CHAPTER 17
How to Champion the Good Idea
I N 1973 A man by the name of Steve Sasson went to work for Kodak. Palpable interest in all things digital was beginning to grow everywhere, and most companies wanted to know how they could get in on it.
In 1975, Steve’s boss assigned him to an engineering unit to work on coming up with ideas around a recently discovered CCD (charged couple device) microchip. After exploring a few ideas that went nowhere, he got creative. He thought, What if I use these chips to capture light in some way and make a digital impression?1 It was a new way to think and was creatively ambitious. No one had ever done that with this particular chip, and he thought to himself, What do I have to lose?
What Sasson made while thinking creatively changed the course of history forever. He wound up creating the world’s first digital camera. This eight-pound device had 16 batteries, a tape cassette recorder, and several dozen circuits wired together.2 It looked like a bomb straight out of an old cartoon, but this idea changed technology forever. It took 0.01-megapixel photos in black and white and recorded them to a tape. Each photo took almost half a minute to produce, and if you wanted to view a photo, you had to play back the tape and plug it into a television screen, which took another minute or so. The picture quality was horrible; the image was grainy and noisy and didn’t look very good,3 but none of that mattered. It was the first handheld digital camera ever invented, and it couldn’t have come at a better time or in a more relevant company.
Eventually, Sasson made his way onto the leadership team at Kodak, but instead of his creativity being championed, his digital camera was not well received. No one liked or understood his invention, which was even seen as threatening. In the end, the leadership team at Kodak convinced themselves that no one would ever want to take a picture digitally and that things would stay the same forever.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Kodak’s story is a tragic one, but the important thing to ask here is why it happened. It turns out that a combination of things had gone wrong for Kodak that we can learn from so that they don’t happen to us. When creativity occurs in our business or career, we need to be ready to capture it in all we do. What can you do to champion creativity in your career or your company? Here are a few tools that can help.
HOW TO BE A STALWART SUPPORTER OF CREATIVITY
The rest of this chapter lists techniques that will allow you to support creativity.
1. Think Like a Child
When you were a kid, you were free to make plenty of mistakes. The stakes were just not that high. If you failed in playing or dancing or just about anything else, you didn’t blame yourself or the market conditions. Of course not. You just went out and tried again. Here is the important thing: when we think like a child, we are not afraid to retry what has failed.
What you end up gaining is a childlike indifference to aversion, a form of creative grit. Now it is time to use the grit you had as a kid. It’s the same grit you can use as an adult to bounce back. When you think like a child, you give yourself permission to explore: to go big, to dream, and to imagine the bigger picture creatively.
Think more like a child when you are solving problems in your career or business. You will get an opportunity to push the boundaries on potential solutions and rely on your grit in dealing with failure. In those potential solutions there are opportunities to champion creativity.
One of the side benefits of thinking like a kid is the camaraderie it creates. When you give life to an idea while thinking like a child, you may ignite a following in others. Sort of like a contagious connection fueled by bucking the status quo, thinking like a child can rally support. Coworkers and customers see the need for ideas like yours that are disruptive because they were children at one point too—everyone was! There is a certain memory that is triggered by thinking like a child that is communal. Therefore, connecting to the primordial creative brain we are all born with has the ability to champion any creative idea in any organization.
2. Try Saying Yes Sometimes
I wonder what would happen at your company if an employee or coworker presented an idea like the digital camera at Kodak. How would you react? Do you think you would be able to spot the potential of this innovation? Would you be prepared to take a leap with The Creator Mindset and see the potential for something that is so fundamentally disruptive to your organization?
Sadly, the answer is probably not. We have spent so much time specializing in understanding our role in our career or our company’s function that we cannot see outside the day-to-day grind. It really is true that sometimes the best ideas come from unexpected places, but are we willing to look in unexpected places for newfound creativity? Taking a leap of faith by saying yes from time to time is one way to look in those unexpected places for ideas. It is one way to see outside the daily grind.
So much time is spent saying no in business today. Try saying yes from time to time. Yes requires that you take a risk; no is always a safe way out.
No matter who you are, from the owner of the company all the way to an intern, it is your job to help champion the idea regardless of its origin.
Saying yes allows you to understand that in a world of constant change, sometimes we don’t have all the answers. No is a far easier position and involves less risk. Saying yes takes far more effort, but the payoff to yes is far greater. Higher risk, higher reward, higher championing of creativity.
3. Recognize Fear
Fear of failure is a major force in driving bad business and career decisions today. As we have seen, it is in failure that creativity can shine. So why are we so afraid of it? Sometimes it is more about getting it wrong and learning than getting it right and not learning. Sure, your mistakes can lead to big issues from time to time, but I would argue that trying to get it right all the time (which is impossible) is far more costly in the long run. Creative ideas get stifled when you are on a mission to get it right all the time, and fear of the unknown leads to a paralysis of action on any risk that destroys creativity.
What fear exists in your organization or career that is preventing you from being a champion of innovation? Most folks would say that it’s bad cash flow, lack of profit, or constantly decreasing margins. Maybe it’s a bad boss or a lack of clear career objectives. These certainly are real fears, but they are fears that can be transcended at all levels with creativity.
Let’s look at these fears quickly one by one:
1. A lack of cash flow can be changed easily if you have the right mindset. It turns out that limitations (on available cash flow in this case) force you to use creativity (which is essentially free) to transcend your current limitation and come up with a solution. You most likely don’t need a loan or have to renegotiate terms on your accounts receivable; you need to look at every nook and cranny of where the cash is being spent and then implement creativity.
2. Lack of profit is a wonderful problem to have. It means you have some level of existing revenue and have not been able to leverage it to profitability at sufficient levels. Here you look at the problem creatively to employ a solution: Is it inventory, pricing, education, or something internal that is creating this lack of profit? There are so many places to look that you are bound to strike the mother lode if you are guided by creativity.
3. Decreasing margins are another one of my favorite issues to tackle when I am out consulting. Decreasing margins are led by market forces that do not differentiate your product or service from others. Why not try creativity to overcome these limitations and differentiate with a concrete and resolute mandate? Redefine or create an evolved position and execute it.
4. If you have a bad boss, this is a great opportunity to learn. I have had some of the worst bosses in the universe (see the section on my boss Allen in Chapter 9), and I bet you have too, but here is the thing: What did you really take away? Was it resentment and bitterness? Or was it creativity to look at this person’s actions and learn what not to do? As we talked about earlier in this chapter, sometimes it is more about getting it wrong and learning than about getting it right and not learning. I learned so much from Allen (the worst boss I ever had) because I chose to look at the situation creatively and not get bogged down in the mire.
5. A lack of clear career objectives provides another great opportunity to use creativity to overcome a hurdle. Define your career objectives in a way you feel is most appropriate by using creativity at every step. Embrace the idea that a laundry list of expected job performance indicators is bestowed upon you as your job description, but then make the creative choice to do more. Look at the potential you have to push the boundaries creatively and you will find that your role can take on a whole new meaning.
The power of an idea to forever change the outlook of the market you are in is far more powerful than the limitations that you have in front of you. Ideas will always win, no matter what. Creativity will always win, no matter what. But have you given creativity the chance to bloom without fear in every facet of your career or business that drives you away from being a champion of creativity?
Finally, what are you ignoring because of fear in your business today just as Kodak did? Personally? From within? What idea did you have just last week, the one you thought was so out there that you didn’t bother to share it with anyone? What creativity lies just beneath your surface that you are afraid of?
Perhaps the problem is not wanting to get it wrong. Perhaps it’s not wanting to change the current trend of what is working. Perhaps the self-doubt monster is shutting it down. What is it that you can champion with creativity that you are too afraid to try? No one knows but you. If you keep it under lock and key, forever afraid of revealing your ideas, nothing will ever happen. You can take that creativity to the grave, and the impact that it would potentially have not just on your career or business but on the world will be forever unrealized.
4. Get Unstuck from a Band of Time
Nothing lasts forever, and the fact is that things work only for a certain amount of time. Whatever is working today may not work tomorrow, and whatever is working tomorrow is not necessarily a solution for the future. It is only a solution for right now based on what’s familiar and what’s established.
The good news is that there are two simple questions that can help you get unstuck from a certain band of time and drive yourself headlong into championing creativity. Look at what is working today and ask yourself these two very important questions:
1. Will what I’m doing today be relevant tomorrow?
2. When what I’m doing is not relevant, what can I do to change it?
These two very simple questions can have deep implications for your career or business in terms of championing creativity. The first one involves a real gut check of whether your product or service will be relevant in however you define your particular tomorrow (in one day from now or in one year’s time or more). It’s the self-check that will help you clarify an honest interpretation of your offering. Remember it’s not if but when relevancy becomes questionable. Much like death and taxes, it’s inevitable. So why not champion that creative initiative?
The second question deals with the inevitable: when relevancy is no longer a factor. It asks what you can do to change so that you can stay relevant. It questions how much creativity you can champion so that the change becomes a force in your company or career. The answer will be individual to you and your career or business sector and will be found in whatever creativity you can champion by using the principles described on these pages.
Forever pushed out of a position of comfort, The Creator Mindset encourages looking at your business with new and inventive eyes and driving hard to champion a good idea no matter where it comes from. This in no way means that you should ignore your current model. But if all you are doing is working on your current model, you are not in a position to capitalize on change.
As things occur only in some optimal band of time or some limited amount of time, creativity will help you reinvent yourself in your career or your company’s product or service to continually be fresh, new, and relevant. Go out and find or make it and then champion it to success.
5. Do Not RUST
The rest upon success tool (RUST) is one of the only tools that I will cover in this book that I do not want you to use. You cannot possibly act as a champion of creativity if you rest upon success.
The Creator Mindset is built to fight our natural urge to rest and say, “Why fix what isn’t broken?” This destructive force is no longer constructive in any meaningful way, and this tool is one that has to be unlearned. Resting upon success is exactly what Kodak did, along with Toys “R” Us, Pan Am Airlines, and Columbia House, as you will learn in Chapter 19. It’s the anti-advocate of creativity. This is a culture that reveres past success and doesn’t see anything worthwhile in the future to pursue, not to mention that it makes employees feel that ideas will never be taken seriously, investors feel leery and disengaged, and the public feel lethargic and indolent. In the culture of a company steeped in the past, creativity that bubbles up is shut down. These types of environments that lack a champion of the idea to stand up collectively and defend creativity eventually are out of business. Creativity is the very fabric of our humanity, and ignoring it because it might not happen in the next 5 or 10 years or because you just don’t get it is no reason to stop progress. You are simply robbing the next generation of innovation and creativity at your own expense and leading to the eventual downfall of your organization.
THE CREATOR MINDSET IS set up to allow the championing of creativity whether it appears as an idea, an innovation, a new way of thinking about something, or the countless other ways creativity can manifest. No matter where it comes from, creativity must be supported. It is not good enough to create an environment where these ideas can be generated. They must be upheld in every way.