric sensors and a laser-guidance system to keep the drill aligned with the part…10 time faster than a hummingbird’s wings the controls can make 100 adjustments every second.”

Pretty impressive. But the real significance is the new technology’s recognition that yesterday’s technology was cumbersome and slow, and by the time the drill was only partway into the hole it was too late to do anything but stop the drilling.

Over the years there’s been much use of the criticism of “Ready Fire…AIM” as evidence of reckless, impulsive behavior.

Actually that’s exactly the way today’s world needs to function. Just weeks ago there was an article in WSJ about the “new” strategy that has little or no use for a long range plan. That all of the variables in any industry’s situation are so fluid and unpredictable that smart strategy must be able to respond to change as change surfaces.

So I’ve invented a new term that places Ready, Aim…Fire” on the musty shelves of business history: “Ready, Fire…STEER” is not only now entirely possible, it is indeed a critical imperative.

Why do they settle for this weak claim that’s impossible to quantify, and is so commonly used by companies in every industry that it’s evolved into a cliche?

I think the real opportunity is in saying you will REDEFINE customer expectations. This sets your company in one bucket and everybody else in another. A lot of power in that strategy, eh — and why nobody has landed on the strategy is beyond me.

The moderator says at the outset “no ideas are off base today” and “no rules, no hierarchy here today, everybody’s thoughts are just as good as anybody else’s,” and “there’s to be no criticism or comment about anyone else’s idea.” In spite of the rules all the destructive dynamics of interpersonal corporate interaction are immediately triggered. None but the most reckless will feel free to share ideas indiscriminately in front of rivals, superiors or unknown quantities.

The participants are not only intelligent, they’re also every bit as street smart as pickpockets.

Somebody once said, “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.”

Well they’re wrong.

Because they’re not making their sports sponsorship dollars deliver the same way they make the dollars they invest in other things deliver.

Sports sponsorships – even on a small scale – are often well rationalized corporate indulgences. This is a real shame, because sponsorships can be one of the most powerful tools you have to accelerate and protect sales and earnings.

The biggest game of them all takes place off the field. A few companies play it well and win. Most companies play it poorly and lose.

They leave millions on the table because they don’t properly hitch the power to their business plan.

If the main thing a company does is take customers to games, they’re being taken to the cleaners.

Now there’s a customer promise to strike fear in the hearts of every other competitor in town.  How could any prudent customer even think about buying produce whose freshness was UNVERIFIED! Then I did a mental double take, ”Freshness Verified” by whom? Did they have a freshness verifying department headed up by a Manager Of Freshness Verification? Where do they verify it, on the truck that brings it in? Or when it finally hits the cooler in the back, or after it’s been in the produce showcases a while? I asked the produce guy what’s with this freshness verified thing, he said “We make sure it’s fresh.” I asked how they go about it, he said “You can tell whether it’s fresh or not and if it’s not fresh we don’t put it out.” I thanked him for the information and thanked my lucky stars that the freshness of the iceberg lettuce my wife confidently thrust into the cart was VERIFIED. I feel well cared for now, one less thing to worry about.

Following the free wheeling brainstorming, everyone swarmed the original sheets, picked the 3 they judged to be the best out of 1100-some, went back to their places and filled out 3 new slips with the ones they selected. They all went up to the front again, and filled up a new paper sheet with well over 100 of the ideas hijacked from the original sheets.

The ideas were then combined, with “votes” for the best ones determined by how many participants selected them. Some of the ideas were only picked once or twice. A few were picked 10 or more times. The 5 ideas with the most “votes” were passed on to management back home for evaluation.

Somebody’s assistant then typed up all the raw idea sheets, which were then also reviewed back at headquarters by management and the marketing department. About 10 of the rough ideas from the original brainstorm sounded interesting enough to management and the marketing people to be added to the final list, while the brass summarily vetoed 3 of the 5 that had made it out of the brainstorm.

After additional discussion and meetings, the list of “finals” (now swelled to 12 by headquarters’ efforts) was whittled down to the 2 “best.”

The way this brainstorming project worked out was very typical to others. In this case there were 2 ideas that management deemed worthy of pursuit (1 of them plucked by the brass from the transcripts and one original “final page” survivor). After a lot of research, discussion, numerous successive internal conferences, and outlay of a shameful amount of organization time and money, nothing came of either one of them.

I asked one of the C execs what they thought of the exercise. He said, “We didn’t get anything actionable out of it, but it was good that it did get everyone thinking about our business for a couple of days.”

I kept the following thought to myself, “Shouldn’t they all be doing that anyway?”

It’s a sad fact that creative people are often looked upon by many in business as intellectually ungrounded, loose impractical thinkers whose ideas are generally interesting, usually provocative, hardly ever immediately practical, and always to be investigated rigorously to find all the reasons they won’t work.

Because of this, if you’re going to discuss your creative thinking output with others your ideas had better be logic-based and be persuasive, because odds are at least some of the people you’ll be sharing your ideas with will be champion linear thinkers and secretly suspicious of creative thinking no matter whose it is.

Creative thinking is needed more than ever before because the pace of change in the business environment is faster and more unpredictable than ever before. Yesterday’s ideas are no longer relevant, traditional ways of doing things are sometimes dangerously out of touch, and this new environment, this globally connected, always on, real-time environment has no tolerance for plodding unimaginative behavior.

In these times the wrong and the slow are quickly punished and so are the wrong and the swift.

But in these times the right and the slow are punished too.

Chaos no longer eventually becomes order. Chaos continuously evolves to chaos, creating a sort of equilibrium, as with a spinning top. If order were to somehow emerge, it would soon collapse because the true source of sustainable energy always springs from instability. We can no longer go back to a gentler, more comfortably predictable time. We have to be restless, uneasy.

We have to be constantly looking for something very precious that nobody else yet knows is missing: an insight. A new way of seeing something that everyone else sees differently.

Insight is the true path to effective strategic creative thinking. The key to ideas that take you somewhere new. The doorway to a future very few people are looking for; a future that many aren’t even fully aware is coming and coming fast.

Our minds have to be constantly trying to be out in front of what the rest of the world sees. The present is already hopelessly behind us.

- Howard

The amount of energy wasted trying to train fundamentally non-creative people to be creative is incalculable. 

It’ s true that many kids have the innate capability of developing creative skills, but early on this capability is forever crushed under the boot of parenting, educational systems and workforce authoritarian rigidity. They become linear thinkers on the spot, and over a lifetime become as unlikely to develop a passion for creative thinking as a bookie would be to develop an obsession with early English literature.

If creativity isn’t there early it very likely won’t be there late. Trying to put it there is much like trying to teach elephants to create paintings. They’re alert enough to learn eventually to pick up a brush, dip it in the buckets of paint and swish it onto the paper.

But all they’re doing is whatever it takes to earn another serving of peanuts, their art purchased with magnificent self delusion by people who don’t understand art any more than the elephants do.

People are a lot like the elephants. Particularly when they’re clustered together in a “How To Be Creative” employee learning session.

It’s actually easy to convince people they’re being creative simply by encouraging them to blurt a random thought without much regard for its connection to the topic under discussion. Since they would never have otherwise had the nerve to do this, and since they’re applauded now for doing it, they can be forgiven for thinking that something seriously profound has taken place.

Blurting thoughts and receiving approval is a real novelty and a lot of fun, like it must be for a philosopher to yell insults to the referees at a wrestling match.

Finally, since this sharing of impractical, irrelevant thoughts is enthusiastically applauded by everybody else in the room – indeed, peer criticism is strictly forbidden – they forever after think their ideas are all good ones, and confuse random mental outbursts with honest-to goodness creative product.

As I said early on, the damage this can do to an organization can’t be properly measured.

For one thing employees who subsequently step forth with other ideas in the normal course of their work almost always take permanent offense at the fact that their ideas (which are just as dreadful as you might imagine) immediately disappear into thin air.

There are other reasons, too. Stay tuned.

-Howard

The companies that have very little innovation tend to throw the word around indiscriminately in an effort to convince through weary repetition. Problem is the word slides through the brain without leaving a trace. 

APPLE is clearly one of the world’s masters of innovation. I went to their investor site and read through a number of their filings and publications and had to go several pages deep before I discovered the word “innovation. On the other hand, going through the same kinds of materials of a well known stumbling, shuffling  automobile dinosaur, “innovation,” “innovating,” “innovative” and “innovators” variously modified by “leading,” “world-class,” “breakthrough,” and “visionary” were sprinkled all through the first couple of pages like too much pepper on a potato.

I’ve found a terrific example of what happens when a well known global company decides to change from the ground up to be an “innovation” company, driven by creative permissiveness fueled by an army of creative thinking coaches in hundreds of retreats, offsites and brainstorming calisthenics.  I’ll tell this enlightening tale in a soon-to-come post. 

Companies that are really innovative don’t think of themselves as innovative, mainly because creativity and the thrill of putting it to practical use and seeing it work is a part of the way they work and the way they think.  It doesn’t need a word.  Again and again in APPLE’s material you see thoughts like “We try to be the best company at sensing what people want and creating and designing it better than anyone else.”

They don’t think of themselves as innovative because that way of thinking and behaving is not what they do, rather it is who they are.

Innovation has to be part of a company’s DNA to be a dependable component of culture, and almost without exception efforts to inject it into the system by training and management directives are doomed to be both short lived and disruptive.

APPLE is innovative because it is innovative.

The fumbling giant car company is not innovative because it is not innovative, and  its relentless insistence that it is carries about the same persuasive impact as “our people make the difference.”

All this is not to say that companies that aren’t inherently innovative can’t innovate. All we’re saying is that it’s fiendishly difficult to get that way from the inside out. The right outside resource is a much better solution, particularly when things need to happen fast.

-Howard