PrettyLittleHead

Once upon a time, I hosted a dinner at H&P on the topic of ‘innovation.’  We invited people we knew through our own networks who were starters of businesses, makers of things, dabblers in ideas, creators of stuff.  We told them we chose them because they were actively engaged in ‘making’ and ‘new.’  We had a great group of people – here are a few of them:

• one of Charlie Rose’s producers, who at the time was responsible for developing a series on future newsmakers
• Benny Rietveld, a professional musician (touring bassist with Santana, among many other accolades) and the producer of a beautifully produced film about what goes in to being a guitar player – not just a guy on a stool playing chords, but a real meditation on creativity and music and spirit
• Doug Jaeger, who at the time was running a shop called thehappycorp and doing great, subversive, immersive, co-creative things with brands and people and is currently president of the Art Directors Club
• Meghan Keane, a staff writer, editor, contributor to the NY Sun, Wired, Reason, The Awl, and on and on (and why, I ask, does she not have a website I can easily discover? Stalk her @keanesian on twitter. It’s brill.)
• Jason Olim, founder of CDNOW, and now of the Freshman Fund, and in general a fascinating, pragmatic and prolific entrepreneur
• Jonah Keegan, formerly of the Freshman Fund, and basically a genius who I think sort of pioneered the word cloud
• Stephen Tasker, an engineer and designer of juvenile furniture
• And there’s more, but I’m blanking on names and feeling very bad about myself as a result

A few interesting things emerged straight away – a definition of the word ‘innovation’ is tough to come by.  And our group of people felt that it was irrelevant.  They were interested in problem-solving, experimenting, prototyping, not ‘innovating.’  They even balked at the moniker of ‘innovators.’  They were passionate about bringing together interesting people to solve interesting problems and figuring out a way to turn that solution into a business or business model.

And they were right – despite some of my colleagues’ best efforts, pinning down a definition of ‘innovation’ or ‘innovative’ is a silly exercise, and one that keeps you from the essential point.  Noah Brier was talking about a process that is like this the other day (or at least, this is the picture in my head):

I have begun to think that often what we mean when we say ‘innovation’ – especially when we use it as a noun – is ‘invention.’  And invention, to my way of thinking, happens at that inflection point between having a problem and not knowing of or having an available solution. No readily apparent device, app, service, etc. to fix my situation?  I’ll fix it myself.  Innovation then is the routinizing of the invention, and diffusion is basically what happens when you apply it broadly, and sell it.  This is my interpretation, anyway.

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Today, Ad Age’s Creativity put out its list of the 2010 Creativity 50.  There are some expected people/brands in here; and then there are a few surprises.  These are people who, in other contexts would be described as ‘innovators.’  Creativity just calls them creative.  I think this is probably for the best.

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Even bobulate had something to say about the overuse of the word (or the misuse of the word) ‘innovative’ – basically, stop it.  Be clear about what you mean when you want to use the word innovative, and say that instead.  She linked to a nice, concise piece on the perils of overusing the word via The Economist, called “Stop Saying Innovation“. It’s worth a quick read.

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Actually, this makes me think of something I used to do.  I used to tell Ed Madrid that I loved him.  Constantly.  Every few minutes throughout the day.  And we would sometimes spend 25 hours a day together.  I would, in varying tones and accents, say, “Ed, I love you.”  He hated it.  He told me that I was devaluing the concept of love.  I knew that this was true, but I also knew that I totally did love him because the man is a freakin’ pop culture icon and artist and genius.  There were actually two things I did that creeped him out: tell him I loved him, and continue typing for paragraphs while making direct eye contact with him when he spoke to me.

Anyway, I digress – the point is, don’t overuse this term. It’s sloppy, and it devalues things that really are innovative.

some surprises here – and some things i’m really interested in reading:

http://www.squidoo.com/morebooksforlinchpins

I’m looking at my desktop.  I have 8 short stories I’m supposed to read and give comments on.  I have a short story to revise, another to finish, and about 6 good starts to short stories that I am tempted to work on instead of the one I need to finish.  And there’s always the temptation to start something entirely new based on a fragment of conversations overheard at brunch.

I am looking at my coffee table.  I have a stack – nearly a foot high – of magazines I want to read.  1/3 of the stack are issues of Vogue that I want to flip through in search of hairstyle and clothing inspiration (I’m planning yet another makeover).  The other 2/3s are miscellaneous mags that have articles I want to get to… eventually.

I am looking at the whiteboard in my home office.  It has four columns of ideas for projects, and lists of people and tasks under each one of them.  Then there are the post-it notes and the clipboards.

I know I’m not alone here – people who love to make stuff have no shortage of stuff they want to make.  Some get only as far as the sketches – books and books full of sketches, drafts, schematics, flow charts.  Others actually get started on prototyping but don’t get through the revision process.  Folks like Seth Godin remind us that the measure of success is ’shipping.’

So this article in GOOD has an interesting couple of ideas on how to overcome the gorging on ideas that some of us suffer from.  One idea I really was drawn to is the idea of the “sober monitor” – someone who isn’t high on ideas and can help you see the ideas worth sticking to and to be skeptical of the half-baked or far-fetched.

There are some other really useful ideas here – and I bolded the ones I like best…

For his part, Karnjanaprakorn has made some major improvements. He divided up his projects with an action-oriented partner, and he has committed himself to saying no to the majority of new opportunities and ideas that come up. He explains, “When your purpose and mission in life is to make the world a better place, it’s really easy to get distracted and overbook yourself. You’ll paralyze yourself and end up doing no good.” Karnjanaprakorn has also taken some practical steps to increase his focus and productivity. For starters, he has completely cut out meetings during the day that have no intended outcome. When people contact him out of the blue—or when a meeting doesn’t have a clear agenda—he politely declines. The problem, as Karnjanaprakorn describes it, is that everybody, especially in the world of social innovation, loves to talk about changing the world. “The problem for me is that I get excited about a lot of these ideas and it gets me sidetracked,” he says.

The action-oriented partner is the thing I’ve recently started using a lot more.  It helps that I’ve met some amazing people who are interested in collaborating; and that I have a few old friends who have always been incredibly supportive (to the extremes of: giving me places to live, finding me jobs, introducing me to cool ideas and new fabulous people).

The second one seems trivial by comparison but is a big problem for me.  Like a lot of people in the strategy/planning business, I start out the week with a few conference calls and meetings already on my calendar, and then I watch the week fill up with them.  I’ve started pushing back on meeting requests using a tip from Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek.  I ask people for a quick agenda, “so I can be prepared.”  Then I can cut down the meeting from 2 hours to 10 by answering the questions that can be dealt with in e-mail.  Often it means not bothering about a phone call at all.

But it’s too easy to blame all those external distractions when the real problem is addiction to new ideas.  We need air traffic controllers and co-pilots to help us get the right ones off the ground.

Here’s a few things I’ve been up to the last few years.  some good, some fun, some not-quite-there-yet.  Most of it is from my time at Hall & Partners as Partner, Innovation.

My role at H&P was varied, but I did manage to carve out a niche for innovation in the qualitative division.  You’ll see some of the themes I explored and helped build thinking around on this blog…

For instance – this is a talk I gave at the ARF re:Think conference in 2008 in NYC about participatory brands and communications, with a focus in digital and social media.  My colleague, Steve Pagan, and I presented together, and got some positive reviews elsewhere – the original version of the paper was presented at ESOMAR – and won best paper.

I also played host and emcee for a few Fresh Meet events – one of my favorites was the Fresh Meet in which we used the Pecha Kucha format to explore the topic “Liberating Constraints.”  Check out all the videos – my friend Robin’s might be my favorite (yeah, I’m biased), but Michael Hastings Black, Paul Parton, and Rex Sorgatz’s talks were all fascinating and attacked the brief in very different ways.  For my part, I gave a Pecha Kucha about Pecha Kucha, which, as noted in the video below, is very meta.

We did an event on H&P’s Big Digital Experiment as well – no video up that I’ve found of the event, but it was quite a conversation… Seems it’s 15 years in and we’re all still fretting about the same stuff when it comes to what goes on, online.

Here’s me, though – being bossy and chatty, as usual.  Good turnout though:

Last summer I co-authored a piece for AdMap with Vanella Jackson, H&P’s Global CEO on the effect the recession would have on consumer behavior – ours was a story of shifting values, and though I think the condensed version here does not quite do the story we developed justice, it turned out to be a fascinating look into how people think about ‘value’ in the context of their own personal and social values.

And I have a stack of these in my apartment now:

A super fun thing I got to do was guest lecture at VCU’s BrandCenter in Caley Cantrell’s planning master class.  We talked about innovation in brands, communications and in research – and a member of the class is now part of the Innovations group I work in at OTX.  The world is small and miraculous.  And now Noah Brier tells me he will be giving a guest lecture on innovation there soon – should be pretty amazing.  In any event, I got to use my favorite image as the title page (via 20×200.com):

Amen.

There’s more of course, but now I’m tired of talking about myself and want to go finish writing a short story instead.

I attended an event for the UO Alumni group here in NYC last night that was theoretically about “Journalism and Media in the Digital Age.”  Jodi Kahn from iVillage and Carlos Lamadrid from Woman’s Day, and Tim Gleason, the Dean of the Journalism School at the UO were the panelists.

This is not a review of that event.

There was one strand of the conversation though that really struck me – and that I think is one of the biggest problems all big media companies face as they’ve been muddling through the last 15 years of ‘digital.’  There was a real sense of ‘all or nothing’.  Either paid or free.  Either protected or open.  Either web or mobile.  This is not to say that the panelists are not exploring ‘hybrid’ approaches, or taking their brands into other channels, but they are thinking about things in those ways: hybrids, channels, etc.  There is, it seems to me, a singularity of vision that comes from this way of thinking about things.  And it wasn’t the kind of ’singularity of vision’ that equals ‘clarity of purpose.’

You could tell because their favorite answer to most of the questions was, “No one knows.”  I believe this was honest.  It also suggested they should try harder, do some more experimenting, play with more ideas.  Not just try to port over old models into new structures, because as Dean Gleason kept saying, those models are broken.

The need for a closed environment, a safe place, in which to try new things – a vacuum in which to run experiments – seems to be the dream of all big corporations and marketing departments.  But that’s hard to create, and limited in its usefulness.  I propose instead that you prototype in public – don’t insist on an answer that is provably good or true; look for the path to the answer.

Make some things and try to sell them.  Learn about them by the way the prototype works and doesn’t.  Learn about how people will react to your message by whether they sample or purchase your prototype.  Learn about how to make the prototype better by how people actually use it.

Now, here’s the tricky bit.  You do need to have a direction in mind.  That direction should be rooted in who you (A) are today, and (B) want to be tomorrow.  It should be immersed in the way people live their lives and have a point of view about how to augment or disrupt people’s habits and assumptions.  That takes living in the world where your brand lives, but as a conscious, conscientious observer.  It takes respecting the other people who live there, the people who have a bit of green in their wallets that you’d like to put in yours.  And it takes making something worthwhile.

Some examples, hot off the presses.

DailyCandy sent their email out today…

The profile was of Wintercheck Factory’s new line of sunglasses.  I poked around the site this morning and am very impressed by the openness of the business model.  They are keeping track of and teasing their prototypes on the site. And in some cases, they show you how to do it yourself.  This is, by any big brand’s measure, foolhardy – why give away the store?  But Wintercheck is simply showing us the thought and effort that goes into making their products.  Yes, we could make our own, but we don’t really want to.  We want the thing, and it’s even better if there’s a story behind it.

Here’s how they made their Julian Scarf:

This got me thinking about something else I’d seen recently that I really loved – the new Ok Go video.

So I went back to their channel, and sure enough – the guys at Ok Go don’t just want you to see their brilliant, single-shot videos, they want you to see some of the ‘behind-the-scenes’ action.  Check this out:

Prototyping helps you work out the kinks.  It can be a lengthy process, but it’s alway a fruitful one.  You see how the thing actually works – not just how it’s supposed to work – and you get to have a real sense of the thing, not just the messages and positioning around it.  When you do it in public you inspire other people – you demonstrate the benefits of creative effort, you lift the veil, you reveal your methods, and you earn their trust and admiration.  This is way more valuable to any brand than a transient transaction.  People come back to see what great new idea you have, and they want to have proof that they were there.