Laugh a Little, Innovate a Lot - BusinessWeek

When looking for a big idea, you don't necessarily want to hear "Eureka!" but laughter

By
G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón

How much fun are you having at work these days? Let's face it. Having fun isn't as easy as it used to be, even for the most courageous, creative, and curious. Today just reading the headlines can turn an optimist into a fearful pessimist. The stories all seem to make you worry the very real possibility of losing your job.

Here is a critical insight for you. It is impossible for teams to innovate effectively while they are afraid. Impossible. Nothing kills great ideas like fear.

The good news is that fun is the antidote to fear. So if you are an innovation leader in a company that has become fearful, your people are on the road to failure unless you can change your culture. Cue the music, it's time to infuse some fun into the workplace.

The place to start? With you.

Leaders know how to laugh at themselves. Show us a person that can stand up in front of his team and say, "Call me stupid, but I have no idea how to do this," and we will show you a person with great leadership potential. Humble leaders with this trait create cultures that don't take themselves too seriously; cultures willing to take risks; cultures capable of creating and supporting a greater number of ideas.

The Daily Huddle

Why not start every day with a fun meeting? The daily huddle is simple practice that jump-starts the day and sets the stage for big ideas. Verne Harnish, "growth guy" and chief executive officer of Gazelles, which is an outsourced corporate university for midsize firms, taught us about the daily huddle. He developed the practice after studying and writing about John D. Rockefeller in his book The Rockefeller Habits.

Our company meets every day at 9 a.m. for no more than nine minutes. The agenda is simple. We share good news, bad news, and how well the company is doing. We use video to connect offices so everyone can attend the meeting. We encourage everyone to take a turn at running the huddle. Most importantly, we try to make them casual, transparent, and fun

In the last year, our daily huddles have included baby pools—where everyone guesses when someone's baby will be born; whether it will be a boy or girl and what it will weigh—costume contests, music trivia, engagement announcements, love poems, and ballads to welcome new employees. Yes, there is a lot of silliness, and not surprisingly, there is a lot of laughter. Much of the laughter has led to jokes, observations, and comments that have in turn led to ideas that have directly impacted our clients and company. (See www.bringchangehome.com, a viral marketing campaign with the humble goal of simply changing the world.

Says Harnish, "Of all the practices we teach, the daily huddle is probably the simplest and most powerful way to infuse fun, accountability, and momentum. When companies embrace the huddle, we always see a positive impact to their bottom line and culture.

Loosening Up the Suits

He's right. In fact, our clients actually like to come to these huddles. That should tell you something about the experience.

We first started noticing the liberating possibilities of linking fun and work in the early '90s in a meeting with an extremely conservative, extremely large utility company. You have probably been in a similar room; think suits; think fear; think awkward silence.

During this "mandatory" brainstorm session, someone offered up an idea as a joke. "I know," he said, tongue firmly in check. "We can send customers a bill that actually explains all the charges in plain English." He meant it as a joke, of course. And one joke led to another. Then something amazing happened: At one point the most senior person in the room commented, "You know, that's really not that bad of an idea. We could actually do that." Eventually the idea that started as a joke wound up being seen by 40 million consumers as a new kind of phone bill—one that was simple to understand. Not only did consumers embrace the joke, so did other phone companies who have adopted the idea. How great is that?

The Equation

There are two lessons here. First, it is not difficult to stage events that create this type of result, and leaders should be intentional about creating them. More important, we must learn to pay attention to laughter. Where there is laughter, there is an idea that holds people's interest. The pleasant by-product of all this: Work becomes more enjoyable, and that, too, increases the chance that you will be able to innovate successfully. It turns out that if you are having fun, you are more creative.

Here is an equation for you to consider the next time you are wondering why nobody is coming up with big ideas: I = F + H.

Ideas equal fun plus humility on the part of leadership to support the idea—and embrace those ideas that may come out of it.

This article originally published in BusinessWeek

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Major League Innovation - BusinessWeek's Innovation Engine Features Chicago White Sox and ESPN

As fans cut back on spending, sports teams must find ways to increase their share. Here's our formula for Major League Baseball—and other businesses:

By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón

We are often asked about ways to innovate beyond the traditional business setting. In honor of the All-Star Game, here is our suggestion to the owners of professional Major League Baseball teams.

Sports teams run on statistics. Players are signed, promoted, rewarded, or released based on how well they perform against an agreed-upon set of detailed metrics. Yet when it comes to figuring out the best way to attract and keep fans—especially during a recession—it's a whole other matter. These same teams are, for the most part, relying on either outdated research approaches or "gut feel" to determine what fans want.

And not surprisingly they are swinging and missing. Want proof? Consider some of our recent findings:

• Every sports executive we have ever met says the No. 1 thing fans want is a winning team. Fans rank it 11th when asked why they show up at a game.

• What the paying customers want most is a "fan friendly" environment, right? Nope. Fans rank it 6th in importance.

• Teams worry that their ticket prices are too high. Fans say cost ranks 7th when they are deciding whether or not to attend a game.

This discrepancy between what sports executives believe and what is actually going on in the marketplace reveals that most have failed to take notice of two related and depressing facts: A) Few sports teams recognize the power of their brand/customer relationship. B) Most fail to leverage the unshakable fan loyalty, simply because they have not taken the time to figure out what fans truly care about.

READ THE ENTIRE FEATURE AT BUSINESSWEEK

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Social Media, Business Week, and Everything Else

The realities of working on the cutting edge of advertising, social consulting, and agency life are that - occasionally - you are unable to blog with as much frequency as you would like.

That being said, I am back on top of things today with a quote in Business Week:

Nicholas Kinports, our firm's digital integration manager, has a wonderful way of thinking about implementing your social media strategy.

"It isn't about making content go viral—though that would be a wonderful byproduct, should it happen—or creating the next great Facebook application," Kinports says.

"It's about structuring, and in some cases restructuring, how a business views and interacts with its customer base. The modern consumer is savvy, aware, and fully able to make informed decisions, thanks to a wealth of information freely available on the Internet. The consumer of the near future will make purchase decisions based on information gleaned from unbiased peers and influencers. Social media is the latest tool through which these interactions occur."

Read the full article, "The Smart Way to Tap Social Media" for more perspective on the subject.

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BusinessWeek: Dive into Social Media Now

Your competitors know that Twitter, Linkedin, and the rest of the social media gang are a communication channel between you and your consumers. Do you?

By G. Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Vitón, Founder and President of Maddock Douglas

We believe this with all our heart: While social media are complex and often misunderstood, they have a value beyond traditional marketing campaigns. More specifically, we believe they can be used to help form your marketing strategy and be integrated into all your communications.

We have invested heavily in social media at our company. We believe in the power of online communities to help uncover insights; generate and validate new-product, service, and business-model concepts; and most important, create the necessary conversations that spark a new idea we can develop and introduce across the globe.

Everything it has done for us, we believe it can do for your organization as well. Our research shows that marketers intend to invest more in social media in the months ahead, but they have yet to allot substantial budgets for them. That isn't the way to go. And if you continue to fund social applications only as experiments, you're unlikely to be able to make an impact.

Ownership Is Fleeting

Our purpose here is twofold. First, we want to clarify exactly what we (and you) should be talking about when using the term "social media," and then we will address the three biggest worries about implementing it: the loss of control, the related concern that someone in your employ will make a mistake during real-time interactions with customers, and perhaps the biggest misconception of all, that there is no way to measure its impact.

Simple definition first: Social media are a technically enhanced—think Internet and mobile-based—way of discussing ideas with people in communities. (Twitter, blogs, niche communities, and giant communities like LinkedIn and Facebook are the sorts of things we are talking about here.) Social media use words, pictures, audio, and video to foster interaction.

It is that interaction that makes some business people nervous. We understand.

When you advertise in a publication or on radio or TV, you decide on the words, the imagery, and everything else. When you use social media to get that message out, that ownership is fleeting. While you maintain absolute control over the initial content, what happens afterward depends on the audience. Is there any way to alter that? No.

But instead of worrying about it, we think you should see it as an opportunity, one that you already have some (analogous) experience with.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT BUSINESSWEEK.COM

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