Ideas Don’t Equal Innovation: A Filter For What You Could Do, And What You Should Do

Posted on October 12, 2010 by Scott Gould

I love Mike Myatt’s blog. A leader’s leader, Mike has a wealth of leadership experience and insight that he boils down into quick but prudent lessons everyday. I remember speaking with him on the phone at the beginning of the year, and it was clear to me that whilst Mike works with top companies and is a revered figure in leadership theory circles, he walks his talk. The very fact that he time for a phone call with me also speaks volumes about him.

One of Mike’s main things is focus. This isn’t just a singular focus on one thing, but it’s about adjusting focus as a balance between near sighted and far sighted. He famously says that “It’s not leadership or management, it’s leadership and management. It’s not strategy or tactics, it’s strategy and tactics”, which gives you an idea about this approach.

It is on the subject of focus that I clipped this article of his that demands some treatment from the Friends here at our blog. In his post, “Ideas Don’t Equal Innovation“, Mike lays out 15 elements to measure what you could do against what you should do. We have no shortage of ideas today and thus the defining characteristic of strong leaders, particularly in the digital space, is a focus that is not deterred easily by what they could do. We’ve certainly all been in that place where we’ve been governed by could instead of should.

Mike’s 15 Filters

1. The idea should be generated within a solid framework for decisioning. It should be developed as a solution to a problem or to exploit an opportunity. The idea should be in alignment with the overall vision and mission of the enterprise.

2. If the idea doesn’t provide a unique competitive advantage it should at least bring you closer to an even playing field.

3. Any new idea should preferably add value to existing initiatives, and if not, it should show a significant enough return on investment to justify the dilutive effect of not keeping the main thing the main thing.

4. Put the idea through a risk/reward and cost/benefit analysis.

5. Whether the new idea is intended for your organization, vendors, suppliers, partners or customers it must easy to use. Usability drives adoptability, and therefore it pays to keep things simple.

6. Just because an idea sounds good doesn’t mean it is You should endeavor to validate proof of concept based upon detailed, credible research.

7. Nothing is without risk, and when you think something is without risk, that is when you’re most likely to end-up in trouble. All initiatives surrounding new ideas should include detailed risk management provisions.

8. Adopting a new idea should be based upon solid business logic that drives corresponding financial engineering and modeling. Be careful of high level, pie-in-the-sky projections.

9. Any new ideas should contain accountability provisions. Every task should be assigned and managed according to a plan and in the light of day.

10. Any new ideas being adopted must lead to measurable objectives. Deliverables, benchmarks, deadlines, and success metrics must be incorporated into the plan.

11. It must be detailed and deliverable on a schedule. The initiative should have a beginning, middle and end.

12. Ideas need to be incorporated into strategic initiatives and not constitute disparate systems. They should be incorporated into integrated solutions that eliminate redundancies, and build in tactical leverage points.

13. Ideas should contain a road-map for versioning and evolution that is in alignment with other strategic initiatives and the overall corporate mission.

14. A successful idea cannot remain in a strategic planning state. It must be actionable through tactical implementation.

15. Senior leadership must champion any new idea being adopted. If someone at the C-suite level is against the new idea, it will likely die on the cutting-room floor.

Your Leading Thoughts

I don’t want you to discuss all 15. You might want to clip this for later, but there’s too much here for you guys to take time out now to spend a length of time discussing, instead:

Pick 2 out of the 15 that are issues that you have faced recently and have had victory in. Share your story and your lessons so that we can learn form your practical implementation of these points.

Photo credit

London Blog Club October

Posted on October 11, 2010 by Scott Gould

On Tuesday 19th October, I’m speaking at London Blog Club on the subject of “How to consistently receive over a dozen comments with each post.”

The event is FREE, with drinks and venue sponsored by Talk Talk, so sign yourself up for a great evening of meeting new people, as well as you and I getting some quality time to hang out. You can sign up for free here.

How Do You Receive More Than A Dozen Comments Per Post?

Given that this is our blog that I’ll be talking about, I want to go with your feedback and suggestions on how to consistently receive over a dozen comments with each post.

For most of us, 12 comments a post seems a small number, but this was the title that I was asked to talk on and thus I deduce that most people don’t even have that many. Nurturing community is something a lot of bloggers can write about, but few seem to actually do.

Here’s a few things that I’ve done and I think work:

I’ve never been good at titles, not even first paragraphs, but I do write with a style that is with you, not down to you. I under bake the issue and leave room for discussion.
Foster ownership. Let people own the blog – mention contributors, invite feedback, post great comments as posts, call it “Scott Gould and Friends”, love on people. After all, it is their blog!
Make the value-based play by investing in relationships with people off of the blog, like Skype calls, Twitter discussion, tweetups, etc. Be on their sales team.
Don’t just ask “What do you think?”, provide conversation starters. Be specific. Then when people comment, ask them further questions. Facilitate discussion. Link people and ideas together.
Know what your top metrics are and stick to them, and refuse to be discouraged by others. Mine are comments and subscribers. Page views and retweets don’t concern me one bit (and I don’t get many of them.) Rankings mean nothing but vanity, and not even that unless you’re top 10 Power150.

Your Leading Thoughts

Your inputs as leaders and facilitators who generate meaningful discussion on a regular basis.

How do you consistently get over a dozen comments per post? Your top 3 tips please.
What is the underlying mindset required, without which you can do the above but not get those comments?

So in case you missed it, I am speaking on Tuesday 19th at the TalkTalk Centre in London at 7pm. You can sign up for FREE here (as well as get address details.)

Also, thanks to Filip Matous for inviting me after we briefly met last month.

Video: There’s Growth in the Boredom

Posted on October 10, 2010 by Scott Gould

Every Sunday I share an inspirational video and this week’s is a 2 minute inspiration blast from my very good friend Robin Dickinson.

The best bit about this inspiration video? It isn’t telling you what you need to do that you aren’t already doing. It’s telling you what not to do that you are already doing: do the boring stuff.

I love this. Robin basically says that the business is in the boring. Once you’ve got the idea and made the sale, now you must deliver, and delivering isn’t as fun. I certainly have struggled with executing the boring on a regular basis, and have suffered greatly because of it. I continually find myself restless, looking for new things to tweak because I don’t want to knuckle down and deliver.

Obtaining vs Maintaining

In our attention age we have two problems that have strengthened the hold of boredom as an influencer on our lives:

We are so used to multitasking and being distracted that the focus on mantainence is increasingly unnatural to us (and thus needs to be learnt.) Remember that it’s easier to obtain than maintain.
The saying that “you can do anything you put your mind to” has created a youth culture in particular that thinks, “I can do anything I put my mind to and don’t really need to fine tune my skills because I can do anything.” What they forget is that you have to put your mind, and everything else you’ve got, to do anything of worth. Thus we have a complacency and an atitude that considers itself to be above the boring. Again, they’d rather be obtaining (having fun) than maintaining (sharpening the saw).

We need a major shift in our thinking to overcome this detrimental habit:

Getting Clear On Results And Rewards

We need to get smart about what our results are, so that we can stand being bored because it gets my results. I would say that when I haven’t done what was boring but necessary, it was because I wasn’t clear that it was necessary for my end results. We must focus! This also requires a challenge to know what does hit our bottom lines, and filter everything by that.

Secondly, we need to know what our reward is: that being bored by getting my results empowers me to have time for what I really enjoy. If I can get into the mindset that the boring empowers me to have the fun, then perhaps I’d stop working 18 hours a day.

Respect The Boredom

Robin’s best quote is that he “respects the boredom.” I think I should take that same atitude, and get some healthy respect for the boring but profitable things that work, albeit without glamour. I know what many of those things are, and I feel the results when I do them. It’s just bad that often times emotion takes over and pushes the important underneath the interesting.

Your Leading Thoughts

Robin’s already got a conversation going on about this subject on his post “the secret money power of boredom“, so please join in there.
If you’d like some tips on overcoming this issue in your own life, Robin has some great tips that I highlight on this post on maintenance.
Our culture has created a hatred of boredom that is detrimental in my opinion. What’s yours?

What Is The Defining Factor For Success?

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Scott Gould

I’m not necessarily talking about financial success. What is the defining factor that separates success from failure, in a marriage, a business, an idea, a friendship, etc?

HTC Desire Review: The Digitall and the Digicool

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Scott Gould

I spent some time recently with the HTC Desire with my new reviewer hat on, not just wanting to say how I feel products are, but also how they affect our lives. Right now, I am using an old style phone, you know – the ones without predictive text, internet, and touch screens – and it is amazing to see how many habits I have picked up because I’ve been using the iPhone for two years.

So I think it stands to reason that by reviewing technology, we’ll get a better handle on how it’s changing how we communicate and how our minds are working.

The Digitall and the Digicool

I did two reviews for this phone, one with me (a Digitall), and one with my friend Anya (a Digicool). If you don’t know what I mean by these phrases, check out this post where I lay out four profiles of digital users. In short, a Digitall is someone who users the latest digital devices for all they do – your typical innovator and early adopter, like me. Digicool is someone who uses new digital technology because it’s cool, it’s current, and makes financial commitments based on lifestyle and the fashion status of digital devices. So let’s being:

The Digitall Review

So let’s deal with the elephant in the room: as I held it for the first time it felt like an iPhone clone. This of course isn’t true – Apple didn’t invent the touch screen, and the app based view has been around for at least 10 years with the Nokia Communicator – but the iPhone did make touch popular and they canonised many of the ‘laws of touchscreen’ like the gestures, how it should feel and respond, etc.

This is undoubtedly an issue for any touch screen smart phone, because the moment you being to use pinch and zoom, you feel like you’re copying the iPhone. So with the Desire, I felt that whilst some things were similar to the iPhone, others were totally different, as if they on purpose said “let’s make that different so that we’re not the same as the iPhone.” (This is detrimental, and part of the reason why I’m excited about Windows Phone 7 which appears to have created a new UI and way to engage with your phone.)

Another example of this is the fact that a touch screen phone has 5 physical buttons, which confused me beyond belief. I can’t understand why we have to be confused like this – either make it all on the screen (even the iPhone’s top button confuse some people), or make it buttons. Don’t confuse us.

On the other hand, what I really liked when using the HTC Desire for the first time was the beginning tutorial – genius. Helping someone quickly learn how to use your phone is an excellent idea. Trouble is, there are no online videos to back this up (or if there are, I couldn’t find them in 2 searches.) What I totally lacked is a support network to get into this phone. This is an important point for anyone these days. The product is not enough. We need warmth as well as light.

The Digicool Review

So Anya really liked the HTC Desire. What she didn’t like was how long it takes to learn it. After over a week with the phone, she still wasn’t comfortable with it. Having said this, she was fond of the customisable home screens.

The big selling point for the HTC Desire is how customisable it is. Considering I couldn’t find any videos on HOW to customise the phone, HTC have failed in my opinion. My friend Tendai tells me that “if you read the manual, you’ll learn how to use the phone.” You don’t need to say how much that statement tells us about the poor usability and support. If you need a manual or guidance, then the product won’t last in today’s market - a lesson I’ve learnt recently with Like Minds this month.

Anya seemed happy to plug away with it – in a trail and error kind of way – but she didn’t read the manual. I guess I had forgotten about trial and error because I haven’t had a new phone in so long. Now that I have this awful little £10 phone (because my iPhone broke), I’m seeing how horrible it is to have to learn how to use a device again.

What both Anya and I both liked was the Google integration. Our contacts, calendars and email were all synced with one entry of my email and password, without any further options. This is a beautiful thing, and it’s a shame that the rest of the phone doesn’t employ this same ease of use when it comes to settings.

The biggest clincher for Anya though was the price. It’s a very competitive option (both on the price of the handset and the monthly tariff) when compared to the rip off price of the iPhone. If HTC do win, it’s because they’ve done a good job here and they tie into people who just can’t afford £50+ a month on a contract or a £500 handset.

Bonus: A Pirate Review

If you want a far more in-depth review from someone who really knows there stuff, check out the review by my friend Glenn Le Santo. Glenn’s a bit of a pirate and a fantastic writer, and his take is very insightful and useful if you are considering the Desire as an option.

Your Leading Thoughts

First of all, if you do own an HTC Desire feel free to speak now and balance this review out. By no means is this complete at all and I’m sure I’ve missed a lot.
Secondly, what do you think in general about phone user interfaces? Think back to how phones were to how they are now. How you would you like them to ideally work?
Thirdly, how has your phone changed your habits and defined your life?

What The New Facebook Groups Mean For Community

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Scott Gould

Yesterday Facebook released a new version of Groups. So what?

Well firstly, phew!, finally Groups and Pages are different again and groups appear to have functionality that would make you want to use them! I don’t know about you but as a marketer and community builder, I struggled between knowing which to use for what, based on the benefits of both.

However now these new Groups have been built from the ground up with a new resolution to facilitate real world groups and communities that already exist, something that gets back to the core of Facebook’s early mission of ‘helping you connect with the people you know.’ And within this, I think there is not only opportuniy, but also it acts as a confirmation about what we’re now thinking about communities in general.

Communities are made of micro-communities

Let me take church as an example, seeing as I used it recently already to illustrate community. A church meets every Sunday for their service, which is the macro community, where all the people come together, no matter what age, demographic, class, gender, ethnicity, etc. But it isn’t the virtue of Sunday in itself that brings this community together nor holds it together. In actual fact, we find subsets of communities within this community, micro community if you will, where people exchange life on a more frequent and deeper level.

Therefore, macro community is the product of micro communities. The strength of this macro community is the strength of these micro communities – the strength of the bonds between the people in them, and the strength of the bonds that link these micro communities together.

This isn’t just a church thing. Take #LikeMinds and you’ll find we have micro communities within our macro community. Take your school, your family, your friendship groups, and so on.

What this reminds me of is this slide below from “The Real Social Network“, an exquisite and mind-shifting, a-ha moment presentation from Paul Adams at Google. It basically says that we can’t approach social networks from the point of view that we have one community, because we don’t. We have different sets of friends who we might say totally different things to. In other words, micro communities that make up our own personal macro community.

Facebook isn’t a single community

Whilst Facebook isn’t a single community, we currently have to treat it like it is. I have to send my Church updates to everyone, and my work updates to everyone. It’s just one community. And when I do share any of this content, it is quite clearly owned by me, not by anyone else.

What Facebook now appear to be doing is giving us a way to groupalise content. Remove my made up word and you’d have ‘co-owned content’ or something similar. The groups allow you to have group photos, group tags, group emails, group documents – a space where no one is really the owner but where everything is shared.

This means, it I use the image above, I could now form a group for each of those 4 communities above, and govern or guide it accordingly.

Groups in the status feed

From my early testing, these new Groups insert the updates into the news feed for those who are following them, meaning I have a new way to keep track of information that relates to an area of my life. Previously, it was this ability that gave Facebook Pages a competitive advantage over Facebook groups. Facebook Social Plugins, however are currently still only with Pages or customised content, so Groups don’t have a weigh in there yet.

Groups are like contact groups in your email client

When I use Mail to send an email to certain teams, I can type the name of that group. Now, I can do the same with the new Facebook Groups, as well as see it in the news feed. This is a powerful move towards what The Real Social Network was talking about when it said that we don’t have one single community.

The way that I plan to use them is like I’d use this email contact group, a place to foster micro community through curation of people (not so much content.) The difference over the old format of groups is that I get notifications on all the activity. This is really lacking when it comes to Pages, but now means I can track everything in that group. Considering that for many Facebook has replaced email, and is their top communication method other than talking, it makes sense for me now to conduct work through a Facebook group that will automatically keep me up-to-date on all the activity.

The bigger changes

Facebook making this change tells me a lot about how we are changing in our knowledge economy. Facebook has become strikingly powerful at both reflecting and shaping how we think and interact. I’m interested to see how this changes us. ‘Friend’ was their first big thing, then ‘wall’, and then most powerfully with ‘like’. Whats the new verb or noun going to be now?

Your Leading Thoughts

Do you see a use for Facebook groups? Or is it effort that you just don’t have time or interest for?
Do you observe my same observations about macro and micro community? What has Facebook taught us about how we really approach community?

The Warmth And The Light

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

Light might bring someone to you, but it’s warmth that keeps them. When it comes to church in particular, people don’t just want great direction – as in teaching, a well run service, professional handouts, great songs – they want connection – the warmth of friends, family, shared interest, prayer groups, etc.

Consider your blog. It might be the light and great insights that gets them to read it at first, but it’s the warmth and sense of community that will have them stay. I would certainly say that any success that I have with building this blog is because I’ve provided warmth to those who regularly contribute here.

Providing warmth in business is much the same. It might start with a Christmas card, but it becomes about caring for your clients and thinking about how you can not only provide a great product (light), but the service and care that makes it work (warmth.)

Your Leading Thoughts

What is more valuable, being given a bike (light), or having someone teach you how to ride it, there with you to encourage you when you fall to literally get back on the bike (warmth)?
How do we scale direction (light) and connection (warmth)?

Making Our Blogs Conversation Corners In One, Limitless Building

Posted on October 7, 2010 by Scott Gould

I love our blog. We had a wonderful discussion this week about the reformation of this blog into “Scott Gould and Friends” as a place of collaboration, where comments and equal to blog posts, and where regular contributors can have a voice.

One of my thoughts around this is that this blog is only part of the conversation. If I’m on James Poulter’s blog, I’ll be discussing the recommendation economy, whereas if I’m on Jeff Hurt’s blog, I’m discussing event design. It’s one big conversation that I’m having with similar people, but the topics at Scott Gould and Friends are different to the topics elsewhere.

If I think like this, then I realise this is just one a many corners for conversation. But the best most blogs come to realising this fact is a blog roll or aggregating posts – neither of which are a particularly meaningful way to join conversations together.

In the comments on Tuesday, Robin said so truly that “the currently available blog templates are designed around the self-centric web-logging.” That means we need to address how our blogs work from a design standpoint if we want to adopt the idea that conversations are happening across multiple blogs, not just in one place.

What I Want

I want to provide every regular contributor here, every Friend, a profile on the WordPress installation. Then they could have a profile so you can find out about the main people adding to the conversation here. That would also mean that their posts are pulled into this site (but linking to their sites), meaning that the homepage on this blog is more about showing the best conversations across multiple places.

It would mean that these Friends can also write posts for this site and add to the conversation. This would go hand in hand with a new way to display comments, ideally, as just as important as posts themselves, with the ability to tag those posts.

This is just the beginning, but I think it gets in moving in the right direction towards the future of blogging – collaboration and sharing.

I then like the idea of having a digital book club, whereby we have conversations about a particular book say every Friday, where people can read up before hand and come to the conversation prepared. This could subsequently ooze into video interviews and such.

Your Leading Thoughts

What do you want here on your blog? Speak up and be bold.
Where do you think the future of blogging lies?

Photo credit

Live Video Interview with Me and Dan Blank, Today at 5pm UK Time

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Scott Gould

At 5pm today UK time (which is 12:00 ET), I’m on a live video interview with Dan Blank, a writer and consultant who I’ve really come to respect over the last 6 months.

The show is “We Grow Media“, which is also Dan’s consultancy. You can watch it live, which means you can pitch in with questions and insights during the interview.

Seeing as this is our blog and all, then this is our interview, and I’ll be talking about our community. Keep in touch while it’s live and give plenty of feedback!