While browsing TEDTalks in anticipation of the 2008 installment, I ran across this gem by Richard St. John. I thought it was one of the most concise statements of what I have heard from many people I respect. Richard aggregated this view by interviewing 500 successful people over a 7 year period.
For those of you that can’t see the embedded video, here is the link to the page on TED.com For those of you that don’t have time to watch here they are:
Passion (Do it for the love not the money)
Work (Hard work, be a worka-frolic)
Good (Get damn good at something)
Focus (x-ray vision focus)
Push (through shy-ness and self-doubt)
Serve (others something they value)
Ideas (have them)
Persist (through the Criticism, Rejection, and Pressure)
Over the last two days I was pointed to two interesting on-line moneymakers. They were interesting in how they make money. One sells something that is ubiquitous and in most caes considered a nuisance, while the other harnesses the power of a distributed crowd to provide a service at a very low cost.
The first example is http://www.prairietumbleweedfarm.com/ where Linda Katz of Garden City, Kansas sells, you guessed it, tumbleweeds on the internet. The original post I ran across is over at Unusual Business Ideas That Work. This excerpt from the linked article pretty much explains the origin of the business.
“It all started as a joke,”says Katz, 49. She asked her son to build her a family Web page so she could communicate with friends and give it the tongue-in-cheek name Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Never mind that she didn’t even live on a farm, but in a subdivision. Nevermind that you can’t cultivate tumbleweed, which spreads its seed as it tumbles in the wind. For authenticity’s sake, Katz added a price list ($35 for a big weed, $25 for a midsize one, $20 for the small economy model)
So tongue-in-cheek or not, Katz created a business when she wasn’t looking for one. It turns out that her buyers range from people looking to decorate their houses, to movie studios, to academic researchers, to people in love with Westerns, and even for tumbleweed Christmas trees (picture at right by erissiva). Seth Godin has a comment on this site on how this site emerged totally from organic search engine traffic.
The second site is www.pickydomains.com where they have an original take on making money off the domain name trade. Most people make money (some say a lot) by speculating on domain names. Some companies can hire consultants for thousands of dollars to come up with a catchy and traffic-driving domain name. Pickydomains takes the “power of the crowds” approach. As a person/entity wanting to use their service, you pay $50 and a list of requirements for your domainname. For example you would provide the basic site type, hyphens/no-hyphens, .com or other, mandatory keywords, etc. Pickydomains would post this to their list of users, a large list. The users would submit possible solutions. If the users’s submission is chosen, pickydomains shares half the $50 fee. PickyDomains also can buy any ones the customers don’t want, but they think are worth something. If they don’t provide something you are interested in, they refund your fee. This is a great example of having a crowd solve a problem that it is difficult to solve as an individual or a small group. Interesting business idea. If you do to the site you can see some exmples of successful wins. The one comment I have is that this service is too inexpensive. Just like the previous post Here, people expectation are linked to evironment and pre-text.
Scientists at NIST show DNA wrapped SWCNT of 200nm or less enter ex-vitro lung cells where longer ones don’t. Not sure if this is like saying 200nm DNA stands enter lung cells, while longer DNA stands don’t? Another confusion in the the debate on the safety of “nanomaterials”. How does your company deal with EHS and nanotubes?
I had a long drive this past weekend and was listening up on Phil McKinney’s Killer Innovations Podcasts from 2006. This one on “Listening Skills and Rules of Future Forecasting” was one that I enjoyed.
Ditto on the Podcast “Observation Skills and Contradictions” deals with a quick exercise for improving observation and the most concise and true-ringing explanation of TRIZ I have seen anywhere.
Endless Innovation has a post from Design Sojourn about 7 ways to unleash your creativity originally from IDEO. (three level link action). Those IDEO guys are great, I got to meet a few through work.
Hugh MacLeod from GapingVoid fame has a whole series of articles on “How to be creative.” You really should check them out if you haven’t read them before. Although the Hugh was approaching this from a artist point of view, there is some universality to some of these comments that each person can adapt as needed. One that happened to strike a cord with me today was:
“6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with books on algebra etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the creative bug is just a wee voice telling you, “I’d like my crayons back, please.”……..”
This really is very qutie striking. The engineer and scientist in me likes the order and rules that we build up to explain the world, control our environment, and make the future. We didn’t start out with models, or rules, or equations, we had to be trained. All of us started out as uncontrolled little minds that didn’t know or care for the rules. We dripped of “outside the box” thinking and creativity, but over time had to learn the proper way of things.
S o what does this have to do with you or your career or innovation? Well a couple of things. One is the importance of stepping out of your training and experience to imagine what might be possible if you ignored the rules temporarily. What opportunities do you miss because you use the current paradigm that everyone accepts? Have you ever had a situation where an answer was simple and elegeant, yet it was counter-intuitive to the “right way”? What happens when you remove the lens through which you view reality and replace it with someone else’s?
Second is to leverage those fresh perspectives when you have a chance to come across them. One great example of this is the finding yourself in a situation where you have a fresh employee to your company or a fresh new team member? Take this blessing and use it. Give them enough information to see the problem and then step away. Let them identify the problem details and come up with those solutions that you would never think of due to your “training”.
After reading the article do any of you have a favorite. “guest author” spot up for grabs. Just shoot me and email.
Hugh MacLeod over at gapingvoid (of the cartoon fame) has a great summary of a talk he gave recently. For anyone in business this is a must read. It is the best synopsis I have seen on why you want to have strategy around the use of blogs in business.
Some great quotes from the article:
“To me, The Cluetrain is the most important book about the internet ever written. Why? Because it was the first book that talked about the internet the way it REALLY is- i.e. people talking- as opposed to the way business and the media pretend it is- i.e. people buying.”
“If corporate blogs work, it’s because they help humanify the company”
“Blogging is not about reaching a mass audience. Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. Blogging is about allowing “The Smarter Conversation” to happen.”
”Blogs allow you to cheaply and quickly begin a smarter conversation. And once you get it going, that conversation starts bleeding out into all other areas of your business- including advertising, PR and corporate communications.”
There is much more in the link and it is worth the few minutes it takes to read. Seth refers to this article as a great take “humanification” and “being small”. That state of acting like a small, nimble company that is in-tune and aligned with its customers because they only have a few and they make or break you. You can’t treat them as a transaction.
I was exploring who had viewed my site on MyBlogLog.com last night and ran across this entry while “visitor surfing”. The “in-your-face” nature of the images was what first caught my eye, but then I realized that there was someone more important or at least interesting about these images. Someone has innovated on the shopping bag. Here are a couple of the images:
Whether you want to call this an innovation or just a good example of marketing (advertising on shopping bags is not new) is up to you. Either way it is a great example of someone taking a shopping bag to another level in potential impact. If you can do this with the shopping bag, something that each one of us has probably touched thousands of times in our lives, then you can probably do this in your own field.
Another interesting part of the images is that they are possible because of the well known functional interface that we all have agreed on for shopping bags. In the first 2 images the advertiser makes use of the fact that he can count on people using the handle thus enabling his design to work. Although the 3rd image may be strictly accidental, the same could be said for a shopping bag with long strap intended to be slung over the shoulder. These images also shows that the most common items are sometimes difficult to improve on because we have all standardized on their use. We all look and use shopping bags all the time just accepting the use interface, life expectancy, disposability, limitations, and level of usefulness.
What is a common product, service, or method that use everyday that could be improved?
What functional interface in your product, service, or method can be used to bring new/improved value?
Where can clever or shock advertising be used effectively to sell your product?
This is worth a read. “Security Theatre” over on Seth Godin’s blog is a refreshing post. It talks about how there are many cases where we “put on a show” or a bit of theatrics for our customers. His primary example is the safety talk that we all hear before we take off in an airplane, where the speach is meant to calm and re-assure a potentially nervous crew. Excerpts concerning seating arrangments, the need to turn off electronics, and the effectiveness of that flotation device you are sitting on all gave me a good chuckle. I for one have always questioned the veracity or at least the motivation for some of the instructions you hear before you take off in a plane. What does turning off my mp3 player or cell phone have to do with the navigational system? I sure hope they have a system that is more robust than to be affected by my $100 portable music player. Should I even be on this plane if it were the case?
He goes on to make an anology to how many companies do the same thing when relating to their customers. Sometimes selling “customer experience” is much like that speach in the airplane.
Are there situations in your interactions with customers where by eliminating these “theatrics” and getting to the truth you can provide improved customer satisfaction?
Are there other situations where you are selling these theatrics on a commondity product and extracting more profits by doing so?
Guy Kawasaki has a great Post on his website about the book Founders at Work. I’m gonna have to go buy the book now. If you look at the first three sentences on Amazon you get a quick idea of the book contents:
“Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? “
So Guy puts up some of his favorite passages. My favorite one from Guy’s list is:
James Hong (Hot or Not) on his first beta site. “My dad was the first person that ever saw Hot or Not besides Jim and me, and he got addicted to it! Here’s my dad, a 60-year-old retired Chinese guy who, as my father, is supposed to be asexual, and he’s saying, ‘She’s hot. This one’s not hot at all.’”
The first part of the post was also about how Guy draws inspiration from books like this, notice the picture of all his bookmarks. (I am glad to see that others do that with postits)
It is also amazing that some of these people are houshold names now, but at that stage they were just guys with an idea and the passion to make it happen.
