Are You Ready for the Fourth Quarter?

Throughout January, we covered a variety of potential resolutions for the year to improve strategic thinking skills. With the fourth quarter starting tomorrow, it’s a great time to see if there’s an area to embrace as an objective before the end of the year. Here are the links:

• Finding a Strategic Mentor
• Learning from the Challenging People in Your Life
• Identifying What Clears Your Mind for Better Thinking
• Shaping Strategic Thinking in Meetings and on Projects
• Identifying What Matters
• Making Sure Your Work's Special and You Can Say Why
• Collecting Questions to Use When You Have Nothing to Say

Check them out and see if you can finish 2008 with demonstrable growth in your strategic thinking skill set.

Creative Quickie – How Would You Spend Your Most Creative Days?

List 10 experiences that have ignited your creativity in the past. Also list 10 new experiences that you believe would trigger your creativity if you had the opportunity to do them.

Now figure out ways you can realize these twenty experiences either today, next week, next month, or next year so that you have a schedule of creative days planned in advance to recharge yourself.

Can You Be More Specific?

Heading home from Denver on Sunday morning, I stopped for a to-go sandwich and wound up choosing an “Angus Beef and Cheddar Cheese” sandwich. Interestingly, back at home Sunday afternoon, I saw a Sonic ad for its new Angus bacon cheeseburgers.

It would have been just as easy to say “roast beef and cheese” and “bacon cheeseburger,” but in both cases the specificity of mentioning “Angus” beef made these two random messages much more memorable.

There’s your Friday marketing lesson – don’t overlook opportunities to provide even marginally more specificity in your customer communications to stand out and improve memorability.

And as a bonus, here’s your weekend nutrition lesson: If you’re watching your weight, stay away from the Angus bacon cheeseburgers – 760 calories? Eeeeeek!!!

Elitch Gardens Part II - Doing It Backwards

There are several posts here about looking at situations in different ways.

Another new way to look at things became evident while riding a backward roller coaster at Elitch Gardens. These coasters go out and then return you backwards along the same track. The Boomerang roller coaster provided a wonderful and surprising sensation since it was impossible to match up the forward and backward experiences as mere opposites. Going through the ride backward created completely different sensations.

We likely all have processes that we’ve run in a particular direction time after time. Take a cue from the new sensations created by the Boomerang and step through a familiar process backwards. Starting from the end and working your way to the beginning of a process can yield truly new insights to help make the forward process even stronger.

Valerie

Branding Lessons with the Newlyweds at Elitch Gardens

Last Saturday, my niece Valerie and her husband Jerry treated me to roller coaster riding at Elitch Gardens amusement park in Denver. The afternoon provided great lessons on aligning branding and customer experience implementation.

A ticket booth sign promoted Rapid Ride passes – $14.99 add-ons permitting, as the materials stated, time savings by moving to the front of the line for rides. It was touted as providing more family time together at the park.

We decided to get three passes. When Valerie bought the tickets, she received a receipt for one pass, but nothing we could actually use. The ticket taker told us to check with Guest Relations. The Guest Relations worker said the receipt was an internal stub, and that although she could sell the passes, none had been delivered to Guest Relations yet. She sent Valerie back to the ticket booth to wait in line. After redoing the transaction for three passes, they didn’t have the passes either. By the time a manager brought them over, we’d blown thirty minutes getting passes to speed up our park experience.

So think about these branding and customer experience defects:

1. A brand really is more than the name; it’s a customer’s experience with a product or service. When something’s called “Rapid,” everything about it better be “rapid.” It shouldn’t take thirty minutes for anything whose promise is based on rapidity.
   
2. Don’t get focused on narrow brand attributes during naming. While they emphasize speed in the name, we also got to select our seats before anyone else. For roller coaster lovers, riding at the front or back every time is nearly as good as cutting in line. But the name obscured this attractive feature.
   
3. Provide honest information about the experience customers are purchasing. At the first coaster, it was unclear how to use the passes - there were no signs. Turns out there wasn’t a special line Saturday; we had to walk up a ride’s exit line. And only after checking the passes did we learn they were good only five times and only on certain rides.

All three of these are important mistakes to avoid in reconciling what’s important to customers, the brand promise, and actual experiences!

Valerie

You Find Experts Everywhere You Look

Experts are everywhere so in unfamiliar situations look for them to help you perform better. How to spot them?

• Focus on people displaying multi-dimensional talents or responsibilities
• Observe who others go to with questions – irrespective of formal title or position
• Watch for people who look as if they know what they’re doing
• Pick out those who appear to informally take charge

Setting up wedding reception music the night before my niece's wedding ceremony in Denver, Chris was clearly the expert. Though never sure of his official title, he was a wealth of information about the hotel sound system, the reception set up, and how long the event would last and wind down. He predicted that after 4 hours there would be 15 people left; the next day, 3 hours and 50 minutes into the reception, there 16 people remaining. Chris knew what he was talking about!

Another advantage of finding experts is that it’s fun to push them to tap their knowledge to devise innovative approaches.

The wedding was on the hotel’s patio, and that morning Nate (my nephew) and I were still determining how to get enough volume through our small speakers. There were, however, four speakers outside playing house music. While Chris wasn’t available, Warren, who had cleared our table at breakfast (see the bullet about multi-dimensional responsibilities), was. I explained what we hoped to accomplish, showed him a hidden audio jack on the wall, and within 15 minutes, we were playing the ceremony music through the speakers. The hotel had never done this before, but now plans to make this available for future events.

The key was being open, willing to learn, and allowing ourselves to be seen as knowledgeable but uncertain. That’s when an expert will almost always go out of his or her way to come up with an ingenious solution. So remember, look for telltale signs of expertise to help you get smarter when you need it most.

Valerie

Celebrating an Unconventional Life

We were in Denver this past weekend for my niece’s wedding. Travel always spurs blog ideas, so this week touches on ones from the trip.

Living an unconventional life isn’t something to which I’m inclined. My life tends to fall within some fairly standard bounds, allowing for the uncontrollable events that life always holds.

As I pointed out in the toast at the wedding reception, my niece, in stark contrast, had an unconventional life thrust upon her almost from birth.

Growing up amid a care group that depended on her extended family and close friends, she’s an interesting blend - a very loving young woman with certain traditional views surrounded by some very different experiences and twists on life. At several crucial junctures though, she has made incredible decisions that I view with tremendous respect and pride in her judgment. And among traditional aspects of the ceremony and reception, there were multiple unconventional elements for those that wanted to look for them. It was quintessential Valerie!

The whole trip was a reminder that it’s important to be open to and learn from life perspectives and behaviors that are very different from your own. Try to look for points of agreement where you may share views. And maybe wait a few minutes (or a few days, or even until the next trip) to provide your wisdom on life and how to live it. In so doing, you may get to learn all kinds of new things about tattoos, snowboarding, and what it means to be a polite graffiti artist!

The Answer Is Blowin in the . . . a) Wind b) Data c) None of the Above

“Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.” - Wernher von Braun

“Generalizations are generally wrong.” - Butler Lampson

“Beware of the man who won't be bothered with details.” - William Feather

“If you torture the data enough, it will confess.” - Ronald Coase

“Lies, damn lies, and statistics.” - Mark Twain

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - George Bernard Shaw

BrainzoomingTM - You Spoiled Little Customer

“Being respected is nice. Being spoiled is wonderful.”

Rushing through the Cleveland airport (which I always seem to be doing when in Cleveland lately), I saw a Continental Airlines poster that included the line above, give or take a few words (since I was rushing, I didn’t have time to take a picture).

Anybody responsible for addressing customer experiences can use the statement as a great starter for innovation. Ask: “What could we do to treat our customers so special that they’d feel as if we were completely spoiling them?’

The answers can be powerful in dramatically enhancing experiences for your customers.

Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere’s Johnny On the Spot

I downloaded a fascinating interview from emusic – an hour long interview with Johnny Carson on humor recorded in the late 1960s (it’s one of several such interviews with famous comedians). In one segment, the discussion turns to ad libbing. Johnny made the statement that rarely do comedians make up something entirely new right on the spot. He said instead, improvisation comes from having a good memory for things that you’ve said, done, or seen previously and the ability to switch things around to fit the current moment.

That’s a great formula for on-the-spot innovation whether it’s comedy or any other situation you face.

BrainzoomingTM - Cool Isn't Always Enough

Dave Wessling, one of my all-time most influential teachers, shared many comments that have shaped my thinking in so many ways. One that’s particularly relevant recently is, “Form should reinforce meaning.” It’s a great rule to apply when developing and assessing creative material against an underlying strategy.

The principle basically challenges you to consider everything (i.e., color, position, sequence, pacing, volume, length, vocabulary, position, shape, movement, tonality, etc.) surrounding a communications message (the form) relative to how strongly it supports the meaning of the message being conveyed. Substitute “creative” for “form” and “strategy” for “meaning” and you have a maxim you can use over and over again:

“Creative should reinforce strategy.”

You’ll never go wrong applying this principle in business, and particularly in marketing decision making. It’s especially helpful in an environment where people are advancing interesting, intriguing, even cool creative ideas that have little to do with any underlying strategic foundation.

Asking if the creative reinforces the strategy at the appropriate time (i.e., during a specific evaluation period and NOT during a divergent thinking exercise), will lead to making better strategic decisions and producing messages with stronger impacts.

Creative Quickie for the Week – I Tune In So I Tune Out

Dive into your music collection or an online music source to create mixes tailored to all the creative situations you may be facing. Some possibilities include:

• High energy music to create energy
• Classical to stimulate strategic thinking
• Quiet music to relax your brain
• Electronic to allow your mind to roam

Whatever suits you and your typical creative needs, have a CD or mp3 player all ready to go to establish the mood for the work day or the evening at home on the commute to/from work!

Reinvent Yourself Week - Prioritization and Implementation

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“If you invent your own instrument, you’re automatically one of the top three musicians in the world on that instrument.” - Matt Goldman, Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group (August 2008 “Inc.”)

That quote is how we started the week working through creating a personal category to set yourself apart. And if you’ve been playing along at home all week, you should have a wide variety of potential possibilities as input into your category.

So what are some steps to dramatically narrow the list of ideas? Here’s a flashback to some previous posts you can use to narrow your possibilities:

• Prioritizing for dramatic input
• Forcing consideration of ideas that seem uncomfortable (but may hold the potential for a big direction change)
• Narrowing ideas by comparing them directly

Try to narrow to 10-15% of your original ideas, and then begin looking for elements that you can put together to create a new category with which to describe your talents. Ideally the category should be distinctive and defined in a way that you become the only answer to, “Who are the best people who can do this?”

Reinvent Yourself - Trait Transformation

Yet another way to ideate on a strong “personal” category is to use your current personal strengths and deliberately transform them to identify new and distinctive possibilities. Here’s a relatively quick approach:

1. State your objective as “Building a distinct personal category to define and differentiate my value to others.”


2. List 8-10 of your distinctive talents (Tuesday) and areas of incredible value (Wednesday) as Attributes in the left column in the grid below.


3. Using the objective from Step 1, take each talent and value area in Step 2 and transform them in the various ways suggested below, always asking: “To create a new personal category how can I (INSERT TRANSFORMER FROM BELOW) to / of (INSERT STRENGTH OR TALENT)?

Potential Transformers include Make It Bigger / Do More of It, Make It Smaller / Do Less of It, Replace It, Turn It Around, Remove It, Standardize It, Customize It, Make It More Complex, Simplify It, Eliminate It

Run through as many combinations as you can, trying to generate 2 or 3 new ideas form each pairing. Don’t settle for fewer than 60 possibilities that could fit into the category definition we’ve been working on all week.
Next, we’ll narrow all the possibilities to get close to defining your category.

Reinvent Yourself Week - Look and Ask Around

A 360 degree survey can be scary, but it’s a great tool to get a sense of how others perceive you. It can be tremendously instructive and beneficial. I did one through a leadership class several years ago that really helped me redefine some of my behaviors. There are various ones available online.

Another fast way to get some sense of potential areas you can use to define “your category” is to ask yourself and others three value-related questions:

• What are the TOP 3 things I do that ADD INCREDIBLE VALUE for others?
• What are the TOP 3 things I do that DON'T DELIVER INCREDIBLE VALUE for others because we can't/don't focus enough time, attention, and/or resources on them?
• What are the TOP 3 things I do that ADD LITTLE OR NO VALUE for others?

Look for themes among the answers and consider using areas of incredible value as potential category definers. Areas where you could deliver value but don’t are potential opportunities for more concentrated effort. Areas where you’re delivering little value could be areas to attempt to eliminate from your routine.

Soliciting reactions about yourself from others may feel intimidating, but assessing and using the responses wisely gives you an advantage most people are unwilling to pursue.

Reinvent Yourself Week - Look Inside for Distinctive Talents

Distinctive talents are skills closely associated with you where you continually improve as you do them, you benefit others, and you create a spark that attracts people to be a part of the energy you’re radiating. Building your list of distinctive talents begins with answering these questions openly & honestly:

• What things motivate you to get up every morning?
• How are you of the greatest service to others?
• What activities bring you the most happiness and contentment?
• What functions, talents, and skills do you (or have you) used that give you the most fulfillment in your professional life, family relationships / duties, spiritual life, and personal interests / hobbies?
• How would you spend your time, talents, and attention if you didn’t have to work?

Hint – Stumped for answers in some areas? Ask a few acquaintances what they think your distinctive talents are.

After answering all the questions, go back and circle the 5 or 10 or 15 answers that truly fit the distinctive talents definition. Since these areas are likely to be the most intuitive for you, you think less about the mechanics of doing them and simply perform them really well. This makes them ideal to incorporate into creating a new “category” where you’ll be the best in the world.

Reinvent Yourself Week - The Blue Man Group

“If you invent your own instrument, you’re automatically one of the top three musicians in the world on that instrument.” - Matt Goldman, Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group (August 2008 “Inc.”)

This is a great strategic concept that any of us can apply personally or in business. What is an instrument, tool, process, or category that you can invent which creates a new area where you are, by definition, one of the best performers in the world?

This week, we’ll work through ways to answer that question.

Creative Quickie – Don’t Speak Your Goals

This is a non-traditional approach shared by motivational speaker Ed Foreman: when you have a big goal that you tell others about, many of them will try to explain why you shouldn’t have a goal that big or how come you’ll never achieve it.

His answer? Keep your big goals to yourself and don’t share them with others. In that way, you avoid all the negative advice and can move toward your big creative goal mentally unfettered.

I dismissed the approach when I first heard about it, but my wife of 21 years (as of today) has used it to cross numerous projects off her list without having to listen to me explain why we shouldn’t be doing them!

Happy Anniversary Cyndi!!!

Sure I’d Like to Help Brainzooming Grow Mike!

Next week is the 200th Brainzooming post. Starting this blog has been a great personal growth experience, providing an opportunity to interact with people and to create a new outlet for ideas and cartoons. Ideally, it’s also been beneficial for you, the readers.

In June, I asked current readers for input. Your comments helped re-shape the blog’s content and style. Your ideas have been very beneficial.

I’d like to ask your help again to expand the blog’s readership. Specifically I need your help in growing the new reader pool for the blog by 200 people more than typical in the next two weeks.

Here’s how you can help. If you find value in the content, please forward the site’s URL / link with a brief comment to 10 or 20 friends that might also find benefit in it. Heck, if I may be so presumptuous, copy and send the paragraph below, if you’d like:

I just wanted to pass along a daily blog that I’ve been reading on innovation, creativity, and strategy. It’s an interesting mix of topics that helps in thinking about work and even personal life in new ways. Thought you might be interested in checking it out at http://brainzooming.blogspot.com. The posts are pretty short and available via email. Check it out!

Your referrals are vital in helping grow the readership base so that we can get more comments, interaction, and feedback to continue shaping the content to address challenges and opportunities the readers face.

Remember, we’re going for 200 new readers. And as a thank you, to the person who cc’s me (at email address - mike@mikebrownspeaks.com) with the most invites to potential readers (across both BrainZooming and mikebrownspeaks readers), I’ll send a copy of “Made to Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

So get cutting and pasting, help the blog grow, and get your chance to win “Made to Stick.” Thanks for your help!!!

Mike

Creativity on the Road in Kansas

Back in Hays, KS with my parents over Labor Day, we took a road trip inside a road trip, heading to central Kansas on Saturday. It was reminiscent of trips when I was young, taking pictures of abandoned farmsteads and interesting buildings as inspiration for drawings and paintings I was doing then.

The first stop was the Smoky Hills Wind Farm along I-70 around Lincoln, KS. It’s a great example of functionality (power generation) tied to natural resources (there’s lots of wind in Kansas) and the surroundings. Although the wind turbines can appear stark and modern, their interplay with the rolling hills of central Kansas is fascinating and natural.

Because of how the interstate winds through the hills, the turbine placement, and the effects of foreshortening, there are several instances where the blades appear to be emerging from trees or waiting for vehicles to drive right into them. Click on the pictures here to get a better feel for this.

There are other instances where the juxtaposition of the turbines and an old conventional windmill sets up an intriguing contrast. And even with the current level of completion, the wind farm’s visual impact is quite striking. I can’t wait until it’s fully operational.

Afterward, we headed north to Lucas, KS to visit “The Garden of Eden,” a 22 year project started in 1907 by Samuel Perry Dinsmoor. He fashioned limestone and 113 tons of cement into a faux log cabin and sculpture garden featuring the fall of man and various populist issues of his time. It has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

We also discovered that Lucas has positioned itself as an outsider arts haven with a number of exhibits and a Grassroots Art Center. Additionally, we happened upon The Great Toilet Seat Art Show and Auction, an exhibit of interestingly decorated toilet seats that are available for purchase and online viewing!

If you’re traveling through Kansas on I-70, Lucas is easy to overlook (I haven’t been there in more than twenty years), and the wind farm is impossible to miss. But both destinations, though very different, are very cool representations of Kansas and the creative aspects of its heritage.

Did I Write That? Or Did You?

On my Labor Day road trip, I listened to “Live at the BBC,” a 2-cd set of recordings The Beatles made on BBC Radio from March 1962 to June 1965. It made me think about an old book definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in the musical creative process.

“The Playboy Interviews with John Lennon and Yoko Ono” is a transcript of interviews the pair did with writer David Sheff right before Lennon’s death in 1980. In one section, Lennon walked through the entire Beatles catalog, discussing the creative origin of each song with Paul McCartney. Sometimes it was true collaboration; at times it was the other person adding a small, yet critical element that made the song. Many times, particularly in later years, it was primarily individual creation. Yet because of publishing agreements, and perhaps a recognition that their creative styles were inexorably shaped by each other, all of their songs were jointly credited as Lennon-McCartney.

R.E.M. in its original line-up also credited every song to all members – Berry/Buck/Mills/Stipe - irrespective of how it was composed, acknowledging that through the recording process, each band member had shaped the final creation.

I’ve always loved that creative team approach. In the best creative work in which I’ve participated, I enjoy the phenomenon that once it’s done, it’s very difficult to actually recall which person contributed which theme, idea, line, or edit.

That truly reflects a collaborative creative team.