Out and About with the Motorola Q Capturing Real-Life Strategy & Innovation

In the Parking Lot

I was at VML in Kansas City yesterday for a meeting. Visitors are greeted in the parking lot by these signs not only representing the new VML brand identity, but also setting the stage for strategy and innovation!

In the Bathroom

In the midst of our conversations with VML on branding, there was a product in the men's restroom that I hadn't seen before. It's rather off-putting brand name? The Dyson Airblade (say it aloud for the full effect).

While it promises to be "the fastest, most hygenic hand dryer," it was obviously named by engineers. Who really wants to stick their wet hands into a contraption whose first name sounds like a threat and whose second seems to tell you exactly how the threat will be carried out? Just in time for Halloween!

At the Polls

Voting the other day, there were signs displayed outside warning against campaigning too close to the polling place. While most candidates' supporters were at the nearest main intersection, this supporter for candidate Steve Roberts seems to say, "I'll operate inside your lines, but I'll damn well get right up next to them."

I vote for this guy's chutzpah!

EXERCISE YOUR RIGHT TO VOTE! You can vote in the blog poll to suggest upcoming posts. You can also vote to request a copy of the new Brainzooming book, "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation" by emailing me early and often at mike@mikebrownspeaks.com.

Brainzooming - End the Day in an Upbeat Way

At the end of each day, ask yourself a Brainzooming question to wrap up. Pick one from the list below if you don’t have one of your own:

• What was the most creative thing that happened today?


• What was the funniest moment of the day?


• How did I serve others today?


• What was the day’s most positive moment?


• What was the coolest twist on an idea today?

Answering any of these will bring the work day to an upbeat conclusion!

Change Your Character - Attracting Customers as a Celebrity Attracts Fans

Of anyone in society, celebrities readily attract the public’s attention, drawing fans to themselves. While it can be trying for celebrities, we’d probably all like to attract customers in business with the same type of fervor and interest.

So let’s take a look at why fans are attracted to celebrities and revisit the Change Your Character exercise. Apply each of these reasons fans are attracted to celebrities to a situation where you’re trying to draw customers to your brand.

Fans see celebrities as:

• Having attractive characteristics that they want to be around
• Being familiar because celebrities are seen all the time in the media
• Approachable
• Likeable
• Friendly
• Having the ability to change someone’s life if they knew each other
• Getting lots of attention that others can bask in
• Wielding lots of influence & power

The goal is to generate 3 new ideas for each of the items above. Click here for a refresher on using the Change Your Character exercise.

A Bunch of Small Steps and a Special Bonus

At the gym recently, I was reading closed captioning for Maria Bartiromo’s CNBC show “The Business of Innovation.”

The conversation turned to small innovations – the idea that many (maybe most) innovation efforts wind up creating a string of “singles,” with few “home runs.” It was a great reminder from the show’s experts that there’s value in an ongoing innovation effort yielding a steady stream of modest, directionally correct improvements that add up over time.

While it’s probably unrealistic to think you can create one big innovation success after another, repeated small advances can ideally set you up for major breakthroughs!


SPECIAL BONUS FOR EMAIL & RSS SUBSCRIBERS!

I've just finished my new e-book, "Taking the NO Out of InNOvation." It covers techniques to create and reinforce the breadth of perspectives necessary to foster innovative thinking.

If you'd like a free copy, email me at mike@mikebrownspeaks.com and I'll send you the pdf along with getting you signed up to receive the Brainzooming blog (the companion to the mikebrownspeaks blog) via email or RSS feed if you don't do so already.

Looking forward to getting your reactions to this new work plus your comments on the poll running on the upper left of the blog!

What Do You Like Reading About?

With the blog’s first anniversary in the offing, I’d really appreciate your quick input on the types of posts that you find most intriguing.

Let Me Know What You Think

Check out the poll on the upper left of the blog and provide your point of view on where the subject matter heads in the near future. There are five categories to select from (and you can choose multiple ones).

Click below to see examples in each category:

• Quick Tips (Creative Quickies, Brainzooming)
• Lessons Learned (Situations I’m encountering on strategic thinking & innovation)
• Reports (News & links to events I’m attending)
• Guest Bloggers (Topics from colleagues)
• Observations (Commentary on general subjects or marketplace situations)

As always leave a comment or send me an email to let me know – what would you like to read more about in the blog?

Surf’s Up

Fun Shoestring Branding in the World of Finance

A Great Perspective for Turning Current Apprehensions into Positives

Dilbert’s Advice on Battling the Idea Squirrel



What have been your favorite web finds for the week? Leave them in the comments or email me to share them with everybody.

Random Thoughts from TMRE

This is the last planned post from The Market Research Event (TMRE) – 4 intense days with so many learning and insight opportunities to share!

• TMRE runs its conference with 5 minutes breaks - never seen anything like it. Hats off to them for making it work since it adds at least three more educational sessions in a 3-day conference. That translates directly into increased value for participants.


• Interesting how many research companies include orange in their color pallets. Like that a lot! Every research company describes itself as a “full service market research company.” Doubt that a whole lot!


• Disneyland isn’t Disney World. Granted, I was last at Disney World more than a decade ago. At the time though, it appeared to be the epitome of smart marketing, managing all conceivable elements of customer experience. Disneyland clearly doesn’t. (Quick examples – no mention of going to the park at check-in, the early-order breakfast door hanger was never replaced after using it the first day, and a bag’s worth of crushed pretzels remained on the floor overnight without being cleaned up). So, what’s not happening?


• Disneyland note pads feature Mickey ears and the phrases
  “Ideapad” and “Inspire. Innovate. Dream.” at the top. COOL! And it has meeting rooms called “Adventure” and “Fantasy.” COOL!! But when you put the pads in basement level rooms with low ceilings, poor lighting, and no windows, it’s a little more challenging to inspire, innovate, and dream.
  
• Despite my mini-rants above, how much happier would your workplace be if the background music played “Zippity Do Dah,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” and “The Mickey Mouse Club Theme” in heavy rotation?

And if you haven't gotten enough about TMRE yet, go over to my Schmoozii post from yesterday about the concept of "creative consumers." It's the snarkiest post I've done yet, although I do realize Barrett that it isn't all that snarky...but I'm working on it!

The Only Person You’re Fooling Is Yourself

In the airport last week, I saw a “chunky” guy who had drawn a black line through the label sewn to the back of his jeans. That way, nobody could read his waist size. Interesting approach, but here’s an alternative – just cut off the label.

It was funny to see this site, but let’s all ask ourselves a question. What challenges or nuisances do WE try to “black out” that could actually be removed from our lives completely, if we were able to look at them in new ways?

Careful – don’t fool yourself!

Wonderful Wishes for Today - HBTM

Brainzooming (TM) – Catching Up with Your Business Kids

I got to hang out at The Market Research Event (TMRE) with a couple of my “research kids.” It was great to see how they’ve continued to advance in their careers.

This week, make a short list of your “business kids” – the people you’ve worked with and helped shape that have moved on to other places. If it’s been awhile, give them a call, see how they’re doing, and find out if they’re headed to any conferences in the near future. If they are, and you can see your way clear to do it, join them, do some learning, and get a Brainzoom from seeing how they’ve grown since leaving home.

“The Market Research Event” – Final Day Keynotes – Marcus Buckingham and Dan Ariely

There were two great keynotes at “The Market Research Event” on Thursday, the final day of the conference at Disneyland.

Marcus Buckingham

Perennial best-selling author Marcus Buckingham spoke about building your strengths and his new book, “The Truth About You.” He related a funny story about his son, who has shown himself to be a substandard artist in kindergarten. Despite Buckingham’s work on developing your strengths in lieu of the futility of addressing your weaknesses, he noted that he and his wife were quick to consider remedial art training, missing their son's demonstrated aptitude in math.

Dan Ariely

The other great keynote was from Dan Ariely, author of “Predictably Irrational.” He shared background from his book on how our eyes and brain both work to skew our view of reality and cloud the ability to process information rationally. It looked like the temporary bookstore in the trade show area was doing a brisk business in his book at the morning break. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re in the business of asking people questions and trying to predict what they may do.

Question for readers - This is the first week in quite some time where EVERY article was written within hours of its morning posting. Like it? Don't like it? Didn't notice the difference? Leave a comment to let me know what you think.

More Highlights from The Market Research Event (TMRE)

It’s wrap-up day for The Market Research Event (TMRE). Here are a few highlights from a various sessions this week:

• Interesting quote on changing business dynamics from Doug Cottings, Executive Director Marketing Research & Analysis at UBS – “Financial markets are changing over the weekend, which never happened before.”
  
• We’ve talked about businesses going after your market share not always looking like your company. Karen Gryson, Director of Global Knowledge & Insight at The Coca-Cola Company provided a great confirmation of this when covering its extensive work on needs-based segmentation. She highlighted that Coca-Cola competes with candy, snack chips, and even cigarettes on a sensory needs basis.
  
• In our Monday session, a participant from a major CPG marketer asked what’s next in ideation and strategic thinking. I mentioned the IBM Jams approach that lets widely distributed groups exchange ideas. Technology is in place that enables theme analysis and prioritization within these broad discussions. On Tuesday, James Newswanger from IBM talked about IBM Jamming in a session on Corporate Reputation measurement. He identified two epiphanies from these experiences: the Internet can transform relationships between employees and the company, and the size of these online events breaks down intra-company silos.
  
• Kelley Styring, head of Insight Farm and author of “In Your Car: Road Trip through the American Automobile” did a great overview of the work for this upcoming book. Her approach is a very cool merging of qualitative research (and ethnography specifically), quantitative analysis, and ideation to identify enhancements that would make cars much more functional for how people use them. How else to generate ideas ranging from a food warmer (for cooking items in a sun-drenched car during the day) to a separate temperature protection module (to keep all the HBA and medical solutions we keep in cars cool and protected from spoilage).

These are just a few of the insights and idea starters. We’ll cover more in the future, along with an update to the ongoing series on what poor presenters should stop doing.

“Design Driven Deliverables”

The standout presentation Tuesday at The Market Research Event (TMRE) was from W5, a market research company based in Durham, NC. The session was on “Design Driven Deliverables,” defined as “any method of communicating research findings that goes beyond the standard research report.”

This topic has been of great interest to me; it’s unfortunately often met with blank stares. As Steve Kulp and Lisa Broome from W5 discussed expanding the range of media used to communicate research results, my thought was, “Maybe I’m not as crazy as I thought, or at least they’re crazy in the same way I am!”

W5 considers four types of design driven deliverables:

• Graphic – Results depicted visually in posters, booklets, stickers, note cards, etc.
• Sensory – Stimuli that engage the senses in various ways, including textures, audio, video, and smells.
• Experiential – An interactive presentation of results in ideation sessions, dramatization, experiential tours, immersion rooms.
• Installation – Physical environments that convey understanding, including displays, large scale murals, shadow boxes, and artifact installations.

They showed examples that demonstrated meaningful, story-based depictions of research data going beyond simply reporting statistical differences. Check out more information through W5 white papers on this and other topics at company’s website.

Follow-up note - here’s a recap video shot right after Monday’s strategic thinking session. It’s posted on YouTube!

Update from Day 1 of The Market Research Event

Monday’s IIR The Market Research Event (TMRE) agenda included pre-conference sessions. I did a strategic thinking seminar along with Lori Schade in the morning. Thanks to all the attendees who asked questions and offered comments throughout the very interactive session.

I attended Holly O’Neill’s seminar on turbo charging new product ideation in the afternoon. She is president of Talking Business, a California-based marketing firm. Her session included 9 exercises intended to help participants grow in facilitating ideation sessions. Her comments were a reminder about ideation session fundamentals that are easy to overlook. Among these:

• Create an ideation platform upfront – a clear documentation of the session’s objectives and topic breadth
• Use an initial mind dump to let people share ideas already on their minds
• Get people standing up and moving around often to keep energy levels high
• Consider an inspiration table – a collection of objects designed to spur creativity on the topic being considered
• Structure exercises that allow people to build off of one another’s ideas
• Have participants sketch out ideas to help bring them to life

As time permits, I’ll provide additional updates throughout the week on relevant topics.

Creative Quickie from Disneyland - Plane Reading

In the current issue of "Fast Company," there's an intriguing article on what neuroscience reveals about how to be more creative. Author Gregory Berns highlights the importance of forcing our brains into situations where they "must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization."

Excerpted from his book "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently," it reinforces the idea of throwing ourselves into as many new situations as possible to literally force thinking differently and spurring creative instigation!

P.S. I'm at Disneyland speaking at The Market Research Event (TMRE) today. Maybe there's a new ride to throw myself into to instigate creativity! I'll have to check that out!

But They’re Both on the Menu!

I was eating in a hotel restaurant recently and was hesitant about the food. After talking with the server and deciding to be adventurous (foolish?) and ordering the salmon she suggested, I was pleasantly surprised that the dinner salad was made from a very good lettuce mix (not Styrofoam iceberg lettuce). Thinking I’d probably ordered too much, I told the server I probably should have just had a salmon salad since the dinner salad was so good.

She agreed a salmon salad would be good, but informed me that the salmon salad on the menu was a Caesar salad so I couldn’t have had salmon with the same lettuce and vegetables in my dinner salad.

What’s the lesson? Just as in the famous scene from “Five Easy Pieces” where Jack Nicholson has to go WAY out of his way to get an order of wheat toast, the lettuce and the salmon I wanted were both on the menu, just not together. And since they weren’t together, the server couldn’t envision the combination.

This isn’t to criticize her, but to ask how many times we do exactly the same thing in our own worlds? How many times are all the parts there but we simply fail to think about how we can rearrange them into something new? Probably more than we care to admit. So let’s all be on the lookout for new and exciting combinations lurking right in front of us on the menu!

And the Little Children Shall Question Them

Here’s a follow-on to the recent article about the young boy on the plane whose father confirmed that his drawing was a masterpiece. Going back through the notebook from that plane trip, I found several wonderful questions that he asked during the flight:

• “Is this a masterpiece?”


• “Who invented gravity?”


• “Are we off the ground yet?” (This was probably 30 minutes into the flight!)


• “Can butterflies fly this high?”


• “Is there such a thing as eleventeen?”

Maybe it’s only because I’m not a parent that I found these questions so fun.

Nevertheless, we’d all think about things in exciting new ways if we could get ourselves to ask questions as unencumbered by our own experiences as this little boy could!

BrainzoomingTM - Hotel California

Is there a “Hotel California” in your work? To borrow from the Eagles song, it’s the activity or project that you can check out from but never seem to be able to leave behind. Identify them and ask these questions:

• Are you really sure you can’t leave? When was the last time you tried? If you couldn’t leave through the front door, how about a side door, back door, or window?


• If you’ve satisfied yourself that you really can’t leave, is there a way to check back in? Is there something about it that you’ve been overlooking that makes sticking with it more rewarding? Maybe it’s a different room – ones that’s an "upgrade" or on a "different floor"?

Only you know the answers. See what you can do about them.

Getting Less Focused

Three incidents happened recently that show that at times, focus is overrated.

1. Meeting a friend for lunch and FOCUSED on getting into the restaurant right on time, I parked, bolted for the door, and walked directly past him sitting in the car right next to mine.


2. I bought an audio birthday card for a friend. I FOCUSED on it playing the theme from “The Twilight Zone” when buying it because it tied to something going on in her life right now. When discussing it later, it recalled for her a shared connection to the song from nearly ten years before. That very personal connection completely escaped me when I purchased it.


3. My wife and I were looking for an orange shirt to replace one that I’d ruined with permanent marker (it’s a bit of an occupational hazard, unfortunately). She was holding up a possible shirt when I became FOCUSED on exactly the orange shirt I wanted and made a beeline past her toward the rack where it was hanging. Moments later when she called my attention to the shirt again, I reacted as if it were the first time seeing it. She said that she’d held it up for me to see not five minutes before. But once I saw the orange shirt, it wouldn’t have mattered if a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model had been standing there; I’d have missed her.

Focus can be great when facing a critical task and you can tune out distractions, but too much focus can cause you to completely miss the obvious. That’s why it’s important to either force yourself to break focus or to seek perspectives from others who aren’t as focused on your issues as you are. In that way, you can help avoid looking foolish (or worse) for ignoring something staring everybody else in the face.

Creative Quickie - What Me Worry?

Growing up reading Mad Magazine, I found it humorous that it described the editorial staff as “the usual gang of idiots.” Often, in trying to creatively solve business challenges you can find yourself involving the same people every time – it’s the “usual gang of idiots” phenomenon.

Here are some ideas to freshen your creative team next time it’s feeling stale:

• Ask a friend who is a creative thinker to participate, even if they don’t know your business.


• See if someone new in your company could introduce a fresh perspective.


• Change scenery and go somewhere different to think (Some co-workers stole away to a local hotel recently and did a creative session at a big table in the hotel’s lower corridor. Fresh ambiance for no cost!)


• Buy unusual magazines and do the magazine random idea exercise - page through each one, using images and words on each page to trigger new ideas for your thinking challenge.

Try one or more of these to help your “gang of idiots” come up with anything but usual answers to your challenges!

BrainzoomingTM - Airplane Time

People do a variety of things on planes, from very active to very passive. For me, airplane time is some of my most creative strategic thinking time because there are very few interruptions and there’s a very different perspective from which to think.

So next plane flight, don’t distract yourself (with iPods, DVDs, etc.) or others (with idle small talk) – simply think, contemplate, and create in whatever ways you do best.

10 Things to Do When Everyone Else Is Losing Their Heads

1. Call whatever the closest equivalent to “time out” is for the situation.
2. Pray.
3. Determine if there’s real physical danger (since every other type of danger pales in comparison).
4. Figure out how bad the worst thing that can happen really is.
5. Take a moment to think.
6. Ask, “What’s within my control to improve the situation?”
7. Circle your best, most dependable confidants and solicit their input.
8. Identify the most comparable situation that you’ve previously addressed successfully.
9. Work through any contingency scenarios that you’ve developed.
10. Develop a quick contingency plan if you don’t have one.

Strategic Leadership

Looking back through some material while working on a self-imposed writing deadline, these perspectives on strategic leadership surfaced, and seemed worthwhile to share.

• You can’t take on somebody else’s leadership style; you have to ultimately develop one that works for your personality.
  
• Leadership isn’t about position or title. It's about service. Every person can be a leader – and great leaders cultivate other leaders throughout the team or organization.
  
• Some leaders are great at creating & communicating a vision. Some are better at implementing the visions of others. Figure out which type of leader you are and pair up with the other type to be successful.
  
• A leader can’t begin to control everything. Surrender on the things that you can’t control. Many times you have only two options – PRAY and PAY; often, it’s only PRAY.
  
• Have mental restarts to help stay sharp. What do yours feel like?
  
• Sometimes leaders lead based on a vision. Or emotion. Or facts. Or all of these at once.
  
• Leaders take action and use all the tools that are appropriate and available to them to do so. Even if it means inventing new tools.