GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Most people have tested Pinterest by now, but mostly as a personal hobby, since it is, after all, a digital pinboard that plays to our desire to cut out and collect images that call to us for one reason or another. It’s quick, clean, and easy to use. Perhaps that explains why Pinterest is driving more traffic to websites than all the other social media combined. According to Shareholic, Pinterest back in January of this year exceeded YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ in referrals. A month later it overtook Twitter.

But as social media specialist and technology trainer Beth Hayden writes in her terrific book Pinfluence, a practical guide to using Pinterest to build your business, Pinterest’s business value “might be harder to initially spot. Marketers might look at Pinterest’s lovely images of fashion, wedding venues, and recipes and think, ‘This can’t possibly be useful for me.’ But you’d be surprised what you can do with images and pinboards. There’s a whole world of visual marketing that businesses can dive into with Pinterest.”

Hayden maintains that once you’ve gotten the swing of setting up and publishing attractive pins and boards, it’s time to get your black belt in Pinterest, and use to drive sales and customer engagement.

Here are seven ways to market your business with Pinterest:

Run contests. Pick a contest topic, write a short blog post about the rules, and invite your followers to enter. There are a number of ways to pick a winner, the easiest and most social being popular vote.

Spotlight testimonials. Hayden suggests pinning pictures of your clients and pasting their testimonial in the pin’s description. “People love seeing faces with testimonials,” she says. “It makes them much more credible and friendly. This is therefore another effective technique for gathering and sharing social proof about how awesome your company is.”

Pin your videos. Many people aren’t aware that you can pin video content. It’s especially easy on any YouTube page by simply using the Pin It! bookmarklet. Once you pin a video, you can pin it to any of your boards. If your business has a YouTube channel, this is a great way to leverage it.

Tell client stories. You can turn traditional case studies into visually engaging stories, since images evoke emotion. A Pinterest board of stories is easy enough to build. Take pictures of customers engaging with your product or service, then develop an entire pin board dedicated to customers. If they have a Pinterest account, you can link them to the pin description.

Create a Pinfluence contact list. Most business owners have lists of current professional contacts, as well as potential connections they’d like to make. You can keep this list on Pinterest. You can pin their website or their Pinterest account if they have one.

Create conference boards. Let’s say you’re attending a conference or tradeshow. Blog about the event before you go–the who, what, when, and why you’re going. Then take pictures at the event, and create a Pinterest board for them. Invite others you meet to post to the board. When you’re back home, close the loop by blogging about what you did, who you met, and what you learned…then pinning the blog.

Host a pin chat. You can blend Twitter with Pinterest to host an online chat event in which the attendees tweet links and pins featuring pictures, blogs, sites, videos, you name it. It’s a great way to augment Twitter chats and build community around a theme or topic related to your business or industry.

“Beyond all the hype,” writes Hayden, “Pinterest truly is huge business opportunity for you. The site has prove itself to be incredibly powerful and addictive–and very valuable to business owners looking to market themselves online.”

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

What do the Broadway musical Spider-Man, the Indiana Colts, and Domino’s Pizza have in common? They all used the same process to turn around a losing team.

Sports psychologists and Washington Post columnists Joe Frontiera and Daniel Leidl reveal that process, distilled from five years of research of business, sports and government teams, in their book Team Turnarounds: A Playbook for Transforming Underperforming Teams.

They spoke with CEOs, frontline managers and governors, as well as owners, general managers and coaches in the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Basketball Association to explore what it takes to get a failing team back on track. All of the teams they analyzed—across every sector—reversed their fortunes and did a 180 from failure to success.

Here Joe Frontiera and Daniel Leidl answer a few questions on the art of team turnarounds, and the parallels between business and sports teams:

Why did you choose Spider-Man on Broadway as an example?
Joe Frontiera and Daniel Leidl: Partly because Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark was getting pummeled in the news, and partly because we wanted to demonstrate that all industries, all teams, are sometimes in need of a turnaround. In speaking with the co-lead producer, Jere Harris, we got some insight into his incredible commitment to what the project could become, and a lack of ego that allowed him to partner so effectively with the other co-lead producer, Michael Cohl. Their partnership and commitment injected confidence into a cast and crew that had been battered by the media, and now the production is one of the most successful on Broadway.

With respect to turning around underperforming teams, what parallels have you seen between sports teams and business teams?
A sports team is also a business, but its products center around the achievements of the team. The most striking parallel we found is that a committed leader is needed. Specifically, there must be someone who is willing to stand up and tell the truth to the larger organization, as difficult as that may be. Often, it involves some iteration of the message, “You’re really not that good.” But just as important is the follow up message that needs to be sent, “We can be better, we can succeed.”

How can you evaluate the state of your current team to know if it is in need of a turnaround?
Most teams that are in need of a turnaround already know it deep down; what holds them back is the creative rationalizations and excuses they hold on to. In sports, it could be something as simple as “We’re a small market team,” which implicitly lowers the expectations.

What role does the leader play in a team turnaround?
There are a few things that leaders must do if they are going to be successful. For one, people don’t follow a title, they follow the person. So the most important thing that a leader can do is to create relationships with the team and provide insight into who they are and what they value. Secondly, the leader must find ways to refute the excuses of the past and raise the expectations. Finally, a leader must be committed to teaching the team how to be resilient while continually cheering them on because any climb to the top is going to be riddled with obstacles, and a team needs to learn how to persevere through the challenges and setbacks.

What is the hardest stage of the turnaround process?
Changing behaviors. For a real transformation, a group needs to replace old behaviors with the new ones that align with the appropriate vision, goals, and ideals. But as anyone who has ever tried to diet, quit smoking or exercise more knows, changing your own behavior can be a brutal challenge, let alone trying to change a group’s behavior.

How do you get teams past the discomfort and denial of admitting failure so they can move on to a better future?
Deep down, everyone wants to achieve, to be a part of something bigger than themselves. So it’s important that we engage them in the process. One individual that we interviewed, Frank Esposito, asked his employees questions like, “What are we doing that’s stupid?”, and, “What do you think we can be?” These are two incredibly simple questions that can not only reveal a lot about the past and the present, but begin to shift focus to the future.

How can you change a team culture or belief system?
We always hear about the importance of vision, but that only provides an idealized end goal. The end goal is important, but transforming culture is about having the right values, and aligning behaviors with those values. That tells people how they’re supposed to go about achieving that end goal, what they’re supposed to do on a day-to-day basis. It’s also about changing the mindset of the group, getting the team to support each other as they fight side-by-side to achieve the shared goals.

What surprising insight did you gain from your research?
One thing that stuck out was the very different personalities that have successfully led turnarounds. Some are laid back, and others are almost maniacal about their beliefs. But the one commonality that they all have is they care deeply about their team. Another thing that stuck out is the creativity that existed within this group. They’re not insular—instead they use the experiences they have outside their sport or industry to make their own teams better. For example, Bill Polian of the Indiana Colts told me that he goes to hockey games with a GM in hockey to watch how that individual evaluates talent. He believes that in looking outside his sport of football, he can make his team better.

What’s the one ingredient needed for any successful turnaround?
No matter what kind of team it is, the process for a turnaround is the same. A leader has to boldly identify where the turnaround is needed, say it, and then guide the team forward. However, you need trust for any of this to happen—trust within the team that the turnaround is possible and trust from customers or constituents that the turnaround is taking place.

image credit: rowing team image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Have you heard any of the following lately?

“I’m OK with how things are.”
“The timing for this isn’t quite right.”
“Seems like a lot of pain for such little gain.”
“We need more buy-in to do this.”
“That may work elsewhere, but not here.”
“We tried something like this before, and it didn’t work.”

These are early warning signs that your once high-spirited startup is vulnerable to what might best be termed “big company sickness.” What is it? It’s something that preys on very successful small businesses. It goes something like this:

As business begins to boom, the fight-to-survive instinct fades and the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t quite what it was when the company was a startup. Sometimes it’s completely M.I.A. More and more people seem to need more resources to get ideas implemented quickly. Eventually, the ability to flex, react and innovate is lost.

Addicted to Resources

But that’s not how the company began. Maybe it didn’t start in the proverbial basement or garage, but it certainly started with little of everything—money, space and labor. There was a goal, and a passion for reaching it. Those limits made the company more creative and resourceful than it is today. Today, the addiction to resources is blocking innovation.

The good news is that there’s a relatively simple (but not necessarily easy) fix. But before revealing it, it helps to physically experience what I’m referring to, because the complacency in question has a universal presence, no matter how creative or resourceful we think we are.

Greater Potential

Stand up, feet planted shoulder width apart, arms straight out at your sides, parallel to the floor, elbows locked. (Imagine Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch of the Vitruvian Man if you need a visual reference.)

Now, twist your torso all the way to right as far as you possibly can go. Look down your right arm and mentally mark your stopping point on the wall. Remember that mark.

Now, turn back around to face front. Now close your eyes and repeat the exercise, stopping when you think you’ve met your previous stopping point.

Now…go a little past it. Open your eyes.

Most people surpass their previous mark by a good margin, and are surprised when they do. The point is that we generally don’t know what our potential is until we put our capacity on trial. We don’t stretch the limits of what we are actually capable of. But every business needs to constantly stretch in positive ways to move the business forward, to remain relevant.

Embrace Limitations

The solution is to treat resource constraints the same way artists do. All artists work within the confines of their chosen mediums, and it’s the limits that spur their creativity. The canvas edge, the marble block, the eight musical notes—these are finite resources. It’s how we view and manage resource constraints that makes all the difference.

And that’s the key question: Are limited resources preventing innovation, or enabling it?

There’s only one right answer.

A team that doesn’t thrive on the challenge of limitations is a sure sign that big company sickness is lurking. It signals an inherent fear of failure in your company. And that spells danger for innovation, because most real innovation springs from failure and conflict. The bigger and more successful a company gets, the less they have tolerance for both. So they mismanage a valuable source of new thinking by adding a buffer zone: higher budgets, more layers and lower expectations.

Unfortunately, success usually isn’t what breeds the kind of thinking that produces the extraordinary results needed to add value and keep competitors at bay. In fact, success can often generate a defensive posture that discourages the very behavior that created it. It can absolutely stifle innovation.

Innovation—which is the specific tool of the entrepreneur—demands exploiting limits, not ignoring or lamenting them!

Is the entrepreneurial spirit fading or missing in your business? How can you reset the bar by recreating the kinds of limitations that drive new thinking?

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

In addition to the reasons you already have for taking a vacation this summer, there’s another one you may not have considered: Travel is thought to increase creativity.

One of the difficulties we all face is the “curse of knowledge,” also known as subject matter expertise. Expertise is obviously valuable and required for success, but it can also hamper creativity. It can blind us to radical new ideas, because our mindset is so strong.

That’s why it’s good to hire young people—they aren’t shackled by deep knowledge. They’re ignorant of the conventional wisdom that dictates how things “should be done.” They’re outsiders, at least for a time.

Jonah Lehrer, author of the bestselling Imagine, believes that the virtue of youth is that the young simply do not have the knowledge to be insiders and have not had the chance to become experts. “While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks,” he writes, “it also comes with creative advantages, which is why so many fields, from physics to punk rock, have been defined by their most immature members. The young know less, which is why they invent more.”

But creativity does not have to ebb as we mature. Lehrer maintains that we can continue to innovate as long as we work to maintain the perspective of the outsider. One great way to do that is to travel.

“We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise,” Lehrer explains. “But sometimes that’s not enough: We need to leave behind everything. One of the most surprising and pleasurable ways of cultivating an outsider perspective is through travel, getting away from the places we spend most of our time.”

Lehrer argues that when we are physically near the source of whatever problem we’re wrestling, our thoughts are almost automatically constricted, due to all the physical and mental associations present. While those limits can be helpful, they can also inhibit the imagination.

Lehrer uses the example of a cornfield. If you’re actually standing in the middle of a field of corn, your mind is automatically drawn to a pattern of thoughts and associations about corn: it’s a plant, it’s a cereal, it’s a staple of Midwestern farming. But now imagine instead that you’re standing on a crowded city street. Your brain will generate completely different associations: You’ll think about high-fructose corn obesity, or perhaps ethanol as fuel for automobiles, or even the Iowa caucuses. New connections are made that wouldn’t have been if you remained in the cornfield.

And this is why, Lehrer argues, travel helps boost creativity. Creativity is all about making new connections between seemingly disparate concepts. “When you escape from the place you spend most of your time,” he says, “your mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed.”

But it’s not enough to simply hop a plane to anywhere. If you want to experience the creative benefits of travel, then you have to rethink its purpose in the first place.

“Most people, after all, escape to Paris so they don’t have to think about those troubles they left behind,” Lehrer explains. “But here’s the ironic twist: your mind is most likely to solve your stubbornest problems while you’re sitting in a swank Left Bank café. So instead of contemplating that buttery croissant, mull over those domestic riddles you just can’t solve. You have the breakthrough while on break.”

And if you’re lobbying for a longer summer vacation, know that the longer you’re away from home, the stronger the effect. A recent study by researchers at INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management reported that students who lived abroad for an extended period were significantly more likely to solve a difficult creativity problem than students who had never lived outside of their birth country. According to the researchers, the experience of another culture endows the traveler with a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings.

The lesson is this: Our creative thoughts are often stifled by the familiar. Our brains spend a great deal of time and energy choosing what not to notice, and the result is that creativity is traded for efficiency. When we distance ourselves from our most pressing problems, and our usual stomping grounds, the creative shackles loosen their grip on the imagination.

If you’re looking for some new and radical ideas, you may just want to put that “staycation” on hold, and board the next plane to somewhere else.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Massive information and idea sharing is the hallmark of a high-performing and innovative company, right? When critical information and good ideas flow freely, everyone’s on the same page, everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and that transparency can only be good, right?

Maybe not. Maybe too much information isn’t so good. Maybe Law #3: Limiting information engages the imagination, has some social and company cultural consequences.

According to Indiana University cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone, when information is freely shared, good ideas can stunt innovation by distracting others from pursuing even better ideas.

At the heart of his study was a single compelling question: “How do you structure your community or organization so you get the best solution out of the group?”

According to Goldstone: “It turns out not to be effective if different inventors and labs see exactly what everyone else is doing because of the human tendency to glom onto the current ‘best’ solution.”

In another words, transparency may just make us lazier. Let’s face it, coming up with new and novel ideas with any consistency isn’t exactly easy.

Goldstone’s research examines and charts group behavior and the patterns in which people unknowingly participate — much like ants creating colony structures about which they are clueless.

His study used a virtual environment in which study participants worked in specifically designed groups to solve a problem. Participants guessed numbers between 1 and 100, with each number having a hidden value. The goal was for individuals to accumulate the highest score through several rounds of guessing. Across different conditions, the relationship between guesses and scores could either be simple or complex. The participants saw the results of their own guesses and some or all of the guesses of the others in their group.

In the “fully connected” group, everyone’s work was completely accessible to everyone else — much like a tight-knit family or small town. In the “locally connected” group, participants primarily were aware of what their neighbors, or the people on either side, were doing. In the “small world” group, participants also were primarily aware of what their neighbors were doing, but they also had a few distant connections that let them send or retrieve good ideas from outside of their neighborhood.

Goldstone found that the fully connected groups performed the best when solving simple problems. Small world groups, however, performed better on more difficult problems. For these problems, the truism “The more information, the better” is not valid. In other words, beware of TMI (too much information)!

“The small world network preserves diversity,” Goldstone said. “One clique could be coming up with one answer, another clique could be coming up with another. As a result, the group as a whole is searching the problem space more effectively. For hard problems, connecting people by small world networks offers a good compromise between having members explore a variety of innovations, while still quickly disseminating promising innovations throughout the group.”

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

For anyone who has ever dreamed of starting and growing a business, By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop, by Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson is an absolute must-read. Their story, from how they met at Harvard Business School to their billion dollar business, is a page turner filled with real world insights and lessons every entrepreneur can profit from.

Without further ado, here is a conversation with Alexis and Alexandra.

Gilt Groupe took both the fashion and e-commerce industries by storm with such a seemingly simple idea. Where did your idea for the company came from?

We were inspired by the popularity of New York’s designer sample sales, and we wanted to make this popular local pastime available online to customers throughout the U.S. and offer highly coveted fashion labels at insider prices to a passionate group of consumers.

In just 4 years you attracted 5 million members and earned a $1 billion valuation. This is hardly the norm for a start-up company. What is it that sets Gilt Groupe apart?

The most critical success factor was probably our founding team. But a number of other things made us different. We enlisted leading and coveted brands to sell on our site. We curated the best of a season or collection rather than feature everything. We tapped cutting edge viral and social marketing techniques to scale the customer base quickly. And we used the best creative talent we could find to help us cultivate an online luxury brand.

Common advice is to never go into business with friends or family, butyou have turned that on its head. Why has it worked for you and what advice would you give to someone thinking of going into business with friends?

In a startup, it is absolutely critical to be able to trust and rely on your co-founders and/or team. If you are considering going into business with a friend or family member, you are likely to put a lot on the line. It is important to communicate. Lay out any potential issues or concerns on the table and talk about them in detail. We did this because, people told us to have these discussions, but we were never all that concerned about working together. It is important to think about the context of your friendship. In our case, we were friends from Harvard Business School, so we had seen each other’s work ethic and drive in action, and we were familiar with each other’s basic business acumen. Most important, we each had seen the other at her best and worst and knew we would not encounter any surprises as we hit the inevitable highs and lows any start-up faces as it grows. Our confidence and trust in each other was absolute.

You talk about relationships and execution being key to the success of your business. What is it about these two factors that are so important?

Our relationships with the fashion community were necessary in convincing brands to sell their wares on Gilt. Our relationships with friends were important because they helped to form our early base of members and customers of the site. Our relationships also enabled us to find and recruit top talent in all functional areas, from merchandising to marketing to operations technology and finance. Execution is key; ideas are cheap. We knew that we needed to execute our vision better than our competitors, and we started having competitors enter our industry very quickly.

Gilt Groupe’s success was largely built during the recession. With a sleepy economy still very much a reality, many people are eager to start their own business. What advice do you have for someone dreaming of starting their own business now?

There is no better time than now to pursue an idea you are deeply passionate about, and in fact there are many sources of financing available now to would-be-entrepreneurs. If you have an idea, here are some things that you might consider in determining if now is the right time to pursue it. First, the idea should be easy for you to explain in one sentence to a friend or colleague. Second, does this concept exist in any shape or form already? Why or why not? Take an honest look at the marketplace. Who else is out there? Has someone already tried this and failed-and if so, why? Have times changed? Sometimes an idea can be too ahead of its time and advanced for the market. Can you test your idea before over-investing, just to make sure? These days the best way to make sure that the time is right for your idea is to get it out there and see what people think. Getting customer feedback from the start will help you build a better product, one that will maximize your investment.

In your book you discuss the importance of naysayers, especially early on, in building the company. Can you explain that?

Don’t get discouraged by the people who tell you your idea will never work. Instead listen to them and see if you can apply any of their thinking into refining and improving your strategy. If you can anticipate pitfalls and those hard questions you will get from investors and partners alike in advance and more importantly be ready with great, Well-thought-through answers, then you will be better equipped for the challenges ahead.

With the tech industry still being predominantly male, what are some of the unique challenges you faced getting started? How can women make their gender an advantage?

We launched a business initially targeting female customers; in fact we were precisely the target demographic. This was very clearly an advantage as we understood the consumer mindset better than anyone. Beyond that it can be more challenging raising money as a woman. Women led 28 percent of all US. businesses in 2002. Yet female entrepreneurs historically receive less of the invested dollars coming from venture capital firms, estimates are as little as four to nine percent. So while this is clearly a challenge, keep in mind that as a female you are more likely to be a more memorable party pitching the partnership as there are not as many Women to walk through there doors to begin with!

Entrepreneurs think that venture capitalists invest in ideas, but you argue they really invest in people. So what makes them want to invest in someone? Are there any key qualities that stand out?

Because there’s so little due diligence that can be done on most new start-ups, it’s natural that VCs concentrate most on the team involved. Many investors like to see a track record of success and will use this to guide them. Drive, ambition, leadership potential, integrity and the ability to motivate others are also important traits for an entrepreneur. You need to focus on the background and skill sets of the key team members in order to convince investors that you are the right team to back.

You’ve expanded beyond fashion with sister sites such as Jetsetter.com for travel and GiltCity.com for local deals and finds. Was this always part of the plan? How did you decide when and how it was time to grow?

We’ve always been close to our customers. We both spend a lot of time with our members, listening to their perspective and ideas and responding to their feedback, as well as investing in regular customer research. Our members communicated clearly that they were not only interested in fashion and decorative items, but they lived or aspired to live a luxury lifestyle which included travel, local experiences, food and wine. We incorporated this feedback into our business and our offerings.

Growth and a healthy business are something all entrepreneurs and small business owners work towards, but sometimes growing too quickly can be detrimental. How can this be avoided?

There are two areas where you see companies suffer when growing too rapidly. The first is not anticipating the right type of people they will need to lead various teams or functions, hiring them too late or making the wrong choices in hiring. Hire fast enough, but do not over-hire, and invest in recruiting the right talent so you do not have to rehire later, which is often a time consuming and sometimes costly mistake. Second, if you grow too rapidly and aren’t investing enough in making sure your business infrastructure is strong enough then you can find yourself ground to a halt when the site crashes, the orders outpace what you can ship out in an acceptable time, or your accounting systems fail and lead to detrimental errors in expense reporting or others. Try to anticipate what could “break” next and get rigorous as a team in shifting focus fast enough to address these problems.

As a company grows, the culture of the company can often change, too. What are some tips you can share to help people maintain and preserve their corporate culture?

It’s not always easy to maintain a corporate culture as a company grows, but it is important and is absolutely worth the investment. Establishing a vision and a mission and regularly communicating them to the employee base and to potential hires is important. Think about company culture when hiring. The cultural fit for a candidate is just as important, and sometimes even more important, than the candidate’s skill set. The best way to select individuals who fit your company’s culture is to include employees in the hiring process who embody the culture and are really good at vetting for certain values in the hiring process. Make sure they are involved in training new hires, too. You can even do something as simple as hosting lunch or after-work socials. No matter what, though, the company’s culture will always be a reflection of the leader or leadership. So you must lead based on what you value culturally. Any disconnect will lead to a shift, even if not intended.

What advice can you offer for how to spot a trend that could reinvent an industry?

There are no simple formulas here. However if you are intimately familiar with an industry or a customer group, and you recognize a really tough problem that is universally faced or a so-called pain point that confronts all, and you have a pretty good solution that you could introduce or build better than the existing alternatives, then you are probably on to something important. Some of these problems could have been left for dead or abandoned, and sometimes people need to just take a fresh look at them.

How can anyone transform a personal passion, like shopping, into a business?

Not all personal passions should be businesses! But if you think that your passion has a viable market, then explore it, and perhaps find someone who could join you in your venture. We believe doing a start-up with someone you trust is so much more rewarding and fun than going at a business alone.

Anything new in the pipeline you can give readers a sneak peak at?

The final chapters of Gilt Groupe have yet to be written, and we are still just at the beginning. We’re watching dramatic shifts in our business as more customers shop through mobile devices. That shapes how we sell our products and services. As a quarter of our revenue come in through a mobile device we are launching new apps and new formats for shopping. We want to be right there with customers, at the forefront of social shopping, letting our members shop on their terms.

Originally appeared on AMEX Open Forum

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

Most people know that 3M’s Arthur Fry was not trying to invent the thing he invented in 1974–the Post-it Note–he was daydreaming in church.

As neuroscientists now know, and was conclusively shown in 2009, it’s when our minds wander that our brains do their best work–it’s when we’re not trying to think creatively that we’re often most creative. That’s when a still mysterious process in the right hemisphere of the brain behind the right ear makes connections between seemingly unrelated things, and those connections then bubble up as sudden insights, as if out of nowhere.

Jonah Lehrer, through our discussion of his just released new book Imagine: How Creativity Works, helped me sort out and make sense out of the latest discoveries, and what the results might imply for anyone wishing to better tap into their natural creativity.

“It’s not an accident that Arthur Fry was daydreaming when he came up with the idea for a sticky bookmark,” advises Jonah. “A more disciplined thought process wouldn’t have made the connection between the annoying little pieces of paper he used to bookmark his choir music and a weak adhesive another 3M engineer had developed. The errant daydream is what made Post-it notes possible.”

Jonah believes that the kind of thinking that enables these unexpected connections is the essence of creativity, and people who daydream seem to be better at it. The trick, though, is daydreaming and letting your mind wander, yet remaining aware enough to recognize a sudden insight when it comes. He makes the point that if you don’t notice an idea, it’s not useful daydreaming: “The reason Fry is such a good inventor—-he has more than twenty patents to his name, in addition to Post-it Notes—-isn’t simply that he’s a prolific mind-wanderer. It’s that he’s able to pay attention to his daydreams and to detect those moments when his daydreams generate insights.”

What that means is that not all daydreaming is created equal. Sitting around the house all day in one long protracted daydream won’t produce any insights, unless there was a certain density of attention paid to a specific problem that preceded it. It’s dedicated daydreaming—-purposeful mind-wandering that yields productive creativity.

“When our minds are at ease,” says Jonah, “we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights.”

Naturally, I’m curious about the role of daydreaming in Jonah’s own creative process.

“I think about this great Albert Einstein line,” he tells me. “The one about ‘creativity is the residue of time wasted.’ In my own creative process, I now feel much more comfortable knowing that when I’ve hit a wall, spent a day tinkering with the same stupid paragraph—that it’s time to take a walk and accept the fact that the most productive thing I can do will look really unproductive to everyone else. I now take more long, languid showers and don’t feel guilty when I take long walks in the middle of the day.

“Answers to my toughest problems come to me while I’m walking, when I’m not thinking about them. I know when I’m stuck that I’m not going to solve them by just playing with words on my computer screen—-I need to get away.

“I think about Jonathan Schooler, who has pioneered the study of daydreaming and mind wandering. He’s shown that people who daydream score higher on creativity tests. He takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day on this beautiful bluff along the Pacific, just north of Santa Barbara. He talks about how he always knows when he desperately needs a daydreaming walk.

It’s the problems that really seem impossible, where there’s no feeling of knowing, no sense of a solution, no sense of progress—those really hard problem that are most likely going to be solved by long walks, showers, meditation, games of ping pong…those kinds of things.”

What Imagine and the literature about the neuroscience of creativity says is, when we need moments of insight, when we need to find far-reaching connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, when we’ve really hit the wall…that’s when we need to relax, to stop thinking about work, because the answer will only arrive when we stop looking for it.

The next time someone catches you daydreaming on the job and asks you why you’re not working, tell them that in fact you’re doing your best, most creative work.

Originally appeared on AMEX Open Forum

Imagecredit:smud & futurity

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

According to Scott Anthony, who directs the Asia-Pacific office of innovation consulting and venture-capital firm Innosight, “the seven deadly sins have very clear parallels in the world of innovation, serving as a useful and memorable way to highlight an innovator’s most common mistakes. He highlights those in his recently published book, The Little Black Book of Innovation: How It Works, How to Do It, and shows you how to avoid them.

1. Pride

The sin of pride innovation is forcing your view of quality onto the marketplace, which often results in overshooting. The easiest way to avoid the sin of pride is by taking an external viewpoint to make sure you understand how the customer measures quality. Make sure you are grounded in what the market wants, not what you want.

2. Sloth

Are your innovation efforts slowing to a crawl? That’s sloth. More often than not, innovation simply takes too long. By the time a company gets around to doing something, the window of opportunity has closed. Why does innovation take so long? It’s not really laziness. It’s that people work on the wrong activities, typically by prioritizing analysis over action. It’s all too easy to fill your day with activities that make it feel as if you are making progress tackling a problem.

Avoid it by releasing your inner Edison: “genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

3. Gluttony

Gluttony is suffering from an addiction to abundant resources and leads to overly slow, overly linear innovation efforts. Deep pockets allow companies to spend too many resources following the wrong strategy. They throw bodies against a problem, but everyone knows that small teams typically move faster than large teams.Avoid it by practicing selective scarcity: constrain resources in the early stages of innovation to enable creativity.

4. Lust

It’s easy to get tempted and distracted by pursuing too many bells and whistles, too many bright, shiny objects. Avoid it by focusing your innovation efforts, remembering that destruction often precedes creation. Stopping is as important as starting. Lust after too many things, and you’ll find that you end up with nothing. Good innovators carefully choose the opportunities they go after.

5. Envy

Envy occurs when innovators inside a company proclaim themselves the chosen ones, and create an us-vs-them relationship between your main business and your new growth areas. Remember, without that core business, there is no corporate innovation. Actively celebrate the efforts and successes of both old and new business areas to avoid the sin of Envy.

6. Wrath

A wrathful leader punishes innovation failures, using lines such as “Failure is not an option.” But in innovation failure is most certainly an option. What kind of message does it send if you punish people who take well-thought-out risks that don’t pan out? Beautiful business plans don’t always turn into beautiful businesses. A void wrath by rewarding behavior, not just outcomes.

7. Greed

Greed has its advantage, but innovators need to make sure they are greedy for the right thing. Greed is sinful when you’re being impatient about growth, and can lead to prioritizing low-potential markets and opportunities. If you look for quick growth, you are forced to look to what exists. The best innovators avoid the temptation to go after large, obvious, immediate markets. These people can be patient for growth. They should absolutely be greedy for results that demonstrate that the approach they are following has merits.

Which of the seven deadly sins are blocking your progress? Do something about it by using the seven avoidance strategies above!

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all. –Michelangelo

Talent is merely potential, and everyone has it. Talent is everywhere – but by itself it is nothing special. It is the developed talent – the artistic skill – that sets us apart in a distinctive way. Think of talent as personal raw materials to be converted into human performance: assets to be fully capitalized upon and developed in a purposeful way to produce desired results in our work. When we fail to exploit them, we shamefully squander our most valuable resources; indeed, wasting talent dishonors our creative gift.

Transforming talent into performance is a matter of positioning and practicing. No one is a universal creative genius, and no one should try to be. But when a person knows where there is potential for creative excellence, they can unleash its power by working in an environment in which their talents will not only continually deepen but also yield the most meaningful outcomes. Poor positioning and practicing are commonplace, and only inhibit our ability to gain full command of our gifts.

Proper positioning is no more complicated than fitting talent to task, yet this simple fundamental is seldom leveraged well. We regularly find natural “thought starters” floundering in the role of a “playmaker,” and natural “taskmasters” failing in the role of “peacekeeper”.

Companies are notorious for aiding and abetting the creation of misfits. The talents and skills needed to artfully manage a team of salespeople are dramatically different from those required to actually sell, yet most companies will move a star salesperson into a management role, then scratch their heads when the once-high-flying individual not only fails to achieve desired results, but eventually disengages entirely, longing to return to the battlefield. Unfortunately, the pattern is generally self-perpetuating: “I started in the mail room, and so will you.”

It takes far more effort to improve from poor to fair than to improve from good to great. The child whose parents hire a tutor to bring up the single stubborn D among A’s and B’s will find not only little improvement in the D, but diminishing performance in the stronger subjects. The penalty of becoming well rounded is mediocrity. No one ever achieved creative excellence by focusing on what they couldn’t do, or by trying to be who they weren’t.

Business artistry does not require breadth; it requires depth – the polar opposite of the approach taken in most educational institutions and business organizations. Understanding the need to play from a base of strength is the critical difference between the accomplished artist and the also-ran.

Of course, we must often develop certain skills simply to get by, but leveraging the talents of others enables us to concentrate our energy on what we do best. In fact, the most accomplished creative business artists pull their power from only one or perhaps two key talents, parlay that talent into stellar performance, and surround themselves with those whose gifts complement their own.

Bottom line: standout creativity requires gaining command of our gift.

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GUEST POST from Matthew E May

For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to, consumed by, even obsessed with, ideas. I’m a meta-idea person, meaning I like to spend a lot of time thinking about the idea of ideas. I’m often accused of being “in my head.” And this time of year finds me generating more ideas than usual–partly because the holiday season gives me a bit more free time, partly because the tradition of making New Year resolutions puts me in an optimistic frame of mind.

But to be quite honest, I abandon the vast majority of my ideas. Most should be abandoned, because they aren’t very good. But some of them shouldn’t be…I should act on them. Do something with them. Yet I don’t.

I’m sure you have a lot of ideas for 2012 too. After all, it’s that time of year. The question is: what are you going to do with them?

As serendipity would have it, on New Year’s Day I stumbled across and read a short manifesto that addresses this very question, written by Tanner Christensen, who owns a boutique e-book publishing company called Aspindle. The timing was perfect, and as we head into 2012, his book How to Use Ideas delivers an inspiring mix of wake-up call and call to action.

“Maybe you can relate to the experience of abandoning ideas, of believing that some of your ideas may never work, or of being overwhelmed when the pressure of failure started to build,” writes Tanner. “It’s okay. Ideas do get abandoned or lost or pressured away from us. These things happen. There’s really nothing wrong with pushing an idea down or abandoning it all-together; it happens to the best of us. We can’t let our ideas get away from us any more. Our ideas – each one of them – has the potential to change our lives or the lives of those around us.”

Here are the four simple steps outlined in How To Use Ideas that will help you bring your ideas to life in 2012:

Step 1: Recognize your fears, but set out to pursue ideas regardless.

Says Tanner: “You have what it takes to use your ideas, even when the fear of failure or making a mistake feels overpowering and all-encompassing. You only need to acknowledge the fears your ideas stir up inside of you, and then remember that fear is no predictor of the future (if it was, we would all be very happy and rich and secure, right?). So in our process of using ideas, the first thing to do is to recognize that you will have fears and doubts, and then to push through anyway and try to do something with your ideas.”

Step 2: Give yourself time to find the right motivation for using an idea.

Here’s Tanner: “Try to recall ideas you’ve had in the past that simply faded away or somehow you forgot for a while. How many of those ideas could have been great if you had let somebody else focus on building them out? Which brings up a new problem when it comes to using ideas: acting quickly on an idea. If you want to be someone who uses his or her ideas effectively, you have to learn how to act quickly, to do something right away before the idea gets pushed under everything else going on in your life.”

Step 3: Do something with your idea right away. Start by writing it down.

Tanner again: “Write your ideas down first, always. Then, if you have time as you’re writing down the idea, ask yourself: ‘What can I do right now to make this idea more of a reality?’ Write down any answers you have for the question too, then follow through with them, immediately. If you don’t have time to think of ways to act on idea right away, at least write it down and then make a note (or, if you’re up for the task, set an alarm or reminder) to go back and think of ways you can act on the idea when you get a spare minute. Writing down your ideas won’t automatically make them a reality, of course, but doing so will provide you with the constant nagging of knowing that you have an idea that needs pursuing.”

Step 4: Dive In.

No explanation needed. Just do it. I’ll do it with you. In fact, my 2012 resolution is to follow these steps to improve my ideas-to-action ratio.

On a parting note, remember the words of the late Peter Drucker: “Ideas are cheap and abundant. What is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.”

Now, go bring your ideas to life!

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