Tag Archives: videos

We Are Target. Who Are You?

By now you’ve probably seen the video of the Target employee standing on the checkout counter delivering a Mel Gibson, Braveheart inspired speech to fellow employees prior to opening the doors on Black Friday (nearly 4 million views and counting).

The video ends with “Because we are more than just a store. This is a team! This is a family! This is Target!!!”

It left me with one central idea at the end, and that’s the title of this article “We Are Target. Who Are You?” and the reason it left me with this idea is that in our companies we too often take the passion out of business. We inadvertently, through the way we communicate internally, end up sending the message that people should leave their passion at home, or feel passionate about something else other than our company.

What would happen if didn’t kill people’s passion at the same time we time we’re busy killing their creativity?

What kinds of connections with our customers could we form if we were (from the top to the bottom) passionate about serving our customers, about crushing the competition, and trying to be better than them in every way?

Do you want to work for a mediocre company?

Does your company want to be mediocre?

Does your company want to provide crappy customer service?

If not, then first work on making your company excellent in every way possible, and then give people permission to be passionate about serving customers and about demonstrating that excellence.

Then you’ll be ready to shout it from the rooftops!
(or at least from the counter)


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Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation Center

Video Provides a Peek Inside

As innovation becomes increasingly recognized as the sustaining lifeforce of any company, more organizations are investing in improving their connections to startups, entrepreneurs, academic institutions, researchers and other outside entities to strengthen their pipelines for insights, ideas, and collaboration.

To support this effort, some companies are even creating dedicated physical spaces for this collaboration to occur, and regular events to attract startups, entrepreneurs, and the like for collaboration events.



The embedded video provides a peek inside Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation Center and some of their efforts in this area.

Is your organization undertaking similar efforts?

Are they considering it?

And those of you that have done something like this already, have you been satisfied with the results?


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Coke Combining Creativity with Marketing and Branding

Coca Cola Vietnam Thinking Beyond Traditional Product Lifecycle

I came across this great video from Coca Cola Vietnam that is an example of how creative minds and the concept of Value Access can sometimes unlock more value from your existing products and possibly even create new products as a result.

The concept of the video starts with a simple question:

What if a Coca Cola bottle was never thrown away?

From there it goes on to show lots of different potential uses for a Coca Cola bottle, and possibly even new products that Coca Cola could sell.

I love this.

And hopefully it will inspire you to ask, what simple question could we ask that would unlock new sources of value from our existing products or services for customers?


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Innovating by Staring at Goats

Innovating by Staring at GoatsWhat makes you stop and stare?

What inspires you?

I’ve written many times about the role of inspiration in innovation, and there are lots of sources of both inspiration and innovation. For me, inspiration is so important to innovation that I put inspiration at the center of my Eight I’s of Innovation framework (traducido al español por Vanessa Lopez-De la O). While inspiration is of course important, there are seven other I’s in the Eight I’s framework that help to transform inspiration into income. I came across a video, on Yahoo! Sports of all places, that inspired me. It shows goats engaging in a very unusual behavior with a metal ribbon.

Here’s the video:



The video of the goats’ behavior made me not just stare, but also made me think about several things, including:

  • What a fun way to play king of the mountain
  • This is a great demonstration of the importance of flexibility, balance, and perseverance
  • All athletes need off-season training, maybe this is off-season training for goats
  • Just about anything will make me laugh (5 million views can’t be wrong)
  • How long before someone tries to turn a metal ribbon into the next Zumba like craze?
  • How long will it be before Cirque du Soleil creates a metal ribbon act?

What else can we learn from this video?

Well, in my previous post Key to Innovation Success Revealed! I shared that I see successful innovation as being composed of:

  1. Invention
  2. Entrepreneurship
  3. Collaboration

Some might disagree with me, but I believe animals can be inventive, and we can see in the video the goats collaborating. But are the goats being entrepreneurial here?

Are humans the only animals that innovate?

What can we learn from the behavior, physics, or architecture of other animals that might inspire us to achieve success with our current innovation challenge?

Keep innovating!


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Interview for Top 75 Disruptive Experts Series

Interview for Top 75 Disruptive Experts SeriesAs part of Bill Jensen’s series of interviews with the Top 75 Disruptive Experts from around the globe, I had the opportunity to sit down with Bill and discuss several different questions about disruption in this video interview, including:

  1. Introduction
  2. My Favorite Disruptive Hero
  3. My Value Innovation Framework
  4. My Favorite Disruptive Change
  5. The Disruptive Change I Struggle With

Some of the key points I make in the video are importance of recognizing opportunities and seizing them, the impact of online services on how we all relate to each other and conduct our lives, my view on the key components to creating innovation success, and finally some thoughts on how evolving mobile capabilities are already changing our lives and how mobile will continue to change us (aka the mobile-centered human experience). Hope you enjoy it!

If you would like to schedule an interview with me for your online, television, print, or radio program, please contact me.


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How to Design Like Apple

Steve Jobs was a notorious perfectionist. Apple engineers and designers went through hundreds of revisions on every prototype that made it into his hands. But Jobs’ maniacal obsession paid off. No gadget on the market is as instantly recognizable nor as coveted as the latest iteration of an Apple product. The company’s dedication to sleek design and intuitive, user-friendly technology has made each iPad, iPhone and Macbook launch an enormous success.

And how did Jobs and Apple do it? The company follows a set of simple but strict rules to ensure that every product meets Jobs’ standards for clean and flawless design. First, design must complement and improve the product’s usability, never detract from it. And of course, Apple’s sleek and uncomplicated aesthetic must be reflected by every component of the product, no matter how small.

Apple’s design philosophy sounds simple, but putting it into practice is more difficult. Check out Online MBA’s latest video to see Apple’s philosophy boiled down into five principles that any designer or brandmaker can leverage in their own work.

A GUEST POST from my friends at OnlineMBA.com


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Innovation Interview with Scott Cook of Intuit

Innovation Interview with Scott Cook of IntuitThis is the first of a series of video and text interviews with innovation leaders at a range of companies that are seeking to create innovation excellence in their organizations. This interview, and many others with innovation leaders from trailblazing organizations around the globe, will build upon the foundation of the research and findings contained in my first book – Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire – and will form part of a case study on Intuit for my next publishing effort. This effort will be a highly collaborative and interactive endeavor looking at what is required to make innovation a deep capability in successful organizations.

If you think your organization is doing some really great work to create innovation excellence in your organization, please contact me.

I am excited to present the first innovation interview in this video interview series examining some of the topic surrounding the development of a deep innovation capability. I had the opportunity to interview Scott Cook, Co-Founder and Chairman of Intuit, at The Economist’s “Innovation 2011: Entrepreneurship for a Disruptive World” event in Berkeley, CA. In this video Scott talks about some of the key factors required in helping an organization become excellent at innovation. Below you will find the video and a written transcript.

Here is the innovation interview transcript:

Hello everyone this is Braden Kelley of Blogging Innovation. here with Scott Cook the founder of Intuit. Scott, I would really like to ask you about innovation and building innovation as a deep capability within the organization and as you started Intuit and as you look to grow and make it a successful company, what are some of the key things that you tried to do to help make innovation a capability in a continuous possibility for the organization.

Scott: Yeah that is something we have been spending a lot of time on over the last 4 years so I think a lot of the DNA we have on innovation is good in the company but we had lost some of the skill and capabilities. We hired new people, new managers so we went into a big rebuilding starting in 07. Things that have been very— I mean what you are trying to do, is change and improve the way teams do their daily work and the way managers, what they expect of teams.

So we worked it at all levels, so I work with teams from the top and it changes your expectations of what business unit leaders do with their teams and then we have innovation catalysts who work to couch teams and help teams when they hit innovation roadblocks or trying to leap and really change their thinking. We also work on skill building so one example is that a number of our executives had actually narrowed who we would hire from various companies, good folks but it never actually done innovation in a way that we teach people to do it.

So we took 2 days of an off site with just the top 18 people in the company and had our innovation catalyst come in and have them do the very process that we expect to our teams. Customer immersion with the customers and the executives did it, why we recruited customers as they came in. The nature of going broad that day— in a nature of trying to come to a key insight, testing that insight back with the customers then going broad, I don’t care with that insight, what could you do and then narrowing.

We made them go through the same steps that we expect as a team so they personally could have done it. I find it hard for leaders to lead to a destination, they have not yet been. So that is why we had to work on a leash up level but at the same time we were working on the team so how they work. So that is, we also do internal company broadcasts where we take teams inside Intuit and they tell their stories of how they did it step-by-step because we all learn from stories.

Another thing that we do is we teach by doing. We used to teach by preaching, talk at people. I don’t find adults learn from being talked at. They just retain the same habits they already have. So if we really want to change habits you have to get them to practice the new habits. So now when we do company meetings or leadership development sessions most of it is doing very little of it as listening. We get them busy doing the very things we want them to do or with homework in advance where they had to interview people who do what we want, then to do and learning from that and report back into a very doing process.

So that has been a big change we have made as from how we actually conduct the meetings where we want to use them to change habits so it is a series of things, note it happens fast step-by-step. Some teams move faster than others and we try to use those to inspire the rest but I think as I worked with teams now I see them— we are getting better outputs higher success rates with customers much higher than ratings of new products, fewer failures are pruned out early and cheap which is the whole goal. So I have seen the output metrics now finally after 4 years at working at this that you would project in the desire from making these sorts of interventions.

Braden: So in talking with other people in Intuit, it became very clear that when the company started small there was this idea of Follow Me Home’s, and then you know kind of follow me into the office and the catalyst programs sounds like one of the things that you are doing to try to instill some of these behaviors across the company and expose people to some of the ideas. And as I, you know talked with people at the organization it became very clear that the design for the like concept that you are trying to move across the organization is spreading farther and wider and then as you pursue that what are some of the key challenges that you found and that you have overcome over time in relation to trying to take some of the small company ethos as you have grown and maintain that those aspects of designing for a customer to like?

Scott: I want to say 2 things one is there is a challenge of team size. The team’s size when we started of course was small so everyone in the team was very close to customers. Our team size has grew and it grew and it grew and once you get a bigger team you move from 4 people working on a product to the 20 or 30 or 50, well then you have got some people in the team who go out and meet with customers. Other people say “Nah, I don’t need to do that, you do that, oh just listen to what you are saying” and suddenly you just get most of the team who has never met with customers or has not met in the last year with customers or with prospects.

And then you have much more communication problems, you don’t have shared vision, you don’t have shared understanding, a lot of things go haywire so key is to get back to smaller team sizes. So we have been busting up the team sizes sort of taking teams that used to be 30 or 40 and broken up some note in some cases no team bigger than 4. And we have to architect the work a lot more if those teams are truly going to be independent and that is our jobs as leaders. So that has been one very helpful thing. I think another. I would focus on learning from customer behaviors, not learning from customers, learning from customer behaviors.

Because the tempting tendency is for people on teams to rely on what customers say and maybe that works if you are selling to specialists. Let us say you are selling to a doctor who does cardiac surgery 8 hours a day, 5 days a week maybe that person can really tell you accurately what they are going to do if confronted with a new offering. But for regular people that just sell regular stuff to who might do taxes ones a year or might work with a bank ones in a week or pay their employees ones every 2 weeks. What they tell you, maybe half of it they will actually do, but you actually don’t know which half you are listening to.

So I learn much more reliable behaviors, trust observable behaviors that you can observe and measure either measure remotely through what happens in the web or you can measure by observing with your own eyes. The tendency though when you take people having them trained and send them out to meet with customers is they have got to interview customers. Well you just invented the word’s most expensive way to do a customer interview. If you are going to interview them call them on the phone or send survey, don’t do Follow Me Home.

Follow me homes are there so you can see with your eyes so shut up, say nothing, watch for an hour or two, or three then you can ask him about what you saw and then you are asking about behaviors. That is still an interview, not the most reliable but it will be better because you are probing about specific behaviors yourself. So I say that is the second thing that we have worked to re-instill this trust behaviors and behavioral data, not attitudes or words.

Braden: Very good, well I think the insight is very important and really and the taking the time to listen like you said is very important to innovation, I mean that is what we are all trying to do there early is the people that follow blogging innovation so on behalf of the readers and the viewers of Blogging Innovation, I think you very much Scott for your time and again this has been Braden Kelley of Blogging Innovation here with Scott Cook of Intuit.

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Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011

Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011Do you have a favorite innovation video?

We asked you the global innovation community, to suggest videos for the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011.

Many people did, and they had the chance to win some of the $3,650 worth of prizes up for grabs.

Here are the Top 10 Innovation Videos of 2011 based on the submissions:

  1. Where Good Ideas Come From

  2. Innovation Acceleration

  3. Do Schools Kill Creativity?

  4. ABC Niteline – IDEO Shopping Cart

  5. Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy – First Followers

  6. Interview with Dean Kamen

  7. Reinventing the Technology of Human Accomplishment

  8. The Myths of Innovation

  9. Two Similar Visions of the Future
  10. Here are two very similar visions of the future, the first is Microsoft’s vision for the year 2020:


    The second is Corning’s vision of the future dominated by specialty glass:

  11. The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Happy innovating!

Before you go…

What are your favorite innovation videos?
(make your suggestions in the comments)

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy – First Followers

If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

1. A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore – it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

The 2nd follower is a turning point: it’s proof the first has done well. Now it’s not a lone nut, and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news.

2. A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers – not the leader.

Now here come 2 more, then 3 more. Now we’ve got momentum. This is the tipping point! Now we’ve got a movement!

As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join now. They won’t be ridiculed, they won’t stand out, and they will be part of the in-crowd, if they hurry. Over the next minute you’ll see the rest who prefer to be part of the crowd, because eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining.

And ladies and gentlemen that is how a movement is made! Let’s recap what we learned:

If you are a version of the shirtless dancing guy, all alone, remember the importance of nurturing your first few followers as equals, making everything clearly about the movement, not you.

Be public. Be easy to follow!

But the biggest lesson here – did you catch it?

Leadership is over-glorified.

Yes it started with the shirtless guy, and he’ll get all the credit, but you saw what really happened:

It was the first follower that transformed a lone nut into a leader.

There is no movement without the first follower.

We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective.

The best way to make a movement, if you really care, is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.

When you find a lone nut doing something great, have the guts to be the first person to stand up and join in.

Special Bonus

Download 'Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire' sample chapterIf you’ve read all the way to the bottom, then you deserve a free sample chapter from my new book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. I hope you enjoy the sample chapter and consider purchasing the book as a way of supporting the future growth of this community.

Download the sample chapter

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