Healthcare is one industry that many technologists and entrepreneurs have either overlooked or discounted for a multitude of reasons. The bureaucratic nature of the stakeholders in the industry (hospitals, physicians and patients) is a headache to deal with for a startup with no money, switching costs from old technologies to new ones are often expensive for doctors and difficult for startups to overcome, and the regulatory environment/politics for each country is very different which poses many problems when a company tries to scale beyond their home borders.
There has never been a greater need for innovation than right now in healthcare. The deficit in the U.S. is in large part due to a troubled healthcare system. Healthcare costs account for 18 percent of the U.S.’s GDP compared to 10 percent among other developed nations. Furthermore, the country is still feeling recessionary symptoms and Obama is calling on the American entrepreneurial spirit to be the one that lifts the country to flourish once more, exemplified by his We Cant Wait initiative that commits $2 billion to startups over the next three years. Entrepreneurs are starting to disrupt healthcare in order to lift its strain on the economy.
Ryan Howard, CEO and founder of San Francisco-based Practice Fusion, is a prime example of an entrepreneur who recognized and took advantage of this opportunity. He founded Practice Fusion in 2005 as a web-based electronic medical records solution for physicians and hospitals. What has been historically provided for upwards of $40,000, Practice Fusion manages to provide for free and physicians across the country are adopting it rapidly, with over 100,000 physicians have transfered their records to their system. Howard says that the real “silver bullet,” once Practice Fusion has data for 100 million human patients or more, would be direct engagement with consumers — that is, analyzing medical records to offer people personalized health information and advice. “WebMD has been successful, but they don’t own the market,” Howard said in an interview. “If better content came out tomorrow, people would go search that content.”
Opportunities in this space aren’t limited to B2B companies either. Frank Moss, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, predicts a “technology-driven revolution in consumer health.” These solutions will attempt to decrease health costs by integrating into consumer’s everyday lives and encouraging healthier habits. Massive Health is an app that aims to help people take control of their eating habits, crowdsources a rating on how healthy a user’s meal choices are, and keeps track of their diet. Consumers can also manage their healthcare costs and insurance providers in one place now with startup Simplee. Incubators such as Rock Health out of Silicon Valley are also beginning to pop up to enable startups in this space.
Many of the innovations in this space will be in the form of companies that decrease the downstream costs of bad health habits, which is particularly important for developing countries where technology can impact the quality of life for many. Doctors are often vastly outnumbered by the amount of ailing patients and in using technology to increase the efficiency of these visits, doctors can see many more patients who previously wouldn’t have access to them. MedKenya is in private beta, and will increase access to medical information via mobile phones to Kenyans, while Medic Mobile helps rural doctors increase the efficiency of their time through an SMS coordination system.
Many criticisms of this space stem from an inability to identify scalable and sustainable business models. However as technologies become more sophisticated this should change and investors are beginning to recognize this fact as well, and 77 percent of VCs expect investment in healthcare IT to increase next year. While there are many challenges facing entrepreneurs tackling this space, the opportunity to create a highly profitable business that contributes to society positively has never been greater.
When it comes to mobile marketing, your small business needs to be there or be nowhere for an ever-increasing percentage of the market. A survey of wireless carriers revealed that over 285 million Americans are mobile subscribers, about 91 percent of the total U.S. population (2010).
Mary Meeker, Morgan Stanley analyst, predicts that within the next five years "more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs" ( Mary Meeker: Mobile Internet Will Soon Overtake Fixed Internet, Gigaom).
So how do you get into mobile marketing? Here are mobile marketing strategies for your small business: 1) Get into mobile advertising.
Direct marketing is still the most effective type of marketing and mobile advertising has strong response rates. Don't let the price of a shortcode (necessary for mobile marketing) put you off. As Mike Craig of Ruxter Mobile Marketing points out in Mobile Marketing: Get a Grasp on the Basics, it's possible to share a shortcode with other businesses. 2) Take advantage of text messaging to communicate with your customers. Text message marketing, also known as SMS marketing, is ideal for sending notices of time-sensitive events such as deals-of-the-day. One of the things to keep in mind is that SMS is not limited to particular types of phones, such as SmartPhones. So it might be the way to go with your mobile marketing if you want "everyone" to get the message. 3) Use phone apps that are customized to your industry to get the jump on competitors.
For instance, About.com Real Estate Guide James McKinnon writes about a text message marketing service for realtors that lets prospective buyers text in the property ID and get back a fast text of the property basic details. What apps are available for your industry that you could be using? 4) Interact with customers using check-in and coupon services.
Use services such as Facebook Places, Gowalla, Foursquare and Groupon to entice customers to check in, get discounts, and participate in "exclusive" giveaways, contests and deals. 5) Blend your mobile marketing with your social media marketing.
Don't forget about Facebook and Twitter, more great places to interact with customers through their mobile devices. Giving them the chance to do things, such as enter or vote in contests and polls, post reviews or upload photos, is always good. 6) Because local search is so big, make sure that your business listings are all up-to-date and accurate.
Claim your business listing on Google, if you haven't, and make sure your business is listed properly on sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla. Don't forget your local directory sites, such as your Chamber of Commerce listing, if you're a member. 7) Make sure your website is mobile friendly.
Your website may be a thing of beauty to people viewing it with a Web browser on a desktop computer, but an unusable mess to someone trying to access it via mobile device. Find out and do what's necessary to ensure mobile viewers also have good seats. 8) Make sure full product information is available on your website.
Product numbers, model numbers, full descriptions, even reviews... Remember that customers are increasingly using their mobile devices as research tools to compare products and prices - even when they're standing in your store. Almost seven out of ten shoppers check the store’s website while they’re in the retail establishment according to ForeSee. And nearly half (46%) also used their phones to access a competitor's website. Mobile Marketing Strategies a Wise Investment But...
Mobile marketing is like any other type of marketing. You need to assign some money and time to mobile marketing for it to succeed and be sure you have the metrics in place to measure your mobile marketing success. But with mobile device use and the number of ways people use their mobile devices both increasing, it's a marketing space you want to colonize.
A friend of mine in Dallas loves the local Chick-fil-A restaurant. The reason? An employee named Jose once asked my friend's three-year-old to help with the mopping — and proceeded to give the boy a ride around the restaurant on the mop. For my friend, this was a "wow!" experience, the kind of out-of-the-ordinary event that you want to tell people about — and that inspires you to recommend the business that provided it.
One of my favorite examples of this happened at Rackspace, the managed hosting and cloud computing company. An employee on the phone with a customer during a marathon troubleshooting session heard the customer tell someone in the background that they were getting hungry. As she tells it, "So I put them on hold, and I ordered them a pizza. About 30 minutes later we were still on the phone, and there was a knock on their door. I told them to go answer it because it was pizza! They were so excited."
I'd have been pretty excited, too, if I were that hungry customer. Another "wow!" moment.
Maybe you noticed something about these wows: They don't cost much. I call them "frugal wows." A company that brings a smile to the face of its customers in this manner builds a huge reservoir of goodwill and positive word of mouth at very little expense.
Why would an employee make that kind of a gesture? No doubt the individuals involved are good-hearted folks. Doing well by others makes them happy. But there are plenty of equally good-hearted people in other companies who would never think to offer something extra to a customer. It just wouldn't occur to them to go beyond their usual duties.
What distinguishes Chick-fil-A and Rackspace is that both companies have created what might be called a "Golden Rule" culture. Employees treat customers as they would like to be treated if they were in the customers' shoes. Rackspace calls it "Fanatical Support" and views it as a cornerstone of the company's competitive advantage. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy says, "We strive to deliver something for which there is unlimited demand — being treated with honor and respect."
Both companies regularly survey customers using the Net Promoter system. They disseminate the scores and responses throughout the organization. They follow up with unhappy customers, and they make a point of acting on the feedback they receive. In other words, they take their commitment seriously.
So it's hardly surprising that employees of these companies would come up with imaginative ways to wow the people they serve. It isn't only their own good-heartedness or their personal commitment to the Golden Rule — they know that's what their employer values as well. And they know that their actions will ripple outward through the recommendations their customers provide.
Barbara Talbott, the retired head of marketing for the Four Seasons, tells the story of acts of intelligent kindness: a pot of tea delivered gratis to the room of a guest with a bad cold, a vaporizer for a mother with a croupy child, and so on.
Her point is that if you hire good employees, they will seek out opportunities to be kind. They know that when the line at the front desk is five deep, then they must be intelligent and move the line expeditiously, but if there is no crowd, then that is the time to add a little flare and conversation.
All this sheds light on the ongoing conversation about employee happiness. Most people are happiest when they get a chance to do something that others truly value — when they can act according to their best instincts. More and more companies are making sure that they support those instincts with the right team structures, leaders, tools, and training. And they put in place systems that give employees immediate feedback about how they have enriched a customer's life — or why they fell short and how to fix it.
For an employee, that support is likely to mean a chance to make a real difference in the life of a customer. How fitting that the employee's company gains from this as well.
The cost of starting a business today is lower than ever. If you have an idea, pursue it. Or give one of these three arenas a hard look. I would (if I weren't already tied up in social media).
Recently I outlined the two most important rules to follow when deciding what market to attack for your new business. In turn, many readers asked me which markets are most ripe for starting new businesses.
Here are the three areas I'd explore if I weren't already knee deep in social media at Buddy Media: 1. China + Internet = $$$$$$
A few months ago, a headline in Business Insider shouted "The China (Internet) Bubble Has Burst." I'm not a stock trader, so I'm not about to enter the debate about whether or not several of the high-flying Chinese internet companies are overvalued. But what's not up for debate is the fact that the Chinese market is a huge one with no signs of slowing in the next few years.
China is already home to 500 million Internet users, the largest population of Internet users on the globe and larger than the United States and Japan combined. According to iResearch, China Internet advertising revenue reached $8 billion in 2011 and is already larger than newspaper advertising in the country. This number is expected to double by the end of next year.
Many of the world's largest companies have set up shop in a huge way in China. And the real opportunity is selling online in China. The Boston Consulting Group released a report late last year that outlined the scope of the opportunity.
A few highlights:
23% of Chinese Internet users shopped online in 2010, and this figure is expected to double in the next four years. This means that an additional 30 million Chinese consumers will shop online for the first time every year for the next few years.
E-commerce in China only represents 3.3% of all shopping today. This is expected to grow to 7.4% in 2015.
The low cost of shipping in China is helping boost growth. It costs $1 on average to ship a 1 kg package there, compared to $6 in the U.S.
If I had the opportunity today (which I don't given my responsibilities over here), I would pack up, move to China and figure out a business—any business—in the exploding Chinese Internet market. 2. Online organization drives offline markets
The Internet is great at organizing people and starting movements. Without the Internet, and social media in particular, Hosni Mubarak would still be running Egypt, Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafi would still be alive and, well, Wall Street would never have been occupied.
Businesses can take advantage of these trends more cost effectively than ever before by using the Internet to create new markets and ecosystems that translate into offline revenue and value creation.
Take Ben McKean and Dan Leahy from a company called Savored in New York, which I invested in. They came up with an innovative membership service that lets consumers join and save up to 30% off many of the best restaurants in the country, including the world-famous Le Cirque in New York. Savored is using a members-only website and mobile platform to drive affluent customers into restaurants. It's a win for the consumer and a huge win for the restaurant.
The shining star of this new model is AirBnB, which lets property owners list their apartments and houses in a marketplace policed by a powerful peer-to-peer review system. AirBnB's last round of financing valued the business at more than $1 billion. 3. Content is once again king
One of the clearest paths to making money today is creating content. We're in a renaissance of content. There are more awesome TV shows than ever before. New websites with both innovative and traditional business models are building audiences more efficiently than ever before.
The great thing about content is that it can allow you to create a company around anything you're passionate about. Take Jonah Peretti, who will go down as the William Randolph Hearst of my generation. He started The Huffington Post, sold it to AOL for a reported $315 million, and now has done it again with BuzzFeed.com.
Six years after launching, BuzzFeed.com now has more than 30 million unique visitors and is well on its way to becoming one of the largest media companies online. Both businesses were born out of Jonah's interest in politics and pop culture, and a fascination about how content spreads through social connections.
Jonah is not alone, and success doesn't need to be measured in tens of millions of loyal visitors or millions of dollars in venture financing anyway. My friend Melanie Notkin started SavvyAuntie.com four years ago. A single woman and former marketing executive at American Express, the New York Times Company and L'Oreal, Mel identified childless professional women as an underserved market. She now has a loyal following on her site, happy advertisers like Disney and Pepsi, and a growing media empire built around her brand.
Some entrepreneurs can make it in content without even creating content. Gabe Rivera decided to start organizing headlines about the tech industry in 2005. His site Techmeme.com is a daily visit for almost everyone I know in the tech industry and he has since spawned three more sites—on the media business, politics, and celebrity news. All of this more than 15 years after Matt Drudge launched the first news aggregator, The Drudge Report, which is still one of the most trafficked sites on the Internet.
All of these businesses launched and reached critical mass with 10% of the funding it would take to launch a newspaper today (don't know why anyone would want to do that)!
With interest rates low and tax rates for regular income significantly higher than long-term capital gains tax rates, the actual cost of starting a business is lower than ever. If you have an idea you want to pursue, do it. And if you don't, give these three areas I've described a hard look.
I think we have the outline of a logic of entrepreneurial action in the set of ideas that have come to be called effectuation. Effectuation suggests you start with who you are, what you know, and whom you know to come up with very doable venture ideas. Then you invest no more than you can afford to lose and invite stakeholders to support the project in a way that ensures they are really committed. The goal is to co-create rather than predict the future. These are part of a broader complex of ideas that challenge conventional wisdom such as seeing the future as something outside our control, something to be predicted. Or seeing entrepreneurship as a lonely, heroic and risky activity. Or seeing success as the product of wealth. Of course, there's a lot more to be figured out. But I think we now know enough to start teaching everyone.
Francis Bacon could not have known and probably did not even dream that his insight about a method accessible to everyone would lead to a world with iPads and Google and airplanes and defibrillators. And the women in my family, themselves unschooled in science, woke up every day to make sure their kids went to school and learned to figure out this world that changed on them in such profound and incomprehensible ways. They did not have much, but they were far from helpless. For me the most inspiring thing about the entrepreneurial method is that it is something they and folks like them everywhere can learn and use. And I know what they would use it for: to build a world in which all little girls and boys become capable of cooking up their own opportunities from scratch
I recently shared with college creative thinking students a short RSA Animate video by Ken Robinson titled "Changing Education Paradigms." In the talk, Robinson argues that our current education system stifles and anesthetizes creativity. Because half of this particular classroom of engineering students will graduate at the end of the term, I asked them to talk about the impact of the last sixteen years of education on their own creative thinking.
The resulting discussion was eye-opening. As much as they realize the need to have honed their convergent thinking and executive functioning skills as they look toward entering a competitive workforce, they also spoke of a deep loss of something integral to who they are, and a few wondered if that capacity for creativity they remembered from their youth would or could ever return.
Rather than disheartened by their comments, I am excited to show them over the next ten weeks a few ways that they can begin to reclaim their creativity and that parents and teachers can encourage creative thinking at home and school. Aim for Quantity Over Quality
In his RSA talk, Robinson is careful to point out that divergent thinking is "not the same thing as creative thinking" but that it is an "essential capacity for creativity." Robinson refers to a study in the book Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today, by George Land and Beth Jarman, that followed this creative capacity throughout childhood. When tested as kindergarteners, 98 percent of the study's subjects scored at the genius level in divergent thinking. When they were ten, 32 percent of the same group scored as high, and by age fiften, only 10 percent made the cut. When 200,000 adults were given the same test, only two percent tested at the genius level.
We can help children to practice skills of divergent thinking as they grow by helping them at least some of the time to aim for quantity over quality, without pre-emptive judgment. This can be done in ways that are more applicable to their daily lives than asking how many uses they can think of for a paper clip. What are all the meals we can make for dinner with the ingredients in the refrigerator, even (and especially) combinations that are new or strange? While they answer, we can be alert for the "yes, but" voices in our own heads that want to butt in and stop the divergent flow of ideas. Where are all the places we can go for vacation, beyond the ones we can afford or can get to easily? How about the moon? Or the past or future? Once the divergent exercise has run its course, we can then (and only then) think about practical vacations that would provide a similar experience.
Children will have plenty of opportunities to practice convergent skills of analyzing and narrowing for quality, but we often have to plan consciously for the skills that allow them to practice divergent fluency. Go Lateral
Just as a lateral pass in football mixes things up by defying expectations, lateral thinking, a phrase coined by Edward de Bono, can spur creativity by introducing the unexpected. De Bono explains that being able to think laterally is important because, most of the time, when we are stuck on a problem, we simply try harder in the same direction. Lateral thinking is not about trying harder but trying differently, changing directions, sometimes in ways that seem illogical or impractical.
For example, one of de Bono's lateral thinking techniques is the practice of "wishful thinking," in which we allow ourselves to imagine what the ideal solution would be, regardless of financial, physical, or even ethical constraints. During this process, we do not censor our thoughts or in any way think of why the solution might not work. What is the point of this exercise? Very often, such "what if" thinking contains ideas that can lead to and inspire practical possibilities. However, we often censor our own thoughts before such ideas ever bubble to the surface, as we begin too early the process of convergent criticism. Refuse to Pigeonhole Personality
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creator of the theory of flow, studied the lives of over 90 eminent creative producers and thinkers to learn what they had in common. What he found is that the creative personality has no template. Being adaptable is key to using our creativity effectively, so we cannot expect even our own personality to be the same from one creative venture to the next. He summed up his findings by presenting ten pairs of what we usually think of as antithetical traits that highly creative people "experience both with equal intensity and without inner conflict," pairs he referred to as "dimensions of complexity."
Our temptation to label and pigeonhole others is often for reasons of our own comfort and efficiency. If we know Johnny is an extrovert, we know, or we think we know, what to expect from him and what his needs are. However, to encourage children to give themselves more options for how to feel, think, and act, we can refrain from typecasting them as either/or and, instead, give them permission to be both/and: Both extroverted and introverted, both playful and disciplined, both feminine and masculine.
For example, we may think Johnny is an extrovert because he likes to talk through ideas, laughs easily, and has a lot of friends. For this reason, we might mistakenly think that he doesn't need much alone time and be tempted to over-schedule his afterschool hours and weekends, rather than giving him needed space to create and to hone his introverted skills. We can also be particularly careful not to talk about children's traits within their hearing, even with comments such as "Angela always is the self-disciplined one and never goofs off," which we intend as praise. Angela may come to believe that being self-disciplined is what she is valued for and be reluctant to be silly or to play, for fear of disappointing adults. Encourage Boundary Crossing
Dan Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, describes boundary crossers as follows:
"What's the most prevalent, and perhaps the most important, prefix of our times? Multi. Our jobs require multitasking. Our communities are multicultural. Our entertainment is multimedia. While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people 'boundary crossers.' They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multilives-because that's more interesting and, nowadays, more effective." (p. 134)
Larry Livingston argues in his article "Teaching Creativity in Higher Education" that today's generation of college students shows up in our classrooms already expert boundary crossers. They have grown up in a world where research is done not in limited, discipline-specific journals but through multi-disciplinary Google searches and collaborative social media. He writes, "Our students investigate all manner of diverse topics without being trapped by discipline-based limitations. They do so because no one has told them otherwise."
What adults can do is to recognize the value of such boundary crossing and encourage students to use the best of what is online through multi-discipinary text, images, and video, rather than relegate it to the periphery of learning because we are afraid of its potential for abuse or because we haven't taken the time or effort to understand it as well as we should. Prioritize Play
Finally, we all need to prioritize play in our lives, especially as children move into the busy high school years. In his TED Talk on creativity and play, Tim Brown from IDEO tells us that one way to play is to "think with our hands," which can mean everything from playing with LEGOs or clay to using found materials to build prototypes as a way to solve problems.
This kind of hands-on play, however, often requires that we give ourselves and our children permission to engage in activities that can look like a waste of time. For a sixteen year old who has a full schedule of AP classes, sports practice, and orchestra rehearsal, half an hour spent building a snowman in the backyard with younger siblings can seem a luxury, but parents can help to shape good life-time habits by encouraging their children and teenagers to build in time for just such free play, and by setting a good example by turning off their cell phones and joining in.
While individually we cannot always do much in the short term to change our educational system or paradigms, we each have the power to change our approach to creativity right now in our homes and classrooms so that more of our children retain their creative genius into adulthood. In the process, we may just recapture some of our own creativity at the same time.
The image of the 'creative type' is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate—and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague's desk might be the key to your next big idea.
Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They're "creative types." We're not.
The myth of the "creative type" is just that--a myth, argues Jonah Lehrer. In an interview with WSJ's Gary Rosen he explains the evidence suggesting everyone has the potential to be the next Milton Glaser or Yo-Yo Ma.
But creativity is not magic, and there's no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. ("Inspiration" literally means "breathed upon.") Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use "creativity" as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
It isn't a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It's a skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.
Does the challenge that we're facing require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it be solved gradually, one piece at a time? The answer often determines whether we should drink a beer to relax or hop ourselves up on Red Bull, whether we take a long shower or stay late at the office.
The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.
Let's start with the hardest problems, those challenges that at first blush seem impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are solved at all) in a moment of insight.
Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn't stick?
On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that we're forced to live with.
But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn't tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the Post-it Note. Mr. Fry's invention was a classic moment of insight. Though such events seem to spring from nowhere, as if the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun studying how they occur. They do this by giving people "insight" puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the brain: A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man? If you solved the question, the solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a priest. Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard creative problem. Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video—the scientists use a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up—boosts the average success rate by about 20%. Alcohol also works. Earlier this year, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students. The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that goes with a triad of words. Here's a sample problem: Pine Crab Sauce In this case, the answer is "apple." (The compound words are pineapple, crab apple and apple sauce.) Drunk students solved nearly 30% more of these word problems than their sober peers. What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we're probably focused on the wrong answer. And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer. This research also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted." Of course, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won't solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap. There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the "rejecting process," noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. "All great artists and thinkers are great workers," he wrote. This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan "Art is Work" above his office door. Mr. Glaser's most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart. Mr. Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming design, with "I Love New York" in cursive, set against a plain white background. His proposal was quickly approved. "Everybody liked it," Mr. Glaser says. "And if I were a normal person, I'd stop thinking about the project. But I can't. Something about it just doesn't feel right." So Mr. Glaser continued to ruminate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi, stuck in midtown traffic. "I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw," he remembers. "And I'm thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go." The logo that Mr. Glaser imagined in traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design because he refused to stop thinking about it. But this raises an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we're thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities? The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution. This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we need to keep on struggling. Of course, both moment-of-insight problems and nose-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the answers to the creative problems we're trying to solve somewhere in our heads. They're both just a matter of getting those answers out. Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed. Steve Jobs famously declared that "creativity is just connecting things." Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs's leadership, for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category. And it isn't just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet. How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out "diverse experiences," collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don't know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere. Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs's wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts. Many of the most innovative companies encourage their employees to develop these sorts of diverse networks, interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas—a sort of grown-up science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient. Such solutions are known as "mental restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage. This principle is at work daily on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website for difficult scientific questions. The structure of the site is simple: Companies post their hardest R&D problems, attaching a monetary reward to each "challenge." The site features problems from hundreds of organization in eight different scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from a multinational food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" to an electronics firm trying to design a solar-powered computer. The most impressive thing about InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of challenges posted on the site. According to Mr. Lakhani's data, nearly 30% of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being posted online. The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields. Chemists didn't solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to understand the challenge, they weren't so close that their knowledge held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that held back their more expert peers. It's this ability to attack problems as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that's the key to creativity. The composer Bruce Adolphe first met Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was just 15 years old at the time (though he'd already played for J.F.K. at the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece. "Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing," Mr. Adolphe remembers. "I'd never written for the instrument before." Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. "Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing," Mr. Adolphe says. "And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it." Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled "Stop!" They looked at Mr. Ma's left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was nearly impossible to hold. "You're right," said Mr. Ma, "you really can't play that!" Yet, somehow, he did. When Mr. Ma plays today, he still strives for that state of the beginner. "One needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello," Mr. Ma says. "Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure." Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world. For the first time in human history, it's becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection. Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.
Ask most small and mid-sized farmers who sell food to a local audience what they like least about their job and they will probably say marketing and distribution. Driving long hours to sit at farmers markets (or managing someone else who does) is always a risk that can result in unsold leftovers. And even when you have a guaranteed market — like in the case of community-supported agriculture (CSA) and restaurant sales — the effort involved diverts time and energy from the actual work of farming.
Enter food hubs. A key component of the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, food hubs operate on the simple principle that farmers, like everyone else, are stronger when they work together. Food hubs are networks that allow regional growers to collaborate on marketing and distribution. The term applies to a broad range of operations, from multi-farm CSAs to Craigslist-like virtual markets where buyers and producers can connect. But each model is motivated by the belief that individual farms can’t survive in a vacuum.
“When everybody was a farmer, there was all sorts of infrastructure to support family-scale farming, and that’s all gone,” said Amanda Oborne, director of FoodHub, an online resource that connects growers, buyers, and distributors in the western U.S. “Food hubs are a huge part of the answer to rebuilding that infrastructure.”
“Talking, getting together — that in and of itself is a new thing for a lot of growers,” said Dru Rivers, whose Full Belly Farm in California’s Capay Valley is part of the Capay Valley Farm Shop. “The food hub brings together this region, rather than [us farmers] competing against each other.”
Capay Valley Farm Shop partners with 26 institutions around the Bay Area (about 100 miles away from the valley), from schools to cafes to companies like Ideo and Adobe, to offer “farmshares,” CSA boxes containing not just one farm’s produce but an assortment of the best offerings from the shop’s network of 35 farms. Last year the farm shop started offering wholesale produce as well, selling to company kitchens and neighborhood markets.
“The collaboration allows everyone to market together, so there’s one truck that goes to the city, and one delivery route,” Rivers said. “Some of us are much better farmers than we are marketers, so [it’s] a tremendous help, and allows the farmers to focus on what they’re good at.” Local Food Hub, in the Charlottesville, Va., area, concentrates solely on distributing wholesale produce to its 150 buyers, which include public schools, hospitals, and nursing homes, as well as restaurants and grocery stores. “We really try to focus on those big institutional markets that small farmers have been traditionally locked out of,” explained Emily Manley, Local Food Hub’s director of outreach and development.
Many of those institutions feel the customer demand for local food but don’t know how best to meet it. “If the purchasing manager [at a hospital] can call up Sysco and get all the tomatoes he needs, he doesn’t want to call up a bunch of different farmers and coordinate with each,” Manley explained. “We do all the logistics.”
Farmers tend to be risk-averse by necessity, and Manley likes being able to offer them a solid commitment. “We say, here’s where there’s opportunity; we’ll commit to buying this amount of squash from you every week. Just having that information is key to being more efficient and growing more food.”
By making regional distribution easier for farmers who usually have to compete with cheap produce trucked and shipped from afar, food hubs also pump dollars back into the local economy. Local Food Hub has invested over $1 million in direct farm purchases in its two and a half years of existence.
Beyond the direct economic benefits, connecting eaters with local growers helps cultivate a sense of regional pride and solidarity. “We have a real attachment to making sure our valley continues to have its rural, agricultural heritage,” Rivers said. “We want food to be recognized from a region, not just one farm.”
Bruce Johnson at Dragonfly Farm sells his pastured meat through the Fall Line Farms food hub. (Photo by USDA.)
Virtual hubs, like FoodHub, FarmsReach, and Local Dirt, offer a more interactive way for growers and eaters to connect, allowing them to specify exactly what they’re looking for, the same way apartment hunters can filter their Craigslist results by neighborhood, price, or number of bedrooms. “Our point really is to make it all transparent,” Oborne said.
Food hubs maintain the transparency that draws eaters to farmers markets and CSA programs, while ramping up the efficiency necessary to get fresh, local food to a wider audience. Thomas Nelson, one of the community members who founded the Capay Valley Farm Shop, describes food hubs as “the center of the new rural economy. Once you begin to put that infrastructure in place,” he adds, “it gives new farmers more confidence that they have the support they need to succeed.”
Which is why it’s great to see the USDA taking food hubs seriously, offering funding [PDF], doing research, and collaborating with groups like the National Good Food Network to provide webinars and other resources to help food hubs get off the ground. The local food supply won’t keep pace with demand unless new, young farmers feel that encouragement. Even veteran growers sense the tide turning.
“I’ve been farming here for 28 years,” Rivers said. “Having this new venture makes it exciting again.”
Our memories of an event are overwhelmingly shaped by its last moments. So why do so many services conclude with the worst part of an experience: paying for it?
If you had to relive a painful event for either 60 or 90 seconds, you’d choose the shorter period, right? It seems so obvious that we usually don’t even bother to ask the question. But, remarkably enough, experiments have shown that you’d be overwhelmingly more likely to pick the longer episode if, the first time around, you sensed even a slight lessening of the pain in the final moments of the experience. It seems that we tend to remember, and judge, an overall experience based on the intensity of our sensation at its end relative to its peak intensity. And we tend to ignore the duration of the experience. So, for instance, we’ll rate a mediocre vacation more highly overall if our final experience of it is overwhelmingly positive. And vice versa: We tend to discount a great holiday almost entirely if it is in some way tarnished toward its conclusion.
For those of us who work in service design and innovation for a living, this has profound implications. After all, it is one of our orthodoxies, part of the designer credo, that user experience is paramount. But what if it isn’t? What if user memory is at least as important--if not more so? What if memorable experiences are determined not by the value of the experiences themselves but by the value of the memories they provoke? Does this mean that we need to rethink our work? In some cases, I think it might.
Take the design of the average retail experience. Typically, the least compelling part for customers is the financial transaction, the point at which they actually have to pay for their purchases. In most cases, regardless of whether those purchases are products, such as clothes and groceries, or services, like meals and haircuts, the exchange of money tends to happen at the very end of the experience as a whole. So if we are truly most impacted by what happens to us last, it would seem that many of these experiences provide customers with the worst possible memory of them.
One of the world’s most creative chefs, Grant Achatz, is tackling this problem head-on with his latest restaurant, Next. Like a theater that puts on a new show every few months, Next presents themed menus that get completely overhauled four times a year. For the restaurant’s opening theme, “Paris 1906,” diners relived the legendary cuisine of French master Auguste Escoffier at the Ritz hotel. That was followed by a “Tour of Thailand,” after which came “Childhood,” a trip down memory lane replete with PB&J sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, and superhero lunch boxes. Diners book tickets online in advance as they become available. The tickets cover the cost of the meal (which, like a show, is presented as a whole, not a la carte), taxes, tip, and (optionally) wine pairings. Once the ticket has been bought, there is no bill to be settled at the end of the dinner.
This method of payment not only improves Next’s planning and budgeting abilities but also extends the pleasurable aspects of the experience for the diners all the way through to them leaving the restaurant and very likely heightens their memories of it. Reading the reviews on Yelp, it becomes clear how willing customers are to embrace these innovations (nearly every single reviewer appears to be a repeat diner at Next) and how evocative their recollections of them become.
Meanwhile in retail, Apple has not only replaced the checkout and cashier paradigm in most stores with “on the floor” payment offered by any available staffer, it now provides an option to bypass the human transaction entirely. Its November 2011 release of version 2.0 of the Apple Store app enables shoppers in any of its U.S. retail locations to use EasyPay on their iPhone 4 to purchase Apple accessories electronically. This means that Apple owners can choose whether they even want to engage with a store associate at all. Apple’s efforts to improve the final part of the retail experience, by giving their customers payment options that include using their own beloved iPhone, serve to reinforce positive memories and, perhaps, influence future purchasing decisions.
Of course, not every coffee, meal, grocery run, or shopping trip needs to be made into an experience. Sometimes, maybe most times, people just need their caffeine fix or a to-go sandwich, snacks for the kids, or some office supplies. But in every case, the transaction can feel easy and pleasant, in which case they’ll likely return, or difficult and unsatisfactory, in which case they most likely won’t. In higher-stakes experiences--whether they have a reputation for being painful (dentist’s visit) or pleasurable (vacation)--we should consider designing them to maximize these rules to transform people’s memories and influence whether they are game to repeat the experience or prefer to find an alternative. Where once this may have been the domain of a user experience (UX) specialist, now maybe there’s a role for an expert in user memory (UM) as well.
Design thinking seems to be all the rage in business and entrepreneurship circles, but the momentum has been building for over 13 years. In 1999 I was in the Doctoral program at the University of Colorado-Boulder studying strategy and entrepreneurship. While procrastinating on reading 400 pages of scholarly research articles for a seminar the next day, I flipped through channels one night in my tiny apartment passively watching mindless TV (on a 19” screen!). It was 10:30 pm and the familiar voice of Ted Koppel’s Nightline caught my attention. I heard Koppel say, “Tonight, the deep dive – one company’s secret weapon for innovation.”
He had me at deep dive! I was enthralled with the show, the company, and the methodology. I immediately ordered an educational copy of the program (on VHS!) and showed it to my undergraduate entrepreneurship class the following week. After using the video in my course, more than half of the class had dreams of working for one company. IDEO. With that type of student enthusiasm I thought to myself, “There is really something here for entrepreneurs.”
Since then I’ve been playing around with elements of design thinking in my entrepreneurship courses to help students create better ideas and identify bolder opportunities. Even at the executive level I’ve starting using design thinking because it creates an incredible “mindshift” among executives. Design is no longer a support function; it’s strategic.
For those of you unfamiliar with what is rumored to be the best selling Nightline video of all time you may view an excerpt here. The Nightline premise was simple. IDEO was challenged to reinvent the shopping cart in 10 days. The outcome was impressive but the methodology was inspirational. The principles of the method have since become known as design thinking.
For entrepreneurs I use design thinking to generate bold ideas. I borrow from Tim Brown, author of Change by Design and CEO of IDEO, and highlight three parts of the design thinking process.
Inspiration: Observing users in their own environment to identify latent needs. Takeaway: See the world differently in order to capitalize on needs that your competition hasn’t taken the time to recognize.
Ideation: Developing new ideas based on observations to address latent needs. Takeaway: Don’t depend on your customers for the big ideas.
Implementation: Testing assumptions of new ideas to continuously shape them into viable opportunities. Takeaway: Fail quickly and often not to kill an idea but to make it better.
In a paper recently published with my colleague, Patti Greene, we stated, “Design is a process of divergence and convergence requiring skills in observation, synthesis, searching and generating alternatives, critical thinking, feedback, visual representation, creativity, problem-solving, and value creation. Teaching entrepreneurship through a design lens can help students identify and act on unique venture opportunities using a toolkit of observation, fieldwork, and understanding value creation across multiple stakeholder groups” (p. 65) But what is most compelling about the approach popularized by IDEO is this notion of human-centered design.
Human-centered design involves a different starting point in the creation process. In typical scenarios where new ideas are being vetted we often jump to answer two questions: Can it be done? Will it make money? A design thinking approach forces you to answer an entirely different question in the beginning while not even addressing feasibility and economic viability.
The first question is: What do people need? This isn’t marketing 101 where I encourage you to talk to customers and ask them what they need. This is, however, anthropology 101 where you observe people in their environments to understand their lives, develop empathy, and uncover latent needs. Latent needs are those needs that we have that we don’t even know we have. They lie dormant until something comes along that encourages these needs to surface. Think iPad. Human-centeredness is what separates design thinking from other innovation methodologies. It has the ability to produce radical innovation rather than incremental innovation.
The beauty of design thinking is that it works best under conditions of uncertainty—when you really don’t know where to start. It’s a methodology that is very messy in practice but does allow for a systematic approach to creating new opportunities. In my opinion, every entrepreneur is a designer.
If you’re an entrepreneur and use a phone system for business (other than your personal cell) you’re probably using Grasshopper. At the very least, you’ve probably heard of the virtual phone system that enable entrepreneurs to work from anywhere while maintaining a professional presence.
Since first launching in 2003, Grasshopper has become the brand synonymous with “phone” for entrepreneurs. How exactly did the company manage to dominate the category like that? Yes, lots of hard work, but after speaking with Grasshopper Co-Founder and CEO Siamak Taghaddos, here are a few other take-aways that struck me from their story.
Think like a Fortune 500 company from Day 1. When I asked Taghaddos about his marketing in the earliest days and how it changed over time, he shared with me that he never viewed the company as a startup. Even from Day 1, the brand was built with the mindset of “what would a Fortune 500 company do?” They took risks with marketing and explored channels that were still new and innovative. They sought to be first movers and were not too concerned with sticking to the tried and true. And yes, they bootstrapped the company back then and 9 years later, continue to build it quite successfully without outside capital.
If you’re going to re-brand, go bold or go home. Around 2008, after being in business for 5 years and already hitting the Inc. 500, Taghaddos and his business partner, Co-Founder and CTO David Hauser, looked into the future and saw potential trouble on the horizon. The economy was faltering, they didn’t think their growth trajectory was sustainable, and perhaps most troubling of all, they thought the name of their business at that time (Got Vmail) would ultimately limit their growth. Got Vmail was difficult to remember, which made it hard to share via word of mouth. Developing a brand and then realizing you picked the wrong name is not an uncommon situation for entrepreneurs. Businesses evolve and sometimes companies simply outgrow the names they initially chose. What to do if you find yourself in that situation? Well, if you’re Grasshopper, you use the anticipated slowdown as a chance to boldly unleash an innovative re-branding campaign. In honor of their new name, Grasshopper sent 25,000 chocolate dipped grasshoppers to a list of 5000 entrepreneurial influencers. If that doesn’t get people talking, I don’t know what will. The result? The cost per acquisition for their advertising went down by 50 percent as their word of mouth referrals increased by the same amount. Amazing!
Keep your marketing relevant by staying relevant in your community. Grasshopper is one of those companies that is built for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. Thus, they whole-heartedly embrace the entrepreneurial community both by what they do and how they do it. For example, they seek out opportunities to support organizations focused on entrepreneurship such as the Young Entrepreneurship Council and the fantastic work it does (I, too, am a member). They were also instrumental in the declaration of the first-ever National Entrepreneurs Day on November 19, 2010. They look for opportunities to chime in on conversations related to entrepreneurship and look for ways to support the community when possible. Plus, knowing they are speaking to entrepreneurs, they have fun with their marketing (Check out some of their YouTube videos!)
So, while I’ve never had a desire to eat a chocolate dipped grasshoppers myself, hats off to Taghaddos, Hauser and the rest of their team for the creativity they continue to infuse into their brand. It’s no wonder this is a business that people want to continue to talk about
Every two months, I pull together a community of innovators. We meet somewhere in New York City, usually a boardroom overlooking a park or cityscape. But last month we all found our way into an acting studio operated by The TAI Group to learn about storytelling.
The members of this group certainly already know something about the topic. They are senior executives at some of the largest corporations, partners in some of the most prestigious consulting and private equity firms, and several cutting-edge entrepreneurs. But the more you know, the more you realize there is to learn, and this group wanted to learn more about how to use effective storytelling to drive change in and grow their organizations.
The experience shocked me, to be honest. I considered myself an expert and snobbishly thought there was little more to learn. How wrong I was. Here are my two key takeaways from this session. Apply them today at your next meeting or phone call and I am willing to bet you will have a better result. 1) Use lots of LOTS. Our facilitator, Gary Lyons, senior coach at The TAI Group, told us a story and had us dissect what we remembered. Do this, and you will realize your audience is often checked out, comatose, or unable to hear or remember what you are saying. The key to engage them is to use lots of “language of the senses,” or LOTS. When telling a story, share with us what you see, smell, feel, taste, and hear. When you trigger a sense in someone, you bring them into the story with you. 2) Build on your story spine. At McKinsey, I was taught to open presentations with a standard structure: situation, complication, question, answer. TAI suggests you use a five-step structure and do so not just to open your presentation, but throughout your talk. They call it the "story spine": reality is introduced, conflict arrives, there is a struggle, the conflict is resolved, a new reality exists. These two tools caused a profound shift in our abilities to tell effective stories.
Not convinced? Let me try the story spine with lots of LOTS then: Reality introduced: A dark room is filled with 20 executives and entrepreneurs resting on chairs in rows facing two director chairs. The door closes, snuffing out the faint sound of New York traffic. Conflict introduced: Our facilitator, Gary, begins scratching markers on flip charts. He is there to teach us about storytelling. But all I can think about is, "This is a highly accomplished group; they know all of this already. Will we learn anything new?" Struggle: Gary tells us to use “language of the senses,” but someone complains, "You can't talk like that at a board meeting," to which Gary points out that if you talk differently than people expect you to, they are more likely to listen and remember. Conflict resolved: Gary gently bats back every concern this Type A group lobs at him, patiently walking us through the journey. By the end he has us on the edge of our seats. New reality: We close with a “before and after” exercise. One of our members gets up to practice a pitch; he is raising money for an energy tech venture. He starts speaking, but I just can't follow. When he finishes, I realize I have not heard a word. Gary coaches him--lots of LOTS, story spine, look us in the eye, take us in--and the speaker tries again. Now it is all waterfalls of electricity pouring down the mountain, the opportunity to create something and break through with passion. I heard every word, and so much more.
That is the impact that two tools can have in your ability to tell stories--about the company you are building, the project you are leading, the life you live. You can enroll people more completely and emotionally in your mission. Here is how you can put it to use now:
1) Think of a presentation or pitch you will be giving in the next seven days.
2) Write out your presentation as a story, longhand, on paper, using the story spine.
3) Brainstorm a list of LOTS (language of the senses) you want to embed into your story.
A 2009 study found that subjects solved twice as many insight puzzles when surrounded by the color blue, since it leads to more relaxed and associative thinking. Red, on other hand, makes people more alert and aware, so it is a better backdrop for solving analytic problems.
2. Get Groggy
According to a study published last month, people at their least alert time of day—think of a night person early in the morning—performed far better on various creative puzzles, sometimes improving their success rate by 50%. Grogginess has creative perks.
#3 Don't Be Afraid to Daydream
3. Daydream Away
Research led by Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that people who daydream more score higher on various tests of creativity.
4. Think Like A Child
When subjects are told to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds, they score significantly higher on tests of divergent thinking, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire.
5. Laugh It Up
When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
6. Imagine That You Are Far Away
Research conducted at Indiana University found that people were much better at solving insight puzzles when they were told that the puzzles came from Greece or California, and not from a local lab.
7. Keep It Generic
One way to increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, people think in narrow terms. In contrast, the use of more generic verbs—say, "moving" instead of "driving"—can lead to dramatic increases in the number of problems solved.
According to a new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-footsquare workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
8. Work Outside the Box
According to new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-foot-square workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
9. See the World
According to research led by Adam Galinsky, students who have lived abroad were much more likely to solve a classic insight puzzle. Their experience of another culture endowed them with a valuable open-mindedness. This effect also applies to professionals: Fashion-house directors who have lived in many countries produce clothing that their peers rate as far more creative.
10. Move to a Metropolis
Physicists at the Santa Fe Institute have found that moving from a small city to one that is twice as large leads inventors to produce, on average, about 15% more patents.
Oregon architecture firm ideabox is producing this prefab tiny house, which comes pre-installed with IKEA cabinets, flooring, and closets. The “activ” house is about 750 square feet and costs $86,500, and you can pick the color scheme of IKEA accoutrements that you prefer. And unlike most IKEA stuff, it doesn’t come flat-packed and there’s no assembly required.
Want to get across town fast? Try a quick ride on one of Scoot’s scooters, soon to be available for rent around the city.
If you’ve always wanted to be part of a scooter gang (Heck’s Angels, anyone?) but don’t want to invest in a scooter, we’ve got great news: The Zipcar of electric scooters is about to be unleashed. Scoot Networks, a startup that emerged from the Greenstart cleantech accelerator, launched this week with the aim of bringing the joys of zipping around on a scooter to the masses. "We were looking at collaborative consumption and electric vehicles, and hit on the opportunity of using these affordable and efficient electric scooters in a European-style bike sharing system, and adding to that all the smarts and technology you find in Silicon Valley," explains CEO Michael Keating. The system, which is being rolled out to San Francisco-based companies for private fleets, lets users locate nearby scooters with their smartphone and claim the one they want (as with Zipcar, each scooter lives at a certain location). After it’s docked into the scooter, the phone unlocks the vehicle and acts like a virtual dashboard, providing a map as well as information on speed and range. The scooters have a top speed of 30 MPH and a range of 20 to 30 miles--enough to go roundtrip from any one point in San Francisco to any other point. They charge up once they’re returned to their parking spots. For now, users have to return the scooters to their original location. Once the service scales up, Scoot expects that users will be able to make one-way trips and drop the vehicles off at more convenient spots.
Once the corporate clients test out Scoot Networks, it will start to deploy scooters for public use at public transit stops. And after that, it will be rolled out widely across the city. The service will have 20 networked scooters by April and if all goes well, hundreds by the end of the year.
Heavy users will pay a monthly fee that costs about as much as a Muni pass ($62) plus a few cab rides. Occasional users will get a single-use rate that competes aggressively on price with cabs.
While California residents have to get a moped endorsement on their driver’s license to operate a scooter that they own, riding a rented scooters doesn’t require any special certification. Still, Scoot plans to offer training for new riders. Keating isn’t too worried about having to maintain a large fleet of scooters. Scoot imports its scooters from China, which manufactures about 10 million of the electric vehicles each year, almost all of which are snapped up by its scooter-crazed emerging middle class. That volume of production allows the service to pay less than $1,000 for each vehicle.
"We’re able to take advantage of the huge investment China has made in electric vehicles," says Keating. As a result, Scoot expects that it will simply turn over its fleet every year--perhaps not the most sustainable option, but one that will ensure customers don’t have to worry about faltering vehicles.
Scoot chose San Francisco as its launch city for a variety of reasons: There’s a lot of transportation innovation happening in the city, taxis are expensive and hard to find, the hilliness of the city can make it difficult to bike, traffic makes it hard to drive, and public transport is lacking. If the service succeeds in the Bay Area, it will expand to other cities across the U.S. "[Scooters] are the cheapest form of motorized transportation in the world," says Keating. "We would like to see this go everywhere."
Design thinking seems to be all the rage in business and entrepreneurship circles, but the momentum has been building for over 13 years. In 1999 I was in the Doctoral program at the University of Colorado-Boulder studying strategy and entrepreneurship. While procrastinating on reading 400 pages of scholarly research articles for a seminar the next day, I flipped through channels one night in my tiny apartment passively watching mindless TV (on a 19” screen!). It was 10:30 pm and the familiar voice of Ted Koppel’s Nightline caught my attention. I heard Koppel say, “Tonight, the deep dive – one company’s secret weapon for innovation.”
If you’re an entrepreneur and use a phone system for business (other than your personal cell) you’re probably using Grasshopper. At the very least, you’ve probably heard of the virtual phone system that enable entrepreneurs to work from anywhere while maintaining a professional presence.
