Tag Archives: innovation

Innovation Is Creative Thinking With Purpose

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Innovation is creativity with a purpose. It is the creation and use of knowledge with intent. It is not only creating new ideas but creating with a specific intention and with plans to take those ideas and make something that will find purpose the world. Innovation is ideas in action, not the ideas themselves. Innovation is also a word that gets thrown about, often without really considering the reality that it is, in fact, damn hard work. What makes it hard work isn’t the generation of new ideas, but the fact that turning complexities into simple, clear realities can be excruciatingly difficult, but that is precisely what needs to be done to make innovation useful. Simplicity and clarity are tough to do.

Innovation, whether we’re talking about product design or a marketing plan, should be simple, understandable, and open for a wide range of people. Innovation is becoming more of an open process, or it should be. The days of the closed-door R&D session is gone as we incorporate more engagement of users, customers, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and employees in the process. Most companies are very good at launching, promoting and selling their products and services, but they often struggle with the front end of the innovation process, those stages dealing with turning research and brainstorming insights into new ideas.  The creating, analyzing, and developing side of things is often murky or done in a haphazard way. Articulating a simple system with clearly defined activities is central to bringing innovation to life and involving a wide variety of stakeholders and collaborators who can understand and engage in making the beginning stage of the innovation process less confused. It is as much art as it is science.

Easier said than done – you need a starting point. The simplest and most obvious element in this is to begin with a system of innovation best practices. You would typically generate multiple ideas and then synthesize relevant multiple ideas logically together in the form of a well-developed concept. This is the no-holds-barred side of the idea generation process and allows for people to begin exploring multiple trajectories. The key is to make sure the ideas don’t remain in a vacuum, but are open to everyone. With that in mind, it is extremely important to ensure that ideas are captured and stored in one place, whether electronically or on a wall (literally) dedicated to the task. Truly breakthrough innovations are not solitary work, they are part of a shared experience where ideas build on each other. They are the result of collaboration. This means that the work involves others to help you generate ideas, develop concepts, and communicate the concepts in meaningful and memorable ways. The more open the process, the more likely it is to get buy-in as people engage directly in the innovation process.

Next, make sure people have access to all the information available to them. Research around a problem or a people is often lost once the report is handed over and the presentation of findings complete. Central to the success of an innovation project is to make sure themes and experiences are captured and easily available to the people tasked with generating ideas. So make it visible, make it simple and make sure people are returning to the research (and researchers) again and again. This is about more than posting personas on boards around a room. It involves thinking about and articulating cultural practices in such a way that they are visible, clear and upfront. As people think and create they should constantly be reminded of the people and contexts for which they are creating.

Once the stage is set, the problem and hopeful outcomes need to be made clear. This is fairly obvious, but it’s easy to drift away from the goals as ideas emerge and people have time to simply forget why we’re innovating (or attempting to innovate ate any rate). So make them real, crystallize the problems and challenges. Make them visible at every step of the process.  In addition to posting the goals, be sure to have space to pose questions that are grounded in the problems or opportunities for innovation. Categorize the types of questions and ask that people visit them every step of the way to ensure the process stays on track and is grounded in the goals of the project. Categories of question types to consider might include:

  • How Will This Impact the Community: How can we help people, build communities and reflect the cultures and practices for which we are designing?
  • What is the Opportunity: How can we create something that provides a better life for the intended users?
  • Is It New or are We Simply Tweaking Something: How can the thing we’re creating change the current situation or are we simply creating a variation on an established theme?
  • How Will It Be Interpreted: What challenges do we face in getting people to accept the concepts and what cultural or psychological barriers do we need to overcome?

These are just a few examples, but they represent some of the ideas that might emerge when thinking of new designs, models and messaging strategies. They will, of course, vary depending on the goals of the organization. If your goal is to build a new delivery system for medications or if it is to do something as broad as change the way people eat, then the questions will change. The point is to have a space that opens up the dialog, not just a space to throw out ideas.

The point to all this is that in order to innovate, you need to clarify a simple system that all the various contributors can use. Establish a system and stick to it. Identify and write down the areas you would like to innovate in, get all the parties who will contribute involved and make sure they engage in an open environment. Create questions to ask and areas of exploration. Do that and you will move from a complex mess to something that can be acted upon.

Co-Creation and Managing What Matters

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Co-creation has become a central theme for brands and innovators over the last decade, and rightfully so. The idea of collaboration in a postmodern world where information and opinions reach millions in the blink of an eye is a necessity. But what do we mean when we talk about co-creation and is it the panacea it’s made out to be?

Co-creation views products, brands and markets as forums for companies and customers to share, combine and renew each other’s resources and capabilities.  This creates value through new forms of interaction, service and learning mechanisms. In other words, it ideally establishes a dialog between all actors involved in the company’s offerings.  Co-creation is about collaboration. It’s about working together to solve problems, uniting a range of perspectives and approaches to an issue. Very often this collaboration involves consumers working directly with professionals from inside and outside a client organization, to define and create a range of outputs, from strategy to communications, from products to experiences.

Value is co-created with customers if and when a customer is able to personalize his or her experience using a firm’s brand promise and product/service proposition to a level that is best suited to get his or her tasks done or need fulfilled. This, in turn, allows the company to derive greater value from its product-service investment in the form of new knowledge, higher profitability and/or increased brand loyalty.  The interaction established through co-creation produces a sort of community where the company and the user/buyer engage in an ongoing, continuously evolving relationship, defined by and defining a shared set of actions and beliefs.

A key element in all of this is the notion of personalization on the part of the customer.  But what does personalization mean? Personalization is about the customer becoming a co-creator of the content of their experiences.  This doesn’t mean providing products and content that can then be tweaked to meet their needs, because that is still largely a passive process – the company makes it, the consumer buys it and then reconstructs it in something of a vacuum. There is no feedback loop.  In a true co-creation model, customers and actors inside the company are taking active roles in developing and sharing new ideas. Competencies of the consumer and stakeholders within the company come to interact and harness a range of ideas, functional and symbolic.

This is done along four axes: engage in dialogue with customers, mobilize communities, manage customer diversity and co-create experiences with customers. Ultimately, the goal is to leverage customers for a shared creative experience, going beyond insights and creating a constant interaction that produces brand experiences and better products and services. The increase in the number of collaborators and the numerous interactions among them, across each stage of development, leads to products and services that better meet customer needs.  We see a greater diversity of individuals, functions across organizations and stakeholders across the product/service/brand ecosystem getting involved.

While I am a proponent of co-creation, there are problems with a co-creative model. A customer who believes he or she has the expertise and chooses to co-produce may be more likely to make self-attributions for success and failure than a customer who lacks the expertise. A customer who lacks the expertise but feels forced to co-produce may make more negative attributions about co-production. The dialog can backfire.

The second pitfall is that co-creation assumes customers can readily articulate what they want and need. Customers take on roles, which means what they tell the stakeholders inside the organization may not reflect anything more than a whim. Think of cars with 17 cup holders and fins a mile high. What we can articulate is often a manifestation of something else, something we can’t articulate well, which may lead to creating the absurd. Rather than taking suggestions at face value, ideas need to be analyzed through the lens of detachment and we need to tease out meaning and innovation from the unsaid as well as the said.

Finally, co-creation often assumes a fixed identity for the customer, meaning that the person with whom we’re working and the person for whom we’re building changes according to context. If the co-creating customer is in the role of “mom” in one instance, she may be in the role of “artist” later in the day. The dramaturgical shift in identity will shape what he or she says and does as it relates to a brand, product or service at any given point in time. So even though the idea is well developed and well thought out in the co-creation process, whether that be an ideation session or an online forum, it may have little relevance once that stage is abandoned and the customer moves on with the rest of his or her day.

Co-creation can help break the yo-yo effect of research and development, where clients go back and forward between creative agencies, research agencies and their audience. By working with your consumers, rather than directing stuff at them, companies get a real sense of what works and what doesn’t as the ideation takes place. But it is not without risk. As co-creation becomes a mainstay at companies, we will need to figure out how to keep a diverse set of participants engaged, how to share the risks and value of innovation, how to manage the complexity of the system without laying out too many constraints. We will need to learn how to tease out what is actually needed and what are simply flights of fancy. We will need to learn to balance the said and the unsaid. But in the end, the payoffs can and will be tremendous.

Trucks, Women and Unexpected Markets

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The pickup truck has become an essential part of Western culture.  Even though trucks are needed and valued for their usefulness in farming, ranching and blue collar occupations, decorative additions are often made to trucks and these additions don’t always follow utilitarian functions.  Indeed, many truck owners do precious little in the way of physical labor – spend a few hours driving through the pricier suburbs of Houston and it become quickly clear that the truck is as much a fashion statement as it is a tool.  Perhaps more so.  Rather, pickups help negotiate and present group membership, notions of masculinity and femininity, and associations with class structure.  However, trucks don’t always present a seamless image, nor are the images always interpreted monolithically by those who own and decorate pickup trucks. There are a range of meanings associated with trucks and subcultures within the larger cultural framework.  But what is most important to this discussion is that trucks are far more than they seem.

Truck owners spend a considerable amount of money on customizing their trucks, with 45 percent spending at least $1,000 and 17 percent spending at least $3,000. The most common components customized are wheels and tires (36 percent), audio and video (29 percent), exterior trim (29 percent) and exhaust systems (19 percent). The high value that pickup truck owners place on their trucks and the amount of money that they spend in aftermarket products makes sense when you consider the fact that 64 percent consider their truck as an extension of their personalities.

As an example, when I was doing fieldwork with women who owned trucks, only one of them owned a truck as a function of her occupation.  Some used it as a means of establishing a sense of identity that said to the world, “I’m not a girlie girl.” Some used it as a way of asserting a sense of strength on the highway.  Some used it as a way of maintaining a connection with their past rural (or semi-rural) lives.  The point is that the truck became a symbol, an extension of themselves and utility played a minor role in the underlying reasons they chose it over a car or an SUV.

So why does it matter? It matters because it speaks to the fact that the products we own and use, whether they are thought of by their manufacturers and retailers as utilitarian or extravagances, are reinterpreted and redefined by their owners and that is a huge opportunity for marketers and designers. The truck is a fashion piece. It is a mobile living room.  It is a toy.  It is many things, and those things become apparent from doing deep fieldwork, not through surveys and interviews.  And just as trucks have a range of unexpected meanings, so to do laptops, beer brands, eye glasses, etc.  Regardless of your product or service, understanding people on a deeper level gives you a significant advantage over your competitors. That means getting out there and doing the kind of rich, immersive research that uncovers real insights, not just the low-hanging fruit.

The Great Dumbening (Wait, Is That A Real Word?)

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There is a growing contempt for thinking amongst certain quarters in this country and it is as dangerous as any foreign power has ever been.  Contempt for knowledge, real innovation and critical thinking have become a rallying cry for anyone in disagreement with the dogma of the far right.  And while it didn’t begin with the far Right’s outcry about the president’s statement about everyone having the opportunity to go to college, the speech certainly galvanized the anti-intellectual movement.  Now, I’ll be the first to agree that not everyone need go to college. There is value in learning and practicing a trade and it is, admittedly, something that has been devalued in recent years. However there is equal value in education, regardless of what you do for a living. Education doesn’t mean elitism anymore than being skilled at hunting or farming or woodworking means you are an oaf. The world is not as binary as they claim, and I say this as someone who has done both what amounted to trade school as well as graduate school.  Both have been exceedingly valuable. Unfortunately, for the Right it has become an either or declaration of value and a moral litmus test. So much for the people complaining about class warfare – they are as guilty as anyone of fanning any such flames.

America has always had a critical thinking deficit.  It has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism. This is particularly perverse and contradictory, since America’s Founders were the most intellectual group that ever founded any nation we know of. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, etc. were all brilliant thinkers, well educated and dedicated to the idea that reason was the best guide to any endeavor. The desire to foster free and critical thinking, both in government and in the society at large, was one of their notable goals.  The Enlightenment was the heritage on which America’s Founders depended.  But anti-intellectualism has become a mainstay of the not-so-far Right in America today.

Anti-intellectualism is hostility towards and mistrust of intellectual pursuits, expressed through antagonism of  science, art, education.  In public discourse, anti-intellectuals usually perceive and publicly present themselves as champions of the common folk proposing that the educated are a social class detached from the everyday concerns of the majority. This has become the new mantra of the Likes of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, etc. And while it was never a pillar of the Republican Party, it has crept in as a mainstay of the post-Tea Party conservative identity. Hopefully, that will change.  In the meantime, it is a fundamental threat to everything the Right upholds as sacred – defense, personal liberty and economic development.

Opinion has become what serves for reason and now trumps critical thinking in the public discourse. But the fact of the matter is that training and education are more than esoteric pursuits.  Expertise in an area, whether plumbing or biology trumps opinions grounded in vague statements of belief, and the bulk of the arguments being presented in the anti-intellectual movement are just that – vague, unreasoned, unfounded speculation or rehashing of familiar dogma.  Flat Earth theory is somehow seen as valid though everything points to its absurdity. So, while I would be inclined to defer to an engineer about matters of structural integrity or to a carpenter about matters of home building, so to would I defer to a biologist on matters of evolution or an psychologist on matters of cognition.  The point is that while opinions are valid, education does indeed confer special knowledge and expertise that is not so much a matter of opinion as training. There is nothing elitist about it.

Education allows for a wider range of perspectives and creative thinking. That leads to more innovation and growth of the economy, political freedom and civil discourse. Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University, began his career as a plumber. It was that work that led to his seminal work on the nature of black holes and the nature of the universe.  It was at the intersection of these two seemingly binary occupations that imagination and reason flourished.  The imagination deficit we currently seem to be fostering in the US is closely tied to our critical thinking deficit. Minds that are perpetually muddled in uncritically accepted ideas and psuedo-facts, incapable of grasping clear-cut truths are hardly prepared to grasp projected possibilities and judge them soundly.  Hardly a positive situation for innovation and economic growth.  Contrary to the arguments being presented on the far Right this is about opportunity, not indoctrination.

But the current anti-intellectualism was never about elitism or a return some mythical past where everything bordered on the utopian. It was about power and fostering division. It is about training people to be blind followers. It is about control. It allows for power to be held in the hands of a few.  The most vocal about the issue use anti-intellectualism to gain popular support by accusing intellectuals of being a socially detached, politically-dangerous class who question the extant social norms, who dissent from established opinion, and who reject nationalism, hence they are unpatriotic and thus subversive of the nation. And there is nothing new in this, nor is it the sole property of the Right. It was used by Mao, Pol Pot and the Nazis.  Unfortunately, the long-term results of the anti-intellectual movement result in devastating consequences for the rights of citizens, the growth of innovation and the development of the economy. None of these seem particularly smart.

Purpose, Power, Politics: Barriers to Creative Organizations

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Creativity and innovation are always in demand.  Well, to be more accurate, lip service to the ideas of wanting creativity and innovation are always in demand.  The reality is often far different. Most of us recognize the necessity of creative processes at work, regardless of whether we’re taking about strategic planning, insights development, product design. We, as individuals at least, recognize creative thinking as central to generating new ideas and innovation that in turn lead to greater brand recognition and profits.  We know all this and yet creativity is something that often dies before it can get a foothold.  That begs the question, if creativity is so valuable to an organization, why does he corporate culture regularly frown upon the very pursuits that lead to ground breaking innovation? Why do companies so often suppress creativity, both tacitly or overtly? While there is no doubt room for as many opinions as people, I think it largely comes down to three primary elements: Purpose, Power, and Politics.

Purpose:

Companies hire people tasked with strategic thinking and innovation that they think are smart, inventive and inclined to explore their world. They hire people who tend not to think in terms of perpetuating the status quo or who are inclined to think in a linear fashion.  They hire people who can think in ways others overlook.  While those people are intriguing and exciting during the interview and indeed the first few months of joining the corporate team, they are also disinclined to conform to the standard practices of the organization. They do not sit typing at their desks, revisiting the same spreadsheets endlessly or thinking about to shave 10 cents off the production price of some widget the company makes.  They are the people who find new product ideas while visiting the museum, create new strategies while shopping for organic dog food with people and draw insights that can be applied to messaging through reading a Victor Turner. Unfortunately, these sorts of activities run counter to what many business people believe when observing or talking to these sorts of folks. If the activity can’t be readily quantified or tied to a specific project of the moment, it is a waste of time. If it takes cerebral effort and any degree of time, then the employee isn’t worth the expense. What this boils down to is the idea that if creative thinkers don’t conform to the expected, day-to-day behavior of the organization, they are devalued and ultimately punished, even though it was their non-traditional methods that got them hired in the first place.

Punishment for thinking, learning and doing is the driving force. Curiosity fuels every great innovation, but this is easily forgotten. Innovative thinkers don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that is its own reward. If that way of thinking is thought of on an organizational level as something superfluous, then creativity and innovation die. These people have a quality that allows them to identify significant opportunities and to find creative solutions rather than simplistic ones.  If they aren’t rewarded or if they are devalued, they leave. And the organization loses out.

Power:

With power comes, many times, a decline in the ability to step outside your own way of looking at the world and embrace new ideas. While leadership leads to a unified vision and direction for the company, power often also distorts reality. Many leaders come from a traditional system that rewards organizations producing regular, predictable outcomes and profits.  There is a singular focus on how things should be done and a lack of flexibility, both in terms of thinking and control.  Encouraging more creativity means letting go of control and questioning the status quo.  This has two results. First, it means that uncertainty is now part of the business equation.  Business people are typically trained to avoid risk. Creative thinking means embracing a greater degree of uncertainty.  And this goes beyond direct business concerns, it goes to the heart of identity.

Embracing the way creative types think, learn and act often means relinquishing a degree over people. Power can be defined in many ways. Most simply, it is the ability to get what you want.  But what is it people want? Often it is greater power and recognition by the organization of their indispensability. Control leads to greater value and an increase sense of self-worth. Often, embracing creative thinking is interpreted by members of leadership as relinquishing control and opening oneself to personal and professional risk. The result is that creativity is subject to conflicts from the highest levels of the organization, down to the lowest. Which leads to internal politics.

Politics:

For all practical purposes, organizational politics are essentially an extension of the issue of power, but I separate the topic here simply because it is about those in search of power rather than those who have it. Creative thinking means being wiling to think about the big picture, to embrace the whole rather than the parts. Unfortunately, that means people are asked to do things in ways they haven’t before, thus challenging not only their worldview, but also their place in the pecking order – or so they often believe. Once a happy rut has been established, it is difficult to get out of it. We are encouraged by the system to stay within the confines of these ruts, receive our paychecks and maintain the status quo. We guard our kingdoms jealously, even as our borders slowly crumble around us. Consequently, innovation and creativity become subject to internal jockeying and stale thinking.

So What?

So what can be done to foster creativity in an organization? What needs to change? First, reward people for doing things differently and providing new, creative ideas. Encourage teams and individuals to experiment with new ways of learning. Encourage engineers and designers to spend a day at the natural history museum. Promote reading books other than the latest business book – poetry, science, anthropology philosophy, whatever gets the mind running at top speed and in new directions. In other words, give people license to think and act in creative ways rather than tying them to the same chain of behavior they have been tied to in the past.

Second, there needs to be more than temporary excitement at the top. There needs to be long-term, clear, open support by leadership and management at all levels.  It has to be sustained and encouraged throughout the organization. If leadership does not loudly promote its commitment to creative thinking, it will die on the vine.

Ultimately, talking about being a creative organization and actually performing as a creative organization are very different things.

Laying Out Fieldwork in Under 10 Steps

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DEFINE THE PROBLEM
What are the pain points a client has defined? What issues are we trying to better understand. Depending on the project, questions may be very tactical and specific or very strategic and broad. In either case, the first step is to clearly articulate what the overarching goal is.

RETHINK THE PROBLEM
Once you’ve defined the problem, it’s time to rethink it. Frequently, what we see as the problem is in fact a facet of something else. For example, when researching something like an eBook the problem to be solved isn’t technology, it may be understanding why people read different material in different contexts. It may be about displaying books for colleagues and friends as a means of gaining status. The point is that the problem we see may not be the problem at all and we need to think about possibilities before we enter the field.

DEFINE THE CONTEXTS
Where does an activity or practice take place? Defining the contexts we want to examine helps articulate the range of possibilities for observation. For example, if we’re studying beer drinking, we need to articulate all the possible contexts in which beer is purchased and consumed.

DEFINE THE SAMPLE
Who are the people we want to talk with? What are the social and cultural circles that will shape the event? It isn’t enough to define a demographic sample, you need to think in terms of cultural, social, professional and environmental systems, determining not only who will be the primary participants, but also the actors that shape the context.

MAKE A GAME PLAN
Put together a guide to help navigate the data collection and a method for managing the data (remember, everything is data and it is easy to become overwhelmed without a plan). Having a series of key questions and observational points to explore is the first component. But don’t just think about the questions you will ask, but also include opportunities for observation, mapping, and participation.

ENTER THE FIELD
This is the heart of the process. Meaningful insights and moments of “truth” are slow to get at. Low-hanging fruit will be easy to spot, but the goal should be to find those deeper practices and meanings. Because everything is data, from attitudes to mannerisms to artifacts, it is important to capture as much as possible. Take notes, draw maps and sketches, take photographs, shoot video, and collect audio – the smallest piece of information may have the greatest impact

ANALYZE AND INTERPRET
Hands down, analysis is the most difficult, but also the most rewarding part of research. A trained ethnographer will do more than report anecdotes. A trained ethnographer will bring a deep understanding of cultural understanding and social theory to the analysis process. This goes beyond casual observation and starts to pull together the web of significances and practices that get to the underlying structures of why people do what they do. Analysis should always work within a framework grounded in the social sciences. Analysis takes time, but the results will include modes of behavior, models of practice, experience frameworks, design principles, and cultural patterns. Once the data has been analyzed and crafted into something meaningful, the research team should be able to provide a rich story with a clear set of “aha” findings.

SHARE THE INSIGHTS
The findings and insights generated through ethnography should be shared not only with direct stakeholders, but across an organization because of their depth. Ethnography usually produces insights that can influence a wide range of people throughout an organization. Because of the complexity and the richness of ethnography, these stories can influence, inspire, engage, and change the way people think about a problem.

DEFINE OPPORTUNITIES
Finally, it isn’t enough to simply hand off results. As compelling as we may find our insights, that doesn’t always translate into someone seeing immediately how to apply them. Once insights and findings are shared, an ethnographer needs to work with others to craft those findings into action plans, product ideas, etc.

Finding Nirvana

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Like every other 40-something I am looking back with nostalgia over the approaching 20 year anniversary of the release of Nevermind.  And as seemingly happens to everyone as they age, we wax misty over our youth.  I have no intention of going on about the music, as it has been done be many more people, far more eloquently than I could do. No, what I’m interested in is the tremendous cultural shift it signaled, like a the shot fired at the beginning of a race.  Because while Nirvana didn’t change the world and certainly wasn’t the first band to express the worldview and symbols of the counterculture scene (with it’s shifting labels from punk, to underground, to alternative, to name-of-the-moment), it was the band that shifted the trajectory of a culture.  Not just a shift in subculture, but a fundamental change the culture at large.  Understanding the impact of the band and their second album requires a cultural context to understand Nirvana, because Nirvana were primarily about cultural context. Because without this album you wouldn’t have FaceBook, you wouldn’t have Forever 21, you wouldn’t have Mini Cooper – at least not in the forms they taken on.

I remember my first hearing of the album and oddly enough, so do most people over 35. We can relate stories with precise detail.  I was a lowly cook at the time, working at The Free State Brewery in Lawrence, KS, one of any number of Midwest college towns to which punks, misfits and the eclectic gravitated. My friend Grant Fitch had been talking all night about how earth-shattering the new album was.  And of course my thoughts ran along the lines of “bullshit.”  That was what people said anytime a new album came out – it would change everything.  So once the place closed and we were having a beer while cleaning up I expected to like the album but not be blown away by it.  Grant popped the CD into the restaurant’s CD player, cranked up the volume and hit play.  And activity in the place stopped.  Grant was right.  We listened to the whole album, from beginning to end, at top volume and put clean up on hold.  What’s remarkable about it is how many people have similar stories.  But why does it matter?  It matters because it was a signal, a symbol embodied in sound that changed the reactions, realities and worldview of a generation.

Nevermind marked the emergence of a generation of music fans in their twenties and younger in a climate dominated by the musical tastes of the baby boomer generation that preceded them. Nevermind came along at exactly the right time. This was music by, for, and about a whole new group of young people who had been overlooked, ignored, or condescended to.  It came along at a moment when counterculture had seemingly been permanently relegated to the outskirts of society or had become stale and the product of an earlier time, be it hippie or punk, that had little relevance.  This was something uniquely ours and it was a great big “fuck you” to the status quo.  And timing is everything.

I don’t remember when I first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on mainstream radio, but I know it wasn’t long after and I know my response went something along the lines of, “What the hell?” and wondered if I’d stumbled inadvertently onto the college radio station. It brought what was being termed “alternative rock” as a whole into the mainstream, establishing its cultural viability.

What Nevermind did, for better or for worse, was to legitimized counterculture as an expression of identity that had been dismissed to that point.  Punks, alternative snot whackers, hipsters, whatever you wanted to call them, represented a class of people that were inherently and forever outside the larger society.  Oh, they influenced it to be sure, but the idea of someone with pink hair and full tattoo sleeves being the face of a major business or as a top designer for Ralph Lauren would have been unthinkable.  They, we, were the fringe.  A fringe that had grown painfully stale.  A different way of embracing and interacting with the world was something you put aside upon graduation from college or it meant accepting your fate as part of a permanent, disenfranchised minority. So the album became a tangible anthem for a generation searching for its definition of counterculture.

Like I said, the album was like a shot in the night, a signal that said control was there to be taken and it was possible to navigate multiple worlds. Rather than being the perpetual Other, the postmodern search for individual identity and expression was now at the forefront of the social narrative, which meant merit, inventiveness and non-linear thinking could become more important in how we chose to interact with each other, be it in the workplace, the street, or the retail shop.  Until this point, you rarely saw a stockbroker, an ironworker and designer sitting having a beer together – these generally represented too clearly defined groups.  The divisions and social trajectories would have been established too early on to have even allowed a friendship between such seemingly disparate groups to begin.  The changes had begun, but Nevermind came along at a point of radical change in the social dynamic, signaling a shift from liminality into a new state of being.

Bricolage had been transformed into the norm.  For those unfamiliar with the term, it is a concept meant to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process.  In anthropology bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as, for example, the punk movement out of which so many sub-groups emerged. Here, objects that possess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the tattoo became a form of decoration in post-punk culture (until then it had been something bikers, dockworkers, and Marines had – note how few tattoos you see on musicians prior the 90s).  But being subversive no longer meant being limited in terms of work, profession or social mobility. Indeed, “Loser” had been co-opted and repurposed as a response to a society that saw those wearing the emblem as just that, losers. To be sure, the shift was underway, but the catalyst had yet to emerge until this moment. And it had yet to find a symbol to which it might cling.

That shift expressed a growing response to 12 years of conservatism and sparked innovation.  Everything from technology to science to art to advertising changed.  Without that sense of license and self-determination, many of the people who were responsible for the dotcom explosion and the technology that made it possible would have remained out the periphery.  There would be no ecommerce.  Without that expression of bricolage, there would be no guerilla marketing, no dada-esque Skittles ads, no multimillion dollar trade in skinny jeans.  The iPod would be just another gadget for techies and Pabst would never have become the beer to drink in hipster bars.  Symbols come in many forms and can change forever how the world works.

Metaphor as a Design Tool Also Works For Business Development

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Retrieving concepts from metaphors demands creative thinking.  Contemporary theories have defined metaphors as a structuring of our cognitive system.  Metaphors are a way of equating signifier and signified into a new symbols, or at least making parallels between a symbolic construct and something completely new. In other words, metaphors affect the way we perceive the world, categorize experiences, and organize our thoughts. Metaphors not only guide reasoning but also enhance innovative thinking. They allow the marketer, the designer, or the business developer to think unconventionally and encourage the application of novel ideas to problems.

When used to pin down abstract concepts or unusual details, the use of metaphor bridges a major gap of understanding. The use of metaphors helps structure the mind to identify and define similarities and differences, break away from binary thinking and start to examine to problem from the standpoint of a system (as opposed to a series of elements within a system). It is also helpful for explaining strategic decisions back to a client. Few client-provided specifications are all-inclusive, and you can expect questions when your judgment calls don’t match what they imagined. If you explain that you designed your strategy “like Company X,” you can more readily summarize a wide range of choices and elements of the strategic plan, as well as gain added authority by showing that your choices mirror those of a successful strategy.

In design, metaphors are viewed as heuristics that help organize design thinking and tackle ill-defined design problems. Metaphorical reasoning is an iterative process through which designers gradually increase their knowledge of a design situation. Basically, the use of metaphors aids in structuring problems.  The same process can be applied to marketing and business development.  We frequently take observations at face value, focusing on the product or service to such a degree that we can’t open ourselves to new possibilities.

Why does that matter?  Because “innovation” has largely become a buzz word and doesn’t necessarily equate with creative thinking. The result is incremental thinking that is limited by conceptual walls we struggle to break through.  Creative thinking enables one to perceive a problem from unorthodox and innovative perspectives.  Creativity is a captivating and stimulating aspect of human thinking. It has been defined as the ability to restructure old ideas to produce singular inventions and to apply original thinking. It is the capacity to look critically at reality, explore unconventional alternatives, and perceive situations from unexpected perspectives. That leads to real opportunities.

 

 

 

Tax Cuts Will Not Drive Innovation or Job Creation

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, contrary to popular belief amongst the far right, cutting taxes won’t make the economy grow.  The basic facts speak for themselves. High-end tax cuts haven’t trickled down as job creation, at least they haven’t created jobs that provide a decent wage. The only things trickling down during the last six years of tax and benefit cutting have been  economic meltdown, foreclosures, unemployment, business closures and yet more budget cuts.  From a high-level perspective, the myths created by the far right haven’t come to be. On a more granular level, a large portion of this stems from the realities of how small businesses operate and the needs they have.  But then, the Republican agenda is not in fact about job creation, small business development or entrepreneurialism.  It’s about providing benefits for the elite.

Contrary to myth, most small business owners will tell you that their  tax rate doesn’t affect hiring. If they think I can do more business, they hire more workers regardless of the tax code. The costs of finding, hiring and paying new employees are business expenses. They’re deducted up-front from the taxable income of the business.

Fewer than 3 percent of taxpayers with any business income have yearly incomes above $250,000 (couples) or $200,000 (individuals). Most high-enders aren’t who you think of as small business owners. They include hedge fund managers, CEOs getting paid to sit on the boards of a variety of corporations and partners in wealthy real estate or law firms. These are the people whining that eliminating tax cuts will kill jobs at small businesses. They do not represent the majority of small business owners. Nor do they represent the bulk of job-creating businesses for the bulk of the population.

If Congress wants to help my company create jobs, it should support policies that strengthen our economic foundation and boost broad-based consumer income and spending.  More important than tweaking the tax code YET AGAIN is the need for stability in the system. Nothing scares small business owners more than a fickle market.  Today’s plummeting of the Dow is far more detrimental than closing loopholes and taxing the richest 5%.  The poor and the middle class are expected to sacrifice, the super-rich are not.  Small  businesses and the people they employ take the hit.

More tax cuts at the top won’t create jobs. But we will create jobs and strengthen our economy by rebuilding our crumbling roads, bridges, public transit, levees and water and gas pipelines.  In other words, if we invest in innovation, we will create jobs and stability. We won’t heal our economy by repeating the toxic policies the right is so in love with.

 

Political Demagogues, The Dow and You

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As the Dow Jones takes the expected nose dive and the combined woes of Europe slowly move in the direction of bringing the collective EU economy to a standstill, there is hope of a sort.  It is a moment for reflection and reflection brings positive change.  The prolonged crisis is a teaching moment for all the middle-aged children running the show. The ongoing debate about the origins of the financial crisis presents a vexing dilemma for businesses, pundits and politicians.  How do we grow when economic chaos is the norm?  How do we market products and services when no one can afford to buy them?  It begins, at least to my mind, with how we even conceive of the current economic mess and its origins.

The technical perspective has relied on the perspective of reducing economic realities to numerical abstractions. Some contend that the crisis simply boils down to technical mistakes, independent of ethical considerations. Policy, regulations, trading practices, etc. all came together to form a perfect storm, so to speak. Banks should not have held so many fabricated and risky assets. The Fed’s monetary policy was far too loose. Credit default swaps should have been transparent. Securitization tools should not have been available to absolve mortgage providers of accountability. It was all matter of technicalities and procedural snafus.

Set in motion the political explanation. Tax cuts and the cost of two wars led to absurdly large budget deficits financed by China. Unprecedented income inequality translated into political power that not only succeeded in treating income as capital gains but also defeated prudent regulation. In other words, deregulate and cut taxes to the point where favor could be more easily curried with power brokers, corporations and the far right.  As a result, we saw the growth of a massive financial industry characterized by unbounded incentives for excessive risk-taking.  We also saw the emergence of a political dogma built on fantasy rather than fact.  Poor economic policy fueled the myth that less government and less taxation would create freedom and jobs.

The problem seems that we are all busy pointing the finger and/or digging through minutia in an attempt to validate positions we’ve already established.  We espouse the idea that the free market will heal what ails us even as we deride the very things an unfettered free market has produced.  Pornography, guns and all our vices are all opportunities that the free market has been able address – it’s hard to argue that a “degenerate society,” as Mr. Santorum described the bulk of the progressives, is the product of government intervention when the majority of the undesirable businesses have grown as deregulation has declined.  The problems businesses and economies around the world face go far beyond the cartoonish explanations of the current host of demagogues.

Eleven years of cutting (taxes, wages, spending, etc.) have brought us to the brink. Businesses thrive on a sense of consistency.  Yes, a willingness to embrace risk defines the entrepreneurial spirit and is a central element of all good businesses.  It is less about tax hikes and spending cuts than it is about providing an environment that isn’t prone to the chaos brought about by legislating through dogma.  Unfortunately, we have chosen to go down the path of ideological strong arming disguised as political discourse.  The result is that business and innovation suffer.

And so we see the results today of this prolonged expedition into fanaticism and one-way thinking.  The Dow Jones is down 633 points as I write this (and it will no doubt continue to slide) and there seems no way out. At least not until the dialog moves away from moralizing political diatribe and back to a reasoned approach to business and economic growth.  And therein lies the hope — suffering brings enlightenment.