… you can't be the leader you want and ought to be. Or more than a million.
Here's my personal short list:
I'm not powerful enough
I'm not wise enough
I'm not rich enough
I'm not patient enough
I'm not smart enough
I'm not artistic enough
I'm not stubborn enough
For me, and I'd wager for you, this is all bunk. We're not born ready, and if we can be honest with ourselves, we'll likely never achieve a state of true mastery of anything. But life is about getting on with things, because life, after all, is finite. A lot of rewards go to those willing to embrace mediocrity and get on with life. But fear has a way of getting in the way. By acknowledging the fear we feel, and not ignoring it, but choosing to act because of it, we give ourselves — and those around us — a gift of inestimable value.
Because, for me, when I'm telling myself all of those "I'm not…" phrases from the list above, that's when I know I'm really on to something. The fear I feel is a signal that what I'm contemplating not doing is really worth doing. And to not take the risk of action is to shirk the responsibility of acting when I'm able to act, of delaying or nulifying the value of the gifts I can bring to world. We owe it to ourselves — and to each other — to go for it, to try to help someone, to make something, to move things forward whenever we can.
I'm really passionate about education, particularly when it comes to helping people learn how to become makers and creators. That's why I'm currently spending a fair bit of my time outside of IDEO teaching and advising at the Stanford d.school, Harvard Business School (as an Entrepreneur in Residence), and at the MIT Media Lab.
It's a cliche, but when you hang around smart, motivated makers, you learn as much as you teach. It's particularly gratifying to help someone discover that they're indeed passionate about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, and then to help them figure out how to build an existence around doing it. In the process, I believe, they become better entrepreneurs, builders, creators — people who get stuff done and help build a better society for all of us. I just wish this stuff could happen earlier in people's lives, that more kids and young adults had access not just to the training they need, but to a world view where they hear "You can do it!" much more often than "No you can't." or "Who do you think you are?".
I was blessed to grow up in a household where this stuff was in the air. I took it for granted that people built stuff and that engineering, creativity, art, and the sciences were things worth investing your life in. After last year's TED I singled out Salman Khan's talk on education as one that knocked my hat in the creek. At this year's TED I saw a live demonstration which made me think about the awesome creative experiences I had as a kid which set me up to do the things I enjoy doing today. As it so happens, there's a brilliant video of that same demo I participated in at TED, and you can see it right here — it's the first release done as part of TED's new education initiative called TED-Ed:
Is that cool, or what? From thinking of the brain as a lump of fat, to seeing cockroaches chilling out, to cleverly utilizing the cockroach leg to literally see how a neuron fires, it's science made tangible. And I'd wager it's a lot stickier than anything you saw in high school.
Here's the TED-Ed manifesto:
TED-Ed's mission is to capture and amplify the voices of great educators around the world. We do this by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to produce a new library of curiosity-igniting videos. A new site, which will launch in early April 2012, will feature these new TED-Ed Originals as well as some powerful new learning tools.
It's going to be really cool! Hopefully this initiative will help lots of kids (and maybe some adults, too!) see how they might learn to creatively express themselves across many realms of human knowledge. Excellent!
This talk by Bryan Stevenson was my favorite of TED 2012. It is an elegant call for action which expertly appeals to our senses of logic, ethics, and emotion. You may or may not agree with all of Stevenson's arguments, but I would encourage you to listen to this talk all the way through, as I think it works on many levels. As I tweeted on my way out of the TED auditorium just after this talk had finished, "Bryan Stevenson blew my mind, engaged my heart, and inspired my soul."
And, for those of us interested in making a dent in the universe, his speech is a mandatory lesson in the art of communication. To be able to speak this convincingly, this naturally, this logically, without benefit of notes or slides or videos, is master class in public speaking. Wow.
Bryan Stevenson is an innovator. He looks at our status quo and says "we can do better than this". Innovating is hard. Most of the time it's easy — and even fun — to start something, but it's hard to finish. But in the case of the things that Stevenson pursues, I would argue that it's hard to even start, let alone finish. As he says in the speech, changing fundamental aspects of the way our world works will make you tired, tired, tired. But he is an exemplary study in what it means to be brave, brave, brave.
Whatever you're doing, wherever you may be, keep your eyes on the prize, and hold on. Be courageous.
Where do great songs come from? A great question, to which I must ask: what's a sleestak?
Every once in a while, I become obsessive about a special tune. Case in point, I've probably listened to Tower of Power's Knock Yourself Out several thousand times. When I encounter a piece I like, I need to listen to it over and over and over to unlock its secrets. It drives my wife nuts.
Here's my latest obsession, a tune called Cloisonné:
Readers of metacool will know that I deeply admire They Might Be Giants. Not only is their cover of Tubthumping the official anthem of all of us trying to make a dent in the universe, but over and over they create some amazing pieces of music which are highly creative, playful, and original. Art. They are also a case study in group creativity, having produced a stream of consistent innovation over a period of 30 years. How many individuals — let alone groups or organization or companies — can lay claim to a track record like that?
Back to Cloisonné. In the following passage, John Flansburgh talks about the creative process that lead to tales of second-story sleestaks breathing on his dice:
The story behind the song Cloisonne is pretty discombobulated. In an experimental period of putting Join Us together we created a series of electronic beats entirely without song ideas behind them. The idea was to make the tiniest drum machine-based beats that were still exciting. I probably spent twelve hours just editing and tweaking these sounds with no particular song in mind. The lyric is kind of from a Rat Pack point of view–like the guy singing is really into his own swagger, but he's also kind of out of date and out of it. The idea of not knowing what a sleestak is does come from my real life–I am actually exactly a year too old to have watched that show. Having to have Land of the Lost explained to you is slightly undignified, but thus is the fate of those who get old.
This version of the song is essentially our live band arrangement of the song. John L. is playing a bass clarinet, and we took Stan Harrison's inspired, highly chromatic sax intro and outro and mangled it in our fashion. Our apologies to Stan!
Personally, I like the Stan Harrison version on the album more than this one, but that's because the saxophone arrangement reminds me of The Borneo Horns, whose leader is arguably the greatest saxophonist in the world, Lenny Pickett, who played that incredibly gnarly solo on Knock Yourself Out, and who collaborated with Stan Harrison to create the Borneo Horns. And yes, I've listed to my precious Boreno Horns CD thousands of times… but enough of this beeswax, let's get back to our conversation about innovation and creativity.
Perhaps the astounding fecundity of imagination presented to us by They Might Be Giants can be attributed to several of my innovation principles. To wit:
Principle 2, Hear and see with the mind of a child: clearly They Might Be Giants are able to think differently about the kinds of things which other adults take for granted in day to day life. Othewise, how do you go from Quonset huts to law enforcement to sleestaks? Free association, creative association, and wordplay are all common behaviors in kids, but they get squeezed out of us as we jump through the hoops of scoring 90% on spelling tests, hitting 740 on the GMAT, and getting through that interview with the company we always wanted to work for. You can see see and hear the way you did as a kid, but it takes practice. Clearly the guys at TMBG are still in practice.
Principle 11, Everyone needs time to innovate: I love the story Flansburgh tells above, because Cloisonné happened even though they weren't even trying to write a song. They were screwing around with electronic beats for the sake of screwing around with electronic beats. This is intrinsic motivation at its best, and it's the kind of time that's rarely accounted for in mainstream business. Forget 10% time or 20% time or that funky offsite, how much time do people have for seemingly unproductive, totally unaccountable time to simply play with stuff? Messing around is a surprisingly effective way to get to unique and novel outcome.
Principle 19, Have a point of view: Yes, they have one. It's about telling interesting stories in unusual ways, and never telling the same one twice. They aren't working from script vetted by 100 layers of focus group-approved marketing criteria. This is them, and they are this stuff.
By the way, the generation of this blog post required nine spins of Cloisonné and another ten of Tubthumping.
The genesis of these thoughts on marketing from Mike Markkula are detailed on page 78 of Walter Isaacson's intriguing biography of Steve Jobs. In their clarity, simplicity, and actionability, they are stunning. As a marketer, I take three lessons from them.
First, they are about people. Markets are made up of individuals. When striving to bring something new and cool to life, we're much better off imagining the life of a single customer than we are trying to disaggregate and disambiguate mountains of anonymized market data. A holistic understanding of the customer experience you wish to enable is a great way to start creating mind-blowing products. As a way of being, empathy is to product developers what The Force is to Jedi Knights.
Second, they are focused on the market. Surely great marketing is always about the market? Not always, and not so often: in my experience, many marketers worry more about communicating with each other internally than they do with real people in the marketplace. They spend more time reading reports created by others than they do learning from the market directly. They don't use products created by competitors, nor do they try to experience their channels in the way that an end user would. They may or may not love their product segment — I mean, can you imagine Steve Jobs hawking anything other than stuff he believed in? Significantly, none of Markkula's dictums explicitly mention the internal functions or structure of the enterprise. Granted, it could be argued that "Focus" is about both the internal choices an organization makes about what not to do, as well as on all the market-facing features, line extensions, and complementary offerings it chooses not to invest in.
Third, they focus on the big picture and on the smallest details. Yes, you need to understand where the market is going and how culture, politics, and macro economic trends may influence your future state in three to five years. But you also must appreciate the nuances of texture, smell, form, sound, proportions, and color. The realm of the visceral is always there, our minds and hearts want things to feel good and true. Everything matters, and marketers (or designers, or businesspeople, or engineers — it's all the same to me) ignore this truth at their peril.
Back on planet metacool, I believe the following innovation principles are at work in Markkula's document:
I love this video by Ice Cube. It got me thinking about my approach to principles 6 and 8.
Ice Cube is a remarkable person. When I learn in this video that he studied architectural drafting, his compositional approach to the structure of his music makes total sense. And you can feel the authenticity of his knowledge of the architecture and built environment of LA. Every great innovator I know makes for a great dinner partner, in the sense that they invariable have a wide array of life interests, for which many they are a bonafide expert. Being interested in many areas, knowing a lot about a few but being willing and curious to learn about the rest, is the stuff that great innovators are made of. Given all of this, I need to expand Principle 6, Live life at the intersection, to embrace the idea of being able to pull from, and make connections across, many buckets.
He ends the video by talking about Ray and Charles Eames engaging in mashup activity before mashups were cool. There's a saying that if you're not stealing (from your predecessors), you're not designing, and that's been the thrust of Principle 8 for me: you should proceed with the humility to believe that someone, somewhere, created something you can learn from. But I like the idea of sampling more. Just as Ice Cube and other musicians sample each other's work to create new, perhaps we should substitute the notion of "sampling" for "stealing". Take a sample of something already in the world, learn from it, extract the essence of it, and mash it up with your current threads to get to something wonderful, remarkable, and new.
I really like these thoughts from Scott Cook, Intuit's founder.
His expression "the boss is no longer the Caesar" gives me some new ways to think about Innovation Principle 12, Instead of Managing, Start Cultivating.
