Baked In

One great way to start knocking down the walls is to make other people look good. If you have a hand in hiring, hire great people and get out of the way. It’s fun to be with people who make you feel good, right? And if they make you look good, all the better. Find ways to make the folks you work with feel good. How can you be better and faster at giving them positive feedback and credit for their good work? Here are some ideas: learn how to listen better, and show more interest in what your colleagues have to say. The next great idea might be there, in one of your staff members, waiting for you to hear it. And remember, listening is not the same as waiting for your chance to speak. You have to engage in the dialog – you know, as if valuable human exchange of ideas and opinions were the basis for responsible social media.

When you’re trying to figure out how to become a silo jumper, seek out the experts. They’re the generalists. Generalists have made a career out of jumping from one silo to the next. In any company, the generalists are usually easy to spot. They’re the ones whose career path hasn’t been linear. They’ve been in marketing, on the product side, in sales, and maybe even in finance. Usually, it’s the generalists who can get things done. They know whom to ask to get involved in a project. They know where to turn for answers. As a bonus, they can make the mistake or ask the stupid question an expert might not be able to. And they’re not expected to be right every time. Most important, they understand the unspoken system of how things get done. Can you spot the generalists? Seek them out, and start learning from them.

One of the keys to tapping untapped resources is to realize that the community around your products is bigger than your company. There are many passionate people who would love to help you improve your products and spread your marketing. It’s important to remember that this community thrives on open dialogue. Hence, the walls of your company have to become porous. Think about how you relate to people outside your company. Is your organization litigious or inviting? Can people at all levels of your organization dialogue with outsiders? Invite people to participate by communicating openly; write a blog, publish articles, give speeches, and publish information about projects on resources like InnoCentive. Focus on connecting and building community. Instead of dictating your vision, try listening and responding to what others think. When you invite dialogue, you’ll be amazed by the kind of fresh perspective you’ll gain and the kind of creative momentum you’ll build.

Think about the products your company is producing. Most of us are in the habit of thinking about new features we could or should add to those products. We spend a lot of time thinking about how products can satisfy the various needs of customers. That’s the way most of us are used to thinking of innovation. Instead, think about what you could take away from your product. Make a list of your product’s features, according to their importance to the customer. Now cross off all but the top five. What would it mean to sacrifi ce the rest? Does your product still work? In what respects does it work better?

Do you have an innovation department? Maybe you shouldn’t. Try getting everyone involved in the process. Start by finding innovation evangelists in every department. Give them the task of getting others involved. Start an innovation movement. Make it contagious. Challenge people and award creativity. Ultimately, figure out a way make everyone in your organization accountable when it comes to innovation.

Do you know your company’s founding story? Some are about the place. Some are about the iconoclastic founder betting everything. Some are about overcoming great odds. These stories are always inspiring and can ground and clarify your thinking about the future. Also, think about the best product your company ever produced. Tell that story. Or the best marketing your company has done. What made it great? Share these stories, and explore what can you learn from them.

Someone inside your company needs to be asking the biggest of questions. Like, does our core product really work? What would happen if we went in the exact opposite direction? What would happen if we tried to destroy ourselves? Will these kinds of questions produce conflict? You should hope so. There is a lot of power in conflict. Think about the categories you work in and the conflicts that exist among them. If you’re in the traditional energy business, it’s pretty obvious that you have a conflict with the environmental movement. If you’re in the financial world, there’s a lot of conflict around public trust. The cultural conflicts in your category are probably a bit subtler. What are the big, hairy cultural conflicts affecting your company that everyone knows about but no one really likes to discuss?

We always look for conflicts at CP+B. Whether it’s helping MINI launch in the U.S. when SUVs dominated the market; or helping Burger King focus on a segment of the fast-food market that unapologetically wants indulgent food, while the culture at large is very concerned with fast food’s impact on health. Unleashing the power of conflict can not only differentiate your products but also help them find the space to grow.

Look around. Are your customers demanding more involvement in your brand and with your products? Are they talking about your products on blogs and other social media? The first step in your exploration of this opportunity is to get into the conversation. Start answering questions about your products on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Make comments on relevant blog posts. Likewise, ensure that your website is more interactive. Let people leave comments on it, and make sure they’re answered.

The key is the ability to engage, to be involved in dialogue. It’s a hard shift to make from inside-out to outside-in innovation—but most likely, it’s inevitable. Once you get the hang of participating in an open fl ow of conversation, millions of possibilities unfold. You can start getting feedback from the community you’ve engaged, in ways that might complement or even replace customer service or market research. Once you’ve built the dialogue, you’ve created the conduit through which ideas can really start to flow. People want to participate. But remember, the only way to keep ideas flowing is to keep the dialogue going.

Making intuition a more powerful innovation tool comes with practice. Everyone has the ability to be an intuitive designer; we just need to do some training. Start by integrating design intuition into all of your decisions by starting off with the question, “What if…?” Once you start exercising your strategic intuition muscles, you’ll be able to recognize important patterns. The more you train, the more patterns you recognize.

Also, encourage others to use their design intuition. It’s contagious and inspiring. Ask them to dig deeper into how they feel about a design or marketing insight. Where would they take it? For many, intuition can be a particularly hard thing to express, and it’s the sort of quality many people don’t feel confi dent expressing. Help make sure people’s intuitive thinking is supported and not quashed by overanalysis. Be positive. Welcome heresy.

What have you stolen lately? Is there something a competitor does that you could do better? Is there a new process or product that could be disruptive in your market, but isn’t quite dialed yet? What can you do to make it more relevant? Nikon and Canon embraced the idea of replacing film with a digital sensor, taking the idea of a digital camera to places Kodak could never go with its heritage in film. It’s our belief that good ideas are easy to come by. Where the hard work happens is in the process of making these ideas relevant. Steal good ideas. Make them relevant to your products. You’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition.

How does your company deal with failure? Is it celebrated as an inevitable part of innovation, or is it seen as something to be avoided at all costs? Usually, fearless leaders provide inspiration for fearless companies. That doesn’t always mean the founder or CEO could be a group leader or the leader of a division. Think about whether you are or your company is fearless. Can you move at lightning speed to address a change in the marketplace? Are you willing to risk being wrong to get to market first with an idea? Becoming more fearless is a learned skill that only comes through failing. The old innovation expression, “fail fast,” is more important than ever these days as our world speeds up.

Being a heretic takes guts. It means not just going a different way from your competitors, but going a different way from the established norms within a whole culture. What’s happening in the culture around your business? Is there something that’s percolating outside the market that might cause radical changes to the way companies and customers interact? Amazon is just one of several disruptive examples that have destroyed existing ways of doing business. Can you take advantage of a disruptive technology that could, possibly, change the way you do your core business or service? Learn the new technology. Start applying it in small doses. If it works, flip the paradigm, lead the disruption, and be a heretic.

First, you have to think big. Really big. Then you have to sit back and think about all the ways your thinking isn’t big enough. Shoot holes in it. Look at it from the customer’s point of view. Look at it from an environmental point of view. Look at it from a need-based point of view. This is why collaboration is so powerful. Every collaborator comes with a new vantage point and, maybe, a better vantage point. Are you collaborating enough with other designers? With your customers? Even with your competitors?

Are you thinking small enough? What’s a niche in the market that seems to be forgotten by everyone else that you can own? Are there any small niche customers, like dog owners, with whom you can innovate? Also, think small when it comes to your products. How can you innovate a product feature that seems small but could do huge business? This is another reason why we like the new Amazon Kindle’s Read-to-Me function. Also, think about what’s happening in other fields that might influence your customer’s behavior. When the iPod came out, it certainly changed how people used their car stereos. The winners have been those companies that adapted fast with a small change—an iPod plug-in, for example—with big consequences. The question is, can you find inspiration where no one else is looking?

Before you can align your story with marketing and product design, you have to know it intimately. It all starts internally. Studies have shown that employees are most engaged when they understand where they’re going. From the understanding comes a deeper commitment. To build its story internally, a company must answer these sorts of questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? What do we do? What do we care about? Can you answer these? If so, you’re ready to start telling powerful stories with your products and marketing, and then you have the ability to change culture.

The Shakers had their founding story. It influenced everything they did. Think about powerful stories that are told inside your company. Is there a founding story? Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, knows his. His vision for the airline was getting passengers to their destinations when they want to go, on time, at the lowest cost, and, most important, having fun doing it. This vision created a narrative that customers can connect with and employees can have a great time rallying behind. People crave a human connection with the companies whose products they buy. A cornerstone of good branding is good storytelling—but it’s a two-way street. Companies must constantly evolve their own story by listening to and understanding their customer’s stories. From here, they can create deeper, more relevant stories that evolve and continually change culture.

What’s different about what you’re doing?
• A unique and more sustainable manufacturing process?
• A different set of longer-lasting materials?
• A streamlined functionality?
• Easy-to-open packaging (now, there’s an innovation someone needs to develop)?

Instead of just advertising the benefits, think about making the differences visible in your product design. If you do it right, not only will your products be more distinct but your competitors will also have a harder time copying them. In fact, you might want your competitors to start copying them. Think of the iPod earbuds. The white cords are so synonymous with the iPod that whenever anyone is wearing a pair of white earbuds, we all just assume that they’re carrying an iPod. Apple can just sit back, thank its competitors for helping promote its products, and start baking the next disruptive marketing idea into its next generation of products.

How do you name your products? Most companies just use the industry norm, that is, if it’s about numbers, then they use numbers. This happens a lot with technology, where the focus is on the function of the product. That’s okay. But just think how much more momentum products would get if they had a name that made a connection to culture. Do you remember the story about the Flip video camera? What a powerful story—and name.

In addition to numbers, companies like to use place names for their products. The U.S. car industry has gotten really good at this. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work well, either. The name just doesn’t fit with the product, or at worst, it says something the product isn’t saying.

Think about your products. Is there a way to bake in names that mean something to the culture in which your products live?

What happens if you did things wrong? Are any of your competitors doing it wrong, too? If not, think about how you would do things if you wanted to do them perfectly wrong. You can design your product the wrong way, like the Uglydoll, or have the wrong ingredients, like Frutels. Or you could do something even more radical. Bruce Mau helped Shaw Industries turn the carpet business upside down by focusing on a new system to implement the company’s values in everything it does. The system, Shaw Green Edge, has given the company not only a different philosophy, but it has also helped identify some of the inherent flaws with the way the entire industry has been run. Similarly, Patagonia has taken the wrong position in the clothing business by calling into question many business-as-usual practices that have been done for decades.

Think about how you talk currently. Do you use traditional advertising and PR with centralized controls? Or is there a vibrant community of communicators inside your company? Even if you might not know it, there are probably dozens, if not hundreds, of people inside your company who are blogging, tweeting, or even stumbling. Wouldn’t it be cool to take all of that communication and turn it loose to make more people passionate about your company and what it does? We know—there is probably some rule in an employee handbook somewhere that spells out guidelines for what people can and can’t talk about. Sure, every company has secrets that need to be kept secret; but most of these handbook guidelines may have become a bit antiquated. It’s probably time to change them.

Once they’re changed, it’s time to start allowing people who work with you to use the new media to your advantage. Threadless has it dialed—its internal folks are communicating in a way that has invited passionate fans who want to participate in the culture of the company. By becoming more like a media company and putting communications at the center of your company, magic starts to happen. Think about how you might bake more
media into your products.

Is there anything about your product that is absolute? Do you have any products that are the fastest? The slowest? The biggest? The smallest? The loudest? The quietest? Stop and think about your products using “er”; what can you do to stake out an “est”?

What will you need to do when someone threatens your absolute? MINI had the opportunity to protect its legacy, but when the Smart Car was introduced in the U.S., it lost its “est” (smallest) and became an “er” (smaller)—and along with it a lot of power, not only in product design but also in marketing. Try to own your “est.”

Making the invisible visible is a powerful way to bake marketing into your products. Think about what’s inside your products that makes them work and connects them to your customers. How can you make the power of your products visible? It could be literal, like the window Nike used to feature Air technology in the Air 180 running shoe, or how Fukasawa designed the packaging for banana juice. Or it could be subtler, like the hump on the Xterra. The key is making sure a big idea is baked into the product itself and not just the packaging. Packaging can get thrown away. Your product usually won’t.

What’s the big hairy monster in your category? Is it an aging population? For a long time, Cadillac was faced with the fact that most of its customers were dying. Is it a new technology? Is it, like Wal-Mart, the environment? Or, like Nintendo, the effects its industry was having on customers? Face it. Every business has big hairy monsters.

Think about how you can embrace the big hairy monster. What can you do to start a dialogue about your monster? Can you engage your customers? Can it be reflected in your product design and your communications? Just like Wal-Mart, you’ll probably not be able to tame the monster, or even necessarily solve the problem, but you can start working on it. The key is to start a movement with momentum. Customers love it when they see consistent behavior in the right direction, and they want to support companies that face up to their big hairy monsters.

Add it to the comments below and the one that gets the most thumbs up becomes a new recipe and will hopefully be included in the next printing of the book. (Please oh please let there be a second printing.)