The Daily Innovator

Dump innovative now!

A hat tip to The Innovation Insider for this post confirming the basic uselessness of the word "innovative."  Long ago, I advised colleagues, clients and audiences to stop using this word because it was essentially meaningless.  CEOs and executives make their companies sound more interesting and attractive by spicing up their speeches, annual reports and web sites with descriptions of so-called "innovative" initiatives and projects.  All too often, these efforts are nothing more than yesterday's ideas repackaged as new or different.  Moreover, when everything from audio/video equipment, to consulting solutions, to food, to pavement can be described as "innovative," how can we effectively calibrate our understanding?

My advice:  rather than trying to be "innovative," be about innovation.  You can't change your organization's future with adjectives, but you will with action.

Join the iPod Economy!

Check out this great post on the Church of the Customer Blog about the wedding photographers who now offer what they call "iPod Proofs" to newlywed couples.  What a fantastic idea!  (I actually like Ben's suggested name better, but it is still a great idea.) 

At the Arizona Heart Institute, doctors are using video iPods to communicate with and educate patients.  (You can access the Institute's podcast site here.) 

These are just two examples of how organizations are using iPods either to create new market opportunities and/or create new value for customers.  How can your organization join the iPod Economy?

Quotations to innovate by #37

Here's another great quotation to inspire your work today!  Tim is absolutely right, of course.  The question is whether we will choose to think about our work in this way, as well as convince others to do the same.  If innovation naysayers are left with no alternative but to reframe their own thinking, we've made a step in the right direction!

"Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems."                               
                                                                    —Tim Brown, CEO, Ideo

(From Fast Company First Impression newsletter)

Expectations

Everybody has expectations.  We expect that our spouses will love us (most of the time), the kids in our lives will behave (sometimes) and our disobedient but lovable dogs will bark no matter what we say!  :>)

So here's a question for you to consider:  what expectations do you have for yourself as an innovator?  What are your expectations of others?  If you don't have any expectations, take a moment to reflect on the reasons why.  Is innovation so low on the daily priority list that it never occurred to you to have expectations?  How can you create or raise such expectations and include innovation of some kind in your top ten to do items for each day?  What will it take to make that happen?  Think about it and share your insights right here!

Expanding your (humorous) workplace vocabulary

My wife forwarded an e-mail to me yesterday with some "New Words for 2005--Essential vocabulary additions for the workplace (and elsewhere)."  The list included 19 terms reflecting both workplace and societal phenomena.  Here are my six "unfortunate" but funny favorites with relevance to innovation:

• BLAMESTORMING—Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.    
• SEAGULL MANAGER—A manager, who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.   
• ASSMOSIS—The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.   
• SALMON DAY—The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.   
• ADMINISPHERE—The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.   
• 404—Someone who is clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested site could not be located.

So do you remember what your elementary school teacher would say whenever you learned a new word?  Use it in a sentence!  So here you go:

Seagull managers live as 404s in the adminisphere, encouraging blamestorming and engaging in assmosis, while creating salmon days for their subordinates.

All of these terms are sad but true reflections of what's actually going on in today's organizations.  What do you do to defeat these ways of thinking and acting?  Have you coined your own terms to describe similar things you've experienced in your organization?  Please share your thoughts and add to our vocabulary list!

Innovation book I just found

This weekend, I received a book I ordered through the self-publishing website, Lulu. (I am working with some colleagues on a book and we are thinking about using Lulu for it.)  I discovered We love innovation! so long as it's nothing new while exploring the Lulu site, and it was very exciting to find a brand new innovation resource!

The book is by Jeffrey A. Carlisle, and anybody named Jeff is okay by definition in my "book" (no pun intended), so there was no question I had to buy it.  I've only started looking through it, but I can already see that I'll be blogging often on We love innovation!  It includes interesting innovation stories from the author's personal experience, as well as great quotations. I'll put up my first post on Carlisle's ideas in the next few days.

Write a letter to the future...

I just came across a site called FutureMe.org where you can send an e-mail to yourself in the future.  My recommendation is that you register for the site so you can update your e-mail address if necessary.  You have the option of marking your e-mail as either public or private, and you can read the messages that others post publicly.  Some of these e-mails are quite interesting and even touching.  (Please note that not all message are workplace safe.)

There is nothing remarkable about this tool in terms of its underlying technology, but I still think it is quite useful.  As a daily innovator, you can use this site to inspire yourself and your team to think ahead about what is possible in your organization. To get started, let me suggest you and your team write FutureMe e-mails about the big ideas you have for your work, your department or your organization.  Schedule the e-mails to arrive in three months and arrange to meet at that time to discuss how much progress you've made in implementing those ideas.  This is just one of many possible applications for catalyzing the work of innovation. Please share your ideas for using the site here at TDI!

Very cool tool!

I discovered a very cool new tool called Springdoo yesterday.  Springdoo, which is based in New Zealand, lets you record e-mail messages by phone and send them to contacts.  The contact receives an e-mail  with a link that opens to a player you can customize with your photo and text.  You can create groups of up to 20 contacts each, with a maximum of 899 total contacts. You dial a toll-free number to record your message, and the cost is 29 cents per minute (US) for the call. 

I see all kinds of interesting applications for Springdoo. Let me know what you think about it.  I look forward to your thoughts!

The power of questions

On the Fast Company blog yesterday, Doug Sundheim has a superb post on the value of questions.  Here is the crux of the post, and the part I really love:

Questions, not answers, are the seeds of success. Someone focused on answers says, "This is the way." Someone focused on questions asks, "Is there a better way?" Questions force you to explore - to stretch, to learn, to grow, and to be creative. Answers let your mind go to sleep. You get lazy when you think you've found the answer. You haven't. And you never will because things always change. To stay vibrant and relevant, keep living the questions.

As a DI, it is imperative that you live in and with the questions that capture your imagination.  Your questions are precious gifts to the cause of innovation.  From the well-considered question can emerge extraordinary insight and enormous opportunity, even when there are no definitive answers.  Organizations tend to prefer answers, of course, so you must be steadfast in asking questions in the presence of your colleagues and even your bosses to make sure they don't end valuable inquiry prematurely.  In those difficult moments, try to remember Doug's words.

Did you have a big thought today?

Sitting at your desk today, did a really big idea cross your mind?  Did you ignore it because you had "more important work" to do?  Take a moment and try to find your wayward idea.  It's probably still floating somewhere nearby, just waiting for you to pay attention and do something about it.  Don't ignore it.  You never know where it might take you.