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The Others.

THE ONE THING.
At least since the dawn of the new millennium, the overabundance of choices available to consumers has been compressing product lifecycles. Many organizations refuse to deal with that reality and instead choose to cling to the tactics that used to work (in the last millennium) but no longer do. No matter, the diminished returns achieved by squeezing just a bit more efficiency out of production processes or instituting The Grind* sooner or later manifest themselves in the form of stubborn, flat-lined growth.

As upstarts disrupt industry after industry, upending old business models as they do so, forward-looking organizations have clued in to the fact that the next business wars won't be over things like tools, locations, or First Mover advantage. They will be fought over human capital.

Funny thing, though: Ask 100 business leaders to name the one quality the ideal 21st century employee possesses and they'll always choose traits like "leadership," "job experience," or "the ability to work well with others."

Close, but no cigar.

In a landscape evolving as fast as this one, the singular quality -- the one thing -- every person you hire must possess is the talent, the tendency, and the drive to innovate. And that's because, for the foreseeable future, organizations will be winning or losing based on offense.

*The Grind - a soul-crushing, no-fun-allowed atmosphere that presses metrics-wielding managers into perpetual hiring mode; replacing staff who drop out one after the other either because of burnout, because they care too much about the organization, or because they respect themselves too much to hang around to witness the inevitable.

THE PINK PURPOSE

The first thing you need to know about pinking a product is that it is not about half-measures or wishful thinking. It’s about understanding that everything an organization does nowadays -- the way the phone is answered, the position of the bar code on its packaging, what an invoice looks like -- is all marketing nowadays.

The most important thing about unleashing a Pink Porpoise is what it isn't. Pinking something is not about presenting a simple differentiation to the marketplace. The two may look alike but no matter how splashy a debut you give it, differentiation does not approach the standard true remarkability demands. That's because no matter how unique it may seem; ultimately, a business differentiation is just a slightly improved version of average and we now know that in 2016 average is the surest path to INVISIBLE.

If remarkability is about unleashing a pink porpoise, differentiating is about floating a slightly grayer one. If remarkability is gold, differentiating is fools gold. Getting this right is huge. While there may be a million other fish in the sea, a Pink Porpoise is something people truly remember.
(excerpted from Essay 4 of my 16-part course on the Connection Economy)

THE LONELIEST NUMBER

It's nearly impossible to change anything inside a huge organization. That's because huge organizations operate at the committee level. And while it's true that battleships have loads of firepower, you'll also find they have a lousy turning radius.

So, isn't it interesting that while most breakthroughs are seemingly curated by a single person, that one of the worst ways to innovate is ALONE?

If "one" won't quite cut it and if "all" is too big, what's the right-size solution to innovating, then? The answer, of course, is small teams.

Orville had Wilbur AND Charlie Taylor, Harley had Davidson AND Edward Hildebrand. Hewlett had Packard AND Yokogawa, Paul had John, the two Georges, and Ringo.

Small teams have worked miracles and that's what breaking through is all about, isn't it? Creating a "reality-based" miracle that somehow overcomes the bounds of gravity? It's just that no one creates a miracle in solitude.

JUICY FRUITLESS

Tomorrow, something depressingly predictable will occur at companies across the world. Tomorrow, hundreds of managers are going to order hundreds of ads to be posted on hundreds of job sites looking for "rockstars."

And then all the candidates who answer those ads will be interviewed for... very ordinary jobs.

When I write about employees transforming into commerce artists or small teams dedicating themselves to a mission, inevitably, an executive will ask me a variant of, "How do we hire people like that for our business?" The answer is:

It's unreasonable to expect extraordinary work from employees you don’t trust to create it. It's unreasonable to find someone truly talented to switch over to your organization when your organization has been optimized to hire and keep people "employed" aka, "busy until the next thing comes along." It's unreasonable to expect that you'll develop amazing people when all you do is pay lip service about giving "human resources" room to change, grow, and fail.

While “good enough” may the standard that sets us free to innovate, it's unreasonable to think you'll find great people if you're spending all your time and sourcing "good enough" people.

Now it's clear that the future of work is (small) teams, building an extraordinary organization means having the guts to trust the members, treat them with respect, and to go to ridiculous lengths to find, keep and nurture extraordinary individuals who care enough to make a difference or respect themselves too much to hang around when they realize you don't.

SATIS?

To appreciate the innovator's dilemma of whether to ship at the "good enough" or at the "ready" stage, you need only google any episode in the first season of "Seinfeld." Twenty-five years after the fact, you can still see the producers hadn't realized Costanza and Kramer would be the real comedy draws and that beginning and ending each episode with Jerry delivering stand-up would become a contrivance.

Instead of waiting for all that, however, the producers did their very best, deemed their creation "good enough," and unleashed it into the world in all its imperfection.

So what if the show wasn't quite ready? The first Mercedes wasn't "ready" nor was the first iPhone or Prince's first album. Each of them were good enough to earn the right to evolve in public, however, and that is plenty good.

You'll never see a motivational poster of someone standing atop a mountain with a caption reading "I climbed Good Enough!" yet when we're innovating, that standard must suffice. There's a pretty obvious good reason for it, of course: If we wait for when "it's Ready," we'll never ship.

"Good enough" isn't a bad term but it could stand a touch of positive pr. How about "satis," instead? Sounds much more elevated in Latin.

HEADS UP!
Watch the most popular You Tube vids and you'll quickly understand that the sports of baseball and hockey have one big thing in common: Folks with the best seats are in constant danger of being hit by flying objects, frequently to the face.

In 2016, marketing is innovating and being part of an in-team (an inside innovation team) is very exciting. It's a seat right up close to the action.

But sports venues have the decency to warn you to maintain vigilance. At work, they never tell you, "If you sit beyond the protective screen, you do so at your own risk" or "Keep your eye on the action at all times."

Remaining vigilant against the commercial versions of foul balls, flung bats and stray pucks isn't about playing it safe or being ready to intercept; it's about preventative measures. And prevention is all committing to make the hardest decisions from the get-go even as you accept that those decisions will rarely pay off short term. It's about caring enough about "the later" that you're willing to commit to "the now."

How important is all this? It's the difference between taking home a real cool souvenir or getting smacked right in the kisser.

THE OPPOSITE OF INFINITY
The trouble with accepting a leadership role during the infancy of any new era is very similar to what it was like to be an early adopter of the automobile: Very few of the roads are paved and the ones that do exist aren't well mapped.

All the uncertainty has given rise to organizations not fully trusting their people, and instead, opting to carefully monitor customer feedback. While it seems to make sense, if you do take that off-ramp you're going encounter two potholes: The first affects innovation and what Steve Jobs realized a decade before anyone else did - that people can't ask for something they can't imagine existing. The other problem can be blamed on a combo of uberchoice and the amplification of the single voice:

Ever since the menu expanded to 20 pages, certain customers have felt the need to explore your edges. They're looking for something that elicits a reaction from you, for a point of failure, for proof there are boundaries. Don't be fooled. Regardless that a couple of them asked for it, your customers do NOT actually require another button. What they need is your acknowledgement that they requested something extra, and in return, got a sense of your security from getting a sense you have limitations.

So there's good news. You are in a terrific position to offer these folks a free extra feature they will truly appreciate. It's called "Finity." Finity is the opposite of infinity and it works like this:

"Sorry, but we can't do that."

BIG AND TALL.
Urgency and accountability are the two most crucial sides of the innovation equation. When a company succeeds in grabbing more than its "fair share" of a market, usually it's because it's shipping innovation. But then an interesting phenomenon I call "Mitchell's Law" occurs:

Mitchell's Law states, "As an organization succeeds, the individuals within it succeed also, stifling its ability to succeed further." How so? Well, it's mostly due to an increased fear of failure: All of a sudden, there's something to lose.

And how does this fear manifest itself? By making organizations behave "Small and Short." First, the urgency disappears and the vacuum left behind gets filled with a myriad of excuses: "Why ship it today when we can ship it next week? Let's arrange more meetings. Let's polish. Let's socialize. If every worthwhile idea is going be questioned or criticized anyway, why should we rush?"

And then there's the accountability side: Let's face it. a whole lot of meetings are events in which people sit around a table until someone finally says, "Oh, alright, I'll take the responsibility!"

Your team doesn't require more meetings and you don't need more time. What you need is to commit to embracing a special type of teamwork that specifically neutralizes Mitchell's Law; it's a teamwork I call "Big and Tall."

Big and Tall arises from desperation too but not the desperation of hopelessness. It's the healthy version that comes from being Big enough to realize you must continually innovate in order to thrive but also Tall enough to mean it when you confidently utter the mantra, "Hey, we've got this."

MAY I QWOTE YOU?
It's a given that all organizations should be innovating. And just like every other vital mission, innovating involves lists. There is no single list a company maintains, however, more important than its QWOTE list; short for, "Questions Worth Our Time & Energy."

There are shortcuts, highlights, and summaries for just about everything but not nearly enough time to digest them all. It was when the Information Age morphed into the Information SURPLUS Age that QWOTES became indispensable.

Examples of good QWOTEs are: Is this idea worth seeing through? Should we just maintain the status quo? Is the market ready for this?

But here's the thing, QWOTEs aren’t really about finding the answers to the questions posed. Those will be revealed and in due time you'll either be proved right or wrong. No, effectively leveraging QWOTES is all about asking the right questions in the first place.

THE PACKED THEATRE

Big Beer has been in the packaging industry for decades. Packaging is a poor substitute for innovation which occurs in markets where a few players dominate and all the choices are pretty much the same. While packaging is a form of theatre, don't think theatre isn't important in marketing.

It may be intellectually easy to believe the carrier isn't going to change the flavor of the six longnecks it holds, except that it does. Illusions to bucolic settings where dalmatians roam and a brewmaster grades hops are powerful because they're stories people can glom onto; this, even though on some level we correctly intuit that the brands on supermarket shelves were most likely brewed inside sterile, industrial facilities.

What clever marketers know is that because customers can't truly judge a beer until they drink it, they're open to telling themselves a story. They also understand the placebo effect: Having bought into the story, the customer pops the top biased toward being proven right about the choice he's made.

The trouble for upstarts is, no matter how good YOU know your product is, if customers keep passing it over, it never gets a chance. That's why, given its importance, it's so amazing that most just take a good guess instead of bothering to actually try and understand the worldview and the biases of the folks they seek to connect with and delight.

Commerce Artists who play the innovation/marketing game well do so because they understand its two vital rules: (1) The product will definitely be judged in advance. (2) The story it elicits is at least as important as the product itself.