“Best Practices Are Stupid” Named Best Innovation & Creativity Book of 2011
I am excited and honored to announce that my book, Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition, was just named the best “innovation and creativity” book of 2011 by 800-CEO-READ. Winners in other categories include Jim Collins, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Eric Ries.
You can see the entire list here on the 800-CEO-READ website.
Thank you to everyone at Portfolio/Penguin for helping make this book a reality. And thanks to the great people at 800-CEO-READ for everything you do to promote business books.
P.S. Jim Collins, congratulations for being selected as the best overall business book of 2011.
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You Don’t Hear Your Customers
The other day, I asked my business manager to follow up with a client about an unpaid invoice. She contacted the company’s accounts payable department and was told that the invoice was paid on June 1st, 2012. (italics added for emphasis)
OK, I have some pretty talented clients, but I don’t think any have mastered time travel…yet. It is only the first week in January. There is no way they could have paid (past tense) an invoice 6 months in the future.
So obviously my client miscommunicated. Or did they?
What my client actually wrote was that the “invoice was paid 6/1/12.” To my American business manager, this was clearly June 1st. But to my European colleagues, they would interpret this as January 6th. In the US, our date format is mm/dd/yy; in Europe it is dd/mm/yy.
Although this is a very simplistic example, it clearly demonstrates how biases – cultural, language, experience, etc – significantly impact how we perceive the world around us. And most people are unaware of the fact that they do not truly see things to same way as they occur to others.
In the world of innovation, this can have an impact on how we understand customer needs.
We think we know what they want. But what they are saying is always interpreted differently than what they really mean.
I like the story told by Professor Chris Parker of the University of Lucerne about a tribesman from a remote part of Malaysia who was taken to Singapore for the weekend as part of an anthropological study. It was his first exposure to the outside world. After a tour of the bustling city, his guides asked him what had struck him most about this place, one of the great high-tech centers of the world. The tribesman said without hesitation that the biggest surprise was a wheelbarrow that he had noticed being used to haul a large quantity of bananas, more bananas being hauled by one conveyance than he had ever seen before.
All the computers and all the mobile phones on the technology-mad island meant nothing to him. He was most impressed by nothing more sophisticated than the big wheelbarrow because in his world, what mattered still focus on basic gathering and distribution of food and water. The digital world has yet to have any bearing on their lives. The technology of choice for this tribe would be a consignment of new wheelbarrows. Of course, in the context of business, technology is more sophisticated than the wheelbarrow, but no more important to its success.
How you see the world is different than how others will see it.
It reminds me of a scene from the movie, “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” A Coke bottle is interpreted many different ways by those unfamiliar with glass. To most of the world, it is obviously a Coke bottle. But if you have not seen one before, it means something entirely different.
Assume you don’t understand what your customers really want. Poke. Probe. Ask clarifying questions. Have them tell you stories that help elaborate. Ask “why” they want a particular feature. Look for alternative perspectives and meanings.
Maybe your customers really only want a bigger wheelbarrow.
P.S. This technique applies to family members and friends. Don’t assume you know what your spouse or kids are saying. Odds are, you are not really understanding them.
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How Oprah Nearly Killed My Business
My book, Goal-Free Living, was featured on the cover of the November 2005 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Two full pages were dedicated to my goal-free concepts. (If you check out the cover left, you’ll see the headline “What the happiest people know for sure.” That is my article.)
Although this was one of the proudest moments in my life, surprisingly, this type of publicity actually had a negative impact on my business.
You must be thinking: How is this possible? Doesn’t everything Oprah touch turn to gold?
Yes, typically. But my situation was different. My core buyers were (and still are) innovators within corporations. As much as I personally admire Oprah and her work, my clients were not as enthusiastic.
For example, after putting the Oprah mention on my website, my bounce rate (the number of people who immediately leave my website) went through the roof. I had potential clients say that they chose someone else who appeared to be more focused on the needs of corporations. They proceeded to share that the Oprah mention made me seem less “serious.”
I even had one client tell me, just as I was about to go on the stage, “If you mention Oprah, we won’t pay you.”
Apparently, the combination of my “self-help” book and the magazine publicity caused confusion. It was no longer clear that my main business focused on the needs of corporations. In this moment I discovered that the old mantra was true: “A confused buyer never buys.”
There is a lesson in this for every small business.
Know your audience. Know their needs—explicit and latent. Speak their language. Understand what gives you credibility in their eyes.
When you innovate, don’t alienate your current market. You can expand to other markets, but continue meeting the needs of those who have been loyal fans.
Innovation is about shifting your business in a new direction at the right speed. Think of the degree of change as a compass setting.
Reinvention is different than innovation. Reinvention (what I attempted when writing Goal-Free Living) is when you move your business on a 90-degrees (or even 180-degrees) turn. It is a pretty radical change. Your customers may not understand the shift and you may lose them in the process.
On the other side of the compass, there are many businesses making only 5-degree turns. They focus their time on incremental innovations. Although these improvements are valuable, on their own they are not sufficient to sustain long term growth and prosperity. You can ride your past success for a while, but eventually your competition will out-innovate you.
So the big question is: What is the right level of innovation? What is the correct compass setting for your business?
Typically, a 5-degree turn is too little while a 90-degree shift is too much. Forty-five degrees should be just about right.
What does a 45-degree turn look like? It is exploring how to tap into your existing market with new offerings, new services and new products, while also expanding into adjacent markets.
My business just turned 10 years old and I am in the process of rethinking my current model. As it stands today, I primarily convey my innovation messages via speeches and books. My objective in 2012 is to leverage my current intellectual assets by finding new ways of delivering my content.
For example, in 2012, I will be expanding the licensing of my content to corporations, training organizations and individuals who can deliver my work. The more I can tap into the reach of others, the more I can grow my business.
For this, I am not changing my message or products. I am primarily deepening the content and making the process of delivering it “replicable.” Instead of content changes, I am exploring different distribution channels such as eLearning systems, membership sites and other digital platforms.
Additionally, while others are delivering my content to my current target audience, I can explore how to extend my existing content to new, tangential markets. For example, my Personality Poker assessment tool has been largely focused on the corporate market. It can also, however, be positioned to provide value anywhere collaboration is beneficial: relationships, families, negotiations, ventures and so on. Expanding in these directions still positions me as a collaboration expert (a key component of innovation) and would most likely not alienate my core market…
Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum
(please leave comments on the AMEX site and “like” the article if you in fact like the article…thanks!)
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Are You Asking the Right Question?
For many years, I was a loyal BlackBerry fan. More accurately I was a CrackBerry addict.
A year ago a got a MacBook Pro and six month layer I acquired an iPad. It felt like I should switch to the iPhone. But I was not ready for two reasons:
- I wanted a Verizon phone that could work globally, and the iPhone 4 was North America only.
- I was wildly concerned about my ability to type on a virtual keyboard. Previous attempts were disastrous.
When the 4S came out, it addressed my first concern. But it did not, from my perspective, address the keyboard issue. Or so I thought.
I was asking for the wrong feature. Instead of asking for a better keyboard, I should have looked for a better data entry method.
I bought the 4S the day it hit the market. I turned off Siri, Apple’s voice recognition system, because I did not think it would be valuable. Man, was I ever wrong! On a whim, I tried it one day. And now I dictate many of my emails and text messages through voice recognition. The accuracy is amazing. And my speed has been increased significantly.
I also marvel at the fact that I can gain access to so much information without ever going into Google. Will these types of devices be game changers, bypassing the search engine’s revenue generating ads? I’m not sure; time will tell their full impact.
But for me, it is a game changer. In one sitting, I dictated four articles; something that I had never been able to do previously. I realize that there are other voice transcription services (manual and automatic) out there. However, the convenience of having it built into my phone made it so accessible I could write anytime I was inspired.
When you are innovating, are you striving to make a better keyboard? Or are you focused on creating a better data entry method?
Asking the right question will lead you down an entirely different path.
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