What I Learned From An Expired Bottle Of Mayo

The late Steve Jobs once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect…connect experiences and synthesize new things. The reason creative people are able to do that is that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Or, in my words, in order to innovate, you need to collect and connect the dots.

The other night I decided to make myself some tuna fish. As I started to prepare my meal, I realized that the 18 ounce squeeze bottle of mayo I was about to use had expired six months prior. I guess I don’t use it very often because the bottle was still 90 percent full.

After throwing out my expired food in frustration, I realized that there is a lot to learn from things we routinely do around the home. Here are just three of the lessons I learned from around the house.

Fail cheaply

Although Costco is one of my favorite stores, I rarely buy perishable items there. As a person who lives alone, I find it difficult to predict how much I will use. Sometimes, as is the case with my mayo, buying the smallest size and paying a premium is better than saving money on larger quantities. Smaller quantities result in less space used, less waste when things aren’t needed and lower costs all around. In business, your best bet is to become masterful at creating small, inexpensive and scalable experiments that give you insights into the real world, not just backroom-based predictions. As you gain new insights and become more confident that a new idea will work (i.e., there is greater predictability), then you can ramp up and go for efficiency.

Sell one, make one

It’s safe to say that one situation no one ever wants to encounter is to be sitting on the toilet and running out of toilet paper. The best solution is to always have a spare roll within reach. When the main roll is finished, the spare role is put into the dispenser and the backup roll is replaced. This is an example of a simple manufacturing technique called “sell one, make one.” To avoid running out of product, companies often produce large quantities of inventory. But as we saw in the “fail cheaply” example above, this can lead to waste. Items that don’t sell need to be liquidated at significant discounts. In the meantime, the inventory takes up space and hurts your cash flow. Instead, if you get your manufacturing process (or your innovation implementation process) efficient enough, you can make one immediately after you sell one—that is, when you sell one, you make one. You will never run out if demand never exceeds your ability to manufacture.

Lather, rinse but don’t repeat

Shampoo bottles are infamous for telling you to lather, rinse and repeat. Perhaps I am one of the few, but I had been following these directions every morning without much consideration. As an experiment, I tried skipping the repeat step. No difference. I even experimented with using less than one pump of shampoo. Same result. Sometimes we take on wasteful activities because we never think to step back and question them. I reduced shampoo usage by 75 percent without any impact on my hair. From my experience, most companies can reduce wasteful activities simply by questioning what has always been done in the past.

Three simple insights, and all were generated from a bottle of mayonnaise.

Want to improve your business? Start by looking around your home. Every day, take an inventory of the innovative products you possess…

Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

A New Innovation Book from ThinkBuzan

I recently had the great privilege of interviewing Chris Griffiths, the author of a new book on innovation, “GRASP The Solution.”  He provides some very interesting perspectives on innovation.  Chris is the CEO of ThinkBuzan, the organization behind Mind Mapping. Enjoy!

Is Thinking Choking Your Creativity?

As I write this, I am sitting in a Starbucks in London, England. Cars and taxis are zipping by on the street in front of me as I sip my espresso. Although I lived in London for several years, I only drove a car once while there…just once.

There is an exceptional transit system in London, so owning a vehicle isn’t necessary. Thankfully. If it were, I would have been significantly challenged. It’s funny…before moving to England, I had been driving effortlessly for 20 years. But one small difference made it nearly impossible for me to navigate here.

I am of course referring to the right-hand drive cars that are driven on the left-hand side of the road. I felt incapacitated while behind the wheel. I never knew which way to look. I had a hard time judging the edge of the car and kept hitting the rumble strips on the side of the road. And attempting to drive a manual stick-shift vehicle proved to be even more comical.

What I learned was that we quickly pick up habits. After driving for two decades, my skills were on automatic. Thinking was not necessary.

Unfortunately, moving the steering wheel and driving on the “other” side of the road forced me to think. Thinking caused me to choke.

It’s been shown that as athletes get closer to breaking a major record, their performance drops. They begin to “think,” when they otherwise would not. For example, as Barry Bonds approached his record breaking 762nd home run, his home runs per at bat dropped by as much as 90 percent. And what about Tiger Woods? Thinking of his personal situation seems to have thrown him off his game. Why?

When the “thinking” part of the brain—the cerebral cortex—is triggered, it literally chokes off the pathways to the pre-programmed skills that are stored in the cerebellum.

Studies show that 98 percent of 5-year-old children are highly creative, yet by the time they are the age of 25, only 2 percent are. Creativity is a pre-programmed skill. But education and the need to learn skills designed to pass standardized testing, chokes the creativity out of us. Instead of effortless fun and play, we are programmed to focus our thoughts on succeeding, winning or looking good, hampering our natural capabilities. But our innate creative abilities are still there. We just need to find better ways of tapping into them.

What does this have to do with business innovation?

Unfortunately the drive to perform in business is the very thing that inhibits creativity. Despite this truth, businesses will always be driven by metrics designed to monitor performance.

So, as an individual, what can you do to avoid choking your creative potential? The answer is simple: stop thinking.

Have you ever noticed that while taking a shower, you sometimes get creative thoughts? Have you ever had a brilliant insight while falling asleep or when waking up? The relaxing water and restful sleep quiets the judgmental part of the brain allowing your innate creative abilities to emerge. Take advantage of these moments. Keep a notebook by the side of the bed. Or in my case, a waterproof note pad in the shower. When lying in bed, Aristotle reputedly put a brass plate on his chest and held a metal ball above it in his hand. As he fell asleep, the ball would hit the plate waking him. He claimed to have his greatest insights just as he was dozing off.

Consider a company that is in the fragrance business and needs to develop 40 new scents every day. This is a daunting task. One manager I know decided to take his team out to Stonehenge to meditate before embarking on some brainstorming…

Read the rest of this article on the American Express OPEN Forum

One Week Until My New Book is Available

In one week (September 29th), my new book will be available in book stores, online, and on the Kindle. It is published by Penguin’s Portfolio imprint.  For those of you who are new to this blog, here’s a description…

Best Practices Are Stupid:
40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition

Well-intentioned leaders, in their attempts to boost innovation, are inadvertently destroying it.

What if everything you know about creating a culture of innovation is wrong?  What if the way you are measuring innovation is choking it?  What if your market research is asking all of the wrong questions?

It’s time to innovate the way you innovate.

In Best Practices Are Stupid, I offer forty counterintuitive yet proven strategies for boosting innovation and making it a repeatable, sustainable, and profitable process at the heart of your company’s culture.  They include:

• Hire people you don’t like. Bring the right mix of people to unleash your team’s full potential.
• Asking for ideas is a bad idea. Define challenges more clearly.  If you ask better questions, you will get better answers.
• Don’t think outside the box; find a better box. Instead of giving your employees a blank slate, provide them with well-define parameters that will increase their creative output.
• Failure is always an option. Looking at innovation as a series of experiments allows you to redefine failure and learn from your results.

I will show you that nonstop innovation is attainable and vital to building a high-performing team, improving the bottom line, and staying ahead of the pack.

Other powerful strategies include:

• The performance paradox. When organizations hyper focus on their goals, they are less likely to achieve those goals.
• Expertise is the enemy of innovation. The more you know about a particular topic, the more difficult it is for you to think about it in a different way.
• The Goldilocks principle. Challenges can’t be too big or too small.  They must be “just right” to maximize the likelihood of a workable solution.
• Learn from Indiana Jones. Real treasure can be found when you leave your office, don your fedora and bullwhip, and study customers with your own two eyes.
• Use the reality TV show model. Competitions are as much about generating buzz and stimulating interest in innovation as they are about finding specific solutions.

You can pre-order NOW on any of these sites.

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

800 CEO READ

Indie Bound

Freedom Can Limit Innovation

Over the past couple of weeks, I have had the identical conversation with several different clients. Apparently, there is an existing belief that if you want to instill a mindset of creativity, you need to have less “structure.” To some degree that is true. But unfortunately, most companies, when undergoing this kind of change, swing too radically to the other side.

One company that has been autocratic for decades now wants to be more innovative. Their belief is that they can accomplish this by letting people do what they want to do, in turn, enhancing their competitive position.

Another organization wants it’s employees to be more creative. They are now encouraging people to “think outside the box” while giving them minimal constraints.

In both of these cases, the company is going from a highly structured and bureaucratic approach to one that is a bit of a free-for-all. Sadly, and often surprisingly, swinging the pendulum that far in the other direction might also kill creativity and innovation.

To illustrate this point, there is an exercise I conduct with my clients that is simple yet powerful. I won’t go into all of the details here as I describe it in my new book, Best Practices Are Stupid: 40 Ways to Out-Innovate the Competition (available one week from today!). But here’s a short version…

Exercise #1: People are asked to list a number of ways in which they can use a brick. They are given no restrictions (unbounded). I give them about a minute. Typical answers involve using it as a paperweight, a door stop, or a weapon.

Exercise #2: Then they are asked to identify something random (e.g., on the body, in the kitchen, in a marriage) and are to find all of the uses of a brick for that. For example, if “a kitchen” were the random context, people might find uses like heating it up to make paninis, flattening a lump of dough, or using it as a trivet.

When I ask groups which approach – #1 (unbounded) or #2 (connecting to something random) – yields more creative solutions, nearly 90% of audiences choose the second way. In fact, when we take the time to evaluate the uses, there is indeed much greater divergence when using the second method. The first approach tends to yield a lot of common solutions.

In some respects, this seems counterintuitive. By bounding people we actually increase creativity.

How can this be applied in a business setting?

A client, in an attempt to expand, is always looking at ways to branch into new markets. To accomplish this, they used to ask employees the unbounded question, “How can we adapt our (commodity) product to new markets?” Unfortunately they found that most suggestions were mundane. Therefore, as a way of increasing their level of creativity, they created a list of 200 different industries/roles (one for each business day of the year) and posted it on their wall. Each day management chose a different industry/role from the list (e.g., toll booth collectors, nurses/healthcare, or librarians) and used that to brainstorm new opportunities for their product for that industry/role. They found that they generated greater insights when bounding the conversation around a specific market segment.

In this case, more structure increased creativity.

The same is true when it comes to organization structures. For this, I use jazz and classical music as the metaphors.

Most organizations, in the past, have been designed like classical symphonies. Large compositions (processes, policies and procedures) where employees were expected to perform rote, note by note, exactly as written. There was very little room for creativity or improvisation.

But some organizations, in their attempt to increase their level of innovation, have decided to throw out all structures. Power to the people. However this leads to chaos, not innovation. There is no coordination between individuals or groups. The level of work redundancy is high. And the level of collaboration is low. If you brought together a bunch of musicians and didn’t give them any structure, they would not be able to play anything that resembles music.

Therefore, organizations would better benefit by structuring themselves like jazz music. Jazz is not random. There is a simple structure – like a 12 bar B flat blues – that enables the musicians to collaborate and play together while improvising their own parts. Adding structure, in this case, allows innovation to emerge in the moment when it is needed most.

Although it might be tempting to throw structure out the window in the name of innovation, this may kill the very thing you want. Paradoxically, more structure often leads to greater innovation.

P.S. The brick exercise, as it is described in Best Practices Are Stupid, makes several other important points on innovation and breakthrough thinking.

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