A few weeks back I posited that the key to being a successful innovator is having the mindset of a racer, which is some mix of foolish optimism, self-confidence, humility, and above all, persistence. 

Here’s a fun story of persistence and why you shouldn’t believe the naysayers who say it can’t be done.

The new TEDBLOG has a nice overview of each of the TED Prize winners.  They’re as amazing as last year’s group, and just as humbling, too:

Cameron Sinclair 

Larry Brilliant

Jehane Noujaim

Earlier this month, Alex Zanardi won the Italian Touring Car Championship at the wheel of a BMW.

Even if you don’t "get" auto racing, give me a chance to tell you why Zanardi is one of my personal heroes, and why he’s an important role model for innovators.  Simply put, Zanardi, has the kind of singular genius that makes something very difficult look oh so easy.  He is an incredible driver, very talented.  During the 1990’s, from his come from behind win at Long Beach, to his audacious Corkscrew maneuver at Laguna Seca (in racing circles simple referred to as The Pass), Zanardi was the guy you knew would always go for it, would never ever – ever! – give up.  In other word, Zanardi is a racer, a person intrinsically motivated to win.

He almost died in 2001.  Zanardi’s recent Touring car crown is all the more remarkable because it was achieved by a man whose legs were amputated above the knee, by a man whose died several times in a helicopter on the way to the ER room after his horrible accident.  Made all the more remarkable by the fact that, after regaining his health, his intrinsic motivation led him to figure out a control system for his racing BMW which uses his hands and his hip so effectively that he could not just be competitive, but be the most competitive in what is a very competitive racing series.

At the risk of trivializing Zanardi’s accomplishments, let me say this:  innovation is a difficult pastime.  Most of the time it’s not glamorous, fun videos about shopping carts not withstanding.  You’re going to lose a lot of the time.  Ideas get beat up mercilessly.  Hard work gets flushed down the toilet.  People don’t believe you can do it.  And the real world has a way of providing harsh feedback on things that work very well in theory but not in practice.  If you’re serious about changing the world, innovation is ultimately about doing, and ultimately, winning.  Winning, as it turns out, is tough.

I think great innovators – winners – share a lot in common with great racers.  I just want to be a great racer.  That’s why Zanardi is my hero. 

To echo an infamous statement once made about the lowly shopping cart basket, the wallet is tyranny.  In this age of the mobile phone, the PDA, the RFID fob, the massive automobile locking/alarm/ignition system remote, and the iPod, who can get away with carrying a wallet alone?  Convergence isn’t going to happen any time soon, my friends, and clipping that phone to your waist band just ain’t gonna cut it.  Aesthetics matter.  The solution is quite clear, and yet… and yet the pressure to conform to societal norms is intense.  Hence the tyranny of the wallet.

You heard it here first: I’m freeing myself from the shackles of walletdom, and I’m going to start toting a man-purse. 

I’ve been contemplating this move for a while, a long while, in fact.  Back in 1991 my engineering boss at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi used a man purse, and it made a lot of sense from a utilitarian standpoint: having everything in one purse made it a lot less likely that he’d leave a stray pack of cigarettes in a chassis dynamometer, misplace the keys to his diesel Sentra, or drop a data log at the test track.  It made perfect functional — or behavioral design — sense.

It’s the visceral and reflective levels of design which kept me from taking the plunge.  But two recent developments have tipped the balance in favor of the man-purse:

1. When a reputable venture capitalist  makes a very public endorsement of the man-purse, well, that means its societal meaning is changing.  A VC with a purse?  That’s a compelling use case, a great story.  And it works well at the reflective level of design.
2. I’m no clotheshorse, but I do care about personal aesthetics. So I can’t rationalize carrying a cordura camera bag turned purse.  Or worse, a fanny pack.  Enter the Freitag Mancipation line of man-purses.  They meet all my visceral design criteria, and because they’re Freitag they’ll work well and stroke my mojo, too.

So watch out for me and my man-purse.  Now I’ve just got to figure out how to buy one of these Freitag thingies without jetting over to Davos, because I can’t find it on the internet. 

Honey, where’s my wallet?

BusinessWeek is running a great interview about what we’re brewing at the Stanford d.school

We don’t have an RSS feed on the d.school site yet, so in the meantime go ahead and sign up for our mailing list if you want to join the movement.

Viva viva!

Be sure catch The New Heroes on PBS, a four-part series about social entrepreneurship.

Wait, shouldn’t all ventures contribute to society?  Good Business can and should better the lives of employees, shareholders, and society.

Punch it in your TiVo or set the alarm and watch it in live time.

When I awoke this morning, I sensed a step function increase in the power of The Force.

This could only mean one thing:  Jim Matheson is blogging.

My good friend, professional peer, and all-around partner in crime, Jim is one of those rare individuals who does just about everything to the hilt, boosts the energy of any room he enters, and is just plain fun and good to hang out with.  He cares intensely about innovating with a heart, and is a wise man (and sometimes a wise guy).

It’s still very much a startup, but I have no doubt that Jim’s blog Contrails will provide stimulating reading over the weeks and months to come.

My previous post on the importance of avoiding assholes as a way to be more innovative is the single most popular post in this blog, so in the name of creativity, progress, and better workplaces everywhere, here’s another serving of asshole-bashing.

Dan Pink’s blog has an interesting link to a study done by economist Armin Frank, who studied the effect of close managerial supervision on employee motivation.  His conclusion is not startling to those of us who have labored under an asshole, to wit:

"Anyone who is suspicious of the willingness to work of their employees
is in fact punished by poor work levels; whoever is optimistic and
gives them free rein is rewarded."

I really believe in this.  I spent my formative career years doing skunkworks R&D inside of the old, original incarnation of HP.  I had an enlightened manager who always got the best out of his engineering teams.  We didn’t have any weekly supervisory meetings — you just worked to do your best, and when you had a question or needed some guidance, you’d stop by his cube.

One cold, rainy February day he  happened to walk by my cube (hadn’t seen each other in weeks) only to catch a whiff of raw Bondo, the automotive body filler (of course, I was wearing a gas mask).  Toxic fumes!  I was using it to create a quick prototype of some mechanism I had sketched up, nothing that I wasn’t used to doing in my college dorm room 12 months earlier.  What did he do?  Well, he didn’t pull the asshole maneuver and tighten the "circle of trust" noose upon my neck by forcing me to start clearing every little work decision with him.  No, instead, he just said (calmly),  "There are very few things that will get you fired here.  Working with hazardous materials inside of an office space is one of them.  Cool stuff you’re working on, by the way."  And then he strolled away.

For this guy, for this kind of leader able to make this kind of optimistic, trusting gesture, I redoubled my efforts to get the prototype to work. 

Outside in the rain.

I can’t tell you how much I learn from good blogs.  One I particularly like is Presentation Coach.  Scott Rayburn writes pure gems about making good presentations, telling better stories.  His latest post,  “About fear…” is wonderful, because it acknowledges the fact that we’re all human, and nothing in life ever reaches a state of 100% perfection:

Will you make mistakes? Of course.

Will there be flashes of panic? Yes.

Will you forget details? Most likely.

Give yourself permission to make mistakes, to be anxious. Then carry
on. Just don’t make yourself a liability for your message. It’s too
important for that.

I love Scott’s approach to public speaking.  When was the last time you did anything worthwhile without  making a mistake or two?  Giving yourself permission to make mistakes is about much more than effective public speaking, it’s about being innovative across your entire life.  Just go do it!