7 sources of great ideas

7 sources of great ideas

Sep 19, 2016 | Collaboration, Innovation

Where do these great ideas come from, why are some organisations just more innovative than others?.

I have pondered those questions for years as a corporate executive and as a consultant, and it seems to me that there are several points that are common in the situations I have seen that are really innovative, and contrasted in the rest because they simply lack some of these characteristics.

It is also the fact that each of the following ‘conditions’ is a result of that most elusive of management skills: leadership.

Genetics. Some people are just smarter than others, and smart people tend to have more and better ideas. They are also better at driving their ideas through an organisation. If you want an innovative organisation, it seems  that hiring smart people and giving them some freedom is a pretty good place to start.

Outliers. Malcom Gladwell coined this term, meaning those who do not conform, seek to be on the outside, be different, experience things out of the ordinary. Those people are more likely to see and be interested on something different than someone who is comfortable with the status quo.

Intersections. Ideas come from all sorts of places, most often from the intersection of several factors that create some sort of smash, an accident if you like. Rarely are great ideas just accidental. They come out of consideration, often subconscious, of the factors creating friction in a system, and by removing the friction, a new freedom is exposed. You are more likely to see an accident at the corner of Parramatta road and Frederick Street in Ashfield than you are in a country road outside Dubbo. In Ashfield there are a multiple sets of options open to the traffic, some of it entirely unpredictable. If you want to see an accident, that is clearly the better place to be.

Culture. I am a great fan of the scientific method being applied to management and particularly marketing thinking. Create a hypothesis, and test it  see what worked, and what did not, improve the hypothesis and retest. Rinse and repeat. It really works, and when you empower people to have a go, and give them the resources to do so, wonderful things can happen. I have previously described it as a loose/tight management culture. Be very tight about the objectives and behaviour parameters, but loose with the detail of how it is achieved. A note of caution however. The recent recognition that it is all right, indeed good, to fail, seems to be leading us to a point where failure is regarded as a badge of honour for its own sake, and due diligence is becoming less important. Very dangerous this, the right to fail, must be accompanied by the determination to learn from the failure, and great diligence in the construction of the hypotheses and the manner of their testing.

Collaboration. The cliché ‘two brains are better than one’ is a cliché for a reason, it is true. Collaboration will become one of the defining characteristics of success in the 21st century.

Great questions. What if, what now, how about, so what, have you tried… The ability for those in a business to ask questions and not be seen as an inquisitor, and those being questioned seeing the questions as opportunities to learn is a huge factor in the successfully innovating enterprises I have seen. Facilitating a clients innovation  workshop some time ago, the MD started by stating his view, then asking what everyone else thought. Needless to say all participants agreed with him, except for me, and they are no longer a client.

Customers. Current, past, potential, all are sources of ideas, as they are the ones who have the problems you are seeking to add value by solving. Makes sense to ask them.

As a final note, having a great idea is only the first step. The really hard bit is creating the pathways to do something of lasting value with it that adds to the longevity and prosperity of the enterprise.

My thanks once again too Hugh McLeod for the illustration.

When template business plans are useless

When template business plans are useless

Jul 4, 2016 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Small business

In Australia, only around 5% of new businesses survive past the 5 year mark, and make money in excess of the cost of capital.

Scary, because most of them had a business plan, certainly if they ever borrowed any money from a bank, they had one that probably doubled as a door stopper.

50 pages of assumptions, rosy projections and financial outcomes delivered via by a suite of complex excel files to the wazoo. It is essential to recognise that the purpose of a business plan of the lender is to ensure that they get their money back with interest commensurate with the risk, and to weed out the dreamers. That is why banks insist on Directors personal guarantees, mortgages over personal assets, simply to ensure that you do not risk their money.

So much for business plans.

Seriously, why would you waste the time and energy?

Most start with what they think is a great product, without realising that a product is just the starting point.

You also need at least a hypothesis about who the customers are, how you will find them, what sort of prices they may pay, how do you deliver the product, what the competitive reaction might be, and on, and on, and on.

Finding a way to turn all this stuff into a business model that makes sense is challenging, but it is what turns a product idea into a business.

A traditional, templated business plan makes sense when there are a lot of knowns, there is an existing market, ruling prices, you know who and where the customers are, and how they might be reached, and there is not much going on. Then plan to deploy resources for productivity and efficiency, but this is rarely the situation with start-ups with an innovation to bring to the market.

Being an entrepreneur setting about marketing a product with few direct competitors is experimental, requiring iteration, practice, persistence, and preferably mentoring from someone who has been there, seen the traps and is able to navigate around at least some of them.

Planning for the unknown is a touch different from planning for the known.

 

 

The key to successful communication

The key to successful communication

May 9, 2016 | Communication, Innovation, Strategy

Actually it is three keys, which taken together make for a potent mix.

It should be easy, but it seems to be hard, judging by all the rubbish I see around.

There is just so much messaging out there that fails to deliver any useful message, despite the money, time and supposed talent thrown at it. Somehow we have lost sight of the simple rules to apply. If you want a message to be seen and acted on, you had better make it clear, and articulate what you now want the receiver to do with the information.

So, three simple rules:

  1. Make it relevant
  2. Make it simple
  3. Make it repeatable.

As I watch the beginnings of what I expect to be a truly appalling tsunami of complicated, irrelevant and forgettable  babblings from politicians on both sides over the next weeks, I cannot help wondering what would happen if one side or the other told the truth. What if they, acknowledged the shortcomings and uncertainties of their economic and social models, and of the resulting ‘policy settings’, acknowledged  that you cannot please all of the people all of the time, and recognised the value of at least some part of the other sides positions.

Little hope of any of that.

Martin Luther King’s great ‘I have a dream’ speech delivered on August 28 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in Washington would probably not be as well remembered if it was the “I have a 10 point plan” speech.

A 10 point plan to end the racial discrimination prevalent at the time would not have resonated, the way “I have a dream” does. That message has not been heard by the opposition leader who I heard this morning spruiking his ‘Plan to make Australia great” followed later in the day by a long menu of things he will be “fighting for in this election”.

Yawn. Unfortunately the Prime Minister is little better, being unprepared to answer simple questions, even with a caveat that forecasting 10 years is challenging when nobody really knows what will happen tomorrow.

What if one of the protagonists in our political system actually articulated the dreams, the things we can all relate to, then backed it up with the truth. The truth, with all its  power to engage, build a following, and be held accountable.  In the 1990 film  “Crazy People”  Dudley Moore as an over-stressed advertising man proposed that greatest of evils, truth in advertising, and became wildly popular while kicking the accepted wisdom of obscuration, selective delivery of any facts, wild and unrealistic claims, and outright bullshit, squarely in the teeth.

Perhaps a bit of that medicine should be dolled out this morning as this 44th Parliament is wound up.

 

 

How to get lucky!

How to get lucky!

May 2, 2016 | Customers, Innovation, Management

‘Getting lucky’ has some pretty specific connotations in Australian vernacular,  but has much wider implications in business.

My old dad used to say “the harder I work, the luckier I get”. He would usually be saying it as he reached for his last bob while playing a round of golf, or chasing the bream off the beach in the morning.

‘Lucky’ has many faces.

Dad also had things to say about the nature of luck in business, things that have stuck with me over the years and informed the way I advise those I work with.

Luck comes with hard work……

Luck does come with hard work, but working hard to dig a hole will just get you a deeper hole, and sometimes that is not the answer. You have to be able to be selective at what you work at, and swap horses when you need to.

Luck come to the prepared mind.

This old saying is also true, and recognises that preparing your mind to recognise and act on the so called ‘luck’ when it happens is hard work. This work usually happens over a long period, and is usually the result of some level of collaboration. Alexander Fleming  ‘discovered’ penicillin in 1928, his lucky observation informed by previous work by others over a long period. It was not until 10 years after later that is was turned into a product by Howard Florey, driven by the demands of war, and funding from the Rockefeller foundation.

Luck comes from learning.

Thomas EdisonIt seems to me that ‘luck’ also favours  those who treat ‘bad luck’ not as a setback, or indication that they should cease and desist, but as an opportunity to learn and build something better that sometimes, magically overnight after 20 years, comes together in a new way. Thomas Edison’s famous words telling us that the discovery of the light bulb was the result of 9,900 failed experiments says it all.

 

Luck come from seeing what others miss. 

See what others missThen, there is also those who see opportunities as they emerge by, and have the sight to recognise them, and balls to act on them. Steve Jobs was a master at this. He saw a whole new world in combining the existing functionality of the telephone and MP3 player with the then unused touch screen technology that had emerged from NYU labs and demonstrated publicly for the first time in 2006.

 

‘Luck’ rarely just arrives, although it does happen. As a kid I knew a bloke who bought a single Opera House lottery ticket (when 200k was a lot of money) for himself on special occasions, and then won it. That seems like luck to me, but luck is usually a function of several of the above working together.

The (almost) impossible task of brand building momentum. A personal story.

The (almost) impossible task of brand building momentum. A personal story.

Jan 29, 2016 | Branding, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Marketing

What is  a brand?

When you think about it, a brand is a just a promise embodied in a product.

A promise of performance, and delivery of value.

It survives and grows, retains and builds relevance and attraction only when the promise is delivered.

Finding the promise that can be delivered in a way that is sufficiently different to make an impact is really difficult.  Making a promise that is the same as everyone else’s promise, and the brand becomes indistinguishable, just another label on the shelf.

30 years ago I was heading a marketing group that amongst other successes, relaunched ‘Ski’ yoghurt in Australia. The relaunch was a huge success, and over the following 3 years, our national market share went from single figures to well over 35% in a market growing at double digit rates.

There is a lot of patronising bullshit around about the way to build a brand, advice that sounds nice but is usually just a template that promises an outcome, a bit like the paint by numbers paintings an old aunt had adorning her walls. Not very good, and certainly not original.

So, I thought that the hindsight afforded by the almost 25 years since that  Ski relaunch might be valuable as you consider your own brand building exercise.

Following are the lessons I took away, often with the enlightenment that comes with hindsight, as the appearance of organisation and planning is a bit of a fiction, the real situation was considerably more chaotic as we juggled competing priorities, competitive and financial pressure, and all the jostling and risk mitigation that goes on inside big businesses.

 

Be different.

At the time conventional wisdom was that the fruit in yoghurt had to be mashed, the product homogeneous, that lumps of fruit were not good. All the research told us that consumers wanted their fruit yoghurt to be consistent with the fruit mashed and evenly distributed, and the launch of Yoplait a few years earlier had kick started a genuinely competitive race and significant market growth.

We relaunched Ski on the proposition  of taste. The best tasting yogurt, the only one with pieces of fruit. It completely distinguished us from the then market leader, Yoplait, and all other brands, and gave consumers who liked or did not mind whole fruit in their yogurt a real reason to buy Ski. Of course, some rejected it, but many did realise after trying that they did prefer it, and whilst there was a lot of supporting activity and pack changes, the market share of Ski zoomed. A few of the small producers copied us, but the market leader could not, as their whole manufacturing process was designed to deliver a homogeneous product.

The value of true differentiation backed by a brand promise that was carried out and of value to at least some consumers was clear.

Across the range Ski was so different that  it created new segments within  the yoghurt category, segments we owned because we created and named them, and which made competition hard and expensive for our opposition.

 

Get onto a roll.

When you have a line-up of innovations that do add value, you can roll them out progressively and the competitive impact is cumulative, you leave the competition struggling to catch up with your first one, and spending valuable marketing resources to stay in the game while you roll out the second, and third iteration. I would not claim that Steve Jobs knew anything about Ski, but that is the exact strategy that Apple used from the launch of the original iPod on.

In our case, we relaunched Ski with the different product as noted, but we also changed the naming conventions that had prevailed. For example, the low fat version changed from Ski Low Fat to Ski DeLite. Worked a treat, and went some way to redefining the low fat category. The next ‘roll’ of the dice was to relaunch the 1kg size into the now common rectangular packs. To that time all 1kg Packs had been round, as they were operationally easier and the packs were much cheaper. However, we noted that most female buyers, and they made up 90+%  of purchasers, could not easily handle the product in one hand, they did not fit on most refrigerator door racks, and were less than optimal on the retail shelves.

When we changed all this, sales of 1kg exploded, and gave us new retail distribution. We then followed up with Ski Double-Up, a product that had a range of ‘toppings’ in a separate compartment  of the pack, and a completely different yoghurt that emerged from the combination of new strains of culture and operational process innovation,  that revolutionised the market again, creating an entirely new category.

Your customers may not be who you think they are.

Innovation is a powerful way to attract fringe, lapsed or just reluctant buyers into a market. When we launched Ski Double-up the typical consumer was young, educated, and female.  Consumption by men of yoghurt was only about 20% of female. Ski Double-Up changed all that. Not only did it attract more men, they were significantly older in profile, those who would not touch ‘yoghurt’ as it has been with a barge-pole. They tried Double-Up, liked it, tried other versions, and became regular and loyal consumers, adding significantly to the scope and scale of the Ski brand.

 

Start with ‘Why’.

Defining the ‘Why’ of your brand is a foundation of all branding activity. The best articulation of “Why’ is the now famous TED talk by Simon Sinek.  A brand without a clear and distinctive ‘Why’ is just a label. Sinek uses Apple as an example several times, because as he says, ‘everyone gets it’ and they do. Apple is a branding icon, but not the only one. Recently I stumbled across a new brand from a start-up, one that is breaking new ground on a number of fronts, competing against some of the biggest and best marketers in the world, but will (I suspect) succeed on the strength of their “Why’. It is whogivesacrap toilet paper, purchased by consumers  direct rather than via retailers, with a very clear ‘Why’. Many, almost certainly most will not buy into the why, but enough will to make the brand and business a success, and they will do some good in the process.

The corporate benefit of ‘Why’ is that everyone in the business can buy into it, and the resulting culture can become a very powerful motivator and driver of performance. In our case, the ‘why’ was that we were producing a natural, healthy product, our workforce has all been taken into our confidence, and they were our market research as we ran taste group after taste group in the factory during the development process to get the variables right. When the products became very successful, those people  saw what their contribution had resulted in, and took great pride in it, making a huge contribution to improving the production efficiencies .

 

Sweat the small stuff.

Details matter, a lot. Steve Job’s obsession with the experience of opening a shipper containing an Apple product contributed  a core part to the brand identity of Apple. With Ski we pioneered amongst other things a  process that used a new and expensive printing process that both accommodated the square shape of the 1kg tub, and delivered crystal clear graphics. It was expensive and difficult, but  the attention to the detail that could have been dismissed for cheaper more utilitarian solutions paid huge dividends in volume, and profitability albeit at skinnier margins.

 

Be brave & committed.

Nothing really useful will evolve from just doing the same thing as others, but just a bit better. Being different means taking risks, being brave, pushing the envelope, all those clichés that mean someone has to be brave enough to open the door to the unchartered. That takes guts, rare in todays corporate world,  but around aplenty in small and medium sized businesses.

When we changed Ski 1kg to the rectangular tub, there was no way back. Over a week long factory shutdown, the old machinery for  filling the round tubs was removed, and the new rectangular filling machines installed. Had the change failed, there was no way back.

The steps we took with Ski were all brave at the time. We changed the dynamics and shape of the market, a seemingly obvious step,  but at the time it was sweaty palms all around.

 

You have to be smart.

The marketing group had some very smart people, but more than that, it was a collectively smart group. There was great collaboration and support, and the longevity of the group was substantial, which had offered the opportunity to make a few mistakes and learn from them. At a time when the average tenure of marketing personnel was about 18 months, we averaged 6 years, giving us a significant depth of market understanding and intelligence. Just as important, or perhaps more so, we had the support of the CEO of the division who was prepared to support and encourage the things we did, and I am sure his palms were sweatier than any others, although at the time it never showed. His confidence in us, and support in keeping the corporate drones at bay never wavered. Innovation is impossible without that sort of support from the top.

 

It is really hard to continue to succeed.

This is a warning.

If you succeed, when the applause is over and the credit appropriated, the corporate gnomes come out to play, those who do not understand the dynamics of a brand. If you go into a supermarket today, Ski is an also ran, it looks like it is back to single figure market share, a shadow of its former self we had built. The brand we developed was raped by the accountants and sycophants who killed the golden goose by greed, short ‘termism’ and stupidity, rather than continuing to nurture and invest. The temptation to do so will be strong, and it takes a CEO with brass ones to resist the siren call of the throngs and maintain the investment required.

That rot had started a year or so before I was toddled off. By that time the corporate structure had changed a couple of times, and I was unable to keep the support that had enabled the success in the first place in the face of the changed structure and personnel. Unable to stay quiet in the face of the short term lure of the margins instead of continuing the investment for the long haul, I insisted on being the resident ‘Cassandra’  and ended up paying the price.

As I wrote this post I had to shake myself that it was 25 years ago.

Seems like yesterday.

A lot has changed in the marketing landscape, but the essentials remain the same.

The 7 most stupid innovation killing behaviors I have seen.

The 7 most stupid innovation killing behaviors I have seen.

Jan 15, 2016 | Change, Innovation

Most of the innovation initiatives I see successfully predict the past, but fail miserably at predicting the future in any way that enables commercial success.

In other words, they just extrapolate what has happened in the expectation that history will repeat itself unchanged.

Sometimes it does, but most often the key lesson from history is that we need to learn from it so we can better anticipate and react the next time, not that the same stuff will happen again.

In 35 years successfully engaged in the processes of innovation as a corporate jockey, and more recently as an adviser and contractor, I have seen and been involved in and directed a significant variety of programs. That experience has offered the opportunity to see some almighty clangers with a few common roots, along with the outstanding successes.

Following are the 7 most common causes of innovation failure I have seen.

 

  1. Structure-less programs. Employees and stakeholders are asked, often directed, to come up growth ideas, it is a part of the strategic plan after all. However, there is no structure to collect, process and collate the fragments, and the sometimes fully formed ideas that emerge. Net result, everyone gets annoyed at the failure of yet another innovation effort that has cost a bomb.
  2. Failure to define the problem. Out of  the box thinking is fine, but out of the postcode is usually useless. True innovation only comes from finding the solution to a problem, in the absence of a problem to be solved, nothing happens.
  3. Not walking the talk. Business leaders often talk about innovation and risk taking, then ensure that anyone who steps out of line gets whacked. Risk-taking must be in the enterprise  DNA, top to bottom.  However, I am a bit sick of all the ‘failureporn’ around, of the ‘fail fast, fail often’ type, which sometimes serves to remove responsibility for failure from the individual, meaning that due diligence, a solid hypothesis, and a problem definition, and After Action Reviews do not get done, leading to a failure to learn. People watch what those in power do, rather than listening to what they say, then follow what they do.
  4. Resource allocation does not happen. Management wants the ‘breakthroughs’, but are unprepared to allocate the resources, This is usually a function of the built in risk profile of the enterprise and its leadership, and is related to the talk and walk above. Resources take time, money, access, (to information, leadership, outside info, etc.) and assistance to be assembled, allocated, deployed, and then have the deployment optimised, before  outcomes arrive.
  5. Silver bullet thinking. If they can just find it, there is a remarkable, easy, hugely profitable solution out there somewhere, will somebody just get off their arse and find it please. Never works in real life, just  the movies.
  6. Excluding ‘trouble-makers’. This is a “biggiee”, the single most common problem I see with most innovation efforts.  Almost no matter how hard most try to gather expertise of various types and from differing domains, experience with innovation initiatives, and well meaning consultants and experts, they fail. Most commonly because unwittingly they gather those like themselves, excluding those that  make them uncomfortable, the ‘crazies’  whose ideas and views are inconsistent with some tacit understanding of what is possible and what is likely. In short, they exclude the mavericks, outspoken, different, and disturbing they may be, essential to a delivering even a modest chance of predicting what is just around the corner, let alone 3-5 years out there.
  7. The government will do it. Government has a role in my view, but in science and basic research, long term investments, not in the commercial development of that research. They are crap at that because there is way too much commercial risk involved, and bureaucracies, particularly public ones, are highly risk averse. It is different to just funding a bunch of smart people to think about what makes the universe tick.

 

Successful innovation is never a ground hog day event. It takes commitment, vision, guts, resources, and it makes you feel uncomfortable and sweaty. It is also the lifeblood of success and commercial sustainability.

When you need a helping hand who has learnt from history, give me a call, but be warned, I am a trouble maker, someone who will question all your sacred cows and sometimes recommend execution.