InnovAAAAAtion

InnovAAAAAtion is what you hear every CEO yelling at the top of his lungs to his Senior VPs.

"We MUST innovATE!  We have to be innovATIVE to stay competitive!"

What he doesn't realize is that these VPs already know this!

Who are these VPs and what is the innovation that Mr. CEO is looking for?  Well, titles usually range from VP of R&D, Chief Innovation Office (this is newer), VP of New Product Development and of course you have some VPs of Engineering and Marketing.  Innovation in its simplest definition is any product or service that meets an unmet need in the marketplace.  A new way of doing something (Ford's Line Manufacturing) or a new feature to an existing product (the windshield wiper) or a completely new product (although these are rare).

In Scott Berkun's book "The Myths of Innovation" he explains that even the popular belief of innovation relating to a completely new product is a myth.  The iPod was not a completely new product, but an innovative way of using 1,000 existing products in a new way.  The shape was the only thing new.  Innovation has to be grounded in existing products or materials, or they take forever to develop and there usually is not a market for them (aka: no knows how the heck to use them).

So how does Mr. CEO go about getting his team of VPs to innovate.  There are a million strategies on answering this question but, most companies (and I have dealt with many) usually start with a common exercise (which actually relates well with Jason's last post on a personal level as well).

1. What are our core competencies?  What do we do well?  
2. What products or services can we reposition into adjacent markets?
3. What products or services in our markets are we not making now, that we could make better than our competitor?
4. What products or services do not currently existing in our existing markets? What cool new features do our customers want in a new product?  
5. What markets can we combine into one product offering?  (Blue Ocean Strategy)

After answering these questions, I guarantee you will have more questions to figure out:

• Do we have the right people with the right skills to makes these products?
• What type of Return on Investment (ROI) will we see?  What is the potential Commercial Value (ECV) of this product?
• What are our competitors doing?
• And on, and on, and on it goes.....

Companies are able to manage this madness with a simple formula:  The Right People, The Right Culture, The Right Process and The Right Technology.  Without all four of these aspects Innovation is not sustainable.  The right people are entrepreneurial at heart and love figuring out new things; otherwise they get bored.  The culture is founded in executives that are not afraid to fail (often and fast), and are not afraid of letting their employees experiment.  The right process has to take you from Ideation, through development and post-launch of new products.  There are many processes out there, I recommend Stage-Gate, although it is not the end-all, by-all process.  The right technology has to do with software - MS XL and MS Project will kill you trying to find and manage data....TRUST ME!  Do yourself a favor, get a PPM software solution if you are managing lots of projects.

How important is this topic and sub-topics?  The Aberdeen Group found that companies that have a robust portfolio management process (all four parts of the formula) realize 25% more revenue from their innovation projects.  A study from Kalypso found that 52% of medical device companies were unhappy with their return on investment.  Remember, what is not growing is dying!  Don't let your business be one of them!  In order to grow your business, you need new products and services that meet unmet needs.  Otherwise you are competing in price alone and that is a recipe for disaster.  No one can always be the low cost provider and be profitable!

So, Mr. CEO is right - you must innoVATE!

Anonymity

My name is Jason Cheshire. I'm an art director at an advertising and marketing agency. My wife calles me Bubba. In college there were so many "Jason's" in our fraternity that we all went by our last names: Dex, Locke, Fraser, Cheshire. From that point on I was known as Cheshire. My closest friends have shortened it to Chesh. Now I go by Chesh. I've met people that were friends of friends and I've always introduced myself as Jason. Inevitably, after talking with them for a while, it comes up, "Wait, you're Cheshire? Oh, I've heard about you."

Recently, I came across a quote that simply says, "Design should never be anonymous." Well, in my opinion, nothing should anonymous. Not your writing, not my designing, not your selling, and especially not yourself.

Even when you meet someone for the first time you begin to market yourself. You want to be remembered. No one wants to be forgotten the moment they leave a prospective client for the first time. Who wants to be just another "Jason" in the crowd? For me, introducing myself as Cheshire seems to work.

For my clients, I need to help them with their "identity", so-to-speak. Not who they are everyday, but what they're perceived to be through their business card or their website or their billboard. I help them market themselves.

In our business, we come across people who aren't quite sure of their business identity. One thing that gets them thinking on the right track is their "elevator pitch". If you're in an elevator with someone who could be a potential client, what could you tell them in that amount of time to sell yourself or your business? Or simpler yet, what can you tell them that they will remember? Give it about 30 seconds. This narrows it down pretty quickly. It really gets them thinking what they do best. Pretty soon they're confident in that mini-speech and they don't hesitate to give it.

Sometimes it's not a speech. If I'm in an elevator with someone who hands me a unique business card, I'm holding on to that thing. As a designer that's the kind of thing that sticks out in my mind. It tells me they thought about that moment and they obviously pay attention to the details. That they want to be remembered and stick out in a sea of "Jason's". And it works.

Other times, it's a bit of random conversation. Once in the elevator in our own building a guy asked my if my shoes were Clark's. They were and that started up a conversation pretty easily. I remember thinking what a nice guy he was and that he'd probably be easy to do business with.

So think about how to market yourself. Think of your best assets. Find something that people will remember about you. Hand them your cool, new business card. Tell them in a simple way how you're going to make a big splash in the business world. Tell them you're having a bad hair day. Tell them anything.

But, for pete's sake, don't be anonymous.

Cold Calling - 101!

Last week while in the office I got a cold call from a “Lead Generation” company.  Seeing that I make about 50 cold calls a day and this is my bread and butter, I am usually very nice to struggling telephone sales people.  This started wrong, and went terrible south, fast, and then proceeded to get worst.

Here is what happened and how to do it better.

Me: This is Jeremy!
Caller: Hey Jeremy, what’s up, this is Jimmy from ABC Lead Generation...
Me: Mmmm, Ok, How can I help you?
Caller:  I got an email from one of my colleagues stating that you don’t have any need for outsourcing your lead generations any time soon; I wanted to follow up to make sure I understand everything.
Me:  Mmmm, Sure... (although I don’t know what else there is to talk about).
Caller: So, as I understand it, your company doesn’t do any lead generation and your sales reps wait for info requests from your website - is that right?
Me:  No, that is not right, I do what you do, only better.
Caller:  I doubt that!
Me: Thanks for calling!

About five minutes later I receive an email from him with a brochure, no text and his signature - that is it!  I didn’t read the brochure!

So, let’s look at how bad this call really was!

First, never use “What’s up!”  We are not friends, I don’t know you and it sends the message you are trying to be too informal and friendly.  Secondly, the caller started by reaffirming that I have no interest.  Restating this negativity only further turns me off.  Thirdly, if I make a joke at your expense, go with it , DON”T try to defend yourself, you are only going to offend me (which he did!).  

Cold calling has a very negative imagine.  No one likes doing it, no one likes to interrupt their days’ activities to answer the phone and be sold on something they probable don’t need.  That is why real cold calling is not about selling . It is about making connections and starting relationships that may or may not result in a sale.  

The first 10 seconds of any call makes or breaks it, based on a simple formula:  No one will ever buy anything from you if they don’t trust you, and they won’t trust you if they don’t listen to you and they won’t listen to you if they don’t like you!   Getting some one to like you in the first 10 seconds has to be the goal of a cold call not to sell your product.

Using “what’s up” doesn’t send the right message, which is “I am smart, aggressive and busy just like you - I don’t want to waist your time, nor mine.”   Making sure you understand that there is no need waists people’s time.  Defending yourself after a small and harmless joke reinforces the stereotype that the rest of use professionals in the industry are trying to reverse and just PROVES MY POINT.  

If a call does go bad, DON”T send an unsolicited email with no text, this just shows that you are regurgitating the material that your marking team worked hours to develop and unable to communicate the value of your company yourself.

You

Me
BETTER!

I am a writer (and a Leo). Hear me roar.

"Please, keep writing," my grandfather said to me, his voice wavering with emotion and his eyes brimming with tears. He held me so tight against his body that I feared his 81-year-old body might crack from the pressure.

"I will. I promise," I said, feeling light-headed and confused that the nonsense I wrote on my blog could mean that much to anyone other than me.

That was four months ago. And until tonight, I hadn't written anything outside of work. I've written 100-page marketing plans, press releases, bylined articles and everything in-between. But the creative voice that is usually boiling up from inside of me has been silent and unmoving. I've written nothing for me.

My old blog -- which was a fun experiment and a creative outlet for awhile -- lapsed. I got lazy. I got busy. So, I didn't write. I didn't keep the promise to my grandfather and -- most importantly -- I didn't keep my promise to myself: to be a writer.

My whole life, I've been a writer. When I was six years old, I wrote stories about red-eyed people and mermaids that I tucked away in a lime-green pocket folder that had a picture of a koala on the front. When I was in middle school, my teacher "published" a 100-page novella I wrote about a family with 12 kids and put it in the school library (years later, my sister and her friends found it and declared they "loved" it). In high school, I continued to write short stories and was praised for my "college-level" explications of poems. In college, I wrote bad poetry when I was in love and had my pieces read aloud as examples in my creative writing classes. And throughout my 20's, I looked back on my life with one regret: that I wasn't a professional writer. Because I'd always felt that was my destiny.

But I continued to write for me. For fun. Until I stopped. And everyone -- including my grandfather -- asked me why.

So, when Jeremy asked me to start writing for this blog, I didn't miss a beat before answering "yes." And here I am.

I'm still not sure what I am supposed to be writing. I am unclear on the goals of this blog. But when you are a writer -- when prose and paragraphs and ideas fly through your brain at all times of the day -- and someone asks you to spill your guts and share your thoughts in a creative forum, you say "yes." So, here I am.

I promise to be entertaining, emotional, honest, snarky and fun. I promise to be real and let you get to know me. And I promise to write consistently.

Most importantly, I need to keep a simple promise I made four months ago: to just keep writing.

Right-Right Decisions

I have been thinking a lot about one of my assignments during my MBA program.  How do we make decisions?  How do we decide what is best when both outcomes seem to be right?  How do we define what is right?

There are many every day situations everyday when there is no wrong answer, so what the hell do we do?  A pessimist would see these situations as "Screwed if I do and screwed if I don't" as there is no way to make everyone happy.  I see that that the real opportunity here is to find the solution that has does the most good for the most amount of people affected.  Joseph Badaracco (Harvard Professor) came up with a framework to manage and analyze these situations.  Here are the 4 steps:

1. Which way creates the most amount of happiness for the most amount of people?
2. Which individuals and which groups have rights we cannot violate?
3. Where is the uncrossable line?
4. What will work in the world as we know it?

Tough four questions and the old days of doing a Pro/Con list or Risk v. Rewards list simple doesn't work because they only take into account what is a risk or reward for you.  In today's global world there are just simple too many people that are effected by your decisions.  It is difficult to see some times (even though are people that believe they are the center of attention) but everything we decide to do or not do does affect the world (indirectly of course).  

Badaracco's framework provides us a foundation to look at the serious decisions:  Taking a new job, moving the family across country, getting a dog, having or not having kids, choosing a college, etc.  There are a million of these decisions in a lifetime. It would be too much to expect ourselves to use this framework for all decisions and I think we all sort of go through this process for the big decisions.  

I would argue that most of the time we get stuck on one or two aspects of the framework and tend to focus too much on that one aspect and lost track of the complete picture or assign a greater weight to one net consequence than another based on our preferences and not objective facts.  This is extremely dangerous when serious issues such as health care, economy, religion are added to the situation for analysis because it increases the number of people affected by the decision and each person has strong emotional ties to his or hers "objectivity."  The book "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking"  is  a good place to start for those who want to be objective about issues and decisions.  

Best of luck and as always - just my $0.02 worth!

JS

Post- BIG events

It is funny how major events all seem to come at the same time.  As you already know (or don't), my wife and I gave birth to our first son (Evan Cipriani Scully) on May 31, 2011.  This was also the Tuesday following Memorial Day Weekend, and the 9th week out of my 10 week semester for my MBA, and the last semester of my MBA program.  So, this really means that I was learning how to be a father, taking care of my "hurt" wife, and trying to finish off the last two weeks of my MBA program.  Thankfully, I was able to get it all done, get some sleep and actually enjoy the first two weeks of my son's life.

I bring this up not because I want congratulations, but because no matter how hard we try to control when and how things happen, the further we are from how they will actually happen.  When I started my MBA program, I envisioned that by the time I was done I would have had multiple job offers, maybe a new job, maybe even selling software to Latin America (the underlying reason I wanted an MBA).  I never once imagined that I would be a father at almost the same exact time I was completing my MBA and looking back on it (two weeks ago), I wouldn't have it any other way.

So we can struggle to make things happen the way we envision them or we can let things happen sometimes and enjoy the one hell of a ride that comes with this journey called life!

JS!