How to kill that pesky creativity in your business

This video by Harvard Professor Youngme Moon has been sitting in my open tabs for a couple of weeks now as a irreverent reminder of the safe-play bingo phrases which find their way into so many meetings…

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

 

I’ve got *my* personal favorites (being one of the guys mentioned in rule #13) – what are yours?

PS – Anyone want to buy me Youngmes book ‘Different‘ ? I want to build up my shelf-help library… (yes, SHELF – I need a good excuse to take some time to read AND implement 🙂 )

youngmemoon.com

Innovation? No thanks… we’re busy.

Ben Young wrote an article which appeared in today’s Herald entitled “The 12 Hour Startup“. Essentially, it promoted taking time out of working in your business, to spend time working on your business… and it attracted an interestingly one sided range of responses.

I was so disappointed in the views which were pitched in response, that I felt compelled to try and answer some of the commenters and provide a little balance. My response is copied below:

It’s with some hilarity that I am reading the comments on this article – the vitriol is palatable and the underlying understanding is verging on infinitesimal. There was so much negativity that I felt compelled to post something myself in the interests of balance.
@Ben10
1 – No, a decent IT department will appreciate that Facebook and it’s ilk are part of what Gen Y employees expect to be able to do, it’s where they connect with others and how they gain feedback for issues that they may well be trying to solve for their employer. If you truly believe that full control over what employees do on the web is possible while still retaining employee goodwill, then you may need to realign your naivety.
2 – So, if your company cannot sustain 12 hours a month, how about a quarter – I don’t believe the time frames were prescriptive, feel free to adjust to what suits your business. Your risk tolerance may be too low for significant change – that may suit your business if you are not seeking to change anything, but those who DO change and invest in a culture where change is both welcomed and expected will be better suited to adapt to an increasingly agile market. You may find this article helpful.
3 – Another all too common mistake. You confuse management with leadership. They ARE different things and your hierarchical world view is sadly showing.

@internet biz guy
Again I’d challenge your assertion this is ‘bogus’. Great ideas come from such brainstorming and the medici effect of gathering ideas from a wide range of sources (and levels of employees, to reinforce the counter to @ben10 #3) has been around since the 15th century, far be it for someone *young* to dare to reassert such thinking! As for a bio, I used Google and some other online resources to find out about the author.. surely as an internet biz guy you did the same?

@Derek
A 1:10 ratio of ideas to successful launch is actually quite high, if you’re looking for innovations rather than adjacencies and/or improvements that is. Phil McKinney (innovation lead for a fairly large company) discusses these ratios and strategies at length, if you *are* interested, a good place to start is here

@xavier money
“Employees are by definition not great inventors or entrepreneurs” By whose definition, yours? Are you attracting the right people to your company as employees then? There are very few people who know your products and company capabilities better than your employees and your customers. If you are not prepared to leverage these people as a resource then, well – you may well end up working on the same thing for most of your life. Actual real life entrepreneurs will begin, build and sometimes sell off a large number of businesses in their time. Branson would be a good example of this, a wide range of companies under his tutorship. Steve Jobs would be another who as leveraged adjacencies and diversified, rather than sticking to one idea and focusing on it for a lifetime. I guess peoples measures of success vary.

In the interests of disclosure, I am not *that* young, but I am marginally under 40 – please feel free to use the period of my existence to judge the usefulness of my response if that’s what makes you feel comfortable in your world view.

What I have learned from the experience is there is still a marked lack of confidence in ‘young’ people with ideas, and there is still a lot of traditional thinking out there. It will be interesting to see how the adoption curve plays out for these people.

FooCamp 2009, Warkworth, New Zealand

This is part one of my three part coverage of FooCamp 2009. You can also read part two and part three for more.

Well – here I am at the 2009 FooCamp New Zealand it’s 11:30 as I start writing this piece and I’d say that things were winding down for the night but I’d be lying. Although the first two sessions of the camp have concluded, there is no end to the discussions which flow as freely as the drinks.

It’s been an awesome start to what is shaping up to be an awesome weekend. I was fortunate enough to be able to offer a lift to 5 other Foo attendees and the car was filled with incredibly interesting conversation ranging from hacking whiteboard presentation tools for the purposes of entertaining infants, to privacy, security and airline saftey – through to the pain of managing open source coding projects.

I have had a remarkable conversation on education with a couple of people from a major Tertiary institution along with a gentleman whose role included going to schools and assisting teachers in the science curriculum. This conversation will spill into a session I plan to run on Saturday afternoon around Education, collaboration and community – not my standard fare of geek and gadgets, but a subject I’ve been mulling over on and off for the past year or so.

Due to the FrieNDA which is put in place at these ‘unconference’ events, there will be no specific details posted about people or the conversations.  This is to protect all of the attendees, promote openess, and allow compeditior companies to share views in a intelligent manner without egos and personalities getting in the way.

For the record, the first two sessions of the weekend that I’ve attended were both around the control of content. Session 1 was around if a company should start releasing it’s content under creative common licencing, and the second was a very good session led by New Zealands “Creative Freedom Foundation” it’s worth the time of every New Zealander who is active on the Internet to read and understand the implications of the impending changes to the copyright act. I must admit that I learnt a few things during the session that I’d not known before.

Anyway, it’s very late and if I don’t want to get dragged into a game of Werewolf (and lynched) I’d best go hit the hay… What a great strt to an awesome weekend.

Barcamp Auckland 2 – Redux

So, yesterday I attended Barcamp Auckland and as you could probably tell from my Twitter stream, I found it pretty interesting. The following is more a summation of the notes I took – interestingly enough, I found I was tweeting more than I was typing into my laptop so I’ve had to also check my tweets tagged #bca2 or @barcampauckland for a full list.

Continue reading “Barcamp Auckland 2 – Redux”

Embracing Failure

The thing which is irking me the most of late is peoples unreasonable desire to succeed at everything and “do it right first time” – there’s talk of getting requirements “set in stone” before progressing and how all of this reduces cost and produces a better product for the end-user.

The thing which is irking me the most of late is peoples unreasonable desire to succeed at everything and “do it right first time” – there’s talk of getting requirements “set in stone” before progressing and how all of this reduces cost and produces a better product for the end-user.
Continue reading “Embracing Failure”