A couple of days ago I submitted a brief rant about how Burger King failed. This post is meant to provide a few suggestions for how they could improve -- and solicit additional suggestions if you have any.
1) Cross Promote: Work with the Iron Man franchise, Lego MindStorm NXT 2.0 team, and Burger King to have a drawing for a new MindStorm in the image of Iron Man.
2) Sponsor Burger King Science fairs around the country for kids to build their own science projects. Make the prize a trip to the national Burger King Science Fair in Redmond, Washington or Palo Alto, California. Work in partnership with Apple, Microsoft, HP, Caterpillar, Boeing, Genetech, etc.
3) On a smaller scale - include a coupon redeemable for a free robot kit online.
4) Set up math games online and make it a contest for the chance to win a trip to NASA and meet with some the engineers and astronauts and see a shuttle launch.
5) Tap into kids' creative potential by asking them to design the next toy to go into the Burger King Kids Meal. Define the parameters and provide the tools online they could use to create and submit.
These are obviously some fairly basic ideas. In general, the toys in kids meals are irrelevant and useless. More so when they perpetuate outdated cultural norms like mirrors for girls and guns for boys.
Can more be done? I would like to think so. What do you think?
Kevin McCullagh did a great job covering The Big ReThink by The Economist. I especially appreciate McCullagh coverage of Roberto Verganti. Here are my thoughts -- I hope you find them helpful.
Verganti's research on design-driven innovation is spot on. I appreciate his insight into new product meanings and languages that steep into and influence society. But this is both hard and uncomfortable work. Corporate decision making is all about finding certainty in an uncertain world. Radical innovation is scary. It is a venture into the unknown. Businesses are more comfortable with the devil they know rather than the devil they don't. This leads to incrementalism rather than innovation.
One way "design thinking" is valuable is that its methodologies and processes attempt to force us out of our comfort zones. However, as other studies prove, radical innovation -- that is sustainable radical innovation -- is more dependent on corporate culture than on one time intensives. This is what Verganti's research also showed. Just as products have meanings and languages, corporations can have meanings and languages. Language is culture and culture defines behaviors and behaviors determine actions taken and actions not taken. What the discussion about design allows us to do today, more than anything, is influence the conversation -- as McCullagh, himself, has tried to do by striving to give design more strategic significance.
If we do not first change the language of the dialogue, do we offer anything in the way of elevating the role of design or, more importantly, solving sticky problems and uncovering new opportunities?
I hope to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to respond.
Dan Pink makes a great distinction between mediocrity and failure. We are so afraid of failure that it changes our values and our behavior. Dan: Thanks for the reminder.
Keith Ferrazi also said it well in his book, Never Eat Alone. He wrote, "Ultimately everyone has to ask himself or herself how they're going to fail. We all do, you know, so let's get that out of the way. The choice isn't between succes and failure; it's between choosing risk and striving for greatness, or risking nothing and being certain of mediocrity."
"Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization's capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company's capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.
"In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it."
--from Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done (Bossidy, Charan)
I think a good picture of execution is in the Appendices of the movie The Fellowship of the Ring. When you learn how Peter Jackson as the director got everyone and everything working in various departments and then began the process of bringing everything together -- it's truly amazing.
In this way, a business is not much different than making a movie. Your vision/strategy is your main story -- your from point A to point Z -- and your main theme. You still have to make everything come together to make that strategy a reality. Peter Jackson didn't micromanage people. He did, however, concern himself with many details. He trusted key people to do what he knew they were capable of. And he communicated ad naseum.
Execution is knowing what needs to get done and how the whats will get done and then delivering on the promises across multiple departments or personnel. Execution is about getting the right things done in the right ways at the right time in order to achieve success; all the while weaving in and out known and unknown dependencies and environmental factors. Execution is not about doing for the sake of doing. It is about taking action in order to make things happen on the chosen path towards the goal. A thousand mile journey begins with the first step is a true.
Saul Kaplan titled his 1/5/09 post Creating the Passion Economy. In it he writes: "We commit to our passions. We invest our minds, our time, and our resources in passions and passionate people. We will create a more prosperous economy and stronger communities when we enable connections between passionate people and create an environment where innovators can more easily pursue their passions. Knowledge and networks are important enablers but passion is the secret sauce."
I think there's a single ingredient missing in Saul's analysis. It's milk. In the movie "Cinderella Man" James Braddock finally figures out why he's fighting and what he's fighting for. In an interview before the biggest fight of his life, he tells a reporter, "I know what I'm fighting for." The reporter asks, "What's that?" Braddock answers, "Milk."
The Milk Factor is huge. In a world that gives us nearly everything, what is left to give us meaning and purpose? Purpose is the fire that ignites passion. Purpose is the ladder that we build to climb out of the dip. Purpose is a catalyst of passion -- giving direction and speed to our passionate pursuites.
The Milk Factor is seen clearly in the clip above. I am a Cinderella Man myself -- as many are. What is the real intersection between passion and purpose? Are they interchangeable? Are Saul and I talking about the same thing?
I'm passionate about a lot of things. Until recently, I haven't had a clear purpose. That's one distinction and I'm sure there are others. Please join the conversations.
I'm an MBA student and taking a class on Operations Management. I found it intriguing and impressed that our text book -- written by the professor -- made the following claim:
"The CUSTOMER is ALWAYS the center and the most important focus of business, because they have what we want -- THE MONEY."
On our internal discussion board I posted the following:
It's interesting that you say the customer is always central. A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble (P&G), recently wrote a book called "Game-Changer." In it he says that the "customer is king" around this doctrine everything in the business revolves. P&G, similar to many other companies, has began to do on-site ethnography studies on how people -- customers -- actually use P&G products, like Tide. They live in a customer's house observing their daily lives and how they interact with products and then take this information back to development.
Companies like IDEO, an industrial design firm in California, and Adaptive Path, a web development firm, use the term empathy as it relates to customers and consumers. In this regard, empathy is the ability to consider how customers will respond, how customers will interact and use a products, and how they experience products and services.
This approach actually involves all aspects of the business. It's not balkanized into marketing. If fact, just the opposite. IDEO, when it worked with a hospital on how it could improve its services, it had the CEO and Senior Management play-act the role of patient to see how it felt to go through their hospital. When it comes to customer services, customer-centric organizations everyone is involved. Engineers need to learn to work directly with customers. Accountants and financial people need to learn to work with customers. Programmers need to learn to work with customers. Yet, it's been the norm that only Sales & Marketing have had direct customer contact. Each job function has some measurable impact on the overrall customer experience that not knowing who the customer is or how your job impacts the customer is a type of blindness.
Fundamentally, a business needs to be able to answer two questions -- "Who is our customer?" & "What do they want most when they work with us?"
There's more -- there's always more -- but that's a starting point.
In a sketch on Prairie Home Companion a character said, "Sincerity is the new irony." Similarly, Mr. Nussbaum has promoted transformation as the new innovation. It doesn't appear that "transformation" is any different than what innovation is becoming. His main point is that the word innovation has become overused and degraded.
Nussbaum says this about transformation: "It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace edifices and big organizations (students already know this, university presidents still have edifice-complexes, which is why so many of them are getting the boot)."
Similarly, @ricetopher said: "Deleuze and Guattari had it right in 'A Thousand Plateaus': the tribe must become nomadic, rhizomatic to survive/thrive." Which, if I understand it correctly, means that there is no longer just one expert, but a multitude of voices contributing to the knowledge base. Wikipedia entry states: "Rhizome theory is also gaining currency in the educational field, as a means of framing knowledge creation and validation in the online era."
If we crowdsource the term, what might we get? Is "Transformation" a better description of what company's need to do to embrace a the future? Or is there something else?
Nussbaum continues: "(Transformation) implies radical transformation of our systems—education, health-care, economic growth, transportation, defense, political representation. It puts the focus on people, designing networks and systems off their wants and needs. It relies on humanizing technology, not imposing technology on humans. It approaches uncertainties with a methodology that creates options for new situations and sorts through them for the best quickly."
Tony Fry, author of "Design Futuring" believes that transformation is wrong.
"Design Futuring argues that responding to ethical, political, social and ecological concerns now requires a new type of practice that recognizes design's importance in overcoming a world made unsustainable."
Nussbaum makes mention of Paul Saffo. Here's a recent discussion he had on KQED. Tim Brown with IDEO on his blog Design Thinking summarized Saffo's thoughts.
"He discusses what he calls the ‘Creator Economy’ based around the simultaneous creation and consumption of value. He thinks of this as the evolution of what was once the producer economy, where scarcity was the controlling factor, and then became the consumer economy, where sales and marketing was the dominant idea. I have been wondering about this idea recently and see it as a natural extension of Robert Wright’s Non-Zero thesis. As our communication networks grow so does our ability to create new kinds of value. The early examples are Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Threadless. These all rely on their ability to generate participation and through that create individual and group value."
What I appreciate about the discussion so far -- across multiple channels -- is the understanding that we can move forward; that we need to move forward. Innovation may very well be old-school, bushleague. Join the conversation at my Friendfeed... it only makes sense, right?
The ability to convey in words the essence of meaning. To paint a picture with words in order to impart knowledge, feeling, and understanding. Visually speaking, when done well, may enable the hearer or reader to vicariously experience the very thing you're trying to describe.
Metaphor and simile are great tools that aid in the art & science of visually speaking.
1. Scope -- It unpacks how big you perceive your market. Are you chasing the small business owner market? Or have you focused your efforts on reaching the private family physicians only? The scope of your market matters. If you're a start-up, in order to cross the chasm you need a single market you can lay claim to. A more established company may want to spread out from a base of operations and tackle a new channel -- the question still applies.
2. Segmentation -- It unpacks how well you understanding your customer and his/her wants and needs and aspirations. Target Stores has a disproportionate amount of women who shop there -- something like 70% or more. Understanding your customer also means knowing how to innovate for them. Businesses depend on profitable differentiation and disciplined innovation is a means to that end.
3. Stream -- It unpacks your revenue stream. Who is paying you? Why are they giving you their money? What are they paying for? Following the money is a major clue to knowing what your customers value. And equally important is understanding why it's valuable to them.
What seems like a rather benign question turns out to be a key to success. It reveals more than just these three. This is a start. Another thing it unpacks is your competition, because your competition isn't defined by you but by your customer and what he is willing to and wanting to purchase. It may also unpack the degree to which you apply empathy to your customer relationships. I'll have to give this last one some more thought.
At first, I was going to dis Seth's post on Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" with a strawman argument: "Miley Cyrus doesn't have a White Album...& probably won't." I even imagined adding that I suspect -- 10 years from now -- Miley will have joined the ranks of Debbie Gibson and Cindy Lauper.
However, I've reconsidered my position after a careful re-reading of Seth's post.
Seth -- you make a great point. Success depends on pushing through a dip. And pushing through a dip is hard work: more than 1K, 5K, & sometimes 10K hours. It's a lot easier to settle than it is to push.
What is evident by both Gladwell's treatise and your insights is this: It can't be done alone.
Hockey players in Canada have dedicated parents. Jewish lawyers and tailors had community and family supports. Bill Gates may never have attained his status had it not been for the mother's fundraising efforts that brought in the necessary $3,000.
Motivation is important and 10,000 hours is important. Skill is important and timing is important. I think what community and family and friends bring to the discussion is this: Purpose.
We are better people because of those who both support us and depend upon us. I am a better man because I am a husband, father, son, friend, and citizen. The work I'm doing to find the topside of the dip I'm in is meaningful because I am not doing it for myself.
We could all settle for the trough of mediocrity if it wasn't for those who are most important to us. Love may actually make a bigger difference in a person's life -- both loving and being loved -- than either 10,000 hours or dip-mastery.
I appreciate having the privilege to comment. Thank you.
I am a business development specialist committed to helping organizations achieve success by growing existing channels and developing new market opportunities.
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